Ace-In-The-Hole Encounters

(That title sounds like a refugee from yesterday's post. Whatever, anyway...)

As you may have gleaned from my recent HexKit post I am extremely enamored of having a full encounter locked and loaded just in case the standard roll on the random monster table in whatever room the PCs happen to be in doesn't excite me.

I am also fond of cannibalizing printed material for good encounter ideas that can be slotted into existing scenarios if they get dull.

I am also fond of avoiding paying for things that suck by asking y'all what things are like before buying them.

So, here's the Useful Encounter Questionnaire. The point of it is to aim us all toward encounters we can trade around and use, so encounters that can be thrown in almost anywhere are best.

Encounters don't have to be immensely complex to be aces-in-the-hole, they just have to have enough complicating factors that they don't feel just like "you roll to hit, I roll to hit, you roll to hit, I roll to hit". Give the players enough rope and they'll generally make a cat's cradle of things when they show up.

For the purposes of this questionnaire an encounter isn't just a foe, it's

Foe + Environment

or, perhaps

Foe + Unusual Nonenvironmental Complicating Factor

1. Name a good encounter in a published source and say what kinds of situations it could be used in.

I like the "three trapped adventurers" in The Grinding Gear and it could fit in pretty much any indoor adventure at all.

2. Describe a good encounter you thought up.

In a small room, there are some harpies on the far side of a pit. The harpies sing and try to get the hypnotized PCs to fall into the pit. In the pit there is a horrific, chaos-mutated unicorn drowning in eyebally chaos-muck. Crawling out of the pit is hard and the unicorn thrashes around, trying to stab you or hoof you while the harpies try to eat your eyes.

3. Describe a good encounter that developed in-play--that is, it wasn't prepared before the game, it just happened in an interesting way.

The first time my PCs met the Narcissus Peacocks.

4. Name a common item that regularly makes encounters more interesting.

Invisibilty potion--used by the PCs or their foes, but only if there are many combatants on the side with the potion and only one of them uses it.

5. Name two other things in the game that, in your opinion, can instantly make almost any encounter more interesting.

-When one of the PCs' main form of self-defense is the Summon Monster spell and you completely randomize what that monster is rather than using the standard charts,

-Using devices or abilities that inflict temporary insanities on the PCs.

6. The PCs are sleeping. One of them is on guard. What's a fun encounter for this situation?

One eye of dread for each PC creeps in. If the one on guard fails a spot check or wisdom roll or whatever, most of them go to work suffocating the sleeping PCs in their sleep. Meanwhile, the guard hears a rustling some distance away, where the last one is hiding and will jump out and attack as soon as s/he is near.

(Also, I know I still haven't parsed the results from the last time I asked you for game materials, but that's because I am actually going to use some of those ideas in a game--and I don't want to give away the surprise to my blog-reading players. After I use it, I'll post. Promise.)

A Treasury of Unforgivable Puns

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Hexcrawls: Worldbuilding vs. Microlite vs. HexKit

So the question I asked a couple days ago sparked off a few ripples in the pond about how exactly hexcrawling works.

(Barking Alien wants to know what a hexcrawl is. It's when you let the players roam around the map in any direction they want. Like a dungeoncrawl but outside and on a bigger scale. And the paper is gridded with hexagons rather than squares.)

Anyway, my question was:

"I've never run a large-scale hexcrawl. Those of you who do: do you just sort of write a few bits about each place and wing the details when the players get there, or what?"

The short answer people gave is: Yes.

Personally, although I don't mind improvising, I really like having the complexity you get with detailed ready-to-go-scenarios to drop the PCs into.

So...

It seems to me that building a hexcrawl is actually a fairly philosophically complex operation.

The DM wants to know "How much of this do I have to write in advance?" and "How detailed does it have to be?" But answering those questions requires answering a few underlying questions first.

The most important is: how much information do the PCs have about the place they're exploring?

On one end of the scale, the PCs know every inch of it down to the location of the canning jars in the root cellar in Mrs. Fuzzleworth's basement. On the other end of the scale, the PCs have no idea where they are or where (if anywhere) they're going.

Most people avoid these extremes--in the first one, there's no reason to explore anything, and in the second one, the PCs have zero motivation other than metagame-boredom:

"You walk through the forest for weeks and then come to a strange-looking tree."

(Player thinks: This must be where the adventure is.)

"Fine, I investigate the goddamn tree."

So: a hexcrawl is going to have some middle-level of information, but the choice of how much, exactly, seems extremely important.

