Building Tension: TTRPG Lessons from Pandemic
I absolutely love the board game Pandemic. It was one of the first "serious" board games I played, after Betrayal at the House on the Hill. It is still one of my favorites. It is challenging but winnable. The system is easy to understand, but you can get screwed over if you're unlucky. And every variation that I've played, from the base game to the Fall of Rome version (where instead of diseases you're fighting barbarian hordes), to the game of Pandemic: Legacy that me and some friends are playing currently, makes me fall in love with the game all over again.
But one of the best parts of the game, for us as TTRPG people, is the way in which it builds tension. The game has a flow to it, as you feel the danger closing in on you. The pace can get frenetic as you're trying to figure out how you can beat the clock, without neglecting Chile and causing you to lose the game because that corner is so annoying to get to.
Playing a more story-based version of Pandemic--even though we've only scratched the surface of the first two cycles--has made me start thinking a lot more about how to use the mechanics of Pandemic to build that tension in my RPGs. Can Pandemic map easily onto an RPG?
Lesson 1: Keep the Plates Spinning
More than anything, the thing that keeps the tension high in Pandemic is that there are so many things to face down simultaneously. I talked about this a bit in my article about lessons from the video game Suzerain in the context of specifically politically-themed RPGs, but really, this applies to any game that relies on there being tensions from time pressure. When there is a limited amount of time to accomplish things, having there be too many things to deal with is key to ratcheting up the tension.
This can be an excellent relief from the "time doesn't matter" problem that plagues a lot of high fantasy stories. Take Skyrim or Dragon Age, for example. You're trying to solve massive conflicts like civil war or a demonic horde invading the world--basically the apocalypse. So why are you taking the time to complete all those side quests? How do you have time for that? These games ask you to suspend disbelief in order to experience all that they have to offer, because the main plot will always wait for you to finish hunting rats or crafting the newest fashions. The same curse haunts a lot of D&D games, as players can easily get distracted down a side plot, leaving the GM struggling to keep up the tension of their main storyline. Or, in a parallel problem, why can't players stop to take a long rest after every conflict?
The question has been answered variously, by trying to put roadblocks in the way. But part of the problem is baked into the main plot-side plot system as a whole.
Instead, as I brought up in my article about downtime, one of the best systems is the Fronts from Apocalypse World. The idea behind a Front is that the threats that your players are facing off against need to continue in the background. They need to have goals and missions that will advance if not dealt with. Among Cats and Books has one of the best articles about a slight twist on this idea, creating "faction turns," that I've read, something I refer back to constantly when planning my games, which I highly encourage everyone to go check out.
But this is all Apocalypse World or other bloggers stuff. What about Pandemic? What does Pandemic teach us about this? In short: you need multiple fronts/factions taking turns. More than your players can reasonably handle.
Tension in Pandemic comes from trying to do a lot of things at once. There are many crises all happening at the same time. When you head to South America to deal with a fire, you're leaving embers behind in Asia. But take the time to smother those embers completely, and the fire might have gotten out of control elsewhere in the meantime. Keep your players moving from issue to issue, never able to fully deal with a faction lest another one advance too much, and your game's tension will benefit from it.
Lesson 2: Utilize Hot Spots
During Pandemic, you draw city cards to figure out which ones are growing more infected. Every now and then, you shuffle all the drawn cards together and then put them on top of the deck. This means that because you drew Istanbul once, it is more likely to come up a second time... and a third time, and a fourth time.
This also helps ramp up the tension of the game. You know, somewhat, what is coming. It is a mode of foreshadowing. You don't know when Bangkok is going to become an issue again, but you know that it is going to be an issue again, and maybe you want to end your turn within range to deal with it, just in case. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 makes this even better, by having some zones be hot spots or "ground zero" across multiple games--all the better for a campaign, rather than a one shot.
Additionally, the danger of different diseases in Pandemic varies, from 0 (not present in the city) to 3 (crisis). Having this sort of increasing panic/problems in your setting can also give players room to engage with the issues of the campaign.
To put this in terms of Apocalypse World's Fronts or Among Cats and Books's Faction Turns: the increasing dangers should be similar. An early factional goal would bring the matter to the party's attention, but not necessarily be a crisis. A recurring hot spot could be a goal that the faction is really insistent on. The first time that the Grey Wizards attack the town, it is one issue among many. But when that assault is thwarted, they move on to a different back up plan: to take the city by subterfuge. When that plot is uncovered, they decide to find a powerful magic item and use it to simply wipe the town off the map.
