Your Taverns Need a Procedure

This post explains both the importance of procedures as a modern design trend in the OSR, why procedures are applicable to tavern encounters and presents my own pubcrawl procedure designed for my upcoming Barkeep on the Borderlands adventure.

Art: Gus L.

Prologue

After the fall of G+, the folks who set about constructing the edifice known as the OSR were scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth. Like humanity after the fall of Babel, communication broke down. John at the Retired Adventurer blog recently usefully summarized the current state of communication within Post-OSR spaces:

“One of the reasons that I consider the OSR at least in decline, if not in an unholy afterlife is the breakdown in knowledge transmission. That is, we're rarely progressing forward on the ideas and processes that the OSR used to really care about developing and refining, and instead we get dead cliches spouted by people who know less than the people asking the questions.”

This is not my grand opus explaining what I think sets the Post-OSR apart from what came before (although I have some Thoughts). But I wanted to talk about the pedigree of the procedures I am about to briefly outline. There are several trends within the Post-OSR (among them, a focus on information design, minimalist rules, maximalist layout, procedural generation, troika-style backgrounds, greater influence from story game play styles, etc., etc.), but one trend that I find very positive began as a strain of thought within the OSR: Proceduralism. A cadre of designers (hopefully a growing one) are interested not just in rules, settings or systems but in the procedures we use to run games. This is something that is often taken for granted, but paying attention to them is useful for veteran players and referees and downright enlightening for beginners.

What is Proceduralism?

Proceduralism, as a descriptive term, has its origin in a 2014 blogpost on Necropraxis. In that post, Brendan described proceduralism as “the degree to which a game directs your actions as a player or referee” and analyzed the extent to which proceduralsm exists in old-school games and post-Forge story games, such as Torchbearer. Brendan continued on his proceduralist quest in developing the Hazard System (e.g., the overloaded encounter die). Other bloggers during this late OSR era were also getting more interested in procedures, whether it was writing about haven turns (turns for adventuring in town) or thinking about how various procedures work together in games.

These threads of theory continue to be weaved by the modern, post-G+ OSR. Ava Islam marketed her own game, Errant, as “rules-light, procedure-heavy,” a formulation that has been adopted by many other games coming out since early 2021. She described procedures as “not rules, but neither are they vague, general guidance. They provide a framework to structure the game, and can be adjusted, ignored, hacked, mangled, broken, stolen, or seasoned to taste.” She elaborated on this in her design deep dive on procedures. Gus L, who describes his own play style as “Classic”, has his own take on the importance of procedures in what he calls “‘Neo-Classical’ Procedures” for dungeon exploration. The importance of procedures for games continue to be explored (for instance, in my own study of the underlying, largely unspoken procedure of OSR games or in mv’s attempt to add dungeoncrawl procedures to Mothership) and continues to be an interesting trend for game design in this Post-OSR era.

Why Do We Need Tavern Procedures?

Art: Hodag RPG

A wizard, a thief and a fighter walk into a bar. This is not an uncommon situation. An untold number of campaigns have begun in taverns (perhaps too many), and it is a common fixture of games of all genres (fantasy may have their taverns, but westerns have their saloons, space westerns have their cantinas and cyberpunks have their night clubs). While scenes set in bars tend to be exciting and tension-filled in other media, in TTRPGs they can be exceedingly stale. A bit of unstructured roleplay while the players wait for the referee to incite action and the referee waits for the players to incite action. While this could be fun, the referee generally is on their own for running these portions of the game in a way they aren’t when the players are exploring dungeons or fighting monsters.

My favorite bar scene in media is probably the first one I ever saw: the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars IV: A New Hope. My affection isn’t solely due to all of the nasty little freaks the camera pans over nor was it just the catchy jizz music (although it certainly does help!). There is a lot that actually happens both on the way to and in the cantina amidst the wretched hive of scum and villainy: they get stopped by space cops asking about their droids, shoo away pesky jawas, get accosted by a droidist bartender, get in a bar fight (and cause dismemberment), enjoy some smooth jizz, and meet up and negotiate with smugglers. All the while, there is tension because time is a meaningful element of the scenes—the droids wait outside as the stormtroopers seek them out and in the end the heroes only narrowly escape on the Millenium Falcon after that threat comes due.

