Tag Archives: Game Design

Game Prep

I had hoped to be able to play all weekend, but my son and his girlfriend have other plans, so we don’t get to play until Monday.

No problem! How many DM’s would love the chance to have two more days to work on things.

There are several different avenues that they could explore, so I am glad I have more time to flesh things out.

I have been trying to fit it in over lunch during the week and between chores and taking care of my dog after work and before bed. There are days I just want to veg, or days my brain won’t cooperate after a long day at work, so I have to veg.

Well, tonight I am in the mood and the right frame of mind to work on fleshing out things for the current sequence of events and related items that have caught the players’ attention.

There are some things that I can wing very well. Once I have a name for an NPC and an idea of presenting how I envision they will act, I am good to go. But certain things, like treasure maps and planning where certain things are, I am wired to need more prep time for that.

So I will be working on the things that I need a bit more prep time to make ready and will clean up my notes from play. That is, I will re-write them and make sure I don’t forget the names of NPC’s that I came up with on the fly.

I always end up with way more material than I will ever use.

Now, with the era of online RPG play, I can use live, in-person play time to bring it to life, and if I ever DM an online game, I have scenarios all ready to go.

Calendar And Random Generation

Having a calendar that suits itself to easy generation of random dates by a die roll is something that I find very useful.

This idea dates back 20 years or so to my brother Robert’s campaign.

12 months with 28 days, for a year of 336 days. There are four seven day weeks in each month. It is easy and simple. Roll 1d12 for the month and 3d10-2 for the day of the month. Use it to determine the data a character was born. It is useful for determining when aging effects kick in and when to celebrate birthdays, if that is a custom in the game.

This simple system can determine any random date with a quick roll of 4 dice. One always knows what day of the 7 day week a given date falls. The months of the seasons fall with the first day of each season as the first day of the first month of that season. Spring is used as the first day of the year.

I even built an HTML page with the names of the months and days of the week Robert uses for his calendar. I printed one up all nice and fancy and give it to him, and he tells me that there is a festival between the last day of winter and the first day of spring. I pointed out to him that the method we had used for over 15 years never let anyone be born during the festival, or any random events happen then. He laughed and just let it slide.

I like the simplicity of twelve months of twenty-eight days. So what if years are shorter? It is a game.

To get a year closer to that of Earth, one can do 13 months of 28 days and get 364 days. One then needs to make a d13, or come up with a balanced way to roll for 13 possibilities. I’m sure someone is better at this and can just think of it and get the answer. If you do, let me know.

Another option that is close to the Earth year, is twelve 30 day months, for a year of 360 days. The months don’t line up , but the year comes out. For generating a day in a 30 day month use a d30 or a d6 to generate the tens to add to a d10. For example, 1-2 = add 0, 3-4 = add ten, 5-6 = add 20 to the number rolled on the d10.

If you have to have 365 days, then you need a way to roll or account for any festival days between months, or at the end of the year so that those days can have an event.

One can determine any random date in a year for incidents, war, battle, invasions, natural disasters, weather, etc. This can be used for the past as well as the current year or the future.

One thing I like from Oriental Adventures besides some of the weapons and spells are the yearly and monthly event tables. They give ideas for building one’s own tables.

Once you have such tables, you need to decide what date something happens. Then just determine what time of day something happens, if it is important for the exact time. I recommend staying with 24 hours days, unless you want to do a lot of table building, etc. You can roll a D6 for AM/PM and a d12 for the hour. Or roll a d6 and divide 24 by the result to get 4 hour increments, or a d8 for 3 hour increments, etc.

If you want to get down to the minute, roll a d12 to get within ten minutes and roll to determine if it is plus or minus 1 to 5 minutes from that point. Repeat for the exact second. This would be handy for a ritual that must begin or end at the right moment of an eclipse and determine when the hero have to act to stop the bad guy, assuming the bad guy is the one doing the ritual.

