Right kids, while I gear up for the next few big things I’ve got planned — and while I wait to see if you all even want one of those big things — I’m gonna open up the ole mailbag and answer some questions.

You should know the f$&%ing drill by now, right? If you want to submit a question for a future mailbag, e-mail it to ask.angry@angry.games. Be brief. Get to the f$&%ing point. Don’t offer me a bunch of useless context or explanation. Don’t tell me your stupid feelings on the matter. Just ask the question. It should take you two or three lines of text. Tops. I delete dozens of questions every month after glancing at the length of the thing in the preview window and saying, “oh hell no, I ain’t reading that.”

And tell me what you call. Explicitly. And since this is so f$&%ing hard for all of you, here’s a simple template you can cut and paste:

Hi Angry,

Call me [NAME] [QUESTION WITHOUT A BUNCH OF USELESS PONTIFICATION OR BACKGROUND CRAP]

Thanks,
[NAME]

This month, I’m specifically answering questions to do with the AOWG series. That’s Angry’s Open-World Game and it’s turned out to be one of the most popular things I’ve ever typed. Who knew? Not all these questions came in by e-mail. Some were comments, private messages, or came up in the Discord server I maintain for my loyal patrons. And, as I’ve been asked a lot of very similar questions, I’m combining and summarizing several different questions.

CMQ Justin and many others ask…

Are you using the Tension Pool in your AOWG? How do you combine your Tension Pool with your random encounter tables? Can you even use the Tension Pool in an AOWG? How?

For those not in the know, the Tension Pool is an awesome mechanic I invented to keep track of time, to encourage players to think about the time they were wasting in dangerous environments, and to replace the 10% chance of random encounters each hour or whatever other s$&% mechanic the D&D edition du jour suggested. If you’re new to the site, you may never have heard of it. And if you’ve been around awhile, you’ve probably seen so many different iterations that it’s impossible to make sense of the rules that have been scattered across multiple articles at this point.

So, how about I write a final, definitive rule set for the Tension Pool. How it works and how to apply it to dungeon, wilderness, and town-based adventures, and even how to use it to track downtime activities? That sounds good, right? Let’s say I put that out on September 8 for my general audience and on September 3 for my loyal patrons? Cool?

Anyway, the Tension Pool and the AOWG. Look, I’m bad at using my own mechanics. I wasn’t actually using it for my AOWG. But I am now. This means yes, you can use the Tension Pool with an AOWG. I mean, why couldn’t you? It’s just a mechanic for keeping track of when players’ time-consuming and risk-taking actions cause bad s$&% to happen. It’s a random encounter system and so much more.

Just replace whatever method you normally use to roll for random encounters with the Tension Pool. Done and done.

“But Angry, I don’t use random encounters!”

Wrong.

Anyway, two things to keep in mind if you’re going to use the Tension Pool for your AOWG. Or for any game, really. First, be careful about the temporal resolution of actions. There’s basically three time scales for the Tension Pool. There’s minutes-and-hours for when time-consuming actions take about ten minutes. The Tension Pool clears every hour at that resolution. There’s hours-and-days for when time-consuming actions take about four hours and the Pool clears every day. And there’s days-and-weeks when time-consuming actions take most of a day and the Pool clears every six-day week. You can either assume everything in the world shuts down on Sunday for religious reasons or just shorten your weeks to six days.

Minutes-and-hours is the resolution for dungeon-crawling and moment-to-moment adventuring.

Hours-and-days is the resolution for overland travel, though the boring days will just see you rolling to clear the pool every day.

Days-and-weeks is the resolution for downtime, healing, and other between-adventure-dicking-around-in-civilization crap.

The resolution you use depends both on the players’ actions and how often complications should arise. For example, when my players were running around town last week doing investigatory crap, I was using hours-and-days resolution. Partly because wandering town, running down witnesses, and talking to people takes hours, not minutes, and partly because complications should be a daily risk. The PCs weren’t going to spend weeks in town. Just days. Next week, when players wander into the cursed forest to hunt down a monster, I’m going to be using minutes-and-hours resolution. Even though it’s overland travel, they’re not going far. They’ll be out in the woods for hours, not days. And meanwhile, the individual actions they take to deal with obstacles and explore and s$&% will take minutes, not hours to resolve.

If they were hiking through the cursed forest to cover ground and reach some town on the far side, I’d laugh my a$& off because they should use the road that goes around the cursed forest. But I’d also use hours-and-days resolution since they’ll be traveling for days, not weeks and not hours.

Second, remember that the Complication Table that goes along with the Tension Pool is the place to adjust everything you want to adjust. Don’t f$&% with the basic Tension Pool mechanic. If you want an area that’s more dangerous or less dangerous, fix it in the Complication Table.

