On complications and retuning my GM'ing for 2d20

I am a few sessions into running my Lizard Kings campaign - below are my notes on trying to get up the learning curve of running 2d20 by tapping the wisdom of those who have gone before.

Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience", this is a ressurection of the campaign world I could up after receiving the revelation of the OSR, spun back up on the online open-table model of my Southern Reaches campaign, but switching system to 2d20 Conan on the intuition that the momentum/doom system would better fit the high-energy shenanigans atmosphere.

I have tried to pull forward a lot of what worked - encounter tables / random generation, player-driven action, baiting hooks, open-table/roster system - but after spending the past few years honing my style around player agency and truth-in-the-world along the anti-blorbo line, adapting my DM'ing to 2d20 is a shift.

I have on my shelves 2d20 Homeworld, Star Trek Adventures: Klingon Empire and a ton of pdfs for 2d20 Conan and standard Star Trek Adventures from bundles - all of these I have read through but still ran up against a few things while playing that I am going to put here, a breadcrumb trail for those who come after.

Complications

The biggest trick so far has been calibrating complications or "what to do with the doom pool". I was having some challenges callibrating between 'spend some doom, make some random stuff up' and 'doom has no effect' - trying to hit that sweet spot of doom being consequential but to a somewhat known level. The goal here is that players can see the doom pool ticking up and have some idea of how bad that it. Doom of 4-5 could get a bit hairy but probably handleable. Doom north of 20 is time to abandon this enterprise and just start running.

First, I initially missed that reactions all incur Doom - if you dodge or parry incoming attacks, the GM gets doom points. This is in on top of 'complications' from natural 20's which can be converted to 2 doom or the players giving doom to achieve rolls. This builds the doom pool a lot faster than I initially thought.

Spending doom when there are active foes in play always made sense to me, soak their wounds, add more foes, etc. The bit I was unclear on was calibrating how complicated a complication should be - how to play it out mechanically which was ambiguous even after reading the various rule books.

The first good guide was the 'minor epiphany' Gebir had the grace to post as a comment on the Modiphius forum which exactly answered my question on how impactful complications were supposed to be: "2 Doom or 2# [stress] damage + Effect or D2 Minor Action to Clear". This was the rosetta stone I needed.

There was a great list of example complications posted by Feond on a different thread.

There was also a recommendation for taking a post by The Walking Mind on Risks for FATE but considering it as applicable to 2d20 complications in the sense of what opposes what - for a scene about pursuit, complications can be delay, for one about stealth, complications are being revealed, etc.

General Summaries - this character generator cooked up by Mariano Cavallo is very helpful for quickly getting started, next was the website for The Scrolls of Erathius - just seeing what explainers, cheat-sheets and downloads they thought necessary was a great guide on what comes up a lot and what is unclear.

Session timing - I lost my source but another top tip for trying to time these sessions was to plan ~ 30 mins per scene. The 2d20 style of moving from 'action to action' contrasts with the slightly more wandering around, flexing hexcrawl and encounter tables I have been doing lately, so definitely out of my comfort zone and good to get a frame to think about it.

Intros - another neat tip I got that I think helpful for framing things was to ask players to describe introduce their characters as if for the opening credit sequence of the TV show. Was sufficiently different to other 'describe how you appear in this tavern' intros that it resets expectations.

Campaign So Far

I have been running things as close to RAW as I understand for now, but I am also aware of some modifications from later 2d20 such as having additional d20s beyond the first bought with momentum cost more or be otherwise restricted. Thus far players have been relatively frugal shepherds of their momentum and have not been getting into many fights so doom pools have not been exploding such that I can throw lots of complications at them yet.

In a similar vein, players are proving very conscious of when a scene will end and sap their momentum pool.

The main instance of complications off a rolled 20 was a busted stealth attempt; attempting to be unobtrusive got unlucky and spotted by just the wrong person - consequences may be long term.