Choose Your Columns Charts

One of the last mini-games I posted about was for shopping.  And, in play, it didn't work that well, most of what it did was make what you wanted to buy harder to get- it wasn't available or the wrong size, or too expensive.  It wasn't fun.  (I have a different solution I'm fleshing out).  But what surprised me in looking back at that post was how I had players choose which dice to apply to which column.  I had no recollection of using that mechanic whatsoever.  And looking at it now, that seems like the coolest part of that whole idea.

What other uses could we have for a roll all the dice table which let players choose which dice should apply to which column?  I'm at work, a bit under-caffienated, but it seems like the general principles are: higher is better, but smaller columns are less important.  So, for example if you roll a "1" on your d20 you really want to sacrifice a result lower on the table to bump up that d20 column's result, like moving a "6" on you d6 column up and taking the "1" on the d6 column.

So, one idea that springs to mind is a wild magic mini-game.  It would be just a matter of fleshing out the columns.  I'm thinking of something along these lines, though that was more designed for completely random effects.  Players would want to have a bit more control over being able to cause damage in combat etc.

What other possibles uses?  Maybe monster breeding where you select for traits.  Maybe an abstracted NPC conversation mini-game where it lets you choose what you learn from them and what you have to reveal in turn.  Maybe potion making where you are trying to get the best balance of ingredients that have side effects.

Dice Stack Mechanic

 I had an idea for a mechanic that might be fun for in-person games.  I'm always on the lookout for mechanics that 1) use stuff people have around (like cards or dominoes), 2) is dramatic fun (players gather round to see how it will turn out), and 3) kind of matches up with the situation in game (a Jenga tower feels like an oncoming inevitable disaster).  So, what about stacking dice?  We all have them, it will be amusing to watch, and it can simulate pushing your luck to get some gain.  Here are some ideas of what you might use it for:

• DM places down a d20 to start the Dreaded Stack. Any time a player gets a damage roll they don't like, place that die on the stack and roll again with a different die to try for a better result.  But, when the stack tumbles that player's weapon breaks.  Or, maybe, you roll an additional immediate encounter.
• Magic user variant that uses dice for casting determines how many dice they use for a battle/session by stacking.  The stack tumbles, you  get half that many.
• Skill use, the shopkeep's wisdom is worth 5 dice, you've got to stack more dice than that for him to believe your lie.
  

Obviously, some dice are easier to stack than others.  I can't stack my precision d4s at all.  But anyone rolling d4s for damage is probably not going to want to re-roll anyway.  If you needed to give players a pool of random dice to stack from and want to vary which ones they have to work with, you could grab a handful, roll them, and then let the player choose dice from all the even results.

Anyway, I might try it for a simple mini-game at least.

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.

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.

Procedural Lockpicking Revisited

A few years back I offered an idea of a way to make lockpicking more engaging and interesting for players.  You can go back and read that post here.  The problem was some of the things I say in the post (like traps at certain points in the flow chart) make it so locks would have to be designed individually, like mini-dungeons.  Way too much work for it to be used by me.  Zak posted a simpler method of guessing using dice and Arkhein did something as well using cards.

Both are sharp mini-game solutions to the problem of needing to make locks.  Unfortunately they don't allow for something else I'd like in a solution, a way that players can get to know locks and feel like they are gaining expertise, not just their characters through abstract level bonuses.  Today I offer another attempt at it.

First, if we limit the number of actions involved to 3 (I'll use Bump, Probe, and Rake) and limit the "tumblers" of each lock to 3, and even further, say that no action is ever used in a row, then we can whittle down the possibilities to something more manageable and discoverable.  If I'm not mistaken the possibilities for these constraints with actions ABC should be:

1. ABA
2. ABC
3. ACA
4. ACB
5. BAB
6. BAC
7. BCA
8. BCB
9. CAB
10. CAC
11. CBA
12. CBC

Now, if we limit the types of locks players encounter we can roll on that table to assign these combinations to give our different campaigns different lock solutions. So you might end up with something like this:

1. Tin          CAC
2. Copper   ABA
3. Brass      BAB
4. Iron        CBC
5. Steel       CAB
6. Strange  ACB

Strange locks are anything weird: crystal, organic, mythril.

