Category: Refereeing at the Table

Better Not Die, ‘cuz PCs Don’t Go To Heaven

Oversaturated screenshot of Meryl Strife from the Playstation 1 Metal Gear Solid game, lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Text over the image reads "Time to roll a new character. Unless…?"

When your character drops to 0 hit points1 in On A Red World Alone, two things happen:

  1. You must roll on the permanent injury table.
  2. I remind you that the next hit will kill you dead.

That’s it. The character’s ability to take actions is not inhibited in any way beyond their specific injury, and their own desire to avoid character death. This always surprises and slightly confuses new players, who expect having no hit points to restrict their options more severely. It even surprises and confuses old players who haven’t been at 0 hit points in awhile. (Which, as an inattentive player myself, I totally understand.)

I’ve been running games this way for many years now, because it creates an interesting choice: What risks are you willing to take when you’re one knuckle sandwich away from certain death? To me that choice is made so much less interesting if you’re also inhibited by moving at half speed, or rolling with disadvantage, or especially if the only action you’re allowed to take is “roll to stop bleeding.”

If the injured character escapes immediate danger, they are faced with another interesting choice: do they move to the back rank of the party and continue on their quest, or do they find somewhere to hunker down and heal? Healing requires 8 hours of rest2, in which time whatever task they’re pursuing will definitely become more challenging in some way. Doors will be locked, traps will be laid, their enemies will be reinforced, or rival bands of plunderers will arrive to compete for loot.

1 I don’t fuck with negative hit points. If you’ve got 3hp, taking 3 damage and taking 30 damage have identical results. I have toyed with the idea of a catastrophic injury rule where damage that would reduce you to -10 is instantly lethal, but at present I’m not doing that.

2 You can restore 1hp by finding a corner to hide in for 8 hours. Or, if you’re fortunate enough to rest somewhere with a bed, food, and leisure activities, you may roll your hit die to determine how many hp you recover.

Roll on the Permanent Injury Table

My permanent injury table is more bark than bite, since only half its results are permanent.

  1. Gain a cool scar. Roll a new Boon. (In games other than ORWA, I replace this with +1 to a random Ability Score.)
  2. In shock. Automatically fail saving throws for the rest of the session.
  3. The most precious item the character has with them is destroyed.
  4. Roll a die type equal to half your HD (d6 HD -> roll d3). Reduce your maximum HP by the result.
  5. A randomly determined skill is reduced by 1 rank. (In games other than ORWA, I replace this with -1 to a random Ability Score.)
  6. Severe bodily trauma. Your (1-2: arm, 3-4: leg, 5: eye, 6: lung, 7: kidney, 8: face) is destroyed.

I believe these entries are fairly clear, though the last one may require a bit of additional explanation.

Losing an arm prevents a character from holding two things, losing a leg prevents them from standing or moving normally. In both cases I’d roll a d% to see how much of the limb was destroyed. Losing an eye penalizes their ability to aim. Losing a lung penalizes endurance. Losing a kidney is my catch-all for digestive organs and makes them vulnerable to poisons. Lungs and kidneys are both particularly bad if you happen to lose them twice, since you can’t be alive anymore. Having one’s face destroyed penalizes social rolls.

You could get a lot more granular with different bits of the body, and the disabilities that would result from their destruction. For many years I used a huge table with over 200 grisly entries, and enjoyed it very much. I only switched to this because a smaller table is easier to keep at hand and thus faster to use. And until recently I included the possibility for characters to lose their ability to talk, smell, or hear, but I personally find those conditions challenging to enforce at the table, and so have opted to remove them.

In all cases, the nature of the injury can be tailored to whatever caused it. A swinging sword, a falling rock, a venomous bite, and a blast of fire can all destroy a person’s arm, but the particulars will differ.

Death

A character at 0 who takes another point of damage is dead. Depending on the method of death I may allow them some brave last words, or a spiteful final riposte, but then it’s time to roll a new character. Unless…?

On a Red World Alone is set in what I call a Saturday Morning SciFi milieu. Characters returning from the dead in some horrible altered form is a genre staple that I cannot deny to my players. So long as a dead character’s body isn’t completely obliterated, and their friends are able to recover it, then the player may opt to revive their character as either a Cyborg, an Undead, or a Mutant.

Cyborg resurrection has the fewest strings attached if you happen to be absurdly wealthy. For the low-low price of 9000cc + 1000cc/level, the finest scientific minds on apocalyptic mars will replace your most mangled body parts with chrome. If you don’t happen to be absurdly wealthy, worry not! The billing department has already filed the paperwork to garnish half your XP gain until the debt is paid.

Undead resurrection is a bit of a melodramatic term. Sure, your soul was forced back into its fleshy husk by the power of eldritch sorcery which makes you repellent in the eyes of God. But your heart pumps blood, your lungs pull in air, and you don’t smell any worse than you used to. To all appearances you look as good as if you’d never died at all, but necromancers must be paid—and they place little value on plastic. Choosing Undead resurrection places the resurrected under a Geas they must complete. The nature of the Geas will depend on the goals of the magician who performed the resurrection. A wizard’s goals are rarely wholesome.

Mutant resurrection is a gamble. Somewhat less than the finest scientific minds on apocalyptic mars will blast your corpse with strange radiation, pump it full of neon colored goop, and allow stray animals to bite it. On the upside: it does bring you back to life on the cheap. On the downside: you’ve developed a disadvantageous mutation. The process by which I manage this in my own game involves a d1000 table and a series of mental filters, neither of which can reasonably be shared here. Instead, here’s a table of d12 examples:

  1. Allergic to Silver. Can’t touch it, and takes extra damage from it.
  2. A gross little face is growing from where the wound was. It says rude things to people.
  3. Skin glows very slightly. Not enough to see by, but enough to make it impossible to hide in darkness.
  4. Mutant grows tight strands between fingers, hindering their manual dexterity. Reduce a finger-dependent skill by 1 rank.
  5. Nose becomes large and hypersensitive. Must make a saving throw to avoid fleeing from strong smells.
  6. Legs shrink. Normal movement rate is reduced by 25%.
  7. If this mutant touches a wounded person, they absorb that person’s damage. They cannot control this ability, and cloth clothing isn’t enough to prevent touching.
  8. The mutant’s body produces a stone which, if destroyed, instantly kills the mutant. The inverse is not true: the stone being secure does not prevent the mutant from any harm.
  9. The mutant has absolutely no sense of direction. They cannot “go back the way they came” if they’re alone, and will fail any navigation checks.
  10. The mutant is profoundly unpleasant to talk to. Try as they might, they’re always going to say stuff that’s boring, mean, or offensive. -1 on social checks.
  11. Skin flakes off constantly, leaving an easy-to-follow trail wherever they go.
  12. Weak little baby lungs prevent this mutant from holding their breath at all, for any reason.

