D&D-style games traditionally have 6 ability scores, but those 6 scores actually represent 8 different abilities. Those 8 abilities, in turn, are simply the combination of three different dichotomies - physical vs mental, force vs grace, and attack vs defend.
This is something I've thought about before, but my immediate inspiration for writing about it now is something that Jack from Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque posted on Google Plus, and the outpouring of responses and ideas he received in return. I'm going to miss G+. The conversations that happen there can only happen because of all the people who are there. And for now, at least, the conversations that happen there inspire me more than conversations happening anywhere else.
Recognizing the 8 underlying abilities does a couple things. First, it points to the direct parallels between D&D's mental and physical ability scores - Charisma, for example, is mental Strength; Intelligence is mental Dexterity. Second, seeing the underlying abilities gives us some insight into the ways the can be re-combined to make a smaller number of scores. (Jack argues, and I agree with him, that it's more interesting to have a smaller number of important scores than to have a larger number of unimportant scores - which is why I wouldn't suggest expanding out to 8 ability scores, although you certainly could if you want to.)
The 8 Underlying Abilities
Physical force attack - The ability to interact with objects on a large scale. Force open stuck doors, batter down brick walls, bend iron bars, break chains, lift weights, pull yourself up, climb. Break things, smash things, crush things, throw things. Overcome obstacles by flattening them, get through defenses by overwhelming them. Be the hammer. Do damage by hitting hard.
Physical grace attack - The ability to interact with objects on a fine scale. Pick the tumblers on a lock, disarm a trap, do tricks with your fingers, perform sleight of hand, disarm. Touch sensitive things without triggering them, manipulate one thing without affecting another, go around obstacles, get through small openings. Get behind them, out-flank them, out-maneuver. Aim well, be precise, find the hole in their defenses, slip through the crack in their armor. Be the scalpel. Do damage by striking in just the right spot.
Physical force defense - The ability to survive being hurt by being tougher than the thing that's hurting you. Endure extreme temperatures, remain unbowed by crushing weight, flex your muscles so they break the hand punching you, toughen your skin so it dulls the knife trying to cut through it. Be your own armor, be your own shield. Let their attacks hit you, break against you, wash over you. Survive poison, survive disease. Endure.
Physical grace defense - The ability to survive being hurt by avoiding the thing that's trying to hurt you altogether. Duck out of the way, dodge, deflect, riposte. Stay in the shadows so they can't see you, step quietly so they can't hear you. Stop short, jump back. Roll with punch, fall to the floor, slide out reach. Twist to escape their grasp. Move so their attack never touches you, move so that the force of the attack simply pushes you along in the direction you're already traveling. Take cover from the bomb blast, hide from the dragon's breath. Evade.
Mental force attack - The ability to affect the emotions of people an animals. Give a rousing speech, make a call to arms, impress them with your faith, show them the courage of your convictions, demonstrate the strength of your principles. Inspire, incite. Tell a story, sing a song, make them weep, make them thunder with applause, make the wicked cower at your feet. Make a good first impression. Calm an animal, train an animal. Cook a meal. Gain trust. Impress.
Mental grace attack - The ability to manipulate people and objects. Tell lies, wear disguises, negotiate contracts and sales. Deceive, defraud, trick, fool, feint, scam. Draw mazes, make puzzles, tell riddles, set traps. Ambush them, take them by surprise. Diagnose illness, forge documents, scribe scrolls. Uncover clues, unravel mysteries, decipher codes, translate and speak languages. Outwit.
Mental force defense - The ability to avoid having your emotions affected by hardening your heart. Don't be afraid, don't run away. Ignore compulsions and commands. Know history, remember family trees, understand loyalties and relationships, know your enemy, understand who they work for. Do things even though they're boring, chop firewood, fetch water, pick berries, make camp. Endure trauma, bear witness, hunt monsters, stare into the abyss, live to tell the tale, never forget. To thine own self be true. In a game with sanity loss, this would be the ability to witness horrible sights without going mad as a result.
Mental grace defense - The ability to avoid having your thoughts affected by looking in the right place, or by looking away at just the right time. Avoid ambushes and surprise, notice architecture, find hidden doors, search rooms, spot traps. Find tracks and follow them. Appraise the value of objects, discern lies. Search your own memories, remember details, recall lore. See the Medusa in the mirror. See through illusions. Out-think. In a game with sanity loss, this would be the ability to avoid looking at a maddening sight, even though it tempts you.
The Classic 6-Ability Division
D&D's 6 ability scores mostly take these abilities individually, but a couple of them double up. Strength represents physical force attack. Dexterity combines physical grace attack and physical grace defense. Constitution is the physical force defense. D&D's mental attributes are basically mirrors of the physical ones, but there's a slight asymmetry. Charisma combines both mental force attack and mental grace attack. Intelligence is mental grace defense. Wisdom is mental force defense. The broken symmetry, I think, is the result of the organic nature of the way D&D has grown over the years. Yes, in some moments it has been designed, but in-between those moments, it has simply grown by accretion.
There's nothing particularly wrong with this set-up, although as Jack notes on Google Plus, it does make Dexterity unusually important, especially in versions of the game where physical combat is more common or more important that social and/or skill challenges. Reducing the number of scores would make each attribute more important by making each ability do more work. Reducing the number of modifiers might also make them easier to use, even if they apply to a larger number of situations. It's easier to remember +1 on this, +2 on that, -2 on THAT, than it is to remember 6 or 8 different bonuses and penalties.
The other possible problem is their names. If terms like dexterity, constitution, and charisma were ever common outside of gaming, they certainly aren't anymore. DCC renames Dexterity as Agility and Constitution as Stamina. Personality replaces Charisma, and arguably adds mental force defense to its repertoire. The Luck attribute from DCC serves a little like a mental grace defense, but it's also something new, a kind of all-purpose defense against misfortune, as well as a resource that can be used up to improve any situation, like a generalized version of the specific forms of "Effort" in Numenera. When it comes to renaming, I also kind of like Daniel Davis's suggestion to call the abilities Puissance, Celerity, Obdurateness, Supercerebrality, Perspicacity, and Pulchritudinousness, if only because it leans into Gygax's old timey naming conventions and does him one better, and because they're so silly I find them kind of charming.
Two Possible 3-Ability Divisions
In the 3.0 ruleset, D&D introduced new Fortitude, Reflex, and Willpower saving throws, representing essentially the physical force defense, physical grace defense, and mental force defense. When other people have tried to simplify the D&D rules by reducing the number of ability scores, the most common reduction mirrors these saving throws.
Although they give them different names, both Into the Odd and Numenera make the same decisions to arrive at 3 ability scores. There's a physical force attribute (combining attack and defense), a physical grace attribute (combining attack and defense), and a single mental attribute (combining attack and defense, force and grace).
It feels worth pointing out that in the original version of D&D, Strength, Intelligence, and Wisdom didn't represent what they do now. They only things they modified were the XP you received from playing certain classes, which means that they were more like measures of Fighting-Man-ness, Magic-User-ness, and Cleric-ness, respectively, than they were like the abilities that familiar to us using those same names today. And that means, when you take those three away, that in playing OD&D, you're left with only 3 real ability scores, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma, which is just what you get in I2TO and Numenera.
There was another suggestion though, that came up on Jack's G+ thread a couple times. Adam Thornton, Tim Other, Paolo Greco, Jay Murphy, and Joe Coo all spoke up to call for something like Mind, Body, Soul as their preferred division. Paolo uses Physique, Craft, and Spirit in his Adventure Fantasy Game. There's also something similar in Torchbearer and Mouse Guard (and possibly in other games based on Burning Wheel), which use Will, Health, and Nature.
What all these other approaches have in common is that they invert the Fort/Ref/Will division by creating a single physical attribute (force and grace, attack and defense) while allowing for 2 mental ability scores. Mind (AFG's Craft) is mental grace (attack and defense) while Soul (AFG's Spirit) is mental force (attack and defense).
In Torchbearer and Mouse Guard, however, I think the division is different. If I understand correctly, Will is a single mental attribute (combining force and grace, attack and defense), while Nature, like DCC's Luck, is something else entirely, something new. It represents a certain self-ness, or you-ness, or perhaps species-ness (human-ness, elf-ness, dwarf-ness, or mouse-ness) of the character, something outside of the traditional abilities, that isn't represented by any of the traditional ability scores. Whether you call this Nature or Soul, I think, just depends on your preference ... or you could call it Alignment.
DG Chapman at the Graverobber's Guide proposes Attunement instead of Nature. Characters start with an Attunement score ranging from 1-4 depending on their race. If they receive a favor from a fairy, their score goes up by 1. If it reaches 7, they're so attuned to fairy-land that they go off and live there. I propose a similar idea to make Alignment an ability score. Roll 1d6 (or 1d4+1) for your starting alignment. 1-2 is Lawful, 3-4 is Neutral, and 5-6 is Chaotic. Over the course of your adventuring career, you can occasionally receive help from agents of elemental Law and Chaos to decrease or increase your Alignment score, respectively. As with Nature, if you ever drop to 0 or rise to 7, you cease to be a playable character and become an NPC Agent of Law or Agent of Chaos. Or follow DG Chapman's lead, and use the Seelie and Unseelie Fairy Courts instead of Law and Chaos.
Possible 4-Part Ability Scores ... and Beyond
Of the two possible 3-part ability scores, my own preference leans toward 2 physical, 1 mental - but if I were planning to write a set of rules with fewer ability scores, I think I might want 4. My current preference would be for a physical force ability (combining attack and defense), a physical grace ability (combining attack and defense), a mental attack ability (combining force and grace), and a mental defense ability (combining force and grace).
I recognize that I've paired the physical abilities differently than the mental abilities. I also recognize that some of the skills or abilities that I've assigned to each ability score differ somewhat from the way D&D assigned them - although in part, that's because I'm assigning them more systematically and all at once, while D&D's were assigned organically over time. After all, as I mentioned Strength, Intelligence, and Wisdom started out solely as XP modifiers for fighting-men, magic-users, and clerics. The 8 abilities / 6 scores system I've laid out wasn't anyone's initial plan, it's my interpretation of where we've ended up after years of adding on to that initial framework. (Which is probably why the physical and mental abilities are divided asymmetrically - someone might plan to have Dexterity and Intelligence mirror each other and encompass two abilities each, but I don't think anyone would decide to break symmetry by doubling up two un-matched ability scores like Dexterity and Charisma as part of a plan - I think that could only happen organically.)
I could see someone else wanting to make their 4 ability scores by creating a physical attack ability (combining force and grace) and a physical defense ability (combining force and grace) to match the way I've paired the mental abilities ... or a mental force ability (combining attack and defense) and a mental grace ability (combining attack and defense) to match the way I paired the physical attributes ... or, like me, they could prefer mixed doubles, just the opposite of the way I arranged them. Shadow of the Demon Lord also uses 4 ability scores, Strength, Agility, Intellect, and Will, as does John Stater's Tales of the Space Princess, Strength, Dexterity, Mentality, and Knowledge. One thing that breaking down the original ability scores into 8 abilities based on 3 dichotomies does is let me imagine other possible ways to combine them, and thus other possible ability scores that can be derived from the original abilities.
I find the creation of new abilities like Nature and Luck to be interesting, because they represent truly new additions to an old system. Over the years, I've seen other abilities, but none that have felt nearly as appropriate. Comeliness is supposed to measure physical beauty, but that feels useless to note if it's divorced from Charisma, from the ability to influence the emotions of others. I've also seen Social Standing and Wealth represented by ability scores. That's okay, I guess, although for Social Standing, I'd rather know my character's specific pre-adventuring occupation, and have a sense of which tier of society that job fits into. (I also think there should be fewer than 18 tiers, and I also also think that there's little point in playing a truly high-caste character who already possesses real wealth and worldly power - why would someone who can command armies go knock over a goblin's liquor store or carjack an orc?)
For Wealth, if an ability score is going to replace actually counting gold and treasure, I think it would be more appropriate to have just the modifier, not the score, and I think the range should probably be more restricted than the usual range of ability modifiers. (Replacing found treasure with a Wealth attribute implies plenty of other changes about the way you play as well, so this is certainly not a one-size-fits-all-games kind of idea, notable, both D20 Modern and Torchbearer include abstract Wealth mechanics. There's probably an argument to be made in favor of dispensing with ability scores entirely and just using modifiers, as is done in Mutants & Masterminds.)
But Nature and Luck are different, and they point out the fact that although I can imagine a simple system that encompasses all the original ability scores, skills, and modifiers, and maps well onto 3- and 4-attribute rule system, the original abilities don't exhaust the all the possible abilities you could want your character to have. In particular, Nature, Luck, and the way Numenera uses ability scores as pools of points that are both spent to pay for abilities and lost due to damage suggest new ways of using ability scores that go far beyond what original D&D envisioned, and far beyond the 8-ability system I've laid out here.
Showing posts with label mechanics i want to use. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mechanics i want to use. Show all posts
Sunday, January 20, 2019
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
I2TO - Never Tell Me the Odds!
... actually, wait, please DO tell me the odds!
Let me back up. Chris McDowall of Bastionland is writing a combined rules / setting book for running Into the Odd (I2TO) in his fictional city of Bastion.
In support of this setting, he's also written a truly excellent list of failed careers for starting characters. These are fantastic, and aside from the generally terse, evocative writing, there are two things about the list that stand out. First, they fully capture the mood of Bastion as a bureaucratic labyrinth full of petty middlemen, where there's no job too lowly or too demeaning that there's not somebody stuck doing it, probably with an overly self-important supervisor breathing down their neck the whole time. And second, these careers are decidedly failures. You're not just someone who failed at their job, you're someone whose job itself was a failure, your job that should never have existed in the first place. You would have been failing even if you'd done it perfectly, which was probably impossible, because the task you were given was probably misconceived from its very inception.
Seriously, go read his list of careers. I'll still be here when you get back.
Okay, so given a list of 100 careers, my inclination would be to roll a d% dice and just scroll down that master list. It's the DCC way!