The procedure to pick a lock is pretty simple, you try an action and if you get it wrong the lock gets stiff, letting you know that.  If your second attempt is correct you get to go on to the next tumbler.  If your second guess is also wrong the lock jams and will have to be smashed off.  Here is a handout you can use to record the lock solutions for your world and give to players to record their guesses:

As you can see, I've decided that each lock type will have certain number of hit points representing durability; how much damage you have to do to just break them off. I left the action names blank so you can put in what you want (I suppose I should have done the same for the lock types).

The challenge here is to balance the complexity a player will have to encounter in trying to pick a lock and the diversity of locks available in the world.  This depends a lot on how many locks you have in your dungeons and how lucky players get.  They might figure out Tin locks the first time they encounter them and know them ever after.  But they might not.  I think I'll have to just playtest this and see how it works.

I should probably leave it at that until I try it out but I have a few more ideas.

Modifiers could increase lock diversity without increasing the complexity of solutions too much.  Here's what I was thinking:

Lock Modifiers

1. Cracked – more forgiving, first step, any action works
2. Worn – more forgiving, first jam doesn't happen
3. Normal
4. Banded – Twice as many hit points required to smash it off
5. Corroded – less forgiving, wrong action goes straight to Jam
6. Spiked – less forgiving, each wrong action results in 1hp damage to the lock picker

More Locks
Because there are 12 possibile solutions on our chart you could also add 6 more types of locks of just duplicate the default 6 but call them Goblin locks (goblin tin, goblin brass, etc) or Dwarvish locks or whatever.

Character Level
This system doesn't take into account levels at all, you might assign levels to locks by rolling a d10. So, for instance, giving you a 7th level iron lock.  You might assigning penalties and bonuses from the modifiers chart like, locks above the picker's level act as if they are corroded or locks below your level act as if they are worn.  But that might get a bit fiddly.

I like Zak's suggestion that every level you get one get out of a jam free card, but only one.  That might be simpler.  Again I'll have to try this out and see how fast the lock types get solved.  If half the types are still a mystery at 5th level then level might not even be much of an issue-- actual player knowledge standing in for the assumed character's skill increases.

Little Games for Your Big Game

In case you missed it, the gift I made for Santicore was posted here.  I was fulfilling this request:

A game that can be played by the characters in the game world. Could be dice, cards, or board, as long as it reaches a conclusion quickly. If Santicore is feeling generous, perhaps he could provide a gambling game for taverns and flesh-pots, and an abstract board game played by sages and courtiers. [Some variation on Yahtzee or Mornington Crescent will be totally acceptable]

This was challenging for me because creating a game is, well, hard.  You've got chess and checkers and cards and craps, who am I to do better than those.  But I thought hard on it for about a week, thinking about it as I fell asleep and as I woke up.  I carried around a print out of a checker board for a while thinking I might make some sort of mini-domain strategy game out of it.  I played around with a deck of cards.  Here were some of my design goals:

As always, I wanted to use items likely to be in any household, cards, dominoes, six sided dice.  I tried for several days to make the Millet Trader game work with only dominoes, essentially making dominoes the "cards" and "poker chips."  At one point this meant requiring two sets of differently colored dominoes (which is really breaking this design goal in trying to follow it).  In the end, it was too complicated and I could never get it to work right so I compromised and figured folks having something like poker chips wasn't too much of a stretch.  This goal was contradicted by the next.

I wanted something fresh.  I have a book called 180 Ways to Play Solitaire and have read it with interest.  People have been playing games for centuries, but I wanted to find some new angle.  Sets of funny dice are relatively new, so while Pit Fight, requires something an everyday household might not have, I knew Santicore readers would have them and tried to add the Telecanter simplicity touch to a dice game.  Another possible place for something new is our game itself with its sophisticated layers of involvement for a parlour game. I tried to utilize that as a fresh game angle and it coincides with my next goal.

I wanted games that could be a simple "okay, let's roll some dice in the tavern" diversion (Pit Fight) but also am very aware that we are supposed to be playing D&D and not in fact playing cards, or dominoes, or poker, or we could, you know, just call it a poker night.  So Braggart and Tryst are games that, while you could play them straight like Pictionary or something, they sacrifice a bit of good gameness for being games that you can roleplay.  The intention behind them is to offer opportunities to roleplay while playing them in the game world.