In conclusion

A stranger once told me that they’d heard of my games through one of my players, and reported that this player’s favorite thing about playing with me is that death feels like an ever-present risk. This surprised me. It is lovely to know my players speak well of me, but I don’t think of my games as being particularly deadly. Certainly I don’t intervene to prevent death from happening if that’s how the player’s choices and the luck of the dice land, but in practice PC death doesn’t happen often. Most of this post has been about the ways players can survive when they ought to have died!

I think the operative word in this second-hand performance review is “feels.” Death feels like an ever-present risk in my games, because when players get close to it the game changes. They’re faced with decisions that have clear life-or-death stakes, and if they manage to survive the experience still leaves its mark on them.

The Core Mechanic of D&D

Learning to play D&D is more a study of philosophy than it is of rulebooks. Character classes, and saving throws, and combat mechanics are all just subsystems for resolving edge cases. The core mechanic of the game is conversation. Specifically, a Three Step Conversation.

1. The referee describes an environment.

2. The players describe their actions within that environment.

3. The referee describes how the environment changes.

In my experience, this back-and-forth effectively describes the vast majority of good play. For example:

1. “You are in darkness.”

2. “I light a torch.”

3. “The torch illuminates a windowless, brick-walled room with a single door.”

2. “I look around at the ceiling to see if I can find where we entered from.”

3. “The ceiling is vaulted. The hole you fell through isn’t actually up there. It’s on the rear wall, about 10′ off the ground, angled upwards into a chute.”

2. “CRUG THE DESTROYER HATE TINY ROOM! CRUG SMASH DOOR WITH AXE!”

3. “The door’s wood was not particularly strong, and is easily smashed to bits beneath Crug’s mighty blow.”

1. “You see a hallway beyond.”

(See also: “Example of Play for Running Traps Without a Search Check“)

I came up with this formulation a little over a year ago, and have been smugly satisfied with myself ever since. Then, the other day, I was talking with John Bell of The Retired Adventurer. We were discussing refereeing advice, and he suggested following a pattern of Question Answer-Question, something he’d written about back in 2012. To quote the most relevant passage from his post:

I recommend that you, whether a player or referee, end almost any and every assertion you make, especially one that answers another player’s question, with another question, one that either asks what their response is, what further information they want, what the foreseeable consequences of doing something would be, even just confirming their choice.

Question Answer-Question pairs well with the Three Step Conversation. I’m going to work it into the way I referee from now on, and I anticipate seeing some improvement to the flow and momentum of play. If nothing else, ending on a question is a clear signal to the players that I’m done talking. It ought to cut down on awkward pauses where the party waits to see if I have more to add. Moreover, I can occasionally direct my questions at specific players like a vindictive primary school teacher. It could be a useful tool for involving folks who are normally too shy to speak up.

During our talk, John further suggested presenting the players with specific options, not unlike old video game RPGs. “You’ve entered a square room with a door on each wall and a statue of a goblin in the center. Do you want to press on through one of the exits, examine the statue more closely, or look around the room for anything subtle you might have missed?”

Initially this seemed limiting to me. An act of reducing the player’s infinite number of choices down to whatever handful are most obvious to the referee in the moment. That assumes, though, that players will respond to a given list of choices by accepting them as a limitation. That’s generally not how these things go.

Presenting a person with an infinity of options, (“You’re in an open field, what do you do?”) tends to create analysis paralysis, and prompt “safe” responses. Conversely, having the referee put forth some of the more obvious choices could encourage players to look for something outside the box. Even experienced players, who might not always appreciate this sort of presentation, can occasionally benefit from a nudge. And for new players it could be a great way to get them into the adventuring frame of mind.

The method also dovetails nicely with the principals I described in Obfuscation Through Volume, one of the oldest posts on this site which I still stand behind. (The advice, that is. The writing is awful).

Bit of a shorter post today. Sorry if you feel cheated. There’s not a lot to say about this idea, but it felt valuable to share none the less.

Advice for Running Long-Term Campaigns Online

The other day, all-around likeable dude Chris Wilson sent me a message:

“I know you’ve been running a successful Google hangouts campaign for awhile now, and I was just wondering if you have any advice for me to get a similar campaign started?”

This isn’t something I’d ever really thought about. After two and a half years, On a Red World Alone definitely qualifies as a long running online campaign, but that’s not something I set out to accomplish. I have no program for keeping it going aside from simply responding to problems as they’ve arisen. None the less, Chris seems to have found the conversation useful. Perhaps the same advice can be helpful to others as well.

The most important thing is to Keep Showing Up. Everything else I have to say could be distilled down to this single point. Campaigns end when the referee gives up on them. If you surrender to your first bout of “setting fatigue,” your campaign will be lucky to last 6 months.

There have been times when ORWA bores me. Days when I just don’t feel like running very much. I push through those times because I enjoy hanging out with my players, and because I know my boredom is temporary.  I know that in a month I’m going to come up with a cool new idea. When I do, I’ll be happy I still have my weekly ORWA session to inject it into.

On a Red World Alone will end someday, but it won’t end because I’m bored with it. It will end because I’m satisfied with it.

It’s also essential to understand that Your Players Won’t Keep Showing Up. That’s not a judgement on them, it’s just a fact of life. No group of adults will be able to consistently keep the same night of the week available for years at a time. People drop out. Presently, ORWA only has one and a half of its original players. I lost most of my starting group within the first 6 months, and since then there have been multiple “generations” of the party. Some of the later players have become more essential to my idea of what the game is than the people who were there with me at the beginning.

