Manage your game's mental load

A concept I don't see discussed often when it comes to RPGs is that of a "mental load". To put it simply, there is a limit to how many things a human mind can keep track of, and the same is true for RPGs. Once that limit is reached, you tend to either forget things you should be doing, or slow down considerably. Ideally, you want your game to work under that limit, where you can reach the flow state.

Lets break things down into a few categories.

First of all, complicated rules take up a lot of our mental limit. Remembering all the rules for something like Contact would take a lot of effort, so you're most likely be going over it step by step each time you engage in combat. Fewer special cases, exceptions and so on are much less strenuous on the players and GMs alike.

Secondly, more rules means more mental strain, understandably. You can either start off with a system that has a lot of rules for everything, or gradually build up as PCs gain more powers and abilities (which often come with their own little special rules as discussed last time). An example of that from our group would be Exalted, where after a few seasons of Princes of the Universe our character sheets turned into character booklets, with everyone having too many incremental charms to use effectively. This problem was solved when we switched to Godbound where powers were bigger in scope, but smaller in number.

Just one of many of Exalted's charm trees.

Most of those nodes are incremental powers, a small rule to remember...

On a similar note, letting players have limited access to a really large pool of powers can also lead to choice paralysis and increased mental load. A good example of this would be the power Brilliant Invention from Godbound. It's a power that lets you mimic any Lesser Gift from almost any Word. That's over 300 different Gifts you can conjure at a moment's notice - good luck trying to remember the best thing to use for any given situation off the top of your head (then again, 90% of the time you just use Purity of Brilliant Law with this one and call it a day)...

You can use 60% of all Gifts.

Hope you remember them all!

Thirdly, GMs have to juggle more things than players, so it's easier for them to reach their limit. When it comes to NPCs, you ideally want them to be much simpler than PCs. Fellowship handles this pretty well - NPCs only have one to two powers that also serve as their HP. They are much simpler than PCs that take up at least two pages of stats, powers and what have you. It's much easier on the GMs.

Fourthly, context switching can help to compartmentalise the rules and alleviate the mental load. While trying to say, hold 50 different powers in mind at one time can be hard, having 5 distinct and separate game systems each with 10 different powers can be much simpler. You don't need to remember rules for investigation or hacking during a shootout, and bulk trading rules don't apply during space combat. Being able to switch context and only consider a smaller subset of rules and powers can let you handle bigger things. For example, in our Stars Without Number game we use the Suns of Gold expansion that features a big trading system. It's not the easiest thing to use, but since when we are doing the trading there isn't anything else going on, everyone can focus on just this one thing and it flows pretty smoothly.

Fifthly, game aides can help a lot. It's much easier to remember rules when you've trimmed off all the fat and put them on a simple cheatsheet. Having all the rules you need for something on one sheet is ideal - you can context switch to that single page whenever you need to use those rules and follow along to make sure you're not missing anything. For example, while playing Mage the Awakening, having a printout of the Spellcasting Quick Reference pages really made the magic flow, rather than getting bogged down whenever we'd try to engage with the core system of the game.

Page 3 of 4 of MtA's Spellcasting Quick Reference

Sixthly, changing numbers doesn't increase the load. As discussed last time, RPGs usually have powers that come with their own little rules, and stats, which just alter the numbers you roll. Changing the stats doesn't really change your mental load for dealing with them (unless you have to deal with some weird dice mechanics). So if you want to balance your own mental load in a point buy system like Chronicles of Darkness, you can do so by buying powers when things are too simple, and stats when you are reaching your own limits. It can be an interesting way to balance the system without hampering character growth.

So all in all, there are many ways a game can manage the mental load of their players - by keeping its rules simple, avoiding too many small extra rules, keeping things simple for the GM, segmenting systems from one another, providing concise game aides, and letting you buy into more powers or stats to adjust your own load.

Contact - one of the best worst RPGs you'll never play

While back my gaming group have been considering giving CONTACT - Tactical Alien Defense Role-Playing Game a shot. We were initially really enthusiastic about it since the game has had a lot of good things going for it. Unfortunately, after looking into it and familiarising ourselves with the system for awhile, we decided it wouldn't be a good game for us. Below are some of the reasons why you should give Contact a try, and the core reasons why we didn't decide on playing it.

The Good

Contact is basically X-COM the game. You play the role of an OMEGA operative hoping to fight off an alien invasion by shooting aliens and researching their tech to shoot aliens more effectively. Between skirmishes you will also be managing an entire base of operations to help you get an edge over the invaders.

Characters are created using a point build system. You pay for your attributes, your skills, as well as special traits ("I'm very educated", "I'm a junkie", etc.), biomods, gear and so on. Everything comes from the same pool of points, but you also have some restrictions on how many points you can spend on what so you don't end up with unbalanced builds.

The same character creation process is also used for making more unusual characters - you can play as an alien, a full blown robot, and you even use the same approach to making dog companions if you're a dog handler character. The system is very neat and looks rather balanced.

