A Few Sources of Tension in TTRPGs

Tension is one of those things that helps make an interesting play experience for many Table Top RPGs (perhaps all TTRPGs? Even in comedy there's some tension), but how tension manifests can vary depending on the genre, game style, and game design goals.

This time I want to take a little time to discuss some of the different ways the tension appears in TTRPGs and how a GM can use those techniques to make their games more engaging.

This is a related concept to Narrative Tension, but they're (to me) slightly different because of how you implement them in a collaborative game vs a narrative experience.

Time Pressure

Time pressure is the tried-and-true tactic for creating tension in tabletop RPGs. This can make it a bit overused but it's the trusty hammer in the toolbox.

In video games, when you get a side quest titled "Save the kidnapped children", you can generally ignore that quest for however long you want. The kids will still be there, safe and sound, until the player has time to tackle the problem. This makes sense in a single player video game that tosses a bunch of things at you. It's annoying to be forced into doing it quickly.

It's also a bit of a cultural expectation that time essentially pauses in video games, it's how the vast majority of them have functioned in the past. Subverting that expectation is rare and often takes the form of a certain "checkpoint" where if you proceed past a point the side quests will go "boom". If you've played Baldur's Gate 3, there's one of these in Act 2.

In TTRPGs, that same "kidnapping" quest is likely going to go much differently when the NPCs are going to make logical decisions based on the ongoing fiction. However, that kind of time pressure can also be a bit "railroady" when you threaten a thing the PCs care about - they're liable to be encouraged to deal with it right now. Sometimes, that's good. Urgent things happen in real life, in media, in games, and it can add to the realism if you're not sure you'll make it in time.

This works better if there's some time pressure, but enough that you have some wiggle room with the timing. Perhaps there's a town that needs to be warned within 2 days, but it's a 1.5 day's hard ride if they rush. That gives them some decisions to make: do we push the hard ride to gain the half day? What happens if we're waylaid? Do we even care enough for this? And so on.

I bet you can see how this can become overused, though. You can't give the PCs deadlines constantly without triggering fatigue. Just as I've said to bosses over the years: if everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.

Hard Choices

Another way to create tension is to give the players hard choices to pick between, where there's no "correct" or "optimal" answer. This can be tricky to do right. It's easy to fall into the trap of creating a "false choice", where the outcome is the same regardless of which option the PCs pick.

In modern 5e and Pathfinder modules, you can find plenty of examples of a choice that's not really a choice since the module is designed to move you along a linear plot (and managing branching paths in a narrative-heavy scenario), but the players might not know that the choice leads to the same path. Likewise, they might not care.

I'm going to pick a little bit on the Tyrant's Grasp adventure path, because I love it, but it's filled with contrivances to move you along the paths. In the 4th book, Gardens of Gallowspire, Arzani is a key NPC. The whole plan is to teleport the PCs halfway around the world at the end of the book, so that they can start the 5th book. There are multiple paragraphs throughout the book dedicated to "What happens if the PCs do {x} with Arzani". Here are some examples:

1. They ignore her and don't talk to her at all.
2. They anger or try to kill her.
3. They betray her to other NPCs later.

It keeps going. So much is tied to that one (extremely cool) NPC, if the PCs don't play along and you don't do what I do, you need some way to get them to the next adventure. Maybe Iomdae shows up. Who knows!

This is a false choice. Even though the PCs could do all of those things, the adventure can't handle any other consequences besides "PCs make it to location somehow."

How are story games different?

For me, at least, the way you handle this in story games is quite different because you don't have a set outcome in mind when doing the scenario design. That way, whatever the PCs do is the "right" answer for the plot. You can simply follow the logical outcome.

You can still fall into a trap of false choice if you're presenting choices that aren't meaningful. For example:

"You see a police car and a hearse in front of you, which one do you steal?" - if the point is simply to take the car from point a to b, and there's no challenge associated with it, that choice didn't matter. If you're being followed by the cops and you want to fool them, how you do that might matter. If there's a zombie in that hearse and the police car has a flat tire, now you've got different things to deal with and potentially branching paths.

That's a really trite example, but I think you get the idea.

Uncertainty / Mystery

The last source of tension I want to discuss is "mystery". Specifically meaning "those things that are happening behind the scenes that the players can uncover". Notice that I didn't say "must" uncover - running a murder mystery dinner party and running a general story game campaign are, understandably, different things.

If you slip a big mystery to solve in the middle of a campaign and the players don't locate the key element in it, then the whole thing either falls apart, or you have to ensure the players get the clues.

Now, there are many games where the mystery is entirely the point of the gameplay. I'm not talking about those here (and in fact, I think I'm pretty bad at running them). The system I'm most aware of in that space is GUMSHOE, of which there are many variants. Trail of Cthulhu, for example.

So what can you do to promote tension through mystery in a non-mystery system? Lean on your Factions and Fronts and have them do some not-obvious things. Sprinkle evidence of those things during your sessions, perhaps even foreshadowing some grim fate to come. If the PCs start tugging at some of the threads, you've done a solid job. You can start planting more clues for them to uncover.

I have two examples of this. The first is the introductory adventure for Shadows of Esteren (I think it's in book two but I've not confirmed that yet) where the PCs start under an attack in a very large and very dark room - and none of them know who they are and how they got there. The "you remember nothing" angle is hard to pull off, but I think that one was done well.

The other is from a home-brew game a friend ran. She's actually done two campaigns where we were essentially in a bizarre time loop, and it was both coherent and totally confusing at the same time. We slowly uncovered how we were time looping / stuck, and that reveal was great.

I think this one is one of the harder techniques to pull off, and I'm not personally great at it, so I don't do much with it.

Tension in Horror Games, an aside.

One of my favorite genres is Horror, and horror TTRPGs thrive on a tension build-and-release cycle. One of the fundamental ways to evoke a scary experience is to establish and then slowly increase the level of dread until it hits a crescendo, and then let off the gas and give the PCs time to recuperate.

By allowing the players to take a breather you allow them to return to baseline, which makes the next series of unsettling events that much more scary.

You can do this with any number of techniques, providing a safe haven that they can retreat to, a well timed joke, or simply a friendly face when they're surrounded by horrors.

Wrap-Up

This post was a smidge shorter than other posts in the category, mostly because I'm finding it hard to get what I'm thinking down onto paper. If this was useful, leave me a comment down below. If it wasn't, feel free to also let me know (politely, please?).

See ya next time!