Shopping Mini-Game

I've mentioned a few times in the past that I'd like to make some kind of mini-game for shopping.  My players engage in a lot of what we jokingly call Shopping & Dragons.  Because they're in a city and I've used a fad table that changes fashionable things to wear from week to week and because they like to buy things for their schemes, they are often shopping.  Oh, and the city they are in, Ulminster, is pretty mercantile and has a Mile-Long Market as a landmark.  So shopping is something that is going to happen.  But I wish it were more fun, more game-like.

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep I had an idea of how to do this simply: have a roll-all-the-dice type table but let players choose which die to apply to which column.  That would mean there is luck involved but also player choice.  To have a cost of rolling again and again, each roll on the table is 1d4 hours of searching markets and shops.

This is a first draft and I haven't tried it in play.  The worst possible outcome is probably having to wait a week for something, or needing something so badly you would settle for 4x the price.

I wanted there to be the element of clothes not being the right fit and I thought Strength and Constitution might be a suitable stand-in for this.  If players have minuses on those stats it's more likely they might be slight, if they have bonuses they could be considered burly or tall.  I don't know how this applies to buying non-clothing gear.  Can ropes and 10' poles be of different, awkward sizes?  Maybe just ignore this column when buying gear, that would give players an extra die to choose from, meaning non-apparel is easier to acquire or at least more standard when found.

Another thing I was thinking, a player might apply a roll that exceeds a column's maximum to get their choice of the results in that column.  That way a player can "throw away" a high score for certainty of fit or quality.

Here is the table in an editable form.

Of course you will still need a set of simple, well-organized price lists.  My buddy and I started on that, organizing them by material the items are made of so we might hook in trading or world event effects later, with embargoes making prices on all cloth goods go up, say, or metal goods becoming cheaper when a new mine is opened.

City Life, Costs

I'm currently trying to shake my players out of the city and get them back into creepy, dangerous dungeons.  But I've made it hard because the city has been interesting with unexpected events all the time.  I've known for a long time I need a way to drain off their money, to drive them to look for treasure.  So I finally sat down and worked out a chart for costs of living.  I based it on blog posts I saw here and here.

As with most my stuff this is a rough draft that needs development and revising.  I wanted simple labels for different levels of comfort to ease communicating with my players.  I wanted more than three levels.  This is because I knew I wanted sleeping on the streets and luxurious living but I doubt my players will ever use either and I wanted them to still have a bit of a choice of how comfortable they were living in the city.

I'm horrible about pricing stuff but as I was messing with the prices I noticed they were close to a pattern so I made them one to aid remembering.  Of course this immediately brings to mind how much it would be just to buy property to avoid all this.  And that is a whole other can of worms.  Although, I suppose even owning property the comfort level in regards to food and clothing could still be comparable.

I originally had a chance of having something stolen while you sleep a drawback of sleeping in common rooms, but my players weren't having any of that.  They didn't like it being something they couldn't prevent (taking their agency).  So I switched that to other people being robbed, yelling about it, and ruining your sleep.

My players requested safe item storage as a perk for the Fine/Rich levels.  I'm torn, because I'd want that too, but can nothing ever be stolen from them?

The food, lodging, and clothes columns aren't mechanically important right now and I thought about collapsing them all into a little blurb about that level of living, but it might aid me in describing how disheveled they (and npcs) are so I'll leave it for now.

I'd like a disease/affliction chart with lice and bedbugs and all kinds of filthy stuff to amusingly tell them they've been afflicted with.


I don't have anything fleshed out for the rumors or connections items either.  I might be able to use a chart I've for dreams that foretell the future, or for family drama for rumors, but I don't know.  Rumors seem to be usually DM generated adventure hooks and I' never that prepared in advance to have multiple rumors ready.

Anyway, if you've got ideas or more examples of similar charts, let me know.

Regatta Gloriosa

I mentioned previously trying to have events that make a city feel different than the rest of the world.  After many delays and several sidetracks my players got to witness, and take part in, a religious procession of barges that determines which religion will be dominant in this city for the year to come.