If I have more than a couple sessions of low, or no attendance, I go recruiting. I get out there on g+ and let folks know there’s room for them at my table. Sometimes it takes a couple weeks to find someone, but it’s worth the effort. I’ve had 16 different players in ORWA over the years: some dropped out after a few weeks; some are still new recruits themselves; some played for many years but have moved on to other things; some have returned to the game after long absences. Only one player has been part of the game consistently since its beginning.

To mitigate players dropping off, I do my best to Make The Game Part of Everyone’s Routine. In my experience the most common time to lose players is when the schedule is unpredictable. On a Red World Alone happens every Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm PST. That time has never changed, nor have I ever taken a hiatus away from it.

That isn’t to say we’ve never missed a session. In the 132 weeks since we started playing, we’ve only played 101 times. Sometimes Wednesday is a holiday, and we cancel the game so people can be with their families. Sometimes I can’t avoid needing to work during our normal game time, or I’m too sick to play. Sometimes I show up, but none of my players do.

These things happen, but it’s always handled on a week-to-week basis. The session is always assumed to be on until something disrupts it.

In terms of Organization, my games work pretty much the same way that everyone’s games do. I set lofty goals for myself and constantly fall short of them. Somehow the game hasn’t completely imploded yet, and is still a lot of fun, so I can’t be doing everything wrong.

The first step I take in any new campaign is to create a new community for it on Google+. A place where the players and I can talk about the game without any distractions. It is insanely useful, and is easily my #1 organization tip. Beyond that, I can divide my campaign documentation into three groups: the player’s guide, the public records, and my private notes.

The Player’s Guide is a document I throw together which contains all the house rules we will be using. I don’t have any of the ORWA guides available for easy sharing, but the guide I wrote for Fuck the King of Space is a good representative example. Don’t be intimidated by the 23 pages of writing I did for that game. I use a TON of house rules. The original ORWA player’s guide was much less impressive.

Public Records start with the play reports, where I note down everything important that happened during a session. I acknowledge that my style in this is wildly excessive, and creates a lot of useless documentation that nobody will ever use. Do not emulate the way I write play reports. A good play report can be much simpler than the ones I write.

Out of these play reports I copy some information into various threads. Some are more useful than others. For example: any time a new spell is created, I write it up in the play report, but I also copy it into the Spellbook thread. I do the same thing for any guns that are discovered. I have thread for recording the player’s activities during their Haven Turns, and threads for recording which sessions various NPCs have appeared in.

Finally there are The Referee Notes. Nothing too surprising here: it’s a document with all the tables I use, as well as a few notes about what certain NPCs are plotting, etc. Most of the details about the world just live in my head, same as any other referee. Occasionally I’ll need to stat up a monster or doodle a map. I have a pocket notebook where I write all that stuff.

Some issues are unique to running games online. I use Google Hangouts for a few reasons. Habit is the biggest one, but it’s also easily accessible to people I know through Google+, it’s good at supporting multi-user video chats, and is more-or-less reliable. That being said, Google has definitely been treating the service like an ugly stepchild, gradually making it less and less and less useful over time. I’m hopeful that Discord will be able to replace hangouts, but last time I tried it they still had way too many issues with multi-user video chats.

(Please: no one proselytize to me about Roll20. I do not care.)

In an online chat it’s important to realize that everyone’s voices are being pushed through the same set of speakers. Because of this, everyone gets flattened out to the same volume. It’s not possible for two people to lean over and have a side conversation, or for multiple people to talk at once and remain intelligible. The group needs to be good at giving one another space to speak. They also need to acknowledge that this puts increased pressure on people who are shy. If someone looks like they’re trying to say something, do what you can to give them the space to speak.

Don’t make a big deal about not being able to see people’s dice. Some folks get completely bent outta shape over this, as though it’s impossible to play unless there’s some shared dice roller application. It is pathetic. We’re playing D&D, not craps. There’s no money on the line. Who cares if someone fudges a roll? All they’re doing is damaging their own experience.

If someone showed up at my table saying they rolled an 18 in every stat and a 20 on every attack…so what? It’s not going to save them from making stupid decisions, and the only one who is gonna have any less fun because of it is them.

Audio issues happen. People are going to cause some echo or some static. It can be pretty dang frustrating, but you gotta be understanding. Take some time at the start of the session to let people know they’re causing an issue, and give them a chance to fix it. Often having them put on headphones is all that is required.

If it can’t be fixed and it’s a minor issue, try to live with it. Sometimes people live near the train tracks. It annoys them more than it annoys you, so try to be cool. If someone has a major technical issue which is disrupting play, it’s okay to ask them to leave until they can get their gear working.

People are absolutely going to get distracted. They’ll have you open in one tab while they’re looking at their g+ feed in another tab. It happens, just roll with it.

Finally there’s Mapping. At some point you’re going to need a way to communicate the environment to your players visually.

I’m fortunate to have a 25 square foot white board on my wall which I can easily direct my camera towards. It makes mapping a breeze. By far the simplest method I’ve ever seen in many years of online play. If you can set something like this up, I highly encourage you to do so.

If you can’t, some folks screen share their maps using an image editing program like GIMP. If you add a black layer on top of the map, you can slowly erase it as the players go along, revealing what they see. I’ve always found this method painstakingly difficult, because you can’t see the map any better than your players can. There’s always the risk of revealing something you don’t want.

There’s also Digital Whiteboards, such as RealTimeBoard. It’s a powerful tool. Not only can you draw on it, but you can also upload images & PDFs, place post-it-notes, etc. I’ve played in games that were run entirely through the RTB. John Bell has spent a lot more time with the service than I have, and has a few good posts describing the best ways to leverage it for your game.

The downsides to RTB is that everybody needs to create an account, and will need to be invited via email before they can access the board. Also, the company has been scaling back their free service gradually over the years in favor of a paid subscription. It’s not terribly expensive, but it may not be something you want to do just to play D&D online.

That’s all I can think of. I hope it is helpful.

