Month / March 2022

by guyeatsfood

The Third Pillar – Fixing Exploration

In this previous post, I talked about the first two “pillars” of D&D – and by association TTRPGs generally – combat and roleplaying. I’ve put a whole post into the third one, exploration, for a simple reason – I don’t think that we do exploration very well. That is, I don’t think TTRPGs do it very well, and I think there’s a lack of clarity about what it actually is.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

I’m going to describe why exploration is tricky, then try to suggest some ways to make it better. 

Why is exploration hard?

  • It’s not explained well. Looking at the Exploration section of the 5e DMG, there’s two pages covering travel time outdoors, tracking (mainly DCs), visibility, noticing other creatures, and a bit about “special travel pace” to calculate daily travel times if your movement rate gets adjusted (by a spell, for instance). Setting to one side that these are all ‘wilderness adventures’ things, there’s not a lot of rules to sit alongside this. These don’t seem to be rules for exploration – more rules for travelling a long way.
  • It’s not supported by rules. Exploring a dungeon involves crawling from room to room and having encounters. Exploring wilderness (once you’ve worked out your special travel pace) involves walking across a map – and maybe encountering monsters or NPCs. Exploring a new city involves walking around talking to NPCs. All of the excitement in these situations comes from the other two pillars – combat or roleplay. Generally (and there are a few notable exceptions), exploration in itself isn’t rules-supported.
  • It’s not clear what it is. The player’s handbook gives some examples about Exploration being “the give and take of the players describing what they want to do, and the Dungeon Master telling them what happens as a result.” (PHB, p8) – this sounds an awful lot like the entire gaming experience – or Apocalypse Worlds’ roleplay as a conversation – do these things not happen during combat or roleplay?
  • It relies on a traditional GM vs. players model of narrative control. This control has since been shifted in so many games, and in so many play cultures, that the “wander around and find out” type of exploration now feels dull and lifeless to many of us. If I’m planning a wilderness expedition, I’m much more likely to use a 13th Age-style montage or ask my players for descriptive details with Paint The Scene questions than I am to feed information myself.
Dark forests should be scary by themselves, without needing combat or roleplaying as well

Categorizing exploration

Word lovers, look away now. I’m going to posit that exploration is too generic a term, so I’m going to create some portmanteau’s to split it into useful categories. I’m going to argue that exploration is primarily about transfer of information – that is, finding stuff out. This can happen in a few ways.

  • Placeploration is background learning. This can be utterly rubbish, learning what happened 200 years ago (the “Adventure Background” bit we all used to skip over before the actual adventure) – or it can be a brilliant piece of versimilitude. It can foreshadow future events, or provide details of what’s going on in the world’s metaplot. Basically, learning anything that isn’t usable this session falls into this category.
    • It takes a few days to cross the forest, and you find the lumber camps abandoned and empty. Make me an Intuition check (succeeds) – looks like they packed up in a hurry, and there are indistinct boots and tracks that look like goblins around here. After you’ve recovered the crown, you could come back here and look into that.
  • Plotsploration is directly relevant secrets and clues for the current plot. By exploring the dungeon, the city or the world you uncover secrets and clues that either bring you closer to the confrontation, or provide an advantage in it. This works best as a drip-drip of information, and can happen during, as well as in between, combat and roleplaying scenes.
    • This room is clearly a prison. There’s chains and manacles on the walls where prisoners must have been held, but no sign of the Prince. Closer inspection of the manacles reveals they’ve been unlocked, and there are a couple of broken lockpicks on the floor nearby – a picklock did this, and not a particularly good one at that.
  • Perilsploration is less about information transfer and more about crossing a barrier. You’ve got to walk across Mirkwood to get to tell the elves, and it’s going to be dangerous. These places should be dangerous even if they didn’t have combat or roleplaying in, so sometimes you might have to create a skill challenge in order to model it. Games that do this well already, saving you this time, are The One Ring, Trophy, 13th Age (montages can be switched to any system, the rules are so straightforward), Ironsworn, Mouse Guard, and a lot of the PBTA games. These are good frameworks to get some placesploration in as well, as your players try to overcome the barrier.
    • The signal tower is three days away, and you’ve only got two. We’ve got a skill check each – probably at DC 15 unless you try something exceptional – to try and get there in time, and you’ll need at least 3 successes to get there in time. What  are you rolling?

