In the past year, the Old School Renaissance, or New School Revolution, or whatever you want to call the sprawling, vaguely defined, slightly overlapping set of family resemblances that make up the online tabletop roleplaying scene, has entered a third age. (The first age, arguably, was the pre-GooglePlus blog scene, and the second age was inextricable from G+ as a platform for sociability.)
In the wake of these changes, I really missed the hole left by the retirement of Sophia from Die Heart and the passing of James from Dreams of Mythic Fantasy. I also kept thinking about Aaron's from Twisted Cities advice about how to get more art by re-blogging and link-sharing.
Fortunately, there are a few people already doing the work of scene-making. Frothsof from Thought Eater has weekly Blog-O-Rama posts, Sohinfo from Alone in the Labyrinth has started weekly Five on Friday posts, and Ynas Midgard has bimonthly Excellence from the Blogsphere posts. I also think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Alex Schroeder and the tools he's made for connecting the blogosphere, his Links to Wisdom and his RPG Planet, as well as Nick LS Whalen and his ongoing Blogs on Tape project.
I felt inspired by their example, and I wanted to start collecting blogposts I like from time to time. Based on what I've collected for this first outing, apparently what I really like right now is advice for how to do things.
At Throne of Salt, Dan's love for Mothership continues to inspire some of his best writing.
Jack from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque had a couple posts I really liked. In It Feels Good to Have Made Something, he walks us through the process of home-printing a zine, and talks about the costs involved at each step. In Nine Assumptions in Game Design, he identifies some of what he calls the "unspoken and unconsidered assumptions that influence the design of role-playing games."
Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse has a nice post about Karst Cave Systems explaining where caves come from and how they could work differently than built dungeons.
Dan from Redtoof finished a long-running open-table sandbox game, and offers advice for running your own in Lessons from the Unbroken Lands. He offers lessons on downtime, campaign pacing, and treasure.
Vulpinoid from Observations of the Fox has a really helpful page of Map Tutorials.
Over at Melancholies and Mirth, Lungfungus wrote Wheels within Wheels, which walks us through the process of building a dungeon out of loops instead of straight lines, and shows just how quickly the number of possible routes starts growing once even a few loops intersect.
Ben from Mazirian's Garden also had a couple posts I particularly enjoyed. So You Want to Make a Zine has more advice for printing and assembling your own zines. In Check Out These Character Sheets, Ben also shows off some really good-looking character sheets and talks about what makes them both attractive and functional.
Evlyn at Le Chaudron Chromatique returned to the scene this year, and gave us PDF Versions of My Zines, among others.
Paul at the Indie Game Reading Club offers us 50 Lessons About Roleplaying, starting with the observation that "you can’t fix real-world problems between players in your make-believe space," and continuing from there.
Hmmm Marquis wrote Magic User Spells Based Off Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Grecian Magic.
Trey at From the Sorcerer's Skull does so much interesting worldbuilding it's hard for me to pick my favorites. I especially liked his Solar Trek reimagining of Star Trek set entirely in our solar system, his Omniverse reinterpretation of a combined Marvel and DC universe pegged to actual American history, and his transhuman cyberpunk Planescape of Gyre. The fictive history of Armchair Planet Comics is also worth checking out.
Over at Failure Tolerated, Sean gives us A Crash Course on Marketing Your Indie RPG, which includes some nice advice about how to figure out who might be interested in your game and how to bring your game to their attention.
Paul from Dragons Never Forget has summaries and reviews of over 400 roleplaying blogs in The 2019 Great Blog Roll Call, which is an impressive bit of curation.
Skerples from Coins and Scrolls has a three-part series on RPG publishing. First How I Plan and Write RPG Books, second How to Become a Hundredaire on DriveThruRPG, and third How to do Reasonably Well on Kickstarter. There's always a danger of self-mythologizing when you write this sort of thing, so I appreciate a focus on practical advice borne from recent real-world experience.
Cavegirls' Game Stuff has two recent posts thinking about how roleplaying games work - Diegetic vs Non-Diegetic, and Why We Have Dice Rolls, Game Mechanics, and Stats. Both these posts are useful for thinking about what game mechanics are and what they're good for.
Paul from Blog of Holding has two very different bits of advice. To fit the 5e Monster Manual on a Business Card, he uses the same kind of statistics I learned in grad school to create very simple guidelines for creating new monsters, using Challenge Rating instead of Hit Dice as the defining characteristic. If you want to write 5e monsters and don't want to reskin, this might be the way to go. How Big Does a Random Generator Have to Be? uses statistics again, and talks about how often repeated results are likely to appear on any random table, and how to avoid too many repeats.
Bearded Devil took a break from the usual highly-entertaining play reports to tell us How I Run a Citycrawl Campaign, and I have to say, he makes Baroque Maximalism sound pretty appealing.
Finally, at The Alexandrian, Justin gives us another defense of game mechanics in System Matters. He also takes on a fun worldbuilding exercise by retelling the history of Greece and Europe in The Nation in History.
You can expect this series to be highly ir-regular. Feel free to post your own favorite blogpost links in the comments.
Showing posts with label links. Show all posts
Showing posts with label links. Show all posts
Friday, January 3, 2020
Monday, December 9, 2019
Roguelike Advice for Tabletop Games from @Play and Golden Krone Hotel
John Harris of the @Play blog and @Play column writes about "rougelike" videogames. Since I am somewhat interested in procedural generation in tabletop gaming, there are a few of his columns that I particularly like. There are also a couple contrarian pieces from Jeremiah Reed of Golden Krone Hotel, and some ASCII art I like from Uncaring Cosmos and Imminent Demon Engine, and some links at the end for resources for making ASCII and pixel art.
Purposes for Randomness in Game Design is about reasons to use procedural generation instead of "set" content in a videogame.
- to make multiple playthroughs of the same game interesting
- to offer a game some resistance against "spoilers"
- to challenge players' skills by asking them to deduce things about the gameworld
- to create emergent narratives that wouldn't arise any other way
- and to create emergent complexity by randomly combining basic elements
In tabletop gaming, I would add the reason that it allows the gamemaster to discover the world at the same time as the players. I would also add that one of the challenges of procedural generation at the tabletop is that proc gen makes it harder to offer players a meaningful, clue-filled environment where they can successfully deduce what's around each corner - so it's quite interesting to me that he lists that as a strength.
Eight Rules of Roguelike Design is kind of a manifesto for rougelike gaming. Most of these seem like good advice for any dungeon, and a few at the end are especially relevant for resource-management, exploration-style gaming. It's worth remembering that if you want your players to interact with the mysteries of the dungeon, they'll be more inclined to do so if those mysteries aren't usually harmful, and if even the harmful ones aren't instantly lethal.
Some of the advice about unidentified items initially struck me as being kind of narrow and genre-specific, until I remembered that item identification is a kind of mini-game inside Numenera and Mutant Crawl Classics, among others.
- no player character should be immediately killed by a single monster attack
- no player character should be immediately killed by testing an unidentified item
- magic items should require testing to identify, even for players with a lot of system knowledge
- each magic item type should have enough potential effects that testing it during combat is potentially beneficial but also potentially harmful
- magic items should have both benefits and penalties (or at least limitations) so that they present interesting choices
- because magic items have both upsides and downsides, no item should ever be completely useless
- exploring the dungeon should use up a resource so that players aren't able to explore indefinitely
- as you explore deeper into the dungeon, monsters should become more dangerous a little faster than player characters become stronger (so that magic items become more important over time)
Towards Building a Better Dungeon is all about the things tabletop games still do better than computer games. There are a number of experiences and mechanics that I've noticed work better for single players than they do for groups, or that work better when a computer is handling the numbers than when humans are, so it's nice to see someone from the other side praising what works better in our world.
It's also interesting to see which aspects of of D&D he admires. It's many of the same things you see praised on OSR blogs, for example. Although the staircase thing seems like it's an artifact of the way rougelike games randomly generate their maps - it seems so common-sensical to me that I struggled to even write the one sentence summary, but apparently it's an issue for them. There are other elements of old-school D&D that would be difficult to replicate, such as factions of monsters that want to recruit you into their internecine conflicts, but what he focuses on are mostly the elements that would enrich solo play.
- D&D has varied, interesting that are placed deliberately rather than randomly
- monsters in D&D come in different sizes, from small to large
- old-school D&D requires narrative searching to find secret doors
- on multi-level D&D maps, staircases are placed consistently in relation to one another
- despite its difficulty magic item identification is actually easier than in Gygaxian D&D (I suspect roguelike games also don't contain Gygax's, uh, rogue's gallery of look-alike monsters that exist solely to punish his players for adopting the very same playstyle he pushed on them. Also wait, someone is envious of this?!)
- you can't play roguelike games with your friends the way you can with D&D
Meanwhile over at Golden Krone Hotel, we get Things I Hate Sbout Rougelikes: Bog Standard Dungeons, which is, at least kind of, an argument against continuing to imitate D&D and Lord of the Rings in new games. My reading of this isn't that he's criticizing vanilla fantasy per say, but rather, that he's calling for more new games to employ a strong consistent theme that's not the same vanilla fantasy you see everywhere else. Of course, new games like Torchbearer, Dungeon World, and Forbidden Lands all developed large followings by selling "vanilla fantasy but with different rules" - so what's good artistic advice and what's sound marketing strategy might differ here.
There are three parts to his complaint:
- high fantasy is vanilla, and more importantly, it's overdone
- kitchen-sink bestiaries end up full of monsters that feel inappropriate or out of place
- a few "goofy" elements will quickly make an entire setting feel goofy (Which might be an argument in favor of going full-on gonzo. One joke monster just spoils the mood, dozens of joke monsters actually become the mood.)
I actually kept thinking about Jack Guignol's In Defense of Vanilla Fantasy while I was reading this. Because they initially seem like they're going to be in disagreement, but in some ways, I feel like they're two sides of the same argument. After all, when Jack says "they make vanilla so we don't have to", the argument here seems to be "they already HAVE made vanilla, so why do we keep making it too?" James David Nicoll has an ironic version of this plea, when he begs his readers to please, please "give the Tékumel and Gormenghast costumes a rest." Of course, Jack has a rejoinder to that, "vanilla might just be what people actually want" - like I said, there might be sound business reasons why so many game-makers keep making new vanilla games.
Even the Old School Renaissance has only one really weird megadungeon in its top five - Anomalous Subsurface Environment. Three of the others are high fantasy - Stonehell, Dwimmermount, and Castle of the Mad Archmage - and they all start out vanilla at the top and really only end up getting strange near their final levels. Barrowmaze is built out of basically vanilla components, but it has a narrow, consistent theme, and fills up its space by offering variations on that theme rather than a funhouse of new ideas. The biggest change as you go deeper is the slow shift from undead to demons.
Settings with a lot of novelty can run into the problem that "when everything is weird, nothing is weird." But the call here isn't for random weirdness, it's for a consistent theme that's simply a different theme than vanilla high fantasy. If it feels like you have a "kitchen-sink" full of monsters, if a handful of your monsters feel inappropriately "goofy," then the problem isn't that you have too much weirdness, it's that you don't have a consistently applied theme. Real weirdness is weird precisely because it stands out against its background - whatever that background happens to be. You can still have real weirdness even in a setting where everything is (initially) strange, but it will require using only a few stand-out elements (not a sinkful) and making them at least somewhat unique, not "goofy" and not just imported from another well-known genre.
So what games does he like? Unreal World, Cogmind, Hieroglyphika, Sproggiwood, Haque, Sil, Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Spelunky, and Caves of Qud. And presumably he likes his own game, Golden Krone Hotel.
In Item Design: Potions and Scrolls, we return to @Play to look at good design for these single-use items. Remember, half the criteria for good rougelike gaming are based on good magic items. He argues that magic items are so important for roguelike gaming because exploring the dungeons and fighting the monsters are not, by themselves, enjoyable enough to sustain interest in the game, only the items can do that over the long term.
In both rougelikes and old-school D&D, your character is adventuring for basically the same reason you're playing the game - for enjoyment. Your character explores dungeons and fights monsters to find money and cool stuff. Money (via XP) unlocks cool level-up abilities. Money lets you buy more cool stuff. Cool abilities and cool stuff in turn let you ... uh ... explore more dungeons and fight more monsters. So these things had better be enjoyable, because enjoying using them pretty much IS the entire purpose of the game - and if your game doesn't include any level-up abilities, then the cool stuff had better be especially cool!
He feels pretty strongly that single-use items should be unidentified until they're used, and even then, only if their effect is something that the characters could notice. So if you drank a potion of monster detection for example, and there were no monsters around to detect, the potion would seem to have no effect. There are also potions and scrolls that really do have no effect, just to keep you on your toes! While apparently one of the key pleasures of solo roguelike computer gaming, I think this kind of thing probably gets tedious very quickly in a tabletop game. (Apparently the only way to get Gygax to volunteer what your magic item did was to let a Rust Monster or Disenchanter destroy it. He was happy to tell you what you just lost! Otherwise you had to go into town, hope you could find a sage with the right expertise, and then hope the sage made their skill check. Tedious!)
There are a couple elements of roguelike potions and scrolls that don't show up much in D&D, and might be interesting to try including. The first is alchemy rules that reward you for mixing potions. Unless I'm misremembering, the "potion miscibility table" in D&D basically just says, "don't mix potions, or one of these twenty bad things will ruin your day!" The second element is scrolls that let you enchant your own weapons and armor. I've never heard of someone's campaign where players routinely turn their own mundane equipment into homemade magic items. It might happen occasionally, but it sounds like a common occurrence in roguelike games.
There is one element of D&D that he points out never makes it into the roguelikes - cursed items that are look-alikes for specific magic items. In a rougelike game, you're never going to successfully identify a Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals only to try using it and discover it was actually a Bowl of Watery Death, whereas basically all of D&D's cursed items function like that.
In Objects of Collection, he lays out a whole taxonomy of items that characters can find in the dungeon:
- basic one-use item, such as food rations
- one-use unidentified magic items, such as potions and scrolls
- wearable, always-on unidentified magic items, such as rings and amulets
- multi-use unidentified magic items, such as wands
- basic equipment, such as weapons and armor
- unidentified magic equipment
He notes a few other details about each type that are interesting to me, again primarily because they're a bit different from D&D. One-use unidentified items can also include special food rations that bestow some kind of benefit in addition to fending off hunger.
Wearable unidentified items typically have a very minor effect to compensate for the fact that they're always turned on - without the computer there to remember for you, these sound tailor-made to be forgotten about during play. They can also impose an additional cost in exhaustion and food consumption. A minor increase is too finicky to consider, but I wonder if needing to eat double or triple rations would be a meaningful cost in a resource-management game?
