Given that it’s the end of the month and I’m up against the wall with a limited amount of time thanks to a surprise visit from some out-of-town family due to a little bit of an emergency, I’ve decided to round out the month by dipping into the ole Ask Angry mailbag and clearing a few questions. Next month, when I start releasing more content, I’ll do more of these. I really enjoy the chance to burn through a few specific issues in one article.
If you want to submit a question, e-mail it to ask.angry@angry.games. Make sure you very clearly and specifically tell me what name to use when I answer or else I will abuse you mercilessly. And, for the love of f$&%, keep it brief. I have to not only read every one of these, but I also have to insert them into the article itself. And edit them for clarity and brevity. If I take a look at your question and it’s too long or if I know I’m going to have to cut it down too much, I just ignore it. Sorry.
Nanban Jim asks…
I wonder how you’d make D&D chase encounters more dynamic.
I can’t criticize Jim for not phrasing that as a question because he didn’t know he was Asking Angry when he said it. He dropped it as a conversation starter into my Patron only Discord server and I happened to see it. It caught my attention because I know I need to write more about that dynamic conflict thing I mentioned a few articles back. And I’m gonna. But I figured I could offer a little bite-sized chunk about it right here and now.
Jim has also earned one of the very few lifetime immunities from Angry criticism because he’s been one of my most loyal, supportive, and encouraging friends over the years I’ve been doing this. Thank you, Jim, for everything.
So I said there were these two techniques you could use to build better non-combat encounters, right? Visualization and dynamic conflict. Did you happen to notice the secret connection between those two things? Why they got mentioned together and what they have in common?
Think about it. I’ll wait.
Well, you might have noticed that they both have nothing to do with game mechanics and everything to do with how you think. Because how you think about an encounter determines a lot more about how you’ll run it than all the rules and systems you might implement. If you think about an encounter the right way, you won’t need to fall back on specific rules so much. And that means you can save yourself a crap-ton of work and that you’ll be able to improvise more and be more reactive to your players.
Those two specific things also imply a really important dichotomy. One that’s super obvious in combat encounters but that tends to get totally overlooked outside of combats. And that’s the distinction between the environment and the conflict. GMs look at non-combat encounters as a single thing. A single game construct. And that’s why so many people got hung up on that dynamic conflict thing. When I said that the source of the conflict in my cliff-climbing scene was that nature hates the heroes and wants to kill them, people’s sloppy thinking led them to think that nature itself was the conflict. And because the conflict was happening in a natural environment, they assumed the scene was the conflict too. And they ran with that. The next thing I knew, people were talking about bizarre s$&% like living dungeons that moved traps around on their own.
Conflicts aren’t caused by forces, they are caused by motives. Nature doesn’t cause conflicts. The fact that nature is a cruel mistress that punishes anyone that leaves the civilized world causes conflicts. And environments aren’t conflicts. Environments provide neutral battlefields. The heroes and the baddies can interact with the battlefield, and the battlefield can influence the conflict thanks to the presence of hazardous terrain or obstacles that block the line of sight. But the combatants have to interact with the terrain to feel that influence. They have to move behind cover or walk through hazardous terrain or shove each other into pits.
That’s why, in my climbing challenge, nature can dislodge a rock from a cliff. The cliff is just a bit of neutral terrain. The heroes can use the cliff as a way to get from above to below. And nature can use the cliff as a weapon, dislodging a rock when a climber grabs it or rousing bats hidden in the cliff’s folds. I know it sounds needlessly pedantic and highly specific and arbitrarily nitpicking, but the way you think about it is hugely important. Building dynamic encounters is about training yourself to THINK the right way.
If you want to make a chase encounter more dynamic, that stuff I just said is the second thing you have to remember. The first thing has to do with how you describe the encounter. Because, the fact is, you can’t build a dynamic chase encounter in D&D. Because chases aren’t very dynamic in tabletop games.
Picture a monster chasing a hero in your head. You’ll probably see the two of them running full tilt, one trying to keep ahead, the other trying to catch up. And the outcome depends entirely on the interplay between the participants’ speeds and endurances. And while there is some strategy involved, the challenge comes down to who can pace themselves better. And once both sides enact their pacing strategy, there really aren’t many good reasons for either side to change it. No change, no dynamism. It’s just rolling dice to see who picked the right strategy.
Now, you COULD build a push-your-luck style minigame about pacing yourself in a chase if you wanted to. But that’s a bad approach. As a general rule, you want to avoid building around execution challenges in TTRPGs. And if the situation isn’t terribly dynamic by its nature, adding game mechanics to make it more dynamic is actually anathema to role-playing. Because all the important decisions happen in the layer of the games’ mechanics. Not the games’ fiction.
What you need to do is change the way you see the situation to begin with. It can’t be a chase; chases suck. And it can’t happen in a void; conflicts play out on battlefields. Instead, imagine someone trying to EVADE a group of PURSUERS through the back-alleys of the City of Santiem. Or through the wilds of Fangwald Forest. What do you see now?
Looks more dynamic, right? Now, at the very least, you – the GM – can just role-play the escapee and try to get away. Especially if you strongly visualize the scene. Outrunning your pursuers is less important. Now it’s about delaying them or distracting them so you can break the line of sight or making sudden changes they can’t keep up with or trying to go somewhere they can’t. You can implement different strategies and use the environment to your advantage. And that means the conflict will change as it plays out.
When you get good at it, you can play out a dynamic encounter like that without any prep at all. You have everything you need to know right in your head. And you can resolve any action with the game’s basic action adjudication rules. All you have to do is visualize the scene, role-play as the source of conflict, and resolve the players’ actions. Mostly.
