Traverse Fantasy

I got new rules, I count 'em. I liked my existing rules for conversations, being basically the same as in D&D Fifth Edition , but I felt like they lacked structure up to the final roll. I kept hearing about how intuitive the rules from Draw Steel were, but the team at MCDM are such maximalist rules writers that my eyes glazed over the constant weighing of situational permutations on the page—most rulebooks should really be like 70% shorter, huh? So I didn’t fully get them until I watched my queen  Ginny Di’s video where she boiled down the structure in a way that could be extended into principles beyond Draw Steel ’s verbose mechanic framework. It’s basically like: We should have an idea of where the NPC already stands. The goal of negotiation is to shift the NPC’s perspective towards yours. At some point, you have to stop pushing the question. So rather than having a unstructured conversation leading up to a climatic roll where the outcome is finally decided—not t...

I’ve mentioned in passing my haven rules for my homebrew heartbreaker Cinco! but never took the time to describe it in much detail. Remember that I don’t really fuck with wealth; instead, each item of treasure just has the value of “1 treasure”, and you spend that during downtime to do an activity ( this is outdated, but you get the idea ). One of those activities is havencraft where you invest 1 treasure to build a town and populate with your favorite NPCs you’ve met and recruited throughout the game. These are called lackeys. Cost Type Population Ability Lackeys 2 Hamlet 100 +1 1 6 Village 900 +2 2 12 Town 3,600 +4 3 20 City 10,000 +8 4 Each season (generally speaking, or unless I fuck it up, a play-session), lackeys can either do a downtime activity on behalf of the governor or embark on an adventure. In the latter case, they can either accompany the crew on their own adventure and basically act like a back-up character, or they can be sent...

This is going to be a kind of strange fragment. Nothing helpful by itself. It's one of those "Towards a Theory of X" posts. You're welcome! Figure it out! When playing Iron Valley in parallel with my friend Lino of Pink Space , I ended up modifying it on the fly because I found the basic procedure and surrounding rules to be so nothing as to be frustrating. Not that I like crunch, but that the text was actively avoiding any obstacle or challenge in the way of play. This is what I came up with. Basic Loop Each day has two time ticks, represented by two diagonal slashes that make an X. When one tick passes, you draw 1 line. When you have a full X, or 2 ticks, that day is over. The trick is that although each action may result in a tick, it also may not necessarily. Ignoring a time tick is a reward for skill or chance. Check out this Farming move, sort of PBTA style on 2d6: (2–6) Make 1 progress and mark 1 time tick; (7–9) Choose to mark 2 progress or to make 1 progres...

Quoting from FMC because it's on hand: "If the party becomes lost, the referee rolls a die to see in which way the party wanders. The party may then correct their course by one direction change" (p. 136). I also point out that, as a result, there is really only a 3-in-6 chance of ending up in the wrong hex. Which is interesting! Let me break this down some more: 3-in-6: You enter the intended hex. 2-in-6: You enter a hex adjacent of the one intended. 1-in-6: You go totally off-path. The last two results are split evenly between the (relative) left or right directions of the intended hex, because of how the die roll itself works. But isn't that neat? On one hand, it's actually extremely uncommon to end up in the wrong hex. The highest chance of this happening is in the desert where there is a 50% chance of invoking the above rule, and by extension only a 25% chance of ending up in the wrong hex. It's very forgiving. On the other hand, I kind of like the ide...

I'm really sick. Stuck inside. Bored. If we assume that an adventuring day is like 8 hours, we can interface between four different hex sizes as requiring different binary fractions of the day. Below, 1 league equals 3 miles or 5 kilometers. Terrain 1 league 2 leagues 4 leagues 8 leagues Regular ⅛ day ¼ day ½ day 1 day Difficult ¼ day ½ day 1 day 2 days The length of an exploration turn would equal the time it would take to traverse one regular hex. This means, regardless of scale, difficult terrain has double the movement cost of regular terrain and always requires two turns to traverse. Hourly time-tracking feels kind of appealing to me lately, for some reason, so I want to try using 1-league ( 3 mile ) hexes sometime. At the same time, I don't want to assume I'll always want to use 1-league hexes. Hence the table.

Expanding upon a comment from a previous blog post : The idea is that the rest phase is an approximately 12-hour period each day where characters take turns sleeping and keeping watch. A rest action is a mini-downtime activity within the space of about 4 hours, during which characters can e.g. cook or craft or cure their wounds. In other words, as a matter of abstraction, each 24-hour period is split into a day phase and a night phase. The day phase is when most of the interesting stuff happens; having just 12 hours to keep track of makes it easier to divvy up when it matters (usually, for travel—with hexes requiring 3, 4, or 5 hours to traverse). The night phase is an abstraction of the time that the party spends resting, after a long day of adventuring. What do rest actions look like? I came up with some basic ones below. However, the idea is not to have a closed set of actions; it's just to provide structure and guidance for when the referee asks, "Is there anything you w...

