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Talakeal
2021-05-30, 11:45 AM
Spun off from my other thread.

My last campaign was an attempt at running a sandbox campaign in my system, and in one way it was a total failure.

I have no idea how to maintain challenge or stakes in such a scenario. In most RPGs, challenges are based on attrition and slowly wearing away resources, but when you only have occasional encounters that is hard to do, and to keep them challenging they need to be so deadly that player death is a real concern.

Now, everyone who has played D&D is familiar with the 15 minute work day, but in a sandbox that really seems to be the default method of play, go nova every fight and then fall back and rest in a safe place.

In a linear adventure I can have time pressures to keep them going forward, usually limited opportunities or enemy action. But that really strains verisimilitude and tone in a sandbox.


I tried numerous rules tweaks; only resting in town, daily costs for supplies, reduced lethality, but all they did was slow down the game or open themselves up to player exploits and arguments about "gentleman's agreements".


Any advice on how to do this successfully?

TLDR: How do I maintain challenge, tension, or stakes in a game where proactive players can fall back or rest whenever they like?

Thanks!

MoiMagnus
2021-05-30, 12:34 PM
Players need to have ambitions.

As part of the concept of the sandbox, player should be able to chose the easy road, to always be prudent, to take all their time by resting between each encounter, and to take weeks to travel through the wild rather than days.

But if they take their time, the world will advance without them. And if their goal is more than just "survive and get a stable job" (which most NPCs are likely happy with), they should need to push their luck at some point.

Lacco
2021-05-30, 01:00 PM
In most RPGs, challenges are based on attrition and slowly wearing away resources, but when you only have occasional encounters that is hard to do, and to keep them challenging they need to be so deadly that player death is a real concern.

Just to be sure: An RPG should be more than just a series of combats. Yes/no?

How do you feel about player choice...? Non-combat related choice, preferably.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-05-30, 01:13 PM
I run...semi-sandboxes[1]. For me, the key in all adventure types is to diversify what you mean by "challenge." If the only question is "will your character kill all the enemies before they kill you," you only have a single axis of challenge. And so having the ability to set your own pace is a problem. If there are other axes of challenge, you can still have a 5 minute working day and also challenge the players. Or you can provide incentives to move faster than glacially. Because resource attrition isn't the only way.

Things like
* you've made enemies who will now threaten those you care about unless handled promptly.
* there's a threat that can't be handled by casting sword, such as a hidden group in another nation stirring up trouble against your people via false accusations.
* there are other competitors for the same goals; if you dawdle, other groups may have already picked the site clean.
* challenges that require thinking through things and putting pieces together usually don't burn many explicit resources, but can provide sessions worth of challenges.

This being said, your players seem to mostly be in the mood of "I cast sword". They're only looking for combat challenges, and mostly mowing down mooks. They're not willing to make their own goals that drive them. Which rather makes sandboxes difficult to pull off.

[1] The structure tends to be
* Seed adventure for levels 1-3. This is branching-linear, designed as a tutorial and introduction to the world. Often has little or nothing to do with the rest of the campaign.
* At that point I've figured out a "major antagonist/major plot" that provides over-arching themes for the rest of the campaign. Individual arcs may not directly touch on it, but will get woven in as they go.
* 3-8 session "arcs" (1-2 levels) based on what the players decide to do and how they approach their goals. Some of these are character driven, others are "plot" driven, but all the themes get woven together into the primary theme.
* At some point, they've discovered the primary antagonist's plot and start focusing on that, leading to a capstone. Sometimes, the "primary antagonist" they choose isn't the one I originally planned for.

Jorren
2021-05-30, 02:24 PM
Sandboxes are less structured than games where everything is an appropriate or equivalent challenge. You have to prioritize either freedom or challenging play. You can do both to some extent but invariably one has to take priority. Sandboxes work best with proactive players with goals; if your players are not that type you are better off with a more stuctured approach.

If you are trying to maintain challenge, tension, or stakes in a sandbox game you are taking the lead, which often works against sandbox play. You need players with goals who are interested in challenging themselves. I find that sandboxes work best when I focus on presenting the setting and then stepping back to be reactive. If the players then take the lead with ideas of their own then I know I am on the right track. If they don't it is probably a good sign that either the setup is not interesting to them or they are not interested in sandbox type games.

In my games I don't run sandboxes for players who are not proactive; end of story. I don't run D&D either specifically because it is a level-scaled resource management game focused around combat set-pieces, making it unattractive to me for sandbox play.

From your previous threads your players come across as a contentious lot who don't want to work with you. If that's the case then the form of play (sandbox vs structured) may end up being irrelevant if they see you as an obstacle rather than someone to work with in creating an enjoyable game.