As always, when making something for others I'm never sure what people want or like, so I wanted variety.  That includes allowing for different social class of games.  Well, and another goal is to give what the requester asked for and he mentioned possible varieties too.

I didn't get to playtest them all.  I did play pit fight with a friend and I thought it was fun.  I hope there aren't any big flaws lurking under the surface.  If you try any of them out let me know how it goes.  Also, the name "Millet Trader" is in honor of a comment Black Vulmea made that made me chuckle.  A game intentionally named to be dull, hah!

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games VII

For those of you just joining this series, I realized that the default for travel in the wilderness is usually-- nothing happens-- and that there was little to differentiate traveling through one type of terrain from another.  So I set out to try and create strategic games to both, give players something to do while travelling, and to make travelling through the desert feel different than travelling through the jungle.

Because I don't have any typical images in my head for travel through the luminous aether, I made this one a little more abstract.  Also, I don't have any experience DMing folks through planar journeys, but I imagine this could be modifiable to lots of different applications-- travelling through dreams or psionically, for example.  For that reason, though, I have no idea what unit to use here, whether it be time, space, or number of planes jumped.  I leave you to figure out the particulars.  Here we go:

The character that initiated the travel begins in the center.  The rest of the travellers are arranged around the initiator concentrically.

Every unit of travel each traveller must move one position as they are jostled about in the aether.  Before moving each player rolls a d6.  The position they can move to can only be their die roll or lower.  Only one player can occupy a spot at a time. 

If a player rolls lower than all adjacent spaces they must move to the lowest space next to them.  If a player on a 2 spot rolls a one or has adjacent spots blocked, they slip into the void.

Once a journey, players with exceptional intelligence can add their bonus to any persons die roll.

If the party is attacked while travelling, characters receive penalties to combat depending on which ring they have been jostled to: the three spots are -1, and the two spots are -2.  A player lucky enough to be on the six spot receives +1 to combat that round.
_______________________________

So, it isn't too likely for someone to get jostled off unless the party travelling is large and starts blocking each other.  But with the penalties to combat, players will still want to stay as close to the center as possible.

What does slipping into the void mean?  Seems like a pretty good adventure hook to me, probably they end up in a plane they least expected.  What happens if the initiator of travel slips off?  Ooh, seems like they'd take everyone with them, don't you think?

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.
________

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.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games V

Here's another attempt at a simple way to engage players while they travel the wilderness while making different types of terrains feel different.  (Maybe a better name for these things would be Terrain Challenges, or Travel Challenges Simon?)

This might be the simplest one yet (I'm sure the seed of the idea came from Zak's critical range choice he gives his players):

Each day the party has to move one box.  The idea is that in the dark woods you can either be safe or know where you are, but it's hard to do both.  Running from encounters leads to getting turned around and all the stands of trees look alike.  You can try to mark your way, but your bread crumbs might lead something to you.  Treat each box as a corresponding bonus or minus to the wandering monster and getting lost rolls.

If you have any of the folks at the bottom in your party they can shift one box per day as well.

Depending on how you check for monsters and getting lost you might want to cut each side down to 3 boxes.  I'm assuming a d6 with results on a one, so you would never completely avoid the chance to have encounters or get lost.

No players will want to get lost, but I'm thinking low level characters may push towards safety just to survive.  Hopefully they will stumble upon a road or an interesting ruin before they are finally eaten alive.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games IV

First, I never mentioned that I would consider any kind of road or known track to be civilization and by using them players can avoid these mini-games.  I intend these for going off-road or trailblazing.  I suppose that could lead to boring trips along roads in the wilderness, but I'm thinking we should probably all have charts for terrain-specific road encounters and travel on a road should feel quicker anyway. I imagine hand-waving road trips would be less of an issue than whole expeditions through difficult terrain.

