# The Universal Interaction and Challenge Table in Chain Reaction Games - Some Critique tags: #thoughts/two-hour-wargames #thoughts/game-design So [[How to Gather Information in Warrior Heroes - Legends|yesterday I wrote about responding to someone on the Two Hour Wargames Facebook page]] about ways you might run what is effectively an interaction challenge in **[[Warrior Heroes - Adventures in Talomir|Warrior Heroes: Legends]]**, and I was rather pleased with the results. However, the [[Two-Hour Wargames|THW]] community is extremely active and on top of things, and the author – Ed Teixeira – is really good about getting on top of any questions that come along. So he dropped this: the *Universal Interaction and Challenge Table* for all of the latest THW games: ![[UICT.jpg]] I just reproduced the whole thing here since it's only a single two-page spread and [available on the Facebook page publicly](https://www.facebook.com/download/276412095318675/001Universal%20Interaction%20and%20Challenge%20Table%205142023.pdf?av=100095312714651&eav=AfZSbBYFOEgXTk6FHmC0Z10FsX8dDKc_3YmX79AuboSs1L9be7M-HRdeXwDrNkaMkts&paipv=0&hash=Acp6_ZuLA47Re3hb-WE&__cft__[0]=AZWZZKmLKQxmZfvEya7KSw1FgG-N5OmWAvzuYLqoDR0P9Pb0B-pZCDLypPBtiRE3Pf2WxkWAMDB9XvLBaS-gSoSO_pPP5_Y7tkOKJg2reimesM8AEKy20WK1eED30IN9kuQMk1K1YX-4auRvlCWLZtX3&__tn__=R]-R). So let's take a look at it and see why it is very much part and parcel of the THW design mechanics, what it actually leans on in terms of design, and whether I really dig it. (Because I'm perfectly happy being critical of almost anything created by anybody, including myself. No one is protected. *Even if I like you.*) We start with a tiny bit of fluff in the usual style, move on to talking about how this can be inserted into any of the THW lines, and a brief bit on talking about when you use it. I will note that this is largely a restatement of the Challenge rules which are found throughout THW games for covering *"anything not covered elsewhere in the rules."* It doesn't really take this much text to explain it: Roll 2D6 with a target of your Rep or applicable Skill or lower. Adjust your Rep based on whether it's particularly Easy or particularly Difficult, and any sort of advantage gives you a +1 to your Rep/Skill. Pass 0 and you fail outright, pass 1 and you can choose to quit or retake the challenge with passing 1 counting as failure, or are you pass 2 and have a complete success. Straightforward. Effectively just the table given at the end of the pages. ![[UICT Tab.gif]] You'll notice there's a little something extra in their that I didn't mention, and that is the use of *Increasing and Decreasing Rep*. Let's table that for a minute and come back to it. Back to the top of the document. ## When Do You Use It? So you use the UICT when you want to have a conversation or when you want to do something not covered in the rules explicitly. Fantastic. All systems should have a mechanism by which you can just resolve a question for which you can't find the rule or for which a rule does not exist. I'm down for that. This is where things start going off the rails for me as both a tabletop RPG and wargame designer, though: > **Any Time I Want?** > > Yep, any time during the turn sequence when you’re Active. However, you cannot use it to change the result of something that has happened. It sounds really good; anytime you want to use this particular rule, you just break it out – it just can't invalidate anything that's come before. I have used many mechanics which do exactly that. The problem is that it can occur during *any* Active phase – which absolutely wrecks the action economy of the game. You might not care about this. This might not be important to you. In fairness, in practice it probably won't be that big a deal because we have an audience which has been trained from birth on the isolation of the action economy, possibly too much. In my mind, Challenge Tests should take up a full action. For clarity's sake, I must point out that in **[[Chain Reaction 2023|Chain Reaction]]** games, your action phase generally has two parts – movement and action. Some Tests, mostly taken in reaction, violate this rule, but the vast majority of those which involve making a decision and taking an action are limited to one per activation, anywhere along the path of movement. (Other Tests can come as a result of the initiatory one, but those count as reactions.) This Challenge Test actively violates that guideline – and because most of the THW systems are designed such that Actions are relatively small in terms of scope and this is explicitly not described as such… I see the potential for some problems. Let's go to the example for the specifics. > *Example –* Arizona Bob is Active and resolves a PEF – he turns a corner and comes into sight of three Desert Raiders. In either case this results in an In Sight Test. > > Bob and the Raiders take the test and the Raiders win and will fire first. Bob cannot change the result of the Raiders winning the In Sight, but he can try and influence it. I decide I want to take a Physical Challenge and have Bob duck into cover – usually the moving side is never in cover. I can take a Challenge. But how do I do it? Do you see the problem? Remember, the text immediately before says *"you cannot use it to change the result of something that has already happened."