In my experience, NPCs are an underutilized element in most role playing games. They serve a few very limited, very one dimensional roles. That NPC is a quest giver, those NPCs are vendors, and this NPC is a villain. GMs tend either to treat NPCs as “their” characters (a bad idea), or as static game world elements which exist to serve the player. The king would never be found outside of his throne room unless it serves a specific purpose. And once an NPC’s immediate usefulness has ended, or the players have moved on to a new location, the NPC’s notes are filed away, or crumpled up and forgotten. This later method isn’t entirely bad, it’s just not as good as it can be. The basic premise of it is true: non-player characters exist for the sole purpose of serving the players in one way or another. The trick, though, is that the players shouldn’t realize the NPCs exist only to serve them. There are a number of ways to accomplish this which I may discuss at a later time, but for today I’d like to discuss Contacts and Foes.
One of my favorite GMing tricks is one which I admittedly stole out of the online comic Goblins by Tarol Hunt. When I’m first dealing with a group of new players, I like to start things out on the stereotypical side. Taverns, villages under attack, or any typical plot hook will do. Eventually this hook will lead the players to a tribe of typical level 1 monstrous humanoids, such as Kobolds, Goblins, Orcs, etc. Now I should point out that I always go out of my way to avoid having these creatures be responsible for anything evil, and I make sure to drop four or five hints that negotiation is an option. Most of the time, the players assume these creatures are evil, and attack. And in another GM’s game, this might be the right choice, but in my games the only creatures which are evil incarnate are creatures like demons or devils. In matter of fact, the creatures the players are attacking are usually neutral. The creatures defend their home, and then they die. I then point out to my players that they, not the monsters, were the aggressors in this situation. I don’t force any alignment change or anything like that, I simply let the players know that, in the future, they’ll want to pay more attention to the specifics of a situation. It’s a learning experience for them, and the hope is that they apply their learning to all aspects of the game. Players who pay attention are players who survive.
The game moves on without the players being aware of the secret penalty I’ve given them. A group of creatures escaped the destruction of their tribe, and have vowed revenge. After acquiring a few class levels, they’ll hunt the PCs down, and attack them at a later date.
If you think about it, players are making friends and enemies every day. Every person they kill is a person that other people card about. Every plan the players foil is a plan other people were invested in. Every treasure they recover is a treasure other people want. And it works the other way as well! Every person the players help is a potential ally in the future. That doesn’t mean that every creature the players encounter ought to show up at a later time, that would just be a clusterfuck of self referential bullshit. But if a character is interesting, or a quest is particularly engaging for the players, you can reintroduce those elements into your game in a completely different place an time.
Not only does this give your game world more coherence, but it enhances the player’s sense that they’re having an impact on the world. Just don’t make the mistake of expecting your players to remember your pet NPC. I recently made that mistake myself by assuming my players would remember a halfling scout named Tacha. When they first met her she had been a bandit, but after briefly joining the PCs’ party, she decided to settle down. When she had been in the game, they players had loved her, and talked about her for several days afterwords. But even that level of involvement in the character didn’t mean they remembered her when they encountered her as the captain of a city’s guard a few years later.
Way back in November I wrote a piece entitled “Stuff Which Never Works.” The post details three elements of adventure gaming which I personally have never seen work well: ammunition tracking, encumbrance, and chase scenes. I actually started with a much larger list of things which need to be improved, but I boiled it down to these three items because each of them strike me as something which ought to work. Running out of arrows in the middle of combat, being unable to carry every single piece of treasure out of a collapsing dungeon, fleeing for your life; these are all staples of the novels and films which inspire our adventuring spirit. I tried to offer suggestions for improving the way each of these issues could be handled in Pathfinder, but none of my suggestions were very thoroughly considered, and I haven’t implemented anything in my games. However, as I mentioned in my much more recent post “Making Travel More Engaging,” the benefits of encumbrance are too valuable to pass up when you’re running a hex crawl.
Before we start crafting a house rule, though, it’s always important to have a thorough understanding of how the official rules on the subject work. The excerpts from the book would be longer than I’d like to post here, but you can find the basic information starting on page 169 of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook under “Carrying Capacity.” The information is arranged somewhat awkwardly in the book, so you may want to use the Pathfinder SRD entry on Carrying Capacity instead. The essential breakdown of the rule is that you consult table 7-4 to determine what your character’s light, medium, and heavy loads are based on their strength. Characters of larger or smaller sizes must multiply or divide the listed weights to get their correct carrying capacities. Light loads can can be carried with no penalties, while medium and heavy loads each reduce a characters maximum dexterity and speed, as well as bestowing a skill check penalty. A character’s maximum load is the upper-range of of their listed “heavy load.” Twice the maximum weight can be lifted, but characters can only hobble around in 5ft steps. Up to five times a character’s maximum load can be pushed or dragged along even ground.
I think I can safely say that these rules are bad. I know I just finished saying that encumbrance is important, but it’s not that important. Figuring out whether their character is straining under the weight of their backpack is not why your players are sitting around your table. They’re sitting around your table because they want to go on adventures! They want to slay monsters and recover treasures and create fantastic, epic stories of heroism together! Nobody wants to spend time thumbing through the equipment chapter of the rulebook to find the weight of anything from a spyglass to a coil of rope. Anytime they got found a potion in a chest, or fired 10 arrows, they’d need to remember to recalculate their encumbrance. Not to mention consulting a chart every time their strength changes! With all of the abilities, potions, spells, and magic items that can alter a character’s strength, requiring the players to flip through the rulebook to find table 7-4 every time their strength changes is unacceptable.
I realize that the game intends for people to play encumbrance less than exactly. Nobody is expected to track every single potion’s weight as it is added to and removed from the inventory. And 90% of the time that a character’s strength changes, knowing how their carrying capacity changes won’t be relevant. But the way in which the system is designed, that kind of exhaustive tracking is the ideal. Pathfinder’s encumbrance system works best when it is handled by a computer, and that is unacceptable to me. No rule that complicated should be allowed to remain in a tabletop RPG. And that is why I’ve neglected encumbrance for so many years.
But as I’ve come to appreciate, encumbrance adds so much to a game. When the party is traveling, encumbrance affects their speed, which in turn changes how many days it can take to reach their destination. The need for the players to make decisions for how they will travel–decisions which affect how well they can travel–can be engaging. More importantly, anything the players need to leave behind is something they can come back for later. Returning to a dungeon to retrieve the piles of gold they were unable to carry can be an adventure in itself, requiring them to face unique challenges such as getting a large cart through the wilderness. In addition, it encourages the players to establish a base of operations. In all the time I’ve been GMing games, my players have never been really interested in buying a house in the city, or establishing a stronghold all their own, and it’s because they could carry as much as they wanted to on their backs. But if they can’t carry everything, they’re going to want to establish a place to keep everything. And once they have a fixed location, I can design adventures where those homes are attacked or burgled. And, perhaps best of all, enforcing an encumbrance system causes a bag of holding to actually mean something.
Assuming you’ve agreed with me up to this point, we’ve established that 1) an encumbrance system is valuable to the game, and 2) the current encumbrance system is unacceptably bad. So step three is obvious: we make a better encumbrance system and use that instead.
The Rule: Items are either Significant, or Insignificant, as determined by the GM. A character may carry any number of insignificant items without penalty. Significant items may be determined on the basis of either weight, or size, and most have a base encumbrance 1. Exceptionally heavy or unwieldy items may have an encumbrance of 2 or more. A character’s carrying capacity is based off of their strength score. An encumbrance equal to a character’s strength score is considered a light load, while a medium load would be twice that, and a heavy load would be three times that. Quadrapeds, such as horses, have double the standard encumbrance capacity. Lightly encumbered characters suffer no penalty. Characters with a medium encumbrance have their speed reduced by 1/4, and take a -3 penalty on all rolls relating to physical activity. Heavily encumbered characters have their speed reduced by 1/2, and take a -6 penalty on all rolls relating to physical activity.
That’s the entire rule. It can be easily memorized, and doesn’t require looking at any charts. No accommodations need to be made for larger or smaller characters, because those differences will likely already be accounted for by the character’s strength. And in cases where they are not, I see no reason to penalize a halfling for being strong, or reward an giant for being weak. All that remains to be done is to determine what is significant? The rule establishes that it is determined by the GM, but there needs to be a baseline suggestion.
The simple answer is that a significant item is any item which is heavy enough, or large enough, for the character to take notice of its addition to their equipment. If I’m wearing a backpack, and someone places a candle, or a pair of manacles, or a blanket in it, then I’m not likely to notice the addition of the weight. I might notice somebody fiddling with my backpack, but if they were sly about it, I might never know that my pack was technically heavier. And in some cases, an item might be noticeable not because it is heavy, but because it is large. A rapier, for example, is a good 4 feet long or more from pommel to point–even though it might be considered pretty light. Or, if you prefer, consider a fully inflated beach ball. It may weigh next to nothing, but there’s no way you’d miss its addition to your pack. If you need a more exact conversion, then use 5lb as a cutoff for insignificant items. That means that items such as a flask, grappling hook, hammer, or iron pot will be considered insignificant items. But items like a 10ft pole, tent, portable ram, or a 50ft coil of rope would be considered significant.