Micro-lite Hexcrawl

If the PCs know only that their home town was burned down by orcs and now they (the PCs) are hungry and tired and equipmentless, then you can do a survival-hexcrawl where you only have to map the six hexes right around where the PCs are and the PCs essentially just stumble into one of those six hexes, each of which has a terrain-appropriate adventure. This is how greywulf recommends building a micro-lite campaign.*

To prep, the DM has to just write 7 hexes (the start position, plus 6 surrounding hexes), all filled with at least a day's worth of adventure. That is--you only have to write a few hexes, but all of them have to contain things which will, by necessity, detain the PCs for a whole session.

After the session, the DM just has to write 3 more hexes to finish surrounding the PC's location in order that the PCs are now once again surrounded by completely written, statted-up hexes.

...and so on, maybe forever, so long as the PCs never get any form of transportation that will allow them to "skip" a hex.

Worldbuilding Hexcrawl

On the other hand, if the PCs have a map, or some basic knowledge of the surrounding area, or have distant goals, or you want them to have distant goals, then things suddenly change.

In this scenario, you need to prep any hex the PCs could possibly get to.

This kind of hexcrawl would seem to suggest the world-building Bat-In-The-Attic-Approach, where you map out a whole section of your world, complete with a few triggerable plot seeds and drop-in-anywhere encounters.

The thing about this kind of approach is that it's extremely easy for the PCs to get to a stretch of territory that you haven't written much detail on. So either you have to write lots of detail on every possible location (which some people like to do, but that's a hobby in itself) or write some detail and be prepared to wing it a lot.

I am thinking the approach I'd want for me is something in the middle--the PCs should be able to choose distant objectives and map out paths using known geography, but I don't want to have to write up towns and cities unless I'm definitely going to use them soon, and I want to have at least one un-improvised, well-planned-out thing going on each day.

Plus, I want to know as little about the world when I start as possible so that I'm exploring as much as the players are.

Plus, oh yeah, I hate wilderness encounters. Ok, maybe "hate" is not the word. But compared to the intricate, cthonic majesty of dungeons having the PCs run into a bunch of bandits in a forest next to a river seems like a waste of my oh-so-precious gaming time. At least, I hate random, garden-variety wilderness encounters. I want to front-load awesome.

So, I think I'm going with a cousin to the Worldbuilding Hexcrawl. I call it:

The HexKit

1. Make a map, include every location you've already used in your game. Also choose a PC start point and, if possible, place this point in the middle of all the others.

2. If you have any dungeons or other completed locations, place them on the map and give them names.

3. Throw a few other places onto the map. The names should sound good, but you don't have to know anything about them yet.

4. Hex off the map.

(There seems to be a controversy about what constitutes appropriate hex-scale--either pick one or do what I do, which is say each hex represents "a days travel" and, if questioned further, tell whoever's asking that they really need to get out more. This should work fine until they're at a high enough level that they've got spells with ranges in miles, by which time you'll have sorted it out. So relax. Hell, you can just grid it with squares, really, but then you'd have to change all the nouns in this post, so I'm going to pretend I didn't just say that.)

5. Make a list of all the kinds of outdoor terrain that you think it's cool to watch PCs fight in. Keep in mind that each form of terrain should have some horrific, dangerous thing that could happen during a fight associated with it--frozen ice on a lake could crack, a battle in a black forest could awaken sleeping (evil) treants, etc.

6. Place geographical and topographical features on the map. Include every kind of cool terrain plus any uncool terrain necessary for verisimilitude.

7. Make a list of all the kinds of monsters (and opposing NPCs) that you think are cool.

8. Make a chart with the monsters/NPCs along one axis and the types of terrain along the other.

9. Place a mark every time you think it would be cool to have the PCs fight that monster/NPC in that terrain. (For example: it is cool to encounter a pack of dire wolves on a frozen mountain-face, it is boring to encounter a basilisk in a cave.) Now you have a List of Wilderness Encounters.

10. Sort the encounters by terrain-type, see how many you've got.

11. For each type of terrain, make at least one encounter more detailed and add a triggerable event or adventure seed to it, for example: killing the wolves on the frozen mountain-face angers the Frost God Cor-Greth and causes the Blue Jewel of Cor-Greth to begin absorbing the souls of men. These are your Complicating Wilderness Encounters. The location of any macguffins in these seeds should be left vague until the encounter occurs, at which point the necessary macguffins will be as far from the PCs current stated objective as possible (the PC shouldn't be able to get to the city/town/location where the macguffin is without doing a day's worth of playing--this gives you time to write more stuff about it before the PCs get there.)

12. Within each terrain-type, sort all the encounters (detailed and un-detailed) by interestingness (keeping in mind the level of your party). This is the order in which you will spring the encounters on the party.

13. Make a list of small (one-page-mappable) locations you think are cool to watch PCs fight in (small ruined temple, forgotten zeppelin factory, briny pub, etc.). These can be locations in a town or city or isolated lonely buildings or both.

