Structure for a Working Game
Learning about game structures was like a magic trick for my little software-addled brain, and I’ve been disappointed by the fact that people seem more interested in tuning the same handful of structures rather than looking to invent novel ones. While reading about them recently it occurred to me that I’ve tried to run two different games which would benefit from a similar structure.
The first was attempting to run a FATE one-shot of the old /tg/ Night Shift setting, and the other was an attempt at an FKR styled game based off a visit to a lighthouse and the vague idea of The Lighthouse, a movie I have not seen. The former game was almost a decade ago at this point so the details have mostly been forgotten, but the premise of Night Shift is that you’re working the titular shift at a gas station and supernatural or weird things happen night after night. The latter game was lowkey just me getting really into doing research on lighthouses and then trying to inhabit that space in a simulationist way. It was run as an attempt to get back into running things by limiting my prep time, so my players came in blind. They weren’t super into the simulationy side of what I was doing, but we did have some fun with it even if the majority of the action came in the form of a player getting bored enough to shoot a fellow lighthouse keeper. Which I kind of consider a win, to be honest.
So what kind of structure would benefit these games? What stands out to me is that both of these settings have a focus on time and labor. Both games feature characters who are working a job and have various tasks and responsibilities to perform. These tasks are not particularly interesting. Restocking convenience store shelves, whitewashing the outside of a lighthouse. I imagine these tasks will be named and described, but not played through in any real detail. They are better elided. If the tasks themselves are fairly meaningless to the characters then what’s important is that they have to be performed at all, so there needs to be consequences for not doing them. In both of the examples there are authorities who will eventually become aware the tasks are not done, but the consequences of not performing each specific task should also be considered.
Without any further additions optimal play would just be performing the tasks, which is boring from pretty much every angle. Clearly we need to add some complications. The first thing that comes to mind is to add opportunity costs. There should be other things the players and characters would rather be doing, or things that are otherwise more rewarding. It’s really easy to establish the cost of other actions in terms of time, so that will be the primary resource at play. This is where we can start to hook in other structures and use the structure as a foundation for others. If we wanted to run a mystery, for instance, it’s trivial to have the investigation take time away from running the store or lighthouse or what have you.
I do also think resources other than time can be used to great effect here. Based on my retail experience, a Boredom meter would work well for Night Shift while the lighthouse game already had a Stress meter I would tick up. (The mechanic was a reveal and got a visceral reaction out of the players I’m still quite proud of). The important thing is that these meters add a cost to carrying out the job the characters are “supposed” to be doing which the players will have to manage.
Circling back to opportunity costs, another form is the order the tasks will be done in. If there is more work assigned than can actually be performed the players will have to make decisions about which tasks to prioritize. This only works if there are meaningful tradeoffs between avoiding tasks. The sweet spot is probably setting things up so the characters can just barely get the tasks done if they don’t screw around in order to get the sweet sweet tension of whether or not they can pull it off along with everything else they want to do. Having more immediate consequences, or risk of consequences, for not doing a task also makes task ordering matter. For example if you have two time sensitive tasks and can only do one, it’s now a question of the consequences of failing to do either task. Another idea might be to have a task which takes valuable time to do and which isn’t immediately important but which has a small chance of causing a much bigger problem which is rolled at fixed intervals.
The second form of decision making we can add to the tasks is worker placement. Something I happened to fall into for the lighthouse game was starting each game day asking who was cooking breakfast, then having the players divvy up their tasks at the breakfast table. As the game was mostly improvised that decision didn’t actually matter for most tasks, but the question of who was staying up all night to man the lighthouse was significant as I had made that give a significant Stress hit. So having different tasks produce different effects on the characters is one way to make decision assignments meaningful. The temptation arises to leverage skill systems to make some characters better at some tasks, but I want to stress that it’s important that characters have a baseline competence at their tasks and that skill rolls should not be required to complete them under normal circumstances. Binary success and failure, or even trinary success-at-a-cost are not useful when considering a character weeding the lighthouse garden or doing inventory as skill checks are meant to resolve risky situations and the cost here is in time and other resources. This is obviously not a hard and fast rule, but I think tasks which require skill rolls are best used as a deviation from the norm.
Where I think a skill system does shine is when things deviate from the norm. What task a character is assigned to will determine where they are when notable events happen, as well as who is at hand to deal with problems (or opportunities) that arise with the task. This is where we break out into whatever other tools or game structures suit the situation. For example in the Night Shift game we could have a customer get upset with the cashier and could handle it with a scene or ellide it with a die roll as we wish. I do think it’s important multiple different things can go wrong with tasks in order to prevent trivial solutions to the worker placement where one character is always assigned the same tasks they’re optimal. And this is important even in settings like Night Shift where the characters have more strict roles in the fiction, as this can incentivise players to pull someone else with a more useful skillset into the situation… and away from whatever task they should have been doing.
