First Steps in the Sandbox

I'll share what I came up with and showed my players last Friday as I try to expand and improve it for our session tomorrow.  We'll be going up to a cabin to play so I want to have all my ducks in a row.  Here is a pic of the sandbox map I showed them:

They started in Ashborough and had just cleared out a Dwarven Outpost last session.  (Though they don't know the weird dungeon was Dwarven).  I told them they could move 3 hexes in a day.  To the east, a wise woman that sometimes comes in from the swamps to visit Moss End has the ability to farsee.  To the west a trading post.  South west is Gilworth, a town known for raising fighting dogs because of constant attacks from the woods.  There are caves located near the trading post and the other two villages.  There is also another Dwarven outpost in the hills near Ashborough.

So, pop quiz, where do you think my players went?  While you think about it I'll give you some more behind the scenes info.  The Dwarven outpost I already had prepared from a different set of friends I ran through it.  I had maps for all three caves.  I had maps ready for Moss End and Gilworth.  I didn't really have anything else ready-- no wandering monster tables for the roads or the plains.  Not even interesting treasures and monsters for the caves.  Trying to prepare four possible dungeons was just too much.  I can see why someone would want to by a product that would have at least the bones of this laid out.

Okay, got an answer?  The clue is that they just cleaned out a dungeon last session.  Heavy with coin, of course they wanted to go shopping.  I should have guessed.  They made a beeline to the trading post and then after shopping for a long time, headed to Red Crystal Cave, explored a bit, got in a battle and then left the cave to camp outside an end the session.  I think I'll just drop some bullet points of things that stood out to me:

• A player sold a ring of water walking and a wand of mineral detection.  For pretty cheap.  He had put on the ring and nothing seemed to happen but never tried pointing the wand.  I should probably make magic items more apparent- it's the toyness/toolness of them that I put them there for, because it's fun to see players use them, so this coyness of not knowing what is magic left over from my 1e days seems counterproductive.  I did say outright after he sold the things, "if you find stuff in a dungeon it is probably good stuff", but maybe I'll make them glow or something.
• I have been on a silver economy trying to make gold feel more exciting but it's like swimming against the tide.  Every equipment list I have is based on more expensive prices.  I found I am unable to convert on the fly.  I think I'm dropping that and just make everything more expensive from now on.
• I know people have mentioned plat mail being easy to get before and boy is it true.  Chain mail doesn't really exist in my game because plate mail is clearly better and only a little more expensive.  I think I might require anyone buying plate in the future to be fitted for it.  And require at least a session's wait before it is ready for the players, maybe multiple sessions.
• You can see "Beorht" written on the map.  That is a note to myself of the trader's name.  I was picking Anglo-Saxon names off a list.  Afterwards I decided it sounded a little too alien.  I want this to feel like Grimm's fairy tales and might go to English or Germanic names.
• I told my players that I am still working on my wilderness rules but that there were three simple things I could tell them 1) stay on a road or by a river and you won't get lost, moving away from those and there is a chance you will 2) you need one ration of food a day and 3) you need one wineskin of water a day or "bad things will start happening".  I told them it would probably give them a negative in combat and start reducing their encumbrance.  With a list-based encumbrance this turns out to be super easy to do, instead of worrying about percentages you can just say "you can carry x less slots, drop some stuff."
• The simple rule already had an effect.  Ashborough could only offer two rations worth of food so the party had to go talk to the local knight to buy more.  Players bought extra waterskins and one was freaking out about not having enough water.  I made it a running joke about her being very thirsty all night :)
• I already knew this but I was reminded that I need three things to run a dungeon: a map, monsters- including a wandering monster chart, and treasure all pre-made.   I can improv details, atmosphere, dialog, tons of stuff, but I need to have those things as a minimum already existent.  Part of it is that my brain can only do one thing at a time, so if I'm describing the movement through the dungeon to the party I can't come up with monsters and treasures for the rooms they haven't reached yet as well.  The other thing is that I don't want the risks and rewards of the dungeon to be my decisions-- I want as much of that responsibility to be taken by the dice.

Okay, so what do I want to do in preparation for tomorrow?  I need encounter tables for the roads.  This is turning out to be harder than I imagined because it sort of sets the tone and danger level for the whole world.  Is this world a place where dragons can be seen flying over the roads or are they rare and hidden away?  Is this the sort of road where bandit attacks are so common that it is safer to travel through the wilderness than on the roads?  I don't know.

