The other day I was playing in my weekly Level Up game, and it went particularly well: I almost drowned. The previous session I was almost eaten by zombies. And the session before that I did actually die. And was then brought back to life by the god of justice, cause as it turns out Sir Solomon the Ugly is too cool for school, nevermind death. I have a habit of throwing characters into certain death with an aplomb that's a bit unnerving at times. This time we had some creatures coming up and out of the ground... so I asked Marty the GM if we were gonna roll initiative. And Marty said no. I raised an eyebrow.
And I charged.
Marty was surprised.
The warlock facepalmed. "Oh God, not again".
What followed was essentially a puzzle as we tried to figure out the weird creature I'd managed to piss off was. It got... really intense. Like I said, I almost drowned, after reducing the creature to 1 hp underwater... and then passing out first. The warlock pulled me out of the water, none too happy about having to save my fanatical ass, yet again. We exchanged the usual pleasantries over a warlock having to save a paladin. For the third time in as many sessions.
Later on Marty asked me what I thought about the session. I told him that I had a great time and that that particular session had felt pretty unique. I wasn't even sure why. Marty's encounter design is absolutely pristine. There is literally nobody else I trust to run a trad game, because Marty's got a good enough head on his shoulders to handle the normal awfulness that is trad design. But this was particularly good, even for Marty. We fought a goopy tentacle monster with a gigantic-ass skull for a head. It had eight legs I think? Took a long time to find the head, and then killing it was... it was something. I got stuck when I hit it, and couldn't get out, and we spent all our resources to figure out that it hated radiant and necrotic damage... and then realized we couldn't do any more of either of those types to the stupid thing. So we had to brute force it into oblivion.
Like I may have pointed out, I almost died.
Anyways.
It felt different this time, a fact that I pointed out to Marty. I couldn't really figure out why the fight was so much fun. I mean, it was a good design on Marty's part, but he's done a lot better. So we talked it over. And for a few minutes I just couldn't figure it out.
But then I literally started shouting on the phone, causing poor Marty to wince. He asked me to calm down and explain.
See, the thing that people don't understand is that special modes inside of RPGs are... well... special. You have to treat them differently. During playtesting of Crescendo I found that if each scene was ended formally players made the transfer to the myriad game scenes that Crescendo has pretty easily. Because of that formal ending to scenes players were able to handle multiple game modes. Their concerns were tied up, debriefing happened, and they were able to move on with a clear head. Clear demarcations helped a lot, specifically ending the scene. In fact I'd argue that doing different sub-mechanics should have some form of debrief before, simply to get everyone's head in the game.
See, the thing is that, without the initiative, there wasn't the muscle response to "combat". Sure, we were using attacks and whatnot, but there was a definite feeling that was not there from not rolling initiative. Had we had an opportunity to book it for the hills after my charge we would have. And it was specifically because we didn't have this klaxon going off in the back of our heads going "KILL. MONSTER."
Instead it was just a puzzle. With swords.
We didn't have to fight. Heck we didn't have to do anything other than just get around it.
I commanded Marty to try a few more encounters with us that didn't involve initiative, to see if it stuck. We'll see.
But going from one mode of play to another suddenly may not work out. We'll see.
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