Example of Play for Running Traps Without a Search Check

My ORWA players recently invaded the sanctum of a villain known for their love of elaborate traps. I figured I’d share a transcription of their interactions with those traps. Hopefully it will be a useful tool for folks who aren’t clear on how this sort of play is done.

Trap #1: Acid Bucket

“You enter the building through the hole you blew in the wall. You’re in a T-shaped hallway with an elevator to your right, and a number of doors straight ahead. The blast is obviously going to draw attention, but there is no one in sight for the moment.”

“We make a beeline for the closest door. What does it look like?”

“Solid wood, lever-style knob, opens into the hallway.”

“I stand to the side of the door, and push down on knob with the Inanimate Carbon Rod.”

“It turns downwards, as you would expect a normal knob to do.”

“I pull the door open just slightly. Only enough so I can peek through the gap with one eye.”

“You see a cord crossing the gap. It’s attached to the door, and goes up somewhere ought of sight.”

“Can I tell what part of the door it is attached to.”

“It seems to be attached just above the knob.”

“You said the door opens out into the hallway, right? So the hinges are on this side?”

“Yes.”

“I remove the hinges.”

“Easily done, though at this point your examinations and tinkering has taken some time. Roll an encounter check.”

“Got a five”

“It seems that, despite the explosion, no one is rushing to see what happened. At least, no one you’ve detected. So, you’ve got the hinges off the door, what do you do now?”

“I’d like to open the door just slightly on the hinge side. Enough to stick my spear through the gap and cut the string.”

“The string is cut. Now what?”

“I’ll open the door enough for us to walk through.”

“Alright–“

“But I’m standing off to the side!!!”

“Hah, okay. You get the door open. Nothing happens.”

“Let’s get everybody out of the open first. C’mon guys, through the door! Can I see what the string was attached to?”

“There’s a steel bucket mounted on a pivot above the door. The string was attached to a latch holding the bucket upright.”

[Later, the players would use this acid bucket to defeat the first wave of enemies who came after them.]

[The bucket had an extendable sluice grate on it, which ensured maximum acid coverage on anyone standing near the door.]

Trap #2: Don’t Touch My Documents

“The room is full of office-style filing cabinets, 5 drawers tall, each standing a few feet apart from the others.”

“I open one to see what sort of documents are kept here.”

“When you pull on the handle, instead of opening the drawer, it simply slides out like a pull switch. You, the cabinet, and a 3′ by 3′ section of floor all drop down six feet, and bars snap into place above your head. Additionally, you hear five clicking sounds as each of the filing cabinet’s drawers lock.”

“Oh…it’s that kinda dungeon.”

[To get the drawers open, the handle would first need to be turned so it was vertical. In fairness, the players were warned that this dude was almost fetishistic about trapping everything.]

[The player later escaped when another character literally sold their soul for a wish to get them out. Kinda drastic I think, but I like the moxie.]

Trap #3: Missing the Heavy Key

“You’ve reached the area where the slaves you want to rescue are being held. They’re divided between two rooms behind barred doors.”

“Barred how?”

“The doors themselves are like others you’ve seen: wooden, lever handle, open out into the hallway. On either side of these doors, though, are metal hooks built into the wall. There’s a metal beam resting on the hooks, blocking the door from being opened.”

“I ask the guard we took prisoner how they got into these rooms.”

“He says that whenever he was sent into one of these rooms, he was given two heavy metal blocks, and instructed to slid them in place as he removed the bar from across the door. He was told that it was very important the hooks always have a consistent amount of weight on them.”

“What happens if they don’t?”

“He doesn’t know. Remember, he’s only been working here 2 months. They only told him what he needed to do his job.”

“Ugh, fine. Ya know what? We don’t have time for this. I cast Cone of Cold on the door. Would that freeze the mechanism?”

“Assuming the trap works mechanically, yes. The mechanism would be frozen.”

“I remove the bar.”

“How are you going to do that? It’s stuck to the hooks by the same ice that’s freezing the mechanism.”

“Can I yank it off?”

“You probably could, though doing so would also have a chance to activate the mechanism you were trying to freeze.”

“Uhm…oh, ya know what? I still have my old blowtorch with me. I’ll use the heat from that to melt the ice on the beam, then remove it.”

“Alright, you do that. The beam is removed, the door is unblocked, and no trap is activated. This won’t last forever, though. The ice in the gears is already starting to melt with the heat from your blowtorch, so I’ll be rolling every so often to see if the trap activates.”

“Okay, I open the door. Is the baby Lamataur in here?”

“No, but the 12 other slaves in here are super happy about being rescued.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. Now we need to get the other door open, it’s the same, right?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have another Cone of Cold, though, so we can’t do that again. Ummm…what sort of building is this?”

“It seems like it was probably an office building before the apocalypse.”
“What are the walls made of?”

“Sheetrock, covered with torn wallpaper.”

“Oh, sweet, I take my knife and hack open the wall next to the hooks on that second door.”

“Okay, but that’s going to take a little while unless you have a better tool than a knife. You okay with an encounter check?”

“Umm…yeah, okay. Gotta do it. I’ll roll the check….a 3.”

“Fortunately for you, that’s no longer an encounter after you defeated that previous group of guards. You manage to saw open the wall.”

“Can someone else do the same thing on the other side while I do this?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, so what do we see?”

“It’s hard to get a good look. The hook is definitely attached to a lever, which holds a wheel in place, which is attached to a chain that goes down further into the wall than you can see.”

“I’ll try to jam my knife in to keep the chain from moving, can I do that?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okay, let’s do it on both sides, then pull the bar off the door and open it.”

“You hear some squeaking as the chains strain against your knives, but the jam holds. Nothing happens. Inside the room you immediately spot the baby Lamataur.”

“Sweet! Time to get out of here.”

[Incidentally, had they activated the trap, a small trap door would have opened in the floor, and a crystal ball would have been launched out by a spring. Everyone would have to make a saving throw versus Magic to avoid becoming mesmerized by the thing, which would issue a command to “go into the cell and sit quietly until someone comes to get you.”]