Now that we have a method to figure out what a significant item is, the question becomes: how heavy does a significant item need to be to count for more than 1 encumbrance? Obviously there needs to be an upward limit on which significant items only count for 1. Otherwise a character with a strength of 12 could carry around a dozen 2-ton golden statues without hitting medium encumbrance. Once again, this should be determined by the GM. As a baseline, something which would normally require both hands to hold (such as a suit of full plate) should be considered to count for 2 encumbrance. If, on top of being heavy, it is also large (such as an empty chest) it might count as 3 or 4 encumbrance. Again, if you would like a more exact conversion, use 30lb as the weight at which a significant item becomes worth 2 encumbrance. Going from there you could use 60lb for three encumbrance, 90lb for four encumbrance, etc.
There is one major flaw with this system to keep in mind: consumables. Food rations, torches, ammunition for bows and crossbows, and in particular money. Items like these are the kinds of things which players will carry an infinite amount of if they can. It doesn’t really matter all that much if your players decide they want to carry 40 cooking pots, but if you treat arrows as an insignificant item, then you may as well give the ranger a Quiver of Infinite Arrows at first level. To solve that problem, you can have vendors sell consumables in groups which amount to a single significant item. Some basic examples:
5 bags of caltrops / flasks of oil / torches (1 significant item)
250 coins of any denomination (1 significant item)
Keep in mind that this system is not meant to approximate reality. It is very possible for characters to end up carrying much more than they should be able to. But assuming you’re playing with rational adults, they’re not going to be trying to game the encumbrance system. The idea is not to make encumbrance accurate, it is to make encumbrance function in such a way that it serves its purpose with a minimum amount of negative impact on play. And that’s what I think this system does.
I would love feedback on this, though. Having never played with encumbrance myself, this is all just theory.
After purchasing the first book recently, I was prompted to re-read The Order of the Stick by Rich Berlew in its entirety. Odds are that if you’re reading this site, you’re at least somewhat familiar with the comic. If you’re not, go ahead and leave. Just click over to the giantitp.com and start at the beginning. Reading Order of the Stick is a far better use of your time than reading my half-assed ramblings is. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you’re done.
The story of one of the comic’s characters, a Paladin named Miko, got me thinking about how game masters should handle the unique challenges presented by a paladin character. I had already written a piece a few months back concerning how I believe a paladin should be played, but I realized that the way the GM treated the paladin mattered at least as much as how the player played their character. That prompted this past Monday’s post on how to provide ethics based challenges to a paladin. So now I’ve covered both how players should enact a paladin’s morality, and how GM’s should challenge a paladin’s morality, but I still haven’t covered the element which makes a paladin’s morality worth talking about in the first place: the code of conduct itself. The paladin’s oath which, when broken, causes the paladin to fall. (Which is precisely the event which makes Miko’s story so compelling.)
The oath is the central element of a paladin’s morality, which makes a thorough understanding of it essential to the task of testing a paladin’s morality. I’ve also got a few ideas on how to make the oath a bit more interactive and engaging. But before we explore those ideas, I think it’s essential to define unequivocally what the Paladin’s oath actually is. Because I don’t think we’re all on the same page here; that page being number 63 in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. It reads:
A paladin must be of lawful good alignment and loses all class features except proficiencies if she ever willingly commits an evil act.
Additionally, a paladin’s code requires that she respect legitimate authority, act with honor (not lying, not cheating, not using poison, and so forth), help those in need (provided they do not use the help for evil or chaotic ends), and punish those who harm or threaten innocents.
Associates: While she may adventure with good or neutral allies, a paladin avoids working with evil characters or with anyone who consistently offends her moral code. Under exceptional circumstances, a paladin can ally with evil associates, but only to defeat what she believes to be a greater evil. A paladin should seek an atonement spell periodically during such an unusual alliance, and should end the alliance immediately should she feel it is doing more harm than good. A paladin may accept only henchmen, followers, or cohorts who are lawful good.
That is the extent of what the book states explicitly about the Paladin’s oath. (If I’m missing anything, please let me know.) Oftentimes the meaning of these relatively simple sentences can be a source of great contention, so lets examine them more closely before moving on. Note the wording of the sentence which makes reference to a paladin falling (there’s only one):
A paladin must be of lawful good alignment and loses all class features except proficiencies if she ever willingly commits an evil act.
It doesn’t say “A paladin loses all class features if she ever willingly commits an unlawful act.” Nor does it say anything about a paladin losing their powers for breaking their oath. Using a strict interpretation of the rules as written in the book, most of a paladin’s code of conduct is fluff. There is no mechanical penalty for using poison, or lying. Doing so would not be very paladin-like, but the rules don’t state that such actions should be punished. It seems unlikely that this is unintentional, since the Pathfinder entry is identical to the entry in the 3rd edition rulebooks. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to clarify things if this was not the intended reading.
Continuing on the assumption that we’re abiding by a strict understanding of the rules, what constitutes an evil act? Page 166 of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook states:
Evil implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.
Hurting, oppressing, and killing others. That’s what evil is. Those types of actions are, according to a strict interpretation of the rules, the only actions which should cause a paladin to fall. And unless you’ve had some conversation with your player about an extended list of fall-worthy actions, then you should abide by a strict interpretation of the rules. For the sake of clarity.
Clarity is one of the most important skills for a GM to have. It is the ability to communicate with your players effectively. To communicate in a manner which gives your players a solid understanding of what the consequences of their actions will be. Clarity is always an important skill to practice, but this is doubly true when the question of whether a paladin falls comes into play. If your player does not feel they were given a fair chance to avoid losing all of their class skills, they will be justifiably upset. If you’re in doubt about whether or not you’ve been clear, there’s nothing wrong with simply letting your player know explicitly.
“Do you realize that if you kill the city’s lord, and he is not in fact evil, your paladin will fall?”
Now, having discussed clarity, lets return to the oath itself. As discussed above, the rules state explicitly only that evil actions can cause a paladin to fall. But the rules also describe a number of other actions which a paladin “cannot” perform—though it describes no specific punishment for performing them. There’s no reason these can’t be included on the list of fall-worthy actions, so long as the player is made aware of it. In fact, there’s no reason any number of actions can’t be included in a paladin’s oath. Which leads me to wonder: what if a player could select from a number of different oaths, each with their own specific requirements, and benefits.
Dungeons & Dragons played around with this in the 3rd edition “Book of Exalted Deeds.” That book included a number of “Sacred Vow” feats. The idea was that your character took some manner of ascetic vow—such as a vow of abstinence—and so long as the vow was kept, the character received a mechanical benefit related to that vow—such as a +2 to resist charm effects. The vows were not specifically for paladins, but they functioned in a similar manner to the paladin’s oath. I always thought it was a great idea, save for the fact that it falls prey to my problem with feats.
So what if the paladin’s oath was extensible in a similar manner? At first level, a paladin could choose to add a vow of abstinence to their oath. So long as they kept that vow, they would receive some type of benefit. It could be a +2 to resist charm effects, but it need not be mechanical. There are already a lot of mechanics involved in each of the Pathfinder classes, and none of them needs to be made more complicated they already are. Instead, a paladin who takes a vow of abstinence could gain access to the services of certain monasteries scattered throughout the game world. And, of course, if this vow is broken, the paladin would fall. So the Paladin can exchange greater restriction on their actions, for greater power.
It’s an idea I find intriguing. What are your thoughts?
My paladin had taken a vow of celibacy. Not the feat from the “Book of Exalted Deeds,” mind you. It was simply something my character had done in-character, with no mechanical benefit. The villain in this particular campaign was an enchantress. It was a lame self-insert character by our GM, but the group tried to put up with it. In our last session I got separated from the rest of the party while we were hunting the enchantress. She jumped out at me, and cast Dominate Person. Once I failed my saving throw, and was under her power, she tried to seduce me. I told the GM that, since this was against my nature as a celibate man, I ought to get a new saving throw at a +2 bonus to resist. Do you know what she said to me?
“Deep down, all men just want to have sex with women, no matter what they say.”
She denied me the right to a new saving throw, and went on to describe my character and her’s having sex. Once she was done, she said that since I had broken my vow of celibacy, I lost all of my paladin powers.
So how can I get back at her for this?
-Paraphrased from a tale told by one of the Anon’s on /tg/.
Every gamer knows the rules. A paladin swears an oath. That oath demands that they do good, and fight evil. Any paladin who willfully breaks their oath will be forsaken by the gods who grant them their holy might. Their powers will be stripped from them, and they will go from being one of the most powerful melee combat classes, to being a fighter without any bonus feats. This fall from grace leaves the Paladin next to useless; worse than that: it represents a fundamental failure of the paladin to uphold the ideals to which they’ve committed their lives. It’s the kind of life-shattering failure which might actually make a person consider becoming a blackguard.
