Exploring the idea of "garbage time" at the end of a game through the psychological lenses of cognitive closure, ambiguous loss, and the framing effect.
Interesting exploration of psychological impact! As a solution to the Goblin game I kept envisioning a framework that allows the player to Retreat into the Underground---the game ends in a loss---but the Goblin player, in a future game, receives a starting bonus.
I realize that's sort of cheating the intent of the article, and may not be possible for some games, but it made my mind happy to think, in Skeletons voice "You may have stopped me this time He-Man, but I'll be back!"
This made me wonder if there is any garbage time in a typical combat in a TTRPG. If the system has some form of attrition (HP, spells, etc.) you could say that there isn't really any garbage time.
You might counter and say "When the PCs are clearly winning, and have slaughtered 18 of the 20 goblins. Then surely that the additional combat round is garbage time?"
Yes, that would be correct on a team level. However, on an individual level you still need to weigh the benefits of risking those additional hit points.
I have seen that players will opt to push combat towards it's last sword strike (especially if the PCs are losing, since they rather gamble on a small phyrric victory then save a few from a fight).
You can also decide to adjudicate the attrition. I used to do this all the time when I ran Pathfinder 1e Adventure Paths (which have SO many combats that exist purely for attrition).
Once a battle entered the mop-up phase (which could still drag on for 30+ minutes in that system), I would offer to call the battle. Which the players accepted 100% of the time. I would then quickly look at what was left on the table, come up with a range of how much damage was likely, then let a player roll some dice to decide where it fell on the distribution. After which I would narrate how the rest of the battle played out. Everyone seemed to love this; never heard any complaints.
I started doing something like this in my D&D games in order to allow random encounters to end early. Borrowing from Ironsworn, I'd let the players turn their final turn into a kind of Skill challenge and ask what they did to decisively win the encounter. Depending on how the Challenge went, and on how they'd performed in the encounter up til that point, I'd simply say something like, "You each take 10 damage during the subdual, casters each lose 1 spell slot, and you lose X Supply." Same idea for running away, though the stakes would be appropriately higher in the latter case.
That's a good thought. The last time I was DMing D&D in any form was about 7-8 years ago. Thinking on it, if I were to do it now, I would make my accelerated mop-up a little more interactive.
Savage Worlds, which I've played a bunch more recently, has a built-in mechanic for Quick Encounters, which is very handy. It basically makes the entire encounter into an interactive skill challenge, for a fight that is fairly trivial but could still possibly wound someone.
I've only played in that system though, haven't DMed. What I haven't seen my DM do, but I would be inclined to do, is turn the mop-up phase of a fight into its own Quick Encounter.
I have trouble suspending disbelief when the party mysteriously only ever fights level-appropriate enemies. But of course the reason for this is no one wants to sit through an hour-long D&D fight of 10th level characters getting ambushed by a bunch of goblins and getting no rewards of significance. Quick Encounters give you a way to note that this happens and quickly move past it.
I think Honor + Intrigue has something similar with "dueling," where you basically reset everyone to Level 1 hit points for the encounter and also give everyone on the field 3 points of "plot armor" to soak damage with. Losing all your "plot armor" basically means that you concede, in narrative terms.
It'd need some tweaking to work as a "quick encounter" in a modern D&D game, but I love the concept.
IIRC, ICRPG also has a baked-in rule that "something interesting must happen to shake up the combat every 1d4 rounds." It'd be interesting to adapt that and say, "Along with something else changing, every 1d4 rounds you get a chance to 'mop-up'." If you roll a 1 and the first turn is just that decisive, let them route. If everyone's still skirmishing for position, the Group Check to "win" that early on should be difficult, and have steep consequences for failure.
This sounds to me a bit like a question of how to lessen impact of skipping turns, while in modern game design skipping turns is mostly viewed as an anti-pattern to avoid, rather than making it more tolerable. I think that a game continuing after the outcome is obviously decided points at problems in design, and should be fixed by preventing those situations from happening in the first place.
There are a lot of tools that could help, such as:
- catch-up mechanics that help the losing player
- diminishing returns/upkeep mechanics that hinder the leader
- escalation mechanics that make later turns more impactful for everybody, mitigating relative harm from earlier mistakes
- delaying resolution of crucial game questions until the very end (for example, you commit goblin units to sieges of different cities, but sieges are only resolved in the last round)
- making goals volatile (especially if the involve leadership which can be both lost by someone and attained by someone else, which produces bigger difference in score)
- probably the most fragile, but also the easiest to implement - hiding VPs or other information crucial for winning until the endgame, or making it cumbersome to count (which is functionally the same). Wargames rarely used this, but I remember Runewars had VPs hidden, presumably for this reason.
