Helping Hands: Teamwork in TTRPGs Should Feel More Collaborative
You should play Raccoon Sky Pirates to see why.
“I help.”
I hear this a lot when playing or running any TTRPG. It’s often just a throwaway line tossed in when another player is rolling for their character to take an action of some kind. If your character isn’t doing anything, you may as well help, right?
Usually, this gives the active player some sort of bonus. In D&D 5E, they get advantage on their next action if you help them. In Numenera and other Cypher System games, the player gets an asset which lowers the difficulty. In Genesys and the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games, helping an ally gives them an extra boost die to add to the pool they roll.
These are all fine. Your character narratively participates in an action and the active character has an easier time doing it. The problem is, it doesn’t really feel very much like working together. Just tossing a small bonus of +1 at your friend doesn’t require the kind of collaboration or communication that teamwork often entails.
Today I want to talk about games and mechanics that can make teamwork feel collaborative at the table. It wasn’t something I thought much about until I played a game that did something very differently. I want to discuss how that game does teamwork really well and what ways we as game designers can try to copy it despite the absurdity it is built upon.
Airborne Vermin
I never thought much about teamwork mechanics until playing a wild and silly game called Raccoon Sky Pirates by Chris Sellers aka Hectic Electron.
In this chaotic piracy experience, you play as a band of junkyard-dwelling critters with an “implausible floating ship” built from trash. The primary goal of the game is to fly your airship across town to the suburbs to rob a house of more trash. As we all know, suburb houses have the best trash.
Yes, it’s as great as it sounds.
Chris cheekily writes in the game: “Flying a ship takes coordination and discipline. Unfortunately, you're a bunch of raccoons.” This joke accurately represents the chaos of the core action mechanic. When a raccoon takes an action, the player rolls a single 12-sided die. Unlike most TTRPGs, you aren’t trying to beat a target number or modifying your result with a skill rating. When you roll in Raccoon Sky Pirates, you are rolling to find out what the fuck your raccoon is gonna do.
Each character has a table of 12 actions, each associated with some number of your raccoon’s traits. For example: Maria Triple-XL is a raccoon that is Strong, Deft, and Brave. On their action table, they have results such as “Heave your weight against something” which is a Strong action, or “Throw Trash or Raccoon” which is a Strong/Deft action.
Before rolling to see what your raccoon does, you must declare which trait they are using for that action. In Maria’s case, you could declare they are taking action with Brave. Then, when you roll, you’re really hoping to get “Draw attention to yourself” or “Land smack in the middle of something” as your results because they are Brave actions. If the action you roll lines up with the trait you chose, the action is helpful.
If you instead get a Deft action like “Use the ship's car, home appliance, or carnival ride deftly,” that’s what the raccoon does in that situation, it’s just not helpful. The incompatible result is a problem and adds complications to the scene. Every time your raccoons do anything, you have no idea what is going to happen or if it is going to help or hurt the mission.
This game is wacky. This game is highly random. This game is also super dependent on cooperation and teamwork in a way that I’ve never seen before.
Pirate crews work together.
Raccoons can cooperate the same way fantasy adventurers can. Well, maybe not the same way but there is still a teamwork mechanic in this dumpster fire of a heist game.
When one player rolls to see what their raccoon does, any number of other players can participate in the moment. All players choose a trait their raccoon is using and roll their own d12 to see if they do something helpful in the moment.
However, this cooperation roll is different. If you get a result that isn’t compatible with the trait you chose, instead of your raccoon doing the thing you rolled and having it be deeply unhelpful, you can put your d12 result into the center of the table for another player to take instead of theirs. If someone swaps with you, you can get one of theirs.
In my experience, our crew quickly realized it was in our best interest to work together. Our raccoons only took actions that the entire team could help with and we would all roll and sort out the best results.
This moment of trading dice was electric for me and my group. It was thrilling to be shouting “I need a 4, a 6, or a 10” while trying to get rid of your 3 because it meant Maria would “Heave their weight against something” in an unhelpful way, hoping someone had a result that could save the Triple-XL from themselves. Sometimes you would have a result that worked for your raccoon, but another player had a result that didn’t work for them but would for you. You trade not because you need to, but because you’re a crew and no pirate gets left behind.
There was a moment after each roll where we, as players, were working together to solve a little puzzle of who should get which die. This moment of teamwork created a feeling of collaboration that no assist mechanic has ever made for me. Unfortunately, it relies on a wholly random and chaotic system of play to function. That doesn’t always tack well onto fantasy adventures or secret agent missions where the player characters are intended to be competent.
Ever since I first played Raccoon Sky Pirates, I’ve been trying to bridge this gap between engaging teamwork and intentional character agency.
What can you do?
It’s a tough nut to crack. How can you create this mechanical moment of collaborative problem solving in a game without ludicrous randomization?
Some games have made some interesting twists on the classic teamwork mechanic. In John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, there are 4 different teamwork actions:
Assist, which gives the active player +1 die similar to most games. Nothing innovative or interesting here. It doesn’t feel very special or collaborative.