"Basic" equipment has a random component, too. Every sword or piece of armor you can find in a rougelike game will have a secret bonus, just like the simplest magic swords in D&D, which makes deducing each item's bonus anothertedious fun mini-game within roguelike play, but again, I wonder how well this would transfer to in-person play.
One thing I think is kind of neat is that unidentified magic equipment always has a predictable mundane use as well. So no matter which random magic power your magic snow boots have, they also always help walk through snow.
His final article in this series Rouge's Item ID In Too Much Yet Not Enough Detail isn't just a description of how magic item identification works in roguelike games, it's also a defense of the gameplay value of having unidentified magic items in the game to begin with. One really important thing to note, in case I haven't been clear enough about it yet, is that these unidentified items all come from a larger list, and you can find multiple copies of the same item during your game. So once you can identify an item, you don't just know "what was that thing I just used?" you also know "what will these other identical things do in the future?" The value he sees in having unidentified magic items would be considerably diminished in a game like Numenera, where theoretically every item is unique, rather than something you expect to find multiples of.
I get the sense that John Harris and other roguelike computer gamers would get along well with some portions of the OSR. He has a deep admiration for Gary Gygax and the original AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, and he praises a number of design decisions in 5e.
So what does he thinks makes identifying unknown magic items a good part of roguelike play?
- it should be possible to use the item without identifying it first
- there should be some bad items so that using unknown items is a little risky
- sages and spells that identify an item without needing to use it should be rare
- the game needs to be difficult enough that players have to risk using unidentified items. they can't afford to wait until they achieve perfect safety to start unknown items out.
- items shouldn't be automatically identified when you use the. you only find out for sure what it is if it does something unambiguous under the present conditions.
- some item effects should be contingent on the character's status at the time of use
- bad items should have some positive use, even if it's just throwing them at monsters
- it should be possible to deduce what some items do without using them
- there should be more items in the game than can be found in one playthrough
For a contrary view, we once again return to Golden Crone Hotel for Things I Hate About Roguelikes: Identification, where Jeremiah Reed proposes a solution that's oddly reminiscent of his last one - to solve the problem by reducing its complexity. Previously, he argued we could "fix" funhouse dungeons by applying a theme to limit what kinds of monsters can appear. Here, he suggests that we can fix magic item identification by reducing the number of possible types that any particular unidentified item could be. I'll come back to that in a second.
His critique of roguelike identification is probably not that hard to guess, but let's look at it briefly anyway. He starts with a series of examples showing the many ways a player can die while using an unidentified magic item, either because the item was directly harmful, or because it provided no help in a dangerous situation.
- Outcomes like that are especially punishing on novice players. Experienced players should be rewarded for their accumulated system-knowledge, but it shouldn't be impossible for someone without that knowledge to play the game.
- It encourages item-hoarding (more on THIS in a second, too) which both makes the game more boring and makes it harder to survive.
- It makes using unidentified items feel like a trap, even though it's not supposed to be. (There's a similar problem in negadungeons, although there it feels like everything's deadly because truly everything IS deadly and will kill you if you interact with it.)
- And for all that, there are enough meta-game tricks that sufficiently system-knowledgeable players can accurately guess what most items are with in-game identifying them. Which seemingly defeats the purpose of making them unidentified in the first place.
So as a solution, he proposes that unidentified potions come in groups of three - each potion is recognizable enough that it could be one of three different things. As an example, he shows a character considering drinking a potion that might be a ration of honey, an antidote to poison, or teleportation in a bottle. The idea here is to encourage players to take more risks with their characters by limiting the scope of their choices. You still don't know exactly which effect you'll get, but it won't just be a dice roll on a d100 table - it'll be one of three things, and importantly, you'll know the worst thing that could happen when you make your choice.
I genuinely like this idea, and I feel like it could have other applications. You see a monster at the end of the hallway. It's a skeleton, and your cleric is certain its one of three possible undead creatures. Or you find a scroll in an unknown language. Even before you translate, your wizard thinks it could have one of three possible effects. Or you enter a room know that you've just stepped on a pressure plate. Before you lift your foot, your rogue tells you the three possible traps you might just have triggered. I particularly like the thought of applying this approach to Zonal anomalies.
There are only two difficulties with putting this idea into action in D&D. The first is that it would take a bit of preparation to add in this extra potential information into an adventure that didn't already include it. The second difficulty is that without a computer to do the hard work for you, it would really take some preparation to re-randomize these associations after each playthrough. Having DM aids that are essentially worksheets you fill out in advance (like the ones Signs in the Wilderness makes) would certainly help.
Finally, all this talk about single-use items got me thinking about Razbuten's video Consumable Items (And Why I Barely Use Them). After all this talk about identifying items, it's worth thinking about what makes you want to use them. The "barely use them" problem is definitely me walking around with a full complement of missiles that I never fire in Super Metroid, or accumulating dozens of Mushrooms and Tanuki Leaves in Mario 3. Razbuten divides single-use items into two categories - "reactive" items that restore hit points or eliminate status injuries (like poison or blindness), and "active" items that proactively affect the world. He argues that most players will use "reactive" items whenever they need to, but end up saving (and forgetting!) their "active" items.
One reason he thinks this happens is that players can often pretty easily win fights and beat the game without using any items. He notes that he uses more items on harder difficulty settings, where the extra boost is the only way he's able to win fights that he can simply hack and slash through at normal difficulty. I think this goes to @Play's earlier point that roguelike games ought to get harder faster than the hero character gets stronger, which will make equipment more important over the course of the game. Having a few monsters that are much stronger than the others can encourage you to use your items to win those fights in particular - although possibly at a cost of wanting to "save up" for those fights.
Making ALL equipment temporary might also encourage players to use single-use items more freely. Instead of using a permanent item to preserve your single-use items, you might be tempted to use up a single-use item to prolong the lifespan of some of your other equipment. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does this, as does the old SNES game Brandish. This could be a little hard to track in a game where a computer isn't counting your sword-strokes, but of course you can make the attack roll do the work for you. If even the best items break on a natural 1 (and less durable items break on a wider range) then nothing is permanent, and you need to keep finding new weapons and new armor throughout the game. (That one might be a hard sell for your players though. A bronze age or stone age setting could make it more palatable.)
Making new items easy to find is another suggestion for getting people to use them instead of hoarding them. There's no reason to try to save up your items if you can be pretty sure you'll keep finding more. Perhaps you could combine that with an encumbrance system that does't LET you build up a large supply, which is more or less what Numenera does - its single use items are plentiful and most characters can only carry 3 at a time early in the game, so you have a strong incentive to use them, and little reason to save them, even though each one is unique. You might also just have to accept that most players WON'T use "special" items under "ordinary" circumstances. The key to encouraging their use, then, would be to increase the number of "extraordinary" situations where item use becomes more likely.
Having non-combat puzzles to solve can encourage experimentation, which is a point that Joseph Manola has made before. It's also consistent with my own behavior in using the slightly-harder-to-replenish "boss power" weapons in Mega Man X. When faced with a problem that has no really obvious straightforward solution, I'm more likely to start experimenting with my equipment. Probably this is true of other players as well. Breath of the Wild includes areas that you can only reach by drinking certain potions to increase your abilities, and of course Super Metroid has its various lock-and-key puzzles where specific equipment items open up whole new areas on the map that are otherwise inaccessible. Puzzles and hard monsters, then, present a pair of difficult situations where players will "dig deep" to stay alive and overcome the challenge, and so they're both perfect times to use special items.
FINALLY finally, if looking at the ASCII and pixel art from earlier got you interested in making your own, here are a few links to free tools. When I posted about ASCII art once before, several people suggested resources to me, and I wanted to share them now. Each of these was recommended by at least one person who seemed to be in a position to know.
advASCIIdraw is a free program for drawing your own ASCII dungeon maps (and presumably anything else you'd like to draw using ASCII characters?)
Oryx Design Lab is not free, but they do sell packages of pixel-art images that you can use in your own games, including ones you plan to sell. Their prices are $25-$35 for an entire collection, and one of their collections is a rougelike tileset, which I believe is what Uncaring Cosmos used for their graphics.
Open Game Art is a repository for free, open-source, and Creative Commons pixel art. All of the art is free to download and free to use, although some artists may have licenses that only allow their art to be used in free products, while others will also allow their art to be re-used in something you're selling.
Lospec has a number of resources for making pixel art. They have a nifty list of artist-submitted color palettes, sorted by popularity, and with a number of search options. They have a free in-browser pixel art program, and a whole list of resources for for making pixel art, finding software, or locating communities of other pixel artists.
Playscii is another free program for making ASCII art. This one can make still images, animation, and can be used to make playable games.
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| image by Uncaring Cosmos |
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| image by Uncaring Cosmos |
Purposes for Randomness in Game Design is about reasons to use procedural generation instead of "set" content in a videogame.
- to make multiple playthroughs of the same game interesting
- to offer a game some resistance against "spoilers"
- to challenge players' skills by asking them to deduce things about the gameworld
- to create emergent narratives that wouldn't arise any other way
- and to create emergent complexity by randomly combining basic elements
In tabletop gaming, I would add the reason that it allows the gamemaster to discover the world at the same time as the players. I would also add that one of the challenges of procedural generation at the tabletop is that proc gen makes it harder to offer players a meaningful, clue-filled environment where they can successfully deduce what's around each corner - so it's quite interesting to me that he lists that as a strength.
Eight Rules of Roguelike Design is kind of a manifesto for rougelike gaming. Most of these seem like good advice for any dungeon, and a few at the end are especially relevant for resource-management, exploration-style gaming. It's worth remembering that if you want your players to interact with the mysteries of the dungeon, they'll be more inclined to do so if those mysteries aren't usually harmful, and if even the harmful ones aren't instantly lethal.
Some of the advice about unidentified items initially struck me as being kind of narrow and genre-specific, until I remembered that item identification is a kind of mini-game inside Numenera and Mutant Crawl Classics, among others.
- no player character should be immediately killed by a single monster attack
- no player character should be immediately killed by testing an unidentified item
- magic items should require testing to identify, even for players with a lot of system knowledge
- each magic item type should have enough potential effects that testing it during combat is potentially beneficial but also potentially harmful
- magic items should have both benefits and penalties (or at least limitations) so that they present interesting choices
- because magic items have both upsides and downsides, no item should ever be completely useless
- exploring the dungeon should use up a resource so that players aren't able to explore indefinitely
- as you explore deeper into the dungeon, monsters should become more dangerous a little faster than player characters become stronger (so that magic items become more important over time)
Towards Building a Better Dungeon is all about the things tabletop games still do better than computer games. There are a number of experiences and mechanics that I've noticed work better for single players than they do for groups, or that work better when a computer is handling the numbers than when humans are, so it's nice to see someone from the other side praising what works better in our world.
It's also interesting to see which aspects of of D&D he admires. It's many of the same things you see praised on OSR blogs, for example. Although the staircase thing seems like it's an artifact of the way rougelike games randomly generate their maps - it seems so common-sensical to me that I struggled to even write the one sentence summary, but apparently it's an issue for them. There are other elements of old-school D&D that would be difficult to replicate, such as factions of monsters that want to recruit you into their internecine conflicts, but what he focuses on are mostly the elements that would enrich solo play.
- D&D has varied, interesting that are placed deliberately rather than randomly
- monsters in D&D come in different sizes, from small to large
- old-school D&D requires narrative searching to find secret doors
- on multi-level D&D maps, staircases are placed consistently in relation to one another
- despite its difficulty magic item identification is actually easier than in Gygaxian D&D (I suspect roguelike games also don't contain Gygax's, uh, rogue's gallery of look-alike monsters that exist solely to punish his players for adopting the very same playstyle he pushed on them. Also wait, someone is envious of this?!)
- you can't play roguelike games with your friends the way you can with D&D
Meanwhile over at Golden Krone Hotel, we get Things I Hate Sbout Rougelikes: Bog Standard Dungeons, which is, at least kind of, an argument against continuing to imitate D&D and Lord of the Rings in new games. My reading of this isn't that he's criticizing vanilla fantasy per say, but rather, that he's calling for more new games to employ a strong consistent theme that's not the same vanilla fantasy you see everywhere else. Of course, new games like Torchbearer, Dungeon World, and Forbidden Lands all developed large followings by selling "vanilla fantasy but with different rules" - so what's good artistic advice and what's sound marketing strategy might differ here.
There are three parts to his complaint:
- high fantasy is vanilla, and more importantly, it's overdone
- kitchen-sink bestiaries end up full of monsters that feel inappropriate or out of place
- a few "goofy" elements will quickly make an entire setting feel goofy (Which might be an argument in favor of going full-on gonzo. One joke monster just spoils the mood, dozens of joke monsters actually become the mood.)
I actually kept thinking about Jack Guignol's In Defense of Vanilla Fantasy while I was reading this. Because they initially seem like they're going to be in disagreement, but in some ways, I feel like they're two sides of the same argument. After all, when Jack says "they make vanilla so we don't have to", the argument here seems to be "they already HAVE made vanilla, so why do we keep making it too?" James David Nicoll has an ironic version of this plea, when he begs his readers to please, please "give the Tékumel and Gormenghast costumes a rest." Of course, Jack has a rejoinder to that, "vanilla might just be what people actually want" - like I said, there might be sound business reasons why so many game-makers keep making new vanilla games.
Even the Old School Renaissance has only one really weird megadungeon in its top five - Anomalous Subsurface Environment. Three of the others are high fantasy - Stonehell, Dwimmermount, and Castle of the Mad Archmage - and they all start out vanilla at the top and really only end up getting strange near their final levels. Barrowmaze is built out of basically vanilla components, but it has a narrow, consistent theme, and fills up its space by offering variations on that theme rather than a funhouse of new ideas. The biggest change as you go deeper is the slow shift from undead to demons.
Settings with a lot of novelty can run into the problem that "when everything is weird, nothing is weird." But the call here isn't for random weirdness, it's for a consistent theme that's simply a different theme than vanilla high fantasy. If it feels like you have a "kitchen-sink" full of monsters, if a handful of your monsters feel inappropriately "goofy," then the problem isn't that you have too much weirdness, it's that you don't have a consistently applied theme. Real weirdness is weird precisely because it stands out against its background - whatever that background happens to be. You can still have real weirdness even in a setting where everything is (initially) strange, but it will require using only a few stand-out elements (not a sinkful) and making them at least somewhat unique, not "goofy" and not just imported from another well-known genre.