I found this article on making a grid like that of graph paper using Excel. I have not tried it with Libre Office or Open Office yet. I used it to build a blank calendar that I can name and number and note events and mark off days elapsed. I have 6 months in a column with room to the right of each month for some notes. If more room is needed, I could do 6 months on one side and 6 on the other.

If you use training to go up a level, players can fly through weeks and months, so planning out what happens in advance can make it interesting if they have to break training to deal with an emergency.

I’m old school in that computers were expensive when I was young and I’m used to paper. I work in the computer industry and find them very useful for gathering and storing data, but they become a hindrance to use during play. I do have a tablet with my PDFs of manuals I purchased through DriveThruRPG, if I need to find something fast and do a search. When I play online, I use it to hold my character sheet since I only have one viable monitor on my home computer.

I am sure that one could build a program or script to generate several millenniums of weather and events in a few minutes, but it takes a lot of the DM’s tweaking and tuning out of it. One does not need to generate every scrap of anything that could ever happen or has happened in the past.

What do you use for your calendar and random date generation?

Festivals

There is a lot of talk about Cinco de Mayo today. I’m not sure why it happens on May 5th, every year. 😉

It got me to thinking about festivals and celebrations in-game. Be it a religious or secular celebration, like a founding of a great temple, or the founding of a city.

It has to fit into the game and can provide opportunities for players to do city/town adventures.

An interesting twist could be the festival/celebration/human sacrifice of an evil religion, whether it be humans, orcs, etc. What if the adventurers come upon it in the caverns/dungeon?

Collapsing Walls

A rule of thumb for firefighters and the “collapse zone” for falling walls is 1.5 times the height of the wall.

That is, if a wall is 30 feet high, when it collapses from loss of structural integrity, such as through a fire, it will cover a distance of approximately 45 feet from the base of the wall, for the length of the wall that collapses.

An explosion would extend the collapse zone, depending on the strength of the explosion.

This should make it quick and easy to deal with this type of scenario, such as a siege or earthquake.

Way back when, I was a volunteer firefighter. My recollection of this rule was wrong, so I’m glad that I googled for the right terminology.

Day 5 E is for Elves

April 5, 2014
April 5, 2014

Elves in D&D are not Tolkien Elves. They are a slight mix of Tolkien, but also ideas from other books and mythology. Tolkien’s elves were tall, usually taller than men. They were powerful. They are likened to angels. An elf lord in Tolkien’s world was someone you did not want to meet in battle.

In D&D, they are short with pointy ears. They have a long life-span, but can’t gain the power as counted in levels of experience, while humans have no limit. This is in AD&D 1st edition. I believe that 2nd edition removed that limit. Some explain this that elves are on the decline and humans are rising. This is a concept from Tolkien. I don’t like the limit. An elf may have a millennium plus lifespan, but it gets more difficult to advance in levels the higher you go. Adventuring is dangerous. After a while elves would retire from adventuring and spend their time building their territory, or studying magic and making items. Without elves of sufficient level to make items, where do all the magical elvish items come from?

Day 3 C is for Campaign

April 3, 2014
April 3, 2014

In D&D the term campaign most often means a setting with an ultimate goal. It is a term taken from the military, as in military campaign, since miniature wargaming was the structure from which RPGs emerged.

For many, campaign is a unique world/realm, and if it flops, the campaign is scrapped, and the would-be DM, must start over from scratch

For others, campaign can mean the setting a given DM uses no matter how many groups of players flop or thrive. Talented DMs may run multiple gaming groups in the same general area in their game world on the same time line. Others may separate their players and each is in a unique instance of the game world, like parallel universes. For the first, the players can easily switch which group they are with, for the second, some sort of magical portal transports them to the other timeline.

The type of campaign that encompasses a world/game setting is also called  a milieu, which means setting, and can have multiple campaigns run simultaneously or in sequence, or both.

The idea of a campaign as a one-shot world is from the heavily story driven type of play where there is an ultimate goal to the setting and once it is achieved, there is no sense to go on. To continue play requires a new setting for a new campaign. I can see where some might like this type of play, but that is an enormous amount of work.

