I know I've read different folks comment on how they hate post play narratives and don't read them. I don't understand this, because as a DM that's really the only place I get to see other DMs at work. It's the closest thing we have to a shared corpus of play data to explore and experiment with.
After the SoCalMini Con I thought about how it would be cool if I could, not just tell you about the events, but show you where the party went in the dungeon. I didn't end up doing it because it would have taken a lot of work (and thus it's probably a no go from the start). But the idea was to show you the dungeon map and then the party's movements on that map through time, animated.
I don't think heat map is the right term but it would be related. The session I have in mind had a lot of backtracking and circling, so I thought I might draw a line showing the party's progress and decay the color as they crossed and recrossed their own path. Maybe show the most recent location of the party in a nice orange and turn it to a gray or brown as the animation progresses.
Why do that? Well, we have modules we share in common-- B1, B2, Tomb of Horrors, Caverns of Thracia, all get a lot of mention on blogs and seem popular at tournaments. What if you could look, literally look, at how 20 different parties ran through B1? You might see, "They always turn left here," or, "This intersection always causes confusion."
I know, unless someone makes an app that would do the animation after we just punch in room numbers, this will never happen. But maybe, if we had a kind of conventional way to note party movement we could still share the data. I'm thinking something like:
2 > 4 > . > 2
where the numbers are rooms and the "." is a pause of a turn or so (to show confusion or decision making). I suppose that wouldn't capture a lot of corridor exploration. I know that as a player I tend to try and get the lay of the land before I open any doors. Oh well, it's a thought.
Perhaps something like [2.2 > 4.3 > .48 > 2.0] indicating location and, after the period, time spent in that area (0 indicating a walk-through). An entry with just a period and a number would be pause in the previously numbered area (in my example, an 8 hour rest).
ReplyDeleteIt's a pretty cool idea.
You are a master of cool ideas!
ReplyDeleteThis makes me recall - at a convention this weekend I watched the end of a D&D 4e Tomb of Horrors session. After 4 hours they weren't quite half way through the first corridor (!). They had to stop the game while they were still in the middle of their first "Encounter" with a single gargoyle. This one combat was taking forever - it was amazing. I think in Classic D&D we are wonderfuly spoiled by how far we can explore in a single session...
I did scent and noise maps similar this for a grid based computer game years back. As the player character stood in one spot more and more scent was added to that grid cell. As action happened noise would be added to a cell and leak away to adjacent cells (That'd be a bit much for hand written notes). I used it to do simple A.I. for the monsters in the game but such data would certainly be useful for tracking behavior.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest hold up (beyond talent and time) would be sharing the maps of published adventures when the publisher hasn't given permission, so as to show the data in action.
I love the idea of annotation to illustrate a party's progress through a dungeon.
ReplyDeleteIt definitely sounds like a useful idea for analyzing the playtesting of a module with different players before publication.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, all.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking a quick and dirty way to do this could be recording a screencast where you trace the party's path with a cursor or something.
@jgbrowning: that seems like an improvement, I was thinking, maybe we could name corridors after the rooms that exit into them, sort of the way you name lines in geometry. That way you could record when the party was pinging around the hallways for an hour.
cyclopeatron: extra thanks, and I can just imagine a youtube compilation of these things set to music as you see party after party bite the dust in the Tomb :)
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMaybe something like this?
ReplyDeletehttp://img638.imageshack.us/img638/9474/dungeonheatmap.jpg
Wow, Icarus, that's cool! Must have taken some work, thanks. Are the exclamation points battles? Were you deciding color by time spent in a region? In 12, say, it looks like the party was in there only once, but maybe they were there for a while fighting?
ReplyDeleteYes, the exclamation marks are battles. The colors are supposed to represent how often the players pass through the area so, yes, checkpoint 12 should have had a few more entries in the notations. I guess the colors can also represent time spent in area but I think keeping track of that in-game would be tedious. Your notations idea is quite good, the DM just jots down the numbered checkpoints as the players move around, like chess notations, and that can be used to construct the heat map later.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of a heat map got me thinking: Why is it that no-one has ever accounted for the fact that caves tend to stay cold, and had the party prepare accordingly? On the other hand those that don't do that tend to get quite hot. So again why not have your party prepare accordingly. Of course with the party that's going through the Sodden Temple, I'm not sure of how much experience they've gotten with the game, so your party in a specific sense might not be at the point where they should have to handle it, but still, in general, why hasn't this been done?
ReplyDelete