A Response to My Post About Spotlight

Recently I wrote a post deconstructing the idea of Spotlight in tabletop games, and why I don’t like it. Red over at the blog “Blood, Death, Satan, and Metal” has written a direct response to my post which I think is worth reading. Please check it out if you’re interested in the subject.

I think our disagreement is largely semantic, in part because my original point is semantic. I dislike terms such as “spotlight” and “cinematic” (another word Red uses in his post) because of their obvious thespian roots. My perception is that most people regard thespians as “doing it right” when it comes to tabletop games This annoys, and I think it is harmful for reasons I’ve discussed at length elsewhere, so I push back against the intrusion of their language into my spaces. It is entirely possible that I am being silly and stubborn in doing so.

In particular, Red’s post is worth checking out because he played in my ORWA campaign for many years. He has a unique position from which to criticize me: that of having actually endured the application of my philosophies first hand. Moreover, he and I made a game together last year which may (Satan willing) someday finally get released. So, in addition to enduring me as a referee, he also had to battle his way through multiple arguments with me over what would be included in that book.

I have nothing more to say. Red is good people. Read his post.
 

Framing the Problem: Rotating Leaders and Spotlights

We’ve been experimenting with a rotating leader system in my Wednesday game. It’s a simple method for ensuring every player’s interests are addressed during play. The whole idea could be communicated in about a paragraph, but like any idea it exists in the shadow of other ideas which preceded it. Ergo, to make its utility clear, I’ll need to show how it differs from existing methods of dividing the spotlight. That will beg the question “why does Nick hate the concept of ‘spotlight’ so much?”, which begs the further question “what is ‘spotlight?'”

Let’s begin at the beginning.

In some TTRPG circles, a player is said to be “in the spotlight” when their character is the primary focus of attention. It doesn’t mean they’re the only one saying or doing anything, merely that they’re saying and doing the most interesting things right now. To use a very D&D-ish example: in a tavern brawl, the thief and magic user may participate, but the fighter will probably have the spotlight. Ostensibly, this is what everyone at the table wants. Being in the spotlight is fun, being out is less fun.

The term was created so that attention could be discussed as a commodity; with the goal of parceling it out fairly amongst all participants. This is both a mechanical concern (“Do this class’s abilities offer an equivalent number of spotlight opportunities to other classes?”) and a social concern for the group to adjudicate at the table. (“Sue has been in the spotlight a lot tonight. We should give Anne some time in the spotlight soon.”) The platonic ideal would be for everyone at the table to spend an equal amount of time describing themselves doing awesome stuff while the rest of the group plays supporting roles as they wait their turn.

At first glance, spotlight may seem to be a useful concept. A game of D&D is basically a conversation with 4+ participants. Like any conversation, only one person can have the whole group’s attention at a time. Everyone wants a chance to play, thus it makes sense to think of the group’s attention as a resource that needs to be managed. So…what’s my fuckin’ problem?

The Spotlight methodology harms the game in at least two ways. First, it discourages a comfortable atmosphere by seeking to control the social aspect of the game. Second, it alters the game’s focus to the point where I would say you’re not even playing the same game anymore.

To expound on my first point first: D&D is a party. It’s a bunch of people getting together to socialize and have a good time. Presumably, the people involved mostly like one another. As with any party, it’s a mess of socialization with an ebb and flow all its own. It’s flexible, responsive. The natural movements of the game are a beautiful thing.

Sometimes people will step on one another’s toes, but if you’re not playing with assholes, folks will generally try to be respectful of one another. If you are playing with assholes, you have deeper problems than any rule can fix. This attempt to use rules to protect oneself from the scary variable of “other people” is a consistent feature of some TTRPG circles, and I find it baffling. My parents kept my locked in the house for most of my primary education and intentionally sabotaged my childhood friendships. How is it I developed better social skills than…anyone?

Worse yet, the form chosen for this regulated socialization is one of the worst types of conversation that exist: the “waiting my turn” conversation. Everyone half-listening to each other, searching for their chance to interject. On the scale of enjoyable human contact, it ranks just barely above “listening to someone who appears to be willfully oblivious to all the hints you’re dropping that you need to leave.”

None of this is to say that groups concerned about sharing the spotlight will be awkward by necessity. People don’t forget how to be people because of badly written game advice, but that’s not an excuse for accepting bad advice uncritically. Nor is it the real issue. The far more substantive problem with spotlight thinking is the second one: altering the game’s focus.

D&D is a game about solving problems. The referee puts obstacles in the players’ path, and the players attempt to overcome those obstacles. Problem solving isn’t the only source of fun, but it is the primary source.

Attempting to ensure every character gets an equal share of the spotlight is incompatible with with that focus. If Maria is on a hot streak and does a great job coming up with solutions for every problem, she ought to be congratulated for her clever thinking, not chastised for hogging the spotlight. That’s what I mean when I say it shifts the focus of the game. It becomes about the characters, rather than the problems those characters tackle. It becomes a story game.

Which isn’t wrong. I have no beef with thespian games or the people who play them, BUT using the concepts of those games to understand D&D will produce bad results. Like trying to drive a nail with a screwdriver: it’s the wrong tool for the job.

I also don’t mean to say the referee shouldn’t be concerned if someone is being left out of the game. We should trust the group to be accommodating of one another, but the referee is the last line of defense to ensure everyone gets heard. I often tell my louder players to shut up so I can hear what my softer spoken players are trying to tell me.

Which brings us, finally, to the rotating leader thing that prompted this whole post. I’ve discussed before that as a campaign matures, it changes. At low levels, the referee can say “there’s adventure to the West of here,” and the players will all respond “Let’s go west!” Once the players have settled into the world the decision of where to go next stops being so simple. They’ve been around the block a few times and developed their own interests in the world along the way.  Lindsey wants to rid the world of slavery, Red wants to steal a giant robot, and Cathy wants to add a pool to the party’s stronghold.

As a rule, players are good about deciding what to do amongst themselves, but over time there’s a regression to the mean. Nobody ever gets to pursue the weird niche quest hooks that only they are interested in. After awhile that can really bum a person out.