So what games does he like? Unreal World, Cogmind, Hieroglyphika, Sproggiwood, Haque, Sil, Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Spelunky, and Caves of Qud. And presumably he likes his own game, Golden Krone Hotel.
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| image by Imminent Demon Engine |
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| image by Imminent Demon Engine |
In Item Design: Potions and Scrolls, we return to @Play to look at good design for these single-use items. Remember, half the criteria for good rougelike gaming are based on good magic items. He argues that magic items are so important for roguelike gaming because exploring the dungeons and fighting the monsters are not, by themselves, enjoyable enough to sustain interest in the game, only the items can do that over the long term.
In both rougelikes and old-school D&D, your character is adventuring for basically the same reason you're playing the game - for enjoyment. Your character explores dungeons and fights monsters to find money and cool stuff. Money (via XP) unlocks cool level-up abilities. Money lets you buy more cool stuff. Cool abilities and cool stuff in turn let you ... uh ... explore more dungeons and fight more monsters. So these things had better be enjoyable, because enjoying using them pretty much IS the entire purpose of the game - and if your game doesn't include any level-up abilities, then the cool stuff had better be especially cool!
He feels pretty strongly that single-use items should be unidentified until they're used, and even then, only if their effect is something that the characters could notice. So if you drank a potion of monster detection for example, and there were no monsters around to detect, the potion would seem to have no effect. There are also potions and scrolls that really do have no effect, just to keep you on your toes! While apparently one of the key pleasures of solo roguelike computer gaming, I think this kind of thing probably gets tedious very quickly in a tabletop game. (Apparently the only way to get Gygax to volunteer what your magic item did was to let a Rust Monster or Disenchanter destroy it. He was happy to tell you what you just lost! Otherwise you had to go into town, hope you could find a sage with the right expertise, and then hope the sage made their skill check. Tedious!)
There are a couple elements of roguelike potions and scrolls that don't show up much in D&D, and might be interesting to try including. The first is alchemy rules that reward you for mixing potions. Unless I'm misremembering, the "potion miscibility table" in D&D basically just says, "don't mix potions, or one of these twenty bad things will ruin your day!" The second element is scrolls that let you enchant your own weapons and armor. I've never heard of someone's campaign where players routinely turn their own mundane equipment into homemade magic items. It might happen occasionally, but it sounds like a common occurrence in roguelike games.
There is one element of D&D that he points out never makes it into the roguelikes - cursed items that are look-alikes for specific magic items. In a rougelike game, you're never going to successfully identify a Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals only to try using it and discover it was actually a Bowl of Watery Death, whereas basically all of D&D's cursed items function like that.
In Objects of Collection, he lays out a whole taxonomy of items that characters can find in the dungeon:
- basic one-use item, such as food rations
- one-use unidentified magic items, such as potions and scrolls
- wearable, always-on unidentified magic items, such as rings and amulets
- multi-use unidentified magic items, such as wands
- basic equipment, such as weapons and armor
- unidentified magic equipment
He notes a few other details about each type that are interesting to me, again primarily because they're a bit different from D&D. One-use unidentified items can also include special food rations that bestow some kind of benefit in addition to fending off hunger.
Wearable unidentified items typically have a very minor effect to compensate for the fact that they're always turned on - without the computer there to remember for you, these sound tailor-made to be forgotten about during play. They can also impose an additional cost in exhaustion and food consumption. A minor increase is too finicky to consider, but I wonder if needing to eat double or triple rations would be a meaningful cost in a resource-management game?
"Basic" equipment has a random component, too. Every sword or piece of armor you can find in a rougelike game will have a secret bonus, just like the simplest magic swords in D&D, which makes deducing each item's bonus another
One thing I think is kind of neat is that unidentified magic equipment always has a predictable mundane use as well. So no matter which random magic power your magic snow boots have, they also always help walk through snow.
His final article in this series Rouge's Item ID In Too Much Yet Not Enough Detail isn't just a description of how magic item identification works in roguelike games, it's also a defense of the gameplay value of having unidentified magic items in the game to begin with. One really important thing to note, in case I haven't been clear enough about it yet, is that these unidentified items all come from a larger list, and you can find multiple copies of the same item during your game. So once you can identify an item, you don't just know "what was that thing I just used?" you also know "what will these other identical things do in the future?" The value he sees in having unidentified magic items would be considerably diminished in a game like Numenera, where theoretically every item is unique, rather than something you expect to find multiples of.
I get the sense that John Harris and other roguelike computer gamers would get along well with some portions of the OSR. He has a deep admiration for Gary Gygax and the original AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, and he praises a number of design decisions in 5e.
So what does he thinks makes identifying unknown magic items a good part of roguelike play?
- it should be possible to use the item without identifying it first
- there should be some bad items so that using unknown items is a little risky
- sages and spells that identify an item without needing to use it should be rare
- the game needs to be difficult enough that players have to risk using unidentified items. they can't afford to wait until they achieve perfect safety to start unknown items out.
- items shouldn't be automatically identified when you use the. you only find out for sure what it is if it does something unambiguous under the present conditions.
- some item effects should be contingent on the character's status at the time of use
- bad items should have some positive use, even if it's just throwing them at monsters
- it should be possible to deduce what some items do without using them
- there should be more items in the game than can be found in one playthrough
For a contrary view, we once again return to Golden Crone Hotel for Things I Hate About Roguelikes: Identification, where Jeremiah Reed proposes a solution that's oddly reminiscent of his last one - to solve the problem by reducing its complexity. Previously, he argued we could "fix" funhouse dungeons by applying a theme to limit what kinds of monsters can appear. Here, he suggests that we can fix magic item identification by reducing the number of possible types that any particular unidentified item could be. I'll come back to that in a second.
His critique of roguelike identification is probably not that hard to guess, but let's look at it briefly anyway. He starts with a series of examples showing the many ways a player can die while using an unidentified magic item, either because the item was directly harmful, or because it provided no help in a dangerous situation.
- Outcomes like that are especially punishing on novice players. Experienced players should be rewarded for their accumulated system-knowledge, but it shouldn't be impossible for someone without that knowledge to play the game.
- It encourages item-hoarding (more on THIS in a second, too) which both makes the game more boring and makes it harder to survive.
- It makes using unidentified items feel like a trap, even though it's not supposed to be. (There's a similar problem in negadungeons, although there it feels like everything's deadly because truly everything IS deadly and will kill you if you interact with it.)
- And for all that, there are enough meta-game tricks that sufficiently system-knowledgeable players can accurately guess what most items are with in-game identifying them. Which seemingly defeats the purpose of making them unidentified in the first place.
So as a solution, he proposes that unidentified potions come in groups of three - each potion is recognizable enough that it could be one of three different things. As an example, he shows a character considering drinking a potion that might be a ration of honey, an antidote to poison, or teleportation in a bottle. The idea here is to encourage players to take more risks with their characters by limiting the scope of their choices. You still don't know exactly which effect you'll get, but it won't just be a dice roll on a d100 table - it'll be one of three things, and importantly, you'll know the worst thing that could happen when you make your choice.
I genuinely like this idea, and I feel like it could have other applications. You see a monster at the end of the hallway. It's a skeleton, and your cleric is certain its one of three possible undead creatures. Or you find a scroll in an unknown language. Even before you translate, your wizard thinks it could have one of three possible effects. Or you enter a room know that you've just stepped on a pressure plate. Before you lift your foot, your rogue tells you the three possible traps you might just have triggered. I particularly like the thought of applying this approach to Zonal anomalies.
There are only two difficulties with putting this idea into action in D&D. The first is that it would take a bit of preparation to add in this extra potential information into an adventure that didn't already include it. The second difficulty is that without a computer to do the hard work for you, it would really take some preparation to re-randomize these associations after each playthrough. Having DM aids that are essentially worksheets you fill out in advance (like the ones Signs in the Wilderness makes) would certainly help.
Finally, all this talk about single-use items got me thinking about Razbuten's video Consumable Items (And Why I Barely Use Them). After all this talk about identifying items, it's worth thinking about what makes you want to use them. The "barely use them" problem is definitely me walking around with a full complement of missiles that I never fire in Super Metroid, or accumulating dozens of Mushrooms and Tanuki Leaves in Mario 3. Razbuten divides single-use items into two categories - "reactive" items that restore hit points or eliminate status injuries (like poison or blindness), and "active" items that proactively affect the world. He argues that most players will use "reactive" items whenever they need to, but end up saving (and forgetting!) their "active" items.
One reason he thinks this happens is that players can often pretty easily win fights and beat the game without using any items. He notes that he uses more items on harder difficulty settings, where the extra boost is the only way he's able to win fights that he can simply hack and slash through at normal difficulty. I think this goes to @Play's earlier point that roguelike games ought to get harder faster than the hero character gets stronger, which will make equipment more important over the course of the game. Having a few monsters that are much stronger than the others can encourage you to use your items to win those fights in particular - although possibly at a cost of wanting to "save up" for those fights.
Making ALL equipment temporary might also encourage players to use single-use items more freely. Instead of using a permanent item to preserve your single-use items, you might be tempted to use up a single-use item to prolong the lifespan of some of your other equipment. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does this, as does the old SNES game Brandish. This could be a little hard to track in a game where a computer isn't counting your sword-strokes, but of course you can make the attack roll do the work for you. If even the best items break on a natural 1 (and less durable items break on a wider range) then nothing is permanent, and you need to keep finding new weapons and new armor throughout the game. (That one might be a hard sell for your players though. A bronze age or stone age setting could make it more palatable.)
Making new items easy to find is another suggestion for getting people to use them instead of hoarding them. There's no reason to try to save up your items if you can be pretty sure you'll keep finding more. Perhaps you could combine that with an encumbrance system that does't LET you build up a large supply, which is more or less what Numenera does - its single use items are plentiful and most characters can only carry 3 at a time early in the game, so you have a strong incentive to use them, and little reason to save them, even though each one is unique. You might also just have to accept that most players WON'T use "special" items under "ordinary" circumstances. The key to encouraging their use, then, would be to increase the number of "extraordinary" situations where item use becomes more likely.
Having non-combat puzzles to solve can encourage experimentation, which is a point that Joseph Manola has made before. It's also consistent with my own behavior in using the slightly-harder-to-replenish "boss power" weapons in Mega Man X. When faced with a problem that has no really obvious straightforward solution, I'm more likely to start experimenting with my equipment. Probably this is true of other players as well. Breath of the Wild includes areas that you can only reach by drinking certain potions to increase your abilities, and of course Super Metroid has its various lock-and-key puzzles where specific equipment items open up whole new areas on the map that are otherwise inaccessible. Puzzles and hard monsters, then, present a pair of difficult situations where players will "dig deep" to stay alive and overcome the challenge, and so they're both perfect times to use special items.
FINALLY finally, if looking at the ASCII and pixel art from earlier got you interested in making your own, here are a few links to free tools. When I posted about ASCII art once before, several people suggested resources to me, and I wanted to share them now. Each of these was recommended by at least one person who seemed to be in a position to know.
advASCIIdraw is a free program for drawing your own ASCII dungeon maps (and presumably anything else you'd like to draw using ASCII characters?)
Oryx Design Lab is not free, but they do sell packages of pixel-art images that you can use in your own games, including ones you plan to sell. Their prices are $25-$35 for an entire collection, and one of their collections is a rougelike tileset, which I believe is what Uncaring Cosmos used for their graphics.
Open Game Art is a repository for free, open-source, and Creative Commons pixel art. All of the art is free to download and free to use, although some artists may have licenses that only allow their art to be used in free products, while others will also allow their art to be re-used in something you're selling.
Lospec has a number of resources for making pixel art. They have a nifty list of artist-submitted color palettes, sorted by popularity, and with a number of search options. They have a free in-browser pixel art program, and a whole list of resources for for making pixel art, finding software, or locating communities of other pixel artists.
Playscii is another free program for making ASCII art. This one can make still images, animation, and can be used to make playable games.
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Recent-ish Resource Management Links - Late 2018
Around this time last year, I started collecting links when people posted about resource management on their own blogs. Aaaaand, then I kind of forgot to post any of them. Aaand then there were kind of too many to fit into a single post. So here's the first post of what will become an irregular series, resource management links from the roleplaying blogs I read.
Ten Foot Polemic - Three Ways to Solve Resource Tracking
This is the one that got me collecting links, because James Young referenced something I wrote at the beginning of his post. Anyway, James makes an interesting distinction between what he calls "drain" and what he calls "use". These are two ways that resources get depleted. "Drain is when they tick down over time. Use is when you make an active decision to use them up." In James's view, and I agree, use is usually going to be more interesting than drain. Drain is something being taken away from you, use is voluntarily giving something up ... to get something else you want even more.
He looks into three resources he wants to manage in his game - food, ammo, and light. For food, he decides on a use mechanic. He makes rations the primary source of healing, and adds a special new cooking rule as an extra incentive. For ammunition, he decides to ignore it. For his game, he decides that tracking ammo uses up too much mental bandwidth for too little payoff to be worth it. For light, he decides on drain. With two of his three resources NOT being drained, he feels able to treat one that way, and uses the overloaded encounter dice mechanic to simplify the rate of torch consumption as much as possible.
In addition to appreciating the drain / use distinction, I also like James's point that you can use different mechanics to deal with different resources. You're not required to treat them all the same way. Also, choosing to ignore one resource might free up the time, attention, and mental energy you need to be able to track another one that you care about more.
Goblin Punch - Triple X Depletion: A Unified Depletion System
Arnold K actually does recommend using the same mechanic for tracking all your resources, but the one he suggests is pretty simple. And you still could, like James does above, adopt the triple X mechanic for just one resource in your game.
In this system, when you initially buy a resource, you get a bundle with 3 check-boxes worth. Each time you use the resource, mark off one of the boxes with an X to indicate that it's partially depleted. When you mark three Xs, the resource is gone. You can also replenish a partially used resource. I'm not totally clear on the costs of replenishment vs buying another resource, but replenishment has the benefit of not adding another line to your inventory.
Magic items can't be replenished, but they get six Xs instead of three (or they get three, but accumulate them a half-X at a time). Using an item for a special purpose means using it up completely.
While the mechanic for tracking resource consumption is the same for every resource, the specific condition that triggers drawing that X varies, which gives each one its own specific feeling. Food and drink deplete twice a day during rests, torches and lamps deplete based on the encounter dice, ammunition has a 50% chance of depleting after every combat where you fire it.
Arnold also recommends having weapons and armor deplete exactly the same way. Armor gets an X when you roll a critical fumble on a defense roll (equivalent to a monster rolling a critical hit in other rules) and weapons can get Xs from critical fumbles on attack rolls. There are a few other complications to both of those, but that's the basic system.