Second, obviously these don't have to be used for the terrain they are named for.  If you have a different terrain that you want to keep interesting as players travel across it, choose the mini-game that fits it best.  So far we have terrains that:

• wear parties down with a single, relentless element (swamp)
• drive hirelings mad through isolation and discomfort (ocean)
• are technically difficult and require gear and planning (mountain)

and today I'll give you:

• consume hirelings with hidden dangers (jungle)

Now, the jungle.  I had a hard time with this one.  While I knew that I wanted something like I remember from watching old Sinbad and Tarzan movies-- porters and bearers dying every step of an expedition into the dark jungle-- I didn't want to interfere with the game's system of playing out dangerous encounters and combat.  I'm hoping this might balance both well enough:

The idea is the jungle devours men and women-- quicksand, silent constrictors, piranha filled streams.  Every other day one hireling will disappear.  Having any of the special folks at the bottom of the chart in the party can save one hireling per journey.

Once per journey, a character with an exceptional strength, dexterity, or constitution can prevent a disappearance.

Otherwise the party must leave the hirelings to the jungle or challenge this cruel fate by rolling a d6.  A result of 5-6 means crisis averted-- you grabbed the hireling's hand just as they were about to slip off the cliff trail. A result of 3-4 means the scene becomes a full-blown encounter-- determine what the hazard is, whether environmental or wandering monster, and play it out.  A result of 1-2 means the scene becomes a traditional encounter as well, but you've escalated the danger of the situation-- 1d4 additional hirelings are knocked into the quicksand, are encoiled by the giant anaconda, etc.

I'm hoping that players that really don't want to lose hirelings can avoid it, but that in tense situations, chases or parties lost in the jungle, they may just let hirelings go to avoid losing even more hands to the wilderness.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games III

And now to the culprit that left me wanting something better, the sea.  I thought about it for a while and I decided a cool archetypal challenge for the sea would be your crew.  What, you think you can drift around in the doldrums for weeks without hearing some grumbling from those shady characters you hired at the last port?  Here's what I came up with:

On the second day at sea with no encounter start the game by placing a marker on the first square (Now that I think of it I should have designed it with the track around the edges so you could use a paper-clip).

Each following day move one square, encounters don't matter any more.

When you land on a square with a black spot your crew has become unhappy and is grumbling.  Roll 1d6 to see how they challenge you.

If one of the party members has an exceptional score in the ability challenged the crew is appeased and you halt their descent into darker moods. An exceptional ability can only be used once a journey. 

If you don't have the right ability bonus you can offer up the secondary item: a change of scenery, wine women and song, or cold hard cash.  As long as you meet their challenge you can hold the crew's discontent on that square.  But every day you'll have to roll for another challenge.

Fail the challenge and the marker moves to the next box.  Once you get to the fork, a challenge failed for 3 starts the crew spiralling into madness, depression, and possible suicide.  A failed 4 or 5 will head them toward angry revolt, and either assaulting or marooning the party.

Keep in mind, successfully meeting the challenges will only stall the inevitable.  Once the game is started the only thing that can reset the board is port, or at least having the majority of the crew go ashore somewhere.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games II

Some more thoughts on spicing up travel through the abstract wilderness.  Keep in mind I intend these in addition to encounters and in addition to terrain-based encounters.  I'm just trying to shift the default from nothing happens to- there is some slow-burning tension.

One thing I've done in the past is add npcs to converse with on a ship.  But that takes some prep and players don't seem to want to interact with anything that isn't explicitly a boon or a hook.

After my last post I was worrying that all terrain might be seen as an element wearing you down: thirst in the desert, cold in the tundra, etc.  So I pushed my brain trying to think of a different approach for a mini-game.  Here's an idea for steep and rocky terrain:

Once a day (or hex, whatever works best for your scale) the treacherous mountain terrain will consume a random piece of equipment.  Ropes and spikes used to cross ravines will need be left behind.  Poles will be lost into deep drifts.  grapnels irretrievably wedged on ascending rock faces.  If the party has a dwarf, ranger or local in it they can absorb one of these losses per journey.  Characters with wisdom or intelligence bonuses can substitute one item for another once per journey-- think of it as cleverly rigging something up: the torches melt through the ice wall they can't scale, a pole is used to clamber up a steep spot.

As long as the party has one of the item type that the roll says is consumed, then things are okay.  If not, movement decreases (halved?) and things start getting harder (food and water consumption double?).

