Prep Tools, Not Adventures

The table of poor-quality tools cropped out of Gary Larson's infamous "Cow Tools" comic. Decorated with the 'Wave' art from '90s paper cups in the background, and a bilighting overlay.

Update January 10, 2023: This post has won the Gold Bloggie for best Advice Post! Holy crap I am floored. Thank you everyone who voted for me, or who voted for one of the other posts, or who wrote one of the other posts, and thank you to Prismatic Wasteland for running this event. Being recognized feels nice 😀

I’ve run a lot of D&D over the years, and in that time I’ve cycled through various approaches for how I get ready for a session. Like most folk, I started out with unrealistic ideas about how much and how quickly I could produce good material. Because of this, my early campaigns were basically burnout generators. They quickly morphed into Zombie Campaigns: I continued running them out of a desire to spend time with my friends and to be a good referee, but I’d lost any creative energy for improving them. A lot of promising campaigns wound up ending before they should have because of that. Over many years and many campaigns I’ve developed better strategies for handling prep. The most important of these is to focus on making flexible tools, rather than specific adventure scenarios.

A few weeks ago I began a new ORWA campaign, so let’s take the first session of that as an example. Because it was the first session, and most of the players had no previous experiences in the world to drive their activity, I needed to prepare some specific adventure scenario to get the ball rolling. I put together a little 12 room dungeon which was being contested by two factions, each of which controlled one of the dungeon’s entrances. So my players go out to this location, get invested with one of the factions, and decide the best way to help their new pals out was to do some rabble rousing among the opposing faction’s neighbors. Then there was an impromptu street fair organized around a challenge fight, which the party skillfully manipulated into a riot when their opponents failed to honor the terms of the fight, culminating in the party using the cover of the mob to assault their enemy’s fortified position.

It was a good little adventure, and a great tone-setter for the campaign! It had everything I like to see: I was able to show off the Saturday Morning SciFi weirdness of my setting; the players did some creative problem solving; they punched above their weight class by leveraging a precarious social situation and deploying their skills and spells precisely when and where they would have the most impact. And never once did they set foot in my dungeon, or deal with any of the specific challenges I had prepared.

I’m glad I had that dungeon prepared. If they’d gone into it, I’d have needed those notes. But I’m also glad I didn’t put too much work into it. The whole scenario—setup, map, and key—was scribbled across 3 pages of my notebook. It was a sloppy little thing I threw together during loading screens in video games and boring scenes in movies. If I’d put much more effort into it I might have been annoyed that I never got to use it.

My more serious preparation time was spent making reusable tools to help me quickly generate gameplay no matter what the players decide to do. In the same session I described above, I used the setting map to quickly identify how long the party would need to travel and what sights they’d see along the way. I used encounter tables to give that travel time weight.1 The encounters also presented the players with a series of smaller side-challenges to navigate, many of which provide hooks or foreshadowing for larger campaign events still to come.2 When the party decided to start rabble rousing among the enemy faction’s neighbors I was able to use my NPC generator to quickly give those neighbors some personality and wants of their own. I was also able to reference the territory this was taking place in, and the social norms of that territory informed what challenges the party would face carrying out their plan.3 When the party organized a street fair I could have had a unique street vendor show up with my popup shop generator,4 but at that point we were running short on time so I decided not to.

1 I detailed my general approach for structuring encounter tables in 2017, though I ought to post about its updated form at some point. (Update July 22, 2022) I have now posted about its updated form!
2 One of those challenges, a minor trap the party fell into, resulted in a friendship with the creatures operating the trap. The party has become highly engaged with that friendship, and those creatures have appeared in every session since.
3 In this case, the local population was already prejudiced against the group the PCs wanted to turn them against, so it was easier than normal.
4 Similar to the Goblin Bazaar I described a couple years back.

