Vendor Saving Throw

The question of “what can my players buy in this town?” is an important one. The availability of equipment creates limits on the player which can force them to make more interesting choices. It can also spur them into traveling abroad, exploring the wider world in search of some place where they can find the things they need.

I’ve used a variety of methods to determine what can and what cannot be found in a given town. And I’ve read many more methods than I have tried using. I’ve never really found anything which worked well for me.

Often times, when my players have discovered a new town, I just wing it. I figure out roughly what kind of town it is, and how big it is, and from there it’s normally pretty obvious what can be bought and what cannot. In a farming village, of course you can find a pitchfork to buy. Sure, there’s probably someone with a sword who wouldn’t mind selling it. No, nobody here can cast healing magic for you.

I can think of no reason why this casual method of determining what is available for sale should not be formally adopted as my “official” method. The only hole are the few items which straddle the line between “obviously,” and “obviously not.” For example, a suit of chainmail armor. It’s possible one of the villagers has a set they’d be willing to part with, but it’s also possible none of them do. The logical thing to do is to roll to see if there’s a such a suit of armor available.

Here is what I propose: every town has a saving throw which is rolled when it’s not clear to the GM whether an item would be available or not. For 80% of what the players might ask for, the answer should be obvious based on the size, wealth, and function of the community. For anything else, 1d20 is rolled against the town’s saving throw. A roll equal to or higher than the target number means the item is available, less than the target number means none are.

The target number would get smaller, the larger a town becomes. An outpost or camp with 5-15 people in it would have a target number of 20. A small farming village where everyone knows everybody else might be 17. A town with a thousand or so people in it might be as low as 14. A major metropolis could get down to 9 or 10.

I’m going to start using this method in one of my campaigns, and see how it works out.

Facilitating a Jailbreak

Over time, as an adventurer adventures, the probability that they will end up imprisoned for some reason approaches 1. For my newest group, their luck ran out in our last game, and they found themselves locked in a bland stone cell, without their equipment, in a part of the dungeon they had never explored before. Which was necessary, since there were actually no prisons in the dungeon before they managed to put themselves into a position where the bandits had significant motivation to lock them up.

Once I had my players under lock and key, I realized that I faced an interesting game mastering challenge. In most respects, being locked in a cell isn’t significantly different from any other problem PCs must deal with. Certainly the trappings of imprisonment are familiar: locked doors, hostile NPCs, and crazy plans. But there’s an important, and potentially game damaging difference: the players can’t give up. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter how hard a given obstacle or puzzle is, because the players can always walk away from it, and seek adventure elsewhere. But when the players imprisoned, walking away is the challenge. If it’s too difficult, the players may become frustrated.

There’s also danger in making escape too easy. After all, the players ought to believe that their prison would have been able to hold most people. Just not super awesome adventurers, like themselves. It would be agency destroying to simply allow the players to escape because keeping them locked up is boring. If the players feel as though their escape was handed to them, then they’ll justly begin to wonder whether they’re being railroaded through scripted events.

This didn’t turn out to be a problem in my specific case. The players relied on a few prison escape cliches (faking sickness? Rly?) but took some creative steps to make it convincing. They earned their way out the door, and have struggled tooth and nail through room after room, gathering a hodgepodge of equipment, and trying to find their way out. But had they been a little less creative, or given up a little sooner, being imprisoned could have turned into a problem. So as an exercise, I thought I’d work on a few different solutions that could be used to either believably aide the characters in an escape, or to outright release them, without letting them entirely off the hook.

They Were Unprepared It’s unlikely that most jailors would really know what to do with an adventurer. They may think they’re tossing a few troublemakers into the clink, never suspecting that their prisoners are a master lockpicker, or a cleric who can call upon the magics of their god. And even if the players demonstrate their abilities prior to their capture, it’s unlikely that a local sheriff is going to know what to do about it. It’s not as though they have antimagic cells handy on the edges of civilization!

It would be silly if every jailkeeper were unprepared, of course. More civilized areas will have more sophisticated holding facilities, and ought to be more difficult to break out of.

24 hours to catch the REAL killers For one reason or another, the players could be released from captivity on the condition that they complete a task for their captors. Most likely, there would be no reward for this task other than freedom, and possibly amnesty for whatever landed the players in prison in the first place. (Of course, it’s still possible they’ll be told not to return to town). There are a number of ways you could do this. A just court could offer to let the players out on parole, on the condition that they take care of a local goblin problem–or better yet–pay a tax on any treasure they haul out of the local dungeon. If the players are held prisoner by an evil character, they might be commanded to perform an assassination or theft.

And, of course, there’s no reason the release needs to be officially sanctioned. If the guard who is protecting the players is in great need, he or she may be willing to release the players in exchange for a favor. It’s unlikely the guard would do this lightly (as they would no doubt lose their job, and possibly be imprisoned themselves) but if their spouse was captured by the devilbear, or their father murdered by Kranos The Red, then the guard may be willing to risk their freedom in exchange for a favor from some powerful adventurers.

