The two words that changed a game

On oracles, solo play, and the subtleties of word choice

Yes and No

One of the staples of solo play is the Yes/No Oracle. Basically, it is a clever piece of technology that allows solo and coop players to answer straight questions that the GM usually would in guided games. “Is there a window here?”, “Does she recognize me?”, “Is it raining?”, “Have I been here before?”, and so on.

I believe the most famous implementation of this idea comes from Mythic Game Master Emulator and its comprehensive Fate Chart, that includes quite granular results depending on the likelihood of a Yes answer and the current Chaos Factor (a measure of how out of control things are going in your adventure).

My first exposure to Yes/No oracles, however, did not come from an actual oracle. I saw it on the core mechanic of one of my favorite RPGs ever, Freeform Universal. In this game, when you attempt to do something, you roll a d6 and check the result on this table:

This was in my early days of attempting game design, and I can’t express well enough how much the elegance of this solution blew my mind. There’s so much packed on this single roll! The addition of “and” and “but” made for nuanced results that other systems would struggle to get with way more complicated dice rolls.

I was so inspired that I created my own hack of it called Presto!, a single-page pocketmod version of it that (coincidently, but we’ll get back to it) uses rock-paper-scissors instead of dice (the author really liked my version of it, and someone else translated it into French! I could barely sleep that day).

The power of a simple Yes/No question cannot be underestimated for solo play. To this day, many friends of mine from the large Brazilian solo RPG community play entire sessions using only a single d6, with 1-3 being No, and 4-6 being Yes as their only game mechanic.

Since then, I’ve seen many different implementations of this technology, with a number of solutions to give more variety to the results of said Oracle. In particular, players notice that this question was a great opportunity to introduce surprises into your adventure, which is essential for solo games (since you don’t have a GM to do that for you). Here are some examples:

Featured here: the oracles from One Page Solo Engine and CRGE

If you’re following me, I hope you’re starting to see how the theme of word choice that I mention in the title comes into play. That leads us to the two words that changed my game.

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Not Exactly

It was early January 2022 when someone on a group chat asked,

“Hey, do you guys know of an FKR-like fantasy game that can be played with rock-paper-scissors?".

To which I replied,

No, but you could do something like this: ...".

And I came up with a simple conflict resolution system that I explained on a text message.

With little tweaks and some extra flavor added, FJKRP was born.

Soon after the release, I added an extra page with rules on how to play it solo or GMless, replacing rock-paper-scissors with a d6. And that’s when one of my favorite game design solutions of the year came into existence.

When you create a game, it is hard to imagine which parts of it people will appreciate the most. And sometimes the bits you're most proud of will probably go unnoticed. In this case, my favorite solution was these two words: NOT EXACTLY.

I wanted to experiment with something different for the Yes/No oracle. How could I offer variety and a sense of the unexpected with a single d6 (technically a d3) roll? How could I raise compelling questions instead of just providing an answer?

I knew I wanted just 3 results (it is a single page game, so brevity was a must). While I was typing it out on the layout, the answer came to me out of nowhere.

"Not exactly". It is not a Yes. It is not a No. It doesn't completely negate your assumption. But it doesn't confirm it either. It offers different (not necessarily better) narrative bifurcations than the "and/but" variations.

Let's see an example.

"Is the door locked?"

"Not exactly." Ok, it is not locked. But it is not unlocked either! What is it? Is it trapped? Guarded? Out of reach? Cursed? See, it's kind of locked AND unlocked at the same time. To me, it feels different from a "No, but" result. Doesn't it?

“Have I seen the Crimson Queen before?”

"Not exactly." Ok, I haven’t exactly seen her. But I’ve seen a painting of her? Or I’ve seen her past self? I’ve seen her in my dreams? So many intriguing possibilities!

(If you’re wondering how I would define which of these answers is true, I’d either ask another Yes/No question to confirm it, or—my favorite—use a complex question Oracle, that in the case of this game is a 6x6 grid of fantasy-inspired icons—much like Rory’s Story Cubes).

I know it's not groundbreaking at all, but boy do I like this silly two-word solution! I truly believe that it elevated the game to something more, and it happened almost accidentally. That goes to show how powerful simple word choices can be in game design.