Choice. Part 1?

Choice is the driving mechanic of ATOMIC.

A choice, by nature, revolves around conflict, internal or external. Choice is evident when there is uncertainty in a situation. Do I drink my water now, or ration it? What perk should I pick up? Do I wait to see what this guy has to say, do I shoot him in the face, or do I hide until he goes away? There is uncertainty in any of these questions, concerning short-term vs. long-term benefit, motivations, potential, choices between things with very few common factors, even the future. Making a choice is different from solving a problem, which is about calculating the most beneficial course of action, about answering the question "correctly." All other factors being equal, do I take the gun that does 3 damage, or the gun that does 5? is a problem to solve, not a choice.

Choice is impossible without a clear idea what is going on in the world around you, but, like life, you generally don't have all the information. If you have all the variables clearly laid out, you are making a decision, and that isn't what we are aiming for here. To this end, here are a few things that should be common to most games of ATOMIC, and ideally, most RPGs in general.

• The GM will give you whatever information is necessary for you to make meaningful choices. This does not mean the GM will detail things to an excruciating degree, only to the extent that you can make informed choices. This can be a balancing act, and the GM is sure to louse it up occasionally, but generally speaking, you won’t be bombarded by walls of exposition, but you also won't have to imagine you are in an endless white room, either.
• The GM will not just hand out information that is not critical to a basic understanding of the situation. If you are hunting for clues, for instance, the GM will have provided a description of the area (or person), and it your job to investigate more closely. Ask questions, experiment, use your skills, it's up to you.
• The GM will not tell you information you would not be privy to in your character's position. You won't be able to tell what someone is thinking or what their motivations are and you won't be able to predict the future. The GM won't tell you what lies behind the locked door unless your character has a reason to know such a thing.
• The GM will use your character's knowledge (measured by skills and general IQ) as a guideline for helping you assess probable outcomes of your actions if you ask. If you contemplate making a 30-foot leap between skyscrapers and you ask the GM how it could go, s/he will probably tell you that you will get a very brief, instructive lesson in human aerodynamics and become a permanent part of the landscape below. The GM will not simply volunteer this information. You need to ask, otherwise it is assumed you are thinking through the process on your own.
• There will be a good bit of discussion at the table. Not only is this the normal activity of a role-playing game, in ATOMIC it is also a way to engage everyone at once. This is not an invitation to argument, nor to senseless debate about minutiae. This is about collaborating in the construction of a cool story, and it is in everyone's best interest not to be selfish or steal the spotlight or argue about "what the rules say." Saying it right here: If a rule gets in the way of everyone having a good time, ignore the rule. This is a game, and we are here to have a great time, and while some people really enjoy debate or even argument, most people would prefer to do something else.
• The choices you make matter. The wasteland has a long memory, and a million stories to be told or discovered. No adventure in ATOMIC is so sacred as to force you along a particular path to resolution, or even to pay it any heed at all. No location or person is so important that you can't blow them to kingdom come. You choose who and what is interesting to you, and see what comes of it.  GMs: This is not a sideways method of encouraging you to punish players who kill off your pet NPCs (and why do you have those anyway?!) or just won't bite on your quest hooks. DON'T DO THAT. You shouldn’t be selfish or steal the spotlight, either.

 
Daniel Floyd and James Portnow have been a huge influence in the design process for ATOMIC. Here, they discuss choice, its nature, and its place in games. Here is a newer treatment of it on Penny Arcade. The context is video games, but the concepts carry over into RPGs, and particularly (like I just noted) into ATOMIC. 

GM Rewards

Dragon's Lair by Tim & Greg Hildebrandt

While I will mostly be posting things with an ATOMIC bent, hopefully some of my ideas translate to other tabletop RPGs, too. I will try adjusting descriptions away from specific ATOMIC rules when I discuss them here.

 

The players in ATOMIC gain skill points and experience to improve and diversify their characters. They gain fame and cultivate contacts, find loot and make names for themselves in the wasteland. Rewards are an integral part of the process of doing the stuff of adventuring.

But the players aren’t the only people playing the game.

Most GMs think the rewards of world-building, creating a memorable session and hearing players talk about for years to come is plenty, and they’re right. It takes a certain kind of person to master a tabletop game. However, wouldn’t it be fun if players could reward the GM in-game for surprising them in an unexpected way, or when they discover how all the plot threads come together, or just for doing something uniquely GM-cool? Glad you asked.

When you, the players, think the GM has done something cool, give the GM a poker chip (or some other token that won’t easily get lost or eaten). Now, don’t do this just because the GM lets you get away with something or has to pull a deus ex machina to save you from your own stupidity—that’s just manipulation. A GM should get a chip when s/he surprises you, awes you, fascinates you, deepens your immersion or just makes things more fun for everyone at the table.

That’s it! Well, okay, no, that isn’t it. The GM hangs onto chips until s/he has 5 or more, enough to purchase assorted Mayhem, Mishaps or Miscellany (or M) of their choosing.

So if the GM designs the whole world and what happens in it, what’s the point? The point is to create GM agency by giving them one-shot tools to bend or break rules without the players holding it against them. Think of them as Get Out of Bitching, Free cards, if nothing else.

Each M can only be chosen once, and can only be used one time unless specifically noted otherwise.

Encore Performance

Bring back one killed NPC or boss of your choice. No explanations, no excuses, no need for backstory. And the NPC is pissed about it. Bonus to attacks. New loot, though!

Poker Face

Is he lying? Is he telling the truth? Who knows? For one day, you do not have to tell them if an NPC is lying or not. Watch ‘em squirm.

Redundant Systems

If the players kill an NPC or boss too quickly for you to show them off properly, roll 1d4. The result is how much of a check interval passes before it stands back up, at full health, but slightly weakened. Don’t use this if combat took half an hour or more to play out—that’s just sadistic. Players gain a little XP or other minor reward when this second combat is over.

Forewarned

Somehow, they knew the players were coming. You don’t have to figure out how. NPC combatants cannot be surprised or subject to cheap shots and have higher defense for this combat. Players suffer equipment damage or loss of supplies/henchmen/vital fluids, but gain double cash and supplies. If they live.

How’d They Get One of THOSE?

Bad news? An NPC in a random encounter is equipped with a heavy pristine weapon (in ATOMIC, a pristine weapon is extremely rare and generally powerful--on par with a +5 weapon in the world's most popular RPG, not the kind of thing to toss into a random encounter, typically). 

Good news? The PCs can have it, if they don’t wreck it first. Or, y’know, die.

(GM, are the players gone? Good)

Bad news? The self-destruct countdown begins at 10 seconds!

Genre-Bender

When you roll a Special encounter on an encounter check, it can be any type of creature you want—specifically, from another sort of genre or game entirely. Optimus Prime? Red dragon from D&D? Introspective vampire that operates along Storyteller rules? Cyberpunk mage from Shadowrun? Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland? Check. If using a creature from another tabletop game, have that creature use the rules from that game and try your best to make it work!

You do not need to justify the encounter’s presence or extrapolate it any further in the campaign. Players receive 100 XP from this encounter (in ATOMIC, encounters don't usually grant XP), and probably should get at least a memento of the occasion (loot, achievement, even a perk).

Gamist

When the players are traveling, instead of using a map, pull out a board game that uses dice. Travel takes one trip around the board (so obviously, it needs a board where you can do that). You take the first turn. Whenever you and a player are on the same space, make an encounter check. Ad-lib interesting encounters for landing on special spaces, and establish one or two spaces that will give you a chip each time anybody lands on it.

Afterwards, have each player make a LUCK check if they wish. Success means they permanently gain +1 LUCK, and a critical failure means they permanently lose -1 LUCK.

Notice in each of these examples (except Poker Face), the players get something out of it, too. This keeps the Ms from feeling like arbitrary punishments, and (in theory, anyway) encourages the players not to be too stingy with the chips unless the GM is being boring, nor too generous with the chips because the Ms can ramp up danger and/or uncertainty kind of a lot.

Overland Travel Without Hexcrawling

A Tomlin Art Company postcard of my default ATOMIC campaign region

Travel doesn't have to be skimmed over in ATOMIC. In fact, it is far better if it isn't. But if the players have the whole wide world to explore, how can you make their choices meaningful? How can it be not a question of picking a compass direction, heading out, make a few random encounter checks, and they're there? How can you travel down a road with nothing happening until the dice clatter and the GM says, "Up ahead, coming around the curve of…" Zzzzzz.

