Sir Poley's Blog, page 3
June 19, 2018
On Wandering Monsters, Part 4: Wandering Traps?
I’ve always hated traps.
There, I said it. Aside from the occasional
booby traps placed by the kobolds and the Ettercap in Into the Living Library, in my
entire GMing career, I’ve only ever used a single trap—also in Into the Living Library—and it was
really more of a plot device than anything else. It was a clearly marked death
trap to encourage the party to turn around and do some exploring and
roleplaying to find a bypass. The trap was a lock; Leonard’s Lightning
Redirector was the key.
Traps are boring. The Rogue makes a Perception Check (and fails it, because
Rogues routinely have terrible Wisdom), then passes their ensuing Reflex save,
and we all move along. Alternatively, the save is failed, and the Rogue takes
damage, which no action or decision from the Player could have avoided in any
case. Some amount of damage will just be taken and the dice will decide how
much; it’s not particularly engaging or interactive. The party recognizes this is
the cost of doing business and deducts a bit more of their profit into healing
potions.
Traps are literally business expenses. Taxes.
But I used to think the same thing about
Wandering Monsters, and lately I’ve come to love those. So far, most of what
I’ve written in this series have been things that have been percolating in my
mind for some time now and tested in Into the Living Library and City of Eternal Rain, but this is largely
new territory.
Can our Wandering Monster table include
traps?
In Living
Library, some minor traps were on
the table as “hints,” but I’m envisioning something much more
comprehensive. If traps are sufficiently foreshadowed—as Wandering Monsters can
be—they will feel less random, and therefore less like wastes of time. If they
aren’t settled solely by a series of dice rolls, but rather decisions (that may
include and affect dice rolls), they will feel less punitive.
“Wandering Traps” don’t
necessarily replace bespoke, custom-placed traps, just as Wandering Monsters
don’t replace designed set-piece encounters. They can work side-by-side,
simulating an active dungeon ecology while reducing GM prep work as a dungeon will
only need a handful of unique, hand-placed traps as the procedurally-placed Wandering
Traps can pick up the slacks.
This post will be an experiment in adding
traps as “creatures” to the Wandering Monster table described in the
last post, which looked like this:
(The previous, simplistic attempt at
including traps into this table can be seen in the Hint column for the Shepherd
of Spiders (an Ettercap) and for kobolds). Let’s see if we can do better.
In the movies, landmines never just explode. Rather, a character steps on
one, then realizes what they’ve done. A tense scene develops wherein the victim
and his comrades attempt to defuse the mine, or trick it somehow, into letting
the victim step off of it without detonating. Do they dare split up and go for
help, leaving the victim all alone?
In many ways, landmines were designed with
this aim in mind, as rather than simply killing one person, a single mine can
potentially delay an entire group for hours, which in many contexts is more
valuable.
What if in D&D, encountering a trap
doesn’t immediately mean that it goes off, but rather, the party (in
particular, whoever is in front) finds themselves on the verge of detonating the trap, and then has to figure out how to get
out of their predicament?
For traps, instead of an ENCOUNTER column, I’ll put in a NOBODY MOVE column. This entry
represents some poor soul suddenly realizing they’re in harm’s way, that is,
standing on the pressure plate (“don’t even breathe or you might set it off!”), with their foot on the
tripwire, or standing on a slowly-creaking false floor above spikes. If they
stay perfectly still, the party might
be able to devise a solution. As this replaces ENCOUNTER, it must be the most immediately dangerous roll, so other
columns ought to be foreshadowing or less-immediate threats.
Unless the party is actively searching for
traps, spotting them should be incredibly difficult. We can safely make this a
hard check, because, as mentioned earlier, failing no longer results in automatically
setting off the trap. A WISDOM (PERCEPTION) check of 20, or an INTELLIGENCE
(INVESTIGATION) of 15 if they are actively searching, is probably a good DC.
Success should be uncommon but not impossible.
However, spotting traps is almost as fun as
getting caught up in them, as it also leads to interesting choices—does the
party press ahead and risk setting off the trap, attempt to disarm it, or take
another route and hope that they can bypass it?
Now, we can lower the DC, but that runs the
risk of meaning higher-level and higher-wisdom characters will always spot traps, which is boring. So
how about we just add another column to the table wherein the party spots a
poorly-hidden trap? TRAP AHEAD can
be our second column, representing exactly what it sounds like—the party
notices a poorly-hidden trap blocking their path, and must choose to brave it
or turn back.
We’ve figured out how traps are spotted,
but unless the party actually knows what triggering the pressure plate will do, they won’t know how afraid to be.
We need to tell the party that the trap shoots poison darts without actually
shooting them with poison darts—this is where our HINT columns come in. We’re still short a column, so let’s extend
this principle further with a FALSE
ALARM column—the party encounters a trap, but it’s either a dud or
malfunctioning. The existence of duds has the added advantage of making them
never know if the trap in front of them is ‘live’ or not.
Here’s an example of how this might come
together. For a finished product, the six creature slots and both trap slots
would be filled in, similar to the table from Into the Living Library.
Alongside the entries in the table, as with
Wandering Monsters, a paragraph or so of description kept nearby is needed to
include a little more detail, and rules like DCs and damage.
Flame Jets. This trap is triggered by a pressure
plate—a disguised flagstone in the floor that depresses with weight placed on
it, causing the arrows to fire. The mechanisms are old, faulty, and weren’t
originally made by a society with particularly advanced engineering, so the
same plate can be walked over many times before it finally decides to trigger, blasting
scorching jets of flame through hidden vents in the walls. If the trap is
triggered, anyone on the pressure plate, anyone attempting to disable the trap,
and anyone else within 10 feet must make a REFLEX SAVE of 12 or better or take
2D10 fire damage. Because the pressure plate is faulty, it may not necessarily
be the partymember in front who realizes their danger—choose your victim at
random from among the party.
We can just append the traps to the end of
the Wandering Monster table. If the GM rolls a D6 (the Creature Die), only
creatures can be encountered; on a D8 (the Threat Die), higher rolls result in
traps. Perhaps D8s are rolled when the party enters new areas (that might
contain traps) while D6s are rolled when the party backtracks, or enters an
empty room. Areas that the party will spend more time in should have more
monsters and traps and use larger dice, though the balance of how many monsters
vs. how many traps will depend on the nature of the dungeon. For example, a
dungeon with a D6 creature die and a D12 threat die will have 6 creatures and 6
traps (with 31 possible unique rolls) will feel very different from a D10
creature die and a D12 threat die, which has 10 creatures but only 2 traps. A
larger number of monsters and traps will mean more variety, but also a greater
likelihood of encountering unforeshadowed traps and monsters. Consider instead dividing
the dungeon into smaller chunks, each with corresponding (smaller) tables, such
as a D4 creature die and a D6 or D8 threat die.
If the party is in a place where they’re
disarming a trap, it either means that they’re very nervous (because someone is standing on the trigger), or were
fortunate enough to spot it before anyone got in the way. The 5th
edition DMG provides scant rules on disarming traps, so I’ll write some of my
own to fit this new system. The DC to disarm the trap should be fairly low, as
the consequences of failure are quite high and it’s probably going to be the
same PC (i.e., the Rogue) who disarms every trap, and as such suffers the most
for failure. An actual plan for disarming the trap has to be presented—simply rolling
a die isn’t enough, as it puts us right back into “roll dice and take
damage, then move along” territory. Feel free to adjust the DC for dungeons
aimed at higher-level play. Similarly, the rarer the traps, the higher the DC
should be, as you run less risk of piling damage unfairly on the Rogue (who can
take one or two trap hits, but not dozens). Correspondingly, for dungeons with
many traps, I would keep the DC quite low. Here’s a first pass of the specific
rule I would use for this:
If an armed
trap is discovered (either from a “NOBODY
MOVE” or a “TRAP AHEAD”
roll), the party will often try to disable it.To disable
the trap, someone first must devise a plan—simply saying “I try to disable
the trap” and rolling a die won’t do. Instead, the Player might declare
that their character will try to wedge a knife under a pressure plate to
prevent it from triggering, or pack a scythe blade’s wall slit full of rocks to
block it from swinging, or plug a dart trap with wax to gum up the mechanism, or
the like. Creativity in this step should be encouraged.After
devising a plan, a skill check must be made. Normally, this is a Dexterity
check using Thieves’ Tools, but depending on the plan, other abilities, tools,
or skills might come into play. Regardless of the skill used, a roll of 12 or
better is a success. A particularly good plan provides advantage, while an
uninspired or foolish one incurs disadvantage. If the Party has encountered an
identical trap previously and has closely examined its workings, the Player
also gets advantage on this roll.A successful
check disables the trap, allowing the Party to bypass it safely. Depending on
the plan presented, the trap might be permanently destroyed or simply
temporarily bypassed. A failed check sets off the trap, which can harm whoever
tried to disarm it, anyone standing on the trigger, and potentially others as
well. If the trap remains a hazard after the party has left, the GM should be
sure to note on her map where the trap is and what state it’s in, in case the
party returns.