All this stuff is what I spent time carefully crafting before the game, and almost all of it is reusable. The specific table entries will change a bit: some have been consumed and new entries need to be written. Others are temporarily exhausted and I moved them off the table for a bit. Still others remain on the table with a note that the next time they occur will be the party’s second encounter, with consequent developments. (“Ah, we meet again!” says the creepy sewer vampire.) But now that the tables have been written this restocking is fairly quick and easy to get done. For some tables I’ve even got pre-written replacements ready to go from days when I had too many ideas to fit on a given table.

Other tools I prepared that didn’t come up in that specific session include:

  • A schedule of goals for each of the game’s major factions, so that each time they accomplish something I immediately know what they’re working on next.
  • A table for determining what a random encounter is doing at the moment they’re encountered. I usually roll this outside the session while stocking the encounter tables.
  • Generalized tables for the results of doing something that publicly affects the party’s reputation, good or bad.
  • Specific consequences, good and bad, for some of the party’s more notable actions. I roll one of these at the start of each session. (This is a bastardized adaptation of Arnold’s Potential Drama idea).
  • A table of major events that will occur in the world, irrespective of the player’s actions. Stuff like natural disasters, or the deaths of public figures. (A distant evolution of Brendan’s Haven Complications table).
  • A series of tables and a little stack of blank maps to help me quickly throw together a small adventure site if the party finds one that I haven’t specifically prepared.

And of course, it bears mentioning that even my unused dungeon can now be repurposed as fuel for my tools. The parts the players learned about will need to be discarded: the nexus of varied mutagenic energies, and the Sherman tank in the basement that was being disassembled and smuggled out in pieces. The individual rooms however—none of which the players explored—could be shuffled among encounter tables, or into my adventure site generator.

The great thing about tools is that in addition to saving the referee’s time and energy, they’re able to react to the player’s actions in a way that specifically prepared scenarios just can’t. If the players are walking down the street towards a dungeon, then become randomly fascinated by a bit of graffiti and wander into an alley on a wild goose chase, then if all you’ve got prepared is that one dungeon you’re stuck. But if you’ve got a table of interesting locations that are designed to fit anywhere in your setting, you can keep the game rolling as if you’d planned for this all along. And when the players are able to find interesting adventure no matter where they go your campaign world will feel much more alive.

The reactive potential of tools is also why my most important prep occurs immediately after running a session. While I’m writing out my recap of events (something I’m indulgently excessive about), I have a set of questions to ask myself:

  • Did the players encounter any interesting NPCs that it would be fun to add to my Recurring Characters table?
  • Did the party wrong anyone who might hold a grudge against them? What form might revenge take? (Put this on the consequences table).
  • Does anyone feel that they owe the party a favor? What might they do to settle the debt? (Put this on the consequences table).
  • Review all the table entries used, and restock anything that needs it.
  • What parts of the session were rough, and what tools or techniques would help them work better in future?

That last one is a biggie. For example, as the sessions have gone on, this party has taken out a lot of loans. That’s not something other groups I’ve played with have done. The first couple times it happened I set an arbitrary limit for how big a loan could be, and noted down the amounts without any real idea of how it would be collected. Now I’ve worked out a formalized little procedure for how loans are guaranteed and how debt repayment is enforced.

As of posting this, the renewed ORWA campaign has had 4 sessions. I made sure I had another specific adventure prepped before we started session 2, but once again I’m glad it’s a thing I scribbled casually into my notebook; because 3 sessions later the players still haven’t stopped moving long enough to need me to prompt them towards an adventure. My tools and their own desires have entered a feedback loop that hasn’t left room for me to say “Well, there’s X thing going on over here…”

I’ve also got heaps more creative energy left in me than I used to after the first few sessions of a new campaign.