Once you’ve got exploration split into these categories, it’s easier to incorporate it into your game – think about each instance you have in your prep, and whether its a barrier, current info, or future info – and spread out your clues appropriately. I’ll pull together some examples in a future post – in the meantime, what other fixes do you have for exploration? Or are you happy with it as it’s presented in TTRPGs generally? Let me know in the comments.

by guyeatsfood

The First Two Pillars in One-Shot Design – Combat and Roleplaying

In the DMG, D&D talks about the three pillars of D&D play as combat, roleplaying and exploration. While this is a generic way to look at play (and I think the first two are probably better defined in the collective mind than the third), it’s a useful check to see if your one-shot adventure has balance. I’m going to look at each one in turn, and how you can tweak your one-shot if you think it’s missing one or more of them.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

Combat

This should be easy, right? Well, I think good combat in one-shots is tricky – that’s why I wrote about it here and here. I would say that, while it’s great to be able to circumvent combat challenges, if I’m playing an action-oriented one-shot system, I want at least one challenging combat in a one-shot that can’t be avoided. At least one of the pregens is likely to shine in combat, and missing it out is sub-optimal. And maybe even in less combaty systems – I’m sure a lot of Call of Cthulhu one-shots could be improved by a tussle with some cultists somewhere along the way.

Saying “a challenging combat” means different things in different systems, but I think it’s as much about fight duration as actual peril. A fight of around 3 full rounds (of everyone taking a turn) is about the optimum I reckon – and I’m sure there’s some maths people can do for individual systems to make this work. For D&D and similar systems with a ‘balance’ system, it’s probably around at least the “Hard” mark of wherever you balance encounters; although in Feng Shui and Conan 2d20, just use the guidance they supply, they already balance combat well for one-shots.

Don’t have enough combat in your one-shot? Bandits, gangsters or men with guns should be easy to add – if you’re not sure about timings put them in at the start and give them clues to lead to the next scene – just don’t add them for the sake of it, link them to the plot.

Roleplaying

Easy to miss, and easy to fix. A good rule of thumb is around 3 NPCs that the players could meaningfully interact with, and who have relevance to their mission. They might not spend lots of time with all three, but it gives them some options as to how to relate to the NPCs. Ideally they’ve got some link to at least one of the pregens – even if they’re both high elves – and to make them shine, give them some contrasting wants and needs. This doesn’t have to be massively complex or dramatic, just enough for them to need to rub up against the plot to achieve these goals.

For example, the tramp merchant wants rid of the pirates plaguing his shipping lines, but he also needs to keep costs down super-low. The princess-to-be wants her prince rescuing, but also wants a more exciting suitor. The crime boss wants his rival offed, but needs everyone to think he did it himself. All of these, even if only tangential to the plot, offer a meaningful interaction where both outcomes are interesting.

To make them pop at the table, give each of these three a schtick to use at the table – rubbing their eyes, a facial mannerism, an accent even if you’ve got the chops for it. For a con one-shot, don’t worry about this being a bit corny – broad brush strokes work best. Both “Basil Brush” and “Terry Jones playing a woman” voices have done me proud over my years of convention GMing!

Don’t have enough roleplaying in your one-shot? Stick in a neutral, or even a friendy NPC, and give them some conflicting motivations to get in the way and rub against the PCs.

Exploration

Now, this is trickier. You see, I’m not sure if even D&D is clear on what makes exploration fun – which is why this will be continued next week!

by guyeatsfood

The Sixth Revelation – Hearts of Wulin, Masks, City of Mist

Conventions are great. A chance to play games with like-minded people, and to spend time with too much drink, too much food, and not enough sleep. Back in the day, “Con Reports” used to be a thing – forums would fill up with people’s reports of the games they’d played, the fun they’d had, what they had for lunch and how much it cost (the lunch, not the convention – I kid you not). You don’t see them much anymore, but after going to Revelation – the sixth annual(ish) Powered by the Apocalypse convention in Sheffield, I thought I’d write down some thoughts.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