Well, it's similar to the swamp travel in that it's still wearing away at the party which I guess is what all resource management amounts too.  But I was hoping with this, the party could be shown the chart before travelling, see what is consumed more commonly, and try to prepare for the trip accordingly, to give the feel of a big expedition.  It could even make finding the remains of a previous expedition, with spikes and rope, treasure-like.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games

Hill Cantons just posted about the tedium of wilderness travel and I was recently struggling with the same thing (you think a hex crawl is boring, try the ocean!).  The first default answer to this is to include terrain-based encounters on the wandering monster table.  That's fine, but if you don't roll an encounter  . . . the default is still nothing happening. 

Weather charts try to balance interest with plausibility, so usually you have the kind of weather you'd expect for the season and it doesn't change much.

You could just make something happen each day of travel and prepare a big chart.  That's how I handle my abstract city Nidus.  Every trip into the city rolls on the table, often these are more exciting things than what the players intended to do in town.  But two things, 1) players entering Nidus are playing a mini-game (they have to roll dice to find what they want), so it's more interesting than just something happens guaranteed and 2) a teeming fantasy city should feel different than the trackless wastes.  Do we really want something happening every day of travel or every hex travelled in the wilderness?

So how do we avoid the boredom of nothing happening while giving the feeling of travelling through vast, treacherous territories?  I think a mini-game is the solution.  Almost exactly a year ago today JDJarvis suggested a roll-to-get-out-of-hex-mechanic to spice up wilderness travel.  I think he was on the right track.  I think it should be a little more involved than that though-- complicated enough that players can make decisions and devise strategies.  I also think each kind of terrain should have a different mini-game.  The challenges of travelling through the Arctic are different than the challenges of the swamp.

What the games would be I haven't quite figured out yet.  Maybe you could help.  But here is a proof of concept I whipped up for swamps:

I think the biggest ongoing threat from wetlands is . . . well, the wet.  The damp gets into food, ruins boots, and wears down pack animals trudging through soft, sticky earth.  So you might make every day in the swamp (travelling or not) give 1+ 1d4 squares of dampness damage.

Players can choose where to put this dampness damage: on boots and armor or on pack animals.  The idea is you can privilege your gear, keeping it dry by overloading your animals or save the animals by trudging through the wet muck yourself.  When the dampness bar is full, the animals are through.  They are lame.  They've been left in sinkholes.  For the boots/armor I'm not sure.  You could say all armor becomes worthless, but that's pretty harsh.  Maybe start taking dampness damage off of AC, once the bar is full, one a day.  Loss of boots should mean slower movement rate too.

You can reset the bar by finding a dry enough spot to camp-- one square cleared per day of fire and rest in camp (props to Wilderness Survival for that idea).

The squares on bottom are if you have a one of any of the labelled folks in the party.  You can sink one square of dampness damage per day into them. The idea is that through know-how and experience they help the party avoid some of the most difficult terrain.

So what choices would this give a party?  Well, in an emergency they could work the animals so hard they sacrifice them, but then you would need to be strict about encumbrance to make that matter.  Or if they are going to need their animals on the other side of the swamp they could store all their armor, sacrifice their boots and travel very slowly.  But if nothing else I'm hoping there would be tension as they split dampness between both bars and looked for a decent camping spot.  You could even set a minimum elevation ahead of time and use this technique as a sub-mini-game.

What do you think?  Can you invent entirely different games for desert/tundra/ocean that would be interesting and "feel" like those places?

Shape Change Mini-Game

Wouldn't it be cool to capture the feel of a mythic shapeshifting chase/duel?  I have the glimmering of an idea of a mini-game that could be engaging for players as well as interesting in-game.  I'll tell you what I'm thinking and maybe you can finish the idea.

You have a diagram of possible creature shapes.  The wizard enters the diagram by becoming one of the weaker/smaller creatures.  I'm thinking d6 +level, so more powerful mages can jump right to bigger things.  Then they can shift form once each round, but they have to achieve the number or higher to move between the creature shapes.

This would become interesting and strategic if they were having to shift from flight to swimming and then from swimming to burrowing.  Or if they were matching fire resistance to a fire breather, etc.

It's possible you could have different diagrams for different schools, say a reptile only, or a mythic beast only diagram.  But that ups the complexity and the number of pages you have to have around.

You might make this interesting by tying it to a magic item that forces a player to shift each round (or else why ever shift from hydra once you get there?).