Additional Reading About Session Prep

That Four Letter Word: Prep on Save vs. Total Party Kill
Planning a Campaign as a Series of Decisions on The Retired Adventurer
The Grand d666 on Being An Asshole To A Goblin

Secret Society Factions in ORWA

In the coming weeks 5 Years Left will be ending. Its been a fun and creatively rejuvenating game, but after nearly two years I’m ready to shift focus. I want to delve back into On a Red World Alone. Play a game with more substantial factions, where players have more opportunity to make world-altering plans. Before I can get things started back on mars, though, I’ve got to develop some tools for myself. Part of the reason I took a break from this game was my fatigue with trying to support a style of play I’d never experienced before. I didn’t know how to referee a satisfying domain game. Worse, I didn’t even know what it was I needed to learn, and never had the time or energy to figure it out. Now I do.

When ORWA returns, the players will be governing a major faction. Major factions can’t be challenged with pit traps or goblins. They need to be challenged by other factions. Groups with their own idea of how the dome ought to be governed, and the power to manifest that government. These other factions can’t be finite challenges the way a typical dungeon or dragon is. If a faction can be cleared in 2-4 sessions of play, then the game won’t last long. Additionally, I’d really like to introduce some new factions to the game, without abandoning the ones my older players will have gotten to know over ORWA’s previous half-decade-long run. But because this game takes place within the confined space of a city-sized bio-dome on mars, there’s not a lot of room for new factions to exist in.

These are problems that will require a variety of solutions. Some of the less interesting old factions have merged together. Other factions that the old party effectively defeated no longer hold any territory at all, and if they still exist have reorganized into religious institutions, mercenary gangs, merchant corporations, etc. Some factions are able to exist outside the dome, underground, or up in space. The least typical sort of faction, and the one I’d like to work through here, is a secret society. It solves two of my issues right off the bat: secret societies don’t openly hold territory, and so I don’t need any extra space to fit them in. They also defy being a finite challenge, since players can struggle against them without knowing who’s in charge. They don’t have anyone to negotiate with or assassinate.

On a Red World Alone has a long tradition of secret society factions. For the majority of the original campaign the players were agents of a mysterious organization known as “The Internet.” One of the culminating events of that campaign was the players destroying that organization, scattering its resources to the wind, and even hunting down the most powerful remnants of its leadership. They leveraged the tools and secrets they stole from it to build their own faction in the shadows, sharing technology and building alliances until they were powerful enough that I didn’t know how to run the game anymore. It seems fitting that secret societies remain a part of the world. Perhaps, just to give my players an eerie sense of déjà vu, some of their own agents are capable-yet-unorthodox upstarts with secret plans to overthrow their masters.

Let’s imagine a theoretical faction that definitely won’t exist in ORWA: the Cult of the Sleeping God. Their goal is to wake their lazy god up. Every faction needs a goal beyond simply seeking more power. Power-seeking is in the nature of big factions, but each has a certain form or flavor of power they value. This is a religious faction, so they’re seeking power in the form of making their god more powerful.

To awaken their god, the cult needs 3 things: cosmic smelling salts (requiring many rare, expensive, difficult-to-acquire ingredients); access to the dimension in which their god sleeps (they’ll need to learn the secret of how to get there); and to kill the traitor who put their god to sleep in the first place (one of the party’s allies!). Whenever it comes time for this faction to act, they’ll do something in pursuit of one of these things.

For any faction to work as an interesting part of the game the players must, at minimum, know the faction exists. So the Cult of the Sleeping God will have a sigil they paint or carve whenever they take action. Something to bless their efforts, and celebrate their victories. It’s not a very good way to keep a secret, but if the faction were too good at keeping secrets then I’d be the only one who knew about them. I’ve done stuff like that before, and every time it’s just me on my own doing extra work the players never see, and which doesn’t improve the play of the game.