But this is I2TO we're talking about, and one of its unique character generation mechanics is the way you generate your starting equipment / career based on your ability scores. Look at your highest ability score, then look at your lowest ability score, then look at a matrix of high and low scores and find your position. (There's also a neat trick where you roll d6 hp and d6 starting money, and each of those d6 rolls gives you a piece of equipment or a class feature that sets you apart from other characters with the same occupation , and creates a kind of balance by giving the best STUFF to the weakest, poorest characters... but although that's nifty, it's not really relevant to our current conversation.)
Chris shows off the failed career ability score matrix in a preview video for his new book, and I've reproduced the image below.
Which brings me back to my original question - what ARE the odds?
What I mean is, what are the chances of getting any one of those failed careers as your starting occupation? If you roll a d% dice on a 100-item table, it's easy - each occupation has a 1% chance, and you have exactly the same chances of getting any one of them as you do of getting any other.
But in I2TO it's not so easy. Because you're not equally likely, for example, to have a high score of 15 and a high score of 17, which means you're not equally likely to get careers from one row or column versus another. If you knew how likely you were to get each ability score as your highest or lowest, you could cross-multiply and fill in each of the hundred cells in the table. (You can do that with a d10 by d10 table representing a d% as well, it's just that every cell along the top and side has a 10% chance of appearing, and when you cross multiply 10% by 10% you get 1% every single time.) Unfortunately, it's also not so easy to figure out the chances that this or that will be your highest or lowest score - even using AnyDice's "at least" and "at most" features.
It's so not easy, in fact, that I didn't figure it out. I asked for help, and Brian Ashford from the Ominosity blog stepped up to answer my question. (Edit: Brian had the same question I had, and got his friend Jamie Prentice to help solve the math. When I posed my question, Brian shared Jamie's answer with me.) I took the output he gave me and turned it into the table you see below. I can't independently verify that it's correct, (obviously) but basic sanity-testing shows that percentages add up to 100, and the careers that depend on the likeliest ability scores are themselves the most likely.
In the table below careers that are more likely have a light background and black text, and the lighter the background, the more likely you are to end up with that career. Careers that are less likely have dark backgrounds and white text, and the darker the background, the less likely the career. I used 1% as the cut-point, so the more likely careers are the ones that you'll get more often than if just you rolled d%, and the less likely careers are the ones that show up less often than they would on a d%.
Looking at the diagram reveals at least one surprise (it surprised me, at least). I expected that Chris would make the most ordinary and prosaic careers the most common, while making the more unusual stuff rarer. And sure, as expected, you're less likely to play as "a dog" or "a brobdingnagian giant" or "literally two characters for the price of one". But on the other hand, if everyone at the table got the likeliest characters, you'd end up with a gonzo party where one character's a psychic, one's a muppet, your spellcaster is either a science mystic or the priest of an alien god, and the last character is actually a whole group of kids stacked up under a trenchcoat. Meanwhile, occupations like "grad student", "ex-con", "orphan" (just one this time), and "poor kid from the country who moved to the big city to make it big" are much less frequent than I would have guess (much MUCH less frequent, in the grad student's case). Although I should note that if Chris changes the order of the careers as he moves from blog post to finished book, then some of what I've said here about which careers are most common could be rendered false.
One final benefit of mapping out the odds like this is that any would-be designers out there who want to emulate I2TO's character generation mechanics can see how to arrange their own 94 classes to achieve whatever worldbuilding effect they're going for. As a designer, you can decide what you want to be most common, and with this information, put it in the correct location so that it actually will be.
Let me back up. Chris McDowall of Bastionland is writing a combined rules / setting book for running Into the Odd (I2TO) in his fictional city of Bastion.
In support of this setting, he's also written a truly excellent list of failed careers for starting characters. These are fantastic, and aside from the generally terse, evocative writing, there are two things about the list that stand out. First, they fully capture the mood of Bastion as a bureaucratic labyrinth full of petty middlemen, where there's no job too lowly or too demeaning that there's not somebody stuck doing it, probably with an overly self-important supervisor breathing down their neck the whole time. And second, these careers are decidedly failures. You're not just someone who failed at their job, you're someone whose job itself was a failure, your job that should never have existed in the first place. You would have been failing even if you'd done it perfectly, which was probably impossible, because the task you were given was probably misconceived from its very inception.
Seriously, go read his list of careers. I'll still be here when you get back.
Okay, so given a list of 100 careers, my inclination would be to roll a d% dice and just scroll down that master list. It's the DCC way!
But this is I2TO we're talking about, and one of its unique character generation mechanics is the way you generate your starting equipment / career based on your ability scores. Look at your highest ability score, then look at your lowest ability score, then look at a matrix of high and low scores and find your position. (There's also a neat trick where you roll d6 hp and d6 starting money, and each of those d6 rolls gives you a piece of equipment or a class feature that sets you apart from other characters with the same occupation , and creates a kind of balance by giving the best STUFF to the weakest, poorest characters... but although that's nifty, it's not really relevant to our current conversation.)
Chris shows off the failed career ability score matrix in a preview video for his new book, and I've reproduced the image below.
Which brings me back to my original question - what ARE the odds?
What I mean is, what are the chances of getting any one of those failed careers as your starting occupation? If you roll a d% dice on a 100-item table, it's easy - each occupation has a 1% chance, and you have exactly the same chances of getting any one of them as you do of getting any other.
But in I2TO it's not so easy. Because you're not equally likely, for example, to have a high score of 15 and a high score of 17, which means you're not equally likely to get careers from one row or column versus another. If you knew how likely you were to get each ability score as your highest or lowest, you could cross-multiply and fill in each of the hundred cells in the table. (You can do that with a d10 by d10 table representing a d% as well, it's just that every cell along the top and side has a 10% chance of appearing, and when you cross multiply 10% by 10% you get 1% every single time.) Unfortunately, it's also not so easy to figure out the chances that this or that will be your highest or lowest score - even using AnyDice's "at least" and "at most" features.
It's so not easy, in fact, that I didn't figure it out. I asked for help, and Brian Ashford from the Ominosity blog stepped up to answer my question. (Edit: Brian had the same question I had, and got his friend Jamie Prentice to help solve the math. When I posed my question, Brian shared Jamie's answer with me.) I took the output he gave me and turned it into the table you see below. I can't independently verify that it's correct, (obviously) but basic sanity-testing shows that percentages add up to 100, and the careers that depend on the likeliest ability scores are themselves the most likely.
In the table below careers that are more likely have a light background and black text, and the lighter the background, the more likely you are to end up with that career. Careers that are less likely have dark backgrounds and white text, and the darker the background, the less likely the career. I used 1% as the cut-point, so the more likely careers are the ones that you'll get more often than if just you rolled d%, and the less likely careers are the ones that show up less often than they would on a d%.
 |
| You, uh, might want to enlarge that... |
Looking at the diagram reveals at least one surprise (it surprised me, at least). I expected that Chris would make the most ordinary and prosaic careers the most common, while making the more unusual stuff rarer. And sure, as expected, you're less likely to play as "a dog" or "a brobdingnagian giant" or "literally two characters for the price of one". But on the other hand, if everyone at the table got the likeliest characters, you'd end up with a gonzo party where one character's a psychic, one's a muppet, your spellcaster is either a science mystic or the priest of an alien god, and the last character is actually a whole group of kids stacked up under a trenchcoat. Meanwhile, occupations like "grad student", "ex-con", "orphan" (just one this time), and "poor kid from the country who moved to the big city to make it big" are much less frequent than I would have guess (much MUCH less frequent, in the grad student's case). Although I should note that if Chris changes the order of the careers as he moves from blog post to finished book, then some of what I've said here about which careers are most common could be rendered false.
One final benefit of mapping out the odds like this is that any would-be designers out there who want to emulate I2TO's character generation mechanics can see how to arrange their own 94 classes to achieve whatever worldbuilding effect they're going for. As a designer, you can decide what you want to be most common, and with this information, put it in the correct location so that it actually will be.
Monday, November 26, 2018
House Rule - Signs & Encounters
Recently, I decided I want to start doing something new when write encounter tables. I want to divide my tables into signs and encounters. These are paired, so that each sign is connected to a specific encounter. Signs have odd numbers, encounters have evens.
(So sign 1 is paired with encounter 2, sign 3 is connected to encounter 4, etc.)
Encounters are typically monsters or environmental hazards. They're things that are dangerous, that could damage or kill a character. Other kinds of encounters might be possible, but this is where my process is right now. Signs are meant to create a sense of foreboding. They might be fairly direct clues about the connected encounter, or they might be ominous, ambiguous portents of forthcoming danger.
(If the encounter is the Demogorgon from Stranger Things, the sign might be all the lights flickering on and off. If the encounter is an Agent from The Matrix, the sign might be a black cat that keeps crossing your path.)
The first time I roll on the encounter table, I'm not going to distinguish between signs and encounters, I'm only looking to see which connected pair I got. The first roll always produces the sign, and the characters experience whatever warning they're going to get.
The second time I roll on the table, I'm not going to distinguish between pairs. I'm only looking to see whether I got sign or encounter. If I got sign, then the character experience the same sign as before. This can happen as many times as I keep rolling sign. Hopefully, he repetition increases the suspense and foreboding. You know something's coming. If I got encounter, then the characters meet whichever monster is associated with the initial sign.
After the characters finally experience an encounter, I start over, so the next roll always produces another sign.
(You could also be less forgiving than I've described here, and let the first roll give you a surprise encounter. I think that's fair. The dungeon is a mythic underworld; the wilderness howls. Sometimes the only warning of impending danger you get is the knowledge that you've entered a dangerous place. My hope though, is that the procedure I've described might produce more narrative satisfaction, by always foreshadowing encounters before they occur.)
I'm hoping that this approach will help create a world with an active environment, full of strange sights and noises and portents. It has already forced me to focus my encounter tables. Instead of just listing 20 vaguely-related monsters, I find myself narrowing down to 4 or 6 that really help define the feel of the region.
Something like this approach could also work with an overloaded encounter die. These dice typically have two entries for lights going out and magical effects ending, which are typically treated as representing torches and lanterns. You could treat the first such roll as producing a warning - torches flicker or dim, magical effects start glitching and fading. The next time the overloaded encounter die comes back to that pair, you have a 50% chance of another warning (just as the procedure I suggested gives a 50% chance of a repeated sign), and a 50% chance that the lights go out and the magic stops. Just as with my procedure, the goal would be to create narrative tension and satisfaction. The thing is foreshadowed, later the thing happens. In between those times, the thing follows you, stalks you, haunts you. When it happens, it's not a surprise, it's a grim certainty. Or anyway, that's what I'm hoping for.
(So sign 1 is paired with encounter 2, sign 3 is connected to encounter 4, etc.)
Encounters are typically monsters or environmental hazards. They're things that are dangerous, that could damage or kill a character. Other kinds of encounters might be possible, but this is where my process is right now. Signs are meant to create a sense of foreboding. They might be fairly direct clues about the connected encounter, or they might be ominous, ambiguous portents of forthcoming danger.
(If the encounter is the Demogorgon from Stranger Things, the sign might be all the lights flickering on and off. If the encounter is an Agent from The Matrix, the sign might be a black cat that keeps crossing your path.)
 |
| A sign ... |
The first time I roll on the encounter table, I'm not going to distinguish between signs and encounters, I'm only looking to see which connected pair I got. The first roll always produces the sign, and the characters experience whatever warning they're going to get.
The second time I roll on the table, I'm not going to distinguish between pairs. I'm only looking to see whether I got sign or encounter. If I got sign, then the character experience the same sign as before. This can happen as many times as I keep rolling sign. Hopefully, he repetition increases the suspense and foreboding. You know something's coming. If I got encounter, then the characters meet whichever monster is associated with the initial sign.
After the characters finally experience an encounter, I start over, so the next roll always produces another sign.
(You could also be less forgiving than I've described here, and let the first roll give you a surprise encounter. I think that's fair. The dungeon is a mythic underworld; the wilderness howls. Sometimes the only warning of impending danger you get is the knowledge that you've entered a dangerous place. My hope though, is that the procedure I've described might produce more narrative satisfaction, by always foreshadowing encounters before they occur.)
 |
| ... leads to an encounter. |
I'm hoping that this approach will help create a world with an active environment, full of strange sights and noises and portents. It has already forced me to focus my encounter tables. Instead of just listing 20 vaguely-related monsters, I find myself narrowing down to 4 or 6 that really help define the feel of the region.
Something like this approach could also work with an overloaded encounter die. These dice typically have two entries for lights going out and magical effects ending, which are typically treated as representing torches and lanterns. You could treat the first such roll as producing a warning - torches flicker or dim, magical effects start glitching and fading. The next time the overloaded encounter die comes back to that pair, you have a 50% chance of another warning (just as the procedure I suggested gives a 50% chance of a repeated sign), and a 50% chance that the lights go out and the magic stops. Just as with my procedure, the goal would be to create narrative tension and satisfaction. The thing is foreshadowed, later the thing happens. In between those times, the thing follows you, stalks you, haunts you. When it happens, it's not a surprise, it's a grim certainty. Or anyway, that's what I'm hoping for.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
GFA18 - Alternative Technology Check for MCC
I wrote some alternate rules for making technology checks in Mutant Crawl Classics for the 2018 Gongfarmer's Almanac. My goal was to make a mini-game out of learning to use technology. As I state below, this is too complex to use for every piece of technology the characters find. My purpose for creating a mini-game is so that, in a sandbox game, the process of mastering an important, campaign-changing piece of technology becomes both a reason to "quest for it" and a spur to new adventures. Players have an incentive to go looking for instructions, tools, and parts to help boost their technology rolls, and the ability to master (or even mass-produce) the tech creates new opportunities that wouldn't be available otherwise. The fact that progressing up the table typically involves the device breaking or becoming temporarily unusable a few times means that judges can give their players fairly powerful objects without fear of them immediately breaking the game. Players can use the power a few times without much trouble, but if they want to use the power of the artifact to remake the campaign world, they're going to have to work to make that happen.
Keith Garrett edited all my MCC-related writing in the GFA18, but he had a lot more to do for this piece than any of the others. His advice and help resulted in something better and more clear than what I initially wrote. Karim did the art for this and all my MCC pieces.
DCC uses d10 skill checks for untrained characters and d20 skill checks for skilled characters. Thieves begin the game casting spells from scrolls using a d10 (as untrained with magic) but as they gain levels, their dice-type improves, one step at a time, modeling the learning process. This alternative to the MCC technology check uses thieves' spellcasting improvement as a model and applies it to denizens of Terra A.D. learning to use Ancient technology.
