Quick Hits III

 

Dungeon Design Principles

 

Dungeon design - 9 principles 

1.     Multiple entrances and exits. At least two obvious and at least two secret ones. Add information to each entrance to the dungeon giving the players clues as to what they might discover in that area. Carvings and glyphs, types of monsters guarding that door, etc. 

2.     Consider the dungeon’s original purpose. Ex. Prison is not a fortress is not a wizard’s tower is not a natural cavern converted into monster space is not a dwarf or kobold delve. Consider shape and materials. Consider the kinds of traps and which way they would face. 

3.     Levels. Each one should have a theme. Some levels will have stairs or other vertical passages within the level. Think of super Mario bros in terms of level theme. These levels also represent a gradation of danger. The higher-numbered levels are more dangerous. These do. It have to be literal stacked vertical levels but you should have different areas of the dungeon where more dangerous ones are farther away from the dungeon entrance than less dangerous ones are.  Give the players some good clue that they are transitioning to the next level. There is a gambling aspect here (risk/reward) that players love - more choices. 

4.     Have physical loops in your dungeon. Looping paths give good guys and bad guys both tactical choices to make. It also gives exploration choices, and grants the players a sense of discovery if they complete a loop that is not obvious. 

5.     Add some verticality. Not just the stairs or a chute, but trap doors and even shafts. Have a tall cavern. Rooms with galleries where PCs can look down or shoot down, and so can enemies. Players enjoy being able to use their rope. They enjoy finding their characters can go up, over obstacles and down again and not just have to push through. 

6.      At least one secret area - an area only accessible through a secret or concealed door. Elves are good at noticing these things. Other characters have a good shot too. There should be clues pointing towards them so an observant player will have a chance to “defeat” you. Hold on the map, gap between evenly spaced doors, breeze blowing candles coming from… nowhere. Dungeons where everything is meant to be discovered doesn’t really feel like discovery. 

7.     Weirdly shaped/filled rooms. Tall, pentagon, water hazards. Pillars, debris, low walls, statues. Analogously, rooms with surfaces of an unusual material or with interesting frescoes, etc. consider different architectural motifs for different areas of the dungeon (levels or inside levels.)

8.     Choke points. Allows a few to battle many (or inferiors to gang up on superiors.) bridges, corridors, low or tight doorways, high ground within a cavern, places with good cover. 

9.     Spying opportunities. Listening at doors. Scrying spells. Portcullis and bars - enemies can communicate but can’t pass. Rooms with echoes that will allow hearing sounds at a great distance. One-way mirrors. 

Constructing the Big Book of Stuff

The last campaign I ran ended in early 2020 because half my table were pandemic enthusiasts. I had assembled an amazing binder of stuff to use to run a game - any game that goes in any direction - completely on the fly. No thinking, no flipping through six million books. 

Then I lost that binder. 

So I’m putting together a team. Or in this case, a new binder. It looks like this right now but of course it’ll change as I get gooder at this. 

10 Dividers

1. Handouts: Bullpens, character sheets, roll up guides, spell sheets, calendars, time trackers, graph paper, unusual storeboughts sheet
2. Seasonal events and calendar - wars, omens, winter upkeep
3. Town adventures, NPCs, henchmen for hire, procedures for hiring them, rumors and hooks sheets 
4. Dungeon: the current thing (remove from binder for play?)
5. Monsters: monster manual, dungeon wandering monsters
6. Treasure including unique materials 
7. Wilderness and overland, with procedures, weather, wonders and wanderers by biome, and a supply countdown sheet. Also disease rules. 
8. One-page dungeons and modules not being played. 
9. Full spell list; spell handout sheet 
10. One-off handouts such as paladin rules, spell research procedures, and unique swords 

Quick Hits I

Just a few things I was thinking about today  

The very best way to prep a session is to reduce the planned scenario to one page of notes. Sounds completely impossible, but actually it’s only moderately impossible. 

This is the stuff you really need:

Flowchart of events (if-then,) map of the area, SHORT monster stats, treasure, NPC names.

Of course this assumes you’ve read the adventure and have a decent handle on the milieu. 

This is the starting point for me. One-pager and GO. I put it on the inside of my DM’s screen along with some cheat sheets I made. (It’s got four panels. Use them.)