14. Make another table with the monsters/NPCs down one side and the small locations down the other.

15. Place a mark every time you think it would be cool to have the PCs fight that monster/NPC in that location. Now you have a List of Indoor Encounters.

16. Expand some (2-4) of these Indoor Encounters and make them more detailed. Add some adventure seeds or triggerable events to them--they can be specific to the location, to the monster/npc, to both, or to neither.

17. Sort all the indoor encounters into two lists: ones that can be isolated in the middle of nowhere, and ones that have to be in a town or city.

18. Take the ones that can be in the middle of nowhere and sort them by interestingness. The most interesting ones will be the ones you pull out first. This is your Middle-Of-Nowhere-List-Of-Location-Based-Encounters.

19. Now: Wilderness encounters will ONLY happen during travel through wilderness zones which you have decided are cool. So, before the first day of play, look at each named location on the map in relation to the PC start point:

-If travel between the PC start point and a given named location crosses several different kinds of terrain that you have deemed cool, then you can be lazy and not stat the place they're headed to, because you've got a whole list of encounters (including ones with adventure seeds attached) to keep them busy with until you stat up the objective.

-If travel between the PC start point and a given location does NOT cross more than one kind of terrain you have deemed cool, then you have to stat and detail that location with enough information to keep the PCs busy for a whole session. If it's a town or city, you can use your List of Indoor Encounters but remember--an encounter can float until the PCs actually meet that foe--that is, if you've hidden a Zombie Pieman in Waldheim but the PCs leave Waldheim without going into the bakery, then just use the Zombie Pieman in the next town, if it fits.

-At any time, you can spice up wilderness travel with an encounter from your Middle-Of-Nowhere-List-Of-Location-Based-Encounters, or even a random hidden dungeon, however, unless there is some feature of the location that forces the PCs into the location, you have to be prepared for the possibility that the PCs will just avoid the location and head toward their objective. If this happens, mark the location on the map and either transfer its contents elsewhere so you can try again later or plant a seed in the next location pointing back to it. Then at least the PCs know there's something there.

20. Start the game. Have the PCs meet one or more talkative NPCs who generally let it be known that there are untold riches and/or rewarding intrigue to be found in roughly every direction and in every named location on the map. Give them lots of rumors and pirate maps and Dead Uncles Who Were Researching Mysterious Cults, etc.

21. After the game, note where the PCs are, go back to step 19 and repeat.

22. As usual, add detail as inspiration strikes. Remember to replenish your store of encounters and (possibly) evolve them as the plot develops.

______
*Regarding the micro-lite link--there seems to be a philosophical difference: hex 6 is empty. If it was a true sandbox, then hex 6 would have to have something in it. Otherwise the players could choose to go there, then there'd be nothing to see and no adventure and then you'd have to improvise and that seems to miss the point of mapping the place in advance. The example probably presumes that the DM gives the players information aiming them in the other 5 directions.

Pick Your Poison

So if you read the post about my Thanksgiving game you may've noticed me trying to figure out how to turn a 4+ day dungeon into a one-shot.

Here's how I did it:

-I eliminated the wandering-monsters, and

-I put a crude-and-under-detailed-but-essentially-accurate map of the entire dungeon (with locations of major threats and exits indicated) on one of the monsters that the players would probably be killing during an early encounter.

(I would've jazzed it up, written it in some faux-foreign-language-looking rune font and thrown in some enigmatic labels on the minor dungeon features, but I was pressed for time.)(And drunk.)

So, put this way, the dungeon has several possible implied "objectives"--having the map allowed the players to decide which one they were going to try for, then head straight there. In effect, they pick the shape of their own one-shot.

This worked out extremely well. All these players--two who hadn't played in years, one who'd never played, (not to mention one who was the host's boyfriend and one who was the recent ex) and none of them had ever played together--got the map, drew a few conclusions, and sat around plotting strategy. Just like a team. Beautiful.

Anyway, I like this idea, and I think it has possibilities far beyond just using it to turn a sprawling dungeon into a one-shot. It's fun to drop a ton of info on the players all at once and watch them sort out how to roll with it. To be continued.

...discuss

A few grab-bag ideas that have been rolling around in my head that I'd like to hear from any of you on...

-"Hey Chad, what's your cleric's name?" "Maurice." "What's his god's name?" "Chad." Chad has solved the cleric role-playing problem by declaring that he, Chad, is the god that his cleric follows. Is this Grant-Morrison-esque move interesting or repulsive to you as a DM, or both?

-1st level PCs suck at everything, except their armor class, which can be fairly decent. Have you noticed any implications of this in-game?