Playing a paladin means holding your character to a higher moral standard. Those who play the class take on an additional challenge for themselves. Not only must they survive the dungeon, save the captives, defeat the villains, and recover the treasure; they must do it all without compromising an ironclad code of ethics. I’ve written in the past about how I believe a Paladin should be played. In my next two posts, I’d like to discuss how I believe a game master should handle a paladin character. Because, after all, what is the purpose of a GM if not to challenge his or her players?
It’s always dangerous to generalize, but I think it’s safe to say that most players who play paladins want to feel noble. They want to feel as though they are the righteous fist of their god, meting out justice one moment, and mercy the next. In other words, people who play paladins want to feel like they’re playing a paladin. And as GMs, it’s our duty to facilitate an environment where they can feel that way. But we can’t simply hand it to them, any more than we can hand out free experience or treasure. We can try to, but when we hand rewards to our players for free, all we accomplish is diminishing the value those rewards have in our players’ eyes. If being an upright defender of all that is good and true is never difficult, then how can it be interesting?
But there is a danger in constructing this manner of challenge. Far too many GMs approach it as a question of how they can make a paladin fall, rather than asking how they can challenge their player. The example at the start of this post is obviously an extreme case. That GM is not only a bad at running a game, but is a pretty awful person to boot. It’s not an isolated case, though. If you’ve spent any time on gaming forums I imagine you know what I’m talking about. Complaints of game masters who force a paladin character to fall are disturbingly common. Sometimes spells such as Dominate Person are involved. Other times, the paladin is put into a situation where they’re forced to commit an evil act by circumstance. Still other times, a paladin falls for doing something the player didn’t even realize they could fall for—something a strict interpretation of the rules would not indicate they should fall for. Regardless of the exact method involved, all of these cases have the same root cause: a really terrible game master.
So the question becomes, “How do we challenge a paladin’s morals, without crossing the line into shitty game mastering?” And for that, I’ve come up with four possibilities.
Make evil the most obvious option. For any given problem, there are numerous solutions. But there will always be on solution which is most obvious. Someone without imagination might not even be able to think of another solution—but a paladin does not have the luxury of lacking an imagination. When the mind-controlled peasants have the players cornered, the rest of the party may give up and choose to kill the poor dominated folk. But the paladin must stand firm, and notice that the wall is weak enough to smash through, or that the second floor balcony is within jumping distance, or that the gem hanging from the chandelier is glowing the same color as the villager’s eyes.
Make evil the easiest option. Even when non-evil options are apparent, they may not always be easy. When the chaotic neutral bandits surrender, it would be easy to simply slay them, or to bind them and let the wolves have them. But a paladin cannot injure a foe who has yielded, not even indirectly. The paladin must make some manner of accommodation, whether it be taking them all the way back to the last town to face judgment, or placing a Mark of Justice spell on them.
Make evil the recommended option. Most often, the options available to a group of characters are implicit. The GM describes a room filled with monsters, and the players figure out for themselves what their options are. Sometimes, though, the players receive directions from NPCs, or even seek out NPCs to give them advice. If this advice requires an evil act, then it’s up to the paladin either to figure out alternatives on their own, or to find another source of advice. For example, if the destruction of an evil artifact requires it to be submerged in the blood of babies, a paladin might choose to instead seal the artifact away, or to seek another sage who knows an alternative method for destroying the item.
Make evil a Justifiable option. A paladin who is lax in their pursuit of justice may be led astray by small evil deeds with appear to serve the cause of righteousness. If a blackguard infiltrates the party disguised as a paladin, the villain may be able to convince the paladin to commit larger and larger evil deeds, all in the name of the greater good. The trickery is in convincing the paladin that the evil deeds are justifiable, rather than in convincing the paladin that the evil deeds are good.
Of course, there is one final element which is important to keep in mind when GMing: never, under any circumstances, try to force your players to take a certain kind of action. No matter how cool you think it would be. No matter how important it is to your ‘story,’ it is never acceptable for a GM to attempt to force a choice. We control the entire world. The demons and the devils, the celestials and the very gods themselves bend to our whim. The only thing the players control is the choices their own characters make. If you really want to make those choices yourself, then maybe you should be writing fiction, rather than running a game.
On Wednesday I’ll write in greater detail about what a paladin’s oath entails. Let me know in the comments if you can think of any more more good ways to test a paladin’s moral convictions.
In Monday’s post on making overland travel more engaging, I discussed how a hex crawl might work in practice. As I noted, the whole concept seems rather dull until you add two elements: survival, and random encounters. I was only able to touch on these concepts briefly in that post, so now I’d like to delve more deeply into the idea of random encounters on a hex map, and how they can work within the context of Pathfinder. I’ll try not to simply repeat Trollsmyth on this issue, since he also covered it in Hex Mapping 17: You’re Everything that a Big Bad Wolf Could Want. Though, while I’m on the subject: if you’ve read my posts and you’re becoming interested in hex maps, read Trollsmyth’s entire series on them. He recently posted part 20, and each post has been thought provoking and informative.
So we’re all at least somewhat familiar with encounter tables, right? They’re not as common as they once were, but sourcebooks are still full of charts to be rolled on, and we’ve all played video game RPGs where walking will suddenly result in a blast of noise and a transition to a battle screen. You’ve probably even had a GM at some point who said they needed to ‘check for random encounters,’ followed by some behind-the-screen dice clattering. But like Vaarsuvius says, these are boring. And it’s true. When the GM “fades to black” anytime the party travels anywhere, random encounters are boring. It’s like being a cardboard duck in a shooting gallery: you’re moving, and you might get hit by something, but you don’t really have much say in it either way. Random encounters only work when the player is in control of their own movement, which in the wilderness, means that random encounters only work when there’s a hex crawl.
Self determination (i.e. PLAYER AGENCY) is not all which is required for a random encounter to be compelling. Before leaping into the construction of an encounter table we need to get two misconceptions out of the way. First, it’s essential to realize that random encounters are not random. There is an element of random determination involved, but whoever creates the encounter table controls the probabilities of each encounter type. Not only that: they control what types of encounters are even possible. It’s not as though you’re obligated to pull monsters from the bestiary without rhyme or reason once you decide to build an encounter table. That would be ridiculous. You populate your encounter table with encounters which make sense. If orcs and trolls are fighting for control of the forest, then the encounter table for the forest will be variations on that theme. There can be troll hunters, orc worg riders, 1d4 trolls on patrol, a battle between orcs and trolls, a wounded orc separated from his fellows, the list goes on. Who knows? Maybe the half-assed “trolls vs. orcs” story will pique your player’s interests. Maybe they’ll take it upon themselves to settle the forest feud.
That’s what you want. Trust me: no matter how brilliant you think your game’s overarching plot is, you will never have more fun as a game master than you will when your players start making up their own quests.
The second misconception about random encounters is that all encounters are combat. Apparently the only reason we’re rolling at all is to determine what type of monsters are encountered, and how many of them there are. If possible this idea is even more ludicrous than the first one. There’s so much to encounter in the wilderness! Abandoned buildings, the bones of a long dead adventurer, a lost child, an undelivered letter, a magical fountain the list could go on. Adventure and exploration have a lot more to offer than hostile creatures in need of a good skewering.
The first step in creating an encounter table is to determine what area it covers. Presumably you’ve already got your hex map, so unless your game world is a homogenous lump, you can look at it and see plains, forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, and so forth. Within each of these biomes, a countless number of interesting encounters are potentially hiding, and the manner of those encounters will likely be completely different in one part of the world than they will be in another. While traversing the planes of Gibbledy-Gop, your players might encounter mighty centaurs, but while in the forest of Creepyscaryeek they’re more likely to encounter orcs. And, if your players go south of the river Fishnstuff in the forest of Creepyscaryeek, then they’ll encounter ogres instead, since the orcs are afraid to cross the river. It’s up to you, as GM, to determine how large an area your encounter table will be used for. If you’re working on creating a fully developed world, you may even want to create a second map with color-coded outlines of areas, based on which encounter table that area uses. If you wanted to get fancy, you could even have some areas which were under the effects of two separate encounter tables.
Once you’ve marked your encounter table’s “Area of Influence,” you need to determine what’s going on there. This will inform your decisions later on when it comes time to populate the encounter table. Above I gave an example of a forest where trolls and orcs fighting one another, and that’s as good a place to start as any. But it needs more detail. Let’s say that there’s a number of elven ruins from an ancient forgotten civilization which the two groups are fighting over. Given that trolls are much stronger than orcs, there’s likely going to be many more of the latter than of the former, or else the trolls would have won the ware a long time ago. And, just for kicks, lets say that the orc leader made a deal with a high-ish level wizard who is now supplying the orcs with some basic magical equipment.