Great article! And I like Jason’s suggestion of a retreat mechanic (with or without a subsequent bonus), that seems like an equivalent to conceding defeat that might be more palatable to some (“The survivors live to fight another day.”)
Yeah, it's not the loss that bothered me. It was the feeling of "ending the game early" and/or "not finishing the game." An explicit concession with narrative connection would make it feel like we actually finished the game. Thanks!
Bit of a tired joke but I can't help thinking a game of Call of Cthulhu is ALL garbage time. If you're playing the game in true Lovecraftian form, winning became impossible when you decided to play.
And now I've reminded myself of the ending of War Games…
So some games are definitely "play to see how you lose" and Call of Cthulhu is one of them. Arkham Horror is a board game with the same vibes. The thing is I *love* those style games and don't consider any of it garbage time. Perhaps because of the promises the game makes going in and the expectations of the players. Perhaps because they aren't competitive games, so the point is not to "see who wins."
In fact, one could argue I've made such a game with Exclusion Zone Botanist. If played in a way to get the most plants documented.... you aren't making it out unscathed.
That's a good point. I guess reframing the game at the beginning makes the "win" condition less about winning in the conventional sense and more about telling an interesting story.
I'm reminded of an interview Graham Walmsley gave on the Yes, Indie'd podcast. He mentioned some moments playing either Cthulhu Dark or Cosmic Dark where players actually chose terrible ends for their characters just because it made for a good narrative. I guess the "play to see how you lose" is a kind of built-in resignation mechanic.
Also, if you didn't see them yet, there are a few comments above about "play to lose" games... which ironically happen to be my favorite style of TTRPG!
Winners never quit, quitters can only lose. Playing to the end can reveal in previously unseen dynamics that may improve players’ skills for next time.
It's common to call 18xx games before they are completed if there is an obvious winner. In fact, there's a contingent of players who call games if there's an obvious loser, even if the winner has not yet been determined.
It seems to me that you did achieve a kind of cognitive closure: you realised you could not win the game. You achieved understanding of something, and you realised that the pieces could no longer be fitted together in such a way that the goblins win.
It is tempting to say you lack closure in the informal sense — ‘a sense of certainty and finality at the end of an event’ — because the ‘event’ (the game) hasn’t ended, you cannot feel any particular way about the ending. It feels more like a desire for endings than a desire for understanding.
But then again, we could reframe it cognitively: it is not about knowing whether you would lose, it is about knowing whether you have lost. Now we could add a rule that says: a game abandoned when you would have lost is a game you lost. Although you know perfectly well that you would have lost, would this have provided the closure you think you want?
(In other cases, a game might be abandoned without either player knowing who would have won had it been played out. Closure denied. But in this case, you do know you would have lost, so that is not a worry.)
With a resignation mechanism, you tidy up cases where you only think you would (or might) lose but don’t know it — by knocking over your king, you MAKE it the case that you have lost, even if you could have come back from your desperate position. So it functions differently.
Surely, closure is always closure with respect to something. In the case of death of a loved one, the thing has already happened — the event ended — you just need to make your peace with it cognitively or affectively. In the case of the game that is not officially lost, the bad thing hasn’t happened. Isn’t resignation a bit like pulling the plug on the life-support machine to achieve closure? Ugh!
We don’t need cognitive closure with respect to everything, else we’d go nuts. If thinking about inserting ‘closure mechanisms’ into games, don’t we need to consider the kind of closure and the ‘object’ of closure, too?
Maybe in this case, you just need to know the game is finished, and it doesn’t matter that you were losing (in some sense had already lost). Not about trauma, just about being tidy: this game is done and not forever hanging, incomplete. I don’t know.
I think Dr. Boss would agree that cognitive closure is not always necessary and/or required, as even her book is titled The Myth of Closure. (To be clear, she is dealing with far more serious issues than board games.)