The triple X system seems like it might be a a nice middle ground between each item taking up its own inventory slot and carrying bundles of 10 or 20 that basically never run out. These bundles are just small enough to make depletion meaningful, they're also small enough to remember. "Three strikes and you're out (of the thing you were using)" is an intuitively simple rule, and three items in each bundle probably allows the bundles to fit neatly inside your working memory.
The Manse - Stow & Load Encumbrance System
Cacklecharm is just looking at encumbrance here, but he does a couple things that are interesting. The first is to make a distinction between the total load a character is carrying, and the items they can stow within easy reach.
You can stow 4 + Dex modifier items where you can reach them immediately during combat. Anything not on that list takes multiple combat rounds to reach. Stars Without Number has a similar detail in its encumbrance system. Troika! adds the interesting touch of numbering your items in order, then needing to roll higher than an item's number to get it out during combat.
You can also load up 8 + Str modifier items for each level of encumbrance, of which there are four. My initial thought is that this feels like a lot of items, with the average character able to carry 36 before running out of room.
However, Cacklecharm also adds the detail that many items take up extra slots based on their weight and size. If I understand correctly, small items like daggers take up 1 spot, medium items take up 2 spots, and large items take up 3. So this system is still more generous than most, but the average character can only carry 18 average items, or 12 heavy ones.
There's another detail that encumbrance interacts with Cacklecharm's encounter system. Becoming encumbered reduces your stealth and adds an extra 1-in-6 chance of an encounter every time you roll. Carry enough weight, and you're guaranteed an encounter every time. Worse, once you slip into the "heavily encumbered" range, you can't act during the first round of combat. So while you can carry a lot of items in this system, there are some serious incentives not to. The increased encounter chance also kind of mimics the effect of finding more wandering monsters while moving slowly, while bypassing Gygax's (tedious) ever-changing movement speeds, which is a nice trick!
Pfaff - Encumbrance in OD&D: The Isle of Ys Campaign
Michael Pfaff has also written an encumbrance system. Characters get between 3 and 7 slots to fill based on their Strength score. The average character gets 5. Adding additional slot's worth of equipment drops you down one movement rate each, so 3 extra slots over your initial limit leaves you crawling along at 30'.
Slots are pretty abstract though, and don't directly correspond to the number of items carried. Armor is heavy, and weighs between 1-3 slots depending on type. You can carry a "short" weapon for free; "long" weapons take up more room, but you can carry a couple weapons for only 1 slot.
Every character also has a pack that holds their other equipment. A pouch holding 1 item is free, a rucksack that holds 9 items takes up 3 slots. This all sounds a little complex to explain, but he makes it sound not too difficult. This is also more or less how Torchbearer handles packs. You can spend 1 or 2 body slots to wear a pack, if you do, you get an additional 3 or 6 pack slots to fill.
It seems possible that you could get the same effect he achieves here by increasing the "slot" limit and allowing "slots" to represent items in a more direct and less abstract way, although the trade-off would be slightly more difficult math. The benefit of Michael Pfaff's system, I think, is that you're dealing entirely with single digit numbers. If you did away with the slot-item distinction, I think you' be left with something closer to what Cacklecharm wrote.
Roll 1d100 - The Sunfall Cycle Playtesting Rules: Equipment and Encumbrance
The first thing to know about Steven Lumpkin's encumbrance system is that it only applies to things you're carrying but not using. The armor you're wearing, along with any magic clothing, is separate from this encumbrance system. So is anything in your hands, such as a weapon, a lantern, or your shield. This feels a bit the "stow" space from earlier, except that instead of quantifying it, Steven chooses to ignore it.
Beyond what you're immediately using, you have 3 regular encumbrance slots, 1 "belt slot" that can only hold a small item, and 1 "class slot" that can only hold a class-specific item (such as a bard's musical instrument or a cleric's holy symbol), and a "back slot" which can either hold one item strapped to your back or a backpack with slots of its own, a bit like the Pfaff packs. A backpack holds 2-6 items, depending on your Strength modifier.
Most items are going to take up one slot. Smaller items are three-to-a-slot, however, for consumable resources like torches or arrows, Steven has a different rule that involves rolling dice after each use. If you roll too low, the item only has one use left, after which it will run out. If you fill two slots with the same consumable, however, you no longer need to make these tests. (Which will almost certainly encourage each character in a party to specialize in a single type of consumable equipment.)
Equipment kits work a lot like consumables. Each kit has a list of possible items. Each time you use the kit, you can pull out any item from that list, then roll to determine if the kit is down to only one use left. You can also pay extra for expensive kits that have more uses.
Sheep and Sorcery - Supply Die: An Alternative to Counting Pennies
Michael Kennedy adopts the Usage Dice from The Black Hack and Macchiato Monsters as a kind of catch-all supply. What he's describing here actually reminds me most of The Scones Alone's expedition resources. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one, although it is a slightly more abstract version of a mechanic I already like, so it has that working in its favor.
Anyway, the Sheep and Sorcery supply dice is a catch-all for rations, torches, ropes, and ammunition. Each time you pull supplies from your pack, roll the dice, and if you roll a 1 or 2, it shrinks from d10 to d8 to d6 to d4 to gone. If every character in the party gives up one inventory slot for supplies, the party gets a d6 supply dice; if everyone gives up two slots, they get a d10 dice. The daily meal for the entire party takes a roll. A roll also produces one rope, or 1d4+1 torches. The idea is to make using any supply a little risky, and presumably to run out of all vital dungeoneering supplies simultaneously.
Buildings are People - Conditions
What Valzi offers us here is not so much an inventory system as it is an option rule that could be added on to any encumbrance system that uses slots.
Valzi suggests that whenever you character has a "condition", that takes up 1 inventory slot, in addition to any other effects it has. He lists additional option effects for fatigue, hunger, thirst, being wet, being cold, and being too hot. Having each condition take up a slot is a simple model for the wearing down of an injured character, it gives you a definite place to write any current conditions on your character sheet (is there another place you're supposed to write them? it's weird that there's not, right?), and it adds a benefit besides hit point healing to taking a good long rest.
You could very easily add poison and disease to this list, and the injuries that characters get from monsters scoring critical hits are another possibility. I think this one's a winner, and I know I've seen one or two people using it in the wild already.
Lithyscaphe - Dungeon Logistics & Supply Bundles
David Perry also uses Usage Dice, but in a markedly less abstract way than we've seen before. To start off with, every item in a character's inventory is labeled as "combat", "pack", or "travel".
"Combat" items are things the character ALWAYS has on their person, even while exploring and during combat. Every single combat item beyond your weapons, armor, and shields imposes an across-the-board penalty to all your combat stats!
"Pack" items then are all the things the character carries with them in the dungeon, but these "packs" are just sacks, just bags with no straps, closures, or handles. The assumption is that you're leaving these in a pile while you explore (with only your "combat" items on-hand), and then making multiple trips back and forth to build a new pile once you've secured a route through some part of the dungeon.
He doesn't go into specifics, but he says that this assumption of backtracking to retrieve your stuff helps explain why characters with more items move slower. I'm assuming that the slower movement rates are an abstraction which lets him track time the way he wants to without forcing his players to actually describe making several back-and-forth trips every time they advance, but I can't say that for certain. He does mention that there's a risk of becoming separated from your packs, which could only happen if there's a problem on the first trip out away from the pile, or if you consciously decide to forgo moving the pile along with you.
I'm also not certain how much you can carry in a pack, or how many packs you can carry. David says that each sack can hold "9 to 30 'faces' in any combination" but I'm not familiar with that terminology. Whatever doesn't get counted as a "pack" item goes into the final category. "Travel" items are left with the horses and carts outside the dungeon. They're available during overland travel, but not while you're inside. It's not clear to me how much characters can bring in with them, and ho much they need to leave outside, but it is an idea that lets you not carry something right now without having to erase it off your character sheet for good.
Now, what's going into those over-the-shoulder sacks are "supply bundles" each of which gets its own Usage Dice. (And, presumably, normal non-consumable equipment.) David makes each dice represent a different supply, in contrast to Michael Kennedy's unified supply dice. So at a minimum, the party needs to carry rations, fuel for their lights, and ammunition. Medicine and nick-knacks get their own dice as well, if you want them. Instead of each character setting aside space for an equal share of generic equipment, the players get to decide how many supply bundles to bring, and how to divvy up the dice across their packs.
This is a full system with a couple different interlocking parts, and you could probably adopt part of it without taking on the other. With his insistence on assigning a physical location to each object, this is one of the most concrete treatments of equipment, and denying his medieval player characters modern backpacks probably also makes this the most "realistic" ... but at the same time, he still uses an abstraction rather than raw counts to handle the supply of consumable items.
David Perry also includes an interesting link to David Black's post The Usage Die and Why it isn't That Great. David Black makes the point that the Usage Dice is most interesting when it's used for a specific purpose in tracking the supply of consumable resources, and that its effectiveness is diluted if it starts being applied to other situations. I've thought before about the fact that you could use the Usage Dice to determine if tools break when you try to use them. But I think that you'd need to make a decision to either have the Usage Dice track the supply of consumables or have it track the condition of breakables, but not both in the same game. David Perry also includes several links to my blog, which I promise is not a criteria for showing up on one of these lists.
Final Thoughts
Looking through these, I think my personal inclination is that, as much as possible, one "slot" should correspond to one item. Some items will be too small to bother with, some will come in (hopefully predictably-sized) bundles, and some will be large enough to need two (or more) spaces, but "one item, one slot" seems like an ideal I would prefer to strive toward. Admittedly, this prevents the kind of "spend a slot to add a storage space with several slots" solutions that Torchbearer and Pfaff blog and Roll 1d100 all use.
I very much like the idea that wounds and injuries take up encumbrance slots, and I would be very tempted to expand this to allow mental scars to take up "mind slots" if I could figure out a good way to make skills and class abilities and weapon proficiencies and spells all interchangeable.
I also kind of like the technology of modifying encumbrance using the Strength BONUS, rather than pegging it directly to the Strength score itself. I've said before that I don't think character's encumbrance slots should vary from 3 to 18. Varying from 7 to 13 seems like a compromise that's easier to live with. The first place I remember seeing this idea was on Roles Rules and Rolls, although there's every reason to think that Cacklecharm and Michael Pfaff both re-discovered the technology independently of Roger G-S, and of each other.
Finally, in any encumbrance system, complexity adds up fast. If you do plan to use different systems for different resources (the way I praised Ten Foot Polemic for doing) you want to make sure that each system is as simple as it can be. If you want different kinds of items to take up different numbers of "slots" then you also want to limit the number of possibilities and to apply them as clearly and consistently as possible. Each feature you add, however elegant in its own right, adds to the complexity of the whole.
I dunno, looking at all these has got me thinking that to evaluate an encumbrance system, you might need to take a step back and ask a more basic question about what design goal the rule is intended to accomplish? It's hard to judge how well a thing is fulfilling its function if you don't know for sure what that function is intended to be. Like, the "spend a slot to add a storage space" thing strikes me as being a roundabout way of increasing the number of slots, it's not a tradeoff if you would never not choose it, and I can't see that that extra complexity serves any purpose. But maybe I just don't what that purpose is supposed to be?
My FINAL final thought is that "encumbrance" and "slots" are both terrible words that feel uncomfortable to say. I don't know if there's a solution to this problem since they are both clearly THE terms of art but I would love it if some other words could catch on.
Ten Foot Polemic - Three Ways to Solve Resource Tracking
This is the one that got me collecting links, because James Young referenced something I wrote at the beginning of his post. Anyway, James makes an interesting distinction between what he calls "drain" and what he calls "use". These are two ways that resources get depleted. "Drain is when they tick down over time. Use is when you make an active decision to use them up." In James's view, and I agree, use is usually going to be more interesting than drain. Drain is something being taken away from you, use is voluntarily giving something up ... to get something else you want even more.
He looks into three resources he wants to manage in his game - food, ammo, and light. For food, he decides on a use mechanic. He makes rations the primary source of healing, and adds a special new cooking rule as an extra incentive. For ammunition, he decides to ignore it. For his game, he decides that tracking ammo uses up too much mental bandwidth for too little payoff to be worth it. For light, he decides on drain. With two of his three resources NOT being drained, he feels able to treat one that way, and uses the overloaded encounter dice mechanic to simplify the rate of torch consumption as much as possible.
In addition to appreciating the drain / use distinction, I also like James's point that you can use different mechanics to deal with different resources. You're not required to treat them all the same way. Also, choosing to ignore one resource might free up the time, attention, and mental energy you need to be able to track another one that you care about more.
Goblin Punch - Triple X Depletion: A Unified Depletion System
Arnold K actually does recommend using the same mechanic for tracking all your resources, but the one he suggests is pretty simple. And you still could, like James does above, adopt the triple X mechanic for just one resource in your game.
In this system, when you initially buy a resource, you get a bundle with 3 check-boxes worth. Each time you use the resource, mark off one of the boxes with an X to indicate that it's partially depleted. When you mark three Xs, the resource is gone. You can also replenish a partially used resource. I'm not totally clear on the costs of replenishment vs buying another resource, but replenishment has the benefit of not adding another line to your inventory.
Magic items can't be replenished, but they get six Xs instead of three (or they get three, but accumulate them a half-X at a time). Using an item for a special purpose means using it up completely.
While the mechanic for tracking resource consumption is the same for every resource, the specific condition that triggers drawing that X varies, which gives each one its own specific feeling. Food and drink deplete twice a day during rests, torches and lamps deplete based on the encounter dice, ammunition has a 50% chance of depleting after every combat where you fire it.
Arnold also recommends having weapons and armor deplete exactly the same way. Armor gets an X when you roll a critical fumble on a defense roll (equivalent to a monster rolling a critical hit in other rules) and weapons can get Xs from critical fumbles on attack rolls. There are a few other complications to both of those, but that's the basic system.
The triple X system seems like it might be a a nice middle ground between each item taking up its own inventory slot and carrying bundles of 10 or 20 that basically never run out. These bundles are just small enough to make depletion meaningful, they're also small enough to remember. "Three strikes and you're out (of the thing you were using)" is an intuitively simple rule, and three items in each bundle probably allows the bundles to fit neatly inside your working memory.
The Manse - Stow & Load Encumbrance System
Cacklecharm is just looking at encumbrance here, but he does a couple things that are interesting. The first is to make a distinction between the total load a character is carrying, and the items they can stow within easy reach.
