Save vs. Fail

I have been working on coming up with a way to *ahem*… encourage players to not end sessions in the wilderness and impress upon them that they NEED to return to the Alehouse (homebase) at the end of each adventure.

So far I haven’t really been enforcing it very strictly since we really only have 5 regular players so the group doesn’t change, however I’m in recruiting mode, so that’s going to have to change. Parties really do need to end the game in town, this also encourages players to handle all their in town tasks like shopping, recruiting henchmen, chasing rumors etc… ahead of time. I tend to like to have all of that out of the way before we sit down at the table, that way we maximize playtime and at the end of the day no one needs me to look up prices for them in the PHB, they are all big boys they can handle that themselves.

I had read a couple of references from Chicagowiz regarding Jeff Rient’s “Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom” in various blogs and decided to implement something similar in my game. After looking at Jeff’s chart however I felt it was a bit… harsh. I think my player’s heads would explode if I put them through his chart as it stands. I also liked the idea of giving characters lingering effects rather than just killing them outright. It will be interesting to see how many groups chance a roll on the table and how many keep playing with characters that keep getting injuries.

I wanted to make sure the chart did 2 things

1. Reinforce that the wilderness is scary as hell and you don’t want to be out there without proper adult supervision, but not kill just kill people outright (all of the time)
2. Make it clear to groups that they need to get back to the Alehouse/Fort at the end of each session.

So, I absconded with a few of his results that I liked and merged them in with another chart that holds a special place in my heart; The Mordheim Critical Injury D66 Table. I’m sure there are smarter people than me out there that can break down the probability of a D66 vs a D20 vs 43D4 or whatever, so I’m not going to bother going into all that, but I digress…

Along with rewriting some of the GW results to make more sense in the C&C environment and some stuff blatantly stolen from Jeff’s chart I think the pieces have suitably merged to form Voltron.

And thus I present…

The D66 Chart of “Get your ass back to town at the end of the session!”

11-15 DEAD

• The Adventurer is dead and his body is abandoned beyond the borderlands, never to be found again. All the weapons and equipment he carried are lost.
• Record his name and deeds in the Book of the Dead.

16-21 MULTIPLE INJURIES

• The Adventurer is not dead but has suffered a lot of wounds. Roll D6 times on this table. Re-roll any ‘Dead’, ‘Captured’ and further ‘Multiple Injuries’ results.
• Return to the Alehouse.

22 LEG WOUND

• The Adventurer’s leg is damaged. He suffers a -5’ to his Movement characteristic penalty from now on.
• Return to the Alehouse.

23 ARM WOUND

• Roll a D6

• D6 Result
• 1 Severe arm wound. The arm must be amputated. The Adventurer may only use a single one- handed weapon from now on.
• 2-6 Light wound. The Adventurer is -1 to hit on all attack rolls for the next 2d6 weeks.
• Return to the Alehouse.

24 MADNESS (Insanity rules can be found in the Freeport Companion)

• Roll a D6

• D6 Result
• 1-3 The Adventurer suffers from a minor insanity.
• 4-6 the Adventurer suffers from a major insanity.
• Return to the Alehouse.

25 SMASHED LEG

• The Adventurer may not run any more but he may still charge. This also means that for purposes of travel rate the Adventurer may never “fast march”.
• Return to the Alehouse.

26 CHEST WOUND

• The Adventurer has been badly wounded in the chest. He recovers but is weakened by the injury so his Constitution is reduced by -1.
• Return to the Alehouse.

31 BLINDED IN ONE EYE

• The Adventurer survives but loses the sight in one eye; randomly determine which. A character that loses an eye is -2 to hit with ranged attacks due to lack of depth perception.
• If the Adventurer is subsequently blinded in his remaining good eye he must retire from adventuring.
• Return to the Alehouse.

32 OLD BATTLE WOUND

• The Adventurer survives, but his wound will prevent him from fighting to his full potential.
• Roll a D6 at the start of each day from now on

• D6 Result
• 1 all damage rolls are reduced by -4.
• 2-6 No effect.
• Return to the Alehouse.

33 NERVOUS CONDITION

• The Adventurer’s nervous system has been damaged.
• Any Initiative checks are permanently reduced by -2.
• Return to the Alehouse.

34 HAND INJURY

• The Adventurer’s hand is badly injured.
• All attacks with a melee weapon are permanently reduced by -2.
• Return to the Alehouse.