By their very nature, secret societies should show up in places where a normal faction would not. For example, while any faction might place spies to gain information, a secret society could build an entire network within the party’s own faction. So as the party is recruiting specialists—diplomats, scientists, architects, etc.—there’s some chance they may be plants working for the Cult of the Sleeping God. Leeching the player’s resources, building back-doors into everything they do. As another example, players will make rolls occasionally to check the health of their faction. Are the needs of their citizens being met, are their supply lines secure, is there civil unrest? If something is going wrong there’s no reason the Cult of the Sleeping God couldn’t occasionally and obviously be behind it.

I haven’t fully settled on the form domain play will take yet, but part of the procedure of the “Domain Turn” is going to be a phase when a number of other factions get to make ‘moves.’ I won’t have every faction move during every session, since moves are big things that presumably took careful planning. Also it would be tedious. I’d rather players have 2-3 moves to react to during a session. The factions that move are also going to be somewhat randomized. So another way the Cult of the Sleeping God could show up where it’s not supposed to be would be to have them on the the faction table twice. One entry would be the cult acting somewhat obviously on its own behalf. Enough that the player’s information networks can confidently inform them that the cult was responsible. The other entry would call for a re-roll on the faction table, and whatever faction the dice landed on will make a move that has been influenced by members of the Cult that have infiltrated its hierarchy.

This is all very rough. Restarting ORWA is a large project, and like most large projects there’s no clear place to start. Every piece is contingent on some other piece that doesn’t yet exist. The only way to get it done is to start putting things in place, building off them, then coming back around and revising that first stuff once I’ve got a better idea of how the rest of the structure fits together. I don’t yet know exactly what the domain turn looks like, or what elements make up the player’s “domain character sheet,” but the idea of introducing a secret society appealed to me. And now I’ve got an idea about how a secret society might want to attack the party, which has forced me to think about the sorts of resources the party might have, which gives me something to tinker on next, and so on until the game is ready.

Go Die in a Hole: The Endless Stair

I got together with Arnold K. (of Goblin Punch) to play some D&D recently. I ran him through an accelerated version of CM8 – The Endless Stair, an Ed Greenwood module from 1987. Once we’d played through the whole thing we talked about it for about an hour. By the time we were done the adventure was pretty thoroughly juiced, I’d say.

We also recorded ourselves while doing these things. If that sounds like it would amuse you, you’ll find the videos below. The first is our play session, and the second is our discussion.

Enjoy!

D&D Christmas Carols: O Lantern Light

A Merry Christmas to all my fellow celebrants! To everyone else: I hope this Saturday finds you well. As is tradition on this blog, I’ve spent the last couple weeks hammering out some D&D-inspired lyrics to an old Christmas caroling standard. My singing voice has not improved, but I think I’m gradually developing a better sense of rhyme and meter during these annual songwriting exercises.

If you’re a new reader, this is the eighth time I’ve done this, so there’s quite a back catalogue of songs by now.

I wasn’t able to fit in a backing track for the melody this year. Apparently the second verse of the song isn’t a refrain, despite having a completely different structure from every other verse? I wanted to use it as a refrain, which means we’re stuck with an acapella performance this year.

O Lantern Light — Lyrics

O Lantern Light, shining in search of plunder.
A tool for folk accustomed to the sun.
A beacon, too, for beasts of ter’ble hunger
lurking near ’til there’s no chance to run.
A joyous cry of hunger to be sated.
Your human meat will make an ogre’s feast!

(Refrain)

Try to parley,
cajole, flatter, inveigle!
Oh talk for your life!
Chat them up, or else you die.
Oh talk for your life,
talk for your life!

Deep down beneath a long-dead wizard’s tower
eyes alight with a greedy glint of green.
Kick down a door searching for magic power,
or things that shine with a golden treasure sheen.
Instead you find a lot—a lot—of goblins.
Ten thousand more than you could hope to fight!

(Refrain)

Far far from home chasing a treasure rumor:
a piled heap where a dragon could sit.
One rests there now, fate has a sense of humor,
as does the thief, who insists she can stealth it.
The heap disturbed, the dragon quickly wakens.
The thief proclaims you as the cleaning crew!

