SOMETHING Happens on Every Watch

Many games have dealt with “the boring campsite watch” problem. It goes something like this.

DM: “OK, so Stonks the thief will take the first watch, Sir Melvin will take the second watch, and Talita of Frond will take the third watch. OK, Stonks, let’s see… rolls dice… it’s a quiet night. Nothing happens during your watch, and so at the end of your turn, you wake up Melvin. Melvin, uh, it is pretty late now. The moon is overhead. Um, rolls more dice… looks like your watch passes uneventfully also. Talita, you’re on the last watch…”

Pretty boring, right? Dead time. What if instead something happened on every watch? Wouldn’t that be more interesting? What would that look like?

Use Random Events, Not (Just) Random Encounters

Depending on your preferred style of play, something happening on every watch may immediately sound like overkill. A positive hit on the ol’ random encounter table three or four times every night the party rests? Too much!

Part of the reason that random encounter tables and similar procedures have atrophied in modern play is that encounters in modern play have a strong presumption of combat, and combat takes a long time. The latter issue is hard to fix. You can nibble at the edges, but you’re not going to fully solve long combats in 5E and similar games without switching to another system and maybe even an entirely different style of play. 

But the former is much easier to solve. De-incentivizing combat in the first place is relatively easy. So easy that it was solved in some of the earliest iterations of the game, where encounter distance plus a reaction roll went a long way toward implying a situation that was not likely to lead directly to combat. Even the absurdly large “no. appearing” counts in early monster manuals communicated that rolls on wilderness tables were suggesting a factional presence or wildlife population, not a Final-Fantasy-battle-music sudden confrontation. Another lost art, “% in lair,” also provides a tool for avoiding obligatory combat, as a lair appearance suggests a creature at rest and perhaps provides a risk/reward choice for the players who can opt-in to risking danger, but aren’t obligated to do so.

The leveled up version of the old-school approach appears in tables like those in Hot Springs Island (still my favorite random encounter table) and Skerples’ Monster Overhaul. These tables give monsters something to do, imply pasts and futures, and often put monsters in conflict with other monsters. 

Campfire by Cody Claus

But even without using those tools, it is pretty easy to adjudicate interesting situations that do not necessarily force combat. Say for example “goblin” comes up on a random table, with no other elaboration. Here are d8 ideas that I came up with quickly, off the top of my head, without using any prompts or tables.

1. A single goblin scout. She is not individually dangerous, but will report the PCs presence to a larger group, if she leaves undetected.
2. Tracks from the goblins cross very close to the campsite; a PC stumbles on them when they go to relieve themself. 
3. Goblins are fleeing rival goblins, clumsily crashing through the campsite in the dead of night.
4. Sounds of goblin drums in the distance. A hunt? A ceremony? Something else?
5. The distinctive smell of goblin cooking, wafting up through a chimney vent in the ground. Unbeknownst to the players, they have camped directly above the goblins’ underground dwelling.
6. Goblins are looking for the PCs, but are unsure exactly where the party is. They are close by, noisily arguing about where to look next.
7. A goblin hunting party chasing a wild boar; for extra chaos, one goblin has a lasso around the hog and is being dragged through the undergrowth. If combat breaks out, the boar will gore both goblins or PCs indiscriminately.
8. A curious goblin spying on the PCs from a safe distance. Are they a thief? A potential hireling? Something else?

This is just scratching the surface, and most ideas like these imply yet more ideas. Practice producing ideas like these for a while, and hooks for non-combat encounters will start to feel like the default way to present random encounters, rather than obligatory fights.

Campfire by Cannonbreed

Offer More Robust Echoes and Omens

This is age-old advice, but warrants rebroadcast for the GMs who don’t already have it in their toolkit. One of the easiest ways to create something interesting based on a random table roll – but without incentivizing combat – is to simply contextualize it in the past or the future, instead of in the present.

Consider a random encounter roll for an owlbear. Spoor? Ominous hooting? Clawed-up tree bark? The screech of prey a few miles off, suddenly cut short?

An easy way to think of this method is in terms of echoes and omens. What has happened in the recent past and what will happen in the near future? What signs can the PCs find for what the monster was doing in this area just before they got there? What warnings can the PCs perceive that the monster is nearby?

Next week: Ends, Themes, Scenes, and Cuts

Places of Power

Magic is not the same everywhere you go. It is not a fixed, internal thing within a spellcaster, that they can call on whenever they want. It is instead something the magic-user always must channel and mediate through the circumstances of their environment.