I mean, you do have to be careful. When you’re role-playing as ‘the entire force of nature’ and playing out your desire to ‘destroy utterly any feeble representative of the civilized world who dares to leave the safety of their walls,’ you can win really easily. Do you KNOW what happens to a paladin that gets struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to any other PC. And that’s why you do have to impose some limits on what these forces can do. That’s what the prep work is really about. But that’s a mechanics thing. A balanced prep thing. And a good GM can even wing that s$&%. It just takes practice.
But all of that comes after you find a good way to think about the encounter itself. Describe the conflict in a way that separates the source of the conflict from the environment and views the environment as a tool both parties can use. And describe the encounter in a way that invites a dynamic conflict.
I’ll talk more about this s$&% in the weeks to come, but I want to put some very firm warnings here because I know people are already starting to f$&% around with dynamic encounters. Remember that dynamic encounters are just another tool for your GMing toolbox. Another hammer. When you get a new hammer, it’s easy to assume that every problem can be solved by hitting something or someone with it. And while that may be true in real life, game design is different. Static encounters aren’t bad because they’re static. They just can’t stick around for too long. They’re not very versatile. And dynamic encounters aren’t good because they’re dynamic. They’re just complex and tense. You need to mix that s$&% up, just like you mix up easy and hard combats and fast and slow scenes. Some encounters just can’t be reframed as dynamic encounters. Fortunately, there’s a place for static encounters at every table. Hell, fifty to seventy percent of your non-combats should be static encounters.
And sometimes, the players will find a way to win a dynamic encounter in one die roll. Or one round with no die rolls. They’ll do something that, by rights, shouldn’t require a die roll and can’t fail. And just as you should totally allow players to end combats – even complex combats – without breaking a sweat if they find a valid way, you need to hand them the win if they manage to find a way to steal it in a dynamic encounter. It’s a good thing. Too many GMs view encounters as a resource tax. The party must work a minimum of this hard to ‘deserve’ the win. Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. Either they win or they don’t.
Ted asks…
I have been struggling with the money system in D&D 5E. It requires too much math and bookkeeping and I’m looking for an alternative. I’ve read there is another approach to it that makes money abstract by giving characters a resource statistic. What do you think of that approach? And the way money is represented in RPGs? And if you make your own RPG, how would you represent money?
Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip
Ted started his e-mail with an apparently simple introduction that nonetheless managed to be totally ambiguous with regards to what I should call him. I don’t understand why this whole ‘tell me what to call you’ thing has to be so f$&%ing complicated. It’s a simple request. See that heading before the question? The one that says, “[BLANK] asks…” JUST TELL ME WHAT TO PUT IN THE F$&%ING BLANK! Don’t make it my choice. Don’t give me options. Especially don’t give me options when it’s unclear whether the first option you offer – the one that seems to be your real f$&%ing name – is an option you’re okay with me using. Don’t make up some sort of cutesy bulls$&% nickname that you think is funny. It isn’t. I’ve heard it a thousand times before. And don’t use grawlixes because you NEVER F$&%ING DO IT RIGHT. You use characters that will break social media sites or web browsers or the secret magical computer code that makes my website work or that just doesn’t look aesthetically correct.
JUST SAY, “CALL ME TED, HERE’S MY QUESTION!”
F&%$%&$&%$&$%&$&%$&$%&$&%$&$&%$&%&$%$&$&%$&$%&$$&$%&$$&%$&$%&$&%$&!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyway, TED…
You’ve already got two strikes against you. Now that I’ve gotten past your introduction, I see you complain about having to do too much math and bookkeeping to keep track of money in D&D. First, if you don’t like doing math and keeping records, you picked the wrong f$&%ing hobby. No one would take you seriously if you said, “I like playing soccer but I want to find a way to reduce the amount of running and kicking I have to do.” But everyone is always pissing and moaning about having to do simple math and write down the answer in TTRPGS like that’s a remotely valid complaint.
But, second, I don’t understand what the hell everyone else is doing to track money at their table. Nor experience points. Nor initiative. Because these are all things people b$&% about being too math-heavy or record-keepery. At my table, I just say things like, “you found 40 gold pieces” or, “the innkeeper charges you 10 gold pieces” and then my players add 40 or subtract 10 from ONE NUMBER on their character sheet and write down the new total. If that is too much math and bookkeeping, I’m not sure how you can actually do anything as complex as paying your rent on time or making change.
But, whatever… I’ll comment on the resource stat thing in general and why the resource stat idea works for some games and not for others and why you might change a lot more than you realize if you use resource stats.
For those not in the know, Ted’s referring to a game mechanic you find in some RPG systems wherein the players don’t track the actual amount of money their characters have in their pockets. Instead, it’s assumed characters have the ready cash they need to maintain their equipment, restock their ammo, pay their living expenses, and so on. But each character has this statistic to show their ability to pull together or borrow enough money to make a big purchase. Like acquiring a vehicle or a powerful weapon or a powerful reagent or whatever. During an adventure, they can make a die roll to see if they can acquire the thing they need. And there’s usually mechanics to determine how much of a strain such a purchase puts on their resources. Like, each time they make a big purchase, it reduces the specific stat by a certain amount for a certain period of time or something. Between adventures, players can put resources into building up or recovering their resource stat, thus representing their character paying off their debts or keeping current with resource-providing contacts or refinancing their loans at a low, fixed-rate or taking a money management course at the local college.