You can stow 4 + Dex modifier items where you can reach them immediately during combat. Anything not on that list takes multiple combat rounds to reach. Stars Without Number has a similar detail in its encumbrance system. Troika! adds the interesting touch of numbering your items in order, then needing to roll higher than an item's number to get it out during combat.
You can also load up 8 + Str modifier items for each level of encumbrance, of which there are four. My initial thought is that this feels like a lot of items, with the average character able to carry 36 before running out of room.
However, Cacklecharm also adds the detail that many items take up extra slots based on their weight and size. If I understand correctly, small items like daggers take up 1 spot, medium items take up 2 spots, and large items take up 3. So this system is still more generous than most, but the average character can only carry 18 average items, or 12 heavy ones.
There's another detail that encumbrance interacts with Cacklecharm's encounter system. Becoming encumbered reduces your stealth and adds an extra 1-in-6 chance of an encounter every time you roll. Carry enough weight, and you're guaranteed an encounter every time. Worse, once you slip into the "heavily encumbered" range, you can't act during the first round of combat. So while you can carry a lot of items in this system, there are some serious incentives not to. The increased encounter chance also kind of mimics the effect of finding more wandering monsters while moving slowly, while bypassing Gygax's (tedious) ever-changing movement speeds, which is a nice trick!
Pfaff - Encumbrance in OD&D: The Isle of Ys Campaign
Michael Pfaff has also written an encumbrance system. Characters get between 3 and 7 slots to fill based on their Strength score. The average character gets 5. Adding additional slot's worth of equipment drops you down one movement rate each, so 3 extra slots over your initial limit leaves you crawling along at 30'.
Slots are pretty abstract though, and don't directly correspond to the number of items carried. Armor is heavy, and weighs between 1-3 slots depending on type. You can carry a "short" weapon for free; "long" weapons take up more room, but you can carry a couple weapons for only 1 slot.
Every character also has a pack that holds their other equipment. A pouch holding 1 item is free, a rucksack that holds 9 items takes up 3 slots. This all sounds a little complex to explain, but he makes it sound not too difficult. This is also more or less how Torchbearer handles packs. You can spend 1 or 2 body slots to wear a pack, if you do, you get an additional 3 or 6 pack slots to fill.
It seems possible that you could get the same effect he achieves here by increasing the "slot" limit and allowing "slots" to represent items in a more direct and less abstract way, although the trade-off would be slightly more difficult math. The benefit of Michael Pfaff's system, I think, is that you're dealing entirely with single digit numbers. If you did away with the slot-item distinction, I think you' be left with something closer to what Cacklecharm wrote.
Roll 1d100 - The Sunfall Cycle Playtesting Rules: Equipment and Encumbrance
The first thing to know about Steven Lumpkin's encumbrance system is that it only applies to things you're carrying but not using. The armor you're wearing, along with any magic clothing, is separate from this encumbrance system. So is anything in your hands, such as a weapon, a lantern, or your shield. This feels a bit the "stow" space from earlier, except that instead of quantifying it, Steven chooses to ignore it.
Beyond what you're immediately using, you have 3 regular encumbrance slots, 1 "belt slot" that can only hold a small item, and 1 "class slot" that can only hold a class-specific item (such as a bard's musical instrument or a cleric's holy symbol), and a "back slot" which can either hold one item strapped to your back or a backpack with slots of its own, a bit like the Pfaff packs. A backpack holds 2-6 items, depending on your Strength modifier.
Most items are going to take up one slot. Smaller items are three-to-a-slot, however, for consumable resources like torches or arrows, Steven has a different rule that involves rolling dice after each use. If you roll too low, the item only has one use left, after which it will run out. If you fill two slots with the same consumable, however, you no longer need to make these tests. (Which will almost certainly encourage each character in a party to specialize in a single type of consumable equipment.)
Equipment kits work a lot like consumables. Each kit has a list of possible items. Each time you use the kit, you can pull out any item from that list, then roll to determine if the kit is down to only one use left. You can also pay extra for expensive kits that have more uses.
Sheep and Sorcery - Supply Die: An Alternative to Counting Pennies
Michael Kennedy adopts the Usage Dice from The Black Hack and Macchiato Monsters as a kind of catch-all supply. What he's describing here actually reminds me most of The Scones Alone's expedition resources. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one, although it is a slightly more abstract version of a mechanic I already like, so it has that working in its favor.
Anyway, the Sheep and Sorcery supply dice is a catch-all for rations, torches, ropes, and ammunition. Each time you pull supplies from your pack, roll the dice, and if you roll a 1 or 2, it shrinks from d10 to d8 to d6 to d4 to gone. If every character in the party gives up one inventory slot for supplies, the party gets a d6 supply dice; if everyone gives up two slots, they get a d10 dice. The daily meal for the entire party takes a roll. A roll also produces one rope, or 1d4+1 torches. The idea is to make using any supply a little risky, and presumably to run out of all vital dungeoneering supplies simultaneously.
Buildings are People - Conditions
What Valzi offers us here is not so much an inventory system as it is an option rule that could be added on to any encumbrance system that uses slots.
Valzi suggests that whenever you character has a "condition", that takes up 1 inventory slot, in addition to any other effects it has. He lists additional option effects for fatigue, hunger, thirst, being wet, being cold, and being too hot. Having each condition take up a slot is a simple model for the wearing down of an injured character, it gives you a definite place to write any current conditions on your character sheet (is there another place you're supposed to write them? it's weird that there's not, right?), and it adds a benefit besides hit point healing to taking a good long rest.
You could very easily add poison and disease to this list, and the injuries that characters get from monsters scoring critical hits are another possibility. I think this one's a winner, and I know I've seen one or two people using it in the wild already.
Lithyscaphe - Dungeon Logistics & Supply Bundles
David Perry also uses Usage Dice, but in a markedly less abstract way than we've seen before. To start off with, every item in a character's inventory is labeled as "combat", "pack", or "travel".
"Combat" items are things the character ALWAYS has on their person, even while exploring and during combat. Every single combat item beyond your weapons, armor, and shields imposes an across-the-board penalty to all your combat stats!
"Pack" items then are all the things the character carries with them in the dungeon, but these "packs" are just sacks, just bags with no straps, closures, or handles. The assumption is that you're leaving these in a pile while you explore (with only your "combat" items on-hand), and then making multiple trips back and forth to build a new pile once you've secured a route through some part of the dungeon.
He doesn't go into specifics, but he says that this assumption of backtracking to retrieve your stuff helps explain why characters with more items move slower. I'm assuming that the slower movement rates are an abstraction which lets him track time the way he wants to without forcing his players to actually describe making several back-and-forth trips every time they advance, but I can't say that for certain. He does mention that there's a risk of becoming separated from your packs, which could only happen if there's a problem on the first trip out away from the pile, or if you consciously decide to forgo moving the pile along with you.
I'm also not certain how much you can carry in a pack, or how many packs you can carry. David says that each sack can hold "9 to 30 'faces' in any combination" but I'm not familiar with that terminology. Whatever doesn't get counted as a "pack" item goes into the final category. "Travel" items are left with the horses and carts outside the dungeon. They're available during overland travel, but not while you're inside. It's not clear to me how much characters can bring in with them, and ho much they need to leave outside, but it is an idea that lets you not carry something right now without having to erase it off your character sheet for good.
Now, what's going into those over-the-shoulder sacks are "supply bundles" each of which gets its own Usage Dice. (And, presumably, normal non-consumable equipment.) David makes each dice represent a different supply, in contrast to Michael Kennedy's unified supply dice. So at a minimum, the party needs to carry rations, fuel for their lights, and ammunition. Medicine and nick-knacks get their own dice as well, if you want them. Instead of each character setting aside space for an equal share of generic equipment, the players get to decide how many supply bundles to bring, and how to divvy up the dice across their packs.
This is a full system with a couple different interlocking parts, and you could probably adopt part of it without taking on the other. With his insistence on assigning a physical location to each object, this is one of the most concrete treatments of equipment, and denying his medieval player characters modern backpacks probably also makes this the most "realistic" ... but at the same time, he still uses an abstraction rather than raw counts to handle the supply of consumable items.
David Perry also includes an interesting link to David Black's post The Usage Die and Why it isn't That Great. David Black makes the point that the Usage Dice is most interesting when it's used for a specific purpose in tracking the supply of consumable resources, and that its effectiveness is diluted if it starts being applied to other situations. I've thought before about the fact that you could use the Usage Dice to determine if tools break when you try to use them. But I think that you'd need to make a decision to either have the Usage Dice track the supply of consumables or have it track the condition of breakables, but not both in the same game. David Perry also includes several links to my blog, which I promise is not a criteria for showing up on one of these lists.
Final Thoughts
Looking through these, I think my personal inclination is that, as much as possible, one "slot" should correspond to one item. Some items will be too small to bother with, some will come in (hopefully predictably-sized) bundles, and some will be large enough to need two (or more) spaces, but "one item, one slot" seems like an ideal I would prefer to strive toward. Admittedly, this prevents the kind of "spend a slot to add a storage space with several slots" solutions that Torchbearer and Pfaff blog and Roll 1d100 all use.
I very much like the idea that wounds and injuries take up encumbrance slots, and I would be very tempted to expand this to allow mental scars to take up "mind slots" if I could figure out a good way to make skills and class abilities and weapon proficiencies and spells all interchangeable.
I also kind of like the technology of modifying encumbrance using the Strength BONUS, rather than pegging it directly to the Strength score itself. I've said before that I don't think character's encumbrance slots should vary from 3 to 18. Varying from 7 to 13 seems like a compromise that's easier to live with. The first place I remember seeing this idea was on Roles Rules and Rolls, although there's every reason to think that Cacklecharm and Michael Pfaff both re-discovered the technology independently of Roger G-S, and of each other.
Finally, in any encumbrance system, complexity adds up fast. If you do plan to use different systems for different resources (the way I praised Ten Foot Polemic for doing) you want to make sure that each system is as simple as it can be. If you want different kinds of items to take up different numbers of "slots" then you also want to limit the number of possibilities and to apply them as clearly and consistently as possible. Each feature you add, however elegant in its own right, adds to the complexity of the whole.
I dunno, looking at all these has got me thinking that to evaluate an encumbrance system, you might need to take a step back and ask a more basic question about what design goal the rule is intended to accomplish? It's hard to judge how well a thing is fulfilling its function if you don't know for sure what that function is intended to be. Like, the "spend a slot to add a storage space" thing strikes me as being a roundabout way of increasing the number of slots, it's not a tradeoff if you would never not choose it, and I can't see that that extra complexity serves any purpose. But maybe I just don't what that purpose is supposed to be?
My FINAL final thought is that "encumbrance" and "slots" are both terrible words that feel uncomfortable to say. I don't know if there's a solution to this problem since they are both clearly THE terms of art but I would love it if some other words could catch on.
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Three Alternate Monster Lists
Brother Juniper from Goblin Flowers recently asked a question about alternate monster lists that jogged my memory for a few classic ones.
Roger G-S from Roles, Rules, and Rolls made Varlets & Vermin, 28 pages of low HD monsters and a smattering of public domain woodcuts that are exactly what you'd expect from the author of the Pergamino Barocco.
"Demi-Real Monster - When a summoning goes partly wrong, or an illusion of a living thing takes on existence, a demi-real creature is created. The monster starts out half-transparent and shaky in form. The monster gains hit dice by leaving its mark on the world - most often this means scoring damage in combat. Once it has its full hit dice it is permanently real. If killed before then, its body will waver and wink out of existence. A demi-real creature that is aware of its existential condition, and able to communicate, may very well try to negotiate a different way to gain full reality than fighting a dangerous group of adventurers."
Zenopus Archives wrote One Hit Point Monsters, which is 20 entries of exactly what it sounds like. I've admired this blog's creativity before, so I'm not surprised I enjoy these.
"Danse Macabre - Finely-dressed skeletons emerge from the ground. One plays the violin while the others try to dance with characters for 2d6 turns. Only attack if resisted. If danced with for the entire time, skeletons sink back into ground leaving a reward. Entire group turns as ghouls."
Al Krombach from Beyond the Black Gate made 6 tables of 20 monsters as Alternative Wandering Monster Tables. There are no descriptions here, so the evocative names do all the heavy listing. Al is coauthor of Warlords of Mars (which really would have looked lovely in a color edition), and his collaborator Thomas Denmark wrote his own OD&D monster book called Beasties.
"Level One - Beetle, Nuclear; Level Two - Ooze, Stop Motion; Level Three - Obsidian Judge; Level Four through Five - Wereslugs; Level Six through Seven - Spiderbear; Level Eight - Toad of the Abyss."
Roger G-S from Roles, Rules, and Rolls made Varlets & Vermin, 28 pages of low HD monsters and a smattering of public domain woodcuts that are exactly what you'd expect from the author of the Pergamino Barocco.
"Demi-Real Monster - When a summoning goes partly wrong, or an illusion of a living thing takes on existence, a demi-real creature is created. The monster starts out half-transparent and shaky in form. The monster gains hit dice by leaving its mark on the world - most often this means scoring damage in combat. Once it has its full hit dice it is permanently real. If killed before then, its body will waver and wink out of existence. A demi-real creature that is aware of its existential condition, and able to communicate, may very well try to negotiate a different way to gain full reality than fighting a dangerous group of adventurers."
Zenopus Archives wrote One Hit Point Monsters, which is 20 entries of exactly what it sounds like. I've admired this blog's creativity before, so I'm not surprised I enjoy these.
"Danse Macabre - Finely-dressed skeletons emerge from the ground. One plays the violin while the others try to dance with characters for 2d6 turns. Only attack if resisted. If danced with for the entire time, skeletons sink back into ground leaving a reward. Entire group turns as ghouls."
Al Krombach from Beyond the Black Gate made 6 tables of 20 monsters as Alternative Wandering Monster Tables. There are no descriptions here, so the evocative names do all the heavy listing. Al is coauthor of Warlords of Mars (which really would have looked lovely in a color edition), and his collaborator Thomas Denmark wrote his own OD&D monster book called Beasties.
"Level One - Beetle, Nuclear; Level Two - Ooze, Stop Motion; Level Three - Obsidian Judge; Level Four through Five - Wereslugs; Level Six through Seven - Spiderbear; Level Eight - Toad of the Abyss."
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
Procedural Generation Demonstration - Box Full of Boxes' Subdimension, Hive, and Bastion
Box Full of Boxes is a relatively new blog on the scene, but they've already written several interesting random generators, including one to create a small extradimensional space to use as an adventuring site, one to create a criminal meeting place, and one to create a law-enforcement organization. Let's make all three, and see if we can determine how they're connected.
