Misc V

Dungeon Telephone
Run your players through your average dungeon.  Ask them to map and don't correct their errors.  Next party, run them through the dungeon using the first party's map as the literal dungeon.  Repeat.  I wonder what the dungeon would eventually look like.  My guess is that it what devolve into a 10' corridor in a square with rooms off of it.  Maybe eventually eroding into a single straight hallway with a few rooms.

Alternate experiment run another DM's dungeon making clear additions and revisions to your own taste, then pass it to another DM who will do the same, and so on.  What would that dungeon eventually become?  I have a feeling it would look very much like a megadungeon made by a mad archmage with giants in rooms next to orcs with pies.  I'm not certain of that though.  Maybe it would be come more bland over time, something like caves of various humanoids.

Precision Backgammon Dice
I'm ashamed that I consider myself a lover of precision dice and didn't know until last week that you can actually buy nice round-faced backgammon dice that are milled from acrylic like casino dice.  They are pricey, but I'd like to buy some eventually.

Minecraft Nascent Module Properties
I almost made a whole post for this but I'm not sure how many Minecraft players I have as readers.  Imagine a procedurally-generated sandbox game that you can build whatever you want, like Lego.  What do you do?  It seems after mastering the early survival phase of the game people often crave challenge created by human brains.  You can download free maps made by people.  There are several types of these, but the most popular by far, are called CTM maps, or "Complete the Monument".  So, they give you a clear goal, find 16-19 doodads and bring them safely to a particular place.

What interests me most is the conventions that have become accepted through play.  First, there is no pretense at a natural setting or reason for areas, like a megadungeon, you just have snow-themed area A over here and Lava Lake B over here because.  However, these are laid out on a very clear grid pattern with intersections.  The intersections have four directions and each are is named with signs.  It seems players getting lost is considered the height of unfun.

Another odd custom, is that the main threat of these maps, monster spawners which can be destroyed or disabled by lighting them up, are put out in clear sight.  Sometimes they might be hidden behind one layer of shallow wall, but the courteous convention seems to be making sure players know exactly what threats lie ahead of them and where.

I'm not sure what to make of this.  On one hand I have the feeling these are attempts to set up challenges that don't require you reading the Map-makers mind, which is great.  On the other hand there is a weird contradiction here of players clamoring for difficult, but not too difficult challenges.  The maps have a reputation as being hard, the most well known series being called "Super Hostile," yet there are chests placed about with resources and weapons for the player in phases of the map where they will need them.  This gives the whole thing a very video-gamey Super Mario feel to me.  There might be some of the same balancing of threats to capabilities in my own games but I like to think I try to hide it behind the veneer of plausible verisimilitude.

p.s. Almost have my Secret Santicore request finished.  Just one more idea to nail down then I'll mail it off.  I'll blog about it after the collection comes out-- I think surprise is part of the fun of the endeavor.

Port Specific Trade II

Just a short post.  Some more ideas on dice drop trade charts unique to specific ports:

• A better artist than I might actually have the dice drop chart look like a map of its port so it's easy to know which port's chart you're looking at.
• If you use the method I suggested for determining what goods merchants want, you run into a weird issue.  Imagine a northern port that predominately ships lumber and hides but wants cloth and pottery.  To make those results come up more frequently I'd need to make the spaces for both bigger on the dice drop chart (or have more spaces scattered about).  That means a merchant is just as likely to have pottery and cloth as the ports biggest exports.  I suppose you could make some interesting adventure hooks out of this: a merchant ship stuck in port and shunned by all the local merchants, or whatever.
• I really liked the idea from the dragon article that made the profit of trade based on distance from port.  My barter idea while even simpler undercuts that whole idea.  I wish I could have both.  But I suppose the "taking goods farther gets more money" is abstract in a way that "this port has an abundance of hides and a demand for cloth" just isn't.  The former requires little world set up by the DM, but bookkeeping of how many ports traveled with a chart and some math.  The latter requires the DM determine ahead of time what each port has and needs, but then determining market quantities is a cinch.
• But what if the party has cold cash?  Doesn't that go back to the original idea that hides should be cheaper the closer you get to the port that specializes in them?

ps. Got my Secret Santicore and it's a doozy.  It'll be a challenge for me because it is more mathy and logical than I think I'm good at.  I'm hoping I can let my unconscious mind help me out here.  I've already scribbled  down a few ideas that were fuzzily in my head waking at 3:00 in the morning.

Port Specific Trade Good Bartering

   I'm excited because I got an idea that could add some fun player options to the game with very little added complexity.  I combine my barter mini-game idea with my attempt to boil down trade goods to a manageable lot.  So how's this for an idea, if players ever get interested in trading or piracy and want to know what is needed or in abundance in a particular port you have them throw two dice on a dice drop chart specific to that port.  You can limit the chart to the goods most likely to be found in that port and even vary the size of for each depending on how common they are.

I don't know enough about how dice drops work to make the perfect template.  I know I want it larger than many I've seen, because I want it visible by all the players sitting around the table.  I tried to make it look aesthetically pleasing too.

I threw together some public domain icons to get a sense of what it might look like.  Gathering images for all the goods will be a challenge, as always, with our century long copyright.  But you can see how it might work:

Livestock, hides, pottery, oil, and glassware.

   Probably should have a space for the name of the port somewhere, now that I think of it. Also, I made twenty spots, but this might benefit from a big simplification to six, especially if the ports are supposed to feel unique with different selections from the 20 basic trade goods.

So the idea is the same as from my gear bartering post: throw a d2 and d4 for each merchant. d2 is what they're offering, d4 what they want. Players with exceptional charisma can shift one of these numbers up or down for each merchant. I'm, guessing that we would need some sense of units. That might be something good to have on the trade goods chart, so oil might be kegs, salt could be coffers, hides bundles of certain weight, etc.

Here is the blank template if you want to fool around with it.

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?

Travel Challenge Compilation

It's rough, but here are all the travel mini-games I've posted about in one document.  I want to add desert later and the trackless waste thingamajigger.  If anyone tries these in play I'd love to hear the results.  My group is on hiatus because of my work right now, so I've never had a chance to try them.