June 14, 2018
Next HPN20 Chapter By End of June
Hey all! I’m back to work on Harry Potter and the Save-Or-Die. I’m polishing up the next chapter now, and I have another couple partway-done in the bank; the current goal is one chapter per month for the time being.
June 7, 2018
On Wandering Monsters, Part 3: Slaying CoDzilla
In part
1 of this series, I admitted to having fear and misunderstood Wandering
Monsters in D&D for years, and resolved to find a way to make the system
work.
In part
2, I proposed some methods, tested both in Into
the Living Library and City
of Eternal Rain, for tying procedural content generation into the
overall narrative of your story.
Now, I’ll talk about one of the benefits of
wandering monsters—the end of the 15-minute adventuring day, and with it,
CoDzilla.
“CoDzilla” is a 3.5-era bit of D&D
slang that, for the uninitiated, means “Cleric or Druid-zilla.”
Clerics and Druids, even without much in the way of optimization, could be
enormously powerful. Close competitors were Wizards, Sorcerers, and various non-core
full casters. Starting from very low levels, these classes, through use of
spellcasting, were able to single-handedly—often single-turnedly—win major encounters. Clerics and Druids were especially
notorious, as in addition to a full complement of spells, they were no slouch
at mundane fighting, had a host of miscellaneous abilities, and, in the case of
the Druid, got the infamously-powerful Wild Shape ability and a pet grizzly bear. In contrast, a Fighter (who is maybe 25-50%
better than the bear the Druid gets as icing) gets marginally better at hitting
enemies with swords every level.
By 5th edition, the power
imbalances between classes have been substantially narrowed, with non-casting
classes getting various per-short-rest and per-day abilities that let them have
some time in the spotlight. In my current 5th-edition campaign, I’m
playing a Paladin, and, at 7th-level, don’t feel particularly behind
the party’s Wizard and Cleric. Back in 3.x, I’d be lucky if I even got a turn
in combat, and, with few skills or utility abilities, would pretty much fall
asleep outside of battle. So to a certain extent, this fix is beating a dead
horse, as changes to the rules have reduced the necessity for such a fix.
Still, anecdotal accounts have suggested to me that the caster-warrior
imbalance problem still lurks, especially at higher levels.
Solving this problem is where Wandering
Monsters come in. Those of you playing Pathfinder and 3.x D&D should pay
extra heed to this, but it’s applicable to 5e as well.
CoDzilla
Encounters with Wandering Monsters have
substantially lower stakes than pre-planned, climactic and narratively-key
ones. Typically, the foes are easier and the tension is lower as victory is
all-but assured. This means that characters have to choose between ‘wasting’ limited
per-day abilities to seek a quick victory, or suffer additional damage by dragging
out the fight by sticking with cantrips and regular attacks. The longer the
battle, the more opportunities the monster has to get in a few hits before
going down.
The devil with this decision is that,
either way, casters lose and warriors win. A Paladin’s basic attack is more accurate,
reliable, and powerful than a wizard’s cantrip, so if spellcasters withhold
their 'special’ attacks, non-casters take the spotlight. If the casters obliterate
Wandering Monsters with high-level spells, then by the time they reach the
'real’ fight (those being the pre-planned encounters, typically in dungeon
rooms rather than hallways), they’ll be relegated to cantrips while the fighters
open up with their modest per-day abilities and their more efficient
conventional attacks.
Martial classes do have some limited-use abilities, especially half-casters like
Paladins, so they are pushed into a similar dilemma (“do I use Smite on the
owlbear or save it for the true foe?”) but the stakes are much lower, as
their abilities are weaker and their conventional attacks more powerful than a
true caster’s. This means that even if the Paladins and other half-casters make
the 'wrong’ decision, they can typically make do regardless.
Now, the obvious flaw with this plan is that
at any point the party can just fall back, rest, and come back in with a full
complement of spells, right? This means that wearing the casters down through attrition
is doomed from the start, because they can conveniently heal up to 100% with a
single night’s sleep. This is why adding Wandering Monsters all by itself isn’t
enough—we have to start enforcing other rules as well, such as…
There’s a secret to the long/short rest
split of 5th edition D&D, and that’s that not all classes
benefit equally. Far and away, a short rest is more meaningful to a martial
class than a spellcasting class, and vice-versa for long rests.
Most martial classes have powerful
abilities that recover every short rest starting at level 2 or 3. For example,
Fighters get Action Surge, Paladins get Channel Divinity, and Monks get Ki.
Barbarians are a rare exception, as their key ability (Rage) is actually tied
to long rests. Rangers have no useful abilities worth noting that recharge on
short rests, long rests, or honestly at all, so there’s no helping them.
Spellcasters’ main ability—spellcasting—universally require long rests to
recover in full. Some casting classes, such as the Wizard and Druid, have
abilities that let them recover some spell slots on a short rest—but these
abilities themselves can only be used once
per long rest, so at the end of the day, are still long-rest dependent.
Additionally, martial classes, due to their larger hit dice, tend to recover
more hit points on a short rest than spellcasting classes do. But, because
casters get minor benefits from taking short rests, their players won’t be
frustrated by the need for taking them.
If you, as GM, provide many opportunities
for a short rest (which is about an hour), but keep long rests few and far
between, then martial classes can keep going while spellcasters are run ragged.
In the context of a dungeon, you can, for instance, let them take short rests
in cleared rooms as long as they put a modicum of effort into securing the room
(blocking or locking the doors, for instance), but stress that long rests are impossible.
There is simply no way to have eight relaxing, uninterrupted hours in a
dungeon; Wandering Monsters will
attack, spoiling the rest. What’s more, the constant threat of attack from the
unknown makes true relaxation unachievable. You can be upfront about this;
don’t assume the players know what you mean when you coyly say “well, you could try that, but you might be
attacked in the night.”
If the party wants to take a long rest,
they have to leave the dungeon, set up camp, and come back—which will involve
fighting their way through the Wandering Monsters that have moved into
previously-cleared areas, thus wearing the party down again and defeating the
purpose. Conveniently, all of this is simulated by the Wandering Monster
table—the GM doesn’t have to worry about actually moving monsters from room to
room. Because
Wandering Monster tables are at their heart a computer-free technological aid,
the random die rolls on the table simulates all of the movement of a real
ecosystem, much the same way that a character’s hit points simulate their
overall health, but remove a lot of the headache of doing so.
For very large dungeons, such as Paul
Jacquay’s famous Caverns of Thracia, it
at first appears simply impossible for any party, no matter how stringent they
are with spells and potions, to complete in a single long rest. In part, this
is mitigated by numerous hidden entrances into the dungeon that, once
discovered, can be used to bypass previously-cleared sections. There are also
numerous shortcuts, such as teleport pads and elevators, that can be used in a
similar manner. Still, all of that might not be quite enough, and when
designing very large dungeons, occasional points of safety can be placed that
are free of Wandering Monsters. They might have particularly secure doors, be
protected by magic, or some kind of friendly NPC or monster. Think of these as
a video game mid-dungeon save point, both in terms of how powerful an effect it
will have, and how rare it should be.
Into the Living Library relies
heavily on Wandering Monsters because they play well with the adventure’s time
crunch: each time the party faces such a monster, their consumable resources
(spells, potions, HP) are slightly depleted, and they must choose whether to
press on in their weakened state or return to campus to rest, which means
sacrificing one of their precious few days.