A group of five people is never going to order a pizza covered in anchovies. The one person in the group who loves anchovies probably won’t even advocate for them, because they know it’s a weird niche thing that other people won’t like. At some point, though, that one person is going to think “Fuck, I haven’t had anchovies in like…five fuckin’ years. I’m just going to order a pizza and eat it all myself.” Except this is an analogy and it’s actually about D&D and you can’t play D&D all by yourself.

To combat this issue, I suggested to my group that anytime the question of what to do next arises, one player be designated to have the final say. Everyone is free to discuss and argue the issue as they normally would, but in the end that one player gets to decide what problem the party tackles next. The group then spends however many sessions it takes to reach a satisfactory conclusion to that pursuit, after which a new player becomes leader and decides on the party’s next goal.

It’s worth noting that aside from picking the group’s goal, the leader has no other explicit authority. They’re the final word on what the party does, not how the party does it. That said, they often serve as a kind of de facto party leader for the duration of the pursuit they chose, which is a nice side benefit. Also, would you believe this post took two agonizing days to sort together? I feel kinda pathetic about that.

How Do You Hexcrawl?

Note: This post, as well as the seven others which will follow it next week, were originally written about two years ago. They were intended to be nothing more than a short series, building on my then-popular Cool Stuff in the Wrong Direction posts. The idea quickly caught fire in my imagination, and I started to develop and expand it beyond the original 8-post run.

Before I knew it, I’d written an entire book. Literally. For over a year now, I’ve had 150+ pages sitting on my hard drive while I work on gathering art and saving money to pay for a proper layout. My plan was to hold these posts in reserve until it was time for a big marketing push. The thought was that I’d post all of these, then after the last one went up I’d say “Didja like that? Well guess what, it was just the first draft of a book that is on sale right now!”

I don’t think it was a terrible plan, but the further out I get from originally writing these posts, the rougher my rough draft starts to look. At this point I don’t think they’re very representative of the quality of the book. Which isn’t to say they’re bad posts–I wouldn’t post them if I thought they were bad–but I don’t want to hold them in reserve any longer. It’s time to get these out of my drafts folder, and out into the world.

Enjoy!

It’s entirely possible that I’m just stupid. There have been many times when I felt certain that what I was looking for didn’t exist, only to be proven humiliatingly wrong the moment I opened my mouth about it. Having said that…

I’ve never seen a good explanation of how the nitty gritty of hex crawling is supposed to work. In the past when I’ve said this in a public space, I’ve been given links to some ostensible explanation. However interesting these links might be, they tend to focus on how a hex crawl ought to work in theory, and have never satisfied my curiosity about the practical, at-the-table mechanics of running one. I’m sure there are people out there who know exactly how a hex crawl should run in practice, but unless any of them want to explain it to me, I need to make the rules up myself. Just for the sake of being comprehensive, I’m going to start with the absurdly basic stuff.

Each hex is 6 miles across. The terrain type shown on the space accounts for the majority of the hex’s terrain. But just because a given hex shows plains doesn’t mean you can’t find a copse of trees there. Plains dominate the space, but the world’s environs aren’t actually broken down into hexes. The hexes are an abstraction. The straight lines between one environment and another actually represent a gradual, uneven transition. Saying “The trees become more spares, giving way to plains over the 6 hours you travel West” is fine. The map itself may be ugly, but since the players will be describing their movement in terms of how many hours they walk in a given direction, a more detailed map doesn’t really improve your ability to manage the campaign much. Though, there’s no harm in taking a prettier map and slapping a hex grid on top of it, that works just fine as well.

It has occasionally been pointed out that a 6 mile hex is ludicrously huge in size. Video games noted for their vast playing space, such as Oblivion or Skyrim, are small enough that the entirety of the game world would fit within a single hex. This vastness is actually beneficial in several ways:

  • It means that no matter how often the players travel through a given hex, you can always justify finding something new there. Barring significant effort, this ensures that a given wilderness environment never becomes safe and mundane.
  • The math for converting hexes into miles is very simple, if for some reason you ever need to do that.
  • It allows you to portray vastly different political situations, environments, and cultures, without forcing you to manage an unwieldy amount of game spaces.

Moving on: the most confusing thing about hex crawls for me has always been how to translate what the players say into what is happening on the hex map. In the past I’ve tried giving players a blank hex grid of their own so they could fill in spaces and tell me which edge of the hex they wanted to explore out of, but I don’t like how this feels. Players already have an idea of how to communicate movement in the wilderness using the cardinal directions. The hex map can be a great referee tool, but I’d prefer not to make the players think about the world in terms of hexes. Unfortunately, cardinal directions don’t always give you a good idea of what hex the players will move to.

If your map were drawn on this hex grid, it would be easy to know what to do if the players say “we go East,” or “we go West.” But what about the North/South axis? Do you choose to skew them slightly to the East, or slightly to the West of where they wanted to go? You could just determine it randomly, then remember to skew back in the other direction if they keep going. That would keep them moving in vaguely the right direction, and is probably the best choice for maximum simplicity. It’s not unreasonable to think they meander a bit as they travel.

If you’re more ambitious, you could try to keep an idea of where your players actually fall within their hex. This requires more granular tracking of how far your players move at a time, but it does have the benefit of making their time expenditure more meaningful, and of making it more clear what hex to move them into next. The geometric simplicity of a 6 mile hex, along with the fact that LotFP’s daily movement rates are all divisible by 6, should make this a feasible task. Though I can’t imagine doing it without constantly marking little travel lines on my hex map. I’d probably tend towards the simpler option myself, at least until I’m more confident running hex crawls than I currently am.

Which brings us to terrain difficulty. You can’t just have characters moving through mountains at the same speed they move along a road. Some hexes are more difficult to get through than others. There’s a whole range of methods, with varying degrees of complexity, that you could use to determine just how much travel is slowed on rough ground. For now, I’d like to keep it super simple. There are three types of terrain:

  • Normal. Players move at a normal rate through most terrains. If it doesn’t fit into either of the other categories, it’s normal.
  • Difficult. Players move at half speed. This is anything that would present a significant challenge to movement, like mountains or swamps.
  • Roads. Players move twice as fast so long as they’re walking along a road.