Subdimension - The Vault of the Hesperus
Rolls: 4/2, 5/2, 8/2, 6/4
On the Second Day, God made the oceans and the sky; on the Fifth, God made all the great creatures of the sea, and every living thing that teems within the waters. On the Seventh Day, God rested, and took His pleasure yacht out onto the seas, and He saw that they were good.
And then came the War in Heaven, and the pleasure ship was made a ship of war. The angel Ismael captained the ship, christened the Hesperus, and Ishmael sailed the Hesperus across the seas, and there fought the great worm Leviathan. Every angel aboard perished, save for Ismael, who was rescued by the archangel Rachel. Together the two angels locked the Hesperus in a vault, still littered with the unburied dead and the detritus of battle, and they returned to the heavens together to await the outcome of the War.
God opened the vault only once, to instruct Noah on the building of the Ark, and to collect the bodies of the angels to await the eventual resurrection of their bodies, but on that day, God left the door ajar.
Today, it is possible to enter the vault where the Hesperus is kept in drydock. When the eye of a hurricane is centered over the spot where God slew the Leviathan, the same spot where Noah released the dove, a ship within the eye that plots a course toward the Evening Star will sail through the open door and enter the vault of heaven where the Hesperus still waits. It is strewn with the debris of war, but seaworthy, and able to sail across the sky and cross the celestial spheres, to go anywhere its captain wishes to take it.
The tale of the Hesperus is told in Melville's recent novel The Leviathan, in the apocryphal Book of Ismael, in The Collected Expurgated Cantos of Paradise Lost, and in tall tales told during storms at a certain seaside bar.
Hive of Scum & Villainy - The Anchor & Saucers
Rolls: 1, 7, 3, 3
Amidst the overcrowded seaside streets of the Wharf District is a bar marked only by the sign of a fat lizard with a morning-star flail where its tail should be. On rainy days it fills up with shop owners and fishing-ship captains, who gather to trade stock and drink rum served with tea. Although the place is always full of the murmur of conversation, it's impossible to eavesdrop on anyone in there, which makes it ideal for conducting business without fear of the competitors sitting at the next table.
The proprietor, Ismael, looks barely more than a boy, and though battle-scarred, is quite beautiful. The regulars call him "the old man" and "the dinosaur". During particularly harsh storms, he entertains the bar with raucous tales of the hunt for a great whale or sea serpent.
Ismael enforces only two rules that outsiders find strange. First, none of the business conducted may be illegal - indeed, those who try discuss crimes find that not only eavesdroppers, but no one at all can hear them speak. Second, no members of the royal navy are allowed inside.
Bastion of Law & Order - Seventh Fleet of the Royal Navy
Rolls: 5, 1, 4, 6
The largest building in the Wharf District is the urban base for the Royal Navy, home to the infamous Seventh Fleet, led by the notorious Admiral Abrahad and his right-hand man, Fleet Captain Isaiah. The fleet captain is always impeccably dressed and marches preening through the streets several times a day, his uniform made from much finer fabrics than are standard in the navy. Abrahad is withdrawn and rarely seen, except peering through the windows of the Admiralty Building, or standing atop its roof, staring down at the wharf. The sailors of the seventh fleet follow the fleet captain's neat example in their habiliment, but give off the unsavory impression of being a pack of murderous thugs disguised in the Queen's uniforms.
Ostensibly the Seventh Fleet is responsible for enforcing all maritime laws in the Wharf District, but the sailors mostly only ever seem to collect "taxes" from all the local merchants, ship captains, and anyone new passing through the district. Anyone attempting to report a crime or seek compensation from the fleet office is likely to subjected to an interminable stack of forms and "filing fees" in order to make their case, and the outcome is equally likely to be a summary dismissal, a back-alley ambush and beating for the plaintiff, or an over-the-top show of "justice" as the Navy executes the accused and confiscates all their effects.
Admiral Abrahad is extremely interested in any information about the interior of the Anchor & Saucer. He might attempt to pressgang newcomers into going inside as his spies, or may send sailors to waylay out-of-towners as they leave the bar. Once Abrahad has heard the final detail he needs (which will sound totally innocuous to the teller), he'll try to recruit any adventurers who are onhand to sail to a particular spot in the ocean, and he'll seem maniacally pleased that there's a hurricane pressing down on his expedition. A group of regulars from the Anchor & Saucer will likely seek recruits and mount a counter-strike to disrupt Abrahad's plans.
All Moby Dick graphics were found at the Book Graphics blog.
 |
| Illustration by Rockwell Kent for Moby Dick |
Subdimension - The Vault of the Hesperus
Rolls: 4/2, 5/2, 8/2, 6/4
On the Second Day, God made the oceans and the sky; on the Fifth, God made all the great creatures of the sea, and every living thing that teems within the waters. On the Seventh Day, God rested, and took His pleasure yacht out onto the seas, and He saw that they were good.
And then came the War in Heaven, and the pleasure ship was made a ship of war. The angel Ismael captained the ship, christened the Hesperus, and Ishmael sailed the Hesperus across the seas, and there fought the great worm Leviathan. Every angel aboard perished, save for Ismael, who was rescued by the archangel Rachel. Together the two angels locked the Hesperus in a vault, still littered with the unburied dead and the detritus of battle, and they returned to the heavens together to await the outcome of the War.
God opened the vault only once, to instruct Noah on the building of the Ark, and to collect the bodies of the angels to await the eventual resurrection of their bodies, but on that day, God left the door ajar.
Today, it is possible to enter the vault where the Hesperus is kept in drydock. When the eye of a hurricane is centered over the spot where God slew the Leviathan, the same spot where Noah released the dove, a ship within the eye that plots a course toward the Evening Star will sail through the open door and enter the vault of heaven where the Hesperus still waits. It is strewn with the debris of war, but seaworthy, and able to sail across the sky and cross the celestial spheres, to go anywhere its captain wishes to take it.
The tale of the Hesperus is told in Melville's recent novel The Leviathan, in the apocryphal Book of Ismael, in The Collected Expurgated Cantos of Paradise Lost, and in tall tales told during storms at a certain seaside bar.
 |
| Illustration by Rockwell Kent for Moby Dick |
Hive of Scum & Villainy - The Anchor & Saucers
Rolls: 1, 7, 3, 3
Amidst the overcrowded seaside streets of the Wharf District is a bar marked only by the sign of a fat lizard with a morning-star flail where its tail should be. On rainy days it fills up with shop owners and fishing-ship captains, who gather to trade stock and drink rum served with tea. Although the place is always full of the murmur of conversation, it's impossible to eavesdrop on anyone in there, which makes it ideal for conducting business without fear of the competitors sitting at the next table.
The proprietor, Ismael, looks barely more than a boy, and though battle-scarred, is quite beautiful. The regulars call him "the old man" and "the dinosaur". During particularly harsh storms, he entertains the bar with raucous tales of the hunt for a great whale or sea serpent.
Ismael enforces only two rules that outsiders find strange. First, none of the business conducted may be illegal - indeed, those who try discuss crimes find that not only eavesdroppers, but no one at all can hear them speak. Second, no members of the royal navy are allowed inside.
 |
| Illustration by Rockwell Kent for Moby Dick |
Bastion of Law & Order - Seventh Fleet of the Royal Navy
Rolls: 5, 1, 4, 6
The largest building in the Wharf District is the urban base for the Royal Navy, home to the infamous Seventh Fleet, led by the notorious Admiral Abrahad and his right-hand man, Fleet Captain Isaiah. The fleet captain is always impeccably dressed and marches preening through the streets several times a day, his uniform made from much finer fabrics than are standard in the navy. Abrahad is withdrawn and rarely seen, except peering through the windows of the Admiralty Building, or standing atop its roof, staring down at the wharf. The sailors of the seventh fleet follow the fleet captain's neat example in their habiliment, but give off the unsavory impression of being a pack of murderous thugs disguised in the Queen's uniforms.
Ostensibly the Seventh Fleet is responsible for enforcing all maritime laws in the Wharf District, but the sailors mostly only ever seem to collect "taxes" from all the local merchants, ship captains, and anyone new passing through the district. Anyone attempting to report a crime or seek compensation from the fleet office is likely to subjected to an interminable stack of forms and "filing fees" in order to make their case, and the outcome is equally likely to be a summary dismissal, a back-alley ambush and beating for the plaintiff, or an over-the-top show of "justice" as the Navy executes the accused and confiscates all their effects.
Admiral Abrahad is extremely interested in any information about the interior of the Anchor & Saucer. He might attempt to pressgang newcomers into going inside as his spies, or may send sailors to waylay out-of-towners as they leave the bar. Once Abrahad has heard the final detail he needs (which will sound totally innocuous to the teller), he'll try to recruit any adventurers who are onhand to sail to a particular spot in the ocean, and he'll seem maniacally pleased that there's a hurricane pressing down on his expedition. A group of regulars from the Anchor & Saucer will likely seek recruits and mount a counter-strike to disrupt Abrahad's plans.
All Moby Dick graphics were found at the Book Graphics blog.
Monday, September 2, 2019
Blogs on Tape 2 - Hallway Boogaloo
After a summer hiatus, Blogs on Tape is back!
And, I'm honored to report that the most recent episode was a reading of one of my blog posts. This is the second time something I've written has made it onto Blogs on Tape, and I couldn't be happier.
You can listen here to Episode 71 - Should We Start Numbering Our Hallway Maps? and read the original post here.
You can also go back and re-listen to Episode 47 - Campaigns I Want to Run: Dungeons & Decorators and re-read that original post here.
Big thanks to Nick LS Whelan for the work he put into these two episodes, and for the whole Blogs on Tape project!
And, I'm honored to report that the most recent episode was a reading of one of my blog posts. This is the second time something I've written has made it onto Blogs on Tape, and I couldn't be happier.
You can listen here to Episode 71 - Should We Start Numbering Our Hallway Maps? and read the original post here.
You can also go back and re-listen to Episode 47 - Campaigns I Want to Run: Dungeons & Decorators and re-read that original post here.
Big thanks to Nick LS Whelan for the work he put into these two episodes, and for the whole Blogs on Tape project!
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Procedural Generation Demonstration - The Manse's Underdark Ocean Island Generator
Cacklecharm from The Manse wrote a series of random tables to generate islands on an Underdark ocean. These tables work together quickly, and I had little trouble assembling the pieces into a narratively coherent whole in a matter of minutes. So instead of my usual two, let's generate three!
1 - Tusk Island
Rolls: 4, 2, 4, 9, 7, 5
Tusk Island rises like a tooth from the sea. The pale stone island is a great stalagmite, pregnant with calcite and riddled with cavities. The water around it glows pink from the luminescent red algae that clings to the island's base, just beneath the waves, feasting on the rich magnesium oxides that burble up from a vent at the island's base.
The Tusk has a large central cave, just off the most obvious landing site. Its floor is flat, carpeted with soft layers of lichen and mushrooms. These grow in ring formations; a few circles are clear, making ideal spots for fire-building; one large ring is especially lush, an inviting place to sleep. Tooth-fairies lurk in the hollows of this cave. They attack sleeping adventurers, stealing teeth from their mouths, clothes, books, and other symbols of civilization.
Most of the other caves on Tusk Island are inhabited by olms, blind, white salamander people. The tooth fairies are slowly domesticating them, filling their mouths with human teeth, supplying them with stolen supplies, and relentlessly tormenting them to enact parodies of human behavior. They will eagerly trade for information about human customs, along with corpses, and literally any possessions the adventurers are willing to barter.
Though most of the olms' belongings are worthless - saturated with seawater and humidity and fluids from the olms' own hygroscopic bodies - they currently own a quiver of magnesium arrows that burn brightly (though without heat) for an hour, from the moment they're exposed to the air, and continue burning even underwater.
The olm are also tormented by "the dragon" a giant of their own species, a mutant olm twice the height of any other, tattooed with arcane sigils, able to breathe fire. It subsists on a diet of olm-flesh and fairies.
2 - Cackle-harm's Glacier
Rolls: 3, 6, 5, 2, 2, 2
It would be easy to run aground against the black glacier. The island is made of black ice, almost invisible against the background. The waters around it are filled with carnivorous black seaweed that grasps at the hulls of ships, and pulls anyone who falls overboard deep below to drown them. Chill winds blow down off the glacier at unpredictable times, always preceded by the sound of laughter, dealing 1d6 frost damage to anyone unprotected by shelter.
A wrecked dwarven ship is tangled in the weeds just off the coast of the glacier. Seven dwarven prospectors have a makeshift camp. Their mining company will pay handsomely for them to be returned to dwarven civilization. These seven are the survivors of a much larger expedition, but their numbers have been much reduced by the wreck, the seaweed, the cold, and the depredations of an invisible menace.
The dread goblin Cackle-harm lives on the glacier, his hideous laughter echoes across the whole island just before the chill wind blows. A marauder and brigand, Cackle-harm and his pirates robbed elven merchants for years before they caught him, and tried to execute him - but the magic in the elf-rope noose they hanged him with malfunctioned, making him invisible and invulnerable. He'll be happy to tell you his story ... right before he kills you. The only way to kill him is to remove the rope. The unbreakable elf-rope is Cackle-harm's only treasure - everything else he steals he throws in the sea, unreachable beneath the black seaweed garden.
3 - The Sleeping Giant
Rolls: 6, 5, 2, 4, 4, 7*
(Note: The Manse recommends rolling d6 to determine inhabitants, but also suggests the island might be uninhabited, so I rolled a d10, and I'm interpreting results 7-10 as uninhabited.)
It's impossible to miss the Sleeping Giant. It's a giant olm, an albino salamander the size of a mountain, trapped in magical slumber.
The waters surrounding the island are filled with flags and warning buoys written in dozens of languages. Shipcatching nets are set out to prevent any vessel larger than a lifeboat from approaching the island directly. A lighthouse sits atop an promontory stone, positioned so shadows prevent its light from hitting the slumbering giant's sleeping eyes. The everburning flame of the lighthouse is a trapped fire elemental, magically bound to the tower.
Hidden in the crevices and folds of the giant's skin are dozens of pest-traps. By now, about half have been triggered and hold the skeletons of various underworld vermin. The rest remain a hazard to adventures. Each deals 1d4 damage and requires an exploration turn for two people to remove.
The only treasure on the island is a spellbook, Ø ōōōō ō Øōōō ØØØ ØØØ ØōØ ØØØ ōōØō Øōōō ōō Øō Øōō ōō Øō ØØō, the Book of Binding, which is locked to a chain, the chain wrapped around the giant olm's neck like a collar. The book is written in a kind of braille, legible to the sightless hands of the original spellcasters. The book contains only two spells - one to put the olm back to sleep if it begins to wake, another to bind the elemental to its lighthouse prison. Any spellcaster intelligent enough to translate the spells from their time-forgotten original language is also skilled enough to reverse them to awaken the giant or free the fire.