Wandering Monsters, tied with any kind of
external time pressure, pack more work into a single adventuring day, and with
that, the expenditure of more spells. Spellcasters’ 'basic’ attacks (cantrips
and crossbows) tend to be much less powerful than those of a Fighter, Barbarian,
or Paladin. If high-level spells and per-day abilities have to be carefully
rationed out over the course of many encounters, rather than just one or two, then
casters are brought down to the level of non-casters.
Not every adventure should include a time
pressure element, as the players will start to feel rushed and possibly even railroaded,
as the constant time demands may keep them from feeling able to pursue their
own goals. Beware Fallout 4’s Preston
Garvey, who continually dispenses timed quests that pull the player away from
doing what they want to do.
Unbalanced
As a GM, I often forget that my toolbox
includes more than perfectly-balanced encounters. It may sound like an
oxymoron, but there is a time and a place for a poorly-balanced battle, which
brings us back to the original post. Oblivion, my least-favourite Elder Scrolls
game, has highly restrictive game rules in place in an attempt to keep every
battle, whether it be against a necromancer lord or a random bandit, balanced
on a knife’s edge. Enemies and equipment level up closely in step with the
player, meaning that as the player gains power, so too does the world. The
drawback is that there are few if any “oh, crap!” moments where the
player gets in over their head. Likewise, there are very few moments where the
player simply obliterates the enemies in front of them, and, by doing so, feels
like a badass.
By all means, strive for perfect balance
and interesting terrain in your pre-made set-piece battles (such as what might
be found in a dungeon’s room, for example), but for Wandering Monsters, imbalance
is a feature, not a bug. Battles that are 'too easy’ will be resolved quickly
(saving precious game time), and battles that are 'too hard’ won’t be fought at
all—the party will turn tail and run (convincing the party to run rather than
fight a losing battle is a good subject for a later post). Battles that are
close to balanced will be drawn-out slugfests, forcing the party to draw upon
every available resource. They will take ages, and burn through per-day
abilities much faster than you intend, which in turn forces the party to leave
the dungeon, thus contributing to the 15-minute adventuring day. Remember that
easy battles will still drain the party’s resources somewhat, as even the
weakest monsters in 5e have a pretty good chance of getting one or two hits on
any character, and players will be constantly tempted to blow the trash
monsters away with their limited-use abilities, like spells and smites.
Another rarely-mentioned feature of
unbalanced encounters is that they let you use a greater percentage of the
Monster Manual when designing your dungeons, thus increasing the variety of
creatures the party can meet. Using only level-appropriate encounters limits
you to an ever-decreasing handful of creatures as the party levels up, and can
push you into placing monsters in unthematic areas just to reduce the monotony
a little. It also means that, in a few levels, when the party actually can fight the same type of high-level
monster they’ve been running from, victory will feel all the sweeter.
May 31, 2018
On the Wandering Monster, Part 2: Narrative and Foreshadowing
In part 1 of this series, I admitted to having
feared and misunderstood Wandering Monsters in D&D for years, and resolved
to find a way to make the system work.
Now, I’ll examine a few ways of looking at Wandering
Monsters that aren’t a waste of time.
One of the major criticisms with Random Encounters
(which are closely related to, but not quite the same as, Wandering Monsters)
is that they feel, well, random. You’re
walking along, minding your own business, and suddenly a lone owlbear attacks.
You’d never heard that owlbears lived in this forest, and you’ve seen no sign
to hint at their presence thus far. Once you kill it (of course you will),
nobody will ever mention them again. They are battles devoid of narrative or
stakes, and thus, they are a waste of time.
Does it have
to be this way?
These terms are used
almost interchangeably, and are very similar. In lots of ways, if we can fix
one, we can fix the other, so I’ll be mentioning both. Wandering Monsters
specifically refer to encounters found in
a dungeon, while Random Encounters seem to be encounters found in the wilderness. Wandering Monsters,
as the name suggests, usually result in a battle, while Random Encounters
(which are more neutrally-named) can just as easily be a run-in with a
travelling peddler or caravan.
Over at The
Alexandrian, Justin Alexander notes that he suspects, waaaaay back in OD&D,
that Random Encounters were intended not as a single battle, but as an entire
adventure hook. He points out that a Random Encounter could potentially
generate hundreds of bandits, complete with their own officer hierarchy and
magic items, which was obviously out of the scope of a single battle.
Potentially the army
of bandits could be a backdrop to a role-playing or stealth challenge, wherein
the party sneaks by or negotiates their way through the bandits. Similarly, the
GM could map out an entire bandit base as a dungeon, wherein the party fights
or sneaks their way in, kills the leader, takes her magic gear, and gets out.
That’s all great in theory, but to me, in practice, this
sounds like a hell of a lot of work. Is the GM seriously expected to create an
entire adventure because she rolled a 1 on a D6 for a Random Encounter roll?
What about all the Random Encounter rolls made as the party heads back to base
to sell their “liberated” bandit loot? The goal here is to reduce the GM’s cognitive load during
play, not massively escalate it.
This method of looking
at wandering monsters—that each roll potentially generates an entire new
subplot—is especially problematic if the party is already working their way
through some kind of narrative.
Except in the most
extreme sandbox-mode playstyles, most GMs don’t want a die roll to
spontaneously generate entire narratives, so D&D as a whole seems to have
mostly abandoned this idea entirely, stripping the narrative out of Random Encounters
to reduce distractions, resulting in wilderness and dungeon run-ins completely
devoid of story. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater—what
if we use the Wandering Monster roll to deliberately
hook the players into existing narratives, rather than create new ones?
Lantzberg, the setting
of City of Eternal Rain, uses this approach, though it’s possible to go further with it. In City of Eternal Rain, Random Encounter
tables can result in run-ins, or clues to the identities of, a monster and a
murderer. Additionally, some of Random ‘Encounters’ are job postings that launch
pre-written minor sub-adventures. Instead of thinking of Random Encounters as a
distraction from the adventure, why
not tailor them directly into the
adventure? Populate your Wandering Monster tables with clues, hooks, and named NPCs
or monsters and try to get the best of both worlds.
Unlike the OD&D
style of having Wandering Monsters dominate the current adventure, we want a
solution in which the wandering monster table assists the GM, rather than taking
over entirely. Think more like Google Maps—which barks directions at the
driver as she needs them—and less like a self-driving car, which obsoletes the driver
entirely.
We want a solution in
which the GM can seamlessly integrate the procedurally-generated content of a Wandering
Monster table with their own hand-made narrative content. The Wandering Monster
table handles the gruntwork of believably populating a forest or dungeon,
letting the GM focus on bigger, better things. This only works if the Wandering
Monster table is effortless (which is to say, it doesn’t require dozens of subsequent rolls to describe an entire
bandit army) and the results are difficult to separate from the GM’s
hand-crafted content. This is hard to do as long as Wandering Monsters remain completely
devoid of narrative or foreshadowing, which brings up the question: how do we foreshadow
a random roll without causing more
work for the GM?
I mentioned above the
problem of the 'Random’ Encounter, that is, that it is meaningless violence
entirely devoid of context, drama, or warning. This can
seem an inevitable result of using random tables as content generation during
play, but what if I told you it didn’t have
to be like that?
The best solution I’ve
found online can be found over at the Retired Adventurer. I shamelessly cribbed this system, with a few
modifications, for use in Into the Living Library.
In classic D&D,
when a Wandering Monster roll is called for, the GM rolls a D6. On a 1 (or 6, there’s
some controversy there), they roll again on a table of monsters. This system
replaces that entirely, but maintains a 1 in 6 chance of actually bumping into
a monster.
With this system, the
GM rolls one die for the row, and another for the column. The row determines
what kind of monster is discovered, and the column determines what information
or threat that monster reveals. For instance, a row of 7 (“Stirges”)
and a column of 3 (“Tracks”) provides a trail the party can follow,
if they choose, to find some Stirges. Column 2 (“Nearby”) means that the
next time you roll on this table, skip the monster roll and use the previous
result. This means that the party is much more likely to encounter the monster
that just spooked them, simulating it being just around the corner. The odds
are low (only 1 in 6) that the party will encounter a given monster before
seeing some kind of hint as to their existence, meaning that they don’t often feel
“random.” For potentially several sessions, the party have been
seeing bits of torn paper here and there, so someone is bound to say
“ah-HAH!” when they finally encounter the animated clouds of paper
that are responsible, creating a simple narrative for each battle.