Magic does not work in civilization. Buildings and infrastructure disrupt ley lines or interplanar convergences. This presumption supports one of the key concepts of the West Marches, where the town is intended to be inherently uninteresting and not a location for adventure. PCs also have a stronger incentive to fly straight while in town and not mess with the locals, because magic, their biggest edge against ordinary folk, doesn’t work there.

Magic does work for clerics in civilization… within the confines of their temple. A single temple in a small settlement dedicated to a particular god is extremely powerful within that region. Anyone who wants clerical aid is going to need to be on good terms with that faith. In this framing, a PC building a temple goes from a nice bit of flair to an essential extension of the cleric’s power.

Magic works in the wilderness. Generally. It may depend on the time of day, the season, or the weather. Perhaps healing magic won’t work until the break of dawn; or will only work in a diminished form. Necromantic magic is the opposite. Players will be all over those meaningful and strict time records if we attach rules like this to spellcasting.

Some magic works better or worse or not at all in the wrong environment. Druidic magic could work well in the wilderness but not at all in a castle. Necromantic magic could depend on the amount of deceased matter and ambient death present. At the extremes, the schools of magic could hold sway over particular regions, jealously preventing rival schools of magic from functioning on those grounds.

Magic is stronger or different in the dungeon. Some spells work better or worse or not at all on certain floors. “Unlocking” magic on a given floor might involve any number of extrinsic goals that characters could pursue. Take it to an extreme and say that magic spells can only be cast on a dungeon level equal to the spell level or greater. 

Sometimes no one knows why magic works or doesn’t work in a place. Spells like Hallow, Protection from Evil, Mordenkain’s Private Sanctum, and Forbiddance may have been cast with permanent durations in ancient times. The origin and purposes of those castings may be unclear to modern people. Indeed, in many cases, even the underlying physical structures that those spells once protected have been worn away by the passage of time, leaving white noise zones where magic doesn’t seem to work the way it should. 

Some of these ideas can be dropped into a game quite easily. Others need to be baked into the cosmology from the first session. But the underlying idea is to make magic less like a handy, ordinary, convenient tool, and more like something strange and difficult and dangerous and unpredictable. You know, something magical. 

Defining the Six Classic D&D Stats

D&D has six core stats. If you can grasp these six stats, the rest of the game is pretty easy to understand. 

Strength. Strength refers to the concentration of the liquids your character can create and use. This can include everything from truth serum to deadly poison.

Dexterity. Dexterity is a made-up word that the game’s designers created because dextroamphetamine was too long and confusing for many players. Dexterity measures the character’s level of stimulation and ability to stay up all night – a very useful ability.

Constitution. Constitution measures a character’s ability to understand, enforce, subvert, or modify the documents used to establish governments and nation-states.

Intelligence. Intelligence, or “intel” for short, measures the quantity, quality, and exclusivity of the secret information a character can obtain.  

Wisdom. Your wisdom modifier (not the score itself) determines the number of wisdom teeth you have, measured against a baseline of the most common number of wisdom teeth (four). So someone with a +2 wisdom modifier has six wisdom teeth. Remember that wisdom controls most tooth-related game mechanics, e.g., determining if you can safely implant a false tooth filled with cyanide. New players often underrate the Wisdom stat, but it comes up more often than they expect.

Charisma. Charisma determines your affinity with (or opposition to) Charisma Carpenter. As the true power behind many of the events in the game world, Charisma Carpenter can be a powerful ally – or a formidable threat!

And that’s it. Most of the rest of the game is built on this foundation, so it should be really intuitive to learn once you’ve internalized these six definitions. I know this was a little more basic than most of what I post here, but I’ve been surprised by how many times I’ve had players join a game expecting these abilities to do something completely different, so it seemed worthwhile to clarify the real definition of each ability.

How Could TSR Have Made a Better Card-Based Product in 1992?

Last time: Making Sense of TSR's 1992 Collector Cards

Let’s go back to that question I posed at the start of the last post, regarding who or what these cards were for. Famously, late-stage TSR produced products with little or no consideration for market demand. The company started multiple unprofitable game lines and packed warehouses full of unsold product. These decisions nearly drove them out of business, and eventually forced the sale of TSR to Wizards of the Coast. Books and articles by Jon Peterson, Ben Riggs, and others cover this history in greater detail.

So it’s not hard to understand why these cards missed the mark. Someone had the idea of a card-based product for D&D (great!) but no idea how to develop, test, optimize, produce, and market such a product (not great).

But let’s say you’re a designer at TSR in the early 1990s and you get the assignment to create some D&D themed cards. What form should it take? 