(Also note: I just used Morse Code to write the book title. If you decide to use this island, consider making a "book" out of three notecards folded in half. Use a hole-puncher for the dashses and poke a smaller hole with a pen-tip for the dots. The spells can just be called "sleep" and "bind" for simplicity's sake.)
 |
| Underdark Ocean Island Generator by Cacklecharm |
1 - Tusk Island
Rolls: 4, 2, 4, 9, 7, 5
Tusk Island rises like a tooth from the sea. The pale stone island is a great stalagmite, pregnant with calcite and riddled with cavities. The water around it glows pink from the luminescent red algae that clings to the island's base, just beneath the waves, feasting on the rich magnesium oxides that burble up from a vent at the island's base.
The Tusk has a large central cave, just off the most obvious landing site. Its floor is flat, carpeted with soft layers of lichen and mushrooms. These grow in ring formations; a few circles are clear, making ideal spots for fire-building; one large ring is especially lush, an inviting place to sleep. Tooth-fairies lurk in the hollows of this cave. They attack sleeping adventurers, stealing teeth from their mouths, clothes, books, and other symbols of civilization.
Most of the other caves on Tusk Island are inhabited by olms, blind, white salamander people. The tooth fairies are slowly domesticating them, filling their mouths with human teeth, supplying them with stolen supplies, and relentlessly tormenting them to enact parodies of human behavior. They will eagerly trade for information about human customs, along with corpses, and literally any possessions the adventurers are willing to barter.
Though most of the olms' belongings are worthless - saturated with seawater and humidity and fluids from the olms' own hygroscopic bodies - they currently own a quiver of magnesium arrows that burn brightly (though without heat) for an hour, from the moment they're exposed to the air, and continue burning even underwater.
The olm are also tormented by "the dragon" a giant of their own species, a mutant olm twice the height of any other, tattooed with arcane sigils, able to breathe fire. It subsists on a diet of olm-flesh and fairies.
2 - Cackle-harm's Glacier
Rolls: 3, 6, 5, 2, 2, 2
It would be easy to run aground against the black glacier. The island is made of black ice, almost invisible against the background. The waters around it are filled with carnivorous black seaweed that grasps at the hulls of ships, and pulls anyone who falls overboard deep below to drown them. Chill winds blow down off the glacier at unpredictable times, always preceded by the sound of laughter, dealing 1d6 frost damage to anyone unprotected by shelter.
A wrecked dwarven ship is tangled in the weeds just off the coast of the glacier. Seven dwarven prospectors have a makeshift camp. Their mining company will pay handsomely for them to be returned to dwarven civilization. These seven are the survivors of a much larger expedition, but their numbers have been much reduced by the wreck, the seaweed, the cold, and the depredations of an invisible menace.
The dread goblin Cackle-harm lives on the glacier, his hideous laughter echoes across the whole island just before the chill wind blows. A marauder and brigand, Cackle-harm and his pirates robbed elven merchants for years before they caught him, and tried to execute him - but the magic in the elf-rope noose they hanged him with malfunctioned, making him invisible and invulnerable. He'll be happy to tell you his story ... right before he kills you. The only way to kill him is to remove the rope. The unbreakable elf-rope is Cackle-harm's only treasure - everything else he steals he throws in the sea, unreachable beneath the black seaweed garden.
3 - The Sleeping Giant
Rolls: 6, 5, 2, 4, 4, 7*
(Note: The Manse recommends rolling d6 to determine inhabitants, but also suggests the island might be uninhabited, so I rolled a d10, and I'm interpreting results 7-10 as uninhabited.)
It's impossible to miss the Sleeping Giant. It's a giant olm, an albino salamander the size of a mountain, trapped in magical slumber.
The waters surrounding the island are filled with flags and warning buoys written in dozens of languages. Shipcatching nets are set out to prevent any vessel larger than a lifeboat from approaching the island directly. A lighthouse sits atop an promontory stone, positioned so shadows prevent its light from hitting the slumbering giant's sleeping eyes. The everburning flame of the lighthouse is a trapped fire elemental, magically bound to the tower.
Hidden in the crevices and folds of the giant's skin are dozens of pest-traps. By now, about half have been triggered and hold the skeletons of various underworld vermin. The rest remain a hazard to adventures. Each deals 1d4 damage and requires an exploration turn for two people to remove.
The only treasure on the island is a spellbook, Ø ōōōō ō Øōōō ØØØ ØØØ ØōØ ØØØ ōōØō Øōōō ōō Øō Øōō ōō Øō ØØō, the Book of Binding, which is locked to a chain, the chain wrapped around the giant olm's neck like a collar. The book is written in a kind of braille, legible to the sightless hands of the original spellcasters. The book contains only two spells - one to put the olm back to sleep if it begins to wake, another to bind the elemental to its lighthouse prison. Any spellcaster intelligent enough to translate the spells from their time-forgotten original language is also skilled enough to reverse them to awaken the giant or free the fire.
(Also note: I just used Morse Code to write the book title. If you decide to use this island, consider making a "book" out of three notecards folded in half. Use a hole-puncher for the dashses and poke a smaller hole with a pen-tip for the dots. The spells can just be called "sleep" and "bind" for simplicity's sake.)
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Reverse Engineering Random Tables - Campaign Events & Minor Magical Items
Two of my favorite random tables are Dreams in the Lich House's Campaign Events for the Black City and Dungeon of Signs' Starting Minor Magical Items for Darkly Haunted Noble Characters.
I like them so much, in fact, that I want to learn how to write my own tables like them. And the way to do that, I think, is to take them apart and see how they work. Having done that, I should be able to put my own lists together in the same way to achieve a similar effect.
Let's start with the campaign events. I've found that having something happen "in town" during the player characters' downtime expands the scope of the game a little bit and makes the campaign world feel "alive" - and by extension, when I've run ongoing campaigns without events, it can start to feel a bit too much like the characters are the only people in the world. (I mean, they sort of ARE, but you don't necessarily want it to FEEL like that. Suffocating claustrophobia is fine INSIDE the dungeon, but you want the outside world to feel more open.)
Lately I've come to appreciate that running a sandbox game requires giving players a surfeit of choice. If you want your players to choose their own goals and objectives, then you have to offer them a longer list of ideas to narrow down from. You need a map that shows them places they could go, you need a basic concept (at least!) of what each of those places is like, and you need to populate your world not just with monsters, but with people, with factions and NPCs who have names and personalities and agendas of their own.
And random events help with all that, because they mimic the unpredictability of a world where things happen because other people make them happen. I've used the Dreams in the Lich House random event list before, and liked it, so let's see what John Arendt is doing with this list:
1-2 Astral Conjunction
3-4 Bad Weather
5-6 Beached Whale
7-8 Bear Attack
9-11 Blood Feud *
12-14 Bragging Rights *
15-16 Dire Omens
17-18 Disappearance
19-20 Favor of the Gods
21-23 False Identity *
24-26 Fire *
27-28 Food Shortage
29-30 Foreigners!
31-32 Gold Rush
33-34 Great Weather
35-36 Herd of Caribou
37-39 Inflation *
40-41 It Came from the Ice
42-43 Long Live the King
44-46 Marvel Team-Up *
47-48 Massacre
49-50 Meteor
51-52 Missionary
53-54 New Sub Level
55-56 New Trade Route
57-58 New Trade Town
59-60 Pod of Whales
61-62 Population Change
63-64 Prize Fishing
65-66 Rampaging Monster Back Home
67-69 Rescue Mission *
70-71 Rival Wizard
72-74 Robbery *
75-76 Ship Lost at Sea
77-78 Sickness
79-80 Skilled Laborer
81-82 Stolen Map
83-84 Stormy Seas
85-86 Supply Problems
87-88 The Enemy Among Us
89-90 Vermin
91-92 Visiting Ship
93-94 Wandering Monster
95-96 Wars and Rumors of Wars
97-98 Where's the Wizard
99-100 Whirlpool
There are 46 events on there, most with a 2% chance of showing up, a couple with a 3% chance. I've marked the more-common events with stars. Reading through each entry, I tried to group them in a way that I think makes sense of what each event is doing for the game. With a very small amount of rounding, we get this:
10% - positive event
10% - rival NPC interactions
20% - faction event
30% - sidequest opportunity
30% - negative event
The specific events that make up those categories go a long way toward defining the environment. If you wanted to set your campaign somewhere that wasn't a Viking outpost beside an alien city, then you'd want to alter or reskin the individual entries. But the overall proportions are what interests me here.
About 10% of the time there's an event with a positive impact. Most of these are for one session only, a couple are ongoing. Notably a couple of these look like NPC events, but the effect is primarily an improvement of conditions, like when a skilled laborer opens a new shop in town, or when a new trade route adds a whole menu of foreign luxuries to the shopping list.
About 10% of the time, the player characters are forced into an interaction with some rival NPCs. These interactions can pose an immediate problem (like when the NPCs accuse the player characters of a crime and demand redress) or they can provide an opportunity for exploration (like when the NPCs offer to join the PCs on a joint mission, providing the personnel to do something more dangerous than usual) or they can just be a goad to spur the players to action (like when the NPCs are bragging about their own exploits). Regardless, this sets up a session where the players can do a bit more roleplaying. It also requires you to invent, or have on hand, some NPCs capable of serving as rival adventurers.
Roughly 20% of the time, there's a faction-level event happening. Unlike their rival NPCs, the player characters aren't necessarily forced into getting involved in whatever's happening - but it will change the social environment of the town going forward. Maybe one faction leaves town, maybe a new faction arrives (or a whole second town springs up!), or maybe there's conflict between two or more of the existing factions. The players could try to ignore that, offer to mediate it, or join one side against the other. For this to work, each faction needs a somewhat distinctive identity, and probably a couple representative NPC members. Because none of these events involve the player characters directly, they get more freedom to decide how to interact with what's going on. As Necropraxis suggests, let the players decide who their enemies are.
Roughly 30% of the random events are opportunities to go on a sidequest. (The default main quest being looting the megadungeon ruins of the alien city.) Most of these involve the temporary appearance of a new adventuring site or a new quest activity - check out that meteor crater! or catch that whale! Some of these seem like negative events, but the effect of them turns out to be a chance at redress, rather than a reduction in the living standard. You might try to investigate what happened to someone who's lost (and rescue them, if possible) or make a plan to kill a monster who's built a nearby lair. What defines these events is the opportunity to go on a mission that varies your routine, whereas the negative events generally don't open up new venues for play.
The final 30% of events impose some kind of negative impact. Again, most of these are single-session events, but a few present an ongoing problem that doesn't necessarily have a solution. Some of the negative events target the player characters directly (like if their campsite is robbed or catches fire), while others are of a more general nature. The key here is variety. I love that good weather provides the opportunity to narratively describe the setting a little differently - and makes travel and digging harder because of the mud. Some problems, like pests or disease, help contribute to the hardscrabble feeling of the environment. Others - like price increases, goods shortages, or offshore weather that makes leaving the island impossible - emphasize the isolation from society. A couple problems are magical, but most of them are mundane, quotidian. They're the kind of problems that remind the players why their characters took up the adventuring lifestyle in the first place - to get away from the poverty and filth of a mundane world that dirty and broken.
I don't know if I ever would have hit on this 10-10-20-30-30 distribution of events if I were making my own list, (I'm certain that I WOULDN'T have attempted a 3-to-1 ratio of negative events to positive, left to my own devices), but I've used this one, and it seems to work well in practice. It requires pretty minimal bookkeeping to run, and still allows the players to impact the game world, by deciding how their characters will react to events not of their own making. More complicated, and deserving of a post of its own sometime, would be the task having dynamic lists so that the frequency and severity of negative events responds to character actions. But as I said, that's for another time, so for now let's turn our sights to something else, instead.
Specifically, let's refocus our attention on the enjoyable task of handing out treasure to the player characters. What Gus L has written is a table of treasures. He intends to give them to starting characters from aristocratic families, to give those characters a sense of inheriting heirlooms from their noble house. I really like this idea, and it certainly fits with Metal Earth's advice to make starting characters special right out the gate. You could also use a table like this to award treasure during play.
There are a couple reasons to use treasure tables instead of inventing what kind of treasure is found on the spot. The first to maintain a sense of fairness and to avoid the appearance of favoritism when handing out treasure. You, the referee, aren't letting your personal feelings about the players determine what treasure they get, you're letting the dice decide, and your campaign is better for it. The second reason, though, is that it can be difficult to imagine treasures, especially new magic items, right there on the spot. A key reason to plan anything in advance is to end up with something better than you'd get from inventing it in the moment at the table.
Anyway, as with Dreams in the Lich House's random events, my sense is that Dungeon of Signs's starting treasures offer a nice mix in a good balance, and that I could learn something by looking closer at it. So let's do that:
1 Jewel Moth Robe
2 Distilled Chanteuse
3 Dueling Cane
4 Butler's Fork
5 House Sword
6 Healthful Wand
7 Fanged Idol
8 Masquerade Helmet
9 Simian Automaton
10 Vestarch's Crest
11 Remonstrator
12 Ring of Hate
13 True Liturgy
14 Uhlan's Armor
15 Sack of Coinage
16 Seraphim's Pinion
17 Revivifying Tipple
18 Parfume d'Maudlum
19 Porcelain Steed
20 Magister's Snuff Box
Again, it's worth noting that the treasure table, like the random event table, is a good place to do some worldbuilding for your campaign. The names, the style of language, the imagery all help to establish what sort of place these treasures come from, and I think just looking at both lists, you can see how different the two campaigns are from one another. The baroque, decadent flavor is obvious from the names alone. As before, I'd like to try putting these into categories:
20% weapon
15% combat trick
25% armor
25% tool
10% retainer
5% cash
4-in-20 of the treasures here are weapons. We get a good variety - a sword, a club, a wand, and a point for a spear.
Another 3-in-20 are combat tricks that provide some kind of advantage. Again, we get a good variety - one facilitates escape, one temporarily incapacitates your enemies, one reduces their initiative and gives a penalty to their attacks.
5-in-20 of the treasures are armors or protective items. We get a robe, a ring, a helmet, a suit of plate armor, and a talisman. Some improve AC, one improves saving throws, a couple offer protection against specific types of damage. One of the items also grants an additional benefit besides protection, and another imposes a penalty.