Each monster has an
accompanying key with a paragraph or so more information describing their
nature and tactics. For example:
The Shepherd of
Spiders. A single shepherd of spiders—an ancient ettercap—makes this
level of the library its home. An ettercap is a very powerful creature to
attack a first-level party, which is fortunate, because this one won’t. The
ettercap in the library is very stealthy and has no interest in a stand-up
fight. If it is encountered, it can only be spotted on a WISDOM (PERCEPTION)
roll of 18 as it hides among the shadows in the ceiling. It will try to use its
webs to disarm the players, picking off their weapons one at a time. If the
party fails their perception check, the ettercap will steal a weapon, wand,
staff, scroll, etc. from a random character, starting with their biggest weapon
and working its way down. On a DEXTERITY SAVE of 14, a character can snatch the
weapon as it leaves its sheath/strap/etc., and discover the ettercap in the
process. Otherwise, they only notice 1d6 minutes later that their weapon is
missing. Once a weapon has been stolen, or if it has been discovered, the
shepherd of spiders will flee back to its lair in area 11. The shepherd has
been doing this trick for a long time, and is very fast. The shepherd’s goal is
to render the party sufficiently helpless that they will be killed by the other
denizens of the library, and then feast on their corpses. There is only one
shepherd of spiders; if it has been slain, then ignore further wandering
monster rolls of 2. The shepherd is devious; it will create snares with its
webs for the party while they aren’t looking.
That table and this
paragraph is all that is needed for an Ettercap to wage a one-spider Die Hard-style guerilla campaign against
the party, all without requiring one iota of brainpower from the GM. The table tells the GM when the Ettercap lays a trap, and the
paragraph tells it how it attacks (it doesn’t). Note also that the Ettercap is
a full 2 CR higher than the party’s level, meaning that it could dismember the
lot of them without breaking a sweat. This would normally rule it out of a 1st-level
adventure (greatly reducing the array of monsters available to the GM, and letting
the players get complacent as they move from one level-appropriate encounter to
the next). Elsewhere in the adventure, rules on the spider’s snare traps are
provided. If the party manages to corner and kill the Ettercap, they will feel enormously self-satisfied, as they finally
bagged the bug that had been laying traps for them.
May 29, 2018
On the Wandering Monster, Part 1: My God, What Have I Done?
It’s no secret that wandering monsters and
random encounters have gotten increasingly unpopular in recent years. I vaguely
recall playing a bit of AD&D with a babysitter when I was really young, but in practice, I started
playing “for real” in the early 2000s with the launch of 3rd
edition D&D, and it was maybe fifteen years before I even considered using a random encounter as a
GM. I’m not convinced any GM I’ve played with has ever used one. But I’m starting to realize that, in doing so, we’ve created a series of problems for ourselves, and that maybe Wandering Monsters deserve another look.
Most of the time, as a GM, I simply decided
when it was appropriate for the players to fight an enemy, and when that
decision was made, I would open the monster manual to the index of Monsters by
CR, then pick a couple monsters with a CR equal to the party. This was the
technique I taught to new players who wanted to GM for the first time. I have
near-photographic recall of every skill and feat in dozens of 3.5-era D&D
splatbooks, I know the stat modifiers of every PC race, I can tell you the BAB
and save progression of (probably) every
class, but I’m actually not even sure if the 3.0/3.5 Dungeon Master’s Guide even
has Wandering Monster tables, much
less whether they’re any good.
I remember seeing such a table at some
point—I think it was in the Planar
Handbook but I’m not sure—and scoffing. The table had something like a Pitfiendat
one end of it and an Imp at the other, which struck me (at the time) as
completely ludicrous. If a tenth-level party fought a Pitfiend, they would die.
If they fought an Imp, they would win in the first action, and we’d all be
wasting our time. I imagined the ages
it would take to pull out the dry erase board, draw the scenery, roll for
initiative, determine turn order, and see the Imp die instantly (in exchange
for no XP) and imagine precious hours of my life simply sliding away from me.
Likewise, (I reasoned) if some fool of a GM actually rolled a Pitfiend and went
through with it, their campaign was effectively over. The party would be
slaughtered, everyone would be upset and unhappy, and it would be the GM’s fault
for using level-inappropriate encounters.
“Hellish” is right. (Manual of the Planes, 2001. p. 151)
I only realize this in hindsight, but it is
deeply ironic to me that my least favourite Elder Scrolls game is Oblivion. I
hated it (by Elder Scrolls standards, which is to say that I consider it one of
the best games ever made, just not as
much as Morrowind) as soon as I left the tutorial area. In Oblivion, every
single monster is scaled to provide a perfectly adequate, but overcomeable,
challenge based on your character’s current level. If you optimize your
character at all, the game is easy from start to finish, as everything from
mudcrabs to daedra are, and will always be, slightly weaker than you. If you make
bad skill choices, the game is a merciless slog as you obtain meaningless levels
and never catch up to the world around you.
In contrast, Morrowind, the lesser-known
and substantially-uglier earlier instalment, makes very light use of level
scaling. At the start of the game, you can walk right into the ash wastes and
scale Red Mountain, where you are certain to die. The monsters there are
appropriate for high-level play. Likewise, at high levels, very little in the
Bitter Coast, which is a lower-level area, will provide a challenge. If you’re
playing at low levels and run into a Dremora (an Elder Scrolls demon-equivalent),
you run. You run like your life depends on it. This is a level of
fear and suspense that I’ve rarely felt in a tabletop game. The Morrowind AI is
pretty dumb, so the enemies don’t chase you very far or effectively, meaning
running away is relatively straightforward. If you’re lucky and a little
clever, you can take down such an enemy at low levels and grab some very not level-appropriate loot. Sure, it
“unbalances” the game, but Morrowind doesn’t really have any balance
to begin with—and you’ll feel pleased as plum with your shiny new Daedric
Tanto. Besides, if you end up too powerful for the area you’re in, you can just
gravitate to somewhere that provides a little more challenge.
It was a dark day for me when I realized that the D&D worlds I was
running were more like Oblivion (which, in my mind, can do no right) and less
like Morrowind (which can do no wrong). I floundered for a while looking for a
solution, house-ruling things that didn’t need house-rules, devouring every
alternate game system I could come across, until I stumbled across some light
in the darkness: the Wandering Monster. Justin Alexander, the genius behind the
Alexandrian, wrote an absolutely brilliant analysis of the decline and fall
of Wandering Monsters, which you can find here.
Read it. It ties into the history of
D&D, the rise of the 15-minute adventuring day, the decline of the Fighter,
and the advent of CoDzilla. Then follow that up with this,
which discusses the fallacy that I—among others—made with respect to CR and encounter
balancing, which is to say, we didn’t read the damn rules.
Being a known rules lawyer, with all the
good and bad that comes with this, is very close to my identity, so please
appreciate that, for me, this is a deeply shameful admission.
All of this happened to me about a year
ago, and honestly, I’m still reeling from the shock of it. I think that
mastering the use of the Wandering Monster is the difference between the style
of game I’m used to running—which is to say, Oblivion, and therefore, lame—and the style of game I want to run—Morrowind. It was during the initial period of shock that I wrote Into
the Living Library, an adventure that, both narratively and
mechanically, hinges almost entirely on Wandering Monsters. I borrowed and
stole a bunch of innovative ways of handling wandering monsters to pull that
off, but I think I can go further. We
can go further. We can perfect the
Wandering Monster, slay CoDzilla, reduce GM prep time, and do it all without
wasting precious gaming time.
Next up: Wandering Monsters and the
Narrative
May 25, 2018
On Towns in RPGs, Part 6: Wait, Wasn't This About Maps?
In the first article in this series, I embarked on an ill-defined
quest to figure out what, if anything, a town map is actually for in tabletop play.
In the second,
I took a look at the common metaphor comparing towns to dungeons—unfavourably.