Or maybe when you get deeper into the chart it gets harder to get back out.

My example diagram is triangular but I imagine a complete circle of choices you could navigate around.  I'd need some more silhouettes and some ideas of which creatures to use.

Sea Trade from Dragon #6

This is the sea trade system from Dragon #6 Ωmega mentioned in my previous post.  I've read it before, but, looking back, I have to say I'm impressed. The whole thing fit on one page, was clean, and easy to understand. Kudos to Ronald C. Spencer, Jr.  It feels very DIY OSR to me.  

I've reformatted the data here for scholarly purposes. I changed "Ports Skipped" to "Port Distance" (it just makes more sense to me, unless there's some kind of race for time related to profiting).  I've also tabulated the returns and odds in a second chart. As you can see the sting of failure is ameliorated by including the brutal chance of ship loss with just getting poor returns on your cargo.  The biggest risk giving a 35% for the former, 25% for the latter. But if you take that risk, you have a 5% chance of getting one of those dreamed of 500% returns on your investment.

I don't think I would use this as is.  The minimalist in me wants to at least cut it down to short, medium, and long hauls.  But it's cool to see what they thought the probabilities should be.  If you can get a hold of a copy, the system also includes simple rules for pilot fees, time spent, and import taxes.  Cool stuff.

About Trade

What's the simplest system we could come up with for trading goods by sea that would still have some of the flavor of the real deal?  I figure some of you are very knowledgeable about this stuff (looking at you richard).

I'm thinking 3-4 tiers of.  More risk = more return. More risk will mostly = ports farther away.  Maybe have the player roll each session we play to check on the trade voyage's fate.

1. What should the probabilities of succeeding be for low, medium, high risk? If you stick with a single d6 and have the roll be 4-5-6, 5-6, or 6, that would be a fifty-fifty chance of losing a cargo even at the lowest risk.

2. What returns should I be looking at? I'd like no chart necessary, so numbers like +10%, +25%, +50% are more attractive, because I can do them in my head.  I have no idea if those are way too much or too little.

If we stick to general rates of return based on distance, we can decide later what ports have what goods and just plug them in and you could always layer shortages and rarity on top of the basic system bones.

Yeah, I realize this could ruin everything and let people make their fortune without needing to enter dungeons.  But investigating the loss of a vessel, or even traveling on your own trade vessel à la Sinbad, is right down my campaign's alley.

Player Perks - Animals

This is for Tim of Gothridge Manor. I reacted negatively to an idea of his to allow players interesting options because I imagined it was about power creep. But as I am wont to do, further reflection has made me do a complete 180 and totally embrace this idea of player perks.

It isn't anything knew, Jeff's Deck of Stuff is a big influence here too. Anyway, Tim mentioned a player in a campaign having an intelligent horse and I've been thinking of possible perks I could give players similar to those mentioned here. So here are a few more focusing on animals:

Trained Ferret

"You have a trained ferret. Before we start playing choose two tricks it knows how to do and one it's still learning. You should be able to call for these tricks with a few words (hide, fetch, go home, sic em!, etc.). Half of the time you ask for the newest trick your ferret will get it wrong and do one of the others."

I think the fun here is the player picking what the ferret can do, but also the potential chaos when it dances instead of sneaking, or something.

Talking Dog

"You have a medium-sized dog that can speak and understand your language at a basic level. This is equivalent to using one verb per sentence (3). It is more intelligent than a normal dog about equal to that of a young child."

I'm not sure what the advantage should be here. A smaller dog could scout and go places a human couldn't. This would be really handy in an urban campaign where dogs are expected, but not so much in a dungeon where a dog is just as likely to become a snack as its master. Maybe a keen sense of smell and the ability to track as a bloodhound would be a boon. But you don't really need to speak with your dog for that to work. What would you want as a player?

Parrot Linguist

"You have a parrot savant able to produce language with perfect pronunciation in five of your world's most common languages. Its vocabulary is limited though. Before play starts decide on five phrases it knows (Where is the gold?, Put down your arms!, Would you like to see my engravings?, etc). When you say one of the phrases to it, it will then repeat the equivalent phrase in all its languages in turn."