At this point we have enough information to start sketching out what the encounter table will look like. There are a number of ways you can set up the chart, using any number of different dice, but I like to keep things simple: 1d20 to determine the type of encounter, and then another 1d20 do determine the specific encounter. This provides enough options that it’s pretty unlikely the players will exhaust all of them within a few hours of gameplay, but so many that it becomes unwieldy to deal with. Of course if you’re working with larger or smaller areas–or longer or shorter amounts of time the players will spend in those areas–it may be prudent to use a more or less complicated chart. If you really wanted, you could roll 1d100 to determine which of 100 charts (each with 100 options of their own) you would roll on. Or you could just roll1d4 to determine which of four different encounter types your players will face. It’s entirely up to you and what you need, but the “1d20 twice” approach provides a nice healthy average, so that’s what I’ll use here.
The first d20 roll, as I mentioned above, will determine the type of encounter, or whether there is an encounter at all. It’s important to make sure that there’s a relatively good chance of the players not encountering anything. Otherwise the hex crawl will slow to…well…a crawl. The players are on an adventure, yes, but they likely also have a goal in mind. Excessive distraction from that goal will annoy them. I like to have about a 50% chance of nothing happening. The nice thing about the d20 is that each number on the die has a 5% chance of being rolled, so if we want to create a 50% chance of nothing happening, we assign the numbers 1 through 10 to “nothing.” And that range can be altered to increase or decrease the probability somewhat, but I would advise not straying too far from the 50% median. Too many random encounters can become frustrating, and a serious drain on the party’s resources. Likewise, too few random encounters makes the hex crawl boring.
50% of the die is left to assign, so lets do combat encounters next. Since the forest is a Trolls Vs. Orcs warzone, combat encounters should be relatively common. 25% seems like a good probability, so we’ll assign numbers 11 through 15 on the d20 to “combat.” Unlike “nothing,” other types of encounters can vary as wildly as you like. The peaceful plains near civilization may only have a 5 or 10% chance of combat encounters, while a party venturing deep into the territory of an evil empire may face a 30 or 40% combat rate.
With 50% assigned to “nothing,” and 25% assigned to “combat,” that leaves only five numbers left to assign, and there are a plethora of things we could put there. Interesting locations, traps, side quests, treasure, dungeon entrances, as with many things in tabletop RPGs, the limit is your imagination. For this encounter table, I think 16-17 (10%) will be Interesting Locations, 18-19 (10%) will be Special, and 20 (5%) will be Side Quests. And there we go, the first roll on the encounter table is taken care of. Rolling 1d20 will either result in “nothing,” or in one of four different types of interesting encounters. But the type of encounter is only half of the equation. Now we need to populate the second half of the encounter table, where we’ll determine specifics.
Combat: The combat chart should include a variety of different combat encounters. The obvious two are a band of orcs, and a band of trolls, but we can be more creative than that. And, more importantly, since combat encounters have a 25% chance of occurring, we need to be more creative than that. Since players are likely to encounter combat a number of times, we should have maybe 15-20 different possibilities on this table. They can include any number of things. The players could stumble onto a battle already in progress between orcs and trolls, which they could decide to participate in or not. They might encounter orcs riding worgs, or trolls carrying orc prisoners. Normal forest danger, like dire bears,can be on the list as well. Though your players will probably have more fun with the encounters that have a story behind them.
Interesting Locations: We’ve already mentioned that the orcs and the trolls are fighting over some ancient elven ruins, so those should be on this list. If you were so inclined, you could even include a number of different types of elven ruins: homes, government buildings, etc. Perhaps one might hide a dungeon entrance. Other types of interesting locations could include an orc village, a troll village, a reclusive wizard’s tower, an illusory copse of trees that one of the players accidentally walks through, or even just a meadow where the players can refill their water rations.
Special: Special is where you can put all the oddball stuff which doesn’t fit in your other categories. You might include a wounded orc warrior who was left behind by his comrades, or a fellow adventurer who got separated from their party and is now lost. If you are so inclined, you might even give your players a chance to find a treasure chest filled with gold which has been covered with dirt and leaves, or a powerful magic item dropped by some long past adventurer. Finding random treasure should probably be pretty uncommon though, and you may want to require a perception check to notice it.
Side Quests: You may not want to include side quests, but I think you should. First, the main questline is never quite as engaging to the players as we GMs would like to think it is. Providing them with occasional hooks to go off in a different direction lets them know they have alternatives. More importantly, showing that the world has a variety of tasks for them to handle, not all of which are related, helps encourage the players to think of your world as a living, diverse environment. Possible side quests include finding the entrance to a dungeon, finding a dead messenger with an important letter for a nearby king, or finding a village which needs the party’s assistance. And if you’d really like the players to continue on with the main quest before handling the side quest, you can always give them a time limit. E.g. “The world will blow up in 5 days and the dungeon where you can stop it from happening is 4 days away.”
A few final notes on using an encounter table:
How often? Once you’ve got the chart made, determine how often you’re going to roll on it. You could roll once per hex, once per hour spent within the hex, once per day, whatever you want. Personally, I roll each time the party enters a hex, and roll once more during the night when the party is at rest (ignoring any results which are not capable of self-mobility, such as an ancient ruin.)
A Gazebo Appears! Encounters should not simply “appear,” as though you’re playing a console RPG from the 90s. Take a moment to figure out how the players encounter whatever it is that you rolled. If it’s a location, do they see it in a valley as they reach the crest of a hill? Can they see it from a distance, or is it obscured by the treeline until they move closer? If it’s a monster, who sees who first? Perhaps you could figure out a simple third roll to determine whether or not the party is surprised. Trollsmyth has an excellent method for determining what a monster is doing when it’s encountered in the same hex mapping post I linked above.
Wow, this forest sure has a lot of wizards… Some things ought to be taken off the encounter table once they’ve been encountered once. For example, if your players have already encountered one reclusive wizard’s tower in the forest, you may not want them to find another. In these cases, re-rolling is fine. However, you might also consider that encountering something twice could lead to an interesting story that you never intended. For example, perhaps the wizard’s tower exists in several locations at once, or teleports around the forest at random, or maybe there are two wizards here who don’t like one another very much. All those options could end up being way more fun than simply re-rolling.
As of late, I’ve been pondering how I can make travel more interesting for my players. It’s something I’ve always struggled with in my career as a Game Master. Sometimes I’ve tried just fading to black between points of interest, but that’s no good. If the players don’t somehow experience the travel, then there’s no tangible metric for how distant various locations are. And even if that’s not a problem for you (which it should be), it also deprives players of the opportunity to experience the game world outside of towns and plot events. Imagery of adventurers traveling together through a forest or desert fuels our imaginations, we can’t simply gloss over that part of an adventure because it’s difficult to present in an engaging manner! We can, of course, try to give the illusion distance by determining that a certain journey will require X days to complete, but even if you try to spice that up with random encounters, the players will get bored. After an unfortunate extended hiatus, my group is finally going to be able to get back together for a new adventure soon. The one I’m preparing will have a great deal of traveling in it, which has brought this problem to the forefront of my attention.
Of course, utilizing a hex map helps solve many of these problems, which I’ve talked about before. Making the players responsible for choosing each 6-mile step of their journey helps engage them in travel, because progress towards their destination won’t continue without their input. Giving them these choices also increases their player agency, which will always increase their engagement. And, as an added bonus, once you start asking your players to make choices, they’ll start making choices on their own. Before you know it, your players will be directing the course of their own adventure, and that’s when you know that you’re a good game master.
But how does it work?
I mean, when the whole group is actually sitting around the table, and you’ve got your filled-in hex map behind the GM screen, what happens next? How precisely do the players interact with the hex map. How do they know where to go? Does a single player just point to one hex after another until the end of the day? How are you going to describe each hex when the players enter it? These are questions which need to be considered, lest we be caught with our pants down at the table. We’re the GM after all, we need to give the appearance that we’re prepared for anything the players throw at us.
Step one is figuring out how the players are going to keep track of the map as they uncover it. Of course, I have a filled-in hex map which I’ll keep behind the screen, but there’s no reasonable way for me to show it to them without revealing information they have not yet earned. My map, after all, has notes on it indicating the locations of dungeons, treasure, and towns. So the players need a assign one of their number the duties of mapmaker, and that player will need a blank map which they can fill in as they play. A quick google search for “print hex graph” turned up a site which creates hexagonal graph paper for you. I printed off 25 or 30 sheets myself, just to keep on hand. I also have a very nice hexagonal battle mat which was given to me as a Christmas gift by a friend. It’s wet-erase, so I can actually have a nice visual “world environment” for my players as they explore. The only drawback is that the mat needs to be erased at the end of each session, so the players will need to keep a map as well.
As with most party decisions in RPGs, reasonable adults won’t need any GM guidance with respect to making a group decision. In my experience, a party leader most often emerges naturally, and when it doesn’t, players don’t have trouble coming to a consensus on issues like “which direction do we walk.” If getting the party to agree on things like this is a problem for your group, then your problems are outside the scope of this post. Likely outside the scope of anything I will ever write about, because I’m not from the “here’s how to handle your friends…” school of GM advice.