I’m going to refer to that system as the Credit Rating system. And we’ll refer to what D&D does – requiring players to keep track of each individual coin as they find it and spend it – as Coin Counting. You normally see Coin Counting systems in fantasy games like D&D. And Credit Rating systems pop up a lot in modern games and near-future games. And that’s generally because in the modern world, there’s a big difference between cash and spending power and there’s lots of ways for people to make big purchases without a briefcase full of paper money or a giant sack of coins. Occasionally, you’ll see a Credit Rating system in a genre to which it really doesn’t belong. Like in Burning Wheel, an execrable fantasy game system I don’t recommend to anyone for reasons that have nothing to do with its semi-misguided inclusion of a Credit Rating system.
And yes, I know that BW TECHNICALLY doesn’t have a specific genre, but the fantasy genre is strongly implied and I am not missing an opportunity to dump on BW because the months of my life I lost trying it and various derivatives out at the behest of others. F$&% me.
The thing is – and this is the reason why these systems tend to piggyback along with certain genres – the thing is that these systems do completely different things. And they’re not just ways of handling money. In fact, neither one has anything to do with money at all. Money systems in RPGs don’t have anything to do with money or economics. And anyone who claims otherwise doesn’t understand either money or economics or game design. Probably, they understand none of them.
That said, there’s a problem with having this discussion right now. And that problem is D&D 5E. The current iteration of D&D uses a Coin Counting system and it is exactly the right choice for D&D 5E. But it doesn’t use it very well. The execution sucks. This means people can point to it and say, “see the suckage; that’s why Coin Counting systems suck.” It’s like if you went to the worst bakery in town – a dirty, smelly, terrible place with an awful baker who never washes his hands after he poops – and bought and cake. The cake would be terrible, but that wouldn’t prove that cake is a terrible idea. Keep that in mind while I explain.
And no, I am not actually implying that Jeremy Crawford doesn’t wash his hands after he goes to the bathroom. But you never really know, do you?
When you dig down, money in fantasy RPGs is basically just a kind of advancement. Like leveling up, but different. It’s easier to see it in video games than it is to see it in D&D 5E though. In most fantasy RPGs, your gear determines a lot of about what you can do and how well you can do it. Armor and weapons determine your combat capabilities. Consumables supplement your character’s abilities, statistics, and resources. Other items provide bonuses to existing capabilities and grant entirely new capabilities. And as you get more powerful, you also get more powerful stuff to make you even more powerful. D&D 3E, D&D 4E, and Pathfinder 1E – still can’t talk about 2E – all exemplify the idea that your character’s gear is just another upgrade, advancement, and customization track. And thus money in those systems is just another kind of XP.
Modern RPGs present equipment differently. Outside of combat, there’s usually less emphasis placed on how your equipment changes your character. Personal equipment – stuff you can carry on your body – rarely drastically changes what your character can do and how well they can do it. That’s mostly determined by your character’s skills. The specialized gear that represents a specific character’s specific tools – like a hacker’s rig in a cyberpunk game – are the exception, not the rule. And there’s usually an entire system about upgrading those specific items that makes them very similar to upgrade systems. In most modern games, characters rarely upgrade their guns or armor. They pick the ones they like and stick with them. And when they do make changes, it’s usually because of something other than raw statistics or money concerns. Like the legality of openly carrying a fully automatic assault rifle in a shopping mall, for example, and what the cops will say about it when they find one in your trunk. Truth is that cost is rarely the limiting factor when it comes to equipment in modern games. There’s usually availability and legality rules, skill minimums, stat requirements, and other things to affect the decision. And such systems usually don’t have the same kind of robust, level-based balancing system that fantasy RPGs have. Characters improve over time, sure, but the improvements tend to be more incremental. And the challenge curves tend to be flatter and tend to be based more on situations and circumstances and modes of play than on statistics.
But there’s times in such games when big equipment really IS a game-changer. And that’s usually because the players have a specific plan and need a specific piece of gear to overcome a specific problem. And it’s usually not a piece of personal equipment. They might need a special device to hack a specific kind of electronic lock or a clean armored car to transport a specific thing or some plastic explosives to create an emergency in the Louvre which will allow them to show up disguised as first responders and steal a piece of art. And those players will need some firefighter kit as well.
If the players in those games could just tick off a certain number of dollars or New Yen or credits or whatever and just have the piece of gear they need, the game would actually lose something. Acquiring the right gear for the plan is part of the challenge. And the ability to acquire the right gear in a pinch is just as valuable as being able to hack a computer or drive a getaway car. Which is why this s$&% is often a big feature in heist-style games.
That just ain’t how D&D works. Not normally, anyway. There’s not a lot of adventures where the players need a specialized piece of gear to execute a specific plan. Equipment tends to be more broadly and unambiguously useful. In modern games, you can’t break out that rocket launcher whenever you want because it complicates more situations than it solves, but there’s few problems a necklace of fireballs won’t solve in the D&D-verse. And even when it won’t solve the problem, the necklace of fireballs usually won’t make the problem worse.
Also, in fantasy games, the characters can usually get along just fine without specific tools. They just have to work harder. In the cyberpunk world, without a specific ICE breaker, the hacker might have no way to access the Yakuza boss’ private server. But the heroes in D&D can attack the red dragon without those potions of fire resistance. They’ll just burn through a little more healing. Get it? BURN?!
Also also, in modern games, the ability to acquire stuff quickly and easily is pretty much useful all the time. That’s because there’s rarely a separation between the adventure site and civilization. But, in D&D, the ability to take out a loan and buy a mace of disruption is completely useless once you’re in the Necropolis of President Lichmummy Vampireghoul six days march from town.
Also also also, the acquisition of treasure is a sort of intrinsic goal in the fantasy adventure genre. Counting coins is a great way for a lot of people to keep score.