When characters first encounter a new piece of ancient technology, they roll d10 + Artifact check bonus + Intelligence modifier. As they learn to understand the artifact, their dice-type can improve. Characters need to be very smart or very lucky to operate a new artifact successfully, or do anything at all other than break it. But each success has the chance to lead to new insights, allowing characters to eventually gain mastery over each new piece of technology.
Technology level and complexity: The tech level sets a limit on the who may attempt to use an artifact. A character cannot make a technology roll for an artifact whose tech level is higher than the limit set by their Intelligence--unless their character level is equal or higher to the tech level (for example, any 7th-level character can attempt to use alien technology, even if their Intelligence is lower than 24. Most 6th-level characters can't attempt to use such a device, however; they can't even fumble and break it). Characters don't need to make technology rolls for objects from their home culture's tech level or lower.
(Stone-age technology is TL 1, mechanical devices are TL 2, electronic and modern computing devices are TL 3, near-future tech is TL 4, far-future tech is TL 5, technology indistinguishable from magic is TL 6, and advanced alien technology is TL 7).
The complexity of an artifact is subtracted as a penalty from the technology roll.
Progressing and re-rolling: As characters roll on the table below, the technology die they roll (starting with d10) can only increase, never decrease. If a result indicates that further rolls should be made using a technology die that's lower than the character's current ability, ignore that portion of the result.
Characters can also continue to study and master ancient technology that is currently non-functional or broken. If a result indicates that the artifact activates, but the tech can’t activate because it needs repairs, or it has run out of ammunition or power, then it doesn’t activate, ignore that portion of the result.
Each successful result on the table below is intended to eventually force a re-roll. Each entry describes how long a character can use the artifact before they must make another technology roll. For example, on a result of 17-19, the artifact functions for 1d3 game sessions before it breaks and needs minor repairs. Once that happens, the character must make a new technology roll, even if they can make minor repairs without needing a new tech roll to learn how--they still need a new technology roll because the result demanded it.
Classes bonuses: As noted in their character descriptions, some characters have an affinity for certain forms of ancient technology. Sentinels also add their artifact bonus die to technology rolls for weapons and armor. Healers roll +1d on rolls related to medical artifacts and devices. Rovers receive an additional bonus to understand ancient doors, locks, traps, and other security systems. These bonuses still apply to the technology roll as well as to Intelligence checks related to learning or using the technology.
Assisting and teaching: One character must volunteer to be the primary technology user; that character makes the technology roll using their current technology die for that object. Up to three characters may assist, if they have sufficient intelligence. Both the technology user and all assistants may expend Luck to improve the technology roll, and all assistants suffer the consequences of a poor roll. To serve as an assistant, a character must have a minimum Intelligence of 13 (or Int modifier +1). A technology user can have two assistants as long as one assistant has a minimum Intelligence of 16 (or Int modifier +2), and three assistants as long as one has a minimum Intelligence of 18 (or Int modifier +3). Add the Intelligence modifier AND the Luck modifier of each assistant to the technology roll, along with any expended Luck.
When a technology user teaches another character to use a piece of technology, the student must roll a d20 to make a DC 10 Intelligence check, modified by their Artifact check bonus, to learn what the teacher knows. On a natural 1, the artifact is permanently broken and inflicts maximum damage on the student and the learner. On a successful Intelligence check, the student may now roll the same technology die as the teacher.
Describing technology: Until characters have attempted to use an artifact and begun to unravel its secrets, they should receive only an "abstract description" as explained in the MCC rules. Once they have a d12 or higher technology die, they have earned the right to a "literal description."
Judging advice: This alternate rule is intended to create a mini-game out of learning to use ancient artifacts. As such, it is probably too cumbersome to use with every artifact the characters find. Instead, I recommend using different approaches depending on the nature of the artifact. Trinkets and other extremely simple artifacts might work automatically. Single-use artifacts might still allow a d20 technology die from the very beginning. Learning to use one artifact might grant a bonus - or even allow the characters to use the same technology die - for any similar objects.
Table: Artifact Check Results
1 The artifact breaks irreparably and inflicts maximum damage (or 1d6, for artifacts with no damage listed) to all characters within a range of 10' (or further, if applicable based on the artifact).
2-3 The artifact breaks and needs major repairs. It inflicts 1d3 damage on the user and all assistants.
4-6 The artifact breaks and needs minor repairs.
7-11 The artifact doesn't function, but isn't broken. However, a piece is missing, a part is knocked out of position, a control is on the wrong setting. The device won't activate until a DC 12 Intelligence check makes it functional again.
12-13 The artifact activates for one use, but its operation is still not understood. Another technology roll must be made before it can be used again. Further technology rolls use a d12 technology die.
14-16 The artifact activates and is minimally understood. It can be used for 1d3 uses, then another technology roll must be made before it can be used again. Further technology rolls use a d14 technology die.
17-19 The artifact activates and its operation is basically understood. Additional ammunition or power sources can be used to reload the artifact if they're available. The artifact can be used for 1d3 game sessions, then it needs minor repairs and another technology roll must be made before it can be used again. Further technology rolls use a d16 technology die.
20-26 The artifact activates and its operation is well understood. Minor repairs may be attempted with a DC 12 Intelligence check and the correct tools and materials. The artifact can be used for 1d4 game sessions, then it needs major repairs and another technology roll must be made before it can be used again. Further technology rolls use a d20 technology die.
27-33 The artifact activates and its operation is precisely understood. Minor repairs may be attempted without rolling a check. Major repairs may be attempted with the correct tools and materials and a DC 12 Intelligence check. The artifact can be used for 1d6 game sessions, then it breaks irreparably and needs to be replaced. Further technology rolls use a d24 technology die.
34-35 The artifact activates and its operation is precisely understood. Major and minor repairs may be attempted without rolling a check. A duplicate artifact can be constructed with the proper materials, parts, and tools and DC 12 Intelligence check. The artifact can be used for 1d8 game sessions, then it breaks irreparably and needs to be replaced. Further technology rolls use a d30 technology die.
36+ The artifact activates and its operation is precisely understood. Major and minor repairs, and even the construction of a duplicate artifact can be attempted without rolling a check. No further technology rolls are needed for this object. It can be operated at-will, and no greater understanding can be achieved by examining it. The technological principles underlying the artifact can be understood by making a DC 24 Intelligence check. Once these principles are understood, new artifacts can be designed by following those principles, using correct materials, parts, and tools, and a DC 12 Intelligence check.
Example: Lily is a post-apocalyptic scavenger, familiar with TL 3 automatic firearms. When Lily meets Jean, a time-traveler from the far future, she steals Jean's fazer-pistol and threatens to shoot Jean with it unless someone explains why cyborgs are attacking. Jean promises to protect Lily, and manages to persuade her to return the pistol unfired. Curious to know what would have happened, Lily's player rolls d10 and adds Lily's Intelligence modifier (+0 for Int 12) plus her artifact check bonus (+2 for a 1st level Rover), subtracts the fazer-pistol's Complexity (-6), and gets a total of 0. Jean says "It was set to overload. If you had shot me, it would have exploded and killed us both." Feeling embarrassed, Lily says "It was my first raygun." Later, they find a hard-light hologram of a 1920s machine gun, and Lily is able to use it without making a technology roll at all. Together, Jean and Lily repel the cyborg invasion!
Keith Garrett edited all my MCC-related writing in the GFA18, but he had a lot more to do for this piece than any of the others. His advice and help resulted in something better and more clear than what I initially wrote. Karim did the art for this and all my MCC pieces.
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| Art by Karim |
DCC uses d10 skill checks for untrained characters and d20 skill checks for skilled characters. Thieves begin the game casting spells from scrolls using a d10 (as untrained with magic) but as they gain levels, their dice-type improves, one step at a time, modeling the learning process. This alternative to the MCC technology check uses thieves' spellcasting improvement as a model and applies it to denizens of Terra A.D. learning to use Ancient technology.
When characters first encounter a new piece of ancient technology, they roll d10 + Artifact check bonus + Intelligence modifier. As they learn to understand the artifact, their dice-type can improve. Characters need to be very smart or very lucky to operate a new artifact successfully, or do anything at all other than break it. But each success has the chance to lead to new insights, allowing characters to eventually gain mastery over each new piece of technology.
Technology level and complexity: The tech level sets a limit on the who may attempt to use an artifact. A character cannot make a technology roll for an artifact whose tech level is higher than the limit set by their Intelligence--unless their character level is equal or higher to the tech level (for example, any 7th-level character can attempt to use alien technology, even if their Intelligence is lower than 24. Most 6th-level characters can't attempt to use such a device, however; they can't even fumble and break it). Characters don't need to make technology rolls for objects from their home culture's tech level or lower.
(Stone-age technology is TL 1, mechanical devices are TL 2, electronic and modern computing devices are TL 3, near-future tech is TL 4, far-future tech is TL 5, technology indistinguishable from magic is TL 6, and advanced alien technology is TL 7).
The complexity of an artifact is subtracted as a penalty from the technology roll.
Progressing and re-rolling: As characters roll on the table below, the technology die they roll (starting with d10) can only increase, never decrease. If a result indicates that further rolls should be made using a technology die that's lower than the character's current ability, ignore that portion of the result.
Characters can also continue to study and master ancient technology that is currently non-functional or broken. If a result indicates that the artifact activates, but the tech can’t activate because it needs repairs, or it has run out of ammunition or power, then it doesn’t activate, ignore that portion of the result.
Each successful result on the table below is intended to eventually force a re-roll. Each entry describes how long a character can use the artifact before they must make another technology roll. For example, on a result of 17-19, the artifact functions for 1d3 game sessions before it breaks and needs minor repairs. Once that happens, the character must make a new technology roll, even if they can make minor repairs without needing a new tech roll to learn how--they still need a new technology roll because the result demanded it.
Classes bonuses: As noted in their character descriptions, some characters have an affinity for certain forms of ancient technology. Sentinels also add their artifact bonus die to technology rolls for weapons and armor. Healers roll +1d on rolls related to medical artifacts and devices. Rovers receive an additional bonus to understand ancient doors, locks, traps, and other security systems. These bonuses still apply to the technology roll as well as to Intelligence checks related to learning or using the technology.
Assisting and teaching: One character must volunteer to be the primary technology user; that character makes the technology roll using their current technology die for that object. Up to three characters may assist, if they have sufficient intelligence. Both the technology user and all assistants may expend Luck to improve the technology roll, and all assistants suffer the consequences of a poor roll. To serve as an assistant, a character must have a minimum Intelligence of 13 (or Int modifier +1). A technology user can have two assistants as long as one assistant has a minimum Intelligence of 16 (or Int modifier +2), and three assistants as long as one has a minimum Intelligence of 18 (or Int modifier +3). Add the Intelligence modifier AND the Luck modifier of each assistant to the technology roll, along with any expended Luck.
When a technology user teaches another character to use a piece of technology, the student must roll a d20 to make a DC 10 Intelligence check, modified by their Artifact check bonus, to learn what the teacher knows. On a natural 1, the artifact is permanently broken and inflicts maximum damage on the student and the learner. On a successful Intelligence check, the student may now roll the same technology die as the teacher.
Describing technology: Until characters have attempted to use an artifact and begun to unravel its secrets, they should receive only an "abstract description" as explained in the MCC rules. Once they have a d12 or higher technology die, they have earned the right to a "literal description."
Judging advice: This alternate rule is intended to create a mini-game out of learning to use ancient artifacts. As such, it is probably too cumbersome to use with every artifact the characters find. Instead, I recommend using different approaches depending on the nature of the artifact. Trinkets and other extremely simple artifacts might work automatically. Single-use artifacts might still allow a d20 technology die from the very beginning. Learning to use one artifact might grant a bonus - or even allow the characters to use the same technology die - for any similar objects.
Table: Artifact Check Results
1 The artifact breaks irreparably and inflicts maximum damage (or 1d6, for artifacts with no damage listed) to all characters within a range of 10' (or further, if applicable based on the artifact).
2-3 The artifact breaks and needs major repairs. It inflicts 1d3 damage on the user and all assistants.
4-6 The artifact breaks and needs minor repairs.
7-11 The artifact doesn't function, but isn't broken. However, a piece is missing, a part is knocked out of position, a control is on the wrong setting. The device won't activate until a DC 12 Intelligence check makes it functional again.
12-13 The artifact activates for one use, but its operation is still not understood. Another technology roll must be made before it can be used again. Further technology rolls use a d12 technology die.
14-16 The artifact activates and is minimally understood. It can be used for 1d3 uses, then another technology roll must be made before it can be used again. Further technology rolls use a d14 technology die.
17-19 The artifact activates and its operation is basically understood. Additional ammunition or power sources can be used to reload the artifact if they're available. The artifact can be used for 1d3 game sessions, then it needs minor repairs and another technology roll must be made before it can be used again. Further technology rolls use a d16 technology die.
20-26 The artifact activates and its operation is well understood. Minor repairs may be attempted with a DC 12 Intelligence check and the correct tools and materials. The artifact can be used for 1d4 game sessions, then it needs major repairs and another technology roll must be made before it can be used again. Further technology rolls use a d20 technology die.
27-33 The artifact activates and its operation is precisely understood. Minor repairs may be attempted without rolling a check. Major repairs may be attempted with the correct tools and materials and a DC 12 Intelligence check. The artifact can be used for 1d6 game sessions, then it breaks irreparably and needs to be replaced. Further technology rolls use a d24 technology die.
34-35 The artifact activates and its operation is precisely understood. Major and minor repairs may be attempted without rolling a check. A duplicate artifact can be constructed with the proper materials, parts, and tools and DC 12 Intelligence check. The artifact can be used for 1d8 game sessions, then it breaks irreparably and needs to be replaced. Further technology rolls use a d30 technology die.
36+ The artifact activates and its operation is precisely understood. Major and minor repairs, and even the construction of a duplicate artifact can be attempted without rolling a check. No further technology rolls are needed for this object. It can be operated at-will, and no greater understanding can be achieved by examining it. The technological principles underlying the artifact can be understood by making a DC 24 Intelligence check. Once these principles are understood, new artifacts can be designed by following those principles, using correct materials, parts, and tools, and a DC 12 Intelligence check.