With that out of the way, the second step becomes determining the best way for players to interact with the hex crawl. What is the conversation that takes place between the players and the GM as they move from hex to hex on the way to their destination. For my purposes, in the upcoming game I’ll be running, the players will receive some very basic instructions. The first leg of their journey will first require them to travel in a certain direction until they reach a river, then they’ll need to follow that river until they reach a village. Pretty straightforward. Straightforward enough that it might end up being boring, but I’ll get to that later.
As the players begin to prepare for their journey, the GM should figure out what the slowest party member’s movement speed is. This will be the movement speed for the entire party, unless the faster party members are willing to leave someone behind. If the players are on foot, the slowest will likely be whatever character is a dwarf or halfling. If the players have mounts (which suddenly become a lot more appealing once you’re hex crawling) their speed will significantly increase. Remember also to consider whether the characters are encumbered or not. If you’re like me, you’ve probably never used encumbrance rules before. However, if we’re trying to make travel engaging, then using encumbrance rules gives the players something they’ll need to pay attention to lest their pace be slowed, and that’s too valuable to pass up. If Pathfinder’s encumbrance rules are too complicated for you, I did a mock up of an alternative a few months back which may be more to your liking. I haven’t got around to putting any spit or polish on it, though.
For simplicity’s sake (and also because this is likely what I’ll have in my game) lets say that the party is made up entirely of unencumbered humans, which have a movement speed of 30. According to Pathfinder’s movement rules (found in the Core Rulebook, on pages 170 through 172), this gives the party a daily movement speed of 24 miles. Now, if you like, you can simply say that since each hex is 6 miles, and 24 divided by 6 is 4, that means that a party may travel 4 hexes in a day–and that’s fine. However it fails to take into account that some terrain is more difficult to travel through than others. Fellow blogger Brendan recently wrote a post entitled “Wilderness Movement Costs,” (which itself was based on a post by Delta). In it, he outlines a basic system for tracking a party’s hex crawling movements which I’ve decided to rip off and adapt for Pathfinder/my own purposes.
Movement Points: Convert the number of miles the party may travel in a day into “points.” So, it the party can travel 24 miles in a day, they have 24 “movement points.” This may seem like a ridiculous extra step. However, its function is that it turns the party’s movement budget into an abstraction, rather than a literal unit of distance. This will help players understand the less-than-literal possible uses for movement points.The party can spend movement points on couple different things:
Travel: Travel is the most obvious function. (That is, after all, kinda the whole purpose of this post). The table below shows the cost in movement points for each of the four terrain difficulties. Since the players won’t know if the next hex will put them over their movement cost, it’s up to the GM to warn them when they’re about to do it, and let them know that continuing forward would constitute a forced march, meaning the players would not be able to move as much the following day. Note that traveling on roads actually allows the party to move at a faster speed than the standard rules would allow. This way, roads have an actual in-game purpose much closer to their real life one.
Terrain
Examples
Movement Cost
Becoming Lost
Easy
road
4
No Check
Average
clear, city, grasslands, trail*
6
Survival DC: 10
Moderate
forest, hills, desert, badlands
8
Survival DC: 15
Difficult
mountains, jungle, swamp
12
Survival DC: 20
*There is no Survival check required to avoid becoming lost when following a well marked trail.
The movement cost happens to be evenly divisible for our band of unencumbered humans, though it may not be for all parties. If a party has some movement points left at the end of the day, but not enough to enter the next hex, give them some extra time to spend on other activities. Remember that in Pathfinder, a “traveling day” is 8 hours. So if you divide their total allotment of daily movement points by 8, you can determine how many movement points are spent during each hour of travel. From there you can easily figure out how much time they gain. For example, if you divide the human’s daily allotment of movement points, 24, by 8, you get 3. That’s 3 miles every hour. So if they have 3 movement points remaining, they have an extra hour to spend on tasks such as crafting, foraging for food, or researching spells.
Searching: A six mile hex is huge. A character could spend a week or more in the same hex without discovering everything there is to learn there. Every time they enter a hex, they see only a tiny fraction of what the hex has to offer. By spending one half of the movement points required to enter the hex, they can explore a roughly equivalent fraction of the hex. For example, a character entering a forest hex spends 8 movement points to make a beeline through the hex. If the party would also like to spend 4 more movement points in the hex (for a total of 12) then they can explore a little bit on their way through. They certainly won’t see everything, but they’ll earn themselves a second roll on the encounter table. Maybe they’ll find nothing, maybe they’ll encounter monsters, or maybe they’ll find something worth searching for. See below for more information on encounters.
That covers how the party’s movement through a hex crawl is handled, but how is it entertaining? At this point all we have is a mini game where the players point to a hex, and the GM tells them whether or not they have enough movement left, or whether they need to bed down for the evening. This is a structure, but without putting some meat on that structure, the whole thing ends up being completely monotonous, and players will leave. That’s where the final two elements of engaging travel come into play: survival, and encounters.
Surviving in the wilderness won’t be easy. First off, each party will need to rely on the survival check of one of its members. Each time a hex is entered, that player must make a survival check to avoid getting lost. If the character fails their survival check, then when the party attempts to move on to the next hex, the DM should roll 1d6 to determine which hex the party actually travels to. A roll of one means the party travels to the hex they intended to travel to (though they are still lost). Rolling a 2 indicates that the party travels to the hex one-space clockwise of their intended hex, rolling a 3 indicates they travel to the hex 2 spaces clockwise, etc. The party remains lost until their guide can succeed on a survival check upon entering a new hex. Items such as a compass or a map can help characters improve their survival checks to avoid getting lost. Once a character is an experienced enough traveler, their survival skill will likely rise high enough that becoming lost is no longer an issue.
Players will also need to monitor their rations in order to survive in the wilderness. If you’ve never forced players to keep track of their food supply before, now’s the time to start. Once the players run out of food 4 days into a 10 day journey, you’ll find they’re much more engaged in figuring out how to reach their destination before they die of starvation. Foraging and hunting are always options, but what if they can’t find anything? Will they eat their mounts? Will they eat…each other? That’s the fun! And don’t forget the elements. If the character’s journey takes place during the colder months, they may regret not spending the encumbrance points on those extra blankets when it begins to snow, and they start to freeze to death.
Lastly, there’s encounters. There are all types of encounters your players can have, which you can roll on a random chart. I won’t take the time to come up with a chart here, but I would say the chart should probably be about fifty percent “nothing,” which will allow the players to avoid getting bogged down in every single hex. The other half of the chart should be some combination of combat encounters, and ‘other.’ Other types of encounters can include walking in on a druidic ritual, finding the entrance to a random dungeon, coming upon a village of friendly or neutral wilderness dwellers, discovering a magic well, or any number of things you can come up with on your own. And for those times when combat encounters are rolled, there’s no need for them to be as boring as the standard “monsters appear” nonsense. Whose to say whether the monsters notice the players or not–or whether it’s a few monsters, or an entire village of them! Trollsmyth once posted an excellent chart which GMs could use to determine what monsters were doing when they were encountered. And don’t forget my Spicing Up the Battlemat series of posts to help make these combat encounters more interesting! (I really ought to do another of those. The last one was in December!)
As I’ve said a million times, keeping your players engaged is the number one duty of a game master. And whether want it to or not, travel is likely going to make up a large part of your game. You can either ignore it, or you can try to use it as another opportunity to challenge and entertain your players. After writing this post, I for one feel a lot more confident about running travel for my players in our upcoming game.
I have a pretty odd hobby for a person my age. During the summer months, I spend every weekend in my car, driving through residential neighborhoods, looking for garage sale signs. I’ve always found Garage Sales to be somewhat romantic. There’s not much technique to searching for them, you just wander about, taking turns at random, following your gut and the signs which may or may not lead you to something you’re looking for. You catch a glimpse of sheet-garbed card tables down the road, and you pull in to take a look. You scan the tables, mentally screening out all of the junk to look for a treasure. You don’t really know what form the treasure will take. Maybe it’s an old book, or an NES cartridge, or a piece of kitchenware you’ve been lacking, or a pile of empty binders in good condition. Then there’s the barter. We have so few opportunities to barter in American culture. It’s something of a lost skill among our people.
This past summer I found a number of remarkable things. Useful things, like a bed frame, and a bike; items which could have easily cost me ten times more had I bought them new. Other finds weren’t so much useful as they were amusing. This latter type is how I classify the 4-disc DVD set of the 1983 Dungeons and Dragons cartoon ostensibly co-produced by Gary Gygax himself. At the time I was only really familiar with the show from screen captures posted on /tg/. Friends who grew up in the early 80s had told me they remembered it fondly, but everyone seemed to agree that the show was pretty bad. $2 to satisfy my curiosity seemed like a good deal.
I wasn’t exactly eager to dive into this show, particularly not after watching the first few episodes. But after 7 months, I’ve finally seen each of the show’s 27 episodes. And let me just say this: nothing gives me more hope that I can succeed as a writer than knowing someone actually got paid for writing this drek. Where can I even begin in picking it apart? The dialog is so stilted and canned that innocuous conversations sent me into laughing fits. Sometimes it seemed as though characters are simply reciting cliches to one another, since the lines they were reading didn’t form any substantive back-and-forth. And while a lack of proper continuity might be expected from a children’s show in the 80s, it was none the less painful to experience.When there’s an entire episode about the characters unleashing a cataclysmic force of evil, I expect more follow-through than “it got bored and left.”