I want you to have as interesting sessions in taverns as you do outside them. Accordingly, I have developed a procedure that can structure the type of tavern adventures Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi had. Because it isn’t enough to fill the twenty bars that will appear in Barkeep on the Borderlands with enough interesting NPCs and creatures to make even George Lucas blush (which we will), I also seek to guide referees and players in how to make it all come alive.

A Pubcrawl Pointcrawl Procedure

A good procedure should facilitate the game without getting in the way of it or supplanting it. So this procedure (for my current Kickstarter, Barkeep on the Borderlands) is designed not to supplant the roleplay the players may do in taverns, instead it provides scaffolding for their drinking, flirting and brawling. It is similar to Necropraxis’ aforementioned overloaded encounter die but tuned for tavern encounters instead. It also explicitly deals with the passage of time. In the Barkeep on the Borderlands, the bars close at 3:00 A.M., and some events may happen only at certain times on certain days. But instead of making the referee keep track of time minute-by-minute (a fool’s errand), time doesn’t flow consistently, which for those who spend a lot of time in bars is sometimes what it feels like. There are hours spent in pubs when nothing happens, and there are minutes when everything happens. How this is accomplished will be explained soon.

Art: Gus L

Pubcrawl Turns

The pubcrawl proceeds in turns, each representing an abstract and indeterminate length of time. At the start of each turn, the referee describes what is currently happening in the fiction. During each turn, the characters may make one action each, such as ordering a round of drinks, flirting, brawling, bumming a smoke or something similarly meaningful and time consuming. Moving between pubs may take a few turns, depending on the distance (shown on the map). After the players resolve their action(s), the referee rolls the Event Die (which is a d6) to determine what else happens that turn.

Interpreting the Event Die

Setback. If the jolly crew is in a pub, they roll for a “Situation.” If the jolly crew is outside a pub (such as when moving to a new pub), roll a “Sidetrack” for the pub they are headed toward. For examples of Situations and Sidetracks, check out the example spread in this previous blog post.

Drink. Each character must finish their drink or suffer a slight harm (1 hit point). They must buy a new drink to continue drinking. The Keep has no prohibitions on open containers during the Raves of Chaos, but you still need to go into a pub to buy another drink. As explained in a previous post on my drinking rules, there is some social pressure to continue drinking while they are in the pubs.

Inebriation. Each character rolls their Sobriety Die (also explained in the drinking rules post), downgrading it on a 1-2.

Mark Time. An hour passes. The referee tracks the current time. At 2:00 AM, it's last call for drinks. At 3:00 AM, it’s Closing Time. If using XP for carousing, all participants gain that XP after each night’s shenanigans at Closing Time.

Free Turn. The referee doesn’t roll the Event Die on the next turn.

You Can Have Meaningful Campaigns without Pubcrawl Procedures

For your standard tavern outings in games, you may not need to make a big deal of it. It can be as quick as describing what the tavern is like and maybe playing out a quick scene. However, if you want to run a pubcrawl, this structure is important for doing two things: First, it makes time a meaningful aspect that the players have to take into consideration when making choices (the more time they spend in the pubcrawl, the more likely there are to get into violent encounters in the forms of Setbacks or to black out if they keep drinking). This makes time a resource that the players may squander or use to their advantage. Second, it provides a framework for the drinking rules, which also provide an element of risk and reward, push and pull. The pubcrawl procedure is designed to create a game where players are constantly making meaningful decisions, even while they carouse in the dive bars and nightclubs of the Keep on the former borderlands.

Art: Gus L

If you enjoyed this, go check out Barkeep on the Borderlands (now funding on Kickstarter) which puts this theory into action.