You probably nailed it in your last paragraph. I just prefer the feeling of the game being finished as per the rules. If we end the game early, we didn't follow the rules to the end and it feels unfinished. There's a tiny part of me that thinks, "Should I log this as a play in BGStats?" however silly that might be. An explicit end isn't so much about closure perhaps as it is my pedantic thoughts about my BGStats numbers! :) :)
I grew up playing Avalon Hill's Third Reich (and later, Advanced Third Reich) with my dad. Classic grand strategy wargame that takes FOREVER to play if you play the war in its totality -- perhaps 12 hours. But in practice, there was a LOT of "garbage time". Wars are often this way, so a true grand strategy wargame is going to struggle with this. It was a long, bloody, but inevitable road from Stalingrad to Berlin. The game technically awarded things like a "Tactical Defeat" as opposed to a "Decisive Defeat", but it was hard to care, 10 hours in with 2 to go, about turning your decisive defeat into a tactical one. We played the full game out one time but then decided there wasn't much fun in it.
So after that we took to resigning if the game was unwinnable. But I relate fully to that lack of closure. I recall still sort of studying the board and not really wanting to put it away.
So we ended up agreeing to a set of conditions (not very complicated) that automatically trigger victory or defeat. In practice, these were basically at the same point a resignation would happen anyway. But it felt better!
Thank you so much for sharing this story of wargaming with your dad. That's something I can relate to, and have mentioned in the Tactics II article!
You bring up a good point with different types of defeat. I've seen many wargames that do something close to what you describe with Major Victory, Minor Victory, Minor Defeat, and Major Defeat. Perhaps that's a way of handling garbage time, like you said. Two or three more hours of playtime to claw back from a Major Defeat to a Minor? Ehh, maybe not. :) With three hours, I could get multiple full games of Undaunted 2200: Callisto played.
Thanks for the thoughts! I'll be sure to take a look at that article and some of your previous writing when I get a chance. I just discovered your Substack, but I enjoyed the discussion. I have no aspirations of designing board games, but I'm someone who DOES enjoy overanalyzing their designs just for fun. Especially when we're talking about games with direct conflict and rich themes.
Wonderful! On Tuesday I’m posting a “best of” list for new subscribers. There’s 150+ articles and it’s hard to know where to start. Hopefully it helps!
Shocked no one has replied "GET GUD." to my story of loss yet. 😂
Interesting exploration of psychological impact! As a solution to the Goblin game I kept envisioning a framework that allows the player to Retreat into the Underground---the game ends in a loss---but the Goblin player, in a future game, receives a starting bonus.
I realize that's sort of cheating the intent of the article, and may not be possible for some games, but it made my mind happy to think, in Skeletons voice "You may have stopped me this time He-Man, but I'll be back!"
Anyhow, thanks for another great read!
I like that as a thematic and narrative connection to the resignation mechanism! Fun idea!
Thanks for the comment!
I was thinking about a ransom / bribery mechanism.
Interesting post!
This made me wonder if there is any garbage time in a typical combat in a TTRPG. If the system has some form of attrition (HP, spells, etc.) you could say that there isn't really any garbage time.
You might counter and say "When the PCs are clearly winning, and have slaughtered 18 of the 20 goblins. Then surely that the additional combat round is garbage time?"
Yes, that would be correct on a team level. However, on an individual level you still need to weigh the benefits of risking those additional hit points.
I have seen that players will opt to push combat towards it's last sword strike (especially if the PCs are losing, since they rather gamble on a small phyrric victory then save a few from a fight).
You can also decide to adjudicate the attrition. I used to do this all the time when I ran Pathfinder 1e Adventure Paths (which have SO many combats that exist purely for attrition).
Once a battle entered the mop-up phase (which could still drag on for 30+ minutes in that system), I would offer to call the battle. Which the players accepted 100% of the time. I would then quickly look at what was left on the table, come up with a range of how much damage was likely, then let a player roll some dice to decide where it fell on the distribution. After which I would narrate how the rest of the battle played out. Everyone seemed to love this; never heard any complaints.
I like this a lot! Thanks for the comment!
It’s notable that your players seemed to always accept and appreciate it. Another data point for trying to limit garbage time in games.
I started doing something like this in my D&D games in order to allow random encounters to end early. Borrowing from Ironsworn, I'd let the players turn their final turn into a kind of Skill challenge and ask what they did to decisively win the encounter. Depending on how the Challenge went, and on how they'd performed in the encounter up til that point, I'd simply say something like, "You each take 10 damage during the subdual, casters each lose 1 spell slot, and you lose X Supply." Same idea for running away, though the stakes would be appropriately higher in the latter case.
That's a good thought. The last time I was DMing D&D in any form was about 7-8 years ago. Thinking on it, if I were to do it now, I would make my accelerated mop-up a little more interactive.