In the third,
I proposed an alternate metaphor: that cities are more like forests than
dungeons.
In the fourth,
I looked at how forests are used in D&D to see what we could use when
thinking about cities.
In the fifth,
I got into to the nuts and bolts of designing cities for use in D&D.
Now, we’re going to break out the Gimp (or,
for you fancy folks, Photoshop) and make
some maps.
Back in the first article, I compared these
two images of medieval Nuremberg:
In that article, I argued that we can make
things easier for ourselves as DMs, and be more effective besides, by splitting
a D&D map into two separate illustrations: one to set the tone, and one for
crunch, much like the tourist map on the right. It’s ugly as sin, but if you’re
a tourist in old Nuremberg, it tells you exactly what you need and no more.
Functionally, this particular map wouldn’t be very useful in D&D (again, it
emphasizes actual streets, which we don’t care about, because towns
are not dungeons) but, because towns
are forests, we can look to existing high-functioning D&D map design—that
is to say, regional maps—as inspiration.
By adding an
illustration, which, unless you’re publishing this city, you can just steal
from the internet, you’re taking a lot of the load off of your map. The map no
longer has to be particularly pretty, it doesn’t have to show individual
buildings or roads, and it doesn’t have to fit any particular theme. All it has
to do is be easy to read, functional, and packed with information. Think about
it a little like a character sheet for your city.
Most D&D town maps
try to give a literal depiction of the exact layout of the streets (which isn’t
useful) and also serve as an
evocative piece of art (which is, but can be done better and more easily in
other means), but doesn’t provide much in the way of useful gameplay
information. So… what is useful
gameplay information?
Travel Time
Consider the map of
the area around Neverwinter Woods that I used earlier. Somewhere in pretty much
every RPG rulebook is a table showing daily travel speeds through various
different terrain types. In D&D 3.5, for example, an unencumbered human can
cover 18 miles overland on flat ground, or 12 miles per day through forests.
These values can be increased by major highways. Knowing this information, it
becomes trivial for the DM to quickly count up hexes (which are 5 miles each),
look up a few numbers on a table, and do a quick calculation to tell the party
how many days it takes to get from, say, Neverwinter to Leilon (13 hexes→65
miles→24 miles per day on a highway→2.7 days travel time, rounded to 3). This
is important information narratively, but also for game mechanics, as it
determines how much food the party must carry (which plays into the encumbrance
and wealth rules), and how many random encounters they risk, well,
encountering.
Now try to do the same calculation with
this map:
An unencumbered human can walk 300 ft per
minute, or hustle 600 ft in the same
time, though jogging through the city armed to the teeth (as most PCs are)
might attract attention. Try to figure out how long it takes to get from, say,
#14 to #18 on the map without giving up. There’s no grid of any kind, so you’ll
have to actually measure the distance. You can’t travel in a straight line
because of the intervening buildings except along the major highways, so you
can either measure it in chunks, or, I guess, use a piece of string or
something. Then take your measurement, compare it to the scale and divide it by
300 or 600 to find out how many feet it took to do such a thing, and then…
…realize that this number is actually
pretty useless. Even if you go through the above steps (which I can’t even
bring myself to do for this example, and would absolutely not do during play),
it’s not a helpful measurement. It doesn’t take into account crowds, traffic,
getting lost, being accosted by strangers, looking for a street sign that’s
hidden behind a bush, and all of the things that actually determine how long it
takes to get around in a city. So, like every other GM in history, you’ll never
look twice at the “movement per minute” table, never look at the
scale, never look at the map, and just say, “eh, it takes ten
minutes.”
If that works for you, that’s fine; you’ve
read a series of walls of text and won’t get much out of it. But if you’re like
me, you’ll always have a nagging feeling that you’re giving up.
The map of the region around Neverwinter
was created with the express purpose of being used in D&D. It is highly
specialized for exactly this purpose. The map of Sutulak here was designed, apparently,
to help with the morning commute of Sutulakers. So let’s turn the city of
Sutulak into the forest of Neverwinter.
We need to figure out the town equivalent
of forests, mountains, fields, and highways. Highways are literally highways—broad,
relatively straight avenues that cut through cities and connect key
destinations (such as a market and a gatehouse). As for plains, forests, and
mountains? They map pretty clearly to me as low, medium, and high-density
construction. Higher density leads to more confusing, twisty, and narrow roads,
as well as denser crowds, making it slower to move through these areas (both
because you risk taking the wrong turn, and you’ll be delayed by traffic).
Low-density is the opposite: the more spread-out the buildings are, the more
space there is to move between them, the less people there are doing so in the
first place, and the easier it is to see where you’re going and take the right
streets. If your town has large-scale natural elements, such as forests and
hills, they should also be included on the map. Sutulak here is criss-crossed
with bizarre inner city walls with limited chokepoint entrances, which should
also be included on the map.
Districts
In the fifth
article in this series, I argued that D&D towns should be thought of as a
small number of named, memorable districts (plus a couple of less-memorable
Hufflepuff districts). Each district can have its own distinct flavour, racial
makeup, police force, and random encounter table (if you use those), and a
memorable name.
Points of Interest
Critical buildings and
places should be marked with numbers that correspond to a key somewhere. For
the more artistically inclined, you could also pick out these buildings in
other ways, such as the Nuremberg tourist map’s large silhouettes of major
attractions.
Putting it Together
You’ve stuck with me
this far, let’s power through to the end. Let’s take this useless map of
Sutulak and turn it into a cutting-edge game aid, step by step.
1. Give it a grid. You can use a square
grid (like a pleb) or a modern,
high-tech hex grid. Either is absolutely fine. I just overlaid a hex pattern as
a new layer over the original one.
Counting distance is massively easier now.
No string or ruler needed; just count the hexes.
2. Highways and Barriers
The
various walls and highways criss-crossing the city are important both
narratively and mechanically, so let’s highlight them, too. Try to keep the
number of these small so as to be significant and memorable, don’t just connect
everything to everything else with a highway, because then we’re back at the
level of worrying about individual roads.
Red lines are highways and allow faster
movement; grey lines are walls and prevent movement barring some kind of skill check,
spell, etc. Crossing them may also be illegal.
3. Embrace Abstraction
This map still has a bunch of minor streets
and buildings confusing the issue. Here’s where we’re going to embrace full
abstraction by removing them outright. Stop seeing the trees, start seeing the
forest; there are no buildings or roads, there is only districts and density.
Let’s get this out of the way first of all: this won’t be pretty. With a proper illustration, though, it doesn’t need to be.
What I’m going to do is use different fill
textures to denote different types of hexes representing district and density.
District allocation is more of an art than a science; theoretically I could use
every walled-in subdivision as its own district, however, this crazy
criss-crossed town has too many of those to be memorable. Instead, I’ll combine
a few walled-in sections into districts, and in doing so, declare that they
have economic, cultural, and ethnic ties to each other. A real artist could do
pretty textures in these areas (like the forest texture in the Neverwinter
map), but as this is a test case, and I am not a real artist, I don’t want to
get too bogged down in aesthetics and I’ll use simple pattern fills.
Here’s the district map. Different angled
lines represent different neighbourhoods. There are five, which I’ve creatively
titled North, East, South, West, and Central. Each district (except central)
has at least one gate to the outside world and one highway. I’ve also moved the
walls above the grid layer (making them more visible) and removed the grid
outside the city as it was noisy and unnecessary.
Now we can inject building density into the
equation. Building density implies population density, which tells us how
narrow, twisty, and crowded the streets are, which finally solves our ‘movement
rate’ question.
Here we have it: five districts, clearly
delineated from each other through textures, and density represented by weight
of the lines. Central district there is packed, as befitting a city center, so
the entire district is at maximum weight. Because moving through cities has
little to do with your physical movement capabilities and more to do with
traffic and navigation skill (a Ferrari wouldn’t get you through traffic any
faster than a Honda), we can largely ignore a character’s movement stat and
base movement just off of hex density. Maybe we can come back to this, but for
the time being, let’s say you can move through low density hexes (with little
traffic and lots of clear sightlines making for easy navigation) and highways
at a rate of 3 hexes per minute, medium density hexes at a rate of 2 per
minute, and high-density hexes at a rate of 1 per minute. Highways boost speed
not only because they are broad and straight, but also because it is much
harder to take a wrong turn on them and have to double back.
