Procedural Loops for Vulnerability

Warning, abstract game design discussion ahead.

As I have been thinking about the sort of dice rolls that I want my game to use, I have been thinking about the core loops of play that will define it. By "loop," I mean the sort of actions that the players and referee will frequently engage in and return to over the course of a session. Those loops proceduralize the conversation between referee and players, structuring the game.

What sorts of conversations are players and the referee having in my game? How are the different sorts of conversation linked? Are there procedures that I can provide that provide or strengthen those conversational links?

There is a core loop that I expect will look familiar to most OSR players: the referee provides a description of a situation; the players ask clarifying questions; the referee provides answers; the players describe their characters' interactions with the situation; and then the referee describes the results, perhaps drawing on a procedure to help adjudicate those results. Those results define the new situation and the process begins again.

There is another core loop that is equally important to me in which the players describe the subjective responses of their characters to some of those results; the referee asks clarifying questions about those responses that the players answer; and the referee describes a change that simultaneously links and transforms the characters and an aspect of the situation, perhaps drawing on a procedure to help inspire those results. This could be a character becoming emotionally entangled with an NPC in the situation or a physical or psychical transformation that changes the way they can interact with the world depending on the situation.

The second loop needs to be less infrequent than the first, something that occasionally occurs. I don't want characters undergoing profound changes all the time, I don't want it to be an entirely predictable occurrence either, but I don't want it to just happen without the players being aware of the possibility.

My current thinking: introduce a subset of save results that engage the second loop of play, i.e., the entanglement with the world occurs only when characters take risks that require a save, and then only occasionally. Entanglement becomes of one of the risks of risk, as it were, and occurs only when the character is vulnerable. I am toying with some different dice and numerical ranges, but I will leave that aside for now.

What is important here is that this procedure develops one theme of the game: you can't predict how vulnerability will change you.