The city they are in is a dingy, trade-oriented republic.  Ulminster has five big families that struggle for power and religion is party of that.

First, here's what my new take on character sheets turned out like.

I ended up using one by Dyson Logos' sheets and deleted a lot of the labels.  I also rearranged the stats (I like mine grouped as physical/non-physical rather than the random traditional order).  So it wasn't a collage, but since everything was pretty much unlabeled spaces of varying sizes, my players each chose what they wanted to put where.  I think that's pretty cool.  We also had one visitor join and I just rolled him up on an index card.  I figured if he comes back we can migrate to a folder like the rest.

Not good picture quality, but you can see the dim, tableless environment I DM in :).  Below is a bit closer view of how I handled the Regatta Gloriosa:

The chips weren't part of play, just representing the barges

The idea is that The Regatt Gloriosa is a festive event sort of like Mardi Gras.  Citizens each get one clay chip from their neighborhood.  These chips have a hole threaded with a ribbon and are thrown onto the barge passing that the citizen prefers.  There were five neighborhoods that border the city's central river.  A majority of these had to be won to win the regatta.

The Captain vs the Doge
My one player decided to build a float and take part int the Regatta, so I designed a mini-game to represent it.  I set it up as five hands of cards, but playing off of three shared cards.  Two of which were hidden until we moved into that region.  I was playing the frontrunner and expected winner (the current Doge representing the biggest religion).  I didn't want to involve the other barges for simplicity's sake, but also because I didn't want to set the mini-game up as a competition between my players.  So it was him versus me, the DM.  That's also not a good situation to be in, an adversarial DM, but I tried to alleviate that by giving him a session to creatively acquire some advantages and I went first so he could react to what I did.

So my player and I started with 10 cards each-- enough to complete a poker hand for all the districts.  My player, G, had earned another card in a previous session by buying thousands of meatpies for the onlookers in one neighborhood.  He also spent money to set up fireworks on his barge.  He had enough to shoot them off twice and could draw an extra card for the particular neighborhood he shot them off in.

So, when the regatta moved into a neighborhood, I flipped the two hidden cards and had the Doge play first.  It was iffy if this design was going to work-- I didn't want my player to win or to lose, but for there to be exciting tension.  And the way it worked out we went into the last neighborhood tied, so it worked perfectly.  My player won.  The Captain (as in Morgan) is now the dominant religion in Ulminster for the next year.

Thugs versus Lepers on the Winning Barge
So what did I do with the rest of the players while only one was involved in the regatta?  Well, I was trying to bring in threads from former sessions.  So, Oma the female fighter took part in smuggling weapons into the city for the Redsashes (the local hireling guild) in a previous session, because they expected an attack.  Aphrodisia, the female cleric, sees the future in dreams and she saw people jumping from a bridge to attack a barge.  There happen to be three bridges.  The players set up on the middle bridge and then had to run frantically to the last bridge when the attack occurred from there.  From a previous session Aphrodisia knew her grandfather was going to be killed by being fed some serpent-like thing and she saw one of the women from that dream on the barge of a new religion.  This is me trying to set up for them having to deal with a weird serpent cult in future sessions.

The final battle was nothing complicated by D&D standards, they were pretty much low level thugs.  The party was never really in danger.  But the thugs were attacking lepers that G had converted to the Captain's cause, so there was some tension trying to save those unfortunates.  You can see dice representing the lepers and their hit points below.  The glass beads are the thugs.  I let my players roll attacks for the lepers so they were all involved.

At the end, it was very satisfying, the regatta went off as planned with fireworks, nailbiting, and a photo finish.  Everyone clapped when we finished.  We had two people watching and one of them was really getting into it and my players were trying to convince him to play next time.

The Great Firework Barge Auction

This happened quite a while back but I finally have a chance to record it and I wanted to share this as an example of a type of city event.

