Nested Loops & Baseline Activities
Over the past two years I've been running the most successful FRP campaign I've ever been lucky enough to be a part of, and I want to think about why. Why were previous games so unsatisfying? What makes this one so good?
Critiquing FRP design is difficult, because existing as it does at the intersection of formal contest and make-believe, our natural ability to tell stories and have fun imagining things with our friends tends to compensate for deficiencies in the rules. And indeed, much of what makes my campaign work is the players, a mix of enthusiastic D&D neophytes and helpful, responsible old hands.
But I think one of the most useful things has been that the OSR style gives structure to the game in the form of nested gameplay loops. The combat round is a loop; the combat itself is a loop; dungeon turns are loops; each expedition into a dungeon, hexmap or pointcrawl is a loop; repeatedly returning to down to level up and build institutions and relationships is a loop.
The smallest loops tell you whether you've been stabbed by a goblin; their results feed into bigger loops, like whether you survived the fight, how much treasure you bring home, until the biggest loops tell you how you made your mark on the world.