If you wanted a coarser grid, you could
make each hex 300ft, and say that it took you 1 minute to move through a light
density hex, 2 minutes to move through a medium density hex, and 3 minutes to
move through a high density hex.
I also added points of interest numbers in
this step. If I were to do it again, I’d make them more distinct, such as using
the original map’s white circles, or perhaps with stylized building
silhouettes, like the Nuremberg tourist map.
Districts can also be denoted using colours,
with darkness and lightness indicating density, perhaps given borders like nations
on a world map to distinguish them a little more from each other. Gates between
walled prefectures are also important enough that maybe we could borrow a
little from dungeon maps and give them a bright, visible “door”
symbol. Also, the medium and heavy weighted areas are a bit too similar looking
for my taste, so improvements could be made there, as well.
Still, I think this is the right direction.
I’m going to let this idea percolate for a while, and maybe try it out in a
game or two of my own, before tinkering with it too much.
May 22, 2018
On Towns in RPGs, Part 5: Building a Playable City
In the first article in this series, I embarked on an ill-defined
quest to figure out what, if anything, a town map is actually for in tabletop play.
In the second,
I took a look at the common metaphor comparing towns to dungeons—unfavourably.
In the third,
I proposed an alternate metaphor: that cities are more like forests than
dungeons.
In the fourth,
I looked at how forests are used in D&D to see what we could use when
thinking about cities.
Now, we’re going to get to the nuts and
bolts of designing cities for use in D&D.
Districts, not Distance
No player is ever
going to remember, or care about, the actual distance between their current
location and the tavern they’re trying to get to. Similarly, they won’t
remember, or care about, the roads they have to cross to get there.
The absolute
most you can hope for is that they’ll remember and care about some of (but
not all of) the neighbourhoods they have to go through. In Terry Pratchet’s
Ankh-Morpork, the Shades is an extremely memorable and dangerous area. Like
Pratchett’s characters, players are going to avoid it wherever possible and yet
always find that they have to go through it. Planescape: Torment’s Hive and Fallout:
New Vegas’s Freeside have similar qualities. If you grimly tell the
players: “the quickest way to the princess is through—oh, dear—the
Shades,” they’ll have a reaction to it.
Don’t overdo it with districts; keep the
number small enough for them to be memorable. I’d recommend seven as an
absolute maximum, but as few as three is perfectly acceptable. Lantzberg,
from City of Eternal Rain, only used
three (one each for lower, middle, and upper class—end elevation). A district
can be as big as you like; feel free to simply scale them up for larger cities.
Hufflepuff
It’s no secret that in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, only two of the
four houses matter at all. If you’re not Gryffindor or Ravenclaw, you’re lucky
to get any screentime at all. However, if they were simply cut from the series,
then Hogwarts would feel terribly small, as if it were built solely for Harry
to gallivant around in, and not part of a living, breathing world. Your city
can’t just have people to tell your players who to kill and people to be
killed, it needs someone to clean up the mess after, also. From a narrative
standpoint, these people don’t matter, and will rarely be mentioned, but they
can be used to pad your world out. When dividing up your map into districts,
include a few that, as far as you’re concerned, will never see an adventure, and give it maybe one or two notable
characteristics. These are areas that are primarily residential, or involve industries
not relevant to adventure (i.e., anyone other than an alchemist, blacksmith, or
arcane university). Feel free to leave these places utterly devoid of points of
interest.
In the adventure written for Lantzberg, for
instance, there’s little to no reason to ever visit the castle at the peak of the
hill. It’s there for verisimilitude (someone
has to be in charge) and for the GM to hook later adventures to (which I’ll
elaborate on in my next point), but mainly it’s just there to make the city
seem larger. Similarly, most of the buildings in Castleview are manors of rich
and important citizens, each one of which might have any number of use for a
band of adventurers, but only a handful are actually fleshed out. After all, it
would hardly feel like a living, breathing city if every single building was
tied into a single adventure, would it?
Gaming is full of Hufflepuff Houses: the 996
Space Marine chapters that aren’t lucky enough to be Ultramarines, Blood
Angels, Dark Angels, or Space Wolves; D&D fiends that are neither lawful
nor chaotic, Morrowind’s Houses Dres
and Indoril, and any of Homeworld’s Kushan
other than Kiith S'jet. This isn’t laziness; they’re there for a reason: they
make the world feel larger.
Try to design a city large enough, and
versatile enough, that once the current quest is wrapped up, you can inject
some more content into it without serious retconning. This is part of where
your Hufflepuff-tier-neighbourhoods come in—maybe one of them has been under
the heel of a violent gang the whole time, but the party never found out
because they never went there. Once the players have started to clear out your
adventure ideas and points of interest, there’s still plenty of room to pump
some more in without the city bursting like an over-inflated balloon.
The map I posted earlier probably
represents the upper limit of how detailed you should make your city. A GM
could run a few more adventures out of Lantzberg, but a long-running campaign
would probably benefit from a bit more room to breathe.
What are the kinds of things a DM really needs to know about a city? D&D3.5
had little statblocks for cities and settlements that broke down the
demographics of different areas, but that’s probably more granular than is
actually necessary. Remember—every bit of detail that you include has the
potential to distract the GM from finding the fact they actually need. It isn’t
for instance, particularly important to know that 12.5% of a neighbourhood’s
population are halflings while 54% are elves, but it might be useful to know
that a neighbourhood has a notably large elf population and an often-overlooked
halfling minority.
the Watchers Watch?
One infamously common thing that comes up
in D&D is the city watch. It’s shadow looms large over every action the
party, and your villains, will take, so it’s worth thinking about them a little
bit. Its best to err on the side of making them too weak rather than too
strong, as a powerful, well-organized law enforcement group can really put a
damper on the opportunities for adventure. The counter-argument is that if the
city watch isn’t strong enough to threaten the party, then the party
effectively has the run of the city; my preferred answer to this problem is to
give the local lord a powerful knight or champion who can be used as a
beat-stick against major threats to law and order (like the PCs) if need be,
but can plausibly be busy enough with other problems to leave some for the
party to handle.
When deciding who the local authorities
are, almost anything you can come up with is more interesting (and historically
plausible) than a centralized, professional police force. Here’s a few
examples:
militia organized by local guildsA
local gang that provides protection in exchange for money and doesn’t want
outsiders muscling in on their turfA
semi-legitimate religious militant orderA
mercenary group funded by a coalition of wealthy merchants (who just so happen
to overlook their own crimes and corruption)
Don’t get too bogged down in their stats;
just pick a low-level NPC from the back of the Monster Manual and write down who they work for. Different
neighbourhoods can share the same organization, but try to prevent a single
organization from policing the entire city.
By breaking up law enforcement by district,
you also prevent the entire city dogpiling on the party when they break a law, like
you see in video games. If the party robs a house in the Ironworker’s District,
they can lay low in the Lists, where the Ironworkers’ Patrol has no
jurisdiction, until the heat dies down.
All those numbers you see scattered over
D&D cities? Now’s the time to add them. Each one should correspond to a description
in a document somewhere. These descriptions can be as long or as short as you
wish. For example, on the short end, #1 from Lantzberg just has this to say:
However, and I won’t get into too much
detail for fear of spoilers, some of those numbers are elaborate, multi-page
dungeons.
While you should endeavour to keep the
number of districts low, there is no ceiling to how many points of interest you
should put into the city. Don’t burn yourself out. If you can come up with six,
put in six. If you can come up with fifty, put in fifty.
A point of interest can be anything from a scenic
overlook to a toll bridge to an elaborate sewer system packed with kobolds and
giant rats and treasure. They can be as fleshed out or as minimal as you are
comfortable with. There’s a sweet spot that varies from GM to GM, as if you
include too much detail you suffer from information overload as the party
approaches the point of interest (sixteen pages of description, for instance,
for a single shop is less than helpful), while too little information might
lead to you having to do too much on the fly. I like maybe one to three
sentences per point of interest, or per room in a point of interest if it is important
enough to warrant its own map (I typically only map dungeons).