-When I run AD&D, the written rules make it hard to sort out how many spells a PC can know per level vs. how many they can cast in any given day. When I run 3.5, I have the same damn problem. I usually end up winging it, or feeling as though I just did. Am I just being lazy/forgetful and refusing to comb through the books or does everybody else have this problem?

-I've never run a large-scale hexcrawl. Those of you who do: do you just sort of write a few bits about each place and wing the details when the players get there, or what? (And yes, I've read those "how to build a hexcrawl" blog posts in Points of Light or Bat In The Attic or whichever.) Addendum: I am not asking you to tell me to go read something, I am asking YOU what YOU have done when you ran a hexcrawl.

-Post-apocalyptic sci-fi DMs--here's an idea: "anachro-anarcho-arachnids". Go!

-I assumed, in a dungeon I ran, that a group of 1st level PCs defeat a vampire and/or a medusa (both high-level monsters, run totally legit) (separately) on the condition that they expected to run into the monster and the monster didn't expect to run into them. And defeat them did. Am I being a soft-hearted monty-haul about this or is this pretty much what you'd expect?

-It occurs to me that the simple initiative system is a big culprit in these victories. If the PCs get initiative, they all get to go before the monster. So: if they win initiative, good for them. If they lose but then win initiative on the next round, then they essentially get to go twice before the monster's second action--still a pretty good deal for them. Essentially: if you outnumber the enemy, then simple initiative works in your favor, even if that enemy is more powerful than all of you put together. Knowing this, do you still like simple initiative?

-Golden rule for awesoming up your players: Fear of death is the mother of invention. Agree or disagree?

-It occurs to me that while the verb "to awesome (one's players)" is stolen from Jeff Rient's essay on the subject the actual approach he describes there emphasizes the carrot more than the stick. My opinion is: the carrot only works if the player's a hardcore gamer and will be back next week no-questions-asked. Casual players need the stick. Agree? Disagree?

Bellet Osc and The Cruel City

Apparently, during the Black Death, doctors actually dressed like this for reasons explained if you click the link.

Anyway, I used it as a visual aid to show what the unruly mob in the city of Bellet Osc looked like.

Bellet Osc

Bellet Osc (or The Inferior City), like most northern cities, reacted very poorly to the legions of skeletal warriors that've been roaming the countryside since forces unknown (that is, Mandy) unleashed them.

The citizens have taken to roaming the streets at night in a motley parade, wearing animal masks, waving torches, and hitting each other with fish parts mounted on sticks, eventually congregating in a statue-lined square beneath a balcony at the foot of a stone tower.

The tower protrudes into Bellet Osc proper from a corner of The Cruel City--a desolate and forbidden district whose rotting spires lie atop the rest of Bellet Osc like a gray crown. From somewhere deep within the unknown corridors of the Cruel City, the Hex King emerges each night onto the tower's balcony at the height of the parade, and whispers enigmatic decrees.

In times of unusual confusion, the Hex King orders his attendants to drop a goat from the balcony onto the square, where the hidden meanings encoded in the patterns and positions of the resulting blood and innards are interpreted for the populace by a shrill crone.

The rules of this science are obscure and jealously-guarded, but the resulting interpetation inevitably blames any local crisis on the appearance of a band of recently-arrived PCs. This, in turn, inevitably results in the entire population of the city transforming into a fulminating rabble bent on destroying the PCs. Which, in turn, inevitably results in the PCs fleeing Bellet Osc proper for the seeming safety of The Cruel City, past the crumbling gates of which the citizens of Bellet Osc are forbidden to pass (or even gaze).

Six black swans swim the moat circling The Cruel City, which though very quiet, still finds ways to justify its ancient name.

I've Created A Monster (Well, I've created lots of monsters and if you're reading this you probably have, too, but anyway...)

"Hey Mandy, want to roll on tuesday?"

"Yeah."

"Ok, tell Frankie," (Frankie's never played, but she's always wanted to play.)

"Ok, and Julia," (Julia'd never heard of D&D, but now wants to play because Frankie's playing.)

"And me!" (That's Cricket, Cricket is a guitar-playing Suicide Girl who thinks D&D sounds really lame and dorky, but wants to play because her friends will be playing.)

"Oh, and Kimberly says she wants to play." (Kimberly is a three-time AVN award winning porn actress who thinks D&D is dorky, and has, in the past, said "Oh jesus no" when asked to play. And says she will show up wearing a cloak.)

"Oh, and should I ask..."

"Ok, wait, before you ask anybody else, just let me check if the regulars are coming so I know at least three of the people who will be there have actually have played D&D and know they like it and want to play, ok?"

"Ok."

We'll see how this works out...