Also also also also, I HAVE TO mention the fact that Credit Rating systems don’t make sense in games modeled on the medieval western world. But only because, if I don’t mention it, someone will bring it up in the name of realism. So, consider it mentioned. The medieval world of Europe, Asia Minor, Northern Africa, and South-Central Asian was pretty much a cash-and-carry world. It was actually more of a bushel-of-wheat-and-carry-world. It wasn’t until the 11th century in the Middle East and until the 13th century in Europe that recognizable banks appeared on the scene and they were mostly concerned with the safe storage of funds and the issue of letters of credit that allowed people to travel without carrying all their money on them. Financial transactions like loans were simple, primitive, and limited. And they had a host of social and religious issues surrounding them due to the way they were seen by various Abrahamic religions.
In the end, choosing a system for handling money is more about what role equipment plays in the game and how characters work than it is about coinage. And if you change the money system, you might be changing – or breaking – more than you think.
Chance asks…
Running monsters with spells is a huge pain. There’s a ton of detail and a ton of choices and spellcasting monsters are hard to run quickly and well. But fights with spellcasting monsters are more interesting and my players enjoy them. Is there a way to streamline creating and running spellcasting monsters?
I figured I could answer one more question as long the answer’d be short and simple. Congratulations, Chance. You sent me an easy question, so you get an answer. I’ll tell you what I do with spellcasting monsters. I don’t use them. I mean, I do have monsters that cast magic spells. But they aren’t spellcasters. They don’t need to be.
The average monster in D&D lives for about three rounds. Sometimes a little longer. That’s why, when you compute a custom monster’s average damage output, you figure out what you expect them to do for the first three rounds of a fight, add up that damage, divide by three, and call it a day. Funny thing is that spellcasting monsters usually have way more than three spell choices and three spell slots. Which means they’ll never use some of their spells or expend all of their spell slots throughout their short little lives. They tend to use one – maybe two – whammy spells, and then fall back on cantrips until they die. So, instead of writing up a whole spellcasting trait and assigning them slots and spells, I just give them attacks and actions for the two or three spells they’re actually going to use as if they were any other attack. And I assign recharge values based on how likely it is they’d use the spell more than once. My players haven’t noticed the difference yet.
Cantrips are easy. You just write them up as ranged spell attacks and follow the same format as any other attack. More complex spells sometimes need a little block of text. If they’ll only use the spell once, I assume it recharges during a short or long rest. If I want them to maybe be able to cast a spell twice, I give it a recharge roll and have it recharge on a five or six. That usually works out to one recharge during the three to five rounds of life a monster has.
If you follow that format, it’s a lot easier to follow the guidelines in the DMG to figure out the monster’s CR. The monster’s average damage output over three rounds is a lot easier to see. And you can follow the guidance in the DMG for adjusting the CR based on other spells the same way you would for any other weird ability. And if you get into the habit of discarding the fluff and bloat from the spell descriptions, it’s a lot easier to run the monster at the table. 90% of the spells anyone would use IN COMBAT can be summarized with two lines of text tops. Especially if you ignore weird exceptions and corner cases and assume that close enough is good enough. Most players won’t notice the changes between your animated paladin armor’s version of compelled duel and the real spell.
And if they do notice some weird restriction you ignored as meaningless fluff, you can just say, “oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot that. My bad.” I’m still waiting for that to happen at my table.
Yes, PF2e also has ‘equipment as progression’. In fact Gamemastery included the Automatic Bonus Progression table 1e had so you sort of 100% know exactly what is vaguely expected.
Unasked clarifications aside, I noticed CR in COC and wondered. I quickly figured out why it had it, so it’s nice to see that my conclusions are apparently correct. I guess it’s why Starfinder feels kinda weird, because it tries to have the CC cake and eat it too, while it really should’ve just been CR or something more Shadowrun.
Having several different tiers of the same weapon with huge cost gaps is just kinda dumb.
The GM’s Handbook for PF2e also has a creature creation section that blends perfectly with the multi-part articles on creature creation/monster balancing that Angry wrote out a while back.
I was pretty salty about Pathfinder dropping the bottom up approach to creature creation, but Angry’s articles softened me to the idea before i even realised that i needed softening to it.
Fantastic post on the rationale behind RPG economic systems. I like this kind of post: a cogent explanation of why design choices were made.
Part of the problem with FRPGs is that there’s a real simulationist drive when it comes to money–it’s just hard to avoid. And most of the simulation assumptions are either wrong or grossly oversimplified, which leads to all kinds of loopholes that are hard to predict.
A decision to “do what D&D does” may not be so much a design question as a “whatever” dodge. It’s hard to dispute the fact that 80% of the players in the hobby will be happy with the former.
Ultimately, 5th edition feels less about shopping and/or loot acquisition than cool combat encounters. A good wealth system would reinforce that – but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what I would want to see to help achieve that goal.
They’re assuming fast, episodic play. One and dones, fast games, games with strangers. If you’re a serious GM or player, as anyone discussing the game on a forum like this is, you want a persistent, “deep” world. Economics is one of the big ways to do that. But there are a lot of pitfalls.
In the old days, cash went to magic items or, further back, maintaining your own realm. Maintaining the realm seems to be the better goal. And if you’re throwing lots of cash around to the temple and peasants and mercenaries even at lower levels, maybe that’s why bands of them show up to serve you once you have your tower or keep built. To say nothing of the great political plots in the meantime.
Basically, to put in lots of treasure you need a way to take lots of it out. Historically there often *were* huge hoards of coins (just not in barbarian Northwest Europe), which got vacuumed up by (usually) temples or a large standing imperial army. Most societies also had substantial “leveling” social pressures. Temples gave away a lot of sacrifice meat. Rich Greek merchants were more or less forced to become our equivalent of nobles, with serious military and political responsibilities. These were expensive. (Greek cavalry dominated because of the many rich nobles who personally sponsored it, something surrounding nations didn’t have/couldn’t do.)