Example: Lily is a post-apocalyptic scavenger, familiar with TL 3 automatic firearms. When Lily meets Jean, a time-traveler from the far future, she steals Jean's fazer-pistol and threatens to shoot Jean with it unless someone explains why cyborgs are attacking. Jean promises to protect Lily, and manages to persuade her to return the pistol unfired. Curious to know what would have happened, Lily's player rolls d10 and adds Lily's Intelligence modifier (+0 for Int 12) plus her artifact check bonus (+2 for a 1st level Rover), subtracts the fazer-pistol's Complexity (-6), and gets a total of 0. Jean says "It was set to overload. If you had shot me, it would have exploded and killed us both." Feeling embarrassed, Lily says "It was my first raygun." Later, they find a hard-light hologram of a 1920s machine gun, and Lily is able to use it without making a technology roll at all. Together, Jean and Lily repel the cyborg invasion!
Monday, July 2, 2018
Mechanics for Resource Management - part 2, Defining our Terms
In my first post about resource management, I argued that the original rules for resource management in D&D are too difficult, that they're rarely used, that they nevertheless saddle us with a legacy of unnecessary bookkeeping, and that a better solution is to truly ignore resources that you don't plan to meaningfully track. A longer-term goal of this project is to think about solutions, about better ways to track resources so that they can be managed, easily, effectively, and at the table. There are a number of creative solutions that have emerged from the OSR that deserve to be looked at in detail.
In the shorter term, I want to take a step back and define what I mean by "resource management" generally, identify the major resources that there are to manage, and talk about what I think RM gaming looks like compared to non-RM gaming (and perhaps, compared to an emerging genre of new-RM gaming).
I don't think I have any original insights here. I'm just collecting my own thoughts in one place. I only have the same intellectual resources anyone reading this blog has available to them: access to the rulebooks, and the wealth of play reports and session reports that let me read what other players and other judges do in their games. I'm not even making a real systematic analysis of those reports, just using what I've seen to inform general impressions of common ways that people play.
(As an aside, because of my time in sociology, my automatic word-association for "resource" is "mobilization" rather than "management". I keep having to stop myself, erase the last word, and rewrite it. It will be interesting to see if this project changes my habit at all.)
By resource management, I mean the minigame of actively tracking the supply of multiple different kinds of resources, making decisions (both short-term tactical and long-term strategic) to manage the rate at which the supplies of these resources are depleted and replenished, making trade-offs to spend one resource in order preserve another, and suffering consequences or receiving rewards for making these decisions poorly or well.
The resource management within a play-style or campaign can vary in at least three ways. Campaigns can differ in the purpose that resource management serves within the game, in the overall importance of resource management to the campaign, and in the method used to track each resource. I think of these as being semi-independent axes; two different judges might both use the same method to track a given resource, but it might be much more important in one campaign than in the other, and the purpose that managing that resource serves might be quite different. On the other hand, I have the impression that people's answers to these questions tend to cluster to form either "resource-management games" (or "high-RM games", if you prefer) or "non-resource-management" games.
Purpose - Resource management can be a source of active danger in a campaign. In such a game, players are always at risk of running out of something mid-session, and if they do, there are mechanical consequences. There is an expectation that the players will run out of supplies sometimes, and so the consequences, while possibly harsh, are generally non-lethal. (For example, if players are exploring a pitch black cave using headlamps, they would need to continuously monitor the battery life of their headlamps. They might rotate leaving some on and some off, or turn them all out while camping to save power. If they run out of batteries entirely, they'll have to navigate the cave in the dark. This is much harder than navigating with lights, and increases their chances of becoming lost or trapped, but they also might still make it out alive, especially if they have a good mental map or a skilled navigator. The players could probably spend an entire session exploring the cave while blind, although this might be a frustrating experience for both them and the judge.) To serve this purpose, the resource in question has to be something that's important and consumable, but not entirely indispensable. A character with enough hp (or other resources) should be able to finish the adventure, or at least rush back to safety, without dying.
RM can also serve to set the context for an adventure. Here the assumption is that ensuring that resources don't run out is one of the players' primary goals for the session; there might be rules for the consequences of running out of supplies, but if so, they're typically so harsh that suffering them for more than a couple rounds is going to be fatal. Alternatively, the judge might rule the the players can't take any action that would cause them to run out of supplies, or that they die instantly if they do. (For example, if the players are exploring underwater, they need diving suits and oxygen tanks before ever going underwater. The judge might have rules for drowning, but if so, they'll only get used if someone gets a nick in their airhose during combat, or fumbles while switching their oxygen tanks. There's no way anyone could do the whole dive while drowning the whole time, no matter how many hit points they have. Alternatively, the judge might simply rule that the players have to surface rather than let themselves run out of oxygen, or that they die instantly if they run out.) To serve this purpose, the resource in question has to be something that's vital, and that with careful play is not likely to be used up. Any kind of survival gear for harsh conditions could serve this purpose. A horse or guide might also serve this purpose, with their hit points or morale being the resource that has to be conserved.
Resource management could be entirely a downtime activity. Here the assumption is that resources will not run out during play, and that the players don't particularly need to do anything special to avoid it. There are likely no rules about what happens if the character actually do run out of something, and no expectation that such rules would ever be enforced. Here, resource management is essentially reduced to the role of mandatory shopping. It becomes a kind of between-session tax that the judge enforces on the players. Each time they set out, they need to buy new rations, torches, arrows, and anything else that might get used - under the assumption that it likely got used up between adventures and now needs to be replenished. Depending on the prices characters have to pay relative to the treasure they're likely to find, this tax could force them to pick and choose which resources they're going to maintain from adventure to adventure, keep them hungry for their next score, or shade into ritualistic bookkeeping. Any resource that's routinely available in very large quantities could fall into this purpose.
RM could also take the form of pure ritualism. Players track their supplies with varying attentiveness; some monitoring every expenditure, others keeping track only when they remember, others ignoring it except when prodded. There are no in-game consequences either way. Details that have no relevance in play are listed in the rulebooks, where they can be dutifully recorded by players who feel obligated to write down such information. It feels weird, or wrong, or strange to consider not tracking some resources at all, across the board. Such is the power of tradition, such is the power of legacy. The actions, once performed for a reason, are now simply performed for the sake of the performance, for the sake of ritual. Any resource that serves primarily as a quantified version of "fluff" or characterization has become ritualized. There's space to write it on the character sheet, but this information is never consulted during play.
Finally, resource management could be absent from the game entirely. There isn't space to write it on the character sheet; isn't there in the rulebook to be copied down. Since everything that isn't there technically falls into this category, but the only resources that are likely to be considered notable in their absence are ones that are recorded in other games. The Sims computer game tracks every characters' bladder capacity and Fatal famously tracks a number of different genital measurements; D&D fortunately doesn't, and few players are likely to miss them in their absence - but to consider removing gp, hp, or XP might seem like something that would change the game so much it wouldn't be D&D anymore. And yet, there are those who say the same (loudly, angrily, and often) about resources like loyalty, morale, and strictly-observed movement rates.
Hit points, incidentally, can fall into any of the above categories, depending on how many hp characters have, how much damage hazards and monsters deal, how easily hit points can be recovered through mid-session healing, and how the rules around dying are handled. Numbered in the hundreds and backed by healing surges, death saves, and similar mechanics, hit points become something that are tracked more as a ritual or a legacy than because there is any chance of falling to 0 and actually dying.
Importance - Resource management can range from being so important that tracking various resources practically is the game being played (as in at least some of those early OD&D games, in Torchbearer, and in LotFP's The God that Crawls module) to basically having little or no role in a game that's mostly about combat, mystery-solving, social interaction, or exploration. In between those poles are play-styles where a smaller amount of resource management is used to set limits on how much combat, how much exploration, etc, can be accomplished, so that tracking resource use is done in service of facilitating some other player goal, rather than being a goal, unto itself.
In principle, the importance of each resource can vary independently, but it seems that in practice, these things cluster together, so that either resource management is considered very important and lots of different resources are tracked, or it's considered pretty unimportant and few if any resources are monitored.
One challenge in all this is that there's a kind of paradox to resource management. A situation where the players treat resources as important and plan ahead to have a sufficient supply is almost indistinguishable from a situation where the players and the judge all ignore resource management completely. In both situations, resources don't matter. In both situations, play proceeds without complications created by resource management. There's very little difference between play where the players track their resources but always have enough, play where the judge describes the characters using up un-tracked resources and they always have enough, and play where resource use isn't mentioned at all. I suppose the amount of work put into describing unimportant resources creates a kind of sliding scale of gritty realism, but if all you want is flavor, I think it's better to get it from the narrative you speak aloud to each other, rather than the math you scribble silently on the sheet in front of you.
Resources don't matter when you always have enough of them. The two situations where resources are truly important are when resources run out and players face the consequences or when resources could run out and players adjust their behavior to ensure the they don't. Spells and hit points make paradigmatic examples for thinking about both situations. Spells run out. Players might occasionally hold back from using a spell to save it for later, but in general, players cast spells when they need them, and then deal with the consequences of no longer having them later. The situation where you used to have a spell that could help you, but now you don't, and so now you have to think of a different solution is inherently an interesting situation. It demands improvisation and creative thinking. Hit points could run out. Nothing interesting happens if hit points do actually run out. You're just dead, just no longer in the game (temporarily). But the things players do to avoid running out of hit points, the way they change their behavior from what they want to do to what they have to do to survive, that is interesting. Negotiations, surrenders, chases, combat-avoidance strategies, all of them happen because hit points could run out and players want to ensure that they don't.
A challenge then, for a judge who wants resource management to be important, is to think of why players who care about resources wouldn't just bring enough of them that they don't need to be managed. If you want resources to be important, you can't allow them to be simply a downtime activity, a ritual, or something that's absent from play. Encumbrance is one answer. The characters don't bring enough resources because they can't, they can't carry that much bulk or weight, at least not without the added inconvenience of pack animals and hirelings. The other main answer I've seen is unpredictable resource loss. If resources are consumed at an unpredictable rate, then it may be impossible to have enough of them on hand when you need them. As I'll talk about next time, rations and torches get used at predictable rates, spells and hit points are used up unpredictably. I don't think it's a coincidence that the resources that survive even in most non-RM games are the ones like spells and hit points that almost always matter, that almost always demand to be managed. One final solution is to treat resources as optional benefits. Nothing bad happens if you don't have resources, but something good might happen if you do. Magic items are like this. So would be, for example, gourmet meals, in a game where you assume you always have enough food to avoid starvation, but gain some optional benefit if you manage to eat a really good meal.
Method - Resources can be tracked by counting them directly, by not tracking them at all, or by using an alternate mechanic to track them abstractly. The original D&D rules seem to me to encourage managing all resources by tracking them directly; not tracking, or allowing unlimited supply, seems to me the most direct alternative to that system.
Between these two poles, there are a variety of experimental mechanics that have been written to try to track resources at some level of abstraction, typically with the goal of making them more important by making them easier to track. A great deal of innovation in the OSR concerns resource management, and coming up with alternate mechanics for tracking resources while making tracking easier than direct counting.
Different resources within the same game can use different mechanics, some resources might be counted, others ignored, the remainder might draw on multiple different sub-systems to track each in their own way. Hit points, gold pieces, and experience points seem to be the most common resources to count directly, even in games that treat other resources differently. Encumbrance, ammunition, and time (especially as it relates to light and wandering monsters) seem to be prime contenders for the choice to either ignore the resource or find a new way to track it. One of my goals for starting this series in the first place was to look at the different systems OSR authors have designed for alternative resource tracking.
In the shorter term, I want to take a step back and define what I mean by "resource management" generally, identify the major resources that there are to manage, and talk about what I think RM gaming looks like compared to non-RM gaming (and perhaps, compared to an emerging genre of new-RM gaming).
I don't think I have any original insights here. I'm just collecting my own thoughts in one place. I only have the same intellectual resources anyone reading this blog has available to them: access to the rulebooks, and the wealth of play reports and session reports that let me read what other players and other judges do in their games. I'm not even making a real systematic analysis of those reports, just using what I've seen to inform general impressions of common ways that people play.
(As an aside, because of my time in sociology, my automatic word-association for "resource" is "mobilization" rather than "management". I keep having to stop myself, erase the last word, and rewrite it. It will be interesting to see if this project changes my habit at all.)
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| Treasure chest interiors from Slam Blogsma |
By resource management, I mean the minigame of actively tracking the supply of multiple different kinds of resources, making decisions (both short-term tactical and long-term strategic) to manage the rate at which the supplies of these resources are depleted and replenished, making trade-offs to spend one resource in order preserve another, and suffering consequences or receiving rewards for making these decisions poorly or well.
The resource management within a play-style or campaign can vary in at least three ways. Campaigns can differ in the purpose that resource management serves within the game, in the overall importance of resource management to the campaign, and in the method used to track each resource. I think of these as being semi-independent axes; two different judges might both use the same method to track a given resource, but it might be much more important in one campaign than in the other, and the purpose that managing that resource serves might be quite different. On the other hand, I have the impression that people's answers to these questions tend to cluster to form either "resource-management games" (or "high-RM games", if you prefer) or "non-resource-management" games.
Purpose - Resource management can be a source of active danger in a campaign. In such a game, players are always at risk of running out of something mid-session, and if they do, there are mechanical consequences. There is an expectation that the players will run out of supplies sometimes, and so the consequences, while possibly harsh, are generally non-lethal. (For example, if players are exploring a pitch black cave using headlamps, they would need to continuously monitor the battery life of their headlamps. They might rotate leaving some on and some off, or turn them all out while camping to save power. If they run out of batteries entirely, they'll have to navigate the cave in the dark. This is much harder than navigating with lights, and increases their chances of becoming lost or trapped, but they also might still make it out alive, especially if they have a good mental map or a skilled navigator. The players could probably spend an entire session exploring the cave while blind, although this might be a frustrating experience for both them and the judge.) To serve this purpose, the resource in question has to be something that's important and consumable, but not entirely indispensable. A character with enough hp (or other resources) should be able to finish the adventure, or at least rush back to safety, without dying.