The B Team If the players have hirelings who were not captured along with them, then the GM can allow the players to take control of those characters for the purposes of mounting a daring rescue operation. It may be difficult if the hirelings are significantly lower level than the PCs. But then again, escaping from a heavily guarded cell when you have no equipment or spellbooks severely hinders a character’s abilities. Fully equipped characters who are trying to get in rather than out may have better luck than their higher level counterparts.

Pulling a Skyrim Sometimes events completely unrelated to the player’s situation can work out to their advantage. It’s likely that anyone who is powerful enough to have a dungeon to keep people in, is disliked by some people. Maybe those people are, themselves, powerful. If a full scale battle breaks out while the players are imprisoned, it’s a good opportunity for them to slip out in the chaos. Maybe they can convince their captors–or their captor’s attackers–to let them out so they can help in the fight. All the while the GM can roll each turn to determine if a catapult or flicking dragon’s tail opens an escape-sized hole in the cell’s wall.

If all else fails, it’s unlikely that anyone will be paying too much attention during the battle. So the players can attempt the noisy stuff which would normally attract guards.

Skipping Out on the Long Walk I’m a little dubious about this last one. It has the potential to be exciting, but there’s also an implied threat here which the GM will be required to act on if the players don’t make good on their escape: execution. A public beheading, for example, puts the players in a do-or-die scenario where any plan is a good plan. And once they’re out of their cell, opportunities to escape will doubtless present themselves. If they’re marched out onto the streets, then if they get away, they can disappear into the sidestreets quickly. Or perhaps they’d prefer to go a more dramatic route and attempt to shoulder the executioner in the chest when he raises his axe to strike.

I’m curious to know if this is how other GMs approach imprisoned players, or if there’s a different approach entirely that I haven’t thought of.

Changing my Dungeon Notation

I’m a long-winded kind of guy. When you get me talking, I tend to go on for a little bit longer than anybody wants to listen. It’s a failing which has often crept into my game mastering. When it’s time for me to make a dungeon, I’m inclined towards writing detailed descriptions for each room. Sometimes these descriptions can be a paragraph long or longer, noting what’s in the room, where that stuff is, what the room smells like, what it’s used for, and so on. It takes forever for me to finish a dungeon. And because of the time it takes, I’ve often had difficulty keeping to a gaming schedule. If I’m being honest, the paragraphs I write about rooms aren’t even that useful to me at the table. Every time the players enter a new room I need to flip through a large stack of papers, and once I find the description I need, reading it takes even more time. All the while my players wait, twiddling their thumbs and making dice towers.

My saving grace has always been improvisation. I’m good at figuring out what comes next while my players are describing what they’re doing right now. In fact my verbose note taking has given me many opportunities to practice my improvisation. I’ve sunk so much time into my notes in the past, that I often don’t have time to finish everything which need to be finished by game day. When the players arrive, I’ve often needed to come up with more content on the fly just to keep the game rolling. It doesn’t help that I have a penchant for games which last until everyone is exhausted of playing. One of my fondest memories is a ~14 hour overnight game session. I think I ran out of prepared material for that session within ~2 hours.

A couple months back whilst I was improvising a dungeon, it occurred to me that I’ve been a fucking moron. As much as I may personally enjoy writing comprehensive notes for my dungeons, this strategy has obviously not served me well, while improvisation always has. Why in the world have I wasted all of this time trying to write notes so detailed that I would never need to improvise? What I should have been doing instead is writing brief notes which give me structure, but still allow me to do most of my elaboration at the table.

Thus was born my new rule: Dungeon room descriptions must fit on a single line of handwritten notebook paper. One additional line each can be added for traps (T), secrets (S), monsters (M), and loot (L) if any (or all) of those are present. The descriptions need not be complete, because anything missing can easily be filled in during play.

If the descriptions says “Bedroom in bad shape. Rotted. Bed, Armoire Fireplace, Painting of a woman.” then when the players enter the room I might say “It looks as though this bedroom was once very fine. The bed appears to be made of oak, but the mattress sags to the floor and emits a stench of mold. From the bed’s canopy you can hear the skittering of vermin. An ornately carved Armorie rests against the north wall, while on the east wall is a fireplace filled with ash. Above it is a painting of a woman.” And if, for some reason, my players decide they want to smash the bed and ask if there are any blunt object nearby, I may say “There’s an iron firepoker laying next to the fireplace.”

Additional lines are just as easy, and might add bits of detail to the room which were omitted in the original description. For example, in one octagonal room I have mirrors on every wall which doesn’t have a door on it. The S line says only “If the mirror on the wall marked with an S is pressed, it swings open revealing a locked safe.” The T line reads “Safe has needle trap [relevant numbers]. If any mirror other than that one is pressed, a spear is launched from behind the mirror. [relevant numbers].” Finally, the L line reads “Safe contains bag of 200gp, and a small bronze statue of a cat. Non-magical. Worth 50gp.”

I’ve already run 3 sessions using this notation system, and I’ve found it to be remarkably effective. I’ve never found dungeons more fun to run, or more fun to create, in all my years of GMing. I expect that the system will continue to evolve the more I use it. Tomorrow I’ll post the first sublevel of The Ironbone Tower dungeon, to serve as a full example of how I’m currently using this method.