I'm not sure what they will want to do next time.  (I know I should have asked explicitly but it was late.)  They may want to go back into Red Crystal Cave and explore it more since they are right outside.  They may want to go to the Dwarven outpost because they found good treasure in the last one ( a player said this).  Or they might head to Gilworth because I think they are interested in getting dogs.

I need to prepare monsters and treasures for the caves.  I need to prepare a price list/ selection for the dogs.  I though iy might be cool to either have a chart randomly determine the type of dog or let some of the dog loving players choose from a selection, the type of dog that Gilworth breeds.

I would like to expand the map so they start getting a sense of more options.  Maybe growing the sandbox a little each session would be a good goal for me.  I scavenged the remnants of an easal pad from work and can center my map on it and that will provide a~2x2.5 ft map to work with and gradually fill up.

I need to assign health scores to the villages.  I am excited about how excited my players were to that idea.  I wish I had a simple goods system so that not everything on an eqipment list was available at every trader/merchant.  But that is a place where computers have me beat.  I don't want to roll for every stinking good to see if it's present.  Maybe just roll once with a percentile and that item is out.  But I don't know, seems ripe for a mini-game.

Village Hit Points

I think you'll like this, it's very simple but allows for interesting stuff to be layered on top.  So, give your villages a small number, 1-6, to indicate their "health."  This number, like character hit points is abstract and encompasses a lot of things- sanitation, safety, and economic and social wellbeing. 

Each session the players visit a village roll a d6.  If it's under this Health Score*, the village has grown a bit.  If you are using these Easy Villages, I would say it's grown by one, 1 pip hut.  Growth is beneficial to players because more huts means more opportunities for hirelings.  And more 1 pip huts means more opportunity for food.  You could tie more benefits in with a villages size too.  (If you roll over the health score I would keep the village the same size to prevent it from fluctuating too much).

Now make certain things modify this village health.  The terrain and climate it's located in could affect the starting score.  If there is a monster lair with a day's travel -1.  War or plague affecting the region -1.  Tyrannical or insane reeve or headman -1.  If these negative modifiers bring the health score into negatives the village will shrink by a hut every session the players visit.  And this would be in addition to non-abstract losses, players killed by cultists or werewolves, for instance, will also be noted and reduce the village size.  However, eliminating threats, bringing livestock, building mills or dovecotes can all give a bonus to the health score, making things better.

I mentioned this as an idea I had to my player on Friday, just as an aside really.  And they got quite excited.  They understood the simple premise and could see why doing things to help the locals would benefit them.  And they immediately set out peppering me with ideas of possible improvements.  I had to rein them in a little and make sure they knew I didn't intend for them to be able to turn these villages into town or cities, just help them become thriving villages.  They were still excited.

This could be an easy way for the lord of a domain to affect how many troops he/she could draw from an area-- healthier villagers mean more serfs to carry pikes.  You might have the villages affect each other, with a village of health 6+ giving all villages within ~ a days travel a +1 to their health.  And vice versa, a struggling village could be a drag on all others nearby.  I could make a list of simple improvements to show my players and make clear what the improvements would require.  So maybe a dovecot would take a wagon load of stone and a wagon load of timber.  That way the players could go about getting the supplies rather than just plopping down a set amount of gold.  Serfs might be hired to cut roads or drain swampy areas.

Maybe players shouldn't know the actual score of a village unless they visit it or talk with someone that has just come from there recently.  But the last known score could be put on the map so players can easily asses the state of the sandbox as they know it.

*I think Health Points is a better name for this than Hit Points but figured by putting the latter in the title you would immediately know what I was getting at.

Misc IX

Update
With this post, only 18 left till my 1000th.  Yikes.  I have been working on lots of blog stuff, though there seems to be too many things I need to make at once.  I'm trying to work out a systematic way to handle intelligent opposition, or at least how to record on a map what guards will do and such.  I've also been working on my sandbox.  I can't put it off any more.  I think I'll have to just shrink the size of what I present to my players tonight to a couple day's walk in all directions.  I've prepared tons of simple cavern complexes.  Now I need to figure out ways to distinguish them so they don't function as quantum caves of a sort.

I've got more silhouettes ready in the pipe, but they're mostly animals and harmless things.  I'd like to find another monster or some savage Amazonian women before I do another post.  Going up into the mountains tomorrow.