I’ll write a series on
handling random encounters later, but for now, breaking up encounters by
district is a convenient way to do it. More dangerous districts, for instance,
might have muggers or even monsters that attack (especially at night). If
you’re going to use random encounters in your campaign, creating a table for
each district lets you use your local colour to affect actual game mechanics.
Castleview, for instance, is very safe due to constant patrols by the Lady-Mayor’s
Watch, while the flooded Lists are full of man-eating fungi, ghouls, criminals,
and who knows what. This lets you follow the age-old advice to “show,
don’t tell.” You don’t have to say
“this area is full of crime,” you can show the players this by throwing some criminals at them.
This post has already
gone on way longer than intended. Next time, we’ll use what we’ve learned to
answer the original question and make better town maps.
May 17, 2018
On Towns in RPGs, Part 4: The Cobblestone Jungle
In the first article in this series, I embarked on an ill-defined
quest to figure out what, if anything, a town map is actually for in tabletop play.
In the second,
I took a look at the common metaphor comparing towns to dungeons—unfavourably.
In part 3, I proposed an alternate
metaphor—that cities are more like forests than dungeons.
Now, we’re going to draw parallels between
forests and cities to see what implications there are to a GM.
Every GM with even a gram of experience has
sent their party through a forest at some point. Forests are almost as familiar
an environment to GM as dungeons, while running urban adventures is a continual
source of confusion and worry. So let’s see what we can learn about running an
adventure by pulling ideas from forests.
The way I often conceive of D&D worlds
is in layers. Each layer contains one or more smaller areas, on which you can (metaphorically)
click, zoom in, and see more subdivisions. This mindset might be a result of video
games like Final Fantasy where the
overworld and dungeon areas were strictly divided into different screens, but I
find it helpful on the tabletop as well: there’s the World, which includes many
Regions, which each in turn have many Points of Interest, which themselves have
Rooms.
Most campaigns will include only one world,
and even if campaigns include multiple, they tend to each only have one Region.
In Star Wars, for example, the
concept of a “planet” and a “region” tend to be synonymous—Tatooine
is a desert, Hoth is a tundra, the moon of Endor is a forest, and so on. Naboo
is pretty unique in this context in that it effectively has two regions—an
ocean and a forest. In D&D, a great example of a multi-world setting is Planescape, which features planes such
as the Plane of Fire and the Outlands (which are often thought of as single-region),
as well as several major metropolises, most famously Sigil.
“Regions” in a typical D&D
world would include a specific forest, or mountain range, or desert. “The
Westwoods” would be a single region, “forests, generally” is
not. Region-level travel is typically measured in days or weeks, rather than
rounds or minutes, so GMs tend to lean heavily on procedural content generation
like random encounter tables to sprinkle these days or weeks with notable
events and discoveries along the way. These random rolls accompany bespoke
content created manually by the GM, such as a monster selected directly from
the Monster Manual, or pre-written
NPC encounters.
Each Region is a container for one or more
points of interest. These are things like magical springs, taverns, washed-out
bridges, and even entire dungeon complexes. In a video game like Final Fantasy or Baldur’s Gate, in an adventure site, the game would zoom in to a
level where you would actually see your characters walking around where you
direct. When using an adventure module, points of interest will include maps to
a scale measured in feet, rather than miles. At their most modest, a point of
interest can be a simple skill challenge (how will we cross the river with the
bridge washed out?) or comment “on the fifth day of travel, you see Lonely
Mountain crest on the horizon”), and at their most complex, a point of
interest is multi-session crawl, such as the entire Caverns of Thracia.
When people try to think about a city as a
dungeon, they’re really saying that a city is on par with a point of interest
In the diagram above, Mos Eisley (a city)
is a Point of Interest (a dungeon-scale site) divided up into buildings (which
are Room-scale locations; important ones would have their own keyed entries
like a dungeon’s room would). Elsewhere in the same Region (the Deserts of Tatooine)
is the moisture farm that Luke grew up on, which is also divided up into rooms,
such as the room Luke works on C-3P0, and the kitchen, where blue milk is consumed.
In this view, streets are akin to the hallways of a dungeon, and buildings are
like rooms. Every building, street, and lamp post is important, as they might
provide cover in a shootout or an obstacle in a chase.
By similar logic, when I argue that a city
is a forest (that is to say, a region-level area), I’m saying that the city
should be bumped up one step on the scale:
If Mos Eisley is bumped up to be its own
region surrounded by the deserts of Tatooine,
rather than inside the deserts of Tatooine,
it leaves more room for fleshing out its own components, which are dungeon-tier
Points of Interest now. Travel around Mos Eisley is handled in an abstract way with
a die roll for random encounters every hour or so (*rolls* “uh-oh, you’ve
been pulled over by Stormtroopers!”) rather than dungeon-crawl-esque
movement (“hrm, should we take a left or a right at the bantha?”)
When running an adventure in a city, don’t
sweat the details. It doesn’t matter what street the party has to take, and it
doesn’t matter how many minutes or rounds it takes to get there. By ignoring
these details, you aren’t giving up or giving in—you’re being efficient. You
wouldn’t describe every tree in a forest and wouldn’t call for a Climb check
for every hill; similarly, you don’t need to talk about or think about every
road and intersection.
If, for some reason, it is critically important
that building A (say, the Temple of Heironeous) is directly across the street
from building B (say, the temple of their hated enemy, Hextor) for narrative
reasons, then note this in their keyed descriptions. In many ways, the temples
of Hextor and Heironeous together would function as a single larger Point of
Interest. Similarly, in Terry Pratchett’s Men
at Arms, it is critically important for murder-mystery reasons that the Guild
of Assassins shares a wall with the Guild of Fools. However, what isn’t important is how many left turns
and right turns it is to get to the Guilds of Assassins and Fools from the watch
house. The distance between the watch house and the guilds is abstract (because it doesn’t matter
beyond broad generalities), while the distance between the two guilds is concrete (because it really matters).
Enough
A city map is only one layer to the
adventure, and is not, in itself, sufficient to run an urban adventure—but it’s
a start. Various books, such as the third-edition-era Cityscape, provide advice for creating cities at the regional level, that is, drawing major
roads and creating districts and neighbourhoods and such. This part’s easy and
fun, but it’s the next step (“okay, what do we actually do here?”) where I as the GM start
to panic, and, I’d be willing to bet, other GMs do as well.
What’s missing is dungeons. Points of Interest. It’s not enough to simply say
“ah, this is the Hive, it’s full of scum and villainy,” you have to say
to yourself “in the Hive is the Mortuary, which is a dungeon.” It’s
around that point that it is appropriate to grab the graph paper and start drawing
hallways and rooms and chests and traps—classic D&D stuff. Once you’ve got
your dungeon, it’s a simple matter of hooking the players, which is no
different than with a wilderness dungeon—rumours, mysterious letters, job
postings, and all the usual tricks can be used freely here.
Making an urban dungeon is very similar to
a wilderness dungeon, but you have one or two extra considerations: the
authorities, and the peasants.
Law Enforcement
One way or another, you need to keep the
pesky authorities out of the dungeon. Either they’d arrest the PCs, or they’d
arrest the vampires, and both ways are boring. There’s loads of ways to pull
this off, but here’s a few examples:
PCs are the authorities (either
full-time, like a fantasy SWAT-team, or are hired in as mercenary contractors)The
law enforcement are the monsters (i.e., the vampires or whatever have
mind-controlled or corrupt guards protecting their ‘dungeon’)The
law enforcement has no authority in the dungeon (which, like the Mortuary
earlier, is ruled by a powerful faction, in this case, the Dustmen of Sigil)There
is no centralized law enforcement (each district is controlled by its own
faction, gang, or guild, and whoever has local authority has no interest in the
dungeon)
Torches and Pitchforks
If there really is a fully-blown dungeon
operating in a town, something has to have prevented the local populace from
rising up against it, torch-and-pitchfork style.
peasants are cowed into submission (the “seemingly-ordinary village in
Transylvania” solution)The
peasants don’t know about the dungeon (the “cult in the sewers”
solution)The
peasants are in on it (the “Hot Fuzz” solution)“I Go Find Some
Berries or Something”
In a forest, if the party is low on food
and a player says the above sentence, no GM would just let them find berries. Berries represent—quite literally—a free
lunch, which proverbially doesn’t exist. At the very least, a skill check is
needed, and a low enough roll provides the possibility of danger (consuming poisonous
berries, being attacked by giant owls on the way, that kind of thing). There are free berries out there in a forest
for anyone to pick, but finding them requires certain skills and the accepting
of a degree of risk.