35 CAPTURED BY SLAVERS

• Held for ransom by seedy humans.
• A member of the Thieves Guild can arrange release for 500gp per character level.
• 1 in 6 chance the money disappears along with your Adventurer. Record his name and deeds in the Book of the Dead.

36 ROBBED

• The Adventurer manages to survive, but all his weapons, armour and equipment are lost.
• Return to the Alehouse.

41-55 FULL RECOVERY

• The Adventurer has been knocked unconscious, or suffers a light wound from which he makes a full recovery.
• However the Adventurer must roll for each item in their inventory.

• % Die result
• 1-50 The item is lost.
• 51-100 The item is not lost.
• Return to the Alehouse.

56 CAPTURED BY MONSTERS

• Roll a D6

• D6 Result
• 1-4 Escaping comrades know the area you are being held and the type of monster holding you.
• 5 Comrades know the type of monster but not the location you are being held.
• 6 Comrades just noticed you haven’t been around for a couple of days…

61 PETRIFIED

• A Gorgon or somesuch creature has petrified you.
• Roll a D6

• D6 Result
• 1-2 Surviving Adventurers know roughly where to search for your statue.
• 3-6 You are a strange new birdbath/lawn ornament in the wilderness for someone to stumble across and wonder at someday. Record your name and deeds in the Book of the Dead.

62-63 HARDENED

• The Adventurer survives and becomes inured to the horrors beyond the borderlands; +1d6 sanity points.
• Return to the Alehouse.

64 HORRIBLE SCARS

• -2 to charisma and the adventurer will force a morale check by any enemy he charges in combat.
• Return to the Alehouse.

65 OPPORTUNITY FOR BETRAYAL

• Pick one other character who got away safe, Roll a D6
• D6 Result
• 1-4 he takes your place and has to roll on this chart while you escape and return to the Alehouse.
• 5-6 you both suffer the fate rolled by your victim.

66 SURVIVES AGAINST THE ODDS

The Adventurer survives and returns to the Alehouse. He gains +150 Experience.

So in keeping with my ongoing jabbering about my sandbox game, I figured I’d talk a bit about exactly what I’m doing with two particular aspects – overland travel and random encounters – and why.

There isn’t really anything NEW here that hasn’t been said on other blogs, or in various RPG rulebooks over the years, but I figured what the hell, right?

The core of my approach in this area is just a mish mash of encounter tables from the back of the AD&D MM2, the creatures by CR and terrain breakdowns in the Pathfinder Bestiary book, the exploration and monster tables in the AD&D DMG and me making some educated guesses and flavoring/weighting the tables to my preference.

Overland Travel

This was a big issue for my group during the first few games in the sandbox. We were using Fantasy Craft at the time, but that’s largely irrelevant to the problems we were experiencing. Namely…

• Travel was taking too long
• Travel involved too much book-keeping for the GM
• Players couldn’t “find” anything they set out to look for

Travel taking too long and too much book-keeping

After talking to my old gaming group back home, as well as folks online who had been blogging about sandbox travel and encounter bits (cheers to Chicagowiz for the input, it was a great help) and of course my players,  I realized that the scale on my hexes was too fine as was my metric for tracking travel/exploration time.

My map was broken down into large hexes of 5 miles with 1 mile hexes inside them. Using the old AD&D DMG I had set the party’s rate of overland travel at 1 mile per hour. At first glance this seems low, but when armor, weapons, gear and varying movement rates of different character races were taken into account it felt reasonable. Keep in mind the average unencumbered person out for a leisurely walk will likely make 2-3 miles in an hour if they’re putting any reasonable effort into it at all.

The method for travel was for the guide in the group to pick a direction, tell me how long (in hours) they were heading that direction then make a nature/survival check to see if they got lost.

In theory this works fine if you and your party are REALLY into the minutae of tracking specific overland movement. For your average gaming group (including mine) it can get a bit tedious.

This method led to lots of the party wandering around lost and confused (in game this was good, I wanted them lost), the players getting frustrated (this was bad) and me wondering what the hell was going wrong.

They weren’t ever able to zero in on any of the Points of Interest/Landmark encounters I had built even though they’d specifically headed out to find them, and they were getting the shit stomped out of them by random encounters because of all the aimless wandering.

To resolve this I’ve modified the scale of the Large overland hexes to 25 miles and adjusted the party’s rate of travel to 1 hex per day. This is an unrealistic rate of travel, but it was pointed out to me that the actual physical scale of the hexes DOESN’T MATTER to the players. The distance scale could be measured in Gummi Bears on the DM’s map, with, say, the Cursed Wayhouse being 435,298 Gummi bears from the player’s home base; all the party knows or cares about is that it’s a 3 day walk.