(Refrain)

Sleepy Ogre (#NED 17: Nap)

A much simpler drawing today. This ogre has had a big day gobbling up human adventurers, and has tuckered himself out. Like all the art I’ve drawn this month, it’s freely available for use in any RPG projects that would benefit from my doodles.

I’ve just about run out of steam with No Effort Dicember, I’m sad to say. I did accomplish the goal I started out with. I wanted to indulge myself by returning to a simpler form of RPG blogging. I did that, and in so doing I connected with the joy of writing in a way I hadn’t for awhile. But daily blogging is a lot of effort. It’s starting to feel like work, and cutting into the time I’d rather be using for other things. I might write a few more as the month goes along, or I might not. Either way, this was a lot of fun!

Big shoutout to Dungeons and Possums, who has been absolutely killin’ it with these prompts every day. Definitely give that blog a look.

You Stumbled Into the Wrong Neck of the Woods, Stranger (#NED 16: Unholy)

Today was the first time in maybe 4 months that I set no expectations for myself. Was gonna skip this too, but the mood to doodle came up on me, and I figured the Dicember prompt was as good a subject as any. To be honest, today’s break has been so nice that I’m at serious risk of plunging into a bacchanal of sloth for weeks. No ragrets.

Check out the hashtags #DICEMBER or #DICEMBER2021 on your social media of choice to see other participants.

I’m Getting Too High Level For This Shit (#NED 15: Snow)

Ice and snow as two separate prompts!? That’s conceptual double-dipping, Dyson!

Alright, uh…snow falls in winter…winter is a metaphor for old age… Let’s talk about retired adventurers. (The concept, not the blog.) This is actually something I’ve been tinkering with for months now. I’ve still got some further development to do before it’s ready for the table, but maybe sharing this half-finished version will generate some criticisms useful to my thought process.

Low level adventuring is fun. I think this is a common sentiment among my peers in the OSR. Levels 1-3 have more tension. Characters are more fragile so they’re more likely to die, and they’ve got less emotional investment in them so it’s less of a bummer when they do. These levels also include the most relatable form of play. The things characters are able to do are more closely analogous to what real human beings can do. The powerful magic items and spells and potions don’t come in until later.

Domain level play is also fun. At least conceptually. It’s neat to move from being a pawn tossed about by the whims of the game world, to someone with the power to change that world. I’ve had a lot of fun with domain play, but I’ve never felt at home with it. Never reached that comfortable back-and-forth where both players and referee know what they want, and what to expect of one another. Part of the issue is that it takes so long for a campaign to reach the domain stage that I haven’t practiced with it much at all. Another part is the dearth of writing on the subject. Rule books usually make only a token gesture towards supporting domain play, and the blogging scene doesn’t often engage with it. There are some notable exceptions to that, like this post from Joseph Manola, and this one from John B., but I’m surprised how many of the blogs I read return no results when searching for “Domain.”

It would be nice to engage with domain play earlier in a campaign, while keeping the focus on grotty, low-level adventuring. That’s the impetus behind this idea.

Characters gain experience only by spending money to gain resources or connections as part of building their future prospects as a ruler of a domain. In practice this just means taking numbers out of the “money” column, and placing them in the “experience” column. Their investments have no form or function within the game until thy reach level 5, at which point they become a Boss. Bosses are too busy with important affairs to bother with dungeon crawling. They send underlings to handle that sort of thing for them. The player of a new boss should roll up a new 1st level character to serve as their Boss character’s underling. The player is now their own questgiver.