Is it repetitive? A little! But when it becomes clear that this faction is not giving up on their particular mission, and are just changing tactics, it gives the players a chance to be proactive rather than reactive. How can they fortify the town so that the next attack is easier to deal with? Or, if you've done lesson 1 well, can they afford to take that time to fortify the town, if there's a simultaneous crisis three towns over? How does that decision change at the severity of the crisis? If there's a level 1 issue still here that you know is going to flare up more, but there's a level 3 over there, should we go deal with the top priority even if leaves their back exposed? Or do they try to cement their control by getting their current threat down to a zero, but risk a true crisis spreading out from the level 3 hot spot nearby?
Lesson 3: Embrace Randomness
I love a well-plotted game with a lot of GM guidance to the story. It is something that I pride myself on as a GM, and it is certainly part of my unique GMing style. I'm not great at running collaborative storygames like Brindlewood Bay where the answer to a mystery is that the players make it up together. And, as I wrote about in my reflections on my hex crawl campaign, I enjoy more structured stories to just a wide open sandbox.
RPGs are built on randomness. It is why they have dice. Randomness can impact how events play out. Letting randomness have some control is what puts the G in RPG. On the other hand, too much randomness--like the random encounter table--can make a game feel like a slog, distracting you from the plot.
Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy teach us that we can have a structured outline with plot, pacing, and tension while still embracing randomness. There's a story to Pandemic Legacy told through exposition and goals to accomplish during the mission, but things like "where the disease is" are still randomly generated. Even the base game of Pandemic is designed to have a building tension as some of those plates that you're spinning get wobbly, while still maintaining a lot of randomness.
So what about prepping as a GM? I'm not advocating for completely random encounters--I do feel like those distract from a plot, in a high-plot game. But if you built the right table, you absolutely can use it to advance the plot. I really like the small scale of Murkdice's Hexflower random encounters--only three "per region". Among Cats and Books encourages you to have the amount of progress that a faction makes be determined by dice roll.
I really don't have much to add except to say: do that! You, as the GM, should write the details. Figure out your faction goals. Write a small random encounter table where each encounter is tied to part of the progressing story. Maybe each "region" of the hex flower is a faction's agenda, and the roll determines which faction gets to make progress. The prep work is in designing the pool of options, each of which should be plot-relevant, linked to your story thematically, and each of which not only mesh with the plot but drive it forward (to keep those crises spinning and demanding your party's attention). But you can leave the determination of which of those happens right now to the dice.
This helps in a few ways. No, it does not make there be less prep. In fact, it might mean more prep, to keep the pool stocked with story-relevant beats that might never see the light of the table. But it does mean that you and the story become less predictable for the players, while still preserving your ability to use hot spots to foreshadow; if you have three main plots, it means that your players won't learn to expect that week 1 is always plot A, week 2 is plot B, and week 3 is plot C (I know I've been guilty of that before). It does mean that you, as the GM, will sometimes be surprised at the developments of the plot, which is a great way to keep yourself from railroading the plot, while still maintaining a heavy focus on plot and not veering into too much sandbox territory. And it does mean that you, as the GM, get to roll more dice. Everyone loves rolling dice.
Conclusion
While thinking specifically about this using the lens of Pandemic is fairly recent for me, in the campaign I ran before my hex crawl--so, now like 4 years ago?--I did do something like this. I had a number of factions each working on destabilizing a city that the party were trying to protect. Every period of downtime, each faction rolled for how many "points" it would get to progress its projects. Often, completion of these projects would at least spark new rumors in the city that would pose challenges for the party. They could and did try to disrupt these organizations.
That said, I think the "Pandemic" structure was a little too concealed. In hindsight, making what those plots were--and having more recurring things, like I've mentioned with hot spots--would have given the players more of a chance to be proactive. Having the opportunity to more directly disrupt their progress would be beneficial. Plus, telegraphing better would have helped give the players more of a sense of their own agency, that they could stop these things before they came to a head, and make moments of failure feel more earned.
Still, it did accomplish the goal of adding tension to the game. There were a lot of plates to keep spinning, and I think that the players felt the challenge of keeping everything under control.
While I'm not sure how I'll use this in my current campaign--World Wide Wrestling by Nathan Paoletta, which doesn't exactly lend itself to tense factional conflicts with advancing agendas, and a review of which you can read here--the next time I run a more serious, politically-involved campaign, I absolutely plan to show my cards a little bit more to reveal the Pandemic structure behind the curtain.
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