* And yet, the example that immediately follows it has Arizona Bob (one of the greatest example character names ever written) changing something that has already happened – he has triggered the Raiders' In Sight Test and been caught out of cover because he's the one moving. Again, for context: the player knew where the PEF[^pef] was because they're on the table. They didn't know what it consisted of but they knew it was there. They deliberately rounded the corner without using the cover of the corner to peek, resolve the PEF, and if things were ugly stay in cover. Being caught out of cover is a player choice. That choice might have come from playing the game in a very fiction-first way, which I can't object to – that is how *I* play; the character has no reason to fear a threat so cheerfully walks down the middle of the street and makes the turn into the line of what could be bad guys but is probably just average citizens. Bad luck ensues. I get it. This particular usage decreases the impact of player choice, and that's a sort of thing that always bugs me a little bit. **Chain Reaction** can already feel a little bit like the game is playing itself while you move the stuff around in front of you. This mechanic moves sideways from that in a weird way and then piles something else on top of it. One other point – having established that you can use a Challenge Test to remove the malus of being out of cover for someone else's In Sight Test, when would you ever *not* use it? Seriously, *when?* Having established this is a mechanism to attempt to avoid a fairly core part of how the system works as a whole and how you can be caught out if you're not paying attention or in a fictional position where it makes sense that you would be, why wouldn't you do this at the beginning of every single In Sight that you're out of cover in? We've established it can happen at any time you're Active and you wouldn't trigger an IST unless you were moving so… You will always be out of cover when you trigger it. This particular part introduces what's effectively just an extra roll every time you trigger an In Sight, and that's a problem. ## Skills Not all of the THW CR games use Skills, and that's just fine with me. Sometimes the only thing you need to know about an element on the map is "how generally good or bad is it." That's Reputation. Perfectly fine. All of them having the potential to be solo games, you can even run things asymmetrically such that only characters under your direct control have fully developed Skills and Attributes, and even squads of which your character is not a part on your side are represented as simply as possible. Fantastic.[^rep] ## Modifiers You know, I don't really have anything to complain about here, either. It makes perfect sense that some Challenges are more difficult than others while some are less difficult than most. If I had an objection, it would be to note that there may have been too little time spent pointing out that most Challenges will be *neither*. The way that the text is phrased and the table is formatted suggests that you should be using difficulties more often than you should. The example for the difficulty and for playing out poor Arizona Bob's results is worth talking about because it mentions something in passing that probably merits a few sentences at least. > *Example –* Arizona Bob lost the In Sight to the three Desert Raiders. I decide diving for cover while losing the In Sight is Difficult. A success means Bob will be in cover when they shoot. I decide the failure will be he fails and the Raiders will count a +1 to their Rep when firing. That’s pretty tough, but that’s what I decide. I roll 2d6 versus the modified Rep of 4 (5 – 1) and pass 2d6. Bob makes it into cover and the three Raiders > open fire. > > Later, Bob runs into a Witchdoctor and three of his Minions. The Witchdoctor also has a higher Rep. So I decide to Interact with him will be Difficult. We have two things to deconstruct here. Continuing the previous example, Bob has decided to jump for cover after the PEFs have resolved as Desert Raiders but before they resolve their In Sight – and this is described as Difficult. Okay, I believe that jumping to cover from the middle of a dusty street would be Difficult. I believe that just ducking down behind a watering trough a couple of feet away wouldn't be Difficult, it might even just be normal. But because of the lack of description or explanation of why that particular Difficulty is chosen, it doesn't help us a lot. Is it Difficult because of the situation on the map, is it Difficult because of fictional positioning, or is it Difficult because it's directly intervening in the normal progression of mechanics? Don't know. Likewise, for the second example – Bob runs into a witch doctor and three of his minions. The witch doctor is a higher Rep than Bob. What's Bob's Rep? We don't know; a Star always starts with Rep 5 but Bob might not be a Star or he may have had some bad luck along the way and run into some Reputation reducing situations. Let's assume that Bob is Rep 5, a normal Star. That would mean that witch doctor is Rep 6 or more, which is already of legendary status. Does interacting with