Revelation is a weekend event where all the games are Powered by the Apocalypse (PBTA), Forged in the Dark (FITD), or related derivations. After some pushing the organisers, I got confirmation that e.g. Spire, Heart, Belonging Outside Belonging and similar games would work fine – basically, if it’s been informed by the sort of gameplay that PBTA engenders, it’s good to go. Which means, you get a tight range of games, and a group of players that dig shared narrative. Running PBTA at Revelation is less of a risk than at some other cons – less of a risk that the players will plan or turtle, or not want to just play to find out. Of course, after making a fuss about what games were allowed, I ran two ‘classic’ PBTA systems.

This year was about 25-30 punters, five slots, and a mixture of single-session and multiple-slot games. I’m not usually a fan of multi-slot con games as it reduces the choice for everyone, but I can grudgingly agree that at Revelation it makes sense so you can see PBTA/FITD games over a longer period. And I can’t talk, since I’ve run double-slotters a few times at them. Like all the Garrison cons, it’s all about the games – there are no seminars or other events, so the norm is to play in every slot – I like this, play is the centre of the hobby and the most important thing we do. We should be going to conventions to play, and conventions should be putting play at the centre of everything.

I ran a double-slot two-table cross-universe game of Masks with my co-MC Neil, and a single-slot game of Hearts of Wulin. I also played  City of Mist in a single-slot game. I’ve split my thoughts into con practicalities (no lunch prices, sorry) and games thoughts, so here goes:

Practicalities

  • Cons are great, and venue matters. The Garrison hotel is almost the perfect place for an RPG convention, such that a few minor changes were noticed – no standing lights in the cells, for instance, and some confusion over the Saturday finish times. That said, I still love running in the cells, and I’m sure at other venues I’ll notice how much better the acoustics are in your own little nook (even if what you gain in audio is sometimes sacrificed in visual in the dim lighting).
  • Sharing a room at a con is great. I’ve become a bit of a solo con-goer in recent years, but I shared a room, which made a much more convivial (although perhaps more boozy and less sleep-filled) weekend. I might have convinced myself back towards it. It was also handy for Masks prep as we could sketch out plans over breakfast.
  • See comment re lighting above – the print on some PBTA playbook sheets is tiny! Print them out A3 in future for a convention, or make your own simplified ones. Similarly, I should have folded my Masks sheets before distributing – if you don’t the booklet for moves starts with the Adult Moves, which you aren’t going to be using.

Games

  • PBTA is varied and diverse! Even disregarding FITD and the other splits, I played three very different games over the course of the weekend in terms of structure of play and player experience, what’s expected of players, etc. City of Mist is, as far as I can tell, pretty close to a trad game – with just enough flexibility in the tags for different approaches and player-driven spontaneity. Hearts of Wulin is entirely at-the-table; my prep was only a backdrop to the melodrama that unfolded. Masks sat somewhere in the middle, but some of that was the necessary structure for us to run parallel games across universes.
  • Multi-table games work, and are a lot of fun. They do rely on the two GMs being comfortable with about the same amount of prep work though, and luckily we were (both of us have also run ‘vanilla’ Masks quite a bit too). We had two parallel universes being combined (the All Star Society and the All Star League) and the teenage heroes (All Star Juniors/Juniorz) having to save the day. At the midpoint – the end of the first session, a failed merge of the universes meant two players swapped tables – and there was more player exchanging to come. The villains of one universe were the hero mentors of the other – it all sounds complicated until you realise we just ripped off Crisis on Infinite Earths. All great fun, and good to push the boat out for a showcase game.
  • Fewer players isn’t always best. Because of a drop-out I had 3 players for Hearts of Wulin, and I think it would have been cleaner with 4 – certainly, the Entanglements were head-scratchy as everyone had to be linked to everyone else. Everyone filling them out at the table was harder than I thought, too – I’m tweaking my prep to run it again at Virtual Grogmeet, and I’ll pre-populate some of them with NPCs to help.

So, there are my Revelation thoughts. Why did con reports fade away? If you’ve got any ideas, let me know below – and if you’d like to hear more about any of the games let me know in the comments.