It makes more sense to me to have a game world that can offer multiple locations for players to adventure. In this way, the DM can develop one setting, and spend the rest of their time fleshing out the details of tombs, caverns, lairs, treasure, magic, dungeons, villains, and monsters in a given area.

This can work for a fantasy world, where a continent or sub-continent sized area is roughly sketched, and the details of the starting area are worked out and the players are let loose to figure things out. For a space based science fiction game, why plan out multiple start systems and their planets, only to have to do it again? For a post-apocalyptic setting, why plan out things only to never use them again?

Obviously if the DM has an idea that he thinks is cool, but flops, it can be scrapped if it is beyond salvaging, or it can be re-worked to be cool. Keep the good ideas and toss the bad ones.

In my game, I have things going on the players only have glimpses of, but have yet to investigate. So far, I have not gone beyond ideas and scribbles of notes. The game needs to mature and simmer some more to determine if my ideas for the machinations of yet to be discovered bad guys fits with what develops in play. I won’t put too much time into some of it until the players are about to discover it. This makes for a fluid and more organic game setting that is more likely to be fun for all.

Day 2 B is for Beginnings

April 2, 2014
April 2, 2014

Starting anything is hard for me. Once I get going it just seems to work out.

Having an idea or scenario that will grab the interest of the players seems to be so difficult.

Meeting in a bar, or just showing up outside a dungeon and starting play just seems so cliche, but often that seems to be all I can come up with.

This ties into the anarchy. There are lots of ideas from other bloggers online, tables for how players meet and start their adventuring together. Deciding which tools and ideas to use can be overwhelming with the sheer volume of information available online. Also, once I get into creative mode, the ideas flow faster than I can keep up and I want to use them all. Trying to pick just one is the hardest.

What I like about blogging is that I don’t have to choose which ideas to write about. I have so many that I spread them out to have one a day instead of ten a day. This way I always have a post ready.

OSR Superstar Contest – Thoughts on Why I Didn’t Win

I think primarily that in a contest of this nature, especially one in which there are so many other entries there are a few keys to getting on one of the judges’ lists.

  • Brevity. Explain your item and what it does in a couple of paragraphs. Walls of text with complex entries are a sure way to turn off the judges to looking at your entries.
  • Uniqueness. Have an entry that is unique and can be described simply and is easy to drop into the rules.
  • Catchy. It needs a catchy name or description. Something that helps explain what it is without needing to read it.
  • Rules. Write it with the designated rules in mind. Writing it for a close but not quite rule set can show and can make it clunky.

I know that two of my entries were walls of text and all of them did not get written with the target rule set from the start. I did read through all of the various S&W rules before I converted to that rule set, but it greatly hampered the effectiveness of my presentation.

The wall of text is an issue I often have in my blog posts. I get to writing and the ideas related to it just keep flowing. I have the blessing/curse of being able to see connections most others don’t, and it takes a lot of text to explain the connections.

The good news is that I cam up with some unique items that I can use in my game. Whether players find them is another thing.

Magic Bookstand – Entry #2 into OSR Superstar Contest

Here is entry #2. Actually, this is the version for AD&D. I will post all three items with the S&W Rules versions all together in one post.

I got this idea from my brother Robert’s campaign. My character, Griswald, owed a favor to a powerful wizard, Moran Redbeard. It turned out that all the high level players in the game owed him a favor or were willing to help him. I don’t know how Robert stated this, this is my interpretation.

Wizard’s Bookstand

This item appears to be a normal, yet high quality bookstand or lectern. Some have a delicate appearance like a music stand, others appear to be sturdy and heavy like a lectern. Others are small angled items designed to sit on a desk or table to allow the user to stand an read as at a lectern. The lectern has a cabinet below with a latching door than can hold three spell books or ten scrolls. The table top form can hold one spell book or three scrolls.