You can start the game as a low-tech tachikoma

It seems that the game is focused on the players having a larger roster of characters, just like in X-com. To maintain and balance that, we have the Base Management Simulation component. It basically boils down to the players managing a budget of a base - hiring staff, building new buildings and upgrading them. While it might sound daunting, it is really streamlined and should be approachable for a lot of groups (then again, I enjoy spreadsheets in space, so take it with a grain of salt ;) ). Each mission feeds funds into BMS on top of a monthly budget, so the players should have plenty of funds to make their base their own and outfit their troops with some good gear.

Now, the best gear in the game is initially locked off. While the players have access to futuristic tech like robots, lasers and cybernetic implants, there is another level of gear they can unlock over the course of the game. This is accomplished through Research Projects. Just like in X-com, the players gather some alien bits and bobs, hire some researchers and in the next fiscal quarter they too can be angels of death clad in power armour. The game doesn't feature a research tree, but the available projects should feel rewarding to the group without feeling repetitive.

You too could be this awesome!

So with the characters ready and geared up, the military industrial complex humming along and the research lab going, the players should be in for some great fun, right? Well, not exactly...

The Bad

Let's say you want to shoot an alien with a burst from your slag gun. How complicated can that be you might ask? Well...

You take your weapon you want to use, check its firing mode to determine how many Action Points you have to spend to use it. You take your skill with using the weapon, apply weapon's quality (good guns are easier to shoot), your damage modifier, add some situational modifiers (light level, size of opponent, etc.). Determine the distance to the target and apply distance penalty. If the enemy is behind cover, apply twice the percentage of their body that is behind cover as a negative modifier. If you are aiming, apply a modifier based on the limb you're targeting. That's roughly your to-hit chance. You roll your die and you hit! Congrats, now let's figure out the damage you do...

You used AP ammo, so you do Ballistic Damage. The target has Ballistic Armour, but luckily you ignore half of it thanks to AP ammo. You take the Armour amount and subtract that amount from your Ballistic Damage. Whatever is left is applied as Damage, after you reduce it by 10% because AP ammo. Whatever was soaked by Ballistic Armour gets converted to Bashing Impact Damage, but luckily enough, the enemy also has Impact Amour! We subtract that Armour value from the Damage. We have some more Impact Damage still remaining, but luckily our body is resilient against this damage - we subtract our Mass score from the Damage - whatever gets subtracted is converted to Fatigue. Apply the remaining overflow Damage.

Now, do this all over again for every other bullet in the burst! Oh, and by the way - with each bullet fired apply a negative modifier based on the difference between weapon's minimum strength requirements and character's Strength. Oh, and only the first bullet in a burst is aimed, so for other ones roll a random location.

If a character takes too much damage their limbs can get crippled and you get some extra effects. If you hit the same location again the limb can get re-crippled. With wounds piling on you get negative modifiers to hit based on those wounds and your Pain Tolerance. The same goes for Fatigue and E. Tolerance. Oh and shotguns have a spread cone.

Congrats, after a few paragraphs you have finished playing one character's action. Now repeat this for every character and enemy, multiply that by the length of the encounter and you have one session's worth of math. Now repeat this every session from day one until the aliens are stopped. This was so tedious I spend a few weeks trying to streamline it with the use of Google Sheets and those still needed an operations manual.

This is the main reason why Contact may be one of the best worst RPGs you will never play - the game is a faithful conversion of the X-COM game into the RPG format that expects you to simulate with dice and spreadsheets what the PC would simulate for you in the background. I know perhaps one or two people that would tolerate this and could bear through this complexity, but I wouldn't want to subject less hardcore members of our group to this.

Now, there is another major gripe with an X-COM style game and that is the variety of encoutners you could have in the game. Contact is focused on sessions that boil down to "go shoot aliens". Whether you're dealing with a crashed UFO, aliens invading a city, some bigger crashed UFO, an alien base or what have you - bullets will be flying and aliens will be dying. Sure, you can have a beach episode where the characters are just interacting. You can have a session where the characters are negotiating with the locals, but there is only so much you can progress the campaign before you go shoot the aliens again for their loot and corpses. So while the Base Management Simulation encourages you to have a longer running game, you will be running the same types of missions on repeat. Variety is good for longevity (as discussed before), and this game doesn't seem to have it.

The most interesting scenarios we could've think of to run with this game were either "a private 80's style corporation finds a Stargate and they explore alien worlds to loot and sell the R&D to fund themselves while trying to keep the military from snooping around", or "a private military corporation is sitting in the Middle East while the aliens are invading. The local powers are engaged in a Syria-like conflict with multiple groups being influenced by multiple foreign powers. Try not to take sides in the conflict while you have to trade arms for alien crash sites and scrap.". While either of those would make for a more compelling game, they would probably still not have enough varied content to carry a longer game.

Conclusions

Contact is a game with a number of great systems. The character generation appears to be balanced between normal humans, full on robots and aliens. The Base Management Simulation and Research Projects are a cool concept that gives the players an overarching goal and rewards to work towards.

At the same time, the game is too simulation-heavy to be enjoyable. The combat has so many variables it can take a long time to properly execute a single round, let alone a larger engagement. The game concept itself doesn't lend itself to a long campaign either - the system appears to be focused on one type of story being played in many variations.

Overall, I would recommend checking Contact for the Base Management Simulation metagame alone if it's a component you're interested in adding to your game. However, I can't recommend it as a game as is due to its overly complicated mechanics.