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I used to keep my monster manual on 3x5” index cards in a recipe box. This is twee, but it turns out to be clunky at the table. Just write the stat blocks in your one pager. 

(I still use this format for henchmen and special magic items so I can hand the cards out to the players.)

If you simply have to use the book in play, use sticky notes on the pages. Write:

1. all the stat blocks you need

2. All the page numbers of game-adjacent info - a little index. But honestly, try not to open a book while you’re running a game. 

I also don’t write up my NPCs beforehand anymore. I have random tables of names and mannerisms that I use. The NPCs pop to life at the very moment I need them, which is a nice surprise. If I need one to have a certain trait, I’ll write down one or two words on the page.

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Never look up a rule during the game. Never. If it’s important, write a note and put it on the right page beforehand. If it’s not in your notes, make it up, and look it up later.

Player-Side Jobs

In anticipation of running a hilariously big table this summer (think GenCon tournaments in 1980,) I’ve been brainstorming ways to offload some of my responsibilities to the players and also give them more to do when it’s not their turn in the sun. I’ve come up with this list:

Player Responsibilities in Order of Delegation:

1 Turn Captain

Keeps tracks of in-game hours, Turns and Rounds. Also keeps track of food and water.

2 Light Captain

Keeps track of torches – who has them and when do they expire. Keeps track of lanterns in the same way. Torches last 1 hour. Lanterns burn for 4 hours on a pint of oil. (Candles burn for 6 hours. Magic swords last indefinitely.)

3 Sergeant

Keeps the game moving when exploring or fighting by calling out the Turn order and getting the players to announce their actions.

4 Rules Captain

Make sure that everyone at the table understands the player-facing rules.

5 Mapper 

Maps the dungeon as the Ref describes it.

6 Counselor

Makes sure that everyone at the table has a chance to contribute. Direct the table to spotlight underexposed players. 

7 March Captain

Responsible for keeping the marching order in the dungeon.

8 Quartermaster

Keeps track of and distribute treasure, gold, magic items, and other loot you obtain.

9 Secretary

Records in-game events as well as upcoming events that you expect to happen. Record quests and missions the party is pursuing and will pursue. Keep track of these things chronologically too.

10 Archivist

Records in-world lore that you may want to refer to later. Will write or delegate the writing of the adventure session recap.

11 Social Captain

Records info about NPCs the party has met or heard of. 

12 Cartographer

Maps important places the party has been to and details about the places. Can be the same person as the Mapper.

13 Tactician

Records the amount of damage each enemy has sustained. Highlight priority targets in battles. Suggest (but don't demand) coordination in battle.

I really have no idea what the AI was thinking here. 

14 Navigator

With input, makes the final decision on move overland or in a dungeon.

15 Caller

Coordinates important decisions among the several players. Settle intra-party disputes.

16 Calendarian

Keeps the in-game calendar for the several players and Referee, including making notes as necessary.

I arranged the list in order of job importance. We will go down the list and assign roles until nobody wants to do any of the other jobs. 

A lot of these jobs pair well together, such as the first two listed. Players can and should pick up more than one role if they can. 

What every parent should know about the Cyfandil campaign

Cyfandil is pretty close to vanilla d&d. The tweaks are minor. But in this sociopolitical climate, “vanilla d&d” as the greybeards know it is fraught with potential misunderstanding, hurt feelings, and ideas that some folks won’t be ready for. 

Take a look to see what potentially-controversial topics we will cover. 

1. There are three human cultures; rough analogs of White Europeans; rough analogs of North African nomad types; and rough analogs of East Asians. 

They are not meant to be real world peoples. The cultures, names, places are a pastiche. I do this to better resemble the real world (but in miniature.) 

The land we will start in and perhaps spend most of our time in is the Europe of the world. Very few nonwhites. 

However anyone can decide to play any of the human cultural traditions without penalty. 

2. There are elves, dwarves and hobbits. Elves and dwarves are not unheard-of but neither are they common in the realm of men. 

Thematically, adventuring is a particularly human pursuit. Other races join men, but only rarely. Elves don’t like to slum it with people; Hobbits consider adventuring scandalous. 

Therefore I will enforce a strict limit of 40% or less of the main characters being non human. Just how you divide that up is up to the players. 

