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I believe there was a thread on here about running the game in a theatre of the mind way, but I can't find it now, but after one of our group's more successful sessions, I wanted to chime back in with what made it work (and what didn't). This is all a trend to how I've been running my games more and more frequently and it really really works most of the time.

As you might know if you've seen many of my posts, I lean pretty anti-prep after learning my lesson more than once in this game and others. Prep can be a trap that leads to bad feelings and bad games. But I mean this in a very specific way. I actually do quite a lot of prep -- I've written an entire supplement book for T2K now, after all! But I don't prep plots or events. I prep background activity, NPCs, and settings that I can slot in where they're needed. I ask the world questions and let it surprise me with its answers. To do this, you need to know your setting very well. It needs to be clicking along in the back of your head almost fluently.

The same can be said for combat. The combat system is very good. But it's also still a gridded tactical combat system. There's no getting away from it taking some time to resolve. And the huge speedbump you hit when you transition from roleplaying mode to It's Time To Do Some Violence, Lads can definitely suck the air out of a scene. So I've been working at using pseudo-combat and theatre of the mind to smooth over that bump and resolve scenes without needing to haul out the battle map, draw initiative (another huge pet peeve of mine), and whip out the action lists.

How do I do this? First of all, you've got to know the combat system very well, so that you can then apply it abstractly. After running a few fights I had pretty much memorized all the basic modifiers that tend to come up. You'll be using all of those, just with common sense instead of a battlemap. The fact that you're still applying the rules, through a filter of common sense, is what makes it all work.

Do you miss your map, though? You can absolutely still use it! And I do... but sometimes it's a topo map, or a Google aerial, without hexes. If I can scale that, though, I still no the distances between things. From the rules you know how far a character can sprint in an action, and a round, and how much further they can go if they make a Mobility roll. This came up in the most recent session: the PCs are disengaging across an open field, 200+ meters from a very angry man with a grenade launcher. This is the culmination of the session -- the biggest and baddest stuff has already happened. Do I want to spend a lot of time going action-by-action for every character as they cross 200m of mostly open field? No, I do not. That would 100% kill the energy of the session. One mobility roll for each character does the trick to tell me roughly how fast they're getting across this field, which tells me how many times the grenadier can fire, reload, fire again. You fast guys are going to be exposed to two shots. You guys that didn't make the rolls are facing a third right as you get to cover. He gets a success on this shot, roll blast damage and you're knocked down, which means CUF and a moment to get back up. One guy didn't make it? Another grenade incoming!

Gotta tell you, this worked great. It was tense as hell and took all of three minutes to resolve. Did I forget exaaaactly how explosive blast damage works on the fly, because I wasn't expecting to use it? Yeah, I did. But I understand the rules well enough that instead of stopping the game to look it up I just made a call and kept it moving. Later I looked it up and found I was only a little off, not enough that derailing the drama would have been worth it.

Earlier in the same session, the same thing worked amazingly for a stealth assassination. The PCs are all hiding in a building, but a patrol has realized something isn't quite right and is investigating. The pointman decides they're about to be made and says "I cross the couple of feet to him silently, put the barrel to his neck, and fire." I actually had a hex map of this building. I could have rolled initiative and gone to it. But that would have sucked all of the tension out of the scene. Instead I ruled "this isn't even going to be a combat roll, if you manage to sneak up on him. He'll just be dead. But you're trying to sneak up entirely on someone -- they're going to hear you. Roll opposed Recon to see if you can do quietly and quickly enough to pull it off." They won by one success, which I had ruled wasn't enough to do a perfect execution, so now they had to roll damage. Missing a crit, I decided "He realizes someone is there in your last stride and starts to turn just as the shot goes off. A spray of blood comes off of him but the bullet misses his spine." I still called it an automatic CUF failure for him. But with the pure stealth approach blown the rest of the group opens up on the other guy. The scene is resolved in a single gruesome minute.