First, some backstory.  I made a bunch of fireworks (here and here) and I have a tradition of giving players a freebie on their actual birthday.  One of my players chose some fireworks for his gift.  Then, his character Gino managed to successfully use those to survive a cave full of stirges.  So, the first city he came to he wanted to buy more fireworks.  Thinking this might be an opportunity for some sort of eventual hijinks, I had an npc tell him "why buy individual fireworks when they're auctioning off whole barges?"  So, Gino got a merchant's license and then a few weeks later (in real life) showed up for the auction. 

I did have a quick bit at the end of a previous session where fireworks from each barge were sampled and it was determined how much water damage they had.  It turned out there were three barges: one with 10% water damage, one with 50%, and one undamaged.

The Interested parties
Gino knew how much money he had and what he wanted but what to do with the other players?  I had them take on the roles of the other interested parties.   So first, I had each of them roll up their npc on my Hireling trait chart.  They're familiar with this chart and so are pretty comfortable using it and find interpreting the traits that come up amusing.

We also rolled on the Court Fad of the Day chart (from Vaults of Nagoh, but I can't find it there now) which turned out to be people carrying poles around, the longer the more fashionable.  So I had players roll how long their poles were.  It was ridiculous and we were all laughing, the characters lugging around their 13ft fashion statements.

The Goals
One of the things that makes D&D unique is that it's one of the few types of collaborative play I know of.  Because of this it's always important to me when trying to devise mini-games that they not pit player versus player.  Seriously, every night we hang out that we don't play D&D we play a game that's PVP, so there is no lack of that in our lives.

So, if the other players were going to be Gino's competition, how did they provide that campetition without just trying to outbid him.  And because the amount of money these npcs have is determined by me (or random roll, but still I'd be setting the parameters) how could any kind of bidding auction be fair for Gino's player?  My solution was the multiple barges of varying quality and giving the npcs differing, but not mutually exclusive goals.  Basically, players could work together to get portions of a barge if they wanted and still succeed.  The four goals were:

• You're under great pressure to win one of these barges with your own money but you don't want to.  Make it look like you tried to buy one but fail.  10,000 sp
• You need some fireworks for an upcoming festival but you're low on funds.  Get some fireworks.  1000 sp
• It would be amusing to have some fireworks.  But buying the damaged barges would be beneath your station.  Aquire some fireworks from the non-damaged barges.  10,000 sp
• You think you can sell the water damaged fireworks to an alchemist.  Acquire one of the barges with damaged fireworks.  3,000 sp

I had the hardest time throughout all of this trying to put a monetary value on these fireworks and thus on these whole barges and on how much money each bidder would be bringing to bear.  But after pulling out a bunch of hair I settled on the values above.

I didn't really know what Gino would do.  So I wanted it possible for him, at the very least, to acquire a portion of fireworks or maybe the most damaged barge.  In other words, this all started from him wanting fireworks.  I didn't want this elaborate mini-game to end up making that impossible.

To facilitate deal-making between the interested parties I gave players ~15 minutes before the auction started to talk to each other in-character.

I also offered 100xp to any player that made their goal.  I know this is bizarre for D&D, to give a character xp for something some random npc did.  In this case, I just wanted something toget them interested and engaged and it worked.

The Auction
I can't remember all the details now.  I started out with very small bids and later, at the suggestion of players made the bid jumps higher to speed things up.  From my notes, it looks like the barges went for 3,500 sp, 2,025 sp,  and 5,700 sp (I'm sorry, I don't remember which barges were which).  I do remember the player with goal one unintentionally won the bid on the first barge and then was a spoiler, bidding wildly in the subsequent 2 exchanges.  I think she won the second barge and only lost the last one after bidding it up.  (yes that looks right, if she'd spent 5025 of her 10,000, that last barge would have been just out of her reach).

I think Gino ended up cutting a deal with the player with goal 3 who had a lot of cash and the easiest goal to make.  Neither of the remaining two players made their goals either.

The Aftermath
The players wanted to find out who was forcing the woman to buy a barge she didn't want and punish them somehow.  I had no idea who it was and felt weird about the whole thing because their characters should have no idea that this woman that just bought two barges didn't want them.  That is something in the back of my brain now though, maybe it will come together with other threads in the future.