Bosses remain in play, but act only during a meta-game “domain turn” which takes place at the start of each session. After the domain turn ends, players control their underling characters in much the same way they normally would: delving dungeons and exploring wilderness. Now, however, they gain experience points by turning money over to their boss to help grow the boss’ empire. Again, this has no tangible benefit in play until the new character gains enough experience points to achieve level 5, at which point they too become a boss. The player now has 2 bosses, perhaps working as partners, or more likely, the first boss has grown powerful enough to need an under-boss. The player again rolls a fresh character, and may continue this cycle as long as they wish. Over time the domain turn will likely become longer and more intricate. The dungeon delving portion of the game may eventually become displaced completely, at which point it might be appropriate to introduce an “underling management” minigame, but that’s even more speculative than the rest of this, and well beyond the scope of this post.

For each Boss a player has at their disposal, they may make take 1 action during the Domain Turn. Additionally, the number of Boss’s at a player’s disposal should roughly set the scale on which they operate. I figure players with 1 Boss operate on the level of a mercenary captain, or Archon of a small town. 2 Bosses might make you a city Mayor, army General, Archbishop in your church, etc. Sometime around having 5 Bosses players would be operating on the world stage.

The Domain Turn, like its sibling the Exploration Turn, is not a set length of time. It is as long as it takes to achieve the results of a Domain Turn action, which may be an hour or a year. As a matter of maintaining the structure of play, it ought to occur once at the start of each session, regardless of how much time passes during the more traditional mode of play. It’s important that the timescale in the two modes be able to float a little bit relative to one another.

The structure of the domain turn as laid out below is strict, but only because this mode of play is too unfamiliar to be loosy goosy with. When a player is told they can do anything they want, many will experience analysis paralysis. When told they must choose from a set of 5 actions they’ll often opt to invent a 6th. This is desirable behavior. I imagine a group that became comfortable with this system would abandon much of this formalization.

The domain turn occurs in 3 steps, each of which have some chance to influence the steps which come after:

  1. Domain Encounter is rolled. Only a single encounter is rolled for the whole group, but it has to be rolled first because it has a good chance of altering what the players what the players want to do in the later two phases. This would be adapted from the Haven Encounters I used in ORWA.
  2. Boss’s projects are updated. Done second because this phase has the greatest potential to be dull. Hopefully not, but if it is, at least the turn starts strong and ends strong. Some project updates will be simple. A progress bar moving one step closer to the end. “You hired a crew to build a tower in the woods. It’ll take 3 domain turns. This is turn 2 of 3.” Other project updates may require the player to roll. “Check a d6 for that spy you put into your enemy’s entourage. On a 4 or 5 they send you information, on a 1 they got caught.” This would also be a good phase to generate adventure prompts which the players could assign to themselves in the other phase of play. “The caravan of supplies you sent for was attacked by bandits along River Road. Half the goods were stolen. Do you want to send someone out to recover the rest?”
  3. Domain Actions. Performed last, because it’s what players will be most interested in. Bosses only get a single action per session, but those actions are more abstracted than in normal play. “Convince a local aristocrat to fund my scheme.” would be one action. Boss Characters are competent. Their actions succeed or fail with much less need to fiddle with the details than the actions of the low-level schmucks players control during normal play!

Before attempting to use this system at the table I’d like to have a codified list of domain actions, and how to resolve them. The sort of thing where if the player knows exactly what they want to do, I can say “ah, that’s an example of X action; let’s resolve it according to those rules.” And if they don’t know what to do, I can say “Well, here are the types of actions you can take, which one seems most useful to you at the moment?” Ava’s rules on Conspicuous Consumption are a particular guidepost to me here.

And that’s about all I’ve managed to accomplish with this system so far. I kinda wanted to push my development a little further today, but I’ve had to write this post in full twice because of an odd computer crash. I am now a Class-B Grumperton, and also over an hour behind schedule on work today.

Check out the hashtags #DICEMBER or #DICEMBER2021 on your social media of choice to see other participants.