And that doesn’t even take into account how legitimately offensive the show is. There’s only one non-white character, a black girl named Diana. When the Dungeon Master assigns all of the kids their classes in the show’s opening, he makes her the acrobat, and as we learn later in the show, she’s a world-class athlete. But that’s not even what really bothers me. Making the black character an athlete is a little stereotyped perhaps, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s overtly racist–even if Acrobat seems to have been specifically created as a class just for her character. What is overtly racist is what she’s wearing. Lets get this straight. All the characters show up in this world wearing adventuring gear. The ranger gets a green jerkin, the cavalier gets armor, the wizard gets a robe, the thief gets an admittedly sexualized skirt-and-leggings getup…and the black chick gets a fur bikini? Am I the only one seeing this? I get that this was the 80s, but I have a hard time believing nobody was upset about this. I suppose we can at least be thankful that she’s not a sexist caricature of a teenaged girl like Sheila, the only other female character in the show.
Honestly, the show is so bad that I’ve thought about doing a series of episode-by-episode mockery posts in the style of my Traipsing Through the Timmverse blog. But this isn’t a television review site, it’s a tabletop RPG site. So lets talk about this show from the perspective of a tabletop gamer. If possible, looking at the show through that lens only makes it worse.
I now find it ironic that when I first wrote about player agency, I used a picture of the Dungeon Master character from this cartoon. I cannot now think of any worse example of a GM who promotes player agency. Nor even a worse example of a GM who is vaguely competent. Even if we are not meant to take the kids as the “players,” or Dungeon Master as the literal DM, he simply does a shit job of facilitating the kid’s adventures. He is overtly controlling, and steps in to give the kids directions any time they don’t have a clear goal to pursue. And half the time he doesn’t even let them accomplish the goal, but rather lets them get within sight of the goal, so he can step in and impress them with his ability to solve their problems.
It was actually my ladyfriend Morrie who noticed this phenomena first. As we watched the show together, it became a running joke to point out instances of terrible game mastering. Such as the time the characters come up with an elaborate plan to defeat a horrible monster called Demodragon. Their plan ends up being completely ineffectual, but it doesn’t matter, because earlier in the episode Dungeon Master had put a wreath of “Dragonsbane” around one of the character’s necks whilst in disguise. The dracocidal herb takes care of the monster, nullifying any value the kids’ actions may have had. Then there’s the episode where Dungeon Master is captured by the villain, which causes the players to go looking for him. When they find him, Dungeon Master frees himself, and defeats the villains handily, because the whole thing was just a ridiculous test. There is episode after episode after episode of this shit.
And then there’s the riddles, or whatever they are. As if Dungeon Master descending from on high to deliver every quest wasn’t bad enough, he always leaves the kids with some ridiculous nonsense phrase. The “riddles,” (if you can call them that) are supposed to help the kids figure out what to do when they inevitably end up in a tough situation. Because telling them what to do, and often doing it for them, just isn’t good enough for Dungeon Master. He needs to be able to take credit even for the problems the players overcome on their own. Half the time they don’t figure the riddle out until pure happenstance has already caused the riddle to resolve itself anyway, which isn’t surprising. The riddles are so abstract and convoluted that the only way the characters could possibly figure them out is by being characters who are written by the same writers who wrote the riddles in the first place. If I’m ever so unclear in my communication with my players, I hope they have the decency to punch me in the face.
The essential problem is that things happen *TO* the players, rather than *BECAUSE* of the players. This is the cardinal sin of neglecting player agency. Let there be no ambiguity on this point: Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and most tabletop RPGs are games, not mediums for storytelling. The game is what puts the ‘G’ in RPG–literally. The stories which are created can be amazing, yes, but they do not flow in a single direction from behind the GM screen. The game’s story is an incidental element, created by a group of people who have real control over their actions and their destinies. And it is because of that control which the players have that the stories created when we play tabletop RPGs are so compelling. They are not carefully constructed narratives. Unnecessary scenes or characters aren’t edited out because they fail to support a predetermined climax. And those things which might be considered useless in a constructed narrative often build to a compelling climax all their own.
There is one episode, titled “The Dragon’s Graveyard,” where we get to see a small glimpse of Player Agency. As the episode opens, the players are just about to go through a portal which will take them home, only to have the portal blocked for some reason by the villain, Venger. This is a pretty common scene, but normally it’s at the end of the episode. As the players are sulking about how they’ll never get home, they start to get riled up. They’re tired of constantly having the path home snatched out from under them. On cue, Dungeon Master shows up, offers them some half-assed sympathy, the immediately starts outlining what their next quest will be. Something about the Duke of Dread. Hank, the ranger and party leader, cuts him off. He tells Dungeon Master that they are tired of his bullshit, and they’re done letting him treat them like toy soldiers. They’re going to find the monster which can kill Venger, and they’re going to convince that monster to kill Venger, and then they’re going to go home, end of story. And how does Dungeon Master respond to his players finally taking control of their characters’ destinies? He starts acting like a little passive-aggressive asshole. An act he keeps up until the end of the episode when the players decide not to hurt Venger, and to leave the magical weapons they’ve found behind.
I honestly weep for the players of any game master who got involved in the hobby because of this show. Most eleven year old GMs are bad enough without having been inspired by the single worst example of a game master in the history of gaming. I have a hard time believing that Gary Gygax was actually involved in this project. More likely, he simply received a co-producer vanity credit because his name was so heavily associated with the Dungeons and Dragons brand at the time. I cannot imagine him actually endorsing the Player/Dungeon Master relationship shown in this cartoon. Even if you consider that the kids and Dungeon Master were not intended as literal representations of players and DMs, it’s simply a poor representation of the product.
When will we learn that Dungeons & Dragons will never translate favorably into a linear narrative? How many terrible shows and movies must fans suffer through before the madness ends!?
Since Monday’s post on time management, I’ve had four separate people ask me how keeping track of time would work in a game. This may not seem like much, but it’s probably the most universal response I’ve received to a single post. Normally I don’t even get that much feedback on a given day’s writing, and when I do, it’s pretty varied. So to have four people ask the same question is unusual, and warrants further attention. I thought I would use tonight’s post to look into time management further. Specifically, to look at how it might be applied to a Pathfinder game. I would like to make clear before hand that I’ve never actually kept track of time in a game–at least not in the ways I’m about to delve into. This post is, at best, educated speculation. If nothing else, the following will be a solid outline for what I will be attempting in the future, and I can do another follow up post with what I learn.
Before I get started, lets go over some basic definitions. As mentioned yesterday, I think the best way to scale time tracking is to use the same definitions Pathfinder establishes for movement on pages 170-172 of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. Tactical Time is something any Pathfinder player will be familiar with. It is built on the 6-second round, and is what we use to measure the passage of time in combat, or in other severely time-critical situations. Local Time is for exploration, such as when the players are delving into a dungeon. The six second round would be far too short for this, and slow down gameplay to a ridiculous degree, so for Local Time, we will use the 10 minute turn, which can also be divided into 1 minute fragments. Overland Time can be measured in days. If the party is simply traveling from point A to point B across a great distance, breaking things down into a unit smaller than a day would be tedious. Lastly, the Hour can be useful as a unit of measure for both Local, and Overland Time, when the situation warrants it.
With our basic units of measure established, we need to know how they fit into one another, and how they eventually build into a year. This may seem somewhat silly at first, but consider: the Gregorian Calendar (the calendar most westerners use) is as confusing as the endless layers of the abyss. Largely due to the fact that it is an imprecise attempt to force a variety of natural phenomena into logical time-measurement boxes. By taking advantage of the fact that we’re playing a fantasy adventure game, we can easily redefine the way units of time fit into one another so that we can more easily keep track.
For most of the smaller measurements, it’s simpler just to keep them consistent with the real world, to avoid the need to alter game rules. Casters need to rest 8 hours to recover their spells because 8 hours is 1/3 of the standard day, so changing the standard day would upset the balance of the game. However, larger units of measure can be toyed with at will.
6 Seconds = 1 Tactical Round 10 Tactical Rounds = 1 Minute 10 Minutes = 1 Local Turn 6 Local Turns = 1 Hour 24 Hours = 1 Day 7 Days = 1 Week 5 Weeks = 1 Month (35 Days) 10 Months = 1 Year (350 days)
Keeping a week at 7 days means that the few spells which have a 1 week cooldown are not unintentionally weakened or empowered. Making each month a consistent 5 weeks means you can avoid any confusion by having a single week bridging two months. And 10 months to a year keeps the everything close enough to our reality that the players won’t feel detached. Everything is uniform, which will be helpful later on.
