This is The Routine. It is the single most useful thing you can steal from Flying Circus by Erika Chappell (and Joe McNeil, Alice Kyra, Calum McBain, James Scott, Luke Marchand, and everyone else on the credits page). As the saying goes, "steal from the best." I aim to explain why this is the best element to steal from Flying Circus for any TTRPG ever.

In video games, you'll hear designers talk about "gameplay loops." Because of the logical structure of computers, designing things for them tends to use nested loops and other forms of recursion, often highly abstracted to more easily access different layers of the program. As a consequence, the most useful way to conceive of the common activities a player will do constantly as long as they are playing a computer game is as a loop, so you can design the persistent base state and the series of actions which build on it and lead into each other to constitute gameplay.

Erika's ingenious design for Flying Circus starts by applying a similar concept to TTRPG play, though that's something I've seen other places too (notably in the LUMEN system and associated RPGs like NOVA). The unique part is the relationship of the phases to each other, and how these different types of play are all fun and lead into each other. The basic thing you're in this game for is to fly WWI-style biplanes and have dogfights and other combat missions, which is the action phase. In a lot of RPGs, that'd be what you get. A hundred pages of air combat and maybe twenty of other stuff. Here, though, going up in a rickety deathtrap and getting shot at builds up a lot of stress, and the game has you keep track of that, mostly when you get to the Landing phase. That's why you need a Stress Relief phase, and a lot of players end up having even more fun in that phase. Which is no surprise, that's the phase with sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll! Well, not the last one, it hasn't been invented, but popular music sure. Finances is where you have the pain of having to pay your expenses, but also the joy of getting paid for the mission you did before all that carousing. Of course because you probably just spent half that income on fuel and ammo and the other half on booze and damages for the building that coincidentally burned down through no fault of yours surely, you now need to find work again, which gives you the fun prospect of more air combat. Once you've found it, if you managed to bleed off most of your stress, you can reflect, and spend the xp that your stress turns into when you manage to clear it on more cool stuff for your character to be good at.

So how do we steal this?

The key features of The Routine are:

1. Flagship action first. (No waiting, the advertised cover art activity up front. As soon as people start playing the game after making characters, get them into the thing that made them pick up the book.)

2. Lead into the densest character drama. (This is where you get to express all those things that make your characters the kind of characters the game features in all its key art and example fiction. RPGs aren't improv theater, but if your players have the itch to improv and emote in character, this is what will scratch it most. It's also the kind of action that makes your characters rounded instead of flat and boring.)

3. Space out the action with a rhythm of a limited amount of book-keeping at a time. (It's really important that the book-keeping phases are explicitly broken up. Keeping track of that information gets dull if you do too much at once, even though it's also part of the fun. Separating the different kinds of accounting out by phase like this keeps it relevant to the action that just happened and prevents attempts to do it as things go on from gumming up the action.)

4. Reset and prepare the next loop. (This is what makes it a loop, and it's frankly shocking how many games don't teach when and how to do this in designing adventures for them.)

5. The rules are laid out in the order of the routine. (TTRPG rules are put in arbitrary or random or unclear orders all the time. The final important strength of this beautiful pie chart is that by presenting the rules for the phases of play in the same order you do them, you can more easily reference the rules you need when you need them.)

That's what you need to adapt to your own game. If I were to apply this to The Vigil, a magical girls and other henshin heroes RPG I was working on last year before my energy was sapped away by other things, the phases would look like this:

Fighting Evil by Moonlight

1. Henshin!

2. I will punish you!

3. My work here is done.

Winning Love by Daylight

4. Teen Girl Squad

5. Homework

6. Bring Me Their Energy

7. As Long as You Remember

Now loop.

This is a naïve first draft that 1:1 copies The Routine from Flying Circus and changes the names. Instead of building up stress, the game already has a mechanic where the characters' balance shifts from Yang to Yin and back as they do different actions, and this could be altered to fit the cycle. If the itch stays with me and my brain spins the right way, I may actually develop this more into something that really customizes the phases and names them something that will honestly still be a meme but a little less vulgar, a little more tightly themed about it. I'd organize the rules for actions in the game to fit into the different phases of play I'd defined.

I might actually do that. And you should do something similar. It'll make your game better! Most of all, it'll make your game playable by people who never speak to you or apprentice to someone you taught, and that's inexpressibly valuable.