Let’s say we don’t expect any TSR designer to predict how Magic: the Gathering (MtG) would soon reshape the market for card-based fantasy gaming products. You’re just expected to make the best-possible product with your circa-1992 knowledge.

Cut the NPCs. I didn’t go through and count how much, but much of this product line was composed of NPC cards. Obviously the pack I pulled was 100% NPCs, and in a pre-Internet world, it would be easy to assume that’s all there is to the product. Which is a shame, because the NPCs are the weak link here.

I mentioned the “let me tell you about my home game” energy in the “Cain Blizzard” entry last week, but the pack I pulled isn’t even the worst example by any means, because at least it wasn’t trying to be funny. For example, I assume this card was a joke from a designer’s home game, and while it may have gone over well in that context, it is neither amusing nor gameable as a commercial product. I have seen incredibly funny things happen in games that I can never properly convey to someone who wasn’t there; RPGs are truly one of the great “you had to be there” areas of humor.

Focus on the monsters. Monsters appeal even to those who don’t play the game. Ask someone what got them into fantasy, or D&D in particular, and there’s a good chance they will say dragons, or beholders, or some other iconic monster. They don’t need to understand what AC or HD is to understand that  the monsters are cool. Spells and magic items also fit more comfortably on cards than NPCs do, but they require a lot of context, and don’t sell the idea of the game on their own in the same way that monsters do.

Our hypothetical 1992 designer need look no further than TSR’s own history for ideas.

Update the cards with new art. No shade on the Jim Roslof art in those early 1980s cards. I like the old-school style, and I think it works well in the OG Monster Manual, or in the context of Dungeon Crawl Classics, a product with a primary audience that is mostly already familiar with RPG aesthetics. But monster cards should be, in part, a way to grab the attention of people without any previous exposure to the game. 

I mentioned how baseball cards would have been a common reference point for an American game designer in the pre-MtG world, but there was another then-recent model that could have been copied. Garbage Pail Kids cards would have played in a similar space. The whole subgrenre of trading cards from that era appealed to a sort of grotty, Mad Magazine rebelliousness. D&D monster cards wouldn’t have to go as far down that road, but some of that energy (on both the front and the back of the card) would have given the product a better chance of catching those young players that TSR was always after.

The art doesn’t have to be perfectly cutting edge for 1992; early MtG itself had a jumble of art styles, with inconsistent tone and art direction. And that included a fair share of MtG fantasy art that would have been more at home airbrushed on the side of a Ford Econoline van than on the cover of a glossy magazine at Waldenbooks. But MtG mixed in enough contemporary art, with a wide range of artists, so it never felt stuck in the past. Compare MtG to some of the CCGs that sprung up in its wake; whatever the gameplay merits of Wyvern, that art style was always going to feel like something off the cover of a yellowed Del Rey paperback, not a cutting-edge 1990s product.

Make the information on the back more gameable. There's room to build on the 1980s TSR cards beyond just art direction. As noted here, the cards from the early 1980s didn’t feature all the monsters, so a new product could serve in part to better capture D&D's ever-expanding bestiary. 

The early ‘80s monster cards are more gameable than the 1992 collector cards reviewed here, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. They hew closely to the style of the 1977 monster manual. The Gygaxisms of that era have a certain magisterial authority that reads well in the context of a big rulebook, but a card needs to be much more concise.

As with the 1992 collector cards, the wording in the 1980s cards is indifferent to the utility of the product, wasting words describing physical features that are already obvious from the art, or providing deep lore that’s unlikely to come up at the table. That kind of thing may be fine for a monster manual, but not for a card that is primed for table use.

But someone iterating on that model could have really focused on immediately usable information, even if we can’t assume that they would have foreseen the lean efficiency of the OSE house style for presenting monster information, or the impeccable utility of the Monster Overhaul, my current preferred monster manual. 

Custom reaction roll results? Typical behaviors and desires when first encountered? Tactics employed? A sample treasure hoard? It’s easy to imagine a lot of things that could go here, even limited to a 1992 design lexicon. The same blog I linked to earlier notes that D&D still hasn’t cracked this nut in the modern age, so perhaps the ideal D&D card product is still yet to be discovered.

Making Sense of TSR's 1992 Collector Cards

A friend of mine (and player in several of my games) gave me an old pack of TSR Collector Cards for my birthday. Many thanks to him, as I found these interesting enough to write about. Let’s dive in.