Shuffledice
It could be fun to set up a game of player skill where they resolve something-- maybe gambling in a tavern or magical research-- by tossing a dice on a piece of paper and trying to get it to land somewhere without rolling off the paper.  I wouldn't want that to be a common mechanic, just something unique to make certain resolutions feel different and to keep my players guessing.

Tree Ring Scrying
The reading of information from tree rings isn't a new idea, but I realized how closely a cut stump looked like the trackless wastes hex:

So, a ranger or player with wilderness knowledge who is lost can take an hour to find and cut down a suitable tree.  Then, by looking at the rings they will know exactly where in a hex they are.

Feats like Encumbrance
I handle encumbrance as a simple list, once you fill up all your slots you have to drop something.  What if special abilities were treated like this.  Maybe characters in the game can learn how to shapeshift, go berzerk in battle, or raise undead, but they can only know 4 abilities at a time.  In a way it would be like Vancian spell picking, or socketed items in Diablo.  But these would be abilities not spells.  Players would have to choose, unrelated to class or level, what they want to be able to do.

Item Generator

Here is my take on a tool to help DMs come up with items.  I'm assuming that qualities of the items would be handled by a separate chart.  And if the items are magical that would be a separate chart as well.  This is just meant to help you come up with a random thing.

Drop two different colored d4 on it.  Choose one color to correspond to the figures and one to the triangle shaped categories.  Where the figure die lands on the silhouette indicates what it is related to.  So, a die on the hand has something to do with hands or fingers.  The other die will tell you what type of item it is.  If it is aesthetic, the item might be a ring.  If it is warfare, it might be a gauntlet.

A die that doesn't land on either figure can be read as items that aren't directly related to the bodies: furnishings, wall-coverings, urns, coffers, statues, etc.  A category die that falls off the page will still be in one of the category triangles, which stretch to the horizon.

Most of the categories are pretty self-explanatory.  I see "Learning" as information storage and retrieval: calendars, zodiac charts, royal successions that are incorporated into an item (like this), or scientific tools-- astrolabes, magnifying glasses.  It could also be a book about what the other die is pointing to.  "Daily Life" is meant to be tools, toys, musical instruments, etc.

You can read the number on the figure d4 if you want to.  So, a Daily Life item for a child on the hand might be a top, or a small spoon, or doll, for example.  An aesthetic result on the horse head could be a fancy falcon hood, a dog collar, a wreath for sacrificial oxen, or a bridle of some sort.

You don't have to use d4.  They are pointy and flat, though, which makes for a good choice here.  And the small number of results should be memorizable with use.  But you could potentially drop d10s or d12s or something and have whole subcharts of specifiers.

I playtested this a bit with my buddy and using it in conjunction with the object qualities chart really helped.  Mostly knowing what it was made of helped you figure out what kind of thing it might be too.  (I plan to revise the object quality chart soon).

Order of Battle

Though I've used sentient enemies before, I'm always leery because of the way they push me, as their proxy, to be in opposition to the players.  It's why I use a lot of animals, insects and weird creepy things that have their own systems of logic.

I want to use intelligent, organized factions more in dungeons, though.  So I want to think out how they might react to incursions ahead of time, so they will have plans and goals that are seperate from me, the DM, before players even encounter them.

First, if you know of any good posts or articles please let me know.  Second I was thinking a good approach might be to think of questions before they need answering the way Jeff's 20 questions for a campaign does.  So here are some questions:

• Where are guards posted?
• Who are these guards-- how loyal, capable, experienced?
• How do guards react to noise?
• How do guards react to smoke or strange lights or smells?
• In other words, when will they leave their posts?
• Is there a way for them to communicate with each other, other than just shouting?
• If reinforcements are sent, how long does it take them to reach different locations?
• Is there a general plan of defense or perhaps, evacuation?
• Is the goal to investigate, eradicate, or imprison interlopers?
• Who are they expecting trouble from?
• What kind of battle tactics will they use-- are they straight up fanatics?  Will they attempt to kill mages first?  Will they target any missile users?  Use shield walls?
• Who is ultimately in charge?
• How will that person be affected by battle results?  In other words will they be afraid, outraged, or impressed if players have killed guards?
• How long does it take, if even possible, for guards lost to battle to be replaced?
• How flexible are they, how willing to adjust tactics?  In other words, will they learn and adapt to losing battles to pcs?

That's all I can think of now.  Other things you know I should be thinking about because of experience, or things you wonder about yourself?