I think that a solid understanding of what a random encounter does will help you decide how to include them into your game, if at all.
Savage Worlds: Tips for Speeding Combat
Posted by Joshua on Nov 11, 2008
Nothing Earth-shattering, just some handy hints to keep things moving along:
- Use two decks for initiative. Have someone other than the GM shuffle the second deck while the first is in use, and at the end of a round when a Joker’s been played just swap decks. (If possible, use decks with different color backs, so that you have no problems separating out the cards when you have people on hold past the point where you reshuffle.)
- Collect the initiative cards as people take their actions, that way the top of the discard pile always reminds you where the count-down is.
- People who go on hold should flip their cards over and hang on to them until they act, so you can tell at a glance who’s Holding vs. whose initiative hasn’t rolled around yet, and who doesn’t need to be dealt a new card if they’re still holding at the end of the round.
- If somebody dithers when their Init comes up, tell them they’re on hold and move on–when they make up their mind they can go.
- Use physical tokens for Bennies and Wounds (I like to use White and Red poker chips, respectively) and to mark powers with duration (e.g. if somebody has the Armor spell on them, give them 3 tokens, like pennies or life-stones from Magic, and have them discard one each turn–when they’re out the spell’s over).
- Similarly, mark Shaken characters with something easily visible; if using miniatures, I like to drop a little pipe-cleaner ring around the figure. When you’re not using minis, another poker chip will do.
- Roll the attacks for all the Extras (or all of them in a convenient clump) at once. SW is designed to allow for this; since they get no Wild Die, it’s easy to just roll one die per Extra.
- When rolling to hit, remember that you never care how many raises you get beyond one. After applying any modifiers, just ask Does it beat the Parry? By 4 or more? (For Throwing/Shooting it’s the range TN instead, but same idea.)
- When rolling damage, you do care about the number of raises up to 4, but you can still simplify a little if you remember that you don’t care about any remainder so you don’t need to divide. Subtract off the Toughness and compare does it beat 0? 4? 8? 12? 16? Most people, even the math-phobic, can just see the answer.
- Don’t look up rules during play. (I know I said this in my Three Don’ts post, but it bears repeating.) If you don’t know the rule off the top of your head, make something up that seems reasonable. Make a mental note to review it later after the session.
- If somebody challenges your interpretation, don’t argue. Either stick to your guns or give in, but don’t stop for debate. If what they’re proposing isn’t ludicrous, I’d say let them have their way. You’re going to look up the actual rule later, so at most it’s going to affect this one combat, and Fast! Furious! Fun! trumps your guess as to fidelity to a rule you can’t at the moment remember. Yeah, it gives your players a minor incentive to challenge you, but if you’re not playing with mature players who won’t abuse the system and you… well, you have bigger problems than that.
Posted in Advice/Tools || 2 Comments »
Now That’s A Dungeon Setting!
Posted by Joshua on Nov 7, 2008
Real life cavern, in Mexico’s Cave of Crystals .
Posted in Cool Links || 2 Comments »
The Necessity of Random Encounters in D&D
Posted by Joshua on Nov 5, 2008
The author goes on to list what he sees as the advantages and disadvantages of random encounters, but quite remarkably to my mind never actually mentions the real purposes of random encounters in terms of setting and game design. So he lists Pros as being things like killing off annoying characters or filling time, and the Cons as serving no story purpose or throwing the wealth per level guidelines out of whack (and I need to rant about that some day). No mention at all is made of anything relating to the setting, or verisimilitude, or even resource management.
The post seems to ignore the two most important features of random encounters: naturalism, and husbanding resources. They’re the GM’s chief tool in presenting the setting as a world that actually contains stuff that isn’t there for the sole purpose of being part of the PCs story, and they are the game system’s primary reason the players can’t completely optimize their resources (particularly daily powers in D&D)–the chance of such an encounter is why players have to keep something in reserve.
(I’d like to get a bit of definition out of the way: by random encounters I mean any encounter that isn’t determined by story needs or the PCs’ direct actions. It doesn’t necessarily literally have to have come about by rolling dice on a table, though that’s certainly an option, but it’s something that isn’t required as a plot-point of the story or because the PCs have decided to seek out, say, the chief of the palace guard and have an encounter with him.)
