Ach! Your Mustache…!
Well, I’ve still not gotten much writing done. Pretend I’ve listed all of the excuses here instead of this sentence. That said, my attention deficit slipped into attention surplus long enough for me to complete about thirteen pages of Commandos & Cultists, a sort of The Cthulhu Hack, The Black Hack, and WWII: Operation WhiteBox mash-up. (I’ve mentioned this once before in another post.)
Once of the aspects of The Black Hack (TBH) that I’ve read (and cribbed for my own work) several times relates to how measurements of time are abstract. The basic unit of time is the moment. In general, moments are fleeting, lasting no more than a few seconds. In another words, a moment in TBH corresponds to a melee round in D&D.
As I was working on Commandos, I had a minor epiphany. Since TBH treats time as relative, not all moments are as momentary as other moments. When appropriate to the story played out in a game session, a moment might be six seconds long (a modern D&D melee round), a minute long (an AD&D melee round), ten minutes long (an AD&D turn), et cetera. But, in the final wash, if the GM can measure every PC’s individual actions with an identical unit of absolute time, then that unit of time can be treated as a single moment.
For example, a team of commandos wants to spread a bit of chaos and fear in the enemy ranks. The commandos plan out a campaign of nocturnal harrassment that lasts for three nights. The GM decides to treat each night as a single unit of time during which each commando can accomplish three tasks. For each commando, two of these tasks are moving into and back out the enemy lines. The third task might be stealing food, sabotaging a vehicle, absconding with classified documents, disrupting communications, et cetera.
In keeping with TBH‘s action resolution system, each commando’s actions would be resolved with a single die roll, using whichever ability score seems most appropriate. Sneaking behind enemy lines? Dexterity. Disguising oneself as a high-ranking officer and bluffing one’s way behind enemy lines? Charisma. Sloshing through a half mile of rat-infested sewer tunnels? Constitution. It doesn’t matter that each one of those tasks would take longer than a moment when measured with a stopwatch. Game-wise, treating each action as a bit of narration followed by a single die roll suffices to keep the action moving.
So, back to the commando team and their three night campaign of harassment. Each night has the potential to be resolved by as few as three d20 rolls per commando. Should a roll fail (“Ach! Your mustache has fallen off!”), then all of sudden time compresses, and a moment that before might have lasted for a few hours suddenly becomes a series of seconds-long moments in which a commando has to fight for his life.
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