That’s very important: don’t let the players get caught up in worrying about miles, kilometres, and other such units.

When building the world you shouldn’t either. Keep in mind that in a sandbox game distance as it relates to overland travel is just a resource sink. That sounds bad and scary but it isn’t: resource management should be part of the game, the main thing is to work out what approach to it works best for you and your players.

In my opinion getting lost should still be a function of a navigation roll of some kind. It gives players the chance to feel like they have some control over their destiny and direction, no pun intended. Let the guy who put the skill points into survival do something with it for once.

To represent characters becoming more familiar with the area there are lots of things a DM can do, including environmental and circumstance based modifiers.

• Give them a +1 to the roll for each time the guide has traveled or performed a search in that hex
• When characters buy a map from town, give +X to navigation rolls made in the region the map covers
• Traveling at night means -1 to the navigation roll
• Navigation in open terrain (plains etc…) gives +X to the roll
• Heavy cloud cover and traveling at night gives -4 to the navigation roll

So that removes the tedious tracking of teeny tiny hexes. The gameplay becomes:

• Player: We go north 3 days
• DM: Ok, Roll
• Player: 17
• DM: -roll-Day 1 no encounters
• DM: -roll-Day 2 no encounters
• DM –roll-Day 3 you get attacked by Gummi Toads!

All of that can be resolved in under 5 minutes, perhaps with the exception of the encounter itself. The party, assuming the navigation roll is successful, has traveled north for 3 days and after defeating the nefarious Gummi Toads can explore the area or continue on with their travels.

As far as behind the screen goes I have my worldmap printed out and in a plastic sleeve in my notebook: I keep track of actual party location with a wet erase marker. The party has their own map that they maintain and update as they wander around and find things. I was using Hexographer to track movement in-game but it wasn’t working so hot for me – I tend to be all over the place flipping through books and the like so the addition of a laptop is a hindrance more than a help.

Resolving travel on a per day basis also helps with party book-keeping for rations and such if you are doing that, which once again in my opinion for a sandbox game you should.

Players being able to find things

The party was also allowed to stop and explore an area they were in, dictating how long they would explore in hours. Once again my scale killed me here, I was making the mistake of having them spend time exploring the entire 1 mile hex they were in. If they wandered into a Landmark hex, I didn’t just automatically tell them they had found it, which in hindsight was probably a mistake.

The big change I’ve made here is, once again, the scale. Exploration will be handled on a per day basis. The party essentially stops and spends a full day poking around the surrounding region.

Im handling this slightly differently from travel. The players won’t be rolling any skill checks : a successful exploration check will locate any point of interest inside the current hex . Since in the back of my head I have my hexes set to being roughly 25 miles I have the percent set fairly low for the initial day of searching. Depending on how easily you want players to discover things you could modify the percentage chance up or down as well as adding modifiers for multiple days searching, having found the landmark before etc.

Right now my mechanics for exploration are as follows:

• First day of exploration 25% chance of finding a point of interest
• +5% per consecutive day spent searching
• +X% for having a Ranger in the party (havent decided on this value yet)
• +10% if the any of the party members have been to the point of interest before. (I’m considering only applying this modifier if the guide has been to the area before, but that may be a mechanic too far as it would require me and/or the players to track who has been where.)

The other thing to keep in mind is that the party will encounter local “wildlife” while exploring, just as they do while traveling. Most monsters and predators are reasonably intelligent, and the longer a party of adventurers spends tromping around a discrete area the more attention they’re going to attract.

To represent this I simply expand the chance of an encounter by 1 for every consecutive day the group spends exploring in one spot. Starting from a 10% base chance  of a random encounter at any given encounter time (1 on a d10), if the party spends, say, 4 days searching it gets up to 40%, or 1-4 on a d10. This is also good encouragement for a party to move on when they’re in an area with no points of interest: if they hang around too long they’ll be hitting encounters all… the… time…. . Let the dice and the environment tell them they’re in the wrong spot, not the mean DM who won’t let them keep exploring.

At the end of the day, even though exploring, getting lost and running from random encounters are all a huge part of sandbox play those elements shouldn’t be painful to manage for you and especially not your players. At some point you DO want them to find all the nifty points of interest that you have built as well, right?

If the core of the experience sucks for everyone then no one is going to want to keep experiencing it. Talk to your players figure out what’s working and what isn’t, and most importantly HAVE FUN!

This ended up being longer than I anticipated. I’ll cover the encounters stuff later this week.