Then what happens? The other guards are alerted. They know something is up. They're getting mobilized to hunt the PCs down. But that doesn't happen instantly. Know what sucks? Running a bunch of combat turns where the only thing that's happening is people moving that you can't see, or are out of range, or [the GM is scrambing to find NPC tokens to put in play]. It's the opposite of dramatic and exciting. So I made a call to leave it to the dice. "Magic D6, how many minutes do they have before the guards figure out exactly where the shots came from?" Lucky guys, I rolled a 6. "How many guards are going to be in the first group that finds them?" Unlucky guys, I roll a 5. The players, of course, don't know these results. Every minute, I ask them what they're doing -- and they finish up their task about 4 minutes in and bug the hell out (leading to the grenade launcher scene above).

Anyway, just want to stress how great this was for running a sort of impromptu combat that didn't shatter the flow of the scene. Great for stealth missions, or those times when you're meeting up with the bad guy and it goes sideways and turns into a sudden shootout. The main fight is over but you've got to clear one or two more guys as you push forward to check the bodies. Etc. You can do it with abstract maps, or real-world maps, or nothing at all. And then of course there are the other times, when the gang is assaulting the Carefully Prepared Compound and you know exactly where and when. That's the time I still break out the battle maps and go.

But ultimately these are tools I've been nudging into the game to make it work as well as possible with our group. Have similar techniques worked for you? Or have you tried it and it just didn't work at all?

I really like what you've explained here because you provide insight into how you leverage the rules to optimize for flow, which is ultimately to maximize player enjoyment - to amp up the tension and action instead of getting bogged down in the minutiae. This is vital knowledge for referees new to the game (like me!) who like to learn from observing how others run their games so they can improve their own.

Typically, when I learn a new game, I create "katas" or exercise scenarios to teach myself the rules by rote. It'd be cool to see more of your playtested experiences on how you handle various scenarios in a similar way - not so much to make the steps rote, but the tactics, eg. using d6 to set a timer and establish number of guards who are hunting the team. When to allow a push, how to keep the game moving past failures, etc.

Keep these posts up - I'm keen to learn more.

Haha glad somebody made it through the wall of text. I started writing it as a blog post and it was even longer than this, so I trashed it!

I'm sure I've improvised a lot of things. Much of this comes from a long exposure, over two or three different chapters of my life, in roleplaying games and watching them evolve alongside computers. I steal relentlessly from other games when they do something I like, as long as I'm able to justify the feeling it will create in the current game -- and assuming it won't break anything dramatically. I hate munchkins and min-maxers and I find these sorts of tools encourage everyone at the table be engaged with finding solutions to problems at the table rather than trying to build the perfect character to solve every problem with a game system. To put it another way, having a fast and exciting firefight that uses the core rules is a lot more exciting and fulfilling to me (and I think, everyone else) than "oh ok my rifle has a range of 5 so I'm going to make sure I never move to 6 hexes on the map" and behavior like that which drags the game out and pulls people out of immersion.

Of course I'm by no means the world's greatest GM -- and in fact a lot of this stuff I write about was on-the-job training where I realized after the fact something I'd done badly and wanted to figure out a way to improve on it later on!

If you've got questions or situations, shoot -- I'm better at attacking specific problems than half-remembering the old ones I've encountered!

Ok: An easy one to start. How have you used your techniques to teach the game to new players? What scenarios/sites did you use? How did you run them? What worked out well? What didn't? Why?

I have only taught this game to two new groups of players: my initial campaign group, where we all sort of learned together, and then two replacements who stepped in over time.

With the first group, I started with a session zero, where we discussed the backstory of the world. Some of my players did not realize this was an alternative history, so that was good to cover! They had a few specific questions, some of which I had to determine or improvise answers to on the spot, or work through with them. Some of those questions I deferred as in-character knowledge.

Everyone made characters and we talked about their goals. This was good, on the one hand, because the overall group composition turned out much differently than I'd expected, and would lead to a very different campaign. Doing this as session zero gives you time to react to those changes and prepare a basic outline for the actual first session. The players had some trouble setting big dreams and moral codes. I tried to help but in the end it took actually playing in the world for most of them to figure it out.

