Wilderness Travel Mini-Games VI

The desert is a grueling waste and the best way to deal with it is spend as little time there as you can.  For every three days the party travels in the desert their food and water needs will multiply.  Each day the party will see features that they can choose to explore or ignore.  Exploring them will require an extra day.  The features that might be seen during each three-day-span are linked with dotted paths.  Landmarks are tombs and ruins or ancient stelae which might hold riches in gold or ancient knowledge.  An oasis will provide food, water, and shade to a party for as long as they like; will allow them to re-stock their supplies; and will reset their place on the chart to the start.  Caravans can offer food, water, and unerring transport, but may also be hostile bandits or slavers.  Unfortunately, 50% of the time any of these will be mirages.  And 25% of the time they will be one of the other two features.

Once a party member cannot meet the food and water requirements they must make a save each day to continue.  Failing this save means they are unconscious.  Each day they are unconscious they must save or die.

Every landmark visited will offer a bonus against getting lost on subsequent journeys through the same area.
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Note: I probably should have put a couple check boxes for local guides or rangers that give you one free non-mirage.

The idea here is that the desert becomes more and more deadly the more time players fiddle around in it.  They may decide to strategically search for an oasis or caravan if supplies start running low.  A DM would need to prepare several landmarks ahead of time.  These could be anything from full blown dungeons to just obelisks.  I envision using my trackless wastes chart to help players know where they think they are going.  I also envision using this with the normal getting lost chances, which could make excursions into the desert very dangerous.

I can imagine situations where a few tougher party members desperately seek out an oasis or caravan with all the rest of the party left behind, unconscious.

Update 10/12:

I simplified the chart to three sections and lowered the multipliers to the still easy to remember but more believable 2,3, and 4x.  I like this better, it looks cleaner. 

I would have the multipliers just apply to water now.  I think it fits the tropes better.  I also added the reminder boxes for rangers and locals getting one free I'm-certain-that-is-no-mirage per journey.  (funny how I put rangers and druids and such on all these charts when I don't even use them in my campaign.  I guess that is just me trying to be helpful to you all-- rangers, druids and equivalent situations-- players with magic items or special backgrounds-- should all work equally well on these simple rules).

I was in the process of changing the three day increments to four but reverted them back, I think, while I had it too brutal before, it needs to feel like a dangerous and slippery slope-- four days of travel equivalent to just being on a normal road was a little too easy to do that in my opinion.

Also, I don't think I ever mentioned that the whole dotted line mess isn't just for aesthetics, I was trying to limit when players might find certain things.  I didn't want a party, fresh and confident, checking to see if every oasis is a mirage.  But as things get desperate there are chances available to get out of the situation, like being picked up by a caravan.

Port Specific Trade III

Here is my best shot at making a reality of what I had in my mind.  A cool isometric view of an actual specific port.  Size and layout of sections can generally correspond with importance of results you want to get.  Here are some more ideas:

• It's a little busier than I would want.  I like the idea of giving the sense of the port, but the main job should be to be easy to read by people sitting around a table throwing dice on it.
• Imagine the icons here were separate tokens you could move around and mix and match on top of the map.  If trade changes in a city, you could rearrange the tokens rather than having to create a whole new image.
• Better yet, imagine a web-thingy like Telemonster that has a dice drop map as a blank template and you can put whatever image you want in each spot.  Infinite visual charts, baby!
• I included icons that could represent piracy and disease to show how random events might also be incorporated.
• I left some spots blank thinking maybe there are times or seasons where there are no buyers for particular cargoes.  But you could put other goods in those spaces too.
• You could also use small numbers next to the icons for prices or to convey extra information.
• If the spaces around different buildings come up, maybe those could have specific meanings.  The lower left looks like a church- a random church-related event?  The town is central-- guild issues?, then a fortress to the right-- embargoes?
• Again, are these the biggest trade goods this port is exporting, or just the most likely cargoes to be found coming or going?  Do we just roll on here to determine gluts, or demand?  I want to accomplish everything you'd ever need on this one page, but maybe that's too simplistic.
• Yeah, so I'm sort of working the implementation backwards towards what it's supposed to be solving, but, man, I really have a sense this is the right direction to be going.  Imagine adding a bunch of possibilities for players and a sense of a more real, working world to the game with just a few pages.

Fear what you See

The Medusa turns you to stone by looking at you.  The Catoblepas' bloodshot glance can kill outright.  So too, the gaze of the Basilisk.  A creature's gaze might put you to sleep or make you drunk.  Blind Agnes steals your eyes, so you see what she sees.   Imagine creatures invisible in light but visible in twilight.  Shadow People and, perhaps the Horla, can be seen only from the corner of the eye.  The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal will not attack you if you cover your eyes.  Imagine a hot room jostling with demons that your character must walk through blindfolded.  The Endermen of Minecraft will only attack if you look directly at them.  They can also teleport and, once hostile, will teleport behind you in combat.  The Weeping Angels will only attack when you are not looking at them, otherwise they appear as statues.  Which brings to mind Caryatid Columns which become hostile and animated when triggered, which could be from just looking at them.  But even creepier for me is SCP-173, pictured above.  If someone's gaze is not constantly on it, it will quickly move in destroy all life in its presence.

