Thinking in Fits

I've got some miles on my Shadowdark book. At the time of this writing, I've easily run a fairly absurd 300+ sessions. Which is to say, I'm pretty familiar with that system.   Recently, I ran Cairn and found... well... Not what I expected at all. Oh, I had heard of it, but I'm an OSR guy, and I don't run "story games," I run dark survival horror the way my first DM did in 2e when I was a teenager. Which is to say, I was uninformed. What I found when I dug in has changed how I run games, even in Shadowdark, and I wanted to put some of that down here for the benefit of the wider community. The Game Interface Rules First Typically, a player will interact with a TTRPG at the table through the rules system. I don't mean theater of the mind vs. maps and minis, or VTT vs. meatspace. I mean, they announce some type of Action, be it a move, an attack, or some sort of skill, the GM Adjudicates an outcome, and the Fiction state is updated as a result. We don'...

Every OSR game offers the referee advice on how to think about calling for a roll, but I kept noticing I was still running things like modern D&D.  I would read the advice and nod along. There are little gems of wisdom on this topic tucked into every system I've run. Intellectually, I understood them, but I struggled to turn them into a low-load heuristic I could use at the table. Under pressure, I fall back to "Roll a d20, add this bonus, let's see if you succeed." Recently, while running Cairn, I stumbled onto a little hack that finally made it easy to run without thinking. Underneath it, I realized there was a bigger principle, but we'll get to that in a moment. The Hack: Don't check for success, save against consequence.  If you can't immediately explain a specific consequence of failure to the player, don't ask for a roll. You will freeze up and miss some, and you'll sometimes fall back into modern habits. That's fine. Nothing breaks. ...