a game where you mine and craft

unfortunately i don't think there's a way to adapt minecraft to a tabletop role-playing format if we think of tabletop role-playing games as vehicles for collaborative story telling, or role-playing as pretending to be a character. however, in my recent blog post (link), i discuss how what sets old-school dungeons & dragons from other games is how it is an open and infinite system. you need both of these aspects to encompass the creative play of minecraft: there should be few strict rules (let language do the heavy lifting), and there should be no absolute goal in sight. there shouldn’t be a realistic narrative [1] either, since we’re talking about minecraft where days are twenty minutes long and players can dig massive tunnel systems in that amount of time.

i think the best comparison is to how most board games don’t ask you to distinguish between you as player and you as character. when i play minecraft with my friends, i don’t make that distinction. i’m the one punching the trees, sowing the seeds, etc. this isn’t to say anything stupid (as a lacanian) that there isn’t a split between player and “character”; obviously you’re only punching trees in the game world, and not in real life. it’s the conceit that your character has a personality that i think wouldn’t mesh well with minecraft.

so keeping this in mind, i think this frees up a lot of possibilities to make something geared towards creative play. the rest of this post is just me coming up with random ideas for how this might all work. these are not all consistent or complete, but i hope it sounds fun! feel free to tell me any thoughts you have :)

brainstorming

so my hunch is this: what would a minecraft board game look like, and how can we use language to expand the set of interactions which a minecraft board game has? i was pleased to learn that there actually is a minecraft board game, but it’s pretty abstract to the extent that you don't really experience being a little minecraft person. i think we need to imagine instead something where we do control a “character”, not only because it’s more satisfying but because that will allow us to integrate language more easily (by being able to say “I do this or that”, where “I” refers to the player-avatar).

i don’t think a tabletop minecraft can work on the usual 10-minute timescale that dungeon games have. the basic loop of the computer game revolves around the threat of nighttime, and what you can accomplish within that short amount of daytime. so, why not have hour-long turns in our minecraft game? for one, it’s an easier justification to mine tunnels throughout the day. it also means that each turn in general is more meaningful: you can say “i mine these rocks” or “i chop down trees”, and it’s not too micro or too macro. finally, i think that twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night are pretty intuitive, and allows for a good amount of turns before nighttime arrives and the world becomes dangerous.

actions

how about some actions? what can you do in an hour? let's assume a square is 1 square meter, and a block is 1 cubic meter.

• mine 4 squares of stone (8 blocks for you to move around in), maybe recover 1 unit of stone
• chop down some trees, maybe get 4 units of wood cause why not
• travel a hex or whatever
• human walking speed is 5 km/hr, aka 5,000 squares/hr
• equivalent to ~3 mph
• walk 40 squares underground
• equivalent to ~120 ft per B/X turn; this is still technically a slower rate than B/X because it's over an hour, but keep in mind how short the minecraft day feels
• construct 2x2 square flooring, or build wall along 2 squares
• a 4x4 building with full walls takes 10 hours: 4 floorings plus 8 walls
• maybe each such construction unit costs 1 unit of material, and the time to construct increases based on the toughness of the material (e.g. stone takes twice as long)
• we should assume the roof comes with everything else lol
• smelt up to 8 units of ore with 1 unit of coal
• i think this ratio, straight from minecraft, actually works pretty well
• we could also say that 8 units of ore can be smelted directly into a block

that sounds nice, i think.

inventory

minecraft uses numbers that are powers of 2; for example, you can hold 2^6 = 64 items in one 'stack'. keeping track of that many things gets difficult on paper, though, and although binary powers are intuitive for computers they are less so for human brains.

so far we’ve been using the number 4 a lot and i think that’s pretty handy; and in general, we wanna keep things small. maybe an inventory size of 16 is a good number because that represents 4 hours of tree-punching or 16 hours of mining. we can increase to 20 to account for tools like pickaxes, swords, torches, etc. that seems pretty chill? kinda unrealistic to hold onto so many blocks of anything, but this is a fraction of what minecraft actually asks you to accept (where steve can carry dozens of billions of pounds). we're not trying to be realistic, we're trying to be minecraft.

let’s recap. there are 24 turns in a day, and 12 of these are nighttime which is dangerous. you can spend a turn to collect X resources (where X can be 1, 2, or 4 to keep things simple). you can hold onto 20 things total at a time.

player characters

let's keep it simple and say you have 10 hit points (HP). okay, that's easy.

starting equipment?