I think the answer has to do with where the PC money goes. For a long time our model was a modern techbro model–make a pile of money, buy a Lamborghini. The individual is the primary beneficiary. In a FRPG setting of whatever ‘era,’ it’s more realistic and far more gameable to make the beneficiary ‘society’–whether that’s the local godling, local king, or local peasantry. Not that this is some kind of utopian arrangement. It’s more like “paying the game” in Monopoly, when you get a $150 fine and that money vanishes from your stash into the ether. As time goes on, I think the best solution is to trade treasure for EXP–you get the points only if you spend it out of the game. Speeds up progression, but this is OK given that the time pressures WOTC identified are very real.
One of the things that bugs me about dramatic encounters in published adventures is the sense of perfect timing; that out of all the days of the cult ritual, the heroes reach the final chamber precisely when they’re 5 rounds from completion. Enough time to do something about it, not enough to rest easy, no matter which path you took – am I supposed to believe that the finish time was predetermined and an extra 30 seconds of breakfast that morning would have lost the adventure? You get one of these for free at the start of the campaign – of course you were born at the right time to see this threat specifically because that’s what the story is about, if you weren’t in this place at this time then you’re not a character in this campaign – but it feels very artificial when events in play seem on pause while waiting for you.
The idea of there being a reactive force acting on the environment helps me a little there. The specific example of the timed cult ritual just needs the minor note that they’re giving up on seeing the ritual to completion and trying to tie it off for partial benefit rather than letting you ruin everything – same mechanical effect, but you showing up materially changed the situation due to the actions of people in the world rather than because the gods decreed thou shalt have a dramatic encounter and shifted the timeline to match.
The immediacy is important. I was entirely too worried about dramatic timing in my last game and wrecked pacing as a result – players discovered something was happening and wanted to handle it right away, only to hear that the event they had discovered had started a week ago and would only surface for interaction in another week, giving the time to make preparations and move to the predicted point but blunting that momentum to do something now.
People vs Nature is such a time-honored conflict that I suppose it also doesn’t feel as bad to have inanimate objects turn on you, particularly since there’s a lot of time spent in the world. The encounter is the time when everything seems to go wrong because it’s the time we’re spending on an encounter, the rest of the trip could’ve gotten the encounter treatment at any time if that dynamic resistance had shown up then.
Never actually thought about that, the few DEs I’ve had centered around Stop The Event typocally have the meastro NPC making skill checks on an extended check system, so nobody really knows exactly when The Event finishes. I might also set the DCs a little high.
When I want to structure things during a ritual (or similar artifice), I’ve found it helps to think about it in reverse. The ritual is going to take two weeks or on the full moon or whatever, plenty of time for the PCs to get there unless they intentionally slow roll it. The bad guys will succeed 100% if they can take their time, so that’s the plan.
But when the PCs bust in, the bad guys start to rush and cut corners and try to finish early. This is where you get the few rounds of chaotic effects, the PCs being able to interfere, and all that drama.
This used to bug me too, until I realized that the PCs are the important part of the story. In fact, they’re really the only reason the story is being told.
I’m not saying you couldn’t enjoy a game of trying to avoid the summoned dread god, just that it would probably be dramatically different from the one the group set out to play in the first place.
X-men Toad jokes are tight!
A dynamic encounter seems to be an encounter composed by two FORCES each with a MOTIVE sharing a potentially exploitable SURROUNDING. In which the motives are opposite to one another. And the surrounding must be visualizable.
The point being that the forces can take actions (chosen by the GM or the players) that don’t have to be prescribed in the rules or system being used, if any rules or system are being used.
And the force that opposes the players can be rather abstract. Like the force of nature that wants to increase the PC’s entropy (by hurting and killing them). Which is different from the surroundings themselves. Which would be the trees, rivers, cliffs and whatnots that surround the players.
In the case of the dungeon, I guess the force would be the intention of whoever built the dungeon, with the motive of keeping adventurers out, and the surroundings would be the dungeon itself.
Spellcasters are so much easier to run this way..
I really enjoy the discussion of dynamic conflict, thought I have thought of it more in regards to the sports I enjoy playing and watching. Some competitions are primarily pursuits of perfection, where each competitor tries to do their best and has very little interaction with anyone else. Thinking of races, many Olympic sports, golf, gymnastics. There is a standard of perfection someone is trying to reach and they can do the same thing competition after competition. In contrast, there is no perfect football game that you can execute each game because who you are playing and what they are doing changes play by play. Same with soccer and other sports. I have always enjoyed sports and games more when you are reacting and playing against someone, not just against yourself. I image it is the same for role playing games and I look forward to your future articles on the subject.
Yes. There is a name for this distinction but I can’t recall it at the moment. Within the realm of the second type, you can further classify sports at non-invasive versus invasive (whether players have overlapping territories – e.g. volleyball versus basketball) and non-contact versus contact (e.g. basketball versus rugby).
As someone who played mainly invasive team sports growing up, I tend to think as “athleticism” (probably incorrectly) as incorporating those characteristics required to excel at invasive sport, which include alertness, peripheral vision, anticipation, and creativity, etc. – arguably attributes that are not required for something like bowling.
I’ve always thought there was something weird about the individual sports that are more or less just objective measures of physical superiority such as shot put or sprinting. They seem less interesting – to the point of almost being pointless (who was born with superior attribute X?) – than a sport like boxing where you can use strategy and tactics to outcompete a “better” opponent.
I am no means an expert on any of these things, but hopefully I can give some useful tidbits. While it might seem like non- invasive sports are only about your individual performance, there are many nuances that are unseeable to most observers. As an example, the direction and intensity of the wind can have dramatic effects. A runner with a wider frame will be better will a tailwind but suffer in a headwind. When every tiny bit matters, it’s up to competitors to exploit any tiny advantage they can find.