After fleshing out the decisionmaking around tasks we can treat them like a baseline to deviate from. It’s probably not a coincidence that both of the games I’m using as case studies focused on the mundane punctuated with the supernatural. The tasks were cyclical and repetitive but broken up by more interesting events that were more the highlight of the game. This does have the potential to lead to reactive play, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we can counter that by giving the players goals which they have to pursue outside and between the daily cycle of tasks. Mysteries are a really good fit for this. Show the players something weird, and make exploring it cost them time while they slowly unravel things. The key is that it’s something they have to actively look into. I also think there’s a lot of potential in exploring inter-character relationships in this mode of play. Players do tend to devise their own goals in time, but giving them something to pursue initially gets the game off the ground.
So what would we need to prepare for this sort of game? The obvious first thing is a list of tasks, and as discussed there would be some necessary game design to make the decisions around them meaningful. The second thing would be a detailed description of the location the characters are performing their tasks. Both of my example games were focused around a single place, which naturally feeds into the tasks as the better you understand the location the more detail you can fold into the tasks. For Night Shift I would also want to describe things like the store’s stock. The third thing would be the breaks from the cycle, whether intrusions from the outside world or problems arising during tasks. This could be organized as some combination of a schedule of events or a series of random encounters. For the lighthouse game having a weather system would be meaningful for many tasks, as well as knowing when ships are going to pass by. For Night Shift I would want to prepare a big table of random NPCs, both weird and mundane. The last thing to prepare would be whatever meta structure you want to run on top of or alongside this - your mystery or your campaign arc or whatever which is outside the scope of this post.
With that I think I’ve provided a pretty solid outline of a structure and highlighted the ways to make it compelling. I’ll have more thoughts on this in the future and would like to produce a more complete writeup of the procedure for an actual game.
2026-04-25
Link Roundup
One issue with reading RPG blogs like the morning newspaper is that I often lose good posts. As a response I’ve been accumulating links in a document since January. Of last year. I figure this is a good softball return-to-blogging. Posts are presented in no particular order within their categories.
Grappling with D&D’s Colonialism
Quick Comments on D&D as Western at Roll to Doubt. The most succinct distillation of the idea I’ve seen, though it doesn’t argue for it so much as casually reveal.
Use Your Words; OR Against the Tribals at Lonely Star. An argument against using “tribe” to refer to groups of people.
Beautiful Settings
The Tauroctony Club at the Nothic’s Eye. Part of a series of posts detailing Victorian urban fantasy locations. Locheil’s work often features a web of characters whose preferences and personalities shape the location, an incredibly compelling format which begs to be replicated. I intend to study these posts to improve my NPCs.
The World of Serina - A speculative evolution worldbuilding project based around the idea of setting up a biosphere with a small number of seed species and letting evolution run its course. A thing of beauty.
The Nomad Kingdoms at Garamondia. The first post I’d seen of a project titled Barony which strikes me as at once surreal and grounded and which is what I really want to share. The bulk of this particular post is a system for generating strange weapons and armor expressed in a way which is both mechanically meaty and evocative of the setting. There’s a wholeness to it which is representative of the best of what I expect from the GLOG community.
A Psi-Wars Primer at Mailanka’s Musings. I unfortunately haven’t read through this in depth but wanted to share it anyway. The entire process of building a Star-Wars inspired setting in GURPS is lined out here in glorious maximalism.
Worldbuilding
Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’ at ACOUP. A description of how coinage worked in pre-modern or partially monetized societies. Useful for more realistic medieval worldbuilding.
Baseline Worldbuilding at Mindstorm. A thorough dive into the additional effort it takes to run games in settings that diverge from player’s expectations. I’ve experienced the difference in effort myself and appreciated being given the words to describe it.
Medieval Demographics Done Right at Apotheosis of the Invisible City. A post which digs into how deeply, deeply flawed the popular RPG worldbuilding document Medieval Demographics Done Quick is. I had run into that document early in my gaming career and dismissed it out of hand due to the numbers simply not making sense, so this post was extremely vindicating. The second part has the information required for a more sensible replacement.
You’re Using Mounts All Wrong at Gracklecourt. Points out that mounts should be handled as hirelings and provides rules to encourage that. I’ve wanted to handle party animals as animals for a while but haven’t been able to put together a framework. I really like the idea of rolling random stats for horses. Related but heavier than I probably want: Horses and Donkeys and Mules, Oh My! at About Bruce Heard and New Stories.
The Emerging Post-OSR
2025 was the year the OSR finally died, at least for me. The constraints and conventions of the playstyle became more restrictive than useful, so I moved on. At first this meant poking around the remnants of what was the FKR scene, but as the year went on I began to find people pushing more in the direction I wanted. These are just the posts I’d saved as the year went on but this category will be well represented in my top posts.
Principles of Conflict at Dododecahedron. One of the things I had gotten tired of in my games was the constant focus on violence. This is something I still don’t have a solid answer to but this post points to the start of moving towards games with a different relationship to conflict.