Recall that my brilliant random encounter tables ain’t just lists of lurking monsters. They include things like Travelers, Points of Interest, Hazards, Unmapped Monster Lairs, that kind of s$&%. Which are all, conveniently, complications. Complications can the gamut from the not-actually-dangerous to the deadly-f$&%ing-serious. Spooky noises and weird distractions are a sort of non-complicating Complication. They make the players nervous and get them to waste time.

Let me give you a solid how to actually do this s$&% right example. Since the days of good ole AD&D 2E, I’ve used the 2d10 format for random encounters. Because it’s got this great in-built rarity to it. It looks like this:

2 Very Rare
3 Very Rare
4 Rare to Very Rare
5 Rare
6 Rare
7 Uncommon
8 Uncommon
9 Common
10 Common
11 Common
12 Common
13 Common
14 Uncommon
15 Uncommon
16 Rare
17 Rare
18 Rare to Very Rare
19 Very Rare
20 Very Rare

Through the magic of dice curves and probabilities and s$&%, when you use a table like that, the party will run into Common encounters 44% of the time, Uncommon ones 26% of the time, Rare encounters between 18% and 24% of the time, and stumble on the Very Rare about 6% to 12% of the time.

Really handy to know that isn’t it? I mean, if you’re just building a simple wandering monster table, you can make sure the Common encounters are of-level threats, the Uncommon encounters are one level above or below the party, Rare encounters are two levels above or below the party, and Very Rare encounters are deadly. Or, if you’re building a Complication table for a region, you can adjust the danger by making combats and ambushes and hazards Rare or Very Rare and making interesting diversions Common and Uncommon. If the region’s sparse and has no civilization, Monster Lairs and Encounters are probably Common while Points of Interest might be Rare or Very Rare. Dangerous wastelands might have Common and Uncommon Hazards, but it’ll be Rare to stumble on anything alive.

See how that works?

The other great thing about this 2d10 table is that it makes it easy to improvise. Because, unfortunately, you might have to pull some s$&% out of you’re a$&. Last week, for example, my players were dicking around town doing a bunch of investigatory crap. Which I wasn’t quite expecting. But good for them. Anyhoo, a Complication arose. So, I rolled 2d10 and got a 15, which told me I needed an Uncommon Complication. In town, harmless non-complications and interesting diversions should be Common whereas dangerous and deadly complications should be Rare and Very Rare. Uncommon means something hurtful, but not dangerous. Since the party had had some bad run-ins with the loved-and-respected local Lord, I decided word had gotten around. The party’s reputation had taken a hit and I bumped up all the social interaction difficulties.

By the way, that’s another key to using the Tension Pool. Whenever possible — and it’s not always possible — whatever Complications arise during play, they should have something to do with the party’s actions. Random encounters are okay, but not totally random. Complications are a great way to express the consequences of player actions.

Then again, even random encounters with wandering monsters represent consequences. Efficient, quiet travel minimizes encounters with wandering monsters. Slow, loud, reckless, inefficient travel through dangerous terrain increases the odds of a wandering monster encounter. Wandering monster encounters are a consequence of the players’ choices. And if you don’t use them, you’re bad and you should feel bad.

Bahnen and others ask…

How do you prep a city or town? What do cities and towns look like in your AOWG? What do you prep? Do they always have maps, keys, smoke signals, and that kind of thing?

Nothing looks like anything in an AOWG. Or rather everything looks like it needs to. There’s no standard format for any of this crap. That’s not the point. The point is to prep only what you absolutely need to run an okay game of D&D for four hours. So, a settlement could be nothing but a name and one line of description. Or it could include a list of important and interesting locations in that settlement. It could have a map with a key. The map could be super detailed or blocky, blobby crap. It could be a player-facing map or it could be something I hide behind the screen in shame. It could include a whole roster of NPCs. Or organizations.

Before you build a settlement — whatever build means in this context — you’ve got to figure out why you’re building it. Are the PCs just passing through? Are they stopping for a day or two to buy supplies and heal up? Are they going to hang out for days? Explore? Interact? Are you running adventures in the town? Is it going to serve as a home base? And how much can you comfortably pull out of your a$& before the lack of prep starts to hurt your ability to run an okay game?

That’s why you prep properly. Remember, there ain’t no room for worldbuilding with an AOWG. Worldbuilding takes too long and most of the world you build never comes out at the table. You build only what you need to run your next session. That’s why you write a Player-Do list or a Script before you start building s$&%. And you only build the s$&% you’re going to need for your next session.

You can always invent more details on the fly. You can always flesh out a town with more detail later. Just because a village doesn’t have a map today doesn’t mean it can’t have one tomorrow. And if you guess badly and the party ends up loafing around a town you expected them to pass right through, you just have to bulls$&% your way through one interesting session. Then you can build a fully-realized town around all the crap you s$&% out during play.