• axe
• pickaxe
• shovel
• sword (?)
• torches (?)

we've been working without any ability scores, and i'd sorta like to keep it that way? except that i just like the 3d6 ritual bc i think it acts as like the gateway to the game... so maybe just have the typical six without much to do with them (like OD&D). i like doing this so that way the information is available if you want it, and it's up to the table to decide what to do with it (do we roll d20 below? figure smth else out?).

experience points

like anything else, minecraft rewards you for doing the tasks it sanctions by giving you experience points (XP). this has sorta weird implications but whatever, it makes it more gamey and i think that's fun. you can spend XP to enchant your equipment. that's all pretty minecrafty, and we can keep it.

prismatic wasteland (twitter) made a blog post (link) about using coal for XP, and i think this is basically what we need! we can give XP for other materials too, like iron or gold or diamonds. i noticed that minecraft only rewards XP for iron and gold after you smelt them, which i think we wanna carry over too. maybe we can use the following XP awards for materials, where n is the base amount we want to give:

• Mining Coal, Smelting Iron: n XP
• Smelting Gold: 4n XP
• Mining Diamond: 8n XP

if we have ability scores, maybe we can use them to give XP bonuses for certain tasks. for example, strength affects your XP from mining. how about each good thing gets you 10 XP adjusted by your ability score, which we'll basically take from OD&D:

• Score 3-6: 6 XP
• Score 7-8: 8 XP
• Score 9-12: 10 XP
• Score 13-14: 11 XP
• Score 15-18: 12 XP

so if you mine some coal and you have 9 strength, you'll get 10 XP. if you have 14 strength, you'll get 11 XP. if you have 5 strength, you'll get 6 XP. you get the same amount of XP for each unit of iron you smelt, except your wisdom affects the total instead. multiply the total by 4 when you smelt gold instead. mining one unit of diamonds is as valuable as smelting eight units of iron.

this is all made-up numbers without any clue as to how they'll turn out, but i hope you get the idea.

to reduce info overload, instead of having levels we can just say you spend 100s of XP. for example, to enchant a weapon you might spend 200 XP or 300 XP or 400 XP or whatever. that makes it easy since the only math you have to do is to subtract from the hundreds place.

crafting

what's the point of mining if you're not crafting? to craft something, you need the materials and the tools to make the thing. maybe it takes one hour for every three ingredients (refer to minecraft) used, rounding up to the nearest hour. a sword takes one hour, a pickaxe takes two hours, etc.

we need smaller denominations of wood lol, so we can say it takes an hour to turn 1 log into 4 planks and 1 plank into 4 sticks.

uhhhhh yeah!

nighttime and monsters

there are 12 turns of daytime and 12 turns of nighttime. keeps it easy!

when doing things outside at nighttime, everyone has a 1-in-6 chance to come face-to-face with a monster. this increases to 2-in-6 in forests or other shadowy areas (which themselves have a 1-in-6 chance during the day i guess).

zombies and skeletons burn up when they are exposed to sunlight. zombies attack with their arms and teeth, while skeletons shoot at you with arrows.

spiders are hostile at night, but neutral during the day. they can climb vertical surfaces.

everyone has a 4-in-6 chance to hear a creeper hissing before it explodes and deals 2d6 damage to everyone. you can jump out of the way (DEX check? saving throw?) or do something else.

random encounter table:

1. zombie
2. zombie
3. skeleton
4. skeleton
5. spider
6. creeper

cave crawling

i think keeping one-hour turns is a good idea, regardless of how unrealistic it is. we can cut it down to the usual 10 minutes if we really need to! idk what's more fun, i haven't played this game yet.

what's interesting about minecraft is that you don't carry torches, but you place them on the ground. besides increasing vision, this also makes the area (let's say a 10 square radius) safer from monsters. do we want to adapt this aspect from minecraft, or do we want more normal dungeon crawling where carrying a torch around is the main issue?

i have the hunch that the reason you place torches in minecraft is because the original designer (may his name be erased and replaced with hatsune miku or w/e) couldn't figure out how to let you hold torches. this means that the resource management comes from running out of torches to place, not from your torch getting extinguished over time. for the sake of the thought experiment, let's say that you have to place torches (and they don't burn out).

maybe each time you mine, you have a 1-in-10 chance of finding a new ore deposit? idk lol

whenever you walk through an unlit area, there is a 1-in-6 chance of encountering a monster. this means that if you don't place torches while mining, you might get in trouble on your way back.

combat

1d6 damage for everything lol. maybe add +1/+2/+3 based on material. maybe unarmed does 1 damage.

the point is, let's just not think about it too much for now.

tool durability

the threat of tools breaking is basically what drives a lot of the minecraft gameplay, since you want to make sure you have enough materials to replace what you have.

maybe we can just have usage/risk dice (previous blog post) for each tool, and let the starting die depend on the material:

• wood/gold: d6
• stone: d8
• iron: d10
• diamond: d12

basically, whenever you use an item, roll the die indicated. if you roll 1 or 2, you go down to the next lowest die size. when you roll 1 or 2 on d4, the item breaks (or maybe you just have one use left). we can also use the delta dice system from macchiato monsters, which i also talk about in that blog post. the advantage of delta dice is that you only need a d6.

i was gonna say that using an item should mean using it for like an hour, but i like the drama of your weapon breaking in combat. i think that's fun.

sooooooooo... what do y'all think? :)

[1] the proper word is probably conceit, not narrative. when you play dungeons & dragons, you play with the conceit that you’re controlling a person in the simulated fantasy world. such a conceit doesn’t work in minecraft where there’s neither rational worlds nor characters with personality. you are basically you, i.e. your character is a thorough avatar.