I've been thinking a lot about the season 1 finale of Sens8 recently. It's a great piece of writing, bringing together a gestalt of characters with different abilities to achieve a goal much in the same way a table top role-playing game might. The finale is (mostly) set in an isolated facility in Iceland, and to get to the facility, the protagonist drives up in a expensive sports car with streams of blue smoke coming out from under the bonnet, and sneaks in while the red-blooded, car-loving guards are all distracted by the tragedy of a high performance vehicle gone to its death to soon.
In a TTTRPG, who comes up with that idea?
If it's the players, then congratulations: you've got the perfect OSR group capable of creative solutions to challenges and the rules just really need to get out of the way to let you play. If it's the game master or scenario designer, then that feels like there'd be the need for a lot of prompting for the solution, which might be hand-waived away with a couple of action checks.
But it's also probably not the first isolated facility you've had to get to, and it's definitely not the last. So how many times do we allow this technique to work? Maybe its not an isolated facility, but its a checkpoint in Gaza, and its not the first check point you've got to, but the fifth that day and you're going to have to go back through them in the other direction later on in the evening.
This is where the game designer steps in. We tend to focus a lot on the action check as a resolution mechanic, because its (usually) flexible and generic, and giving the players verbs to use are a really good idea, regardless of the medium, but action checks work best when situations are dynamic and the player's actions are varied and impactful (like combat); and less well when situations are repeatable and player influence on the outcome is limited.
I'd like to call this type of scenario an activity, to distinguish it from an action. Activities have repeatable outcomes, with limited scope for improvisation (or where we may wish to limit the scope for improvisation for thematic reasons) and are often tied to and reinforce the game's themes. Downtime is a good example of an activity. You get some points, spend them on some stuff, roll for some good or bad things to happen, and then get back to the important part of the game.
But activities should be in the important parts of the game as well; I'm just not sure they're designed as effectively. I've been thinking about the Sens8 scenario, because that corresponds almost exactly to something that comes up in my TTRPG Sixty Years in Space a lot. Arriving at a planet, asteroid or moon is almost exactly the same as arriving at an isolated facility: everyone can see you coming from a long way off, they have plenty of time to do something about it, and you need to turn up with a very good reason for why you're there.
Because we're doing this a lot, the players' first, smart idea of enforcing gun boat diplomacy on every world they go to is going to get repetitive fast - and may not fit in the themes of the game you're trying to create. But we don't want to hand waive away the impact of arriving at a site that you're not necessarily welcome at: instead we probably want to deal with a spectrum of reasons for turning up and responses. This feels like a perfect activity: at a minimum we'll construct some kind of list of things that a typical arrival goes through (are you travelling fast enough to explosively collide with your destination?, can they see whether you have weapons or contraband, what does customs think of you, do you need to quarantine for a while because the bug hunt you came from went a little awry), along with some skill checks to overcome some obstacles that may be put in your way.
But most players don't want to fill out a check list or a clock: they want to role-play. So maybe you decide that the activity should be a scenario: sitting inside your locked down ship while you wait to find out if any of your crew got replaced by a brain-sucking parasite sounds like a perfect sci-fi horror RPG. But it doesn't make much sense if you're delivering a cargo of fresh oranges. Hopefully the orange delivery guys like checklists more than the oopsie we did another Alien guys.
Or maybe you don't want to deal with this at all, and decide to just put a cut scene in, or a fade to black, and hand wave it away completely. Those are fine, but as a game designer, I like making systems more than scenes or scenarios.
I know of one way of creating an activity that's more complex than a check list, and more repeatable than a scenario - and so does every other board game designer. Because that's what I'm suggesting. If you can turn your down time or check list or clock filling exercise into a physical or logical map of a space with some rules for how you navigate it, then players will start to lean forward and engage with it in a way that elevates the experience. It might be as simple as a map of the space port, with the list of places that you have to go in order to get the paperwork completed to get past customs. It may be a combat system. It might be fire fighting rules.
I'm going to repost the TTRPG map making manifesto that I've posted elsewhere, because I think point 3 is especially relevant for the role-playing experience:
1. Put maps in your game for the players to use, not the GM