Expanding upon a comment I posted in reply to hdp on my post about modes of play ! The original thing I said: … I think we would benefit from thinking less about strict/specific mechanics and more about broader principles that can be applied between activities. How much time does something take? What will it cost? What does it risk? Thinking more generally about the impact of character decisions and activities, as opposed to modeling and simulating specific activities (or fitting a variety of activities into the same mold). That’s just my opinion, though! What they asked: How broad are you thinking? Fate-style “everything is one of create advantage/overcome/attack/defend” or more specific? I’m thinking of the way Stonetop has Expedition and Homefront moves, but looking again those all end up with different mechanics so maybe that’s not what you mean. I think those options are all from the standpoint of character actions, but I was referring to the costs/risks/benefits of activ...

Above is a WIP background for a referee screen, drawn by Emiel Boven for Errant by Ava Islam ! Okay, whatever, I keep mentioning this in private conversations and meant to write about it at some point. I just kept forgetting. But now I'm in front of a computer drinking an afternoon coffee and we're all talking about related stuff again. Here you go! The Old: Tiers of Play There are three tiers of play in classic D&D (pictured above is Fantastic Medieval Campaigns ): Underworld (lvl. 1-3): Corresponding roughly with the 'flunky' character level in Chainmail , this phase involves expeditions into the underworld to fight monsters and retrieve treasure. Wilderness (lvl. 4-7): Corresponds with the 'heroic' level in Chainmail , this phase is about exploring and conquering the wilderness. Dominion (lvl. 8+): Corresponds with the 'superheroic' level in Chainmail , this phase is about building a domain and employing armies. The main point I want to get ...

Arnold K’s recent blog on Goblin Punch has sparked some discussion in my circles on using timers instead of random checks for wandering monsters and similar encounters. Going to throw my hat into the ring by looking at a sort of compromise: an encounter check whose likelihood increases over time. This is similar to something I wrote forever ago , except using a d20 in order to be consistent with a ruleset that uses d20 for resolving most tasks. I’m also going to explore using d20 with constant modifiers that do not increase over time, because I think it might also be useful. Without further ado! Simulations I wrote a simple Python script to simulate a handful of encounter check algorithms: Traditional 1-in-6 check. d20 + 0 ≥ 20. d20 + 1 ≥ 20. d20 + 2 ≥ 20. d20 + 3 ≥ 20. d20 + 4 ≥ 20. d20 + 5 ≥ 20. d20 + T ≥ 20, where T is the number of turns that have passed. The script attempts each algorithm 10,000 times and finds the average of how many checks are made before a rand...

Been thinking about procedural generation lately, especially in a paper-and-pencil context. What are some good attempts at procedurally generating game stuff? What do they do well, or poorly? What are some best practices we can glean? Defining Procedural Generation Let’s get the annoying definition out of the way. What’s procedural generation? It’s helpful if we break it down. A procedure is an algorithm or sequence of steps which we can use to solve a problem or arrive at some result. So, something procedural is something that uses such a procedure in order to arrive at something. Our particular use case is procedural generation, which means that we’re using a procedure or algorithm to generate some kind of content. In the realm of computer games, we use procedural generation to create maps, images, or AI behavior programmatically. Take Minecraft as an example: starting from a randomly-determined or user-set “seed” (a long number or string used to generate pseudorandom data), the g...

So. Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition has a really intuitive procedure for handling character dialogues. Like, never mind that it's not really supported by most adventure design (to my knowledge), and that it's written in that same overly verbose style as the rest of Fifth Edition . I like it. I might even like it more than most reaction procedures in TSR/OSR rulebooks , which are typically (though not originally) a 2d6 roll that determines the NPC's initial demeanor and... that's it. But it's also not at all overly complex, formal, or procedural, in the sense that some other rulesets proceed automatically through formal rules without pausing for input or breath. I like it being basically informal. I'm going to go over how character dialogue is supposed to play out, and then I'll transcribe random tables of NPC traits meant to plug into this subsystem. Finding both of these things surprised me, so I hope you'll find them interesting. Open your Dunge...

Above is an OD&D character record template from 1975. It looks a bit different than what we expect from character sheets now. We are used to dedicating the whole sheet to the character's various attributes and equipment, filling in neatly-aligned squares or circles with ability scores or hit point totals or saving throws or item slots. This is not that. Everything we typically expect from a character sheet is squished into the top third of the worksheet. The bottom two thirds are dedicated to a week-by-week description of the character's adventures, as well as changes to their gold piece and experience point totals each week. This sheet was unlike anything I had seen before, and yet to me it is quintessentially what sets apart this ruleset from all that had followed. I am going to go over the different presuppositions this character record has compared to our modern ones. Then, I am going to share screenshots of a recreation I made for my retroclone Fantastic Medieval Camp...

It is not uncommon for a rulebook to introduce itself by its universal resolution procedure. It's become a cliche at this point, so let's say it together: "When your character attempts something difficult or dangerous, [perform procedure] to see whether they fail or succeed." The exact nature of the procedure differs from rulebook to rulebook, whether you roll a twenty-sided dice or a bunch of six-sided dice, whether you aim for high or low numbers, whether there are degrees of success (or failure), whether the distribution of results is even or biased towards the center, et cetera. Whatever the exact method, the universal resolution procedure looms over many rulebooks published today no matter the play culture they are a part of—traditional, story game, or OSR. The universal resolution procedure is often associated with Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition (2000), the first edition of the game developed and published by Wizards of the Coast. It was famous for int...