Hm? Oh, sorry. Overland travel has always been fraught with so much promise that is so hard to deliver. Every GM I have ever known (including me!) has had such a hard time making the wilderlands as interesting as a dungeon I was beginning to think it couldn’t be done, particularly without maps laid out ahead of time. Which got me thinking…

Think of the wasteland like a dungeon map. The reason a dungeon is easier to run interestingly is because, in a dungeon, everything that is in there was put there by the dungeon's designer—meaning the author or GM that made the thing, not the mad wizard or whatever backstory the dungeon has. Thing about the wasteland, though, is that it is no different.

Think of it this way. Towns and other known (either by players or NPCs) locations are like dungeon rooms. The roads (including waterways and other trails) that connect them are like passageways in a dungeon. Anything and anybody you encounter on the road or at a given location is still put there by the designer. Could the players say they want to look for schnozzberries and you hadn’t even considered berries? Sure, but ATOMIC's rules allow a good deal of player agency to answer that kind of question themselves with skill use (actual gathering, not knowledge-style checks). When you look at it like that, it makes things easier.

Encounters on the road can be conducted just like random or wandering encounters in the halls of a dungeon, but the difference is that the players will be able to see things on the road from a lot farther off  (generally), often at a distance that allows them many more approaches than would be possible inside a dungeon.

When the players find an intersection, signs may give an indication of known destinations, or looking down the roads can show the players, "well, it looks like the cars on this road have been dragged off to the side for merchant traffic," or, "that road winds down into a canyon," or, "this other road isn't much more than a dirt trail, and oh look, there's a corpse strung up from a telephone pole there." Both methods make their choice meaningful, because they have information with which to make the choice—it isn't just a crap shoot.

However, unlike a dungeon, which has access channeled and blocked off by walls, the wilds are wide open. Roads are passageways that simply are not constricted by the laws of negative space. They are built and used where they are for similar reasons, though, generally regarding the surrounding terrain. This was the best place for a road in this stretch of the great outdoors because it is naturally the easiest going. There is no reason the players cannot to go cross-country rather than follow a known path. Here is the second place meaningful choice comes in. As noted above, there are reasons roads are placed where they are, so going off the road automatically means the party will be moving more slowly. They are going to be exploring.

Exploring

Exploring the wasteland or wilderness doesn't have to be defined by maps ahead of time (though a map to track known locations is handy for you, GM, so you can keep track of things visually). When the players decide to strike out across the unmapped places, think of this: these stretches of wasteland are still enclosed by roads and other known boundaries like mountain ridges or coastline. Even if the roads haven't been in use since the War, they are still there and still connect the places that were known before then. It isn’t trackless—just unexplored. These boundaries make running through the wastes easier by parceling out the terrain. These chunks on the map are analogous to secret rooms, but in ATOMIC, we call them blanks. Blanks, by definition, have no predefined locations in them. They are truly terra incognito.

A blank should never be empty, but it shouldn’t be overcrowded, either. Figure out a reasonable number of features (critters, locales, or events) for the space. Compare it to known locations on your map, if you're feeling lazy or pressured. When you follow the steps below, don't go above this number unless you have an awesome reason to have more. Less is generally more, but some is better than nothing.

Over, Under, Around, or Through

When the players leave the safety of (currently in-use) roads, use this simple concept: over, under, around, or through.

Come up with an obstacle whose most visible means of bypassing is one of these (note that this should never be the only way, just the most obvious…to you, anyway). An obstacle is something that requires at least some effort or time to overcome. It could be a toppled skyscraper, a toxic slough, a raider camp, a thorny line of scrub thicket, a crevasse, a minefield, whatever. Describe the obstacle (they have to be informed!). Unless the choices the players make warrant more or less time, if they have a jetpack, for instance, or if all of their legs are broken, or unless you have a solid idea of the obstacles' scale, assume it takes them 30 minutes to traverse (encounter check!), and on the other side, roll 3 features (or the number of features in the blank, whichever is less). Each rolled encounter should be at a manageable distance and have visible clues to its nature once the players are past the obstacle, giving them a meaningful choice again.

If they proceed, they then choose one, investigate it, and when they leave to press onward (either to check a different feature or try to move deeper into uncharted territory), ask again:

Over, under, around, or through? Rinse and repeat. The players can do this up to the number of encounters you figured out for this blank. By imagining the 3 random encounters as 3 directions from start, you can track (on your map) where, generally, they are heading. This changes the nature of this movement from slow travel measured in mph to choice-driven exploration. Will they eventually get somewhere? Of course! A lot of places! But if you don’t know where you're going, you can't really get lost, can you?

If they want to get back to town or something, they can retrace their steps or make checks to find another way to known roads or locations.