I’m still not entirely sure I’m on board with the dynamic encounter as described in the cliff example. I read (and participated a bit) in that thread that lead to the “living dungeons” talk. The cliff feels okay to me while the dungeon definitely does not, but I can’t come up with a consistent argument for why that should be. The fiction is different, and works much better in the cliff example than it does for the living dungeon, but mechanically, they’re the same. You have a disembodied personification of an environment that’s never explicitly mentioned to the players, and that entity causes setting-appropriate dangers to pop up in the party’s path. The characters (generally) have a chance to avoid the danger, and if they fail, they suffer the consequences. In both examples, the characters can’t detect the danger in advance because it’s not really there until the entity causes it to be. (Unless, maybe, they specifically call out a thing they want to watch out for) The cliff example is a bit less objectionable there (in my opinion) because the players are not choosing a specific path for their characters to take and the obvious choices of dangers can come from further away, (a bird flying in or a rock falling from above) where the characters couldn’t logically see it coming, anyway. You could do that in a dungeon, too, though, with a large enough room. (darts firing from traps concealed in distant shadows) It just feels like more of a screw job when you paint it as a dungeon. Maybe this is just an issue of bad fiction in the dungeon’s case, but I don’t like that I can’t give a hard answer for why one feels okay and the other doesn’t.
For me the answer to your question does not lie in how you as a DM ‘could’ approach the encounter (all encounters can be either static or dynamic, but one is probably better suited to the sitiation than the other), but more in the nature of the challenge of the encounter. What enviroment or challenge do you want to confront your players with, or how do you want it to feel for your players?
For the man-made dungeon as a whole i feel the choice for dynamic design is off. Someone (lorewise) designed the dungeon and used the dungeon for years maybe? And/or creatures live there. So there must be a perfect or safe route in and out. The challenge is to find that route. If traps start appearing out of nowhere, that does not make sense ingame but also does not match the challenge given.
Nature on the other hand is unpredictable and is not made to be easily walked through. There are no perfect routes, the challenge is to survive. Both the predictability of the ingame environment and the challenge given to the players make dynamic design more suited in that case.
So: predictability of the enviroment and the nature of the challenge given to or felt by the players. That’s my idea on this topic anyway… 🙂
It’s not even that, it’s that you can’t just go separating fiction and mechanics all willy nilly. And a dungeon and the wilderness are very different in the fiction.
We have an understanding of how traps work. Traps do not spring into existance from nothingness. They are built by someone for a purpuose. And they stay there. On the other hand, rocks do randomly fall, and bats do fly out en mass at the slightest provocation.
When you tell your players there’s a cliff and then later hit them with a rock, it does not feel unfair because cliffs have rocks and rocks fall. You don’t have to tell them because it’s well understood that that is the case. Mechanically, springing a trap on them ist same: deal damage without any way to see it coming or prevent it. But if you try it all you get is 4 unhappy players.
To just do a changing dungeon without it being a big component of the plot (ie: genius loci kinda thing) would be like having a regular bloke who can fly under his own power Peter Pan style. Mechanically it’s the exact same as giving them a flying ring, but it’ll always feel weird.
For the record, I agree with both of you. I just can’t help but feel there’s some key hidden behind the answers that we’re not quite getting to. The thing that bugs me is that just like you could notice the hairline crack where a pressure plate is set into the floor, you could notice the crack in the cliff face where the rock is going to break free. Or, as you could notice the holes that darts may shoot out of, you could notice the hole that the bats are sleeping inside. Yet, for some reason, it feels okay to just have those things happen on the cliff at will, without a chance to spot them in advance, almost as if they are “attacks” made by nature rather than “traps” set on the cliff. I 100% get why it feels wrong in the dungeon – I just can’t work out why it feels okay on the cliff.
Gillador, you may be onto something with the “no perfect path” thing. When making your way through nature in the real world, you never stop to analyze the “right path,” because you know there isn’t one. There’s a very good chance that there’s SOMETHING you could trip on no matter which way you walk, and the risk is generally low enough to be acceptable, anyway. In a trapped room, you analyze, because you KNOW there’s a way through unharmed, and the risk is often going to be unacceptable. You could be walking into a spiked pit as opposed to a bug bite.
There at the start, that’s the whole point. You CAN’T spot the crack of a loose rock, not always at least. There’s a reason why climbers generally use harnesses and safety ropes, even experts, because shit happens. They can and do stop to analyze the best path. But you can’t know it for sure.
100% of walls with arrow traps have holes in them, and if you step on the plate they always shoot. Not 100% of holes in cliffs have bats, and if they do they don’t always have external signs of it, and if they do they don’t always fly out.
Because we KNOW that shit can happen without any warning in nature, we don’t find unfair that it happens without warning in dnd. We also KNOW that traps have telltale signs, so if we get no warning for them in dnd it doesn’t feel fair.
That’s also when you can get some showmanship on and feign looking up a table or fake rolling dice to make it seem like there’s some unknowable algorithm controlling the situation when you’re actually just fucking with them.
You’re looking for some grand, complicated answer when it’s actually pretty simple.
Well thanks. I finally had something sensible to contribute 😉
I understand where you are coming from, but i don’t think there is a singular answer to this question. In an rpg the story/world and the game-mechanics will always be intertwined.
You just said it yourself, if nature throws a rock at you, out of the blue, it FEELS right. And for a dungeon it FEELS right for there to be a trap you can spot.
And there is your answer. That gut-feeling (of choosing the ‘right’ mechanic for the encounter amongst other things) is one of your most important tools as a GM.