As a GM, keep an eye out for the “free
berries” of the city. In the modern world, we’re used to municipal
governments providing many services free-of-charge. Fire fighters and police
can be called in an emergency, there are charities and food banks if you’re
down on your luck, and (depending on your country and insurance situation),
hospitals and clinics can be gone to if you’re sick or injured. Our phones can
find these resources for us and provide easy-to-follow directions to their
doors.
In the world of D&D, things are not so
simple. Standing police forces are a modern invention; in the past in many
cities, guilds organized militias to patrol certain areas at night if at all.
Large stretches of the city might have no law enforcement at all, or (for
example) perhaps on Tuesdays—the night that the infamously corrupt Shoemaker’s
Guild patrols the streets, lawlessness might be preferred. If you’re sick or
injured, it’s up to you to figure out which doctor is legitimate and which is a
scammer. A PC can’t just walk into the office of a good doctor any more than
they can just go pick some healing herbs in the woods—both require local
knowledge, experience, and/or a skill roll.
May 15, 2018
On Towns in RPGs, Part 3: Towns are Forests
In the first article in this series, I embarked on an ill-defined
quest to figure out what, if anything, a town map is actually for in tabletop play.
In the second,
I took a look at the common metaphor comparing towns to dungeons—unfavourably.
If you just stumbled on this post, I
encourage you to go back and read parts 1 and 2. Go on; I’ll wait. Nope, I
lied; I’m going on without you.
Towns are forests.
I don’t mean that in a wishy-washy, poetic
sense, but rather, in a very grounded, gamey sense. If a GM can run an
adventure in a forest, they can run an adventure in a town. This might sound
crazy, but bear with me.
D&D?
Here’s a region-scale hex map showing
Neverwinter Woods, from the 5th edition Starter Set, and it’s the kind of D&D forest that I have in mind as I talk about them.
Forests are as classic a D&D location
as taverns and dungeons. Maybe it’s personal bias, having grown up in the
Pacific Northwest, but overwhelmingly the most common wilderness environment I’ve
played in have been forests. In the world of D&D, “Nature” means
“Forest"—just take a look at the Ranger and Druid classes if you need
proof. Both of those classes are flavours of "protectors of nature,”
and how many of you just pictured them in a forest somewhere? Sure, there could be Druids of the mountains or
desert (which actually sounds like a really cool character idea), but if ten
players made ten Druids, nine of them would be forest-themed.
In D&D, forests can be somewhat
dangerous, but tend to have nowhere near the threat density of a dungeon. Forests
can contain predators, monsters, bandits, and the like, but in any campaign
I’ve been a part of, they’re encountered on the order of once or twice a day, not every few minutes, as you would
in a dungeon.
It is possible to get lost in a forest, but
navigation is typically handled by a skill check or abstract statements of
intent, such as “we head north until we find the ruined temple,”
rather than “I’ll take a left around this tree, then a right around that
tree,” and so on.
Forests can
be the adventure locale itself, but far more commonly, a forest is more like a
sea connecting “points of interest"—washed out bridges, troll caves,
ruined temples, sacred groves, and so on. Those
areas are the adventure locations, and often come with their own maps—they may,
in fact, be dungeons themselves. These points of interest might be sources of
information or resources, might be quest-givers, skill challenges, battles,
treasure, or any combination of the above.
Forests might feature an occasional choke
point, such as a river with a single safe crossing or a cliff with one shallow
ascent, but by and large permit largely unconstrained (if slow) movement in any
direction. They may have paths or streams that guide movement in certain
directions, but in most cases, cutting it cross-country is an option.
Forests can provide as much assistance as
they do threats. In a forest, hunting and gathering for food is relatively
straightforward, and you’re as likely to encounter a helpful woodsman or benevolent
sprite as a ferocious owlbear. However, if you aren’t trained in Survival (or
the game’s equivalent), then you’re likely as not to eat something poisonous or
stumble into a den of wolves.
To summarize, in an RPG, forests have the
following key characteristics:
to moderate threat densityAbstract
navigation handled by a simple skill checkCan
be an adventure site in and of itself, but is more often used as a medium to connect adventure sitesSlightly
to completely unconstrained movement marked by rare but notable chokepointsCan
provide food, sustenance, and aid, if you know what you’re looking for. If you
don’t have those skills, such an attempt might end in disaster.What are Cities in
D&D?
Let’s go through the above section and re-flavour
it for cities and see where that gets us.
In
D&D, cities can be somewhat dangerous, but tend to have nowhere near the
threat density of a dungeon. Cities can contain murderers, monsters, muggers,
and the like, but in any campaign I’ve been a part of, they’re encountered on
the order of once or twice a day, not
every few minutes, as you would in a dungeon.
This fits, though the threat density might
be higher or lower, depending on the city and neighbourhood—much the same way
as a dark, cursed forest might have more encounters than a park.
It
is possible to get lost in a city, but navigation is typically handled by a
skill check or abstract statements of intent, such as "we head north to
the inn,” rather than “I’ll take a left at this intersection then a
right at the next one,” and so on.
Spot on. Instead of Survival or Knowledge
(Nature), a skill like Gather Information or Knowledge (Local) is used to get
around.
Cities
can be the adventure locale itself,
but far more commonly, a city is more like a sea connecting “points of
interest"—criminal hangouts, vampire nests, temples, palaces, and so on. Those areas are the adventure locations,
and often come with their own maps—they may, in fact, be dungeons themselves.
These points of interest might be sources of information or resources, might be
quest-givers, skill challenges, battles, treasure, or any combination of the
above.
Also fits. In a city, a small handful of
buildings might be labelled and even mapped. Typically these are critical
services or ‘dungeon-like’ constructions, such as villain’s lairs, sewers, castles,
and the like.
Cities
often have the occasional choke point, such as a river with a single bridge or
a wall with one gatehouse, but by and large permit largely unconstrained
movement. They may have highways or boulevards that guide movement in certain
directions, but in most cases, cutting through alleys or neighbourhoods is an
option.
Not every city has clear, major roads
cutting through neighbourhoods, but I suppose not every forest has convenient
paths to convey the party from one location to another. This actually brings up
some interesting gameable ideas—for instance, in a forest, typically a GM
wouldn’t call for a skill check to avoid being lost if the party is simply
following a path, but would if they are hiking through sheer wilderness.
Similarly, perhaps major streets and highways represent 'automatic’ navigation,
while winding local roads and alleys require some kind of skill check?
Cities
can provide as much assistance as they do threats. In a city, shopping or
begging for food is relatively straightforward, and you’re as likely to
encounter a helpful guard or charitable priest as a swindler or criminal.
However, if you aren’t trained in Knowledge (Local) (or the game’s equivalent),
then you’re likely as not to be caught up in a scam or stumble into a den of thieves.
This largely fits, although the exact skill
to replace Survival is a little less clear. Some games have a Streetwise or
similar skill, which D&D lacks. Depending on circumstances, the GM might
call for a Sense Motive/Insight, Gather Information, Knowledge (Local), or other
skill as a replacement for Survival.
To
summarize, in an RPG, cities have the following key characteristics:
to moderate threat densityAbstract
navigation handled by a simple skill checkCan
be an adventure site in and of itself, but is more often used as a medium to connect adventure sitesSlightly
to completely unconstrained movement marked by rare but notable chokepointsCan
provide food, sustenance, and aid, if you know what you’re looking for. If you
don’t have those skills, such an attempt might end in disaster.
I think this analogy fits enough that we
can move forward and try to draw some conclusions to help a GM run an urban
adventure, and to help a mapmaker make a useful urban map.
May 11, 2018
I’m On Twitter
Having finally caved to the realities of modern life, I now have a twitter. You can get updates and bad puns at @TheSirPoley. Surprisingly enough, SirPoley was taken–just like on XBox Live.
Keep an eye out for a polar bear with a goatee, folks.
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