Now Gino has hundreds of fireworks, what's going to become of them?  Well, he has a group of lepers building a barge for an upcoming religious regatta, and he just hired someone to fit it with a bunch of tubes, so stay tuned.

The Bustling City

These aren't "encounters" so much as the groups of people characters moving through a city might encounter.  They may be just passing examples of the bustling, populous nature of the city.  If players want to interact with them, or somehow get swept up in the thing these groups are doing, more might come of it.

I'll probably have players roll on this (and then help them interpret the results) every time them move from one place to another in the city.

Roll 3d10 and fill in one of the three possible "sentences" with the results:

I've mashed social class and wealth together because, as an American, I'm less aware of class distinctions that aren't tied to cash.  You could make two columns if you want.

Entry #6 for Types of People is trying to get away from thinking that the default will be men.  In my world they will be a mix of genders.  So this result will signify that it is only men, only women, or maybe something different like a group of Hijra.

The second "sentence" is based on the idea that the Types of People categories are not  mutually exclusive.  In other words you might have a group of old soldiers or a group of foreign bureaucrats.

Let's try some for the first "sentence":

6, 2, 10
We could say it is a group of male peasants celebrating a sporting victory, carrying the best players on their shoulders.

5,7,3 
Ooh, this is odd.  A group of wealthier children are protesting something.  Maybe pelting their tutor with vegetables?

9,6,5

A group is pouring from a church after someone noticed a child went missing.

Seems to work okay.  Any of those might turn into an adventure; the players find out about some sport they can try in a minigame, or at least bet on-- they might meet this put-upon tutor and befriend him/her-- the missing child might be an abduction by something dire.

Imagining a City

As you learn to DM there seems to be several stages you go through.  First, you master the enclosed space of a dungeon.  Then you have to figure out how to handle a bigger "wilderness" area, whether it's underground or a true wilderness.  And, at some point, you need to figure out how to deal with the "City."

If you've followed my blog you've seen my long process of learning those first two.  Recently I've been struggling with the City. 

I was born in a suburb 45 minutes north of LA.  So when I think of a city I think mostly of freeways and off ramps.  It's hard for me to envision even a pseudo-medieval city.

Nidus
My first city when I started gaming a again was Nidus, the Shifting City.  The premise was that this chaotic place had stalls and shops that moved every week if not every day.  There was no map.  There was no ruler.  It was me trying to have the conveniences of a city for my players without having to deal with the difficulties of mapping and then peopling a place with tens of thousands of inhabitants.  And it worked pretty well.  Players had their own reason to go there - buying and selling stuff- and I had a very big "encounter" table that they rolled on each time they ventured into the city.  The encounters weren't dangers or adventure hooks, just interesting stuff you saw.  And yet, there was nothing to keep players from making them into dangers or adventures.

I can't make every city a chaotic, bazaar, though.  So, when faced with my players visiting a city recently, I was stumped at how to proceed.

The Problem with Cities
One problem with cities is that the assumption seems to be that players will get entangled in various plots and intrigues.  But unless players are really high level this is very unlikely to me.  It's as if I were to drive into LA and all of a sudden the mayor is asking me favors. 

Another problem is that cities are busy places with lots of factions and lots of plots and events going on.  But how do you get players involved without railroading them.

A third problem is that, more than any dungeon, cities are about sights, sounds, and bustling scenes.  And conveying that kind of sensory stuff through description is always difficult especially if you are trying to do it off the cuff.

So I guess, if you were to boil it down the two big ways I needed, and still need, help with DMing a city are 1) how to make it about more than a place for players to shop (without making the players seem unrealistically like rockstars with all the attention on them) and 2) how to make it feel like a busy, bustling, populated place.

To do this, I think I can take some cues from what I've already learned about sandboxes, some cues from how video games handle cities, and add in some things that are unique about cities.