Magibabble (#NED 14: Ooze)

Y’know how, in Star Trek, they solve problems with technobabble? At its best the technobabble is built on the established physical properties of Star Trek’s world. As a viewer, I understand that the Deflector Dish can be modified to direct a variety of different types of energy, I understand that the Bussard collectors gather up interstellar particles, and I know that tachyons are particles that move backwards through time. In the real world this is all varying degrees of nonsense. None of these tools are defined well enough to hold up to close scrutiny, but within the fiction they have a comprehensible function that allows me to see how they fit together to overcome a certain problem. So when good technobabble happens, the solution feels earned.

That’s a feeling I’d like to create within my games. In particular I’d like for magic users to feel like this as they command the elemental forces to conjure their spells.

Right off the bat I have an advantage over Star Trek’s writers because I’m using magic. Magic makes no pretensions to being science. Its underlying logic is already entirely vibes-based, and nobody expects it to hold up to close scrutiny.* That said, I’ve got some hurdles to deal with as well. Most notably the fact that while I want magic users to feel like they’re cleverly manipulating a complicated system of tools and principles, I don’t want to make them learn a complicated system of tools and principals.

Now, I’ve written about magic systems a few times before. Okay, more than a few. I’ve written about magic systems a lot. I’ve even got a new method I’m developing through playtesting. This desire has always been what I’ve been trying to drive towards I think, even though I definitely wouldn’t have always been able to phrase it clearly for myself. Part of what has helped me figure out what I’m driving towards has been the fairly recent development of Chris H’s oozes.

Chris H. is a highly skilled player. He doesn’t have a public facing blog or social media presence for me to link to, but there’s a good chance you know him anyway because he plays in so many online games that I get stressed just thinking about having a schedule that packed. In my Dangerous Neighbors campaign he plays a magic user named Wob, using my Magic in the Moment system. Early on Wob acquired the magic words “Animate,” and “Ooze,” and this has basically defined his strategy through the whole campaign to this point.

Chris has taken to treating any form of slime, sludge, mud, or goo as treasure. He carries sacks of flour, empty buckets, and a whole collection of odd substances in mason jars as part of his normal load of gear. Every few sessions he mixes a bunch of stuff together to magic up a slime servant to get the party out of a jam. When he throws “powdered vampire ashes” into the mix, it functions exactly like good technobabble in Star Trek. Everyone understands its function well enough that the results of creating a slime with it feel earned.

All this good play is more a result of Chris’s personal playstyle, and our relationship as people who’ve played together for many years and have a certain simpatico with one another. It can’t be credited to Magic in the Moment. Hopefully, though, I can figure out how to write simple rules that best encourage the sort of play that Chris is pursuing, thereby making it something that others can more easily slot into their own games.

*Except people who read too much Brandon Sanderson. Haha, sick burn.

Check out the hashtags #DICEMBER or #DICEMBER2021 on your social media of choice to see other participants.

Supporting Faction Play with Treasure Tables (#NED 13: Food)

The leapfrogging chain of thoughts which led me from today’s prompt to the thing I’m actually going to write about is too labyrinthine to justify. I’m not even going to try.

Social play tends to be central to the games I run. This wasn’t originally a conscious choice on my part, but rather the emergence of a dominant strategy. As a referee, I don’t like mindless or animalistic monsters, I’m bad at enforcing language barriers, and I’m a sucker for a well-stated argument. My players discovered that these factors mean parley is often the most effective way to get what they want, so they do it a lot. This works for me. I enjoy running parleys, and I’ve leaned into it as my personal style. It’s common for creatures like wolf packs and zombies to talk in my games, just for the sheer pleasure of parley.

In order to better support this central aspect of play, I’ve begun incorporating Objects of Social Significance on my treasure and shop-population tables. I first mentioned this in my post about The Goblin Bazaar, but there was a lot of other stuff to cover there so I glossed over it. When the players visit a shop or find treasure, and I roll “Object of Social Significance,” what does that mean?