Set Up, which allows a character to take a separate action before another character to improve the position or effect of that character’s result. Without unpacking and getting into position and effect mechanics, this is very similar to the +1 good stuff version of teamwork we’ve already discussed.
Protect, which allows a character to take the consequences that would have otherwise affected a different character. Step in front of an attack, get attention from guards, etc. This is a neat mechanic to do what players would normally roll dice to do in other games and allow for cool narrative moments without extra steps, but isn’t really creating the collaboration I’m looking for.
Lead a Group Action, which allows all players to roll and take the best die while the active character takes stress for each failed roll. This feels a lot more like cooperation. While the whole group can get past an obstacle off one character’s skill, that leading character cares an awful lot about how well the others do. There is communication. There is back and forth between players. This isn’t bad, but we aren’t really making decisions or collaborating together, just invested in a shared outcome.
Leading a Group Action in Blades is somewhat interesting and make all players feel invested. I don’t think it really comes close to what I’m looking for, but it is heading that direction. I still want more. I want the feeling of collaborating to solve a puzzle, really working together at the table like sky-faring raccoons to accomplish a task.
I want a mechanic that gives players some moment of working together in the rules as well as in the narrative. Preferably having both mesh together really well.
Stonetop, a community focused hearth-fantasy adventure RPG by Jeremy Strandberg, is a Powered by the Apocalypse game that has a great mechanic for working together. I’ve not had a chance to play the game, but there is nothing but praise for the system in many articles and posts online.
In traditional PbtA fashion, there are a bunch of moves that are triggered when characters do certain things in the narrative. A move called Struggle as One triggers when you “defy danger as a group,” so it’s a bit narrow compared to a general assist mechanic but I think it can be drawn from and expanded to a broader purpose.
The way Struggle as One works is making all participating players roll on the move, resulting in each person getting 1 of 3 outcomes:
A low roll causes that player’s character to fail and have negative consequences
A medium roll is successful and that player’s character defies the danger
An exceptionally high roll allows that player’s character to succeed in defying danger for themselves, as well as negate the negative consequences of another character’s failure.
In addition, if you roll a failure but someone’s success saves your character, you don’t gain XP. Normally a failure gives your character XP. That’s how progression often works in PbtA games to promote growth through consequences, and this mechanic specifically prevents that growth if saving a friend.
This breakdown is really interesting and, in theory, has the potential to create that moment I love from Raccoon Sky Pirates.
Let’s say 4 players roll to Struggle as One. In this scenario, pretend 2 players fail with negative consequences, 1 succeeds normally, and 1 succeeds with the ability to negate consequences for 1 player. Now you are in an interesting situation. The players can all converse about which of the 2 failures is worse and should be negated. The failing players might still want to just fail and take the XP growth. There is a moment of communication and collaboration created from the teamwork where all the players have to decide something together.
This is what I want in more games.
I guess this is a request.
I think more games should make teamwork mechanics more interesting than a simple +1 on a roll. While nothing can quite match the joy I get from frantically trading dice to avoid my raccoon’s unpredictable actions causing a cobbled-together trash-based aircraft to plummet out of the sky, I’d like to see more games try. Stonetop has already shown that it can be done in more serious, less random ways. I am personally implementing a dice-exchanging teamwork roll into an updated edition of NOBLECORE that I’m working on, hoping to get the same Raccoony feeling out of a more traditional dice pool game mechanic.
If you’ve got any ideas for interesting teamwork mechanics, I’d love to talk about them. I’d love the design community in general to talk about it in the online and offline spaces we occupy. This specific topic is something I think is worth putting time and energy into addressing.
As designers, we should be looking for more ways to make the rules of our games feel like the narrative they are trying to simulate. Raccoon Sky Pirates does this beautifully all throughout, and if you want to understand where I’m coming from you, should really play it yourself. Buy it from Indie Press Revolution today!
Will rolling a die ever feel like swinging a sword? Maybe not. But working together with the other characters in a story, all controlled by the friends you are playing a game with around the table, can easily feel like the collaboration and communication that is happening in the fiction.
You just have to have the rules to support it.
If you know of any games with interesting and compelling teamwork mechanics that I didn’t mention, let me know in the comments.
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Thanks for reading!
I almost played Racoon Sky Pirates last week! Didn't know much about it so I didn't end up buying it in the store, meant to look for some recommendations, so this is pretty convenient. I don't have a help action in my game, I've been thinking about that and this post. In my own game checks are made with two d6, advantage can be gained multiple times, each time you gain advantage you get to roll another d6, you pick two to use, rolling 6s often activates some sort of effect. A first pass on a help action for this system is:
Perform an action that directly supports an ally's action. If this does not involve a check, roll one anyway. You can trade dice with your ally in the context of this pair of checks.
Not sure if this is balanced. On one hand, you're effectively giving your ally double advantage, on the other hand you are trading those dice, so you still end up performing a check with whatever you got. Depending on what you're doing you might not want to fail badly, so maybe you won't just trade your best dice away. I have a couple other skills that are move involved, but I like the idea of trading dice as a generic mechanic.