5-in-20 treasures are what I'm calling "tools" - they're all items that mimic the effect of a specific spell and provide a utilitarian benefit. We get a lockpick, a divination device, a healing potion, a scroll to turn undead, and a blood-drinking idol that lets you re-cast an already-used-up spell. Like the combat tricks, the healing potion has a limited number of uses; the scroll, I think, can only be used once; and the lockpick, like one of the weapons, has a chance to become useless until next session. The idol can be used freely, but imposes a price in hit-points for each use. A variety of restrictions, alongside a variety of functions, makes each item feel distinct from the others.
2-in-10 of the items are retainers. One is a monkey butler that can't be used for combat, the other is a magical horse (also blood drinking, a repetition that contributes to a sense that these items come from similar sources).
And finally 1-in-20 treasures are just cash money. The amount is enough to buy a magic item if a market were available, so presumably you could substitute another "magic currency", like Eberron's dragonshard crystals or Black Powder Black Magic's demon ore, to achieve a similar effect.
With both the lists here, the point is not necessarily to become beholden to someone else's design decisions, but rather to better understand what those design decisions actually were so that you can make better-informed decisions of your own. As I said, it wouldn't have occurred to me to make so many campaign events negative, but looking at the list, I can see the logic. I also don't know if I'd have thought to make so many tools, and I know I wouldn't have thought about combat tricks, if I hadn't been looking at this treasure table.
A huge percentage of the events on Dreams in the Lich House's list are goads to spur the players to leave town and go explore, whether it's something negative that pushes them out or something positive that pulls them. These aren't just random events with no impact on play, they're events that make one session feel different from the rest, and continuously open up new possibilities for adventure. Even if you don't want the "dung ages" feel of rats and pestilence in your setting, it's good to think of ways to remind your players that their characters aren't homebodies, they're meant to get out there and do things.
Another sizable portion of the events entangle the player characters in the affairs of NPCs. Populating your game world with other people and giving your players reasons to interact with them prevents their dungeoneering from feeling like a totally solipsistic activity.
The entries on Dungeon of Signs's treasure list are all quite different from each other. There's no "ho hum, just another magic sword" or "great, another unidentified mystery potion" here.
They're also all items that are meant to be used during play. There's no incentive to hoard these items, you'll want to use them, even if it means using them up. Half the items have some impact on combat, where you'll be willing to use them just to stay alive. Most of the others have an obvious use in a common situation where using the item prevents hitting a frustrating dead-end. Others are "always on" or have more open-ended applications.
The fact that many of the items do have limitations also helps prevent a handful of early treasures from totally dominating the rest of the campaign. You're not going to stop adventuring because you've already found as much as you could ever carry, and you're not going to turn up your nose at later treasures because they're inferior to what you already own. If you really like an item, even finding another that has the same effect with a different restriction would be a boon. At the same time, only one item is a "one and done" so you do get some sense that your character is defined by the things they've found so far, just not to the extent that you are only defined by what you've already found.
I like them so much, in fact, that I want to learn how to write my own tables like them. And the way to do that, I think, is to take them apart and see how they work. Having done that, I should be able to put my own lists together in the same way to achieve a similar effect.
Let's start with the campaign events. I've found that having something happen "in town" during the player characters' downtime expands the scope of the game a little bit and makes the campaign world feel "alive" - and by extension, when I've run ongoing campaigns without events, it can start to feel a bit too much like the characters are the only people in the world. (I mean, they sort of ARE, but you don't necessarily want it to FEEL like that. Suffocating claustrophobia is fine INSIDE the dungeon, but you want the outside world to feel more open.)
Lately I've come to appreciate that running a sandbox game requires giving players a surfeit of choice. If you want your players to choose their own goals and objectives, then you have to offer them a longer list of ideas to narrow down from. You need a map that shows them places they could go, you need a basic concept (at least!) of what each of those places is like, and you need to populate your world not just with monsters, but with people, with factions and NPCs who have names and personalities and agendas of their own.
And random events help with all that, because they mimic the unpredictability of a world where things happen because other people make them happen. I've used the Dreams in the Lich House random event list before, and liked it, so let's see what John Arendt is doing with this list:
1-2 Astral Conjunction
3-4 Bad Weather
5-6 Beached Whale
7-8 Bear Attack
9-11 Blood Feud *
12-14 Bragging Rights *
15-16 Dire Omens
17-18 Disappearance
19-20 Favor of the Gods
21-23 False Identity *
24-26 Fire *
27-28 Food Shortage
29-30 Foreigners!
31-32 Gold Rush
33-34 Great Weather
35-36 Herd of Caribou
37-39 Inflation *
40-41 It Came from the Ice
42-43 Long Live the King
44-46 Marvel Team-Up *
47-48 Massacre
49-50 Meteor
51-52 Missionary
53-54 New Sub Level
55-56 New Trade Route
57-58 New Trade Town
59-60 Pod of Whales
61-62 Population Change
63-64 Prize Fishing
65-66 Rampaging Monster Back Home
67-69 Rescue Mission *
70-71 Rival Wizard
72-74 Robbery *
75-76 Ship Lost at Sea
77-78 Sickness
79-80 Skilled Laborer
81-82 Stolen Map
83-84 Stormy Seas
85-86 Supply Problems
87-88 The Enemy Among Us
89-90 Vermin
91-92 Visiting Ship
93-94 Wandering Monster
95-96 Wars and Rumors of Wars
97-98 Where's the Wizard
99-100 Whirlpool
There are 46 events on there, most with a 2% chance of showing up, a couple with a 3% chance. I've marked the more-common events with stars. Reading through each entry, I tried to group them in a way that I think makes sense of what each event is doing for the game. With a very small amount of rounding, we get this:
10% - positive event
10% - rival NPC interactions
20% - faction event
30% - sidequest opportunity
30% - negative event
The specific events that make up those categories go a long way toward defining the environment. If you wanted to set your campaign somewhere that wasn't a Viking outpost beside an alien city, then you'd want to alter or reskin the individual entries. But the overall proportions are what interests me here.
About 10% of the time there's an event with a positive impact. Most of these are for one session only, a couple are ongoing. Notably a couple of these look like NPC events, but the effect is primarily an improvement of conditions, like when a skilled laborer opens a new shop in town, or when a new trade route adds a whole menu of foreign luxuries to the shopping list.
About 10% of the time, the player characters are forced into an interaction with some rival NPCs. These interactions can pose an immediate problem (like when the NPCs accuse the player characters of a crime and demand redress) or they can provide an opportunity for exploration (like when the NPCs offer to join the PCs on a joint mission, providing the personnel to do something more dangerous than usual) or they can just be a goad to spur the players to action (like when the NPCs are bragging about their own exploits). Regardless, this sets up a session where the players can do a bit more roleplaying. It also requires you to invent, or have on hand, some NPCs capable of serving as rival adventurers.
Roughly 20% of the time, there's a faction-level event happening. Unlike their rival NPCs, the player characters aren't necessarily forced into getting involved in whatever's happening - but it will change the social environment of the town going forward. Maybe one faction leaves town, maybe a new faction arrives (or a whole second town springs up!), or maybe there's conflict between two or more of the existing factions. The players could try to ignore that, offer to mediate it, or join one side against the other. For this to work, each faction needs a somewhat distinctive identity, and probably a couple representative NPC members. Because none of these events involve the player characters directly, they get more freedom to decide how to interact with what's going on. As Necropraxis suggests, let the players decide who their enemies are.
Roughly 30% of the random events are opportunities to go on a sidequest. (The default main quest being looting the megadungeon ruins of the alien city.) Most of these involve the temporary appearance of a new adventuring site or a new quest activity - check out that meteor crater! or catch that whale! Some of these seem like negative events, but the effect of them turns out to be a chance at redress, rather than a reduction in the living standard. You might try to investigate what happened to someone who's lost (and rescue them, if possible) or make a plan to kill a monster who's built a nearby lair. What defines these events is the opportunity to go on a mission that varies your routine, whereas the negative events generally don't open up new venues for play.
The final 30% of events impose some kind of negative impact. Again, most of these are single-session events, but a few present an ongoing problem that doesn't necessarily have a solution. Some of the negative events target the player characters directly (like if their campsite is robbed or catches fire), while others are of a more general nature. The key here is variety. I love that good weather provides the opportunity to narratively describe the setting a little differently - and makes travel and digging harder because of the mud. Some problems, like pests or disease, help contribute to the hardscrabble feeling of the environment. Others - like price increases, goods shortages, or offshore weather that makes leaving the island impossible - emphasize the isolation from society. A couple problems are magical, but most of them are mundane, quotidian. They're the kind of problems that remind the players why their characters took up the adventuring lifestyle in the first place - to get away from the poverty and filth of a mundane world that dirty and broken.
I don't know if I ever would have hit on this 10-10-20-30-30 distribution of events if I were making my own list, (I'm certain that I WOULDN'T have attempted a 3-to-1 ratio of negative events to positive, left to my own devices), but I've used this one, and it seems to work well in practice. It requires pretty minimal bookkeeping to run, and still allows the players to impact the game world, by deciding how their characters will react to events not of their own making. More complicated, and deserving of a post of its own sometime, would be the task having dynamic lists so that the frequency and severity of negative events responds to character actions. But as I said, that's for another time, so for now let's turn our sights to something else, instead.
Specifically, let's refocus our attention on the enjoyable task of handing out treasure to the player characters. What Gus L has written is a table of treasures. He intends to give them to starting characters from aristocratic families, to give those characters a sense of inheriting heirlooms from their noble house. I really like this idea, and it certainly fits with Metal Earth's advice to make starting characters special right out the gate. You could also use a table like this to award treasure during play.
There are a couple reasons to use treasure tables instead of inventing what kind of treasure is found on the spot. The first to maintain a sense of fairness and to avoid the appearance of favoritism when handing out treasure. You, the referee, aren't letting your personal feelings about the players determine what treasure they get, you're letting the dice decide, and your campaign is better for it. The second reason, though, is that it can be difficult to imagine treasures, especially new magic items, right there on the spot. A key reason to plan anything in advance is to end up with something better than you'd get from inventing it in the moment at the table.
Anyway, as with Dreams in the Lich House's random events, my sense is that Dungeon of Signs's starting treasures offer a nice mix in a good balance, and that I could learn something by looking closer at it. So let's do that:
1 Jewel Moth Robe
2 Distilled Chanteuse
3 Dueling Cane
4 Butler's Fork
5 House Sword
6 Healthful Wand
7 Fanged Idol
8 Masquerade Helmet
9 Simian Automaton
10 Vestarch's Crest
11 Remonstrator
12 Ring of Hate
13 True Liturgy
14 Uhlan's Armor
15 Sack of Coinage
16 Seraphim's Pinion
17 Revivifying Tipple
18 Parfume d'Maudlum
19 Porcelain Steed
20 Magister's Snuff Box
Again, it's worth noting that the treasure table, like the random event table, is a good place to do some worldbuilding for your campaign. The names, the style of language, the imagery all help to establish what sort of place these treasures come from, and I think just looking at both lists, you can see how different the two campaigns are from one another. The baroque, decadent flavor is obvious from the names alone. As before, I'd like to try putting these into categories:
20% weapon
15% combat trick
25% armor
25% tool
10% retainer
5% cash
4-in-20 of the treasures here are weapons. We get a good variety - a sword, a club, a wand, and a point for a spear.
Another 3-in-20 are combat tricks that provide some kind of advantage. Again, we get a good variety - one facilitates escape, one temporarily incapacitates your enemies, one reduces their initiative and gives a penalty to their attacks.
5-in-20 of the treasures are armors or protective items. We get a robe, a ring, a helmet, a suit of plate armor, and a talisman. Some improve AC, one improves saving throws, a couple offer protection against specific types of damage. One of the items also grants an additional benefit besides protection, and another imposes a penalty.
5-in-20 treasures are what I'm calling "tools" - they're all items that mimic the effect of a specific spell and provide a utilitarian benefit. We get a lockpick, a divination device, a healing potion, a scroll to turn undead, and a blood-drinking idol that lets you re-cast an already-used-up spell. Like the combat tricks, the healing potion has a limited number of uses; the scroll, I think, can only be used once; and the lockpick, like one of the weapons, has a chance to become useless until next session. The idol can be used freely, but imposes a price in hit-points for each use. A variety of restrictions, alongside a variety of functions, makes each item feel distinct from the others.
2-in-10 of the items are retainers. One is a monkey butler that can't be used for combat, the other is a magical horse (also blood drinking, a repetition that contributes to a sense that these items come from similar sources).
And finally 1-in-20 treasures are just cash money. The amount is enough to buy a magic item if a market were available, so presumably you could substitute another "magic currency", like Eberron's dragonshard crystals or Black Powder Black Magic's demon ore, to achieve a similar effect.
With both the lists here, the point is not necessarily to become beholden to someone else's design decisions, but rather to better understand what those design decisions actually were so that you can make better-informed decisions of your own. As I said, it wouldn't have occurred to me to make so many campaign events negative, but looking at the list, I can see the logic. I also don't know if I'd have thought to make so many tools, and I know I wouldn't have thought about combat tricks, if I hadn't been looking at this treasure table.
A huge percentage of the events on Dreams in the Lich House's list are goads to spur the players to leave town and go explore, whether it's something negative that pushes them out or something positive that pulls them. These aren't just random events with no impact on play, they're events that make one session feel different from the rest, and continuously open up new possibilities for adventure. Even if you don't want the "dung ages" feel of rats and pestilence in your setting, it's good to think of ways to remind your players that their characters aren't homebodies, they're meant to get out there and do things.
Another sizable portion of the events entangle the player characters in the affairs of NPCs. Populating your game world with other people and giving your players reasons to interact with them prevents their dungeoneering from feeling like a totally solipsistic activity.
The entries on Dungeon of Signs's treasure list are all quite different from each other. There's no "ho hum, just another magic sword" or "great, another unidentified mystery potion" here.
They're also all items that are meant to be used during play. There's no incentive to hoard these items, you'll want to use them, even if it means using them up. Half the items have some impact on combat, where you'll be willing to use them just to stay alive. Most of the others have an obvious use in a common situation where using the item prevents hitting a frustrating dead-end. Others are "always on" or have more open-ended applications.
The fact that many of the items do have limitations also helps prevent a handful of early treasures from totally dominating the rest of the campaign. You're not going to stop adventuring because you've already found as much as you could ever carry, and you're not going to turn up your nose at later treasures because they're inferior to what you already own. If you really like an item, even finding another that has the same effect with a different restriction would be a boon. At the same time, only one item is a "one and done" so you do get some sense that your character is defined by the things they've found so far, just not to the extent that you are only defined by what you've already found.
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