Hand in hand with terrain type is encounter checks. How do those work? How often do you check for them? Again, I say keep it simple. Check once per hex. Twice if the hex’s terrain is difficult, and once every second hex if the players are on a road. (That’s once every 6, 3, or 12 miles respectively). Commensurately, I’d probably place relatively uninteresting encounters along the roads. (After all, anything interesting will have been found), and more interesting encounters in difficult terrain. That creates a nice risk-reward dynamic between fast travel with no loot, and slow travel with tonsaloot.

So what are these encounters, and how are they determined? I’m a big proponent of Brendan’s overloaded encounter die. In ORWA, I use three different encounter die charts based on how frequently a check is required. This is what I use for my 4-hour checks, which I think should translate well to once-per-hex checks.

  1. Encounter.
  2. Location.
  3. Spoor
  4. Rations.
  5. Lost
  6. Safe

Encounters are stuff like wandering monsters or NPCs. They’re rolled on an overall list that covers multiple hexes, like an entire cluster of forest hexes, or maybe even just a whole hex map. There’s between 4 and 8 entries on this table, and nothing is too specific. I don’t want to have to restock it. The point of the encounter table is to provide a sense of cohesion. No matter where you go within the domain of the Goblin King, you might encounter a goblin war party.

Locations are the beating heart of the hex map. They’ll require some extended discussion, so I’ll do that below.

Spoors are hints. They’re footprints, eggs, nests, or a dropped note. They let you know that something exists nearby which you haven’t encountered. When you roll a spoor, you should flip a coin to determine whether it’s an encounter or a location, then roll on the appropriate table to find out what the spoor points to. Once you know that, you can tell the players what kind of spoor they find. Then it’s up to them to interpret it, and choose how to respond.

Rations means the players are tired and need to rest and eat. If they don’t, they’ll take whatever penalties tired and hungry characters suffer. (Personally, I call it a flat -1 to all rolls). This result can be dismissed if it comes up more than once in rapid succession, but having it attached to the encounter roll is a lot easier than tracking rations separately.  A+++++ highly recommended.

Lost means that the players are lost. The referee doesn’t tell them that they’re lost, but you roll 1d6 to determine which direction they start moving in. Of course, if they’ve got some means to avoid getting lost, consider this a “safe” roll. Means do avoid getting lost would be following a road or river, having a guide who knows the area. or even just having a compass.

I’d actually be interested in exploring the idea of getting lost in greater depth, since it’s fairly easy to avoid it. Maybe compasses should be a lot more expensive than they usually are? A high level luxury, perhaps. But that discussion is for a different post.

Safe means nothing happens. Sometimes you move from one hex to the next hex without anything exciting happening.

Alright, so, Locations. Locations are tied to individual hexes. When the encounter die rolls a location, you have to check to see what hex the players are in, and then what locations exist in that hex. If a hex map were a dungeon map, the locations would be the room descriptions. But unlike a dungeon, the “rooms” are so vast that there’s only a small chance of seeing the description each time you pass through a hex.

Locations can really be anything. Of course they can be actual locations, such as villages, dungeons, altars, statues, magic trees, whatever. But they can also be something more transient. They can be wandering wizards, recently summoned demons, or a big scary monster. These are things you might normally think of as encounters, but they’re unique, so you don’t want to put them on the encounter list, which is meant to be more general.

How many locations should a hex have? From experience I can confirm that it’s easy to underestimate just how large an undertaking stocking a hex map really is. There’s no need to create a table of locations for each hex. It’s not like players are going to spend a ton of time exploring a single hex and run through all your work. Hexes are made for passing through. After a session of hex crawling, you can just go back through and restock all the hexes where the players discovered locations with new locations. That keeps the work a lot more manageable.

If you want to be safe, you could push it and put two locations in each hex, but honestly I think it’s fine putting just one location in each. Though that’s not to say you should feel bound by whatever your standard is. If one of your hexes is special for some reason, put as many locations in that hex as you like. Overall, though, it’s best to keep the standard number of locations per hex as low as possible.

Finally, what other information should be included in a hex crawl? I’d probably throw an overview in the front with a brief description of the region, its history, and the forces that are at play there. Something to keep short and sweet, since most of the flavor should be communicated through hex content and encounters. This is also where I’d make note of any particularly important and well known locations, like a large city in Hex XXX. The sort of thing everyone the players meet would be aware of, and which the players themselves might be on their way to reach.

I’d also write about any notable environs, particularly if they span multiple hexes. If the cluster of 8 forest hexes in the south of the map is “The Forest of Doom,” where gremlins sneak about through a persistent chest-height pink mist, that’s something the referee should be warned of up-front so they know to mention it as soon as the PCs enter that hex, even if they don’t think to check the hex’s information.

That’s everything I can think of for now. I don’t know if this has been a useful document for anyone else, but I have to say the process of writing it has made me feel more confident about preparing and running hex crawls, which is something I’m in the middle of doing right now.

Next week will be the first in a 7 part series of posts where I stock a hex map. In point of fact, this post started its life as a footnote on the first entry of that series.

It got a little out of hand.

Stealth

If there’s one skill that almost every specialist trains, it’s stealth. Stealth is almost an obligation. If the party wants the specialist to climb or to search, and they say “sorry, I don’t have any points in that,” then the group will just move on to other possible solutions. If the party wants the specialist to stealth, and they don’t have any points in that, they’re probably going to have to endure some jokes about how useless they are.

Stealth is also one of those things that every referee seems to run just a little differently. There’s no consensus on what can and can’t be done with the skill. Players end up learning one way of doing things in one game, then, they carry those assumptions into other games where the skill is run differently. Because they’ve got these false assumptions, they ignore opportunities that other referees wouldn’t have allowed to them.

For my own sake, I thought it would be a valuable exercise to articulate exactly how I run Stealth. Hopefully, someone out there will find something they like about my methods. Or, maybe somebody with better methods will share them in the comments.

And no, I totally haven’t done this before. This is the first time. Don’t look through the archives, you won’t find it.

When Should Stealth Be Checked?