Again, I'm thinking the fun is for the player to have to predict what phrases they might find potentially useful. I suppose this and the ferret could be taught something new later at the expense of some gold.

Snake Spell Book

"You have a reticulated python that functions as a spell book. A crystal lens set in a brass ring allows you to read its arcane lore and cast a spell normally unavailable to you. It is twenty feet long and weighs 150 pounds (10 stone)."

This is Zak's idea. Although, he suggests dragons would be spell books, snakes more mundane. But I think the awkwardness of having to carry this around might balance out the power of it.

I'm not sure what the power should be, a randomly determined spell from the level above what the character can cast? What the hell am I thinking?! I was assuming this was for a magic-user, what if it was for any character, then any spell would be something unusual. But who would want to deal with that encumbrance for one spell? Any ideas for spells you might find worth it?

Camera Cat

"You have a light grey cat. When it enters a room an image of the room appears as darker fur on its coat, (imagine a pinhole camera view of the room). It sneaks as a master rogue and has nine lives."

Okay, the name is sort of cheesy, I've always thought of cats as familiars for wizards, and I don't know how you are going to get a cat to scout a room you want it to short of tossing it in . . . but it just seems like it would be cool for the party to be crouching around a cat trying to decipher what the image on its fur means: "Are those bugbears!?"

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One thing about all of these is that they are awkward magic items just for the fact that they are all alive and players will want to keep them that way. Maybe a reason to make their perk powers a little better than a inert magic item-- tarp, bucket, shovel, might have.

Also, the more I think about these, the more I think their power is in distributing them randomly. I don't think I would let players pick them.

Ideas?

Player Mini-Games I

At the risk of seeming fawning I'm going to praise something of Zak's again. The goblins that show up in episode 8 of I Hit it With My Axe always say the opposite of what they mean. In trying to communicate with these goblins the player characters have to do the same. And what happens (if you don't have time to watch and see) is that the players immediately perk up, everyone is attentive of what's going on, they're puzzled for a second, have a flash as they realize what's going on, and then they all start contributing their own opposite talk.

I think that's great. That's the whole point of this game right-- everyone involved, laughing and creating together? What makes this achievement especially cool is that (if I'm remembering correctly) at least some of these players were leery of having to create on the spot at the game table-- and here they were creating willingly and successfully. After seeing that episode (and a few after it) I've been wracking my brains trying to think of equally simple ways to pull players in.

You might consider these the smallest possible of games within a game, and if they work the same way as the goblin opposite talk, they'll be fun not just because they draw players into the game creatively but because they highlight the ironic distance of players trying to be successful dungeoneers by making up the best silly sentences.

I've got some ideas in several categories so I thought I'd break them up into several posts. Let's start with:

Letter Constraints

Lipograms

You can't use a certain vowel. In English the frequency of vowels is e a o i u y. I might stick to the middle three as a balance between being too hard and being frequent enough to actually make the players have to stop and think. So, maybe the a local dialect of Thieves' Cant is just Common with no "a"s, that's how the thieves know who is in the the "know."

"Oi, governor, the shipment comes in the first night of this week. We'll pick it up before you might wink your pretty eyes."

Alliteration

You have to start all your words with the same sound (you might forgive prepositions and articles and such). This might be the way to activate a particular magic item.

"Bring back blessed brother Boniface!"

It varies by what corpus you look at but the frequency of consonants in the initial letter of English words is something like t s h w b m f c l d p n g r k j v q z x. This means you could vary the difficulty to use and power of the above magic item by requiring "t"s for the very easy to "r"s for much harder.

Language Games

Any gibberish language games might work as long as they're consistent and simple-- Pig Latin, Double Dutch, etc. Of course it would work best if some of your players new one of these already. Most of these are easily understood by a listener unless they are used so sparingly as to hide the pattern or rattled off quickly enough to do the same. Maybe the test is if you as DM can follow so can the npcs.

"This wine is the best in the city!"
"ilway"
"otednnay"
"Gentlemen, I understand your gibberish"

Rhyming

Rhyming in English is hard. I wouldn't recommend this as a mini game but if you're playing in a different language it might work great. It could work if the rhymed words didn't have to make literal sense, like Cockney Rhyming slang or a code or something, but that is more of a word constraint. I'll cover some of those next post.