Savage Worlds, which I've played a bunch more recently, has a built-in mechanic for Quick Encounters, which is very handy. It basically makes the entire encounter into an interactive skill challenge, for a fight that is fairly trivial but could still possibly wound someone.
I've only played in that system though, haven't DMed. What I haven't seen my DM do, but I would be inclined to do, is turn the mop-up phase of a fight into its own Quick Encounter.
I have trouble suspending disbelief when the party mysteriously only ever fights level-appropriate enemies. But of course the reason for this is no one wants to sit through an hour-long D&D fight of 10th level characters getting ambushed by a bunch of goblins and getting no rewards of significance. Quick Encounters give you a way to note that this happens and quickly move past it.
I think Honor + Intrigue has something similar with "dueling," where you basically reset everyone to Level 1 hit points for the encounter and also give everyone on the field 3 points of "plot armor" to soak damage with. Losing all your "plot armor" basically means that you concede, in narrative terms.
It'd need some tweaking to work as a "quick encounter" in a modern D&D game, but I love the concept.
IIRC, ICRPG also has a baked-in rule that "something interesting must happen to shake up the combat every 1d4 rounds." It'd be interesting to adapt that and say, "Along with something else changing, every 1d4 rounds you get a chance to 'mop-up'." If you roll a 1 and the first turn is just that decisive, let them route. If everyone's still skirmishing for position, the Group Check to "win" that early on should be difficult, and have steep consequences for failure.
This sounds to me a bit like a question of how to lessen impact of skipping turns, while in modern game design skipping turns is mostly viewed as an anti-pattern to avoid, rather than making it more tolerable. I think that a game continuing after the outcome is obviously decided points at problems in design, and should be fixed by preventing those situations from happening in the first place.
There are a lot of tools that could help, such as:
- catch-up mechanics that help the losing player
- diminishing returns/upkeep mechanics that hinder the leader
- escalation mechanics that make later turns more impactful for everybody, mitigating relative harm from earlier mistakes
- delaying resolution of crucial game questions until the very end (for example, you commit goblin units to sieges of different cities, but sieges are only resolved in the last round)
- making goals volatile (especially if the involve leadership which can be both lost by someone and attained by someone else, which produces bigger difference in score)
- probably the most fragile, but also the easiest to implement - hiding VPs or other information crucial for winning until the endgame, or making it cumbersome to count (which is functionally the same). Wargames rarely used this, but I remember Runewars had VPs hidden, presumably for this reason.
Great article! And I like Jason’s suggestion of a retreat mechanic (with or without a subsequent bonus), that seems like an equivalent to conceding defeat that might be more palatable to some (“The survivors live to fight another day.”)
Yeah, it's not the loss that bothered me. It was the feeling of "ending the game early" and/or "not finishing the game." An explicit concession with narrative connection would make it feel like we actually finished the game. Thanks!
Bit of a tired joke but I can't help thinking a game of Call of Cthulhu is ALL garbage time. If you're playing the game in true Lovecraftian form, winning became impossible when you decided to play.
And now I've reminded myself of the ending of War Games…
Oh, I love that you brought this up! Thank you!
So some games are definitely "play to see how you lose" and Call of Cthulhu is one of them. Arkham Horror is a board game with the same vibes. The thing is I *love* those style games and don't consider any of it garbage time. Perhaps because of the promises the game makes going in and the expectations of the players. Perhaps because they aren't competitive games, so the point is not to "see who wins."
In fact, one could argue I've made such a game with Exclusion Zone Botanist. If played in a way to get the most plants documented.... you aren't making it out unscathed.
That's a good point. I guess reframing the game at the beginning makes the "win" condition less about winning in the conventional sense and more about telling an interesting story.
I'm reminded of an interview Graham Walmsley gave on the Yes, Indie'd podcast. He mentioned some moments playing either Cthulhu Dark or Cosmic Dark where players actually chose terrible ends for their characters just because it made for a good narrative. I guess the "play to see how you lose" is a kind of built-in resignation mechanic.
Thanks for giving me something to chew on!
Same!
Also, if you didn't see them yet, there are a few comments above about "play to lose" games... which ironically happen to be my favorite style of TTRPG!
Play it out.
Winners never quit, quitters can only lose. Playing to the end can reveal in previously unseen dynamics that may improve players’ skills for next time.
I can get behind any plan that maximizes fun at the table! 😁
It's common to call 18xx games before they are completed if there is an obvious winner. In fact, there's a contingent of players who call games if there's an obvious loser, even if the winner has not yet been determined.
