Don't forget to hydrate your dice
An H2O resolution mechanic for TTRPGs
Alright all you fire and earth benders with your candles burning and your clicky-clacky math rocks. Buckle up and pack your rain ponchos, because we are gaming with water today.
“Farls, what are you on about?" Oh, yeah. Prismatic Wasteland issued a New Year's challenge that spoke to my love for incorporating funky mechanics.
My challenge is thus: In January 2024, come up with a new resolution mechanic for a TTRPG and give it a name. It doesn’t need to be good (in fact, most the good ones have probably already been taken). It just needs to be new! You don’t need to plan to use it in your games; it can be absolute detritus for you. But one blogger’s trash is another designer’s treasure. You never know how great an impact one throwaway idea on a blog might have.Listening to Asian's Represent's 2023 Year in Review reminded me how many great games use fire (literal or imagined) to generate tension or its core. To name a few we've got Cavalry Games' Ten Candles (https://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles/) or Master of Flame Viditya Voleti's Fire Your Fire (https://vidityavoleti.itch.io/find-your-fire) and The Fire Flickers Between You (https://vidityavoleti.itch.io/the-fire-flickers), including Superdillin's Birthday Blast (https://superdillin.itch.io/birthday-bomb) hack. Sure, fire can be fun (and dangerous) to play with. And there are plenty of (adult) games where drinking is either the consequence for failure or the key determinant for "success." But I can't think of many analog RPGs where liquids are central to the rules.
There's a practical purpose to not include water in your analog games. It's messy and can ruin outfits, paper character sheets, or electronics used to support play. Unless we're doing a LARP, we usually have to mitigate the mess. No one wants to have a flooded apartment or convention hall. But sometimes making a little mess is fun.
Overflow
Setup
We can't really jump into the mechanic without some setup. So here's what you'll need to do:
Pick two bowls of different sizes, such as a large salad serving bowl or mixing bowl with a small cereal bowl. The smaller bowl, –dubbed "the Boat"–must fit completely below the rim of the larger bowl, hereafter referred to as "the Vessel."
Fill the Vessel until the water level is no higher than half the height of the Boat or 1 inch below the Vessel's rim, whichever is lower. If your Boat is heavy, you should stir in some salt to the Vessel.
Float the Boat inside the Vessel, then set the bowls at the center of the table. If you are afraid of making a mess, place the Vessel atop a large baking sheet lined with a bath towel. Just make sure it's relatively level.
Give every player a Glass full of water and a handful of beads, blocks, or pebbles. A variety of shapes and sizes for your stones is encouraged. If all else fails, I suppose you could use that excessive dice collection.
If you really want to play into the messiness, surround the Vessel with Meeple, animal tokens, or houses from your favorite board game you don't mind getting wet. When the Overflow inevitably occurs, they will be swept away like a flood.
PC Resources
Player characters (PC) have two resources for Overflow.
Resolve: The stones are your Resolve, your mental, spiritual, and emotional energy to resist the mounting pressures and stresses of your Situation. When you run out of Resolve, your character Breaks.
Stamina: The water within your glass represents your Stamina, the physical energy your PC exerts to get what they want. When you run out of stamina, you don't have the strength to keep fighting. Your Tests automatically Fail
Sink or Swim
Whenever you make a Risky Move, that is one that puts you, your goals, or your allies in peril, the Referee may call for a Test.
Declaration: You announce whether you are relying on your Resolve of Stamina to achieve your desired result.
Result: If you succeed, things go your way. You describe what happens and how you overcame the challenge. Failure means things go horribly wrong as you near utter disaster. The Referee describes how circumstances prevented you from achieving your goal and the two consequences of failure.
Stamina: You pour a splash of water from your Glass into the Vessel. You fail when you spill a single drop or somehow cause the Vessel to overflow. If you can do so while blindfolded or performing another impressive feat, the Referee may grant you a Critical Success–you get more than you asked for and may attempt to reclaim one stone from the Boat.
Resolve: You add a stone to the Boat. If you sink the Boat or drop the stone anywhere else, whether the table, the floor, or the Vessel, you fail.
Resisting Consequences: Another player can help you resist one consequence of failure, other than an Overflow. They describe how their PC helps the situation and add an another stone to the Boat.
End States
Using this tokens-with-a-twist mechanic, every action has a consequence for player and PCs, pushing your story toward an end state. Both Success and Failure mean the water level rises. But adding a stone also makes the Boat's weight increase, causing it to sink. There are three probable end states.
The Boat sinks but the Vessel doesn't Overflow. The players don't make it through, but their sacrifice ensures the crisis is averted for the setting.
The Boat remains floating, but the Vessel Overflows. The players ultimately make it through somehow but with disastrous consequences for the setting.
The Boat sinks and the Vessel Overflows. The worst outcome. No one gets what they want and something terrible unfolds for our PCs and the setting.
Potential Applications
Overflow would likely work best with games geared toward a single session of play, like Ten Candles. However, I could also see it working for more episodic Powered by the Apocalypse (PBtA) games if you fiddled with bowl types and water volumes for more predictable session lengths. You could even pair the Vessel/Boat concept down from a shared resources to each player having a (small) set, gambling with the Referee how many Stones they could add without sinking their boat.
Wrap Up
If you made it this far, thanks for tuning in! This was my first blog post, so let me know what you thought in the comments and subscribe or follow me on Twitter (@Farlsthegm) for more tabletop design musings.
If you liked these weird mechanics, you'd probably dig my silly little spelling RPG "This Game is B-A-N-A-N-A-S." (https://farlsthegm.itch.io/this-game-is-bananas) As you brain through your next great game or the New Year, New Mechanic, I encourage you to be as water. But don't always go with the flow.