A Bigger Pile of Gear

In a recent post I suggested letting a group of starting players pick their gear from a pool of cards.   The miserly way I tailored the gear available made the whole experience pretty hardscrabble.  Since then, I had the idea of flipping that on it's head and making the players wealthy, petty gentry.

They have as much stuff as their porters can carry.  You would need to decide how many porters, beaters, link boys, personal assistants, personal guards and pack animals allowed to the group as a whole.  And I think you would have to shift the whole delve from one of trying to find some valuables to a kind of difficult, big game hunt.  So, for example, the party is trying to kill a cave bear, or leucrotta or something.

In this kind of scenario resource management would still be an issue-- nets might get torn, lots of food consumed by the hirelings, etc-- but it would be less about survival and more about problem solving.  Should you dig some pit traps?  Drive the beast into spikes or nets?

You would probably need to have lots of gear cards on hand, because money is not an issue; if the party wants 200' of rope then they can give that to their porters.  I would also want to make cards for outrageously expensive stuff that you wouldn't consider normal dungeon gear, like fireworks, cages, and jugs of tranquilizer.

And what to do after the hunt?  This could just be a fun one-off, or you can start tallying the hireling costs-- maybe the family has finally tired of the extravagance of this bunch of layabouts-- so players will have to sell off remaining equipment and decide whether to keep any hirelings and how many.

Here is a draft sheet of how you might handle beaters:

I figure they will be average strength and be focused of flushing and driving game, but can still carry a few things.

Here is a sheet for porters:

They're strong, or know how to balance loads well, and they all carry clubs for their own defense.  The check boxes can be used to show hit points.  Yep, this is basically treating them as beasts of burden (see here and here), but you are wealthy and and consider that their lot in life.

Of course you don't need cards to do this, you could have lists of gear printed out, index cards for each hireling, and have players write down what they want to take, but the cards would make the process more visible for everyone sitting at a table and also quicker, being able to shift gear from place to place without having to erase.

Public Domain Gear Images 2

Here are a few more images of adventuring gear or adventuring equipment that you can use any way you wish:
Shovel:

Sledge or sledgehammer:

 Pick or Pickaxe:

Axe:

Chain:

Lock:

Manacles or handcuffs or irons:

 Caltrops:

Horn:

Canoe:

Snowshoes:

Ice Axe:

Vials:

and some spell book candidates:

Belladonna:

Wolfsbane:

Public Domain Gear Images

Here are some public domain images of adventuring gear or adventuring equipment that you might find useful for handouts:
Rope:

spikes:

and a Mallet:

Sacks:

Grapnels or grappling hooks:

Torches, candles and a lantern:

and two possible oil containers:

Bottles:

a 10' pole:

Crowbar or prybar:

Basket:

and backpacks or rucksacks:

That should cover most basic, traditional D&D dungeon gear I'd think.  I left out weapons and armor to keep it simpler but can try to post some later if people want.  If there is other piece of gear you might need, let me know, I might be able to scrounge something up.  If you would like these in the same card format as I posted previously, let me know and I'll work on that.

Also, these are not my target quality, I would prefer higher resolution images with a consistent style, but this is what I've managed to find in the public domain in the last five years or so.  I hope you can use them to make some cool stuff.

A Pile of Gear

You're down and out.  You heard a recent landslide uncovered a rumored tomb location.  You and folks you know from sitting outside the alehouse gather all the gear you can and throw it in a pile.  Decide how to share it out before heading off to find you fortune:

_____________________________________________________________________

I'm DMing ~7 folks from my work today.  Only two of them have any experience with D&Ds.  I thought I might try this as a new way of starting out.  The cards will be cut up and put on the table between them in a pile.  They'll be asked to sort it out, no rules as to how many each character gets except encumbrance*

You've probably heard of fast packs.  I never really liked them for the same reason I don't like pregens, they sacrifice player choice for expediency.  My solution over the years has been a compromise between those two goals.  You can see my forms here.  I gave players a pre-made character sheet that has a basic set of gear, like food, water, bedroll-- no use spending valuable time on boring stuff like that-- and then had them make a few limited choices about weapons and other typical dungeon gear like rope and torches.  Money wasn't involved.

