The Thing With the Guy In the Place

Look, we all go way back and I owe you, from the thing with the guy in the place, and I'll never forget it. - Reuben, Ocean's Eleven

My approach to creating and running a sandbox means putting lots of balls in the air at once. I've used the traditional dungeon and megadungeon as analogs for the social relationships, factions, and intrigues which provide the focal point for action in my campaign, and like a vast labyrinth of corridors, rooms, tunnels, and caverns, the intricacy of those complex relationships et al. becomes apparent the more the adventurers explore. Keeping it all straight requires some real effort on my side of the screen.

So, what about the players?

In a dungeon crawl, the players and their characters are likely working from an actual map, created as they explore; it is more-or-less - hopefully more! - a representation of what the referee sees on his side of the screen. Virtually every map I recall was covered with annotations, descriptions of monsters and traps and treasure left behind, names of characters, records of battles lost and won. The map which we produced in play was our record not only of the physical space but of events and interactions as well. But our campaign doesn't generate a physical location map of the sort with which dungeon explorers are accustomed, so that's meant looking for other ways to keep them up to speed.

First, our adventure logs provide a record of the events of the game. The wiki format allows me to link to the pages of characters the adventurers meet and locations they visit, immediately cross-referencing 'the guy' and 'the place' with 'the thing.' We've referenced the logs a few times during play, when memories around the table proved hazy. The adventure logs are composed from the notes I keep as we play, and they are checked by the players to make sure I didn't miss anything important to them.

I also use ability checks - roll under Wit on 1D20, usually - as a means of a determining something a character might know about the setting, or to recall a detail that the player is struggling to remember. The characters in my campaign aren't explorers in a post-apocalyptic wasteland - much is known and knowable to their characters without the need for first-hand discovery, so giving the players a roll to determined if their character knows a fact, based on background, skills, or career, is a reasonable way to represent the depth and breadth of their of their characters' experience.

Finally, I tried to build a relationship map for all of the non-player characters of the game-world, but neither writing it out by hand nor using any of the different software programs at my disposal was feasible - there are simply too many relationships for me to manage graphically, and it's not really all that helpful compared to the other options that the wiki provides for managing the many connections between characters. A relationship map is, on the other hand, perfectly feasible to produce specifically for the player characters, to diagram the relationships which they've created in the course of their adventures. I'm using Dia to produce this relationship map. The first draft simply shows the people with whom they've interacted so far, but I'm working on a second draft which includes organisations and places as well, which is proving a bit more of a challenge to create visually than I'd hoped - when it's done, I hope to be able to present them with a 'map' of the 'social dungeon' they've been exploring.

Lazy Saturday Link Dump

FXR's Honor + Intrigue campaign, De cape et d'épée, is underway - check out the adventure logs, and if your French isn't up to the task, remember that Translate is your friend.

The campaign starts in the midst of a trip to the market, a duel interrupted, the king thrown from his horse . . . and the assassination of Concino Concini!

If you're on Obsidian Portal and you haven't added this campaign to your favourites . . . well, why the heck haven't you added it yet?!

Beedo recounts a Gencon seminar on historical roleplaying, which he summarises thus: "The overarching advice that came out of the seminar, a guide to solving all problems that arise when running a period game, is to use common sense, don't be an ass, and have a clear understanding what everyone at the table wants from the game." This is a topic I've thought about a bit, and I always like to read others' take on it.

Daystar Eld has a great piece on offering meaningful choices to the players and their characters. Hint: tough choices are good, and knowing they're tough choices is better.

Rethinking Game-World Delivery

Inspired by a rpg.net thread, John Bell at The Retired Adventurer has a great idea for streamlining supplement design. One of the problems for referees attempting to use random tables on the fly is that the more extensive and detailed the tables, the more involved they are to use in actual play. John proposes a new way of organizing and delivering information in a supplement which matches the way the referee is likely to need and present it to the players, including using a dice drop map to avoid flipping back and forth between different tables scattered across several pages. It's an elegant, insightful approach.

I make extensive use of random tables - most of the situations faced by the adventurers to date in my Flashing Blades campaign began as random encounters from the game's encounter tables in the back of the book. The adventurers are about to find themselves approached to undertake a mission to Milan on behalf of no less a personage than the Duke of Savoy himself, and this patronage opportunity began its existence as a randomly generated encounter.

But that's also the key to how I - and I think quite a few gamers - use random tables, in advance of actual play. Frex, I roll for a half-dozen random encounters, flesh out all the relevant information for each encounter, then put them in a list to use in actual play. The only thing I'm rolling for at the table is encounter occurrence - everything else is generated outside of actual play. Rather than spending time rolling for the details of the encounter at the table, I can keep up the flow of actual play; there's no pause while I piece together the results to give them coherence. Even the dice drop map approach still takes more time to interpret than I like to spend at the table.

The advantage - and the challenge, and the fun - of using dice drop or other sorts of mini-games is creating the setting in actual play, reducing or even eliminating the need for advance preparation. For someone who loves stochasticity in roleplaying games - running my own campaign with a mix of random tables from Flashing Blades and adapted from other sources as well as other randomizers such as the Mythic Game Master Emulator and Rory's Story Cubes - I can really appreciate the appeal.

I'll be interested to see where John, and others, go with this in the future.

Honor + Intrigue Campaign Wiki at Obsidian Portal

There is a new wiki at Obsidian Portal, De Cape et d’Épée, for an Honor + Intrigue campaign. The campaign shows as "In Planning," and I'm really looking forward to following along once it gets rolling. The wiki includes a H+! character which is worth a look-see if you're curious about what an adventurer's stats look like.

The referee is un Québécois and the wiki is in French.

Also, note to self: request that H+I gets added to the games listings on OP.