I confess to being a little confused.
It seems to me that you did achieve a kind of cognitive closure: you realised you could not win the game. You achieved understanding of something, and you realised that the pieces could no longer be fitted together in such a way that the goblins win.
It is tempting to say you lack closure in the informal sense — ‘a sense of certainty and finality at the end of an event’ — because the ‘event’ (the game) hasn’t ended, you cannot feel any particular way about the ending. It feels more like a desire for endings than a desire for understanding.
But then again, we could reframe it cognitively: it is not about knowing whether you would lose, it is about knowing whether you have lost. Now we could add a rule that says: a game abandoned when you would have lost is a game you lost. Although you know perfectly well that you would have lost, would this have provided the closure you think you want?
(In other cases, a game might be abandoned without either player knowing who would have won had it been played out. Closure denied. But in this case, you do know you would have lost, so that is not a worry.)
With a resignation mechanism, you tidy up cases where you only think you would (or might) lose but don’t know it — by knocking over your king, you MAKE it the case that you have lost, even if you could have come back from your desperate position. So it functions differently.
Surely, closure is always closure with respect to something. In the case of death of a loved one, the thing has already happened — the event ended — you just need to make your peace with it cognitively or affectively. In the case of the game that is not officially lost, the bad thing hasn’t happened. Isn’t resignation a bit like pulling the plug on the life-support machine to achieve closure? Ugh!
We don’t need cognitive closure with respect to everything, else we’d go nuts. If thinking about inserting ‘closure mechanisms’ into games, don’t we need to consider the kind of closure and the ‘object’ of closure, too?
Maybe in this case, you just need to know the game is finished, and it doesn’t matter that you were losing (in some sense had already lost). Not about trauma, just about being tidy: this game is done and not forever hanging, incomplete. I don’t know.
Thanks for the comment! A lot to think about!
I think Dr. Boss would agree that cognitive closure is not always necessary and/or required, as even her book is titled The Myth of Closure. (To be clear, she is dealing with far more serious issues than board games.)
You probably nailed it in your last paragraph. I just prefer the feeling of the game being finished as per the rules. If we end the game early, we didn't follow the rules to the end and it feels unfinished. There's a tiny part of me that thinks, "Should I log this as a play in BGStats?" however silly that might be. An explicit end isn't so much about closure perhaps as it is my pedantic thoughts about my BGStats numbers! :) :)
I can fully relate to this instinct.
I grew up playing Avalon Hill's Third Reich (and later, Advanced Third Reich) with my dad. Classic grand strategy wargame that takes FOREVER to play if you play the war in its totality -- perhaps 12 hours. But in practice, there was a LOT of "garbage time". Wars are often this way, so a true grand strategy wargame is going to struggle with this. It was a long, bloody, but inevitable road from Stalingrad to Berlin. The game technically awarded things like a "Tactical Defeat" as opposed to a "Decisive Defeat", but it was hard to care, 10 hours in with 2 to go, about turning your decisive defeat into a tactical one. We played the full game out one time but then decided there wasn't much fun in it.
So after that we took to resigning if the game was unwinnable. But I relate fully to that lack of closure. I recall still sort of studying the board and not really wanting to put it away.
So we ended up agreeing to a set of conditions (not very complicated) that automatically trigger victory or defeat. In practice, these were basically at the same point a resignation would happen anyway. But it felt better!
Thank you so much for sharing this story of wargaming with your dad. That's something I can relate to, and have mentioned in the Tactics II article!
You bring up a good point with different types of defeat. I've seen many wargames that do something close to what you describe with Major Victory, Minor Victory, Minor Defeat, and Major Defeat. Perhaps that's a way of handling garbage time, like you said. Two or three more hours of playtime to claw back from a Major Defeat to a Minor? Ehh, maybe not. :) With three hours, I could get multiple full games of Undaunted 2200: Callisto played.
Again, thank you!
Thanks for the thoughts! I'll be sure to take a look at that article and some of your previous writing when I get a chance. I just discovered your Substack, but I enjoyed the discussion. I have no aspirations of designing board games, but I'm someone who DOES enjoy overanalyzing their designs just for fun. Especially when we're talking about games with direct conflict and rich themes.
Wonderful! On Tuesday I’m posting a “best of” list for new subscribers. There’s 150+ articles and it’s hard to know where to start. Hopefully it helps!
The first wargame my dad taught me was Tactics II.
Same!!!
I wrote about it here: https://www.skeletoncodemachine.com/p/tactics-ii