That deeper layer, about WHY that feels how it feels, is beyond me. I am neither a psychologist nor a philosopher, so i can’t help you with that 😉
You may not be able to see which rock will come loose by looking at it but careful climbers will try them out before putting all their weight on one. Not 100% successful obviously, and it does make for slower progress.
Does your player want to descend quickly or carefully? There’s a choice with clear consequences attached to it, assuming there’s a penalty for taking your sweet time built into the scene/adventure. Make a check for how well you can spot loose rocks, with advantage if you take your time or disadvantage if you rush down.
A mention that there are holes in the wall in the description of the place might make a player choose to avoid them or maybe use them as holds for an easier climb; another decision. They might not realise there are bats unless they notice the guano but such is life.
Looking at it this way there are parallels with the approach to wilderness travel Angry outlined elsewhere. Decide route and pace, look out for problems and deal with them as and when they arise. Players make choices and whatever happens depends on what they do and a few dice rolls. Add carrots and sticks for not taking all day and you have all you need I think.
What if you limited trap-laying to when the players enter the room or encountering a specific object? You just think “would [the owner] have trapped this?” And then your rogues are still safe from having traps spring up behind them because ‘the dungeon willed it so’.
That’d be a callback to the “List of Things that are Facts” about the world, a trap either does or does not exist in relation to a room or chest, once the Object is Observed by the Players it cannot normally continue to exist in a quantum/dynamic state, it must become static.
It’s a game of phrasing. Did the dungeon “attack the party” with a trap or cave-in? Or did you intentionally map out the specific points in the dungeon at which those events could trigger? The players don’t get to see which way it was planned unless you tell them.
I think my “hand of misfortune” playing card mechanism works as a decent visual. In the “classic encounter” the GM takes those playing cards and sets them in specific spots on the board and never ever messes with the battlefield setup after that. In the “dynamic encounter” the GM plays each ‘card’ when and where it feels appropriate, and while they may not use all of them up in an adventure (by, say, only ‘playing’ 1~2 “events” per player in the party, but writing up 3~4, or whatever) the GM is guaranteed to be able to use some of that material, “flatenning the curve” of randomness on the adventure’s probability matrix (i.e. a list of all the rooms and things and monsters that COULD happen compared to what DOES happen).
In short, dynamic encounters take roughly the same amount of prep as normal if you have strong mechanistic and simulationist tendencies (hi, my name is), waste less prepared material, and make you practice the structure of improvisation. Once you can improvise dynamic encounters The Angry Way ™, something like 2/3rds of your prep load has been eliminated and you can respond (more) naturally to the inevitable “off the rails” player-generated encounters.
Like the Tension Pool, i really really like how this gives hopeless, dreary mechanists like myself actual mechanical widgets that are aimed at making us less reliant on the widget addiction.
What monetary system would work for a “D&D world that has reached modern technology levels” setting where visa cards and banks loans are a thing? I want to keep a real gear progression system but I also want to match the feel of the setting. Do I just ignore the RP implications of the system in favor of gameplay?
tl;dr Which system is best for science fantasy (adventure)?
I think if you want a gear progression system, you really need coin counting. If you go with credit rating, you’ll want to heavily restrict the amount of luck involved so that you can achieve a more predictable progression and make it less likely that lucky rolls put one player far ahead of the rest. Maybe even have a wealth tier in addition to the credit rating that sort of represents the collateral you can put down, to prevent players from skipping too many tiers of equipment.
You may want to consider having both, though. I could imagine a mechanic where minor purchases (personal gear, food and board, small bribes, etc) are based on a coin counting system, but large purchases (a space ship, a giant space laser of death, bribes for high-ranking government officials) are based on credit. Perhaps your credit rating only recovers by spending some of the coin-counting currency to pay off loans.
Assume that money and goods are hyperabundant in a modern system–they are in our own world. This means that a lot of middle-class “common sense” ideas about economics and goods are not accurate.
Instead, goods constraints are non-tangible. Let’s use a real-life example: the GE minigun, the kind Arnold used in Terminator II. Miniguns made before 1986, and there are a few, are legal for civilians to own. They cost about $600,000 (and $3,000 in ammo to fire for a single minute). Nobody will lend you the money to buy one: the thing has basically zero utility, even if you claim you’re going to use it to, I dunno, mercenary it up. The seller will not offer financing. More critically, assuming you find a seller (which may be difficult) he probably won’t sell it to YOU. There’s a short list of people who might be interested in such a thing–collectors, range enthusiasts, etc.–and anyone with a minigun knows who they are. No rando with a bag full of cash (or even the right numbers in a bank account) is going to get the gun unless the seller is truly desperate. Too risky.
Hermes keeps an actual customer list. Just because you have $35,000 doesn’t mean you can have a Birkin bag. Instead, you have to work your way up by buying a LOT of Hermes goods…and be someone the brand will accept. Ferrari may make you buy several lower-end cars before you get a chance to get on a waiting list for something special.
Players will need to know the right people, BE the right people, AND somehow establish the actual funds. They might accumulate “experience points” in a simplified “levels of credit” system. A means maybe you can buy a civilian firearm, G might mean Sienar Staryards will agree to admit you to a bidding process on one of its new hulls.
A mixed system sounds pretty cool, but I can’t help but imagine it being super clunky and confusing. I like the idea that you would buy back your resource stat with coins as if you were paying off a loan.
Vanveen also makes a good point. They gave me the idea to use a relationship system and players would leverage those relationship scores to get stuff and then renew the relationship to be leveraged again by spending coins. Still clunky but better because its hooked into an all ready existing relationship system. (The one from Golden Sky Stories)
Look at d20Modern’s Wealth and Requisition rules if you want an abstract example of a credit system that’s already geared for the d20 system.