him really need to be Difficult given that it's already *more difficult* because of the higher Reputation? That just seems like kicking yourself while you're down. This is definitely a situation I wouldn't assess any further difficulty unless something in the fiction made it more difficult. Maybe if Bob was involved in a raid against the witch doctor's tribe, for example, or the witch doctor is predisposed not to like Mexicans (which I just decided Arizona Bob is, because I can). This is the kind of problem that you find new players in solo games like **[[Ironsworn]]** running into, where they make things arbitrarily more difficult for themselves by picking hard outcomes and consequences for relatively mild failure. A lot of people have been put off such games by not being taught or discovering how to graduate the difficulty and not playing to beat yourself. *"It should be harder because it's hard"* is an easy trap to fall into. I love seeing **Chain Reaction** systems drift more narrative because it just makes me happy. But it's also frustrating to see some of the same problems be recapitulated along the way because it's coming from the other direction with less exposure to games which have already dealt with problems like that. ## Gifts and Tools Gifts are sensible; the mechanism for sacrificing an Increasing Rep D6/gaining a Decreasing Rep D6 for an advantage during Carousing has been in multiple CR games and is pretty well-established. I think it's perfectly reasonable to abstract giving up a resource of some sort for an advantage in a negotiation. I don't have a problem with that at all. Let's talk about the Tool mechanics here because I believe those are brand-new, specifically the note that *you must have already done the same or similar Physical or Intelligence-based Challenge in the past*. That's intriguing. Taken strictly, it gets silly very quickly. Some would interpret it to mean *"in the past of the game as played,"* and wouldn't let you bring a rope to help climb down the wall unless you had climbed down a wall in some Encounter previously in the game. That would be a silly interpretation but a possible one. It's not an interpretation I would have or might suggest, but I can see it happening. On the other hand, more positively, this suggests a way for a character to pull back and change the conditions of a Challenge that they fail at. Let's say that they need to get into an ancient crypt for one reason or another, and just can't use the tools at hand to get through the door. They could pull back, go back to town or whatnot, and having experienced trying to get through the door can now justify trying to steal, commission, or build a tool that will let them get an advantage on trying again. The pursuit thereof which could spin out an entire story in and of itself. I like that sort of thing and it's definitely worth pointing out when they pop up. ## Changing My Mind I'm going to be honest – after my concerns regarding the action economy, *this* is the second biggest thing that bugs me. Mainly because it reifies something in mechanics that should be obvious and wastes part of what could be something that pushes the experience forward into just making *"nothing happen."* Of course you can stop doing whatever it is that you're doing in the middle of any Challenge. *Just stop doing it.* If your first result is a partial success/partial failure, don't chance it. Do something else. The problem for me is that I look at this through the eyes of someone who is very thoroughly enmeshed in modern TTRPG design where a good chunk of philosophy has landed on *"when you do something, **nothing happens** never happens.*" By that, what I mean is no matter what the outcome of the roll of the dice, the fictional and narrative environment of the game has changed. Already there's a nod to this in the discussion of deciding what success looks like and deciding what a failure looks like. That's right up front, it's good stuff, and I'm here for it. But this is really just cutting out the partial success/partial failure mechanic and replacing it with *"yeah, you can roll it again with a higher chance of failure, as long as we come out with a fully positive or a fully negative result."* I really don't like that. Maybe I've become too accustomed to the inheritors of the *[[Blades in the Dark|Forged in the Dark]]* systems, including **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** and **[[Ironsworn]]**, maybe it's just me – but that seems like cheating the player out of more interesting outcomes that they could be getting. From an RPG designer point of view, this actually irritates me more than the action economy problem, which mainly bugs the wargame designer part of my brain. Again, other Tests in other CR games actually make use of the pass 1 result to do interesting things. That's why I decided to dip a little bit into **Ironsworn** for my personal approach to it in my original response, in order to have the player be able to make trade-offs in order to have the success that they wanted at a cost to their position, effectiveness, or a mechanical cost. Giving the player more choices within a constrained space is good and I will always advocate for it. To write my own example, in the case of Arizona Bob facing the Raiders: > *Bob dives for cover behind the watering trough in front of the general store and rolls versus his Rep of 5 and gets a 6, 2; pass 1. He'll get the benefit of cover against the Raiders' In Sight but there has to be a cost. He's thrown himself flat in an awkward position so he's going to be -1 Rep on any fire or returned fire until he's Active.