RM can also serve to set the context for an adventure. Here the assumption is that ensuring that resources don't run out is one of the players' primary goals for the session; there might be rules for the consequences of running out of supplies, but if so, they're typically so harsh that suffering them for more than a couple rounds is going to be fatal. Alternatively, the judge might rule the the players can't take any action that would cause them to run out of supplies, or that they die instantly if they do. (For example, if the players are exploring underwater, they need diving suits and oxygen tanks before ever going underwater. The judge might have rules for drowning, but if so, they'll only get used if someone gets a nick in their airhose during combat, or fumbles while switching their oxygen tanks. There's no way anyone could do the whole dive while drowning the whole time, no matter how many hit points they have. Alternatively, the judge might simply rule that the players have to surface rather than let themselves run out of oxygen, or that they die instantly if they run out.) To serve this purpose, the resource in question has to be something that's vital, and that with careful play is not likely to be used up. Any kind of survival gear for harsh conditions could serve this purpose. A horse or guide might also serve this purpose, with their hit points or morale being the resource that has to be conserved.
Resource management could be entirely a downtime activity. Here the assumption is that resources will not run out during play, and that the players don't particularly need to do anything special to avoid it. There are likely no rules about what happens if the character actually do run out of something, and no expectation that such rules would ever be enforced. Here, resource management is essentially reduced to the role of mandatory shopping. It becomes a kind of between-session tax that the judge enforces on the players. Each time they set out, they need to buy new rations, torches, arrows, and anything else that might get used - under the assumption that it likely got used up between adventures and now needs to be replenished. Depending on the prices characters have to pay relative to the treasure they're likely to find, this tax could force them to pick and choose which resources they're going to maintain from adventure to adventure, keep them hungry for their next score, or shade into ritualistic bookkeeping. Any resource that's routinely available in very large quantities could fall into this purpose.
RM could also take the form of pure ritualism. Players track their supplies with varying attentiveness; some monitoring every expenditure, others keeping track only when they remember, others ignoring it except when prodded. There are no in-game consequences either way. Details that have no relevance in play are listed in the rulebooks, where they can be dutifully recorded by players who feel obligated to write down such information. It feels weird, or wrong, or strange to consider not tracking some resources at all, across the board. Such is the power of tradition, such is the power of legacy. The actions, once performed for a reason, are now simply performed for the sake of the performance, for the sake of ritual. Any resource that serves primarily as a quantified version of "fluff" or characterization has become ritualized. There's space to write it on the character sheet, but this information is never consulted during play.
Finally, resource management could be absent from the game entirely. There isn't space to write it on the character sheet; isn't there in the rulebook to be copied down. Since everything that isn't there technically falls into this category, but the only resources that are likely to be considered notable in their absence are ones that are recorded in other games. The Sims computer game tracks every characters' bladder capacity and Fatal famously tracks a number of different genital measurements; D&D fortunately doesn't, and few players are likely to miss them in their absence - but to consider removing gp, hp, or XP might seem like something that would change the game so much it wouldn't be D&D anymore. And yet, there are those who say the same (loudly, angrily, and often) about resources like loyalty, morale, and strictly-observed movement rates.
Hit points, incidentally, can fall into any of the above categories, depending on how many hp characters have, how much damage hazards and monsters deal, how easily hit points can be recovered through mid-session healing, and how the rules around dying are handled. Numbered in the hundreds and backed by healing surges, death saves, and similar mechanics, hit points become something that are tracked more as a ritual or a legacy than because there is any chance of falling to 0 and actually dying.
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| Treasure chest interiors from Slam Blogsma |
Importance - Resource management can range from being so important that tracking various resources practically is the game being played (as in at least some of those early OD&D games, in Torchbearer, and in LotFP's The God that Crawls module) to basically having little or no role in a game that's mostly about combat, mystery-solving, social interaction, or exploration. In between those poles are play-styles where a smaller amount of resource management is used to set limits on how much combat, how much exploration, etc, can be accomplished, so that tracking resource use is done in service of facilitating some other player goal, rather than being a goal, unto itself.
In principle, the importance of each resource can vary independently, but it seems that in practice, these things cluster together, so that either resource management is considered very important and lots of different resources are tracked, or it's considered pretty unimportant and few if any resources are monitored.
One challenge in all this is that there's a kind of paradox to resource management. A situation where the players treat resources as important and plan ahead to have a sufficient supply is almost indistinguishable from a situation where the players and the judge all ignore resource management completely. In both situations, resources don't matter. In both situations, play proceeds without complications created by resource management. There's very little difference between play where the players track their resources but always have enough, play where the judge describes the characters using up un-tracked resources and they always have enough, and play where resource use isn't mentioned at all. I suppose the amount of work put into describing unimportant resources creates a kind of sliding scale of gritty realism, but if all you want is flavor, I think it's better to get it from the narrative you speak aloud to each other, rather than the math you scribble silently on the sheet in front of you.
Resources don't matter when you always have enough of them. The two situations where resources are truly important are when resources run out and players face the consequences or when resources could run out and players adjust their behavior to ensure the they don't. Spells and hit points make paradigmatic examples for thinking about both situations. Spells run out. Players might occasionally hold back from using a spell to save it for later, but in general, players cast spells when they need them, and then deal with the consequences of no longer having them later. The situation where you used to have a spell that could help you, but now you don't, and so now you have to think of a different solution is inherently an interesting situation. It demands improvisation and creative thinking. Hit points could run out. Nothing interesting happens if hit points do actually run out. You're just dead, just no longer in the game (temporarily). But the things players do to avoid running out of hit points, the way they change their behavior from what they want to do to what they have to do to survive, that is interesting. Negotiations, surrenders, chases, combat-avoidance strategies, all of them happen because hit points could run out and players want to ensure that they don't.
A challenge then, for a judge who wants resource management to be important, is to think of why players who care about resources wouldn't just bring enough of them that they don't need to be managed. If you want resources to be important, you can't allow them to be simply a downtime activity, a ritual, or something that's absent from play. Encumbrance is one answer. The characters don't bring enough resources because they can't, they can't carry that much bulk or weight, at least not without the added inconvenience of pack animals and hirelings. The other main answer I've seen is unpredictable resource loss. If resources are consumed at an unpredictable rate, then it may be impossible to have enough of them on hand when you need them. As I'll talk about next time, rations and torches get used at predictable rates, spells and hit points are used up unpredictably. I don't think it's a coincidence that the resources that survive even in most non-RM games are the ones like spells and hit points that almost always matter, that almost always demand to be managed. One final solution is to treat resources as optional benefits. Nothing bad happens if you don't have resources, but something good might happen if you do. Magic items are like this. So would be, for example, gourmet meals, in a game where you assume you always have enough food to avoid starvation, but gain some optional benefit if you manage to eat a really good meal.
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| Treasure chest interiors from Slam Blogsma |
Method - Resources can be tracked by counting them directly, by not tracking them at all, or by using an alternate mechanic to track them abstractly. The original D&D rules seem to me to encourage managing all resources by tracking them directly; not tracking, or allowing unlimited supply, seems to me the most direct alternative to that system.
Between these two poles, there are a variety of experimental mechanics that have been written to try to track resources at some level of abstraction, typically with the goal of making them more important by making them easier to track. A great deal of innovation in the OSR concerns resource management, and coming up with alternate mechanics for tracking resources while making tracking easier than direct counting.
Different resources within the same game can use different mechanics, some resources might be counted, others ignored, the remainder might draw on multiple different sub-systems to track each in their own way. Hit points, gold pieces, and experience points seem to be the most common resources to count directly, even in games that treat other resources differently. Encumbrance, ammunition, and time (especially as it relates to light and wandering monsters) seem to be prime contenders for the choice to either ignore the resource or find a new way to track it. One of my goals for starting this series in the first place was to look at the different systems OSR authors have designed for alternative resource tracking.
Monday, June 18, 2018
Experimental Layouts for a Dwarven City Megadungeon
I previously wrote about devising some experimental procedures for generating a dwarven undercity. As I explained, I have a friend who plans to write an undercity generator, and I'm helping him a little by thinking about the procedures. I wanted to test my suggestions to see how well they did at generating a usable map. My initial ideas worked pretty well, although I developed some modifications while using them, and realized at least one more after I finished.
I started with a blank hexmap with the same layout as the Brimstone Mines from Black Powder Black Magic, volume 4, including a central borehole as the primary entrance. Since the procedures are intended to generate paths as you explore, I didn't want to just start in a corner, fill in a row, hit the carriage return, and repeat. Instead, I started at the entrance and followed a path. Actually I followed two paths, because I did this twice to see how different the layouts might look. The first time, I always went to the left-most unexplored hex; the second time, I went to the right-most unexplored hex.
I realized after doing this that I probably included too many "passageway" hexes, and that if this is supposed to be an under-city, then it ought to have some neighborhoods. I think I rolled more 2s on the left-hand path and more 3s on the right-hand, so if you wanted to use these maps, I would flip coins for each of the passages, and whichever comes up more (heads or tails), I would give the left-hand map more "neighborhoods" and the right-hand map more "passages".
The "passageway" hexes are the ones with small squares and little tunnels branching off them. The things that look like amoebas are "caverns". The larger squares with terrible maze-diagrams are "maze" hexes. "Special" hexes would involve rolling on a sub-table. I imagine these will be unusual, but not unique, terrain like parks, gardens, lakes, perhaps particular districts within the city. I drew them as mushroom forests because, (a) c'mon, of course a dwarven undercity is going to include mushroom forests as one of the possible special terrain types, and (b) they look better than a hex full of question marks. "Unique" hexes would also involve rolling on a sub-table, and I'm thinking these would be known locations, palaces, landmarks, and the like. I drew these as fortresses because again, (a) c'mon, and (b) the question mark aesthetics thingy.
As you enter a hex, roll on the following table to determine terrain type:
1 cavern
2 neighborhood
3 passages
4 maze
5 special
6 unique
Regardless of the terrain type, roll 1d4 to determine the number of exits. If the hex has no blocked sides, it gets 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance you just drew. If it has any blocked sides, it gets 1d4 exits in total. Hexes on the edge of the map all have at least one blocked side by default. Place the exits at random from among the available sides, and consider any side that doesn't have an exit to be blocked. I found it helpful to draw in the blocked sides to remind myself not to draw a new connection there in the future. (When randomly placing the exits, you should never need to roll more than twice - either roll once or twice to determine which sides get exits, or roll once or twice to determine which sides don't get them.)
Earlier I wrote (what turned out to be) some complicated and unwieldy ideas about comparing the number of exits you just rolled to the available sides and using that to determine secret passageways and temporary blockages and etc ... ignore all that. If the number you just rolled is higher than the number of unblocked sides, then all remaining sides get exits. If the number you rolled is lower than the number of pre-existing routes into the hex, then just block the remaining sides off. Trying to use the normal path generator to make special passages was a mistake; those should be features that get determined by a separate table.
I also had some ideas about generating significant sites within each hex. Determining if those procedures are correct or not would take a different kind of playtesting and/or philosophical introspection about what the nature of the undercity-crawl should be like. I will say that I think it will probably be easiest to roll a d20 on a menu showing possible site locations within the hex. Rolling d4 to determine the number of sites, and then rolling d-something several times to randomly place them gets a little tedious.
The question of whether or not this is the correct size map would also require introspection to answer. A larger map lends itself to more horizontal exploration; a smaller map means that players are going to start descending to deeper levels sooner. But it's a question of preference, not true right and wrong. What do you want your city to look like and feel like? How quickly do you want your players to descend? The city probably does need edges though, unless you want it to possibly go on forever. With d4 exits per hex, you will never procedurally generate a map edge unless you start out with one drawn on the map already.
Anyway, the two maps I drew are below. I think the terrain-and-path generating procedure I've come up with leads to a decent variety of areas that are fairly interconnected without allowing total freedom of movement. You would need some actual playtesting to be sure, but I think this should feel more like being inside a large structure or network of caves rather than being in an open under-wilderness. d4 exits might even be too many, although I'd have to try this again with d3 to confirm that. The left-hand map was totally filled in. After the initial pathcrawl filled in most of the hexes, I just went back and rolled for the remainders. The right-hand path actually led to every hex on the map, and cut eight hexes out of the map by blocking off all their available sides.
Here is the map I drew by following the left-hand path:
And here's the map that came from the right-hand path:
I kept track of the two paths I followed while drawing, and you can see them here:
I started with a blank hexmap with the same layout as the Brimstone Mines from Black Powder Black Magic, volume 4, including a central borehole as the primary entrance. Since the procedures are intended to generate paths as you explore, I didn't want to just start in a corner, fill in a row, hit the carriage return, and repeat. Instead, I started at the entrance and followed a path. Actually I followed two paths, because I did this twice to see how different the layouts might look. The first time, I always went to the left-most unexplored hex; the second time, I went to the right-most unexplored hex.
I realized after doing this that I probably included too many "passageway" hexes, and that if this is supposed to be an under-city, then it ought to have some neighborhoods. I think I rolled more 2s on the left-hand path and more 3s on the right-hand, so if you wanted to use these maps, I would flip coins for each of the passages, and whichever comes up more (heads or tails), I would give the left-hand map more "neighborhoods" and the right-hand map more "passages".
The "passageway" hexes are the ones with small squares and little tunnels branching off them. The things that look like amoebas are "caverns". The larger squares with terrible maze-diagrams are "maze" hexes. "Special" hexes would involve rolling on a sub-table. I imagine these will be unusual, but not unique, terrain like parks, gardens, lakes, perhaps particular districts within the city. I drew them as mushroom forests because, (a) c'mon, of course a dwarven undercity is going to include mushroom forests as one of the possible special terrain types, and (b) they look better than a hex full of question marks. "Unique" hexes would also involve rolling on a sub-table, and I'm thinking these would be known locations, palaces, landmarks, and the like. I drew these as fortresses because again, (a) c'mon, and (b) the question mark aesthetics thingy.
As you enter a hex, roll on the following table to determine terrain type:
1 cavern
2 neighborhood
3 passages
4 maze
5 special
6 unique
Regardless of the terrain type, roll 1d4 to determine the number of exits. If the hex has no blocked sides, it gets 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance you just drew. If it has any blocked sides, it gets 1d4 exits in total. Hexes on the edge of the map all have at least one blocked side by default. Place the exits at random from among the available sides, and consider any side that doesn't have an exit to be blocked. I found it helpful to draw in the blocked sides to remind myself not to draw a new connection there in the future. (When randomly placing the exits, you should never need to roll more than twice - either roll once or twice to determine which sides get exits, or roll once or twice to determine which sides don't get them.)