The SCP Foundation is a rabbit hole worth exploring some winter afternoon.  You can start with the top rated pages.

Thoughts on Realism

I wrote this back when Realism was the topic of the day, but didn't publish it because it didn't seem to add anything new, but what the heck, work is eating my brain so have my 2 cents on realism:
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I think when people talk about Realism what they are talking about is specifics (how many people live in this village?) that are actual-- match up with the best we know from historical records (in England of 1100 the village would have between x and y villagers).  Actual might drift into plausible for space or hero games, but what we consider plausible is based on our actual experiences anyway.

Specifics
Specifics communicate the imagined world we're sharing (You're on a cobblestone road.  You can see a village with thatched roofs in the distance).  Without enough details a player might only have a hazy sense of the world, might not even know what they can do or where they can go.

Genre helps a lot with this by acting as a shorthand for a shared set of assumed specifics.  If I say we'll be playing a Western game like Boot Hill, it does a lot of work for me as a DM because we have a shared set of cultural tropes we can draw on.  I don't need to tell you we'll be in Kansas in 1870 for you to have images of six- shooters, saddles, and player pianos.

Many of the tropes we associate with particular genres are inaccurate, or at least very vague in the sense of the time they happened historically.  D&D's weapons and armor and equipment, for example, are pieces that appeared at different time periods in history.

The Actual
Accuracy can become important when specifics break player expectations.  If we all have the sense that our campaign is viking-style, maybe circa ~900, full suits of plate could seem jarring and weird.  If you aren't playing a more gonzo-type of game, modern ideas and philosophies- like druids that are conservationists- might seem weirdly out of place.

Actual details can also be important just because it's so much work for DMs to invent specifics from scratch.  If you want to create a new world you need to come up with the clothing, customs, languages, weapons, religions, and history.  The list goes on and on.  This is a hobby of its own, but takes an enormous amount of time and investment.  Instead, I can read about medieval villages, how they're laid out, who lived in them, etc.  If I read enough, I can internalize a sense of a "typical village" that makes it much easier to create a new village on the fly or field any questions players have while visiting a village.

With this sense of confidence that knowing about actual villages gives me as a DM, I can make villages that are larger than normal or odd in different ways.  I can make it interesting.  But more importantly, I can confidently provide details that help players "see" the place and make choices.

Problems
One problem is when specifics get in the way of actual gameplay.  Examples of rules being more specific than needed are numerous: the idea that because weapons have length and weight that combat should incorporate reach and weapon speeds, or because weapons damage in different ways there should be damage types for blunt, piercing, cutting, etc.  All this detail adds steps to combat resolution and thus time.  The more specifics the longer and slower combat becomes.  Specifics have a price when resolving rule subsystems.

I think the biggest problem with too much emphasis on actual details, being really concerned with historical accuracy, is that very few people are knowledgeable about actual details in a way that will help them see the game world more clearly or give them more choices as players.  So, if you spend enormous amounts of time determining how a game set in Kansas 1870 will be different than Missouri 1880, it might help you as a DM with confidence and specifics you can use to describe the world, but most folks will only have those hazy Western tropes in mind.  You can't expect players to know these specifics any more than they know the specifics of you fantasy land you entirely made up.  We all aren't history majors.  Heck, even history majors specialize in certain eras.   If you set up the game to require them to know these facts, you might be setting up a lecture more than a game.  At the least, players won't see choices that you might consider obvious "You should have asked for help, the way feudalism works means . . ."

Conclusion
I think the reason D&D has been largely a pseudo-medieval setting is because doing that manages a balance of these two: we have images in our head of what things are like, but we don't have to have PhDs in history to play the game.

Everything I do is trying to add the flavor of the real-- whether with trade, toxins and drugs, traveling the wilderness-- without bogging down the fun of the game.  I think this is counter-intuitive.  I imagine as long as there are rpgs someone will be trying to add weapon length to the combat and devising population density algorithms for hex crawls.

I'm sympathetic with folks that care intensely about actual specifics because I like learning and also because I completely understand someone looking to the actual to help them know a range of possibilities.  I create my baselines-- what are the 20 fundamental potions?, or rings?-- for the same reason: to help me, as DM, make rulings and describe my world.  And DMing is hard, so if someone spends tons of time reading up on vikings to help them run games, that's cool.

There comes a point though, where a person has to actually be obtuse to not observe how long things are taking in a game or what players are actually getting out of play.  I am ultimately on the side of players here and I have little patience if after thirty years of this game being around you still get hung up on detailed encumbrance or price lists because how the game works "just doesn't feel right to you."

My advice: read to learn and enjoy, communicate clearly to players the genre and tone of your game, and include as much actual detail as you can without bogging down play.

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.