I Don’t Know How I Feel About TBD-like Domain Games - a Panic Attack in Writing at Archon’s Court. Despite the author’s feeling on the subject the style of game described is something I want to build towards. In particular having the player characters be individuals with goals that don’t always align is compelling to me. It also provides links to several projects in the same style. I’m surprised to see this playstyle emerging from the GLOG community, but welcome it. Since then Archon’s Court has also written further on the topic in the context of their Lanthanide Horizons setting, which itself is well worth delving into.
Play Worlds Manifesto at The Dolent Chronicle. There were a lot of gaming manifestos written last year, and I think that’s a good thing. Being able to describe and communicate your style of play is something the hobby has historically struggled with. I like this one as it’s in the direction of what I want to be doing even if I’m not super into concealed mechanics, and because it came along with its own self-critique. Sam Sorenson’s New Simulationism is also a recommended read.
Aspect: The best TTRPG system I ever designed by Tangent Joy. Effectively “play worlds not rules” taken to its logical conclusion. 2025 was the year of Over/Under for a portion of the community. I barely participated, but I’m glad I was at least nominally there as it drew several artists to the fold which I am now paying close attention to. Something is being born here and it deserves your attention.
Systems and Tools
How to Set Up and Use Faction Turns at Among Cats and Books. What it says on the tin - a framework for running NPC factions during prep. I really like the idea of faction turns to make the game world feel more alive, and I think it could mesh well with patron play.
Cities, fixed at last at Billhook Blog. I’m really not a fan of codified procedures for cities. In my experience they’re dense enough that the complexity can be hand-waved until it’s needed, and small enough that moving from place to place isn’t a meaningful decision. So I saved this post for the prep procedures rather than the play procedures. They provide enough information to give the city character but still leave gaps which can be filled in with play.
Lions, Foxes, Wolves - A Set of Procedures for Political Play by Newt Young. A more or less full campaign structure. The post has been almost fully re-written since I last read it, but what remains is very much still worth a look. Synthesizing this with the faction turns above could lead to interesting results.
Ambition by the pressbetwixt. I suspect this game isn’t going to need any extra help getting eyes on it but I’m not immune to marketing, alas. Even though the game clearly isn’t for me, I can respect the craft evidenced here. The closest thing I can compare it to is unfortunately 5th edition, but I think that’s because the game is aiming to service the 5e’s playstyle with an intentionality and skill not found there. The way the mechanics ooze flavor in the witch playtest got me excited to play the game despite the class essentially just being a normal spellcaster. Though it’s clearly taking from Disco Elysium in a way I’m increasingly side-eyeing in media1 I’m still really interested in the Voices mechanic despite myself. And you know. The art is gorgeous.
Just Neat Blogs
At a certain point in the year I stopped saving posts and just started saving blogs to pull out and dig into later.
Stepnix - Saved for their TTRPG and freeware lists, and for their discussion of games I probably wouldn’t play myself. And the site being really cute helped too.
Bocoloid from Southern Edge - They’re pursuing a playstyle similar to what I want to aim for, and the more I can learn from the mistakes of others the better.
The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm - Probably my top find of 2025. They’re pursuing trad play while also bringing in a decidedly literary bent. It is not a coincidence that the best TTRPG blogs are those which are willing to engage with ideas from outside the hobby. Particular highlights include their socratic dialogue on the value of TTRPGs and other art in the middle of all that’s going on in the world, their outline of a Mage: The Ascension hexcrawl campaign, and an argument for procedural game prep.
The Bottomless Sarcophagus - An inspiration in my early days in the hobby. I saved it to avoid forgetting it as it slips further and further down the RSS feeds, as the blog is no longer updated. I would recommend their posts on the Thawing Kingdom and on Aphid Elves.
Valeria Loves - Originally saved because of her post on Fabula Ultima but her reviews are excellent generally. And she’s just genuinely funny.
subjunctive moods - Excellent worldbuilding posts on fantastic genders and thoughts on simulationism. I was also quite inspired by their approach to social mechanics.
My Top Posts of 2025
Neither of these were on the original document, and indeed one of them was not published in 2025, but I feel like it would be remiss of me not to share them.
The OSR Onion at Dodocahedron. I had seen someone saying that this post provided a clear direction for where the OSR can go from where it is now, and I wholeheartedly agree. The questions to be explored in the conclusion were especially compelling.
Depicting Violence at The Garden Below. I checked this blog before bed not long after it was published, initially hoping for another design diary from her game. Instead I found myself viscerally pulled through to the end. Anything else I have to say about it feels trivial.
Post Script
I’m immensely grateful to those who write for these games and who share their thoughts freely, whether they’re on this list or not. Roleplaying games are a strange medium when you get down to it, and the fact that so much theory and practice - so much care and intentionality - can go into them never ceases to amaze me. It makes me want to build on these ideas, take them down from the shelf and play with them, and maybe add something of my own and hope it’s worth building on in turn.
Footnotes
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One of the greatest games I’ve played, but its ideas have been plastered everywhere recently in a way I’m starting to find tiring. ↩