Earlier I wrote (what turned out to be) some complicated and unwieldy ideas about comparing the number of exits you just rolled to the available sides and using that to determine secret passageways and temporary blockages and etc ... ignore all that. If the number you just rolled is higher than the number of unblocked sides, then all remaining sides get exits. If the number you rolled is lower than the number of pre-existing routes into the hex, then just block the remaining sides off. Trying to use the normal path generator to make special passages was a mistake; those should be features that get determined by a separate table.
I also had some ideas about generating significant sites within each hex. Determining if those procedures are correct or not would take a different kind of playtesting and/or philosophical introspection about what the nature of the undercity-crawl should be like. I will say that I think it will probably be easiest to roll a d20 on a menu showing possible site locations within the hex. Rolling d4 to determine the number of sites, and then rolling d-something several times to randomly place them gets a little tedious.
The question of whether or not this is the correct size map would also require introspection to answer. A larger map lends itself to more horizontal exploration; a smaller map means that players are going to start descending to deeper levels sooner. But it's a question of preference, not true right and wrong. What do you want your city to look like and feel like? How quickly do you want your players to descend? The city probably does need edges though, unless you want it to possibly go on forever. With d4 exits per hex, you will never procedurally generate a map edge unless you start out with one drawn on the map already.
Anyway, the two maps I drew are below. I think the terrain-and-path generating procedure I've come up with leads to a decent variety of areas that are fairly interconnected without allowing total freedom of movement. You would need some actual playtesting to be sure, but I think this should feel more like being inside a large structure or network of caves rather than being in an open under-wilderness. d4 exits might even be too many, although I'd have to try this again with d3 to confirm that. The left-hand map was totally filled in. After the initial pathcrawl filled in most of the hexes, I just went back and rolled for the remainders. The right-hand path actually led to every hex on the map, and cut eight hexes out of the map by blocking off all their available sides.
Here is the map I drew by following the left-hand path:
And here's the map that came from the right-hand path:
I kept track of the two paths I followed while drawing, and you can see them here:
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Mechanics for Resource Management - part 1, The Easy Way
Recently I've found myself thinking (and commenting on G+) about resource management in D&D. The series of posts I'm starting here is mostly an attempt to gather my thoughts in one place so that I can consider my options and think about my own preferences.
In the earliest versions of D&D, it seems that players were expected to keep scrupulous accounting records of their adventuring gear and the weight of their treasure. Gear was recorded in pounds (or even in coin-weight-equivalents) and there were multiple levels of encumbrance with associated movement rates.
As I understand it, the goal of this approach is to make resource management central to the playing of the game. Your gear determines how many 10' dungeon grid-squares you move per exploration turn. Torches provide illumination out to a set distance, beyond which the dungeon is invisible in the darkness. Torches burn out and get used up; if you don't bring enough with you, you could run out entirely and be stuck in the dark. Every turn or every other turn, you check for wandering monsters. When you do find some treasure, you're limited in how much you can carry, and you have to decide how encumbered you're willing to become. The more treasure you take, the slower you'll move, the more torches you'll use up, and the more wandering monsters you'll check for and encounter. (And wandering monsters, of course, use up things like ammunition, spells, and the ultimate character resource, hit points.)
As I said, I think that's the goal. I think the message is intended be that resources matter, you have to make hard choices to manage them, and if you make the wrong choices, you won't get out alive. In practice, rules that require such strict record-keeping and so much memorizing and monitoring of multiple metrics simultaneously, in terms of pounds and coins of encumbrance, in terms of squares of movement, in terms of watching the time on your torches, in terms of remembering to keep checking for monsters ... in practice, a system like this sends a different message, to me at least.
If resource management is going to matter, then the rules for resources have to be simple enough to remember, monitor, and apply at the table.
In defense of the original rules, I think they were playing with miniatures on table-size grip-maps, and I think most of them were wargamers who were used to doing a lot of mental accounting during their games. Move off the miniature map and away from a direct physical representations of the pieces on the board taking their turns ... move away from that, I think it becomes practically unmanageable.
Later editions of D&D and Pathfinder seem to feel obliged to maintain rules for equipment weights in pounds, degrees of encumbrance and rates of movement. But they're like legacy components that are no longer supported by the rest of the system. There rules are there, but they don't matter. You get all the work, but it serves no purpose. In that sense, it becomes completely optional, because nothing in the game depends on tracking those things. There are no consequences if you don't track them, and no consequences if you do track them either.
If there are no wandering monster checks, then why does it matter how quickly you're moving? If it doesn't matter how quickly you're moving, then why does it matter how much weight you're carrying? And if it doesn't matter how much weight you're carrying, then why bother tracking the individual weights of every item in your inventory? (And in general, the high-fantasy settings these editions imagine, the linear-path games they support, and the medieval-superhero characters they generate all seem antithetical to imaginary scarcity and privation.)
For whatever reason though, the people writing these rules seem to be unable to admit that they're essentially set dressing, the weight of your boots mattering no more than the nutritional value of your bar-food or rations. Instead of removing the rules, or stating that they're cosmetic, or choosing to meaningfully support them, instead they have often chosen to fill their worlds with magic items to circumvent them. The worlds of 2e, 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder are all worlds filled with bags of holding, boots of walking, and flashlights of continual light. I don't know what message they hope this is sending to their judges and their players. Something about how it's important to track these things for their own sake, or the sake of realism, or the Protestant ethic, or something, but also about how good players and judges should find magical within-game ways to circumvent these rules as quickly as possible. I'm just guessing at that, though. I don't really understand what message they want to send. I do know what message they're sending to me though.
If resource management is going to matter, then there have to be consequences that result from how the players choose to manage their resources. (Consequences both for carrying too much, and consequences for trying to do without.)
5e introduces some rules simplifications in other areas, possibly aimed at lightening players' and judges' cognitive loads to the point where resource management could matter once again. Rather than picking characters' starting equipment item-by-item from across a multi-page inventory list, players get to pick between a few pairs of weapons that come with ammunition, and they receive a pack that contains bundles of items like torches and ropes.
My only critique here is something I've noticed in play. Every background has a special ability that guarantees you free room and board from someone. You start the game with a week or two of rations, enough arrows to slay a small army, and enough light to last at least through your first session without refueling. You can mark them off as you play, but you know (or you learn, the game teaches you) you'll never run out mid-session, and between sessions, you can fully restock on anything you used up. So why mark them off? Why keep track, if keeping track will never matter, if it will only ever be busywork?
And if you're not keeping track of your arrows, and the things the game offers for sale are things like arrows, things that cost the barest fraction of the treasure you hauled out your very first session, why keep track of those purchases? Your food is already free, your room every night is already free. What is there left to spend money on? And if you can't spend it fast enough to ever, even for a moment, be in danger of running out of it, why bother tracking it at all? (Yes, I realize I just asked "why track gold in D&D?" but if you aren't trading gold for XP, and you always have as much gold as you need for routine purchases, and routine purchases are the only kind of purchases you can make ... then why track gold in D&D?)
If resource management is going to matter, then resources have to be managed routinely (possibly every time they're used) so that running out mid-session is always a possibility, and having enough when you need them is the result of strategy, conservation, or luck, and not guaranteed.
If your supply of something is so great that you'll never run out when you need it, then your supply is practically unlimited. That is, in practice, if the number of supplies you have is so great that it can't run out, then that number does not set a limit on your use of that supply.
So the first option for resource management in D&D is, don't.
Don't manage your resources, ignore them.
Your characters can carry whatever equipment they've accumulated along the way. They are in the hallway, then a room, then back in the hallway again, then in another room, and it doesn't matter how much time passes while they do that, so it doesn't matter how fast they were moving. The lights are always on. Their guns never run out of bullets. They never need to eat or go to the bathroom. They always get a good night's sleep.
But if you're going to ignore resource management, ignore it. Don't force yourself to count things where the number doesn't matter. Don't continue going through the motions of a certain style of play without actually playing it. Be honest with yourself about what you're doing. Admit to yourself that you don't care about encumbrance, or movement rates, or light sources, or whatever. Don't pretend you're using them when you're not. Give yourself permission to play the game you're already playing. Don't punish yourself with unnecessary bookkeeping just because you don't want to acknowledge that account will never be overdrawn. Dan Savage claims, "Some people twist themselves into the oddest knots so they can have what they want without having to admit they want it." Don't do that. Admit what you're doing. Give yourself permission. Ignore it.
Admittedly, this style of play is far removed from the original wargamers counting dungeon tiles and coin-weight-equivalents, and double-checking their marching order, and playing "who's on torch" to decide how far they can move and what they can see each game-turn. But we've been far removed from that for awhile, though we feel obligated to pretend we're not. Ignoring resource management is easy. It frees up your cognitive resources to focus on other parts of the game.
Tracking all that shit is hard, and it's much harder to do in the theater of the mind than it is at a bespoke wargaming table. Sometimes you want to play a game without feeling like you're recreating The Things They Carried in fantasy while you play. Tracking all that shit takes time, real time, your time, an actual resource that is truly limited. For novice players, or players who are too busy, or players who can't make an 8-hour play session, ignoring resource management might be the only way they can play.
Are you missing out on something if your game doesn't include resource management? In the sense that you are missing out on participating in a very specific style of play, yes, you're missing out on something. But in the sense that that style is somehow the superior way to play? That everyone who doesn't play it only experiences something inferior? No, you're not missing out on a thing.
Gary Gygax claimed that "You cannot have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept," and you get the feeling that he felt that way about everything, down to accounting for the last copper penny. But meaning can come from lots of sources, and for me, those sources don't include determining my character's height in inches, or weight in pounds, or age in years, or birth order, or astrological sign, or how much loose change she keeps her pocketbook, or how many pencils are in the jar on her desk, or how many AA batteries she has in the door of her fridge.
Including any resource management in your game has to start with acknowledging which resources you want to manage, and which you can safely ignore. If there are resources you want to manage, then manage them, and for the rest, do what TSR and Paizo and WotC have been telling you to do with them all these years, (despite not being willing to admit what message they're sending you).
This is just the first option, the easiest. Everything else is more complicated.
In the earliest versions of D&D, it seems that players were expected to keep scrupulous accounting records of their adventuring gear and the weight of their treasure. Gear was recorded in pounds (or even in coin-weight-equivalents) and there were multiple levels of encumbrance with associated movement rates.
As I understand it, the goal of this approach is to make resource management central to the playing of the game. Your gear determines how many 10' dungeon grid-squares you move per exploration turn. Torches provide illumination out to a set distance, beyond which the dungeon is invisible in the darkness. Torches burn out and get used up; if you don't bring enough with you, you could run out entirely and be stuck in the dark. Every turn or every other turn, you check for wandering monsters. When you do find some treasure, you're limited in how much you can carry, and you have to decide how encumbered you're willing to become. The more treasure you take, the slower you'll move, the more torches you'll use up, and the more wandering monsters you'll check for and encounter. (And wandering monsters, of course, use up things like ammunition, spells, and the ultimate character resource, hit points.)
As I said, I think that's the goal. I think the message is intended be that resources matter, you have to make hard choices to manage them, and if you make the wrong choices, you won't get out alive. In practice, rules that require such strict record-keeping and so much memorizing and monitoring of multiple metrics simultaneously, in terms of pounds and coins of encumbrance, in terms of squares of movement, in terms of watching the time on your torches, in terms of remembering to keep checking for monsters ... in practice, a system like this sends a different message, to me at least.
If resource management is going to matter, then the rules for resources have to be simple enough to remember, monitor, and apply at the table.
In defense of the original rules, I think they were playing with miniatures on table-size grip-maps, and I think most of them were wargamers who were used to doing a lot of mental accounting during their games. Move off the miniature map and away from a direct physical representations of the pieces on the board taking their turns ... move away from that, I think it becomes practically unmanageable.
Later editions of D&D and Pathfinder seem to feel obliged to maintain rules for equipment weights in pounds, degrees of encumbrance and rates of movement. But they're like legacy components that are no longer supported by the rest of the system. There rules are there, but they don't matter. You get all the work, but it serves no purpose. In that sense, it becomes completely optional, because nothing in the game depends on tracking those things. There are no consequences if you don't track them, and no consequences if you do track them either.
If there are no wandering monster checks, then why does it matter how quickly you're moving? If it doesn't matter how quickly you're moving, then why does it matter how much weight you're carrying? And if it doesn't matter how much weight you're carrying, then why bother tracking the individual weights of every item in your inventory? (And in general, the high-fantasy settings these editions imagine, the linear-path games they support, and the medieval-superhero characters they generate all seem antithetical to imaginary scarcity and privation.)
For whatever reason though, the people writing these rules seem to be unable to admit that they're essentially set dressing, the weight of your boots mattering no more than the nutritional value of your bar-food or rations. Instead of removing the rules, or stating that they're cosmetic, or choosing to meaningfully support them, instead they have often chosen to fill their worlds with magic items to circumvent them. The worlds of 2e, 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder are all worlds filled with bags of holding, boots of walking, and flashlights of continual light. I don't know what message they hope this is sending to their judges and their players. Something about how it's important to track these things for their own sake, or the sake of realism, or the Protestant ethic, or something, but also about how good players and judges should find magical within-game ways to circumvent these rules as quickly as possible. I'm just guessing at that, though. I don't really understand what message they want to send. I do know what message they're sending to me though.
If resource management is going to matter, then there have to be consequences that result from how the players choose to manage their resources. (Consequences both for carrying too much, and consequences for trying to do without.)
5e introduces some rules simplifications in other areas, possibly aimed at lightening players' and judges' cognitive loads to the point where resource management could matter once again. Rather than picking characters' starting equipment item-by-item from across a multi-page inventory list, players get to pick between a few pairs of weapons that come with ammunition, and they receive a pack that contains bundles of items like torches and ropes.