Now that we’ve established our definitions, lets talk about movement. A character’s speed is already listed on their character sheet for use in combat. The speed which is listed on a character sheet is the distance, in feet, which a character can cover in a 6 second round. (The “move action” in combat is treated as a hustle, rather than a walk, which is why it takes less than the full round). This means that a character with a speed of 30 can move 30 feet in a round, 300 feet in a minute, and 3000 feet per 10 minute turn. This may seem ridiculous, but consider that the average human can walk a mile in 13 minutes. A mile is 5280 feet, which actually breaks down to a little over 406 feet per minute, so Pathfinder actually underestimates our movement speed.
Wouldn’t this be easier if we were using metric?
Considering the size of most dungeons, players will likely be moving in 50-100 foot spurts, rather than moving in increments of 300 or 3000 at a time. So I think the simplest way to handle time tracking within a dungeon will be to mentally keep track of how far your players have moved. Your figure only needs to be a rough estimate. Every time the players have moved about 300 feet, make a tally mark on a piece of paper. Once you’ve got 10 tally marks, make note that a turn has past. Bear also in mind that often players will not be moving at walking speed. Sometimes they will be hustling (in which case, they can move 600ft per minute), and other times they will be tapping every cobblestone with their 10ft pole. (There is no official rule on this, so lets just say they’d be moving at 1/3rd their normal pace, at 100ft per minute).
This sounds like a huge pain, doesn’t it? I know, I’m thinking the same thing. But think of how much depth you can add to your game by having your player’s torches burn out, or having time sensitive events in your dungeons, such as secret meetings that begin 3 turns after your players enter the dungeon, and end 2 turns later. Maybe your players will find them and be able to listen in, or maybe they won’t! That’s part of the beauty of tracking time.
Overland Movement should be much simpler to track. A character with a speed of 30 can move 24 miles at walking speed in a given day. A day, in this case, being 8 hours, which is the maximum amount of time a character can travel without requiring a constitution check. This amounts to precisely four hexes, if you’re using the standard six-mile hex. If you’re not using a hex map (like me, in my current campaign, where I haven’t yet converted the world map yet) you’ll need to figure out how far 24 miles is in some other way. One thing you’ll definitely want to keep in mind is how your player’s traveling speed might be affected by obstacles such as mountainous terrain, swamps, etc. It would probably be beneficial to establish a baseline speed difference between traveling on roads and traveling through the wilderness as well. Perhaps road travelers can move and even 30 miles, or 5 hexes?
Movement isn’t the only thing which takes time. Players don’t simply walk from their home base to the dungeon any more than they walk from the dungeon entrance directly to the treasure room. There are things to explore, battles to fight, an traps to disarm. So how do we measure those in our time tracking system?
Combat is obviously going to be the most frequent interruption to movement–particularly if you’re fond of random encounters. When working with Overland Time, their interruption can be largely ignored. Unless the party faced a large number of encounters in a given day, the amount of time a battle takes should be negligible. Whilst using Local Time, however, the length of combat is much more significant. Regardless of how long combat takes, you should probably round the time up to the next minute. Gygax even recommends that “they should rest a turn [LS: 10 minutes] after every time they engage in combat or any other strenuous activities.”
Other activities can include any number of things. Dealing with a trap, discussing a strategy, negotiating with a monster, exploring a room, opening a locked door, bashing open a locked door, the list goes on. GMs will have to use their judgement on a case by case basis to determine whether an action should be considered negligible (such as glancing around a room), a minute long (such as opening a relatively simple lock, or busting down a door), or longer (negotiating a truce with a hostile creature, or thoroughly exploring a room). I would advise against trying to track increments of time smaller than a minute. Either put a tally mark down for a minute, or don’t mark anything at all. It’ll even out eventually. Chapter 4 of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, “Skills,” notes what type of action each skill requires. This can be helpful to determine how much time you want to mark down, though your players will probably hate you if you check the action-typeevery time they make a skill check. Some GM arbitration is called for here.
The number of events which consume enough time to be counted as relevant on an overland scale are few and far between. Sleeping tops the list, followed by crafting, and perhaps a few other activities which have their time requirements listed as hours. Overland time might also be consumed by switching to local time for a significant period. For example, if a party can travel 24 miles a day, then the party might travel 12 miles, discover a village, switch to local time, spend 10 10-minute turns in the village, then continue on their way. They could still make it the full 24 miles (since that distance is traveled in 8 hours of the day), while the time they spent in the village would be rounded up to 2 hours, leaving them with 6 hours of rest before needing to sleep for 8 hours.
Tracking time in towns is tricky. As best I can tell, most GMs don’t even bother with it. However, I think there could be some real value to it if you pulled it off. Often, as a GM, one of my players will want to do something in town, while the rest are content merely to wait. This, to me, seems silly. If the player who has something they need done takes 3 hours, then what is the rest of the party really doing? Sitting at a bench next to the town gate waiting? It strikes me that if I actually turned to them and said “What would you like to do during your 1 hour turn,” that might encourage players to engage with the world around them.
Lastly, I’d like to touch on long-term time tracking, which is actually what I’ve found the most information on. The common wisdom seems to be to print out calendar sheets using whatever number of days you have in a month. Many GMs seem to simply mark days off as they pass, which would work fine. However, I think the calendar is a good opportunity to enhance your campaign record keeping. Simple notes such as meeting an important NPC, engaging in a major battle, or recovering a valuable treasure could be notated on the calendar. And, if you’re like me and want to create a living world around your players, you can make notes for things the players didn’t witness, such as the day two nations went to war, or the day your villain recovers the Big Evil Thingamaboo which will allow them to summon demonic servants. You could also use the calendar to plan future events–keeping in mind that you may need to erase them if your players avert those events from happening.
Once again, these are just my musings on how I think I’ll try to track time in my upcoming game sessions. I haven’t done it before, and I’ve found a remarkable lack of information on the Internet about how to do it well. So if any more experienced GMs out there would like to set me straight on something, please comment!
Either way, I’ll be gathering notes on my success and failure, and will revisit this topic once I have a little more experience.
Allow me to be clear; I play modern tabletop games. Pathfinder is my game of choice, and I believe Paizo is a company with the potential to be a driving force of innovation within the gaming industry. I love rulebooks which are heavy enough to break your toe if you drop them, I love having mountains of build options for my characters, and I love a game which has functional rules for making detailed monster builds. Sure it’s a waste of time if you’re doing it for every monster in every game, but who says you need to? And no, modern rules are not perfect. I think I’ve made that clear with posts like The Problem with Feats, and Stuff Which Never Works. I’d like to see some serious revisions to the way modern game developers look at games.
I also believe in the importance of learning from history. Whether you are trying to run a nation, a classroom, or just a game table, history can be your greatest teacher. Our forebears were, believe it or not, just as smart as we are. They didn’t have all the tools we have today, which is why we sometimes forget just how clever they were. But if anything, lack of tools only made them more ingenious, until one of them was so ingenious that they made a tool so that the given task would never be quite so difficult ever again.
Now, do not mistake me: I do not look into the past with rose colored glasses, as some do. Anytime I hear someone rambling about how things were ‘better’ in the ‘old days,’ I have to roll my eyes a little.* More often than not the speaker in question is just allowing nostalgia to cloud their perceptions. However, the fact that things have, overall, improved, does not mean that our very clever forebears didn’t have amazing ideas which never reached us. And the best part about those clever people being in the past is that we can look around and see for ourselves how their ideas worked out. So even though I do consider myself a modern gamer, I frequently look to the works of Gygax, Arneson, and others who worked on games in the early days.
And in reading these early works, I’ve frequently come across the concept of time management. Specifically, that it is important to track time not only in combat, but out of it as well. It is necessary, according to Gygax, for a Dungeon Master to keep track of in-game time throughout the entire session. This is mentioned a number of time throughout the numerous iterations of D&D’s first edition, but nowhere is it more clear than in the original Dungeon Master’s Guide–universally regarded among the most authoritative works on the subject of role playing games.
TIME IN THE CAMPAIGN “Game time is of utmost importance. Failure to keep careful track of time expenditure by player characters will result in many anomalies in the game. The stricture of time is what makes recovery of hit points meaningful. Likewise, the time spent adventuring in wilderness areas removes concerned characters from their base of operation–be they rented chambers or battlemented strongholds. Certainly the most important time stricture pertains to the manufacturing of magic items, for during the period of such activity no adventuring can be done. Time is also considered in gaining levels and learning new languages and more. All of these demands upon game time force choices upon player characters, and likewise number their days of game life.
One of the things stress ed in the original game of D&D was the importance of recording game time with respect to each and every player character in a campaign. In AD&D it is emphasized even more: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”
-Gary Gygax, Dungeon Master’s Guide
The emphasis, by the way, is not mine. That’s Gary Gygax throwing up caps, because this is that important to him.
When I first read about how important Gary considered time management, I was taken aback. On the one hand, I couldn’t understand how time management was even supposed to work. And on the other hand, I was offended by the thought that every campaign I had run in the past was not “meaningful,” simply because we didn’t keep track of time. I’ve run some damn good games in my years as a GM. Why does the fact that I’ve never even attempted to keep track of time invalidate that?
Then I took a deep breath, remembered that I pride myself on being rational, and tried to stop throwing an internal hissy fit before anyone caught me in the act.