BoroFreak and others wanted to know…

You said your players have to maintain their equipment or else it’ll break. How are you handling that?

First, I want to thank you, specifically, BoroFreak. It was really helpful when you typed out the rules for repairing weapons and armor from the 5E PHB. It turns out, both of my arms were broken that day and I couldn’t open the f$&%ing book myself and I really needed those rules to run my D&D 3.5 game. It’s a damned good thing you took the time to summarize them. I also love how you ended with “thanks for taking the time to read this” and added one of those obnoxious emojis. It was just the icing on top of the s$&% cake that was having minutes of my life wasted by someone who can’t just ask their f$&%ing question.

How am I handling it? Well, first, I told my players that if they don’t maintain their equipment regularly, I’m going to break their stuff. And if they actually don’t maintain their equipment, I’m going to start breaking their stuff. It’s easy. I have a f$&%ing brain. Do you not have one of those inside your skull? Do you need rules for every little f$&%ing thing? Can’t you just decide when a shield splinters or when a sword shatters? How the hell can you run an AOWG game if you can’t handle something as simple as breaking people’s stuff?

Fine, you want rules? How about I pull a rule out of my a$& right now for you.

Broken stuff seems like it’d complicate the players’ lives. And knowing their stuff might break would make the players really tense. Do I have some way of modeling Complications already that I could use here? Something that makes my players Tense? Anything at all? Let me think…

How about this? A two on a Complication roll — double ones assuming you’re using the awesome 2d10 format I told you about — a two on the Complication roll means spoiled supplies or broken equipment. If I roll a two on a Complication roll, something’s about to break the next time one of the players uses it. A shield splinters, armor gets crushed or ruined, a weapon breaks, a spellbook’s gotten wet and the ink is running and it needs to be recopied, a potion bottle broke, rations have spoiled, whatever.

By the way, the odds of that happening in any given major time period is 0.6%. Two-thirds of one percent. Pretty small.

But, every day the heroes spend adventuring, that Complication creeps up the table. So, the next day, a three on the Complication table means something gets broken. Then, it’s a four. A five. A six. Until it gets to 11. If the party spends ten days away from town or ignores their equipment’s needs for ten days, the chance of their stuff breaking hits 7% each hour. Or day. Whatever time period you’re tracking.

And if the players keep ignoring it, you can start spreading the Complication through the table. So, on day 11, it’s an 11 or 12 that breaks s$&%. On day 12, it’s an 11, 12, or 13. And so on.

I also sometimes break s$&% on fumbles and crits. Because I’m mean that way.

A broken thing is either gone forever — potions or spoiled rations or shield — or useless until repaired — armor or weapons or spellbooks — or else it simply ran out of stuff too soon — healer’s kit or spell component pouch — and needs to be resupplied.

Now, some of you might think that breaking important class tools like spellbooks and focuses and weapons and armor and thieves’ tools and s$&% is really painful. Really hard to deal with. And I don’t disagree. I just don’t see how that’s an argument against it. I mean, a mother$%&ing ogre is also really painful when it tries to kill you. Running out of hit dice and hit points is really painful. Adventuring is pain.

When the fighter’s favorite weapon breaks, he’ll have to borrow the wizard’s crappy melee weapon. Spellbook ruined and in need of recopying and rebinding? The wizard’s stuck with whatever spells he prepared for now. Thieves’ tools snapped and bent? You’re just going to have to break down a lot of doors and take a lot of traps to the face. Holy symbol broken? Time to swap your spell loadout for verbal or somatic component spells only. Or start scrounging for bat guano and leather strips.

Or turn around, head back to town, and try again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, whenever the party spends a full day in town and a bunch of money maintaining their gear, restocking their supplies, and repairing whatever’s broken, the chance of a breakage complication drops back down to a two on the 2d10 table. And keep in mind specialized tools like lockpicks and spellbooks and focuses and spell component pouches and s$&%? It takes a specialist to fix a specialized tool. So the party had better make sure they’ve got the right contacts. In other words, they’ve got to engage with the world and spend money and downtime between adventures. Those are good things.

How do you decide what thing to break? It’s up to you. But if there’s one member of the party who’s more derelict than most about keeping their gear up to snuff, you probably want to target that PC. And don’t be a pussy. Break something that’ll actually hurt.

Not that any of this s$&% actually matters. Once you tell the players that you’ll break their s$&% if they don’t maintain it and once you tell them how to maintain it, they’ll do it. Maybe they’ll push their luck once. But the minute you break something that hurts, they won’t push their luck again. So you can totally ignore it after that.

That said, this weapon breakage by increasing complication thing I literally just pulled out of my a$&% seems like fun. I’ll let you know how it goes.

F$&%ing loads of people ask…

What actually happened to your AOWG? How did it get broken? Can you tell us so we can avoid it? Hell, write anything else about your AOWG. Part four wasn’t really the end of the series was it? We want more!