My only critique here is something I've noticed in play. Every background has a special ability that guarantees you free room and board from someone. You start the game with a week or two of rations, enough arrows to slay a small army, and enough light to last at least through your first session without refueling. You can mark them off as you play, but you know (or you learn, the game teaches you) you'll never run out mid-session, and between sessions, you can fully restock on anything you used up. So why mark them off? Why keep track, if keeping track will never matter, if it will only ever be busywork?
And if you're not keeping track of your arrows, and the things the game offers for sale are things like arrows, things that cost the barest fraction of the treasure you hauled out your very first session, why keep track of those purchases? Your food is already free, your room every night is already free. What is there left to spend money on? And if you can't spend it fast enough to ever, even for a moment, be in danger of running out of it, why bother tracking it at all? (Yes, I realize I just asked "why track gold in D&D?" but if you aren't trading gold for XP, and you always have as much gold as you need for routine purchases, and routine purchases are the only kind of purchases you can make ... then why track gold in D&D?)
If resource management is going to matter, then resources have to be managed routinely (possibly every time they're used) so that running out mid-session is always a possibility, and having enough when you need them is the result of strategy, conservation, or luck, and not guaranteed.
If your supply of something is so great that you'll never run out when you need it, then your supply is practically unlimited. That is, in practice, if the number of supplies you have is so great that it can't run out, then that number does not set a limit on your use of that supply.
So the first option for resource management in D&D is, don't.
Don't manage your resources, ignore them.
Your characters can carry whatever equipment they've accumulated along the way. They are in the hallway, then a room, then back in the hallway again, then in another room, and it doesn't matter how much time passes while they do that, so it doesn't matter how fast they were moving. The lights are always on. Their guns never run out of bullets. They never need to eat or go to the bathroom. They always get a good night's sleep.
But if you're going to ignore resource management, ignore it. Don't force yourself to count things where the number doesn't matter. Don't continue going through the motions of a certain style of play without actually playing it. Be honest with yourself about what you're doing. Admit to yourself that you don't care about encumbrance, or movement rates, or light sources, or whatever. Don't pretend you're using them when you're not. Give yourself permission to play the game you're already playing. Don't punish yourself with unnecessary bookkeeping just because you don't want to acknowledge that account will never be overdrawn. Dan Savage claims, "Some people twist themselves into the oddest knots so they can have what they want without having to admit they want it." Don't do that. Admit what you're doing. Give yourself permission. Ignore it.
Admittedly, this style of play is far removed from the original wargamers counting dungeon tiles and coin-weight-equivalents, and double-checking their marching order, and playing "who's on torch" to decide how far they can move and what they can see each game-turn. But we've been far removed from that for awhile, though we feel obligated to pretend we're not. Ignoring resource management is easy. It frees up your cognitive resources to focus on other parts of the game.
Tracking all that shit is hard, and it's much harder to do in the theater of the mind than it is at a bespoke wargaming table. Sometimes you want to play a game without feeling like you're recreating The Things They Carried in fantasy while you play. Tracking all that shit takes time, real time, your time, an actual resource that is truly limited. For novice players, or players who are too busy, or players who can't make an 8-hour play session, ignoring resource management might be the only way they can play.
Are you missing out on something if your game doesn't include resource management? In the sense that you are missing out on participating in a very specific style of play, yes, you're missing out on something. But in the sense that that style is somehow the superior way to play? That everyone who doesn't play it only experiences something inferior? No, you're not missing out on a thing.
Gary Gygax claimed that "You cannot have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept," and you get the feeling that he felt that way about everything, down to accounting for the last copper penny. But meaning can come from lots of sources, and for me, those sources don't include determining my character's height in inches, or weight in pounds, or age in years, or birth order, or astrological sign, or how much loose change she keeps her pocketbook, or how many pencils are in the jar on her desk, or how many AA batteries she has in the door of her fridge.
Including any resource management in your game has to start with acknowledging which resources you want to manage, and which you can safely ignore. If there are resources you want to manage, then manage them, and for the rest, do what TSR and Paizo and WotC have been telling you to do with them all these years, (despite not being willing to admit what message they're sending you).
This is just the first option, the easiest. Everything else is more complicated.
Sunday, June 3, 2018
Mechanics I Want to Use - DCC Movement Rates through a Dwarven City Megadungeon
I have a friend who's brainstorming a dwarven undercity campaign, using procedural generation to fill in a minihexmap as the characters explore a multi-level ruined-city megadungeon. These are my thoughts on the mechanics of moving around the megadungeon. The point of writing this is to try to think through some of the mechanical structure so that he can worry about the content. I'm using DCC as my base here, but my friend could relatively easily convert these ideas to work in B/X or any other system.
Humans and elves in DCC have a base movement speed of 30. Dwarves and halflings have a speed of 20. Characters with the Wild Child birth augur can have their speed altered by plus-or-minus 5, 10, or 15 depending on their starting Luck score. Wearing heavy armor can slow characters down. Wearing scale, chain, or banded mail imposes a movement penalty of -5, and wearing half or full plate imposes -10. So a DCC adventuring party without animals is usually going to have a group speed of 20 or 30.
Dogs move 40. Donkeys and mules have speed 30, ponies have speed 40, and both horses and warhorses have speed 60.
I propose to treat a character's speed as their movement points. Navigating the dwarven undercity requires spending movement points to explore and travel between hexes. The slowest character in the party determines how far the party can travel without anyone needing to forced march. The fastest characters in the party can take advantage of their speed to scout ahead and report back.
Hexes are approximately a mile across.
Although travel times are given too, the need for rest is based on using movement points, rather than the passage of time. Characters need to stop for the night and rest once they get to 0 movement points. Continuing to travel beyond that requires forced marching, which entails some element of risk. You could require that the characters have to stop to briefly rest around the time they use half their movement points, but unless you plan to have something happen during that rest, or just really want to narrate it for realism's sake, there's no reason to. (Alternatively, ignore the movement points, and use the travel times to establish the adventuring day. Travel up to 8 hours is as normal, going longer carries the risks of forced marching. Characters with low movement rates due to their species or encumbrance may begin forced marching after only 6 hours.)
Entering a hex is "free," but passing through it to come back out costs 0, 2.5, 5, or 10 movement points, depending on the terrain and on whether or the characters are exploring or crossing through a space they've already explored.
Terrain types
There are at least three common types of hexes in the dwarven undercity - caverns, passages, and mazes. There may be other common types that will need to be detailed later. There may also be special or unique hexes that would never show up on a general list. (Cavegirl's Game Stuff's The Gardens of Ynn might be a useful tool for thinking about what these uncommon hexes might be like.)
Cavern hexes
Movement point cost: Caverns cost 2.5 to explore initially, 0 to cross after exploration. Some caverns contain difficult terrain (such as weed-like or forest-like stalagmites) and cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross after exploration. Difficult caverns are relatively rare.
Time cost: Caverns take an hour to explore, half an hour to cross after exploration. Difficult caverns take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross.
Cavern hexes are mostly filled with giant, wide-open caverns. They make ideal building sites and contain 1d6 or 1d8 significant structures. They contain 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Unlike in passages and mazes, the structures are not tied to particular exits and should all be considered central.
It is impossible to get lost in a cavern hex.
Passage hexes
Movement point cost: Passages cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross. Some passages are very easy to navigate. They have wider corridors, simpler layouts, and/or better signage. These cost 2.5 to explore and 0 to cross. Some passages are more difficult to navigate. These are narrower, more winding, contain stairs or other changes of elevation, etc. These cost 10 to explore, 5 to cross. Both easy and difficult passages are relatively rare.
Time cost: Most passages take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross. Easy passages take only an hour to explore, half an hour to cross. Difficult passages take 4 hours to explore, 2 hours to cross.
Passage hexes are mostly filled with halls and corridors used to facilitate navigation between structures. Passage hexes contain 1d4 significant structures and 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Most structures are associated with a particular exit, and either can or must be accessed to use that exit. Occasionally there are central structures that can be accessed freely by anyone passing through the hex. Even the first time they explore the hex, players can always choose which exit they use to leave the passages.
It is almost impossible to get lost in a passage hex. Difficult passages have narrow walls, long winding stretches, sharp turns, weird angles, and other features that slow down movement, but, they do not present a navigational hazard. Like caverns, they can be considered fully explored after a single crossing, and unlike mazes, they carry almost no risk of losing one's way (unless the party fumbles their exploration.)
Maze hexes
Movement point cost: Mazes cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross. Some mazes are especially difficult to navigate. These cost 10 to explore, 5 to cross. Because of the risk of getting lost, and the need to fully map a maze before it can be considered explored, difficult mazes are a nightmare for adventuring parties. Difficult mazes are relatively rare.
Time cost: Mazes take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross. Difficult mazes take 4 hours to explore, 2 hours to cross.
Maze hexes are filled with halls and corridors laid out to confuse and misdirect the traveler. Maze hexes contain 1d8-4 significant structures and 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Structures in a maze are always associated with an exit. If there are more structures than visible exits (including the characters' original entrance), then the extra structures contain secret exits. The only way to find a central structure in a maze (at least initially) is to get lost.
Exploring mazes: Mazes take much longer to explore than normal passage hexes. They are designed to thwart navigation and make stymie mapmakers. Fully exploring a maze requires multiple passes through the structure. The characters must leave a maze by each of its exits in order to fully map the maze. Since all maze hexes contain an original entrance and at least one exit, it always takes at least two trips through the maze to fully map it. Getting lost in the maze does not count toward meeting the exploration requirements. (I know, I know, in real life, getting lost in a place a few times really does eventually make it easier to find your way around. Either dwarven mazes are too confusing for that to work, or if the ref is feeling generous, getting lost means that you roll +1d the next time you try to explore it.)
Until a maze is fully mapped the characters can either choose to travel a known route or leave via a random exit. Traveling a known route doesn't let you go any faster, count toward your exploration requirements, or run any less risk of getting lost, but it does let you pick which exit you use to leave the hex. Leaving via a random exit maps one route, putting you one trip closer to mastering the maze, and requires rolling 1d5, 1d4, 1d3, or 1d2 to determine which exit (including the original entrance) you use to leave the hex. For obvious reasons, when there's only one unmapped route left, you don't have to roll the dice, you just go the only way you haven't gone before. Once a maze is fully mapped, you can pretty much treat it like passages.
Getting lost in a maze: Mazes are designed to make you lost, so this is a fairly regular occurrence. Getting lost doesn't count toward your mapping totals. Typically, getting lost either means ending up back in the hex you started from before you entered the maze. Less commonly, you might end up stuck in the maze, or if you're lucky, you might find yourself outside a random exit. The other thing that might happen, if you're lucky, is you might discover a lost wonder of the dwarven underworld. (This can happen in passages too, but since getting lost there is rarer, so is finding forgotten wonders.) Lost wonders are cool, long-forgotten structures and treasures that you can only find by getting lost. There are two ways to handle this. One way would be to have a special encounter table for lost characters, and to include finding a lost wonder as a possible encounter. The other way would be to use a Luck check to resolve what happens when you get lost, and make finding a lost wonder the best possible result of the Luck check.
Exploring the dwarven underworld: When the characters traverse a hex from their entrance to one of the exits, this generally counts as exploring the hex. (It's possible to fumble this in a passage, and mazes of course require multiple trips through to fully explore.) After they've explored the hex, characters can simply cross it thereafter.
The lead character in the party's marching order makes the exploration check. In passages and mazes, this is the roll that determines if you get lost or not. Other consequences TBD. If a character scouted ahead and reported back, and that character then leads the party through the hex, that hex can be considered already-explored. (Something like this also applies for return trips to the undercity bringing along new characters.) Probably rolling the exploration check involves rolling d10 if you're untrained, d20 if you're trained due to your occupation or class. (Since it's a dwarven undercity, I would imagine that all dwarves are considered trained.)
I'm not sure if you should have to roll an exploration check if you're just crossing the hex. If you do, you should either get to make the roll using larger dice, or have a friendlier table to roll on. I guess it depends on whether the exploration check is just to see if you get lost, or if it also functions as the wandering monster check. That might be good, because the person you want to help you avoid getting lost isn't necessarily the person you want in front if you need to sneak past a sleeping monster, or negotiate with a dwarven guard patrol, or lead the charge in a fight. (It could be the same person, but it's not guaranteed.) The exploration check should be a separate roll however, from any rolls that are used to procedurally generate the contents of the hex. (Your exploration roll shouldn't determine if the next hex you move into is a cavern or a maze, for example.)
Structures
Depending on the hex type, a hex may contain one or more significant structures. (Or it could be empty, although I guess the numbers I given so far make it impossible for anything but mazes to be structure-free. Hmm...) The terrain type determines both the number and the type of structures. Depending on the type of hex, structures could be things like dwarven mine-works, small caves, monster lairs, burial sites, temples/shrines, residential buildings, barracks, workshops, vaults. Presumably important public buildings are mostly located in caverns, whereas mazes mostly contain things that they want to protect or hide (like graves and vaults, maybe) or things that appear as the result of neglect (like shantytowns and monster lairs). Also, I'm calling these "significant structures" because you could imagine in-significant structures being part of the set dressing in passages or caverns. (You could walk past a row of dwarven office-worker cubicles that contain no personal effects, or there could be a block of spartan dwarven apartments that you have no need to enter or search.) This is the content that you're filling the the undercity with.
Significant structures should be like minidungeons. Ideally, it should take considerably less than a single game session to explore one structure. You might have some of these pre-keyed and waiting to be used, others could be procedurally-generated right there at the table, as long as the procedures are fast enough. Dwarven mine-works, for example, might be 1-6 rooms, with the room-types weighted toward long passages leading away from the entry. Dwarven buildings could have a handful of stock blueprints, which are then filled up using random tables. Characters should be able to explore multiple structures as a routine part of almost every session. Hexes that contain special/unique locations could contain large buildings that take one or more sessions to explore.
Secret doors
There are a few ways to get secret doors. In a maze, if there are more exits than structures, then some of the exits are hidden. Also, you may have noticed that I'm suggesting that each hex have between 2-5 ways in and out. There are no true dead-ends using the procedures I've laid out, but there are also no hexes without any barriers between them and the others. These barriers lead to secret doors in two ways. One way is, you go into a hex and roll for the number of exits. The number you get is larger than the number of unblocked sides (or, when you're randomly determining which sides have exits, you get a side that's blocked.) Voila, that exit is hidden. Also, there are going to be some hexes, or even some small areas that seem to be fully blocked off from the rest of the undercity. For each hex or area like that, random procedure decides if it's truly solid rock, or open but only accessible from a higher or lower level, or open but only accessible by secret door, or open but accessible both by secret door and stairs from above or below.