It is carved of the most exquisite wood with fine inlays and mystical runes. They can also be crafted of metal, such as, fine steel, adamantite, or mithril.

The bookstand protects the wizard’s spell book(s). It gives a +2 on all saves that the familiar may need to make.

It can hold the book shut and secure to the bookstand as a wizard lock at 11th level.

It conveys protection of the book versus fire and electrical magic, and bookworms and other pest that feast on spell books.

The wizard can summon the bookstand and it will walk to the caster bearing the book and can open the book to the desired page or turn the page of an open book to the desired page.

Use of the bookstand while learning spells allows the wizard to memorize spells in 3/4 the time.

The wizard can cast one spell from the book per day as a scroll, but the spell is preserved. However, if the wizard is interrupted in his casting, there is a 20% chance the spell will fade from his book and a 1% change per level of the spell that the spell before it and after it in the book will be lost. Roll separately for the preceding and following spell. If the spells immediately preceding and following are destroyed, there is a 10% chance that this is a catastrophic failure and every spell in the book is lost.

Some bookstands grant their owner additional spells per day while in their tower/residence or within 30 feet of the bookstand if the wizard is out and about with his bookstand. In both cases, this is only true while their familiar is on the bookstand.

There are two variations on the Wizard’s Bookstand.

1.) Jealous Bookstand. This bookstand is semi-intelligent and will not relinquish a book to the owner unless another familiar is immediately available to take its place. There is a 1% chance on any given day that the bookstand will refuse to give up the book. There is nothing to do short of a wish or limited wish, to get the book away from the bookstand without destroying both the bookstand and the book.

2.) Cursed Bookstand. This appears to be a normal bookstand until the wizard places his or her book on it. There is only a 1% chance for the wizard to notice anything odd. The nature of the Cursed Bookstand is to alter the spells in the book so that they have limited, ineffectual, inaccurate, or opposite effect. Roll separately for each spell in the familiar.

Spell Results Table: 1d6
1 – Limited Range. 3/4, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. 1/8, 1/16 range. 1d6 for range effect.
2 – Limited Damage 3/4, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. 1/8, 1/16 damage. 1d6 for damage effect.
3 – Limited Range and Damage. 3/4, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. 1/8, 1/16 range. 1d6 for range and damage effect. Roll once for each.
4 – Ineffectual. Spell has all the appearance and sound, but no damage. A fireball looks impressive but does not burn. A magic missile looks right but no damage. Illusions have no visual or auditory effect. Informational spells either give static, partial, inaccurate, or outright wrong results. Protection spells have a 50% chance to be limited and a 50% chance to have the opposite effect. Opposite effect can be weakness instead of strength on an ally, or protection from normal missiles on a foe instead of an ally.
4 – Opposite effects, see Ineffectual above.
6 – Roll twice, ignoring this result on further rolls.

There is a 30% chance that an encountered Bookstand will have an Unfamiliar in or on it, or in close proximity.

Bookstand Mimic:
There is a rare creature that some sages and wizards have theorized resulted from some wizard’s experiment that combined a jealous and cursed bookstand resulting in a magical creature. This creature is alive and seeks to devour magic items. It prefers spell books. In the first week of use, it will function as a normal Wizard’s Bookstand, thereafter there is a 10% chance increasing each week, so that the second week it is 20%, third week 30%, etc. until the tenth week after the first, i.e. the 11th week that the bookstand will eat the wizards’s familiar. Starting the second week, the Bookstand Mimic will act as a Jealous Bookstand that refuses to give up its book. If the wizard is unable to free the book before the Bookstand Mimic can devour it, the book is lost. A wizard will only know about this if he or she encounters the information from a sage, fellow wizard, or research BEFORE placing his familiar on the stand.

NOTE: If a normal book is placed on the Bookstand Mimic, the Mimic will not react.

AC: 4
HD: 6 HP
ATTACKS: Special. Only the spell book placed on it.
ST:
Special: Eats spell books.
Move:
Challenge Level:
XP: