The Crisis System
Some systems lavish a lot of detail on combat and provide only bare-bones rules for social or mental tasks, while others have complex non-combat skill systems. Someone in my group was running a game in which our airship mechanic had to climb out onto the zeppelin during a hurricane to fix an engine before the storm could tear the vessel apart. He had to make choices between working to fix the engine or put out a fire, and had to make rolls to hang on in the rain and wind. So much more involved than just Roll to fix the engine. It was the most exciting repair scene I’d experienced in a game and it made our mechanic feel like a badass.
That got me thinking about all of the television shows and movies where the most intense scenes aren’t fights, but things like disarming a bomb, performing emergency surgery, hacking a computer system or navigating a treacherous mountain pass.
I found that most game systems didn’t have mechanics for those sorts of complex skill challenges, at least not with the same intensity as combat.
For my next game, I conceived of the character group as an elite military unit with different and specialized training, such as demolitions, medic, pilot and so on. I wanted to be able to give each character chances to step out onto center stage and use their training in a crisis like that airship mechanic.
I was looking for a way to give each character a chance to shine, without taking a whole session. I experimented with a type of skill challenge system that I called a crisis scene and since then, crises have become a staple of my games.
A normal skill check to perform surgery — if that ever comes up in the average game — probably involves only a single roll. Perhaps for difficult surgeries, the same roll is repeated with multiple successes required. I try to make a crisis scene a bit more exciting than a single or repetitive roll.
In my game with the elite military squad, the group was sent to extract a spy from a space liner. The huge ship was under attack by enemies trying to capture the spy. When the characters fought their way to him, he had been wounded and was dying. It was time for the medical crisis! First, the medic had to accurately diagnose the injuries, with a failed roll adding penalties to the next stage of the crisis: surgery to save the spy. Then the medic had to make a roll to begin repairing the wound, with the life of the spy — and the information he was carrying — hanging in the balance.
During the attempt to treat the wound, a damaged ship conduit ruptured nearby. The medic was given a choice: continue working on the spy and take damage from the shrapnel, or dodge to protect herself and accept a penalty on the roll to complete her field surgery. All of the other characters had to avoid the blast, as well. In other crises, I have allowed other characters to defend the one who is hard at work.
In this crisis, though, my medic stoically continued working and completed suturing the spy’s damaged arteries. To keep the intensity high, I added a complication: the spy had been equipped with a suicide device in case of capture. While repairing the artery, the medic noticed the device and saw that it had been damaged. The device had to be repaired or else a loud cough might set it off and kill him. She had to perform a sort of surgery within a surgery while the ship collapsed all around her.
The medic’s player told me that it was one of the best game sessions of her life. She felt important, like her character was highly skilled and the scene had good tension. A crisis scene uses a character’s specialty skills or abilities and mixes in a few reactions. They can include places for other PCs to step in and help, but allow the primary character to take the spotlight for a few awesome minutes.
Crises can be mixed into your combat scenes to keep things interesting, too. An injured ally or innocent bystander may require medical attention. Perhaps a door is closing and a super-strong character must hold the gate open until the rest of the characters can retreat through it.
I learned just how exciting it could be to mix crises and combat entirely by accident. The player characters were exiting an enemy space station after successfully completing a mission, only to find their evacuation shuttle in ruins and one of the allies they left to defend it actually pinned under the wreckage. Another ally had been critically injured. Standing over it all was the powerful villain and the boss of the chapter. When their NPC mentor charged the bad guy, I had the villain throw him out the airlock to prevent the ostensibly more powerful NPC from stealing the spotlight.
As I had envisioned it, the PCs would defeat the villain in a normal combat scene. Afterward, while the NPC had made his own way back into the space station from outside — thus proving how hardcore he was and continue to build up the players’ reliance on him — the characters could dig their comrade out from under the shuttle and treat the injured one.
But my players were much more proactive than that. While one of the characters lifted the wreckage and held it for an ally to pull their comrade out from beneath, the medic went right to work on the injured man. Meanwhile, another character decided to save their mentor, throwing a grappling line out of the airlock and pulling him back inside, all with only a couple of PCs left to engage the villain and hold her off. It was one of the most exciting scenes I’ve ever run and I’m not sure I have equaled it since.
Crises can also add tension to social scenes or puzzles that might otherwise pale in comparison to the excitement of combat. In a western game I ran, the characters needed to raise a large amount of money quickly. Lives were on the line. So the characters entered a poker tournament with a large cash prize. I used crises for each night of the game, then divided the stages into the parts of Texas Hold ’Em: the Flop, the Turn, and the River. There were twists when their opponents cheated, bluffed, threatened or distracted, or went all-in. Gambling movies can make a card game intense and exciting, and crisis scenes allowed me to do the same in my game.
Crises have added a new dimension to my games and my group enjoys them thoroughly. They do take a lot of planning, however. If you can invent a crisis off the top of your head, that’s amazing, but it takes me a little thought. What sort of complications or twists can I put into the crisis? What should the penalty of failure be? What kind of rolls should be involved and how do I make sure it doesn’t get stuck on just one kind of skill? Can other characters assist?
Planning the crises out ahead of time also gives me the chance to think up some realistic (or at least realistic-sounding) medical problems, computer hacking challenges, or mechanical failures. Those sorts of details maintain immersion and make the crisis feel urgent, but can be pretty hard to make up off the cuff.
So what should the consequences of a failed crisis be?
Crises usually have between three and five stages, each requiring a roll or two. Each stage is a failure point. Depending upon the nature of the stage, sometimes the result of failure is a penalty to the next step rather than botching the whole endeavor. But sometimes the penalty of failure is failure. For example, the characters may be getting ready to defend against a siege and they have some time to prepare. In that time, one of the PCs tries to repair a broken catapult that could be used to help in their defense. If the roll fails, they may simply not get to use it during the battle. In the event of a medical crisis, the patient may die.
Just remember not to let the players roll for something that you can’t let them fail. If the characters need to cross a collapsing bridge, you probably don’t want the entire party to fall off and die. Sometimes the failed stages of a crisis should result in small amounts of damage or the loss of some other attribute — Healing Surges, Willpower or whatever expendables are used in your RPG system.
In that case, the crisis determines not if the character succeeds or fails, but the cost of a necessary success. In the collapsing bridge example, success may be an impressive aerial leap, but failure may be a close call, a scrabbling jump that cuts up the character’s hands (and dealing a few points of damage) as they dangle on the far side and have to laboriously pull themselves up. A successful crisis may mean that they accomplish their goal easily, while a failed crisis means that they succeed, but emerge beaten and tired.
Sometimes I use crises to soften up my PCs before a combat. A little damage or forcing them to expend resources makes the subsequent encounter with even stock enemies that much more challenging.
The thing to watch out for with crises is rigidity. Some of your players may have real knowledge about medicine or computers, or maybe another creative idea. Don’t just shoot your pre-made rolls at them in rapid fire, rushing them through the stages. Your players may have their own ideas on how to deal with the monkey wrench you just threw into the works.Crisis scenes may benefit from planning beforehand, but when you’re running them during game, give your players a moment after announcing the next challenge to see if they have an idea. If they don’t have any, then supply them with the prepared roll to resolve the crisis.
If your players do have a plan, don’t panic. Chances are pretty good that anything they come up with to resolve a computer crisis can be handled using a variant on the computer skill roll you’ve already planned. All that really changes is the description of the solution, which is just supplied by the players instead of by the Storyteller. Give your players the chance to be active participants in your crisis.
The content of this post originally appeared in My Guide to RPG Storytelling.