By the way, what happens if you know from its surroundings that a hex has more exits than you just rolled when you finally entered it? That means something has happened to make one of those exits unusable for now, and you're either going to have to quest for it or negotiate with a faction to get that connector fixed.
Dwarven factions
I don't know what my friend's plans are, but I do want to point out that the OSR has created a plethora of usable dwarf-types. Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons and Slumbering Ursine Dunes has given us robo-dwarves and caveman dwarves. Jason Sholtis of Dungeon Dozen and Operation Unfathomable has written gray dwarves, blue dwarves, and bat-winged dwarves. This is to say nothing of all the dwarven subtypes that Wizards and Paizo have published. Thanks to the Open Gaming License, those (or some re-written version of them) are all available for any dwarf-themed project.
Okay, I think that's enough brainstorming for now. With this framework, and some minor tweaking, one has the beginnings of the procedures necessary to start creating a dwarven city megadungeon for DCC characters to explore. You'd need to start with a blank hexmap that has the outline of the first level of the city. The terrain types here give you the start of a procedure to fill in the hexes as the characters explore, and the times and movement rates lay out how much they can explore per day. (You'd still need tables to decide "what's in this cavern?" and "which significant structures are in these passages?", etc, but this is a start.)
Camping and staying overnight in dwarven houses is pretty much mandatory after the first few forays, although intelligent use of horses and scouts could let the players focus on in-and-out play for awhile before they start going deeper. The use of passages should keep the whole place feeling more like a dungeon and less like some gigantic open space, without the same slowdown that mazes create. The use of structures should also prevent it from feeling like you're always in abstract space, while keeping the structures mostly very small should prevent getting so caught up in exploring individual buildings that you have no time to move across the larger structure. I'm trying to thread a needle, basically, but I think these procedures should avoid several undesirable outcomes ("undesirable" for the goal of feeling like you're in a sprawling dwarven warren, anyway). Only playtesting will reveal if I got it right, or show up where the mistakes are and the fixes are needed.
Humans and elves in DCC have a base movement speed of 30. Dwarves and halflings have a speed of 20. Characters with the Wild Child birth augur can have their speed altered by plus-or-minus 5, 10, or 15 depending on their starting Luck score. Wearing heavy armor can slow characters down. Wearing scale, chain, or banded mail imposes a movement penalty of -5, and wearing half or full plate imposes -10. So a DCC adventuring party without animals is usually going to have a group speed of 20 or 30.
Dogs move 40. Donkeys and mules have speed 30, ponies have speed 40, and both horses and warhorses have speed 60.
I propose to treat a character's speed as their movement points. Navigating the dwarven undercity requires spending movement points to explore and travel between hexes. The slowest character in the party determines how far the party can travel without anyone needing to forced march. The fastest characters in the party can take advantage of their speed to scout ahead and report back.
Hexes are approximately a mile across.
Although travel times are given too, the need for rest is based on using movement points, rather than the passage of time. Characters need to stop for the night and rest once they get to 0 movement points. Continuing to travel beyond that requires forced marching, which entails some element of risk. You could require that the characters have to stop to briefly rest around the time they use half their movement points, but unless you plan to have something happen during that rest, or just really want to narrate it for realism's sake, there's no reason to. (Alternatively, ignore the movement points, and use the travel times to establish the adventuring day. Travel up to 8 hours is as normal, going longer carries the risks of forced marching. Characters with low movement rates due to their species or encumbrance may begin forced marching after only 6 hours.)
Entering a hex is "free," but passing through it to come back out costs 0, 2.5, 5, or 10 movement points, depending on the terrain and on whether or the characters are exploring or crossing through a space they've already explored.
Terrain types
There are at least three common types of hexes in the dwarven undercity - caverns, passages, and mazes. There may be other common types that will need to be detailed later. There may also be special or unique hexes that would never show up on a general list. (Cavegirl's Game Stuff's The Gardens of Ynn might be a useful tool for thinking about what these uncommon hexes might be like.)
Cavern hexes
Movement point cost: Caverns cost 2.5 to explore initially, 0 to cross after exploration. Some caverns contain difficult terrain (such as weed-like or forest-like stalagmites) and cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross after exploration. Difficult caverns are relatively rare.
Time cost: Caverns take an hour to explore, half an hour to cross after exploration. Difficult caverns take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross.
Cavern hexes are mostly filled with giant, wide-open caverns. They make ideal building sites and contain 1d6 or 1d8 significant structures. They contain 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Unlike in passages and mazes, the structures are not tied to particular exits and should all be considered central.
It is impossible to get lost in a cavern hex.
Passage hexes
Movement point cost: Passages cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross. Some passages are very easy to navigate. They have wider corridors, simpler layouts, and/or better signage. These cost 2.5 to explore and 0 to cross. Some passages are more difficult to navigate. These are narrower, more winding, contain stairs or other changes of elevation, etc. These cost 10 to explore, 5 to cross. Both easy and difficult passages are relatively rare.
Time cost: Most passages take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross. Easy passages take only an hour to explore, half an hour to cross. Difficult passages take 4 hours to explore, 2 hours to cross.
Passage hexes are mostly filled with halls and corridors used to facilitate navigation between structures. Passage hexes contain 1d4 significant structures and 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Most structures are associated with a particular exit, and either can or must be accessed to use that exit. Occasionally there are central structures that can be accessed freely by anyone passing through the hex. Even the first time they explore the hex, players can always choose which exit they use to leave the passages.
It is almost impossible to get lost in a passage hex. Difficult passages have narrow walls, long winding stretches, sharp turns, weird angles, and other features that slow down movement, but, they do not present a navigational hazard. Like caverns, they can be considered fully explored after a single crossing, and unlike mazes, they carry almost no risk of losing one's way (unless the party fumbles their exploration.)
Maze hexes
Movement point cost: Mazes cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross. Some mazes are especially difficult to navigate. These cost 10 to explore, 5 to cross. Because of the risk of getting lost, and the need to fully map a maze before it can be considered explored, difficult mazes are a nightmare for adventuring parties. Difficult mazes are relatively rare.
Time cost: Mazes take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross. Difficult mazes take 4 hours to explore, 2 hours to cross.
Maze hexes are filled with halls and corridors laid out to confuse and misdirect the traveler. Maze hexes contain 1d8-4 significant structures and 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Structures in a maze are always associated with an exit. If there are more structures than visible exits (including the characters' original entrance), then the extra structures contain secret exits. The only way to find a central structure in a maze (at least initially) is to get lost.
Exploring mazes: Mazes take much longer to explore than normal passage hexes. They are designed to thwart navigation and make stymie mapmakers. Fully exploring a maze requires multiple passes through the structure. The characters must leave a maze by each of its exits in order to fully map the maze. Since all maze hexes contain an original entrance and at least one exit, it always takes at least two trips through the maze to fully map it. Getting lost in the maze does not count toward meeting the exploration requirements. (I know, I know, in real life, getting lost in a place a few times really does eventually make it easier to find your way around. Either dwarven mazes are too confusing for that to work, or if the ref is feeling generous, getting lost means that you roll +1d the next time you try to explore it.)
Until a maze is fully mapped the characters can either choose to travel a known route or leave via a random exit. Traveling a known route doesn't let you go any faster, count toward your exploration requirements, or run any less risk of getting lost, but it does let you pick which exit you use to leave the hex. Leaving via a random exit maps one route, putting you one trip closer to mastering the maze, and requires rolling 1d5, 1d4, 1d3, or 1d2 to determine which exit (including the original entrance) you use to leave the hex. For obvious reasons, when there's only one unmapped route left, you don't have to roll the dice, you just go the only way you haven't gone before. Once a maze is fully mapped, you can pretty much treat it like passages.
Getting lost in a maze: Mazes are designed to make you lost, so this is a fairly regular occurrence. Getting lost doesn't count toward your mapping totals. Typically, getting lost either means ending up back in the hex you started from before you entered the maze. Less commonly, you might end up stuck in the maze, or if you're lucky, you might find yourself outside a random exit. The other thing that might happen, if you're lucky, is you might discover a lost wonder of the dwarven underworld. (This can happen in passages too, but since getting lost there is rarer, so is finding forgotten wonders.) Lost wonders are cool, long-forgotten structures and treasures that you can only find by getting lost. There are two ways to handle this. One way would be to have a special encounter table for lost characters, and to include finding a lost wonder as a possible encounter. The other way would be to use a Luck check to resolve what happens when you get lost, and make finding a lost wonder the best possible result of the Luck check.
Exploring the dwarven underworld: When the characters traverse a hex from their entrance to one of the exits, this generally counts as exploring the hex. (It's possible to fumble this in a passage, and mazes of course require multiple trips through to fully explore.) After they've explored the hex, characters can simply cross it thereafter.
The lead character in the party's marching order makes the exploration check. In passages and mazes, this is the roll that determines if you get lost or not. Other consequences TBD. If a character scouted ahead and reported back, and that character then leads the party through the hex, that hex can be considered already-explored. (Something like this also applies for return trips to the undercity bringing along new characters.) Probably rolling the exploration check involves rolling d10 if you're untrained, d20 if you're trained due to your occupation or class. (Since it's a dwarven undercity, I would imagine that all dwarves are considered trained.)
I'm not sure if you should have to roll an exploration check if you're just crossing the hex. If you do, you should either get to make the roll using larger dice, or have a friendlier table to roll on. I guess it depends on whether the exploration check is just to see if you get lost, or if it also functions as the wandering monster check. That might be good, because the person you want to help you avoid getting lost isn't necessarily the person you want in front if you need to sneak past a sleeping monster, or negotiate with a dwarven guard patrol, or lead the charge in a fight. (It could be the same person, but it's not guaranteed.) The exploration check should be a separate roll however, from any rolls that are used to procedurally generate the contents of the hex. (Your exploration roll shouldn't determine if the next hex you move into is a cavern or a maze, for example.)
Structures
Depending on the hex type, a hex may contain one or more significant structures. (Or it could be empty, although I guess the numbers I given so far make it impossible for anything but mazes to be structure-free. Hmm...) The terrain type determines both the number and the type of structures. Depending on the type of hex, structures could be things like dwarven mine-works, small caves, monster lairs, burial sites, temples/shrines, residential buildings, barracks, workshops, vaults. Presumably important public buildings are mostly located in caverns, whereas mazes mostly contain things that they want to protect or hide (like graves and vaults, maybe) or things that appear as the result of neglect (like shantytowns and monster lairs). Also, I'm calling these "significant structures" because you could imagine in-significant structures being part of the set dressing in passages or caverns. (You could walk past a row of dwarven office-worker cubicles that contain no personal effects, or there could be a block of spartan dwarven apartments that you have no need to enter or search.) This is the content that you're filling the the undercity with.
Significant structures should be like minidungeons. Ideally, it should take considerably less than a single game session to explore one structure. You might have some of these pre-keyed and waiting to be used, others could be procedurally-generated right there at the table, as long as the procedures are fast enough. Dwarven mine-works, for example, might be 1-6 rooms, with the room-types weighted toward long passages leading away from the entry. Dwarven buildings could have a handful of stock blueprints, which are then filled up using random tables. Characters should be able to explore multiple structures as a routine part of almost every session. Hexes that contain special/unique locations could contain large buildings that take one or more sessions to explore.
Secret doors
There are a few ways to get secret doors. In a maze, if there are more exits than structures, then some of the exits are hidden. Also, you may have noticed that I'm suggesting that each hex have between 2-5 ways in and out. There are no true dead-ends using the procedures I've laid out, but there are also no hexes without any barriers between them and the others. These barriers lead to secret doors in two ways. One way is, you go into a hex and roll for the number of exits. The number you get is larger than the number of unblocked sides (or, when you're randomly determining which sides have exits, you get a side that's blocked.) Voila, that exit is hidden. Also, there are going to be some hexes, or even some small areas that seem to be fully blocked off from the rest of the undercity. For each hex or area like that, random procedure decides if it's truly solid rock, or open but only accessible from a higher or lower level, or open but only accessible by secret door, or open but accessible both by secret door and stairs from above or below.
By the way, what happens if you know from its surroundings that a hex has more exits than you just rolled when you finally entered it? That means something has happened to make one of those exits unusable for now, and you're either going to have to quest for it or negotiate with a faction to get that connector fixed.
Dwarven factions
I don't know what my friend's plans are, but I do want to point out that the OSR has created a plethora of usable dwarf-types. Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons and Slumbering Ursine Dunes has given us robo-dwarves and caveman dwarves. Jason Sholtis of Dungeon Dozen and Operation Unfathomable has written gray dwarves, blue dwarves, and bat-winged dwarves. This is to say nothing of all the dwarven subtypes that Wizards and Paizo have published. Thanks to the Open Gaming License, those (or some re-written version of them) are all available for any dwarf-themed project.
Okay, I think that's enough brainstorming for now. With this framework, and some minor tweaking, one has the beginnings of the procedures necessary to start creating a dwarven city megadungeon for DCC characters to explore. You'd need to start with a blank hexmap that has the outline of the first level of the city. The terrain types here give you the start of a procedure to fill in the hexes as the characters explore, and the times and movement rates lay out how much they can explore per day. (You'd still need tables to decide "what's in this cavern?" and "which significant structures are in these passages?", etc, but this is a start.)
Camping and staying overnight in dwarven houses is pretty much mandatory after the first few forays, although intelligent use of horses and scouts could let the players focus on in-and-out play for awhile before they start going deeper. The use of passages should keep the whole place feeling more like a dungeon and less like some gigantic open space, without the same slowdown that mazes create. The use of structures should also prevent it from feeling like you're always in abstract space, while keeping the structures mostly very small should prevent getting so caught up in exploring individual buildings that you have no time to move across the larger structure. I'm trying to thread a needle, basically, but I think these procedures should avoid several undesirable outcomes ("undesirable" for the goal of feeling like you're in a sprawling dwarven warren, anyway). Only playtesting will reveal if I got it right, or show up where the mistakes are and the fixes are needed.
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