This has worked fairly well, it's fast, gear is limited enough to be important, and players get to make some choices.  One aspect that it isn't good at is thinking about the gear the group as a whole might need.  Players tend to make individual choices.  With my more experienced players an outgoing player might start quarterbacking "I'll get a lantern, who is getting rope?"  I tried solving this by making a record sheet for the party as a whole, but that was just an extra step and quickly forgotten once play started.

I thought I'd try the method above this time.  Players can assume they have waterskins and some bread and cheese, maybe, but nothing else.  The party as a whole will need to decide who gets the few precious bits of armor, the best weapons and, the few shields.  Hopefully this will also get them thinking about the roles each of them will play in their expedition.

I hope for a more desperate, gritty feel to the first dungeon delve.  I'm hoping this won't feel too constraining or boardgamey.  I plan to include some armor and weapons in the dungeon that players will be able to immediately use.

*Also, I read recently on a blog about "strength-based encumbrance."  I can't remember where.  That phrase intrigued me, encumbrance has always been affected by strength.  So I thought, does it mean encumbrance derived simply from the STR stat?  Interesting, I'll try that.  So today I'll try an even simpler encumbrance system than the one I've been using:  You can carry a number of things equal to half your strength.  Armor and weapons are included in those things.  We'll see how it goes, but I'm hoping this will make hireling bearers and pack animals much more real as the game progresses.

Bartering Gear

This is for R, thanks for the request.  My first real edition was 1e AD&D, and in it Gygax compares adventuring equipment prices to those of the Gold Rush days.  It always made sense to me that there would be merchants offering as many torches and bundles of rope as you needed but at a steep price inflation.

But bartering could be an interesting proposition.  I think most barter systems are one step away from using a currency; if you're trading chickens for swords it will eventually be easier to standardize on the value of things in chickens or swords.  But standardizing implies authority and enforcement and some places might be far from civilization.

So bartering could give a nice flavor of either being in a post apocalyptic world where there is no government and what is dredged from the wreckage of the former world is always unexpected and hard to put values on, or the savage frontier where merchant houses and authorities are far from the trading post.

Bartering could just be handled by roleplaying out each encounter with a merchant.  I usually do just this, rolling reaction rolls to determine if they have requested items or not, and how much they will ask for them.

But that doesn't help the busy DM much and it doesn't give the players a sense of a teeming market place.  So, can we come up with a mini-game to help?

After thinking about it, I think a dice drop chart of the most common gear would work.  Take a sheet of paper and split it up into sections for each piece of gear.  Cheaper, more common items can have bigger sections. 

Orange will give sacks for torches or spikes, sounds like a crappy deal.  How do you like my ghetto office dice?

Drop a d4 and a d6.  Read the d6 as a d2, 1-3=1, 4-6=2.  The d2 is what the merchant is willing to give, the d4 what they want.  If you pair up d4s and d2s of the same color and have three or four sets of different colors, you can let each color represent a particular merchant.  Throw all the dice at once.

Let the players look at the market.  It should sometimes be possible to identify strings of possible trades: this guy has an excess of rope, this guy over here needs it, etc.  Players with exceptional Charisma can shift the numbers on one of the dice for each merchant up or down one.  You can roleplay out the rest.

Waddaythink?

Party Equipment Record Sheet II

Here is a revision of my party equipment record sheet. Thanks to the suggestion of the fabulous Mr. Reints, I've added a half page for recording party treasure:

Pdf here.

The idea is to write treasure found in easy to decipher sections: scroll, potions, weapons and armor. There should probably be other sections.

I'm not that satisfied with it, but hey, I just spent like an hour looking for a damn public domain image of a halfway decent jewel and failed. I may revise this for myself later, but instead of inundating you with a bunch of revisions, in the spirit of fostering DIY, here's a zip file of all the images in the above document as pngs. Use them as thou wilt.