Medieval World

Every once in a while a commenter will remind me that, yeah, I am slowly eking out a series of genre/environment cliche d20 tables and it wouldn't be too hard to get the next one going. Ideas for these come over a few days and then, there you have it.

Sample Setting in 32 Encounters

This is page number 50 of the 52 pages. It's a slightly less-than-generic medieval town-to-village-to-dungeon of the kind I describe on this other page. Page 51 will be the sample dungeon. I wish I could put an example of play in as well but I think page 52 will have to be more general GM advice.

What's important with these encounters is to make most of them lively - to work implicit action into that short one-line description. One last-minute feature I thought of: instead of d8, roll d10 or d12, and on a result of 9 of higher roll 2d8 and have the party walk in on an encounter between those two.

Another idea: give each area a "boss" that is encountered instead of the first encounter that would be a repeat. It might be a tripping druid in the woods, a shy wererat in the village, the river god's daughter on the river, or the Baron in town. This means the setting has the feel of slow discovery as the characters settle in it.

Two-word Setting Seeds

Here's a simple idea inspired by noisms' observation that having a basic idea about your setting is key to improvisation. I would add that at the same time, you have to come up with ideas that fit the setting but stay fresh, because the imagination under pressure reverts to mediocrity. So how do you turn the stale into the fresh, without veering off the deep and and having encounters with toasters and snuffleupagi?

One answer is to take the elements of your familiar setting and combine them in new ways. Let's say your party has decided to flip the bird to your carefully prepared plans, and heads to a village of adventure you haven't prepared, in hex 2049, the genre being medieval European fantasy. You quickly fill the hexes around with the first ideas that come off the top of your head, in adjective-noun format. Then to your dismay you realize they're all old-hat cliches:

So, just switch the adjectives across the middle, and you're left with this set of encounters that really crackles and challenges:

This works with as few as two cliches - if the party goes off the track and has to choose, make it a choice between frost giants and Skull Castle. Oh, I mean skull giants and Frost Castle. Better now.

A Cellar By Any Other Name

They found a DUNGEON.  Would this story have gone semi-viral under any other name?

Not a basement, mind you, a dungeon. Would a secret cellar or crawlspace be "amazing"? And by that hoary name, older by any reason than the Victorian building, they invoke all that goes with it - torture and skeletons and exploration and adventure. Even if there's no sign of hobgoblins, only hooligans.

The steam-tunnel legends that circulated in the early days of the roleplaying  hobby betray the desire to transform the surplus space of industrial civilization into something haunted,  magical. Even though this photo essayist doesn't descend into full confabulation as does the Ted the Caver website, you can hardly fault someone for wishing to open that trapdoor and hear the grunting of pig-headed mutants far, far below ... or the scurrying of rats, down the twisting stair to a bone-littered cavern, millennia of cannibal rites and madness.

Kicking the Cleric Out of the Niche

Here and here are Talysman's posts where he hates "niche protection." It's a question of who-can-do-what in a role-playing game. I agree that the rules should be based on a view of what characters can do that has its own integrity, not manufactured to create some outcome at the player level.

And yet - especially when it comes to magic - there's such a variety of plausible ways of doing things that we can't help but choose among systems. In that case, why not choose wisely? As I argued a while ago, a good game will strike a balance between making a given skill set useful while not making it strictly necessary.

One example: the cleric. Many experienced players, depending on their D&D-like system, consider the cleric to be an indispensable member of the group. Let's look at the most extreme version of this, in AD&D, where it is easy to get a cleric who starts with two first level spells(1 bonus spell due to 15+ wisdom), almost always Cure Light Wounds.

So you get a slightly less effective fighter with one less hit point on average, worse attack and limited weapons, BUT:

Average HP restored from those two Cure Light Wounds: 9
Average HP of a first level fighter: 5.5

That's right, a character who not only fights in their own right, not only turns undead and can do miscellaneous other things with spells, but provides a force multiplier in the course of play (assuming damage is not taken in huge lots) equal to almost two fighters.

The decision in OD&D and B/X to not give clerics ANY spells until 2nd level in hindsight seems reasonable, although Labyrinth Lord climbs down from this with 1 spell at 1st level and so on. Even without bonus spells this is still a pretty nice force multiplier, that lags behind the fighter's hit dice at middle levels but perks up with the ability to cure serious wounds and raise dead at higher. The choice, still, is not ideal; between a game where clerics have to prove their gumption by spending their first level as a sucky fighter who can turn undead, and a game where clerics are seen as mandatory to the point where people will play them even though they don't really want to.