Finally, I ran a sample combat for everyone. While I did use their characters for this, it was intended as a practice run with no consequences. I anticipated from reading that the system could be quite deadly and they could run out of ammo quickly. In actual fact, they did much better than I anticipated and were able to take on a force about twice their size without anyone dying. And they did the smart thing and ran for it when they heard armor approaching. For the next several sessions after this, they were eager to avoid fights, so I considered the system training a success. This first fight was quite long (about an hour and a half) and while I'm confident we could run it even as played, on the map and everything, in about half the time now, it still gave me a good benchmark for how much time a real combat would eat into a session. I knew I didn't want a session to end up being just entirely a big battle, so I kept that in mind and noted things that had continually slowed me down in running in it, and made reference cards to leave out about those things for next time. I also learned a lot about how to run NPCs in combat to create more or less threat.

For the players who joined later, there was much less onboarding, since they needed to fit into the world in progress. I still did offline sidebar discussions with these players to get them up to speed on the world, but had the help of the other players for this. The first time these new guys get into combat, I give them a little leniency and let other players give them OOC advice and even a "takeback" or two if they misunderstand something crucial. I definitely recommend offloading as much work as possible onto the player group. If they can help you reference specific rules in play, then let them. If they have questions you don't have the answers to about the world, get them involved in determining what those answers are! It takes a lot off of your plate and makes everything run much faster when everyone's waiting for you to say something. I've had entire sessions that consist almost entirely of the players discussing among themselves at this point, and while I don't think they're anyone's favorite sessions, they do offer some nice breathing space sometimes for everyone to regroup and figure out what they want to do next. So I'm just sitting there taking notes about what the players' theories are (and if any of them are actually better or more interesting than my own!), what clues they're picking up on or have missed, and mostly what they seem most interested in. Then over the week I can go and figure out how to adjust what's going on behind the scenes with that in mind. This doesn't mean I'm always making it go in a direction they want -- in fact some of the most rewarding sessions have been a whole series that springs out of unexpected changes of plans or direction or a mission they'd really rather not take, but have no immediate choice. I use these elements to change momentum but also to provide information about the world.

Last thing is every now and then, after the culmination of a story arc or big series of sessions, we usually do a quick review and see how everyone's feeling about the game, their characters, etc.

Oh, you asked about scenario and story sites. I look at these as a great back-pocket resource to ease prep, but they're only useful to me if they are aligned with the objectives that came from everything above. In other words, if the players are wandering aimlessly with no real momentum, then I start looking at these to see how they might give them some direction for a while and what stories they care about might spring out of those. Or if I need a serious complication, I think of them then.

One practical example is that I'd given the players a mission to go retrieve an item from a facility occupied by marauders. On its own, this would be a scenario site. But on the way there, the players seemed distracted by other events and wary about what they would find. As they wandered, I'd pulled encounters normally (from the cards or from some other source, I don't recall. I actually use the ones from the solo rules all the time, even not playing solo, and I've borrowed similar tables from other games to use whenever I need something different). One of the themes that came up more than once was fire. So I decided to put the Burnt Town in their path. But with the twist that the marauders weren't in the town itself, they had raided from the nearby facility. The players explored the town under a time crunch. They would have liked to do the right thing, but the rolls and their initial approach didn't go the right way and they still had a mission to do. In the end they used the town as a distraction to hit their objective at the same time most of the marauders would be distracted. It was a big mix of emotions, and some of them roleplayed this very well in a way that subtly changed their characters.

In the end the scenario site added about a full session to this overall arc. They didn't find out all of the place's secrets, and knew they weren't going to. I didn't try to sell it to them as "a dungeon you must puzzle your way through to move on," but as another part of a living world that was tied into what they were already involved in. They used it as such and it provided some good rp and moral challenges. Going forward it's also provided them a contact, at least a couple of devoted enemies, and a place on the map that they know and would rather avoid.

So that's how I've used these and will occasionally do so moving forward. When all signs point to "hey this seems like a spot where _____ might turn up," I can start planting clues and see who is interested and who isn't. If they aren't interested, that doesn't necessarily mean you scrap it, just that they didn't see the relevance or priority at that moment in time. If those things changed over time, then you can adjust. But if they seem just totally uninterested in the concept (maybe that's "a war college run entirely by adolescents") then yeah, put that one away and don't use it except as rumors and background material.