The first step is to figure out who this object is significant to. I’ll roll a random creature or faction, and sometimes I’ll instantaneously know what the object should be from that. For example, it has been established in my game that the Boastful Bovines (a faction of horrific cow-horse-human hybrids) are film buffs. They’ve got a working projector, and 6 movies they watch and re-watch ad-nauseum. So an Object of Social Significance for them would be a new film which the players could use to improve their relationship with that group.

For other factions no specific object will jump to my mind. In those cases I’ll usually just roll again, and whatever Object I roll can be Socially Significant to that faction somehow. This happened fairly recently when the party killed a nest of giant centipedes, and discovered Objects of Social Significance for the faction of giant spiders on level 3. The spiders haven’t been developed much, so I rolled for treasure again and got jewelry. This meant that the party came upon a number of spider corpses in the centipede nest, and those corpses were wearing jewelry. The following session the party visited the spiders to deliver the jewelry of their fallen kin, and the spiders were touched by their decency. The spiders now like the party very much—though after getting to know the spiders, the party actually hates them and is waiting for a good opportunity to betray them.

Of course, these objects can also function as normal treasure in varying degree. The jewelry could be sold at any shop in exchange for hard currency if the players didn’t want to bother with its socially significant aspect. There’s nothing wrong with that. Heck, I haven’t done this yet, but eventually I’d like the players to find an Object of Social Significance that they’ll be inclined to keep at their peril. They could find a wand of 100 fireballs with “PROPERTY OF MELCHIZAR THE MALEVOLENT” written clearly on the side of it. They’d definitely keep the wand, and Melchizar would definitely be annoyed if they ever found out.

Check out the hashtags #DICEMBER or #DICEMBER2021 on your social media of choice to see other participants.

Helping Other Members of the Party!? That’s Basically Communism! (#NED 12: Help)

Just this past Wednesday I wrote that I wanted to be better at checking in with the whole party during Exploration and Travel turns. For the uninitiated, “Turns” here refers to a fungible amount of time that’s used to measure the length of an action during different modes of play. Exploration Turns—often just ‘Turns’—are where my game spends the most time. It’s used most commonly while the players are exploring an adventure location like a dungeon. Each Exploration Turn is approximately 10 minutes, though it’s best not to try mapping turns onto literal clock movements. Travel Turns, or Watches, are used mostly when players are moving across a vast distance, or when they’re exploring a relatively safe environment like a city. They last about 4 hours, but again, not literally.

In both of these game modes the party tends to behave as a single unit. This is especially true for Watches (“We go North.”), but happens during Exploration as well. The party may discuss what they want to do, but often it’s only a single character who actually does something. None of this is necessarily bad. The only issue is that when the party works as a unit, more outspoken players unintentionally push shy players onto the sidelines.

While pondering today’s prompt, I was thinking about how John B. approaches teamwork. (A second reference in one week. John’s outsize influence on my thinking is well documented.) I’ve wanted to integrate better incentives for teamwork & assistance into my own games for awhile now, and it occurred to me that it could be done as a matter of refereeing style, rather than as a written rule.

When the players are in Exploration or Travel Turns, and a situation arises in which one member of party is doing something, the referee can quickly indicate the other members of the group and ask: “Is there anything you want to do to help them?” If they can come up with something good, maybe the person taking the action gets a bonus, or gains safety from some potential consequence. It may also happen that a player doesn’t have anything to do to help, but does have an idea about what their character wants to do while the rest of the party is occupied. Or maybe the players will simply say “no,” which is fine. Characters don’t need to be acting constantly, so long as players are given frequent invitations to act.

What qualifies as good help may be handled more or less seriously. I’ll end with an anecdote from when John was playing Doctor Trevor Science in my FKOS game, years ago. Another player was hacking a computer, and Dr. Science wanted to help. So as the other player hacked, he played some heavy synth music on his phone, and flashed the lights dramatically.

Obviously the hacker got a +1 to their roll.

Check out the hashtags #DICEMBER or #DICEMBER2021 on your social media of choice to see other participants.