First Impressions

These are cheap. They are labeled as “collector cards,” but they don’t have any of the slickness you might expect from more modern products. That makes sense, as these came out in 1992… the year before Magic: The Gathering (“MtG” henceforth) completely changed how card-based game products were made and sold.

These seem to be made of a rough cardstock, without any lamination or other finishing. They’re sized at 2.5 x 3.5 inches. The pack begins with several collector checklists, and each card includes “trading cards” near the logo at the top. I suppose the idea is that people would swap what they were missing with others to complete the full set. Pre-MtG, baseball cards would have been the most likely point of reference for US-based TSR, so I assume that was the model they were working from. The format is picture on the front, stats on the back.

Granola OatTreat

The contents of one of the cards immediately raise the question: what are these cards actually for? The card provides some information about the pictured character, but it’s not really enough detail for game use, either as an NPC combat encounter, or as a pregen PC. Nearly half of the card is given over to a three-sentence background, which is painfully inefficient in using its space, with loose and flowery language (“He had no love for armor, though, or the making of it…”)

Hey look, we pulled both of the Oaktree brothers. I picture the Oaktree brothers as second-run rivals to the Oakridge Boys. 

The cards in this pack are all NPCs, and they have big “let me tell you about my home game” energy, a trap that TSR and other RPG publishers often stumbled into in the earlier days of the hobby. It’s hard to blame them; I imagine everyone thought they were on the verge of creating the next Dragonlance-style hit. Everything on the back of the “Cain Blizzard” card could fly in a home game, but is pretty embarrassing as a product intended to be sold to the public, from the goofy character name to the excessive multiclassing to the confusing backstory (he finds mixing with others difficult, but was still chosen as an emissary to the world?) 

Jadethread!

The art on those first few Greyhawk cards is pretty bland – lacking the roughshod, outsider charm of very early D&D, but not professional enough to hang with commercial fantasy art, even by early 1990s standards. But I’m kinda charmed by Jadethread from the Forgotten Realms. He looks like Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a heist movie. Why is his mask so large? Was he working a blowtorch as part of the heist? I do like that he appears to be doing a little fist pump here. Way to go, Jadethread. You did it.

These cards don’t credit the artist, which is another knock against them. MtG attributed the artwork on the cards from day one.

What I’m also just now noticing is that some of these cards include the superscript “™” after the character’s name, while others don’t. This is probably just an oversight, but I prefer to think that someone at TSR thought that Jadethread was important IP for D&D’s future, while the Oaktree brothers were yeeted into the 1992 equivalent of Creative Commons.

Jobinov and Thiawskeen

Oh, the pain of unpronounceable fantasy names. It might be… THEE-aw-skeen? 

I was going to make fun of Jobinov’s art, but then I turned over the card and saw “Equipment: Lasso.” Jobinov does one thing and he does it well, I have to respect this. I must still question the choice to draw a halfling – a creature etymologically most known for height relative to the height of others – without any point of reference, not even a piece of furniture, just a hazy blue background. 

Thiawskeen and Jobinov are the only two Spelljammer cards in this pack, but there is nothing on either card that conveys "this is Spelljammer." That's another failure of this product line; if it is not going to communicate something about each TSR world and get players interested in buying products from those settings, why feature characters from each one?

Dappledref

“[H]e just hates working for a living.” Dappledref sounds like he stepped right out of a Stan Kelly comic.

Wethilion

For some reason, this pack is chock full of high-level rogues with ordinary stats and minimal equipment. The waste of space here is off the charts. Think about how much you could consolidate this and make it more gameable if it went something like this:

Wethilion (CN Gnome Rogue 10)
AC 6 TH 16 MV 6 HP 33
Has 2d4 automatic copters, clockwork animals, and mechanical soldiers nearby at all times; at least one will invariably malfunction, emitting sparks or crashing into the nearest fragile object. Uses Rube Goldberg-style inventions to assassinate his victims. Too smart for his own good, his schemes are unnecessarily complex. Secretly wishes to find the Sherlock Holmes to his Moriarity. Sample assassination schemes: A clock that drips poison into a particularly punctual victim’s tea; an ice sculpture that releases magic or poison as it melts; a clockwork assassin disguised as a statue, built to kill the king who shares its likeness.

The Dark Sun characters are not especially interesting, but their art does, at least, suggest some internal consistency and include details specific to Dark Sun. I don’t think they are by Brom originals (again, no credited artist), but I imagine Brom’s strong visual identity for Dark Sun gave it some implicit (or possibly even explicit) art direction that improved the quality across the board. The content on the back of each card 

Next time: How Could TSR Have Made a Better Card-Based Product in 1992?