Thanks, again - very thorough responses!

Next Qs:

1/ Purely curious: In the stealth assassination opposed recon roll you describe in the first post -- the player failed a pushed roll I presume?

2/ What aspects of RAW do you find accelerate your lightweight, "pseudo-combat" style of game? What, beyond what you mentioned already, did you need to drop?

3/ What house rules have you introduced, if any, in this regard?

1 - I don't recall. Either they weren't able to push or I simply ruled they couldn't under the circumstances. If they had failed spectacularly or succeeded spectacularly that would have significant effects on the outcome. Usually in a situation like that I'd offer the player a choice of what extra thing happens.

2 - the system as a whole seems to support this style of play pretty well, if you let it. "Make rulings not rules" can also apply to looking rules up. But I'd say it's kinda important that the players were familiar with the combat system and knew we were playing within the bounds of that. Ranges don't matter much in a situation like the above, but when they do it's pretty easy to judge. We do a lot of roleplaying but when push comes to shove you can always use a die-roll to answer most questions and resolve most issues.

Here's a whole combat: let's say a scout has started taking fire from someone on the roof of a farmhouse he was observing.

Player: "I don't want to kill her, and I don't want to hang around and get shot by them either, I'll turn and run to put distance between us and break line of sight."
In my head I decide there's a 50/50 chance of decent cover within a sprint's distance away, but the die roll comes up 99. "Ok. The bad news is, as you turn around, you realize it's nothing but empty field behind you for about 200m, and from her elevation dhe can see over the treeline you've been hiding in."
"Doesn't matter, let's run for it and pray he's a bad shot."
"Okay. Roll your Mobility, assuming you want to sprint. Take the -2 unless you're ditching your pack."
"I left it at the RP with the others, remember?"
"Right. Okay, Mobility, no modifiers."
[two successes]
"You're able to put some quick distance between you, but she's got time for a few aimed shots."
[rolls enemy shots, all miss but a chance of suppression]
[player avoids suppression]
"Still running?"
"Hell yeah."
"Okay, I'll say any more successes with Mobility get you out to Long range from the shooter, but after this one you'll need to do a Stamina check also to see if you can keep up sprinting. You're about halfway across the field."
And so on.

A whole roleplay-centered minor "combat" resolved in a few minutes! What's even better is I don't have to spend time as a GM looking for the right battlemap, freaking out if I don't have something, setting it all up -- for a combat that maybe doesn't actually amount to anything. Frees you up to use a lot more tools and focus on what's important. Now, if the players decide to return here and stage a raid on the place, that's when I'd probably come back ready with a map set up. But I can already start gauging how likely that is from their reactions in the next few minutes.

You can do the same with social encounters, of course. Set modifiers for Persuasion or Command (or whatever) based on how likely the player's approach is to work, or set a target number of successes. I always try to be upfront about this stuff on the spot, ie, "You can try it, but a single success is only going to stop him from arresting you right now. If you want to really change his mind, you're looking at probably three successes, unless you can change this situation somehow first. Oh, and take a -2 on the roll because the guy just doesn't like your attitude." If the player wants to back out then, they should have that chance usually. How much information I give players depends on how much they know about whatever they're trying to do.

Sometimes I do skill or attribute rolls as "saves," usually for a sudden change.
"Hey, give me a recon roll real quick?" [fails]
"Hm. Now a Mobility roll?" [three successes]
"You don't know where the guy comes from, but suddenly out of the dark a fast, angry silhouette flies right at you. He's on top of you before you know it, but you react instantly. He still knocks you to the ground but you won't take any damage and you're back on your feet almost instantly... he's charging back at you, now what?"

So, all of that is sorta house rules, I guess? But it's all built off the core systems, so it doesn't cheat players of their skills, specialties, tools, etc. This is not to say that I don't still run plenty of the game RAW, but it's useful to be able to improvise or simplify sometimes. The travel/shift rules are a major place where I often feel some friction and often abstract things.

I've got another whole thread somewhere with various other house rules I've come up with. Most of them are not exactly about this style of running the game though, they're for things like machine gun and so on.