3. There will be off-screen romance. Nothing acted or role played, but a character might pick up a spouse or paramour.  

If someone wants to opt out of this part of the game, they may do so. The reason I have it at all is twofold: it presents the prospect of having children and starting a dynasty; and marriages can be politically or economically valuable. 

In any case, there are no half-elf, half-dwarf or half-hobbit babies. They are not biologically possible in this world. 

4. Characters, including those played by players, will die. Perhaps frequently and perhaps not, depending on how aggressive the several players are in the game world. 

But these deaths are not a defeat for the players. They are a part of the story. Character death is a learning experience, and it often makes for a good tale in the later telling. 

Consider the Mario Bros. franchise. Mario dies all the time and for many reasons, whether by player mistake or bad luck. But he always comes back and the player can continue playing.

It’s the same concept here, except that the character won’t be like the immortal Mario, but instead a different character every time. 

In some ways this is better, because everyone gets to try out different kinds of characters. 

5. The realm of Aluvia is Christian. Not Christian-analog, but Christian. The good guy clerics are delegates of God, like from the Bible. The bad guy clerics get their powers from the Devil and other related evil beings. 

5a. There are other religious traditions. While it is not a pluralist culture, we will not discriminate if you want a Buddhist or a disciple of Odin. 

5b. I will not be preaching.  At all. I do not run my game as a tool for evangelism, nor conversely one for social commentary. The church is just one power center in a world of many power centers, and there happen to be holy men who go adventuring.  

6. Finally, players will be responsible for playing their own character, but also assisting in the maintenance of the world. 

Time passes. Events happen. The characters and others change the world in many ways. These gallant paper men eventually grow old and retire or die. 

When the several characters are exploring the unknown, then among the characters, someone has to track their limited supplies. Someone has to navigate. Someone has to map. Someone has to manage the treasure they collect. Someone has to chronicle the tales for posterity. 

Therefore, each of the players will take on these administrative roles on behalf of their characters. 

There are two reasons for this: one is to take some of the burden from the referee, who has a lot going on; and two is to reinforce the concept that this is a shared world and shared experience that we are building and maintaining together. 

Balancing Encounters the OSR Way, Part 1

 This article originally appeared on July 19th, 2017.

Traffic Jam, Level 3A

For those of you who are players of modern games, you will understand that the encounters that you face and the challenges you come upon are closely balanced to your level and party makeup.  You are meant to be able to overcome each encounter and in many cases, it will be through making die rolls against skills, both combat and non-combat, that you careful chose for your characters beforehand. Player skill at the table gets rewarded, but the real skill comes before table time, where you build your man up from the many options available to you.

Not so with old school D&D.  There was certainly a system for encounter balancing but it has very little to do with what the players and Referee do before table time. The Referee does prepare encounters and place them, or make rosters of wandering monsters for various areas.  But the balancing act of party strength versus encounter danger happens at the table in real time. 

You might remember that we observed the relationship between XP (the measure of personal power), encumbrance, speed, and equipment.  They are all inextricably linked to each other through the touchstone of the gold piece.  But let's go a little further now and link the gold piece up to dungeon levels.

The first dungeon level is the one closest to the surface world.  We know this to be true because it is a given in the game. The weakest monsters and traps guard the least of the many treasures in the Underworld. Not only are they meager, but they are usually composed of relatively heavy objects, such as copper pieces or perhaps sacks of grain.  Deeper levels hold greater danger, but also contain greater treasures.

Therefore it is up to the several players to decide what level of risk/reward they wish to pursue.  The greater danger guards greater rewards, and therefore the depth below ground (or similar distance) guards faster advancement in terms of XP.

Likewise, there ought to be a simple way for the several players to know how dangerous the Wilderlands can become.  One simple way is to say that the hex that contains a town is Civilized and within it, dangers will be those of civilization.  Things will be "normal."  Two hexes hence will be the weird Borderlands, where dangers of a wild and sometimes magical nature may reside.  Past that is true Wilderlands where one must be prepared for anything, because it's impossible to say what is out there.

In any case, keeping that relationship between distance, risk, and reward is how the Referee keeps encounters balanced. Let this be your lesson: If the Referee does it well enough, the players will trust him and the table will have more fun, and play together longer.