Locations
So, like sandboxes I think there should be locations that players know about and can visit or not.  You can prepare subsytems ahead of time and these locales will always be available to be looped into some plot or happening going on in the city.  Here are some ideas of some I want to make for my current city:

• Great Library
• Mysterious Oracle
• Guild Work Board - jobs they can take or leave, I can have mini-dungeons attached to these.
• Arena - Maybe not the typical arena, which is very swords and sorcery, but some place where players know they can go to compete.  The possibility of competing as a group would be even better.

Events
This idea comes from Jeff Rients' awesome, crazy, parade.  If I can come up with more events, these can be like temporary locations-- things going on in the city that everyone is talking about and that players of any level can get involved but don't have to.  If they don't get involved they can still affect the whole city going on in the background kind of like a sandbox "happening."

• Auction - I did this already and it was fun and a great way to introduce powerful faction members.
• Trial- there is about to be a big, show trial in which several blag dogs are tried for witchcraft.
• Parade - I have an impending parade of religious barges on the river that runs through the city called the Regatta Gloriosa.
• Wedding

The Bustling City
This is probably obvious to you, but a city only exists through it's encounters.  The size of it, the tone of it, the flavor of life in that place will mostly be conveyed by things players encounter on the streets.  I should have known this from my great experience with the Nidus encounters.  But for some reason I thought I was only using those because I didn't have Nidus fleshed out in a way that a normal DM would flesh out a city.  So, these encounters are not encounters in the traditional rpg sense that they are dangers that will spark a combat.  And they are not encounters in the traditional (if infrequent) video game sense that they are waiting to give you an adventure hook.  These are just groups and clumps of people- buskers, locals, pilgrims, delivery wagons-- that will be the city to you players.  I need to make one for my current city.

As I get time I hope to flesh out these locations and events in separate blog posts.

Possible Cities cont.

Some thoughts on my previous post and your comments:

I have no idea why was I focussing on cities and not features in general. I guess because it made more sense that, from an island, they would travel to another point of civilization and not some random point in the wilderness. But sticking in the city is part of the problem, they do more shopping in Nidus than exploring.

A Newhon Ghoul

I just grilled 3 players that work with me about what they want in our campaign, what would be fun (does that mean I'm New School ;) Two things popped out, these guys are smart, they sit around thinking everyday, and they had a very hard time verbalizing what they wanted from a D&D campaign. With some prodding I was able to tease out some specifics. And . . . those specifics were three different things!

Anyway, back to cities.  I think a city that feels different to be in would be a good choice.  So a Sparta-like city with a lot of slaves would allow for awkward social moments where players have to interact with slaves or are mistaken for them.  A very religious pilgrimage destination would work too  (If the party members are some of the few non-believers around).  I like the idea of a city with most of the people lepers and visiting there means you'll probably get it too.

I also think a city which is ripe to be affected by game-world changes, so the two above might have interesting developments in a plague, or invasion.  I suppose any place would be affected by those kind of big changes, but I'm thinking a border city that's colonized by an empire, with foreign troops oppressing a populace, might be more likely to have "interesting" things happen than a trade center, port city.

With Zak's idea that the map I show the players is what their characters think the world is like, what would be some good misconceptions to play up?

Erroneous cultural beliefs. Maybe those cannibals really aren't.  Those evil, demon worshippers are just a different religion.

Unrealistic expectations. The condition of a place is very different, more squalid than thought, or maybe a savage backwater is in actuality a pinnacle of a different culture's civilization.

Wrong scale.  Distances should be off, maybe a continent is much farther away then it shows and the voyage there will prove harrowing.

Out of Date information.  That would more likely affect a an old found map than the character's conception of their world.  Although, I suppose news travels slow.  I think I'll reserve this for my "way out."  Instead of planning out of date features, my do overs can include city-erasing events that have happened since the characters have heard about a place.

The ghoul pic is public domain and a bonus to pay for the rambling.

Possible Cities

My players are growing disgruntled.  One keeps asking: "so there are only two places we can go?" I need to give them a world map so they can choose where they would like to go themselves.  In the past I would have made that all first.  Now I find myself clinging to the abstraction of the fantasy world because anything is possible until I start pinning down cultures and geographical features.  Oh well, got to make decisions sometime.