If there’s nothing that might detect the player, then there’s no reason for them to roll a check. Every game has that player who announces the success or failure of their stealth check anytime the party goes anywhere or does anything. It’s boring. I want to find out what referee has taught them this behavior, and punch that neckbeardy fuck in the face.

In most cases, a stealth check can be reactive. If the characters are walking around through city streets, exploring the wilderness, or crawling through a mostly empty dungeon, it can simply be understood that the stealthy character is trying to move with some degree of subtlety.

When something does appear that a character would want to be hidden from (i.e., an encounter), then the character can make a check. If they’re alone, it means the encounter simply doesn’t see anyone. Maybe they thought they heard or smelled or saw something, but now there isn’t anyone for them to find.

If the character is with the rest of their party, then a successful stealth check probably means that the encounter is so distracted by everyone else, that they don’t notice the stealthy character blending into the shadows.

In other, rarer circumstances, the environment may be full of people the stealther doesn’t want to be detected by. This might happen if they’re infiltrating an enemy fortress, or trying to move around in an active combat zone. In these cases, the stealth check should be made up front.

When Does Stealth Need To Be Renewed?

When a check succeeds, stealth lasts until it is disrupted. Characters do not need to make a new check just because it has been awhile since the last one, or because they’ve entered a new area.

Rarely, a disruption may cause stealth to be forcibly ended. In most cases, though, a disruption only requires that a new stealth check be made. If the new check fails, then the disruption caused them to be discovered. If it succeeds, then they managed to skillfully avoid being noticed.

There are three types of disruption which require a new check to be made:

  1. The stealthed character makes a non-obvious attack. This includes stuff like a silent ranged attack made from a reasonably good hiding spot, or any attack which successfully kills the target. You can’t notice where the attack came from if you’re dead.
  2. The stealthed character ends their movement in an observed location. Quickly dashing across a guarded hallway is easy. There’s no need to check stealth for that. Moving down the length of that same hallway, however, would be significantly more difficult.
    In other words, a stealthed character can easily pass through someone’s line of sight, so long as they start and end their movement in a reasonable hiding place. If they can’t, that will require a new check.
  3. The character performs any action which requires them to disrupt their environment, or act in a conspicuous manner. This includes most actions other than simply moving around. Stuff like picking locks, searching rooms, listening at doors, or even opening doors if there are people on the other side. Some judgement calls from the referee are needed here to determine what can easily be done with subtlety, and what would be likely to draw attention.

What is a “Reasonable Hiding Place?”

Anywhere that no one is specifically looking, or which provides some kind of cover or shadows to hide in. Standing right behind an NPC is a reasonable hiding place from that NPC.

When Does Stealth End?

Aside from a failed check, there is only one way* for a character to be forced out of stealth.

If they make an obvious attack against someone, and that person isn’t killed, then the jig is up. The stealthy character has been spotted, and cannot attempt to re-enter stealth unless they escape from combat, or succeed on a Vanish check. (I’ll discuss the Vanish check more below).

An obvious attack is any melee attack, or a ranged attack made from somewhere out in the open.

It hardly seems worth mentioning, but Stealth also ends when the character takes any obviously non-stealthy actions, such as openly conversing / traveling with their non-stealthy party.

*If the game includes guns, then using a non-silenced gun is also enough to end stealth, whether the target is killed or not.

What Does a Successful Stealth Check Mean?

Stealth is not about crouch-walking, or wearing black clothing. It’s a whole suite of skills. Sometimes it does rely upon acrobatics or camouflage. Other times, though, it’s as simple as walking around with enough confidence to convince people that you’re supposed to be there. If all else fails, maybe they’re just scooting around in a cardboard box.

What Does a Failed Stealth Check Mean?

You’ve been spotted, and you’ve probably gotta either fight, or run away. If the stealthy character was making a specific movement when their check failed, roll a d% to determine how far along they were when they were spotted.

That’s how I run things. But, as you can see, I’m also pretty liberal with what stealth can do. I like to balance that with potentially harsh consequences for failure.

I’m going to divert for a moment here to mention a different way of resolving a failed check, which works well when the stealth skill is more limited.

When the check fails in my friend Brendan‘s game, it doesn’t mean the stealther has been noticed. It just means that they, as an expert in stealth, can’t see any way to do what the player wanted to do without being noticed.

So if the player says “I want to stealth across this room,” then rolls a failed check, Brendan will say “If you move across the room, you will be spotted. Do you still want to do it?” In most cases the player says ‘no,’ and the party goes back to the drawing board.

That’s some tasty retention of player agency, right there.

What is the Vanish skill?

The Vanish skills is a completely separate skill from stealth, which I use in my games. Unlike the Stealth skill, which can be trained by any character, the Vanish skill is available only to specialists.

A successful check allows the character to become stealthed, even in situations where stealth would not be allowed.

So, if a specialist is surrounded by a dozen men pointing crossbows at them–when they definitely would not be allowed to make a stealth check–they can make a vanish check. On success, everyone will have lost track of them, and they can then move around as though they are stealthed, using the same conditions listed above for when stealth ends, or needs to be renewed. (Renewals are rolled using the stealth skill. Vanish is used only for the initial disappearance).

In addition to requiring a whole separate skill, using vanish is also more costly than using stealth, in an ‘action economy’ sense. A stealth check can be made for free, as part of whatever else the character is doing. A vanish check requires a full round of action, so the character can’t do anything else until the next turn.

As an aside, I also allow my players to purchase flash pellets, an encumbering item which grants a +1 to their vanish check.

Can a Group move with Stealth?

A character with investment in the stealth skill can “carry” others who don’t have any subtlety of their own. For each person they’re carrying, they take a -1 penalty to their check. So, if a character with a 6-in-6 stealth wants to, they can take 2 unskilled characters along with them, and make their check with a functional 4-in-6 chance of success.

If the characters who are being carried have some stealth ability themselves, then every 2 of them provide a penalty of -1 to the trained character’s check, rounded down. So if you’ve got one character with a 6-in-6 stealth, and three characters with a 2-in-6 stealth, then the better trained character can make their check at -1 to carry the other three along with them.