Naturalism is important, in my opinion, even if you’re running a story-oriented sort of game. If the setting contains no features at all that aren’t independent of the needs of the story, then the world will lack all verisimilitude and feel flat and lifeless…if it doesn’t degenerate into parody. The central joke of Knights of the Dinner Table, after all, is that the GM is stuck with three players out of four who refuse to see the world as containing any features that aren’t clues, prizes, antagonists or (rarely) allies. If there’s a cow, it must be a magic cow and they capture it and drag it along; if there’s a gazebo it’s a hostile encounter. But if you don’t have random encounters, then the players will be absolutely right in assuming that if the GM bothers to mention it, it must be significant. The world will lack any depth. This, btw, is the curse of many of the graphically intensive computer RPGs…players correctly assume that if something can be interacted with on-screen it must be significant, because the programming and art resources won’t be wasted on mere flavor. But if the setting contains random encounters, and the players are aware of it, they are thrust in the much more realistic position of no longer knowing whether something they run into is there by chance or design. They have to reason about the logic within the gameworld instead of logic about the story, which I think is not only much more satisfying, but makes for better stories. If the players can correctly reason that the vizier is secretly the bad-guy, because viziers are always the bad-guys and besides, he has a goatee, the resulting story only works as a comedy.
While naturalism is valuable for pretty much any kind of system, resource management is peculiar to certain kinds of systems and settings…but is a particularly important part of D&D and its progeny. If you have a system where resources are defined in terms of their availability per day, per encounter, etc, and are replenished by rest (rather than, say, going back to the store and buying more ammo) then it’s an essential part of the design that the players have to consider whether they’re likely to have to call on those resources at times not of their own choosing. The random encounter is what balances the X times a day abilities against those that can be used continuously (such as swinging a sword). If you take it away, either you have to add time pressure to every scenario (which can be quite a strain on verisimilitude) or you have to ramp everything up (or scale the resources back) to match the assumption that the party will always have its full resources and be willing to expend them all.
You could think that it needn’t truly be random, and that as GM you can just devise the encounters just so to make the party expend resources at precisely the right pace, but IMO you’d be wrong. You’d be wrong because the players aren’t stupid, and they know the game, and they know that as GM you have infinite resources to throw against them, so they will reason that if you hit them with something when they’re particularly low on resources it’s because you’ve chosen to be unfair. Which is true. Without randomness whatever you do to them you’ve explicitly chosen to do. But that means unless you’re willing to be a jerk and kill them just because you can (and good luck getting people to play with you once you’ve established that reputation), you had better not hit them with anything challenging when they’re low on resources–unless you’re also willing to cheat like mad so they come out on top despite it. But if they know you won’t do that then they’ll be all the more likely to spend all the resources they’ve got and then turtle.
Openly and publicly using random encounters is the solution to that whole set of problems. If they know that there’s a certain chance of random encounters per period depending on the environs, and some of them might be hostile, then it’s up to them to decide whether to hold something in reserve or chance it–and whether hunkering down in place to recover resources is worth the risk or even possible. The GM doesn’t have to decide to punish or not punish them for recklessness or over-caution…the setting has certain known features and the players can roleplay whether and how much risk they want to take given the stakes and circumstances.
If you’re really considering whether you will eliminate random encounters in your game, what you really need to think about is how you intend to convey the texture of the setting and not give sense that the PCs are locked in The Matrix where everything is just an illusion for their benefit, and in a D&D-like game how you’re going to deal with the players wanting to blow all their resources in each encounter and then to sit around and recover them for the next encounter. Random Encounters aren’t the only way to deal with either, but I think they’re one of the simplest and best approaches I’ve seen.
Getting in the Mood
Posted by Joshua on Nov 4, 2008
I’ve been away for a week on business, so I haven’t been posting…but I have been reading:
I’d forgotten how good Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stories are, and how fired up they get me to play RPGs.
On a more modern note, I really enjoyed:
Also a potential source of inspiration, at least for an over-the-top high magic setting where mad evil wizards can shrink cities and drown continents. That the protagonist is a kobold housekeeper for one of the worst of these mad wizards is icing on the cake. There’s plenty of stuff to steal here for fans of mega-dungeons.