I thought I might just generate a whole list of possible cities before scattering them around on a map.  I'm not sure where I read it (I think Zak), but the idea is to give players some sense of what a city is about, a characteristic or predominate feature.

I'll just start with the categories from here and work from the bottom up:

• Substance: City of Brass, baby.  My favorite.  Basically what a city is built from, brick, alabaster, iron, sandstone
• Quantity: Um, city of a million fires, can't think of what quantity would be but lots of people.  A city of ten families, mostly deserted?
• Quality: The greatest city, cleanest, filthiest, I figure most cities in my world would be filthy so maybe clean streets would be something special, hah. But maybe this is about refinement, or class, a city only of nobles?  Who is going to do the work?  A city of nobles and slaves.
• Relation: Twin cities, cities right across a river from each other, or a gorge, on two levels of a cliff, in a huge tower, a Babel sized tower with multiple cities (that sounds like one big city though).
• Place: In the snow, in the desert, marsh or swampland, coastal, plains, stony badlands, giant forest, island or port.
• Time: ?? Ruins, used-to-be-a-city, shanty town becoming a city.
• Position: How would this be different than relation?  Upside down city, highest city, lowest city, flattest city, hilliest city.
• State (shod, armed, etc.): city in revolt, drought, famine, plague-stricken city (ooh, I bet the players will want to go there haha)
• Action: ?? A city expanding, a city conquering new lands because it's a city-state, city rebuilding, the Winchester city that can't stop building, Nidus fits here with the merchants constantly shifting.
• Affection (actually affected by, affected in some way): This seems similar to state, but maybe conquered, a city with imperial forces stationed there, burnt city, just after a big fire, trade fairs, the influx of people changing the state of the city in different seasons.

• Opinion/Judgement: The friendliest city (haha), accursed, slavers and torturers, a beautiful city, the ugliest city, a city of harsh laws (hand-choppers),slow-paced, lazy, corrupt, decadent
• Dimension (size, length, width): biggest, smallest doesn't really work unless you put this on the map somewhere, tallest buildings, I think a lot of what I put for position up above fits here, maybe narrow streets, a city on water like Venice, a narrow city stretched along a canyon or ceremonial route.
• Age: ancient or new, a city of where the old go to die, a city where the blemished young are exiled to.
• Shape: ?? A city in a a religious pattern, checker board, concentric rings, in a pyramid interlocking rings around wells or shafts
• Color: color of the building materials? of the inhabitants?  Color words can be clues because of connotations, the White City, the Black City, the Grey City.  Not sure what would make them literal, maybe the Blue city paints its walls, a sign of religion? of magical protections, they live near dragons or demons
• Origin: City founded by slaves, pirates, rebels, religious exiles, built around a shrine, an oasis, a trade center, a natural feature, shipwreck, where an armies commander was killed
• Material: I think substance covered this.
• Purpose: trade, military, political center, royal leisure spot, research/libraries/archives, religious magnet, frontier, resources: mining, lumber, fishing, manufacture of: textiles, metalwork,
• Appearance/Condition: Silent, jubilant, reverent, rotting, sinking, splitting (on faults), painted/murals, draped, gilded, whitewashed, stinking, vaporous

Okay, not worrying about category whatever comes to my mind: floating city, nomadic, nocturnal city, city of ambassadors from other cities, freed slaves, zealots, cannibals, city of bells, city of bridges, city of balconies (is that Vornheim), city of musicians, city of spices, city of towers or spires, city of abandoned temples, rediscovered city, temple city, city of pools, city of fountains, city of waterfalls, city of gates, city of stairs, the Hanging city. 

Okay, enough for now, got to get to work.  I'll make another post to try and pick ~5 to get ready for Friday.

Landscape with a Bridge and Fortress

Andreas Roller (1805-1891): 'Landscape with a Bridge and Fortress', 1843

I love this pic. Someone should flesh out the city in broad, old-school brushstrokes and use this public domain image as the cover.

via TYWKIWDBI