* That's a lot more interesting in terms of potential outcomes and one less die roll, if that sort of thing matters to you. For those who are familiar with improv, it's turning a *"maybe"* (which you never do) into a *"yes, but…"* This goes well with thinking of failing with double 6s as *"no, and…"* While succeeding with double 1s could be read as *"yes, and…"*[^fu] Not that critical results of that nature are largely found in CR-games but… They certainly *could* be. Changing your mind during a Challenge should be a no-brainer. You just stop doing that. Actually rolling the dice should always have some sort of active change to the situation and never *"nothing happens."* Likewise, no matter what the outcome is, you shouldn't be able to roll to deal with the same situation without changing something about it, either fictionally or situationally, before trying again. That is, if you're trying to sneak across the courtyard, and you fail, you shouldn't be able to turn around and just roll again. Something should have happened as a result of the failure to change the fictional situation and if it didn't, for whatever reason, then you should have to take action to change the situation before you can try once more. This could be staging a distraction, it could be setting the fortress on fire, it could be finding a Holocaust cloak, standing a giant in a wheelbarrow, and setting it on fire while you push it toward the front gates – whatever works for you. But something needs to change. ## Just – "Interacting" Here's where things start getting a little bit sticky and it goes back into one of the long existing mechanics in CR games, *Increasing Rep D6* and *Decreasing Rep D6*, which in other games very well might be referred to as XP – except in CR games it serves as multiple related things which are loosely connected and make some sense to put together but create difficulties in describing the narrative when they change. Let's start from the top. What are they? Essentially, you have a pool of D6 which can either be positive or negative. If it's positive, it's *Increasing Rep*; if it's negative, it's *Decreasing Rep*.^[Is the naming confusing? Yes, yes it is.] This pool, at its core, is intended to allow your character to accumulate a resource by successful execution of missions/Encounters, which can then be turned around and used to represent how successful you've been and applied to the potential of raising your Reputation if you've been successful or decreasing your Reputation if you've been unsuccessful. That's the core of the beast. You can't simultaneously have Increasing and Decreasing Rep D6; they act as antimatter toward one another and mutually annihilate. If that's *all* it did, things would be simple, but as you can tell from the rest of the UICT, there are broader applications in many of the game lines. Specifically, it is also used as shorthand for your ready resources that can be expended to purchase items, pay henchmen, etc. This is where things get complicated. Once you've conflated two types of use for a resource you've created a tension between those purposes. In this case, a tension between your character getting better and your character having the resources to do things like pay for the other people in the Group (if you're playing **[[5150 - New Beginnings|5150: New Beginnings]]** or **[[Warrior Heroes - Adventures in Talomir|Warrior Heroes]]**). You can actually push yourself into debt in certain situations, which might be interesting if it acted as a spur for story elements but what it really does is cause you to roll to see if your Reputation drops at the end of the month, which makes it that much harder to get out of the hole with Encounters in the next month. So here we have a fairly explicit illustration of why the opposed nature of Rep D6 is weird and leads to strange outcomes, because I can just go out on a Carousing Encounter to meet people, go out to the bar, and come home with *"more money than I left with.*" I can literally use that Increasing Rep D6 to help pay off the loan on my starship, or keep the rogue in my party happy and paid. Does it make sense within the narrative framework? No, not really at all. Even if you interpret it to mean I'm happier with myself in my situation so I find it easier to convince people to stick around or give me a deal, it doesn't make any sense at all that in doing so I would become less able to improve myself or my skills. It's kind of a mess. But then there's the check put on to make sure that you're not just milking the system. If you have a positive outcome, if you've gained Increasing Rep D6 and hit a number equal to your Reputation, there's a 50% chance that you get into a Confrontation. With the rough lethality of **Chain Reaction** games, that's very pointed when it happens. But simultaneously completely avoidable because it only happens, according to the text, when your Increasing Rep