I've seen first-hand in my gaming group the dismay with which players face the prospect of adventuring without a cleric (my 52 pages version has a healing power that likewise is a pretty big force multiplier). The obvious fix is to do what I did with wizards to stop the "sleep/magic missile" fixation; allow only one example of each spell to be cast a day. Because my system lets spells become available at every character level, I could even give a very minor healing spell at cleric character level 1 and the Cure Light Wounds equivalent only at cleric character level 2.

This might be the last major change to the 52 Pages, but I think it achieves the goal of letting clerics feel useful at Level 1, but not indispensable at higher levels. Hell, I might even give them their at-will turning back.

Famous Teleportation Mishaps

How does teleportation work, exactly? That is, you are in one place, and then another; presumably, the air rushes in to fill the space after you are gone; but what happens to the stuff in the space you now enter?

Two possibilities. One, you somehow mingle with what you teleport into; the basis of both versions of The Fly, and of the nightmare scenario where you end up immediately dead after teleporting into a wall.

The other, which I prefer, is that you displace whatever you are teleporting into. Still leads to a sad and lonely death if you teleport into solid matter, but much more forgiving otherwise.

Of course, nothing says fantasy has to be consistent. Indeed, I'd think our intuitive approach to magical

teleportation is a mix of the two ideas. We like the gruesome consequences of teleporting halfway into a floor or ending up as a Brundlefly, but don't consider the consequences of mingling for normal teleportation, where your whole system would be pumped with a nitrogen - oxygen - CO2 mixture that probably would give rise to some version of the bends.

Summoning sickness, anyone?

Displacement, likewise, has some interesting side effects if applied consistently. For example, any wizard's district or magical academy where teleporting is practiced constantly would probably have an abundance of the hallmarks of slightly off teleports: footprints in the floor where a teleport went slightly too low, or in some cases craters where a wizard had to be dug out of solid rock.

One of the better dead ends in a dungeon might be one where, using detect magic, somebody dug their way to the entombed corpse of a way-off wizard to rob him for his enchanted loot. All that's left is the indentation of his body, maybe a skeleton, and a cursed item for the unwary ....

Call it pedantry if you like - but it's the good kind of pedantry, where working out the details of a consistent world leads not to "this can't happen" or "this is more boring" but "wow, really, that happens?"

Finally, for some reason, fantasy teleportation doesn't seem to arouse the same worries about scrambling matter that sci-fi* teleportation does, at least if game rules are anything to go on.  Maybe it's because we have an implicit model of magic as working off some idea of Platonic forms - a kind of object-oriented programming, if you will. Thus, the danger in a spell that changes the "location" attribute of "you" is not that you will be changed, but that you will end up where you don't want to be. By contrast, sci-fi teleportation works in a molecular physics of reality where it's much more clear that you will have to be disassembled and reassembled, monad by monad, giving rise to all sorts of philosophical dilemmas and wacky mishaps.

* Is the last person who viscerally hates this term finally dead?

Clever Rules Fade Away

After a languid summer I'm ready to enter the home stretch and put the final touches on my 52 Pages house rules. Scrap Princess' review reminded me that there is always a gap between the clever system you think up at home and what actually goes down at the table. Indeed, I had some stuff in there that bore little resemblance to the way I actually play, like the "encounter start" matrix that was my substitute for surprise rolls.  So I managed to boil it down to be more like guidelines than rules, and more like what I'll actually do in play - figure out the surprise status by common sense, with maybe a roll for alertness if I'm unsure of the disposition of the defenders.

Likewise for my magical treasure table, which caused some puzzlement when it first came out. I decided to make it more straightforward and more geared toward low levels - appropriately for the "Basic" style levels 1-3 focus in the 52 Pages. I might make the main treasure table more straightforward too.

Finally, I had an insight about combat where I could get it down to fewer phases if I realized that combat should go with the most urgent stuff first - not in the order that you might think things happen. So, melee first and disengaging, then shoot, magic and move, and miscellaneous stuff at the end of the round. To handle the weird gamesmanship and panzerbush situations that might arise I allowed "overwatch" to happen so you can shoot the charging guy at close range while he is charging you. In a surprise situation, by the way, you can move first then melee.

Oh and yeah, I got rid of the grid. I still play that way but I'm pretty happy with a system that looks more spacious on the page and asks people to think about the dimensions of the fight rather than necessarily making them plot it all out.

And I've made a start on the example campaign, dungeon, and play session that round out the last four pages. So some of that soon, I'm hoping.