As I ran into problems with the second Voidpunk novel and had to sink all my available time into fixing them, I haven’t worked on the associated pen-&-paper RPG system for months. And I had gotten stuck with that too! Since then, my train of thoughts in this regard has been chugging along more or less on its own.

A while ago I attended a role-playing game jam with the opportunity to experience Blades in the Dark with an actual set of players and a skilled GM. It was terrific, and I love the system’s ingenuity. While I wouldn’t want to use the specific systems design parameters of dark systems like Blades in the Dark, Cthulhu Dark, or Trophy Dark as a general framework, they’re highly inspirational because I don’t want to fall back wholesale on classical PPRPG systems design, i.e., to a system similar to the one I designed ages ago. Instead, my ambition is to devise a rule system more conducive to faster pacing.

Two insights resulted from that train of thoughts. In both cases, I had confused my objectives in terms of what I actually mean by designing a fast-paced PPRPG rule system.

The first insight was that I don’t want to design a “fast-paced game” in that sense in the first place! What I truly want to design is a playing experience that encompasses every possible kind of pacing—“frantic” prominently among them, certainly, but not as an adrenaline-fueled action thriller from A to Z. I want the rules to facilitate different moods and styles, up to and including rules that give the player characters and NPCs time and opportunities to pursue and play out personal interests and relationships, enjoy a can of beer on the porch, and what have you.

Thus, where I truly want the rules to be fast are session preparation and rule handling. (Which shouldn’t be a brand-new thought—in 2023, I mentored a pen-&-paper RPG project funded by TH Köln KickStart, whose core ambitions included a substantial reduction of the GM’s workload and the players’ rule-related cognitive load.)

The second insight was about the mistaken notion that I wanted to have fast-paced rules for cinematic gameplay. Which, at a closer look, foreshortens the perspective of what “cinematic” means at heart, an aspect I already wrote about for the same context but with a different focus. Being cinematic, as it comes down to, is as much about frantic shootouts as it is about having that beer on the porch.

Not unrelated to this, I supported Austin Walker’s Realis and received its early Kickstarter edition a while ago. I haven’t had the time so far to dive into it, but I’m more than sure it will give me buckets full of fresh ideas.