Moments of Respite

I’ll bury the lead in the next paragraph, but I want you during this read to keep this in mind: How can we make the idea of ‘Take 20’s more engaging or at least make it feel like something happened?

Recently I’ve been playing the wonderful Pentiment, by Obsidian Entertainment, the industry darling behind games like Fallout New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Pillars of Eternity. It’s wonderful in many ways I’d like to discuss, but one thing that stood out to me was how it treats passage of time. That is, not the major time skips or even the day-night cycling, but the meals. Every so often you are told it is time to eat, and made to find somewhere where you can do so. Mostly this will consist of seeking out friends and neighbours that happily share their food with you. During such meals there is chatter, gossip, opportunities to learn much needed knowledge to solve the cases you’re trying to solve, peppered with the game asking you to click on what ever on your plate you wish to eat next. It’s such a small thing, but I feel it works really well to give you the feel for the length of a meal without really needing to sit through the entire meal. It creates a very natural feeling flow.

Let’s look at some other examples. Are there any tabletop games that do something similar? My first instinct is to hearken back to Jack Harrison’s Artefact, a solo journaling game where you play as some magical trinket, shield, sword, or the like and describe what that looks like, about who possesses you over the years, but almost equally important is the periods of time where no-one own you. This you simulate by resting your head on your desk, closing your eyes, and listening to a short snippet of music. The longest track is, I believe, about 90 seconds long, and you choose the track based on how long you are ‘lost’ for. When the track is over you open your eyes, and start playing a new episode in your existence.

Almost every game meant to be played as campaigns has some sort of system for ‘downtime’. I’d say the most prevalent of these downtime systems is in John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, where you pick from a menu of mechanical effects, either working on some gear, upgrading your thieves den, scouting leads for better marks and a plethora of other things. This has been built on in lots of different ways, including by John Harper himself, though I would say the way that appeals the most to me is the idea that not only do you choose whatever you want to do from the list, you also have to play out a small scene of how that thing comes to pass. This however is usually reserved for downtime phases, as opposed to Pentiment’s suppers, which are very much scenes where you are progressing the story, even if in minor ways.

Hey! Time to exhume that lead! My proposition, which I’ve personally used in some of my earlier works, is the ‘Moments of Respite’. Whenever players spend longer periods of time doing something where there is no danger, ask a question. This can be improvised in the moment, build on something you set up earlier, be rolled from a list of generic questions, or any other way you can think of to conjure them up. Frame the question through what the party is doing. Lets imagine the party is taking an hour to fix the wheel of their cart before they move on. ‘While you work the wheel you notice something you haven’t before Ender. Lilly has a tattoo up on the nape of her neck, and from this distance you can’t quite place what it is. How do you go about sating your curiosity?’ or ‘Xavier, one of the tunes Emma plays on their lute sounds familiar to you. Where have you heard this before? Do you inquire about it?’.

The idea is essentially to seed moments where players can take a second or two to speak in character, or tell the table something about their character. My hope is that, like closing your eyes and listening to some music in Artefact, this will last at most 5 minutes, but will give the sensation that time has passed (because even though less has passed in real life than in game, it actually has!) so that ‘Ok, we take some time to fix the cart’ becomes less of a hand wave, nothing moment, and instead can instead be rewarding breaks from action.

Also, because I don’t know if I will have an opportunity to write about it, I love how in Pentiment you don’t get to know if you solved the murder. You run around, collect clues and can find likely stories, murder weapons, motives, and when you present these to whoever arbiters the case they will take them into account in the verdict, but at the end of the day you’ll never get to know if you were correct or not. You have to sit, like the main character, wondering if your actions lead someone innocent to die, and weather investigating the murder at all was worth doing. Definitely something I’ll be doing in an adventure at some point.