D6 is equal to your Rep. Fair enough – at that point it's time to go out and do something else that has a higher chance of giving you more Increasing Rep D6 with less likelihood that you are going to get into a fight with somewhere between two and four opponents. Honestly, I would remove this section altogether. It just doesn't make sense in context with the rest of the CR systems and settings. Moreover, it's just not consistent with gameplay. If I were going to rewrite it into something that made more sense, I would lean heavily on the fact that *you have to determine what a success and a failure looks like for any Challenge Test* up front, and just point out that going out to hang out with people doesn't require any dice rolls – but it also doesn't generate any resources. If you want something out there, you need to have an idea of what you're getting and why it's valuable, and also decide on what you might get instead. Going out to a dirty dive bar to rub elbows with your fellow smugglers and maybe improve your reputation (gaining an Increasing Rep D6)? What does failure look like? Remember that we want to avoid *"nothing happens."* Do you set the stakes as failure means you get into a fight with someone who remembers you from a previous job and doesn't like you? Do you just spend more money than you could really afford (and thus get a Decreasing Rep D6)? Do you get the wrong kind of attention and get offered a job you can't afford to refuse because you're very attached to your kneecaps? In a real sense, part of the problem is the need to separate the character's financial status and resources from their meta-game advancement, and if you need to tie them together, allow them to buy meta-game advancement using their financial status and resources ## Exunt I want to be clear, this is not meant as derisive criticism, but rather a critique rooted in experience in the non-wargaming side of the hobby and industry. One of the things that I *love* about the THW lines is that they represent a form of convergent evolution with the narrative RPGs, approaching from the other side of the problem, coming from a place of simulationist, reified experiences. Ed and Two Hour Wargames were really one of the earliest implementers of what now gets referred to as *"[adventure wargames"](https://www.wargamer.com/adventure-wargames)* by other players in the segment, and that's a big deal. I've been a fan for quite a while now, as the nearly 4 foot tall stack of THW games sitting within arms reach testifies. I love them. But there are definitely things that we can keep an eye on, improve a little bit as we go, and have a good time with. Ed has one of the most compelling catchphrases for his games in the industry: ***"Just play the game."*** It doesn't matter if you hack on the rules, it doesn't matter if you make up things on the fly, it doesn't matter if you've thrown in an entirely new setting – *just play the game.* Not only play the game but tell people that you play the game. Enjoy the game. Share the game. THW has a reputation not just for its games but for the community around them being welcoming, accommodating, helpful – and that is a rarity. And yes, I'm well aware that I just wrote somewhere over 4,600 words commenting and dissecting a text probably 1/6 of that, if even. Welcome to my world. Can I offer you a Coke? Whatever game you play, it's your game. Talk about the mechanics, talk about the stories you make, *just play the game.* If you've enjoyed any of this – I'm so sorry. I'll try to do better next time. If you have comments, please, share them wherever you linked to this article. Odds are good that I'm paying attention like a good omniscient horror from beyond the stars. I think I hear somebody dragging a water trough into my front yard in order to do a set of statistical tests to find out how often I jump behind it and how well I shoot afterwards. Interesting. Out! [^pef]: *Potential Enemy Force*. Basically the red blip on the map that could be anything and is possibly bad. Chain Reaction systems have rules for moving PEFs around in reaction to where the player puts his characters but they don't turn into actual figures on the map until somebody gets line of sight to them – and then reactions happen. [^rep]: There are a couple of obvious problems with this particular instantiation of the design. Since Skills are usually set such that the favored one of the character is set equal to their Reputation, the next is Rep -1, and the least is Rep -2, that means that "generic characters" which use Rep for everything have a weird advantage in that they are equally good or equally bad at all things so you are inherently disadvantaged as a player character (to borrow the term) compared to NPCs. A difference of 1 Rep is notable but a difference of 2 Rep can be really brutal. You can be looking for 3while your opponent is looking for 5which stings quite a bit. There are ways to address this problem but as far as I know, I've never seen one of the THW line take it up. It's possible I'm the only one that thinks it's a problem. It's also possible that almost no one plays using Skills. [^fu]: Totally worth checking out how the **[[FU RPG]]** tackles these things if this terminology excites you. ![[FU RPG Resolution.png]]