I want to help clear up a misconception that I’ve seen again and again in discussions. Skills are skills. It doesn’t matter if they’re knowledge skills, combat skills, bow hunting skills, or computer hacking skills it all comes back down to: The way you use a skill in one situation is the same as in any other situation.
Complexity to be complex
When I am GMing I have a tally sheet in front of me with the names of characters and players. In unstructured time I will make a series of check marks near the name to make sure that everyone is looked at. Some people are observers for a social encounter and slowly build until they have a plan; others are in there from the start and racing to fill any quiet with new flourishes. The messy chart I keep allows me to come back to those slow builders at my table and check in with them every now and then.
My white board practice has grown from running the FFG Star Wars system where there is a very loose initiative system. The basic conceit of the initiative system is that players roll their initiative skill check and it’s tallied against the NPCs and the slots matter, but the slot is assigned to a side and not a player. This has turned into a large problem for some people; they seem to think that a sneak attack or ambush only works in structured time. The confusion about sneak attacks comes from the idea that a weapon skill can’t be used outside of structured time, or, that using that weapon skill automatically starts structured time.
A combat encounter isn’t built around punching and hacking away at people, it’s what comes before and what comes after. A negotiation, for example, is the exact same thing. It is framed with the actions before and after it, not solely by the act of haggling. If all that takes place before the skill challenge is just introduction, you’re short changing your players and eventually they’ll notice. Creating a full encounter around a tense situation where violence can break out is trickier because you do not want to railroad your players into the fight, but you want to leave that option available to them.
Just because we can…
The transition from unstructured to structure isn’t a bolt from the sky and everything switches, it is a conscious choice that a GM makes when asking himself if the encounter will benefit from being in a structured time setting. Initiative is a tool that makes knowing what’s going on easier on everyone and doesn’t leaving someone out. It isn’t something that needs to be slavishly adhered to.
A combat skill is exactly that, a skill. When using a skill it can be in structured time or unstructured and it still does the same thing. A sniper shot across kilometers doesn’t need to be running in an initiative sequence. What does it matter what comes right after? A single gunshot or punch being made isn’t something complex enough to turn it into a full out structured event, the reactions to it would be. If the sniper is shooting at the players, then the sniper is background setting and the players have to react, otherwise the GM has to react with their characters all at once. Depending on how the player narrates the attempt I might make the attack even more successful because they aren’t in a time crunch and reacting instinctively.
Conversely, skills that are of use outside of combat can be used inside of combat. In every single RPG system I have seen they have skeleton rules for using skills in combat. A character wants to charm the leader of a squad into ending the fighting, why not let them? The fighter finally wants to use their intimidate skill so they bellow at the horde once the party has dropped a few of them. The encounter takes place in a factory and a player wants to use the environment around them by turning on the nearby machines. In all of those cases it’s using a ‘non-combat’ skill in structured time showing explicitly that a skill is just a skill without an anointed path for it because it’s of a particular type.
…doesn’t mean we must
While there are situations where using full out structured time is preferable, in many cases it becomes a hindrance that bogs down what you are attempting to do. In other cases, using it in non-combat situations can be a benefit: maybe the flow of a social situation needs to be broken up so the player on the spot can be given a few moments to compose the next question, or the GM needs time to figure out how to drop the twist they’ve been holding onto but the players aren’t taking the hints.
Structured time is a tool that you can use to be more inclusive in your games, but it shouldn’t be a crutch to keep an encounter going on longer than it needs to be or to hinder the flow of the story. Narrating and describing what is going on is much more important to a memorable game than time being strictly structured.
How have you been able to use structured events outside of combat? Have you ever tried to run a combat without an explicit initiative order? Share your thoughts in the comments.