The fact that I’ve never attempted time management before doesn’t invalidate all the good games I’ve run. They were good games, everybody had fun, and nothing will change that. The question is whether those games were good because of, independent from, or despite my lack of time management. And if I’m being honest with myself, I can think of a lot of things which would improve if I was better at tracking in-game time. And even though I can’t think of an easy way to manage in-game time, the fact of the matter is that Gygax did it, and many other game masters do it, so it must be possible. I am simply ignorant of the methodology, and that can remedied with learning.
So I did some more reading. First through Gygax’s Dungeon Master’s Guide, then through the OSRIC manual, since clarity was not always a strong point of Gary’s writing. I also refreshed myself on the movement rules as stated on pages 170-172, 192-194 of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, since movement is one of the core elements time management affects. Pathfinder divides movement into Tactical, Local, and Overland, which I think functions as a good basis for a modern system of time management.
Tactical Time is managed in the basic units which we’re all familiar with. A tactical (or ‘combat’) round is six seconds long. In these six seconds, every combatant gets a turn. Ten rounds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour, etc. Local Time is what you might use if you’re delving into a dungeon, or exploring a town. Taking a page from OSRIC, it seems like the best unit of time for Local Time is 10 minutes. That’s long enough that it shouldn’t significantly slow down the players as they try to get things accomplished in game time, but short enough that it shouldn’t need to be divided further for players to complete small actions. Overland Time is tricky. I’m not sure whether it should be measured in hours, or in days. I think the best solution is to use days and hours both as units of measure, depending on what the players want to do. If they’re just traveling in to a destination, days will work fine, but if they’d like to spend part of their day exploring the area they’re already at, and the rest of the day traveling, then breaking things down into hours could be helpful.
I haven’t tried this yet, so I have no idea how it will play out in a game, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like time management is actually an awesome idea. Casters will actually have to be careful with their spells if the party doesn’t want to stop to rest simply because they ran out of spells within the first few hours of the day. And if a caster does run out of spells, this could give non-caster classes a real opportunity to shine. Potion durations and non-magical hit point recovery become relevant! The players could actually be forced to make decisions based on how much time something will take, or be faced with time-sensitive goals! The very notion that I’ve never done this before begins to seem ludicrous.
I have no idea why modern games stopped emphasizing time management, and why they never developed better systems for implementing it. It seems to be the same problem I discussed a few months ago in my “Why Hex Maps Need to Come Back” post. For some reason, modern gaming developers decided to arbitrarily throw something away without coming up with a replacement for it. And us poor kids who were raised on D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder are stuck with an incomplete picture of how role playings games can best be played, until we start looking back through gaming’s history for guides.
As I stated in the opening of this post, I have a lot of faith in Paizo’s ability to be an important force for innovation in RPGs. They should start by bringing back some of these senselessly abandoned concepts.
*To clarify: this is not always the case. Occasionally people will have well reasoned arguments for why they prefer something old over something new. For example, members of the Old School Roleplaying/Renaissance community have some very solid reasons for preferring 1980s style tabletop RPGs over more modern games. Likewise, I like to think that I have some very solid reasons for feeling that recent expansions of World of Warcraft have reduced the game’s quality in many ways.
I recently read the 2nd edition AD&D module Vecna Reborn, written by Monte Cook during the end-days of TSR. Long-time Comma, Blank_ readers may recall that one of my earliest posts detailed my thoughts on another AD&D module themed around my favorite villain: Vecna Lives!. Vecna Reborn is a kind of loose sequel to Vecna Lives!, insofar as it doesn’t contradict its predecessor. There’s little continuity between the two, aside from the appearance of Citadel Cavitius, and Vecna himself. But, given that the last adventure ended with Vecna being pushed through a portal into another world–which turns out to be Ravenloft–it’s understandable that there’s not much to connect this to the previous quest. There is a third module which I haven’t read yet, entitled Die Vecna, Die!, which ties these two together. I very much look forward to reading it, but that’s for another day.
Vecna Reborn is only about half the length of Vecna Lives!, at 63 pages. But that’s still twice the length of a standard adventure module, so there’s no lack of peril to explore. And the adventure is exciting! I was so engaged I actually put down the novel I’ve been reading for a week. And, as with any well written module, there’s a lot to be learned about game mastery by dissecting the author’s work. The author of an adventure module, after all, essentially a professional game master. Who better to try and learn from? Take what works about the adventure, figure out how it was accomplished, and steal it.
The most memorable element of this adventure is the constant sense that the PCs are in danger. And not just from wandering monsters and surprise encounters. In fact there are very few of either to be found here. Vecna Reborn is set between two oppressive autocracies, one ruled by Vecna, and one ruled by Kas the Destroyer (Vecna’s former lieutenant, and current mortal foe). Neither civilization requires the players to necessarily keep themselves hidden, but nor do they want the authorities to notice them. The “Daggers” of Kas’ domain will arrest, interrogate, and imprison people on a whim. And the “Reavers” of Vecna’s domain are undead sentinels who would sooner kill a mortal than deal with any unrest within their lord’s domain. Even the relatively few times when the players will likely find themselves outside of either city, wandering patrols, invisible stalkers, virulent plagues, and a life-draining desert serve to keep the players on edge.
And that’s something I’ve never been good at. Creating atmosphere in general terms is a struggle for me, but I think I do alright. This adventure, though, would have me actually looking over my shoulder and clasping my hands. I would love to be able to achieve that level of tension and immersion with my players, and I think Vecna Reborn comes with a good toolkit. Kas’ city of Tor Gorak is ruled with a hauntingly chronic injustice, which breeds obsequiousness in its populace. People stay off the streets for fear of getting picked up by the Daggers. The boldest act of defiance in the entire town is the madhouse founded by an old man, where he keeps the insane safe from execution for being ‘worthless.’ There’s only small handful of people there who wouldn’t turn on the players instantly to save themselves from the attention of the authorities, and the players are shown early on that they don’t want that kind of attention. Shortly after the players arrive in the city, they’re (likely) picked up by the Daggers, and taken to their headquarters for interrogation. The players are only released when some good fortune falls into their lap, and if they do anything to warrant getting picked up again, they know they won’t be so lucky.
Vecna’s Citadel Cavitius is less overtly totalitarian, but is somehow even more demeaning and oppressive. Horrifying undead guard every entrance to the citadel, allowing any individual to enter, but allowing no one to leave. Vecna, the undead god, rules the city, his undead lords and ladies handle its various affairs, and undead Reavers maintain order. The unholy citizenry ignore the affairs of mortals the same way one might ignore a dog walking through the streets. So while the PCs can go about their business unmolested, their lives are less than meaningless to those around them. It’s just as likely that they’ll complete their quest as it is for a vampire to pick them off the streets for a gory meal.
Imminent danger can take many forms. As I mentioned above, later in the adventure there is a virulent plague killing everyone around the players, leaving them to wonder whether they might catch it themselves. And even on the road, two invisible demons follow the players and cause mischief, letting them know that an unknown danger still lurks somewhere about them. Vecna Reborn is a litany of very visible, very deadly dangers which the players can do nothing about. Their only hope is to keep their heads down and try to stop Vecna’s plot to be reborn without drawing any attention.
Another element of the game which caught my attention is The Shadowed Room. During the course of the adventure, the party must travel there to learn how to thwart Vecna’s plans. When they find it, they discover that the shadowed room is, in fact, a library. I. Love. Fantasy Libraries. As a bibliophile and a lover of fantasy, they’re a combination of two locations which excite and comfort me. I often design such libraries just for the fun of it, and The Shadowed Room is a good one.
During the height of Vecna’s empire in the realm of Oerth, he ruled over a massive city. And in one of the city’s many spires, he filled a library with secret both arcane and powerful. The knowledge gathered in this room was so profound, and so remarkable, that the library left a permanent imprint on the multiverse. When the city was destroyed, millennia ago, this imprint remained, as a memory of creation itself. Vecna learned that he could access this memory, and constructed a magical portal to allow himself to access this “Shadowed Room.” The knowledge which was once gathered there, knowledge which has otherwise been lost, can be read here. But nothing can be taken from the room, for it is only a shadow of something which once was.
Lastly, I want to make note of the fantastic hooks this adventure leaves you with. In my opinion, the best adventure modules leave a group wanting to do more. With the most pressing goal accomplished, a myriad of other possibilities should call to the players, giving the game master a number of avenues to pursue for further games in the same local. And that’s precisely what Vecna Reborn does. Immediately upon reaching the period at the end of the last sentence, I instinctively started constructing follow up adventures in my mind. There’s so much more the players could accomplish! Freeing Tor Gorak of Kas’ rule could last sessions! The headquarters of the Daggers and Kas’s own castle would both make excellent settings for dungeon crawls, and after the way the adventure encourages the players to engage with the town’s populace, I think they’ll feel enough sympathy for them to want to help. Perhaps even form a rebellion for an extended campaign against Kas.
Oh! By the way, this is the 100th RPG post on Comma, Blank_. Yay.