As a treatment, credit is a measure of how good a person is at repaying debt on a regular basis and also takes into account how much debt they carry and how much of it is backed up or “secured” by tangible assets. It’s basically a political favor done in cash money with an expensive item ante’d up if you break repayment on the favor given. Classical usury was less structured, the banker might not have a security from you, but he might just hire mercenaries to loot your stash or take you into bondage over a failure to pay. What was it? That one prince geeked the Templars with claims of deviltry because he maxxed out his credit with them and lost the war it financed. Medieval bankruptcy was a matter of relative power (heck, modernity isn’t much different despite the change in wallpaper).
If you really must have credit in fantasy, maybe most bankers don’t loan small sums, maybe people seeking a loan also need a residence or landed title, so if your adventurers want to become venture capitalists they need to have that capital to make ventures on? I.e. no random 1000gp loans to upstart, nameless adventurers that might as well be slightly more well-dressed brigands and scofflaws. Guild meisters might be able to lend funds to trusted members or act as their “Name of Confidence” to a banking house, etc, etc. Lots of room for social encounters there and you have plenty of excuses in Reputation alone to keep the number of loans you’ve got to track at once fairly low, regardless of the situation. Little names aren’t known commonly and only have maybe one lender that trusts them, meanwhile the big names can’t really hide who they’re taking loans from because all the lenders will be talking to each other about them (in general).
You mean King Philip IV (the 4th) of France. And he did indeed (in broad strokes) do that. Bit of an asshole move tbh.
There was also an English king who borrowed a lot of money and then criminalised money lending if I’m not mistaken. Asshole moves are pretty common among the powerful I guess..
Among humans, you mean. The powerful don’t have a monopoly on assholry. It’s just their assholry has more widespread impact.
Yes this is true, it also tends to be recorded better perhaps.
Letters of credit get really wobbly in a classic FRPG setting; they’re much more Early Modern (1500 C.E.–). The short answer is that Europe’s wealth supply increased dramatically after the Crusades (loot) and improved tech (caravels) that enabled global trading. Nor was the Church the sole arbiter of all this wealth.
So the questions are, what is the money supply like? Ancient Greece was literally hip-deep in cash (African and near-Asian precious metals). Where does the money go? In Greece, it was concentrated in imperial institutions (temples, military), moving in large sums from one to the other, sprinkling down some on the little guys serving in the military or sweeping up the temple, then getting vacuumed up again into the other vault (military if war was breaking out, temple if it was peace). What are the conditions under which money moves? Finally, is the net money supply increasing (trade, new mines) or decreasing (orcs took it, it got buried right before the border towns were overrun)? An adjacent consideration: how much travel (even local, but especially foreign) is there in the society?
These are some useful frameworks to consider, I’ve found. For the most part, European loans were rare before the Renaissance not only because of the prohibition on usury, but because there really wasn’t all that much to spend them on. Few durable goods, severe restrictions on what people could own (in Ireland, your class status determined how many colors you were allowed to wear), relatively few standing military bodies. And, of course, a sharply limited market for the loans. Not merchants, who were rare. Certainly not “yeomen,” insofar as there were any.
Pretty thankful for the discussion on spell casting monsters. I am running curse of strahd and have used too much time reading through all 8 levels of spells of a 3 round witch.
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In essence I have to do what is described here and plan out spells.
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I still want to create a baddy like sauroman, who has so many powers he’s hard to pin down. I have failed in this regard.
I often end up writing out the monster’s strategy, it’s a good way to keep track of the amount of damage you expect it to do too and you have a purpose for each spell you list. There’s a video out there somewhere on giving your monsters an AI that’s pretty good.
For example: An AoE spell for groups, Chill Touch when someone goes down (make them sweat), misty escape when he’s boxed in and something targeted as a default attack. Maybe something else to fit a certain flavour or theme.
That’s assuming there are a few melee GUYS in the fight as well. Even describing someone as looking like they might be spellcasters makes them the primary target so not much need for more than that.
I did not mean to capitalise “guys” at all in that comment..
There’s a website called “The Monsters Know What They’re Doing” ( http://www.themonstersknow.com ) that goes over intelligent monsters and describes a strategy based off their stats, available actions, and alignment. The spellcasters tend to require a lot of “AI,” and many times the blogger will straight-up say “This spell will never be cast during combat because the caster has better options for that slot,” or “This spell will only be cast if X number of party members will be affected by the spell.”
If you read through several of the monsters you eventually start to understand how he looks at the creatures and how he tries to implement their available actions into an intelligent strategy.
Note that these strategies are almost always focused on knock-down, drag-out fights to the death (unless the monster can teleport away or something), so the strategies may not necessarily apply prior to a fight breaking out.
Ah yes I quite like that one. I think that’s the right approach, especially when (re)designing monsters. How do they fight? What kind of abilities, strengths and weaknesses fit with that? Those form the basis of the roster, then you make variants based on various combat roles or whatever.
The abilities etc then become the justification for why they fight the way they do in the game. It’s basically what Angry described in his kobold draft picks article recently. Conditions for not turning it into a drag out fight to the death would be part of that as well..
If your trying to make something like Sauroman, I think the best way to showcase his power and variety is to have him fight the hero’s several times using different sets of spells each time. Perhaps he’s using more powerful spells in subsequent fights because the hero’s have proved themselves more worthy of his full power. Maybe one time he’s not even there and is attacking them remotely.
Another idea is to use Angry’s monster-inside-a-monster idea. That would make him shift power sets mid fight, creating the variety you desire. https://theangrygm.com/return-of-the-son-of-the-dd-boss-fight-now-in-5e/