I’ve been doing this s$&% for twelve years. I’d think, by now, you’d all understand how I do things. Like, I can forgive some of the newer readers who don’t know the score, but you long-timers? What the hell is wrong with you? You should understand hyperbole and sarcasm by now.

My AOWG didn’t totally break. It isn’t ruined. There’s nothing wrong with my AOWG advice. It’s brilliant. Use it. Even if you’re not running an AOWG, use it. It’s a great way for any adult with limited time to run any kind of RPG campaign at all. It’s good advice. Trust it.

My game hit a rough patch. Part of it was just scheduling inconsistency. The CR 30 challenge that every adult campaign eventually faces. We had canceled games, absences, late starts, early ends, all sorts of s%$&. Our useful game time was greatly diminished so we weren’t really getting anywhere.

But then, there were these play dynamics that were pretty specific to my players that f$&%ed everything up. Well, specific to my players and I. See, I’m a real living world kind of GM. Every NPC’s got a story. There’s always something going on in the world. When you step out your door every morning, you can see all the background stories playing out. The world’s alive. Simple as that.

My players like to be involved in things. And don’t want to miss out on good adventures and good stories and good opportunities. So they involve themselves in everything. Or they try to. And they won’t pursue anything until they know all their options. Motivations and needs be damned, they just don’t ever want to miss out.

I’m a big fan of splitting the party. Especially in town. When the PCs hit town, each character goes their own way and does their own things. Then, they decide on a next adventure and gather up and venture forth, right? So, when the party’s in town, they’re all running around doing their own things.

My players don’t have the best teamwork instincts. Once one of my players gets involved in something, they treat it like a personal story and keep on pursuing it alone. They don’t go back to their allies and say, “hey, this person has this problem and I think we can help them. Could be good for us.”

Now, I like my adventures organic. I don’t want a bunch of quest-givers standing around in a market. I don’t want random strangers approaching the PCs and saying, “hey, I have a mysterious job opportunity for you and a bunch of gold to pay you with.” I want my players to hear about a problem, decide it’s something they can solve, check out the lead, and then solve the problem.

But my players aren’t adventure-inclined. I mean, they like adventures and they play adventures and they made adventurer characters with adventurer motivations. Which is good. Because if they didn’t, I’d kick their a$&es to some other GM’s table and replace them. But my players tend to spend a lot of time trying to solve problems with their heads or their mouths. They rarely think, “good golly gosh but this is tricky; we need to find some adventuring way to fix this problem.” Instead, they go for “let’s keep talking this through until the solution magically presents itself.” Or, “if we just keep talking to the NPCs, we can fix them through the power of psychology and social skill checks even though we have never once managed to fix anything with psychology and social skill checks. But we have sure managed to make a lot of things much, much worse with psychology and social skill checks.”

And you can probably see how all of that led to the party’s spending days and days and days in town, running off, doing their own things, pursuing every tiny little story they could find, thinking and talking and thinking, and never sitting down and saying, “hey, here’s this problem that a good adventure can fix; let’s go on that adventure!”

Now, that said, there’s issues there I can see arising at lots of tables. Not just mine. And the whole problem revealed some s$&% I didn’t do well enough or often enough at my table. Things to do with signposting, urgency, needs and wants, and that kind of crap.

We had a sit-down though. Now, my party’s off to the cursed woods to hunt down a ghoul. And then there’s some ruins that they want to plunder once they’re done. And we’re all a lot clearer on the game we want to play and how to actually play it. And this s$&%’s also why I started thinking about that idiotic Dear Players… bulls$&%.

Meanwhile, you all totally forgot how this game works. I always refer to every little thing that happens as the biggest, best, worst, most catastrophic thing ever. Do you seriously believe I’m constantly irreparably breaking my games? Why would you even follow my advice? And I always say, “I’ll never write this” or “I’m not going to waste time discussing this.” And I always do write it. Of course there’s going to be a fifth AOWG lesson. If nothing else, it’s just too damned popular to let it die.

Besides, I didn’t even get to explain how all this AOWG crap only works because kishotenketsu. So look forward to that upcoming train wreck.

Moreover, this whole AOWG thing really isn’t about open-world gaming at all. And it’s not even about D&D. It’s really a lot of basic-a$& GMing s$&% presented in a new format. I mean, come on? Plan your sessions? Minimize your prep? Build paths and draw people off them? Relax and run a good f$&%ing game? Stop f$&%ing with the system and focus on the table experience? That’s not open-world gaming. That’s just f$&%ing gaming.

And I’ve got a lot more good s$&% like that to share. But you’ll never hear any of it now. Because I’m too pissed off at all of you to ever write anything else about my AOWG ever again.

Do you hear me? I am never writing about my Angry’s Open-World Game again. Never.