SimonMoon6
2021-05-30, 02:42 PM
D&D is a system that is particularly bad for sandbox games. In fact, it's a system that's pretty bad for almost all narrative structures other than "here's a dungeon, go kill stuff". So, my advice would be "don't use D&D" if you want to run a sandbox game. One of the main problems is that if you have five different possible adventures available that would challenge a 5th level party, well, once they finish one of these adventures, the party is no longer 5th level, so the other adventures (that they might then go on, if they are still relevant) can no longer challenge them.

As far as "going nova" and the "fifteen minute day", well, to me that has nothing to do with sandbox adventures. If one plot thread leads the party to investigate a dungeon, then it's just the same (for the most part) as if they had been railroaded into finding the dungeon. If they can beat it by using up all their daily resources and then taking a nap, then they can do that regardless of whether they chose to be here or were forced to be here. The problem here is simply adventure design. Dungeons are bad for precisely this reason (which is another reason to avoid using D&D since the presumption here is that adventures lead to dungeons since "Dungeons" is in the name of the game). But the issue can be managed by putting time pressures on the party. They need to have a reason to do things in a timely fashion. This can be difficult to get right in a D&D setting since the PCs will probably expect to take a nap after fighting every single orc and so they may fail the adventure rather spectacularly if (a) they are not given evidence that makes them realize that they need to hurry or (b) they are put in a situation where they have to use up their resources early on and therefore can't be expected to continue. Resource management is the problem. Games with a lot of resource management (like D&D) are just hard to work with as a DM/GM.

Satinavian
2021-05-30, 03:11 PM
Now, everyone who has played D&D is familiar with the 15 minute work day, but in a sandbox that really seems to be the default method of play, go nova every fight and then fall back and rest in a safe place.
Plan your challanges for them going nova.
If attrition is not a thing, assume, they are at full power for each important encounter. Design for this.

They still can act tactically or not, they still might have to retreat of things go wrong. They still have to recognize the moment they need to do so.


Also, failure must be an option, but an encounter running bad means actually losing instead of just using more ressources, you really want to have other failure states than TPK. Make the fights about objectives. And make sure, they can't retry as often as they need.

False God
2021-05-30, 03:48 PM
You have to have players who seek it out.

So you have to provide hooks that lead them towards those challenges. But it's up to the players to engage in those stakes, and follow through to push forward into the more and more difficult elements of those quests.

It's sort of the perpetual problem of "sandbox" settings. If they players aren't doing anything that challenges them, or attracts enemies to challenge them, "challenge" and "stakes" don't exist.

But, maybe the party doesn't want "challenge" and "stakes". Maybe they want a more low-tier game, dealing with smaller issues. Maybe they have no desire to become level 20 god-tier characters. Sure, they'll miss out on some of the big epic things, but maybe they're okay with that.

Not everything needs to be challenging and have stakes, maybe your party just wants to be the "local heroes" helping out the little guy with the little problems. Maybe they're interested in enjoyable stories and memorable moments that don't revolve around straining their resources.

Telok
2021-05-30, 04:46 PM
About a decade ago I ran a bounded sandbox based off one of the Spiderweb Software's Exile series from the 2000s (rebranded with more graphics & resold as "Avernum"). It was nice because as a crpg based off old ad&d with online resources for maps and walk-throughs a lot of stuff was just picking out the closest monster match and copying the 3.5e stats into a small beastiary.

Challenge was pretty good over the campaign. There was basically a low level area with low level quests and wandering wildlife. A set of medium level areas with mid level quests and wandering monsters. And scattered around were the high level dungeons. While the pcs could have gone exploring they mostly bopped from one obvious quest to another, confident that each town had several and I'd guide them towards appropriate level ones while warning them of really dangerous stuff.

There was a book I had a long time ago (lent out, never returned) that focused on the nation/state level economics and strategy of castles. It's where I learned the concept of "defense in depth", which I apply when building/converting/running dungeons. It basically comes down to each dungeon being a web of points of interest connected by paths, some points have encounters, there are more encounters than the pcs can nova, the dungeon reacts between the times the pcs leave & re-enter. If the dungeon belongs to an organized society it may be able to call on reinforcements from other dungeons. If a dungeon is purely static (only undead, golems, summoning traps) then each encounter is designed as more than just a simple combat encounter.

The thing about sandboxes is you need to run the inhabitants reactions to the intrusions in a way that's a belivable response to what the pcs did. Did they wipe out half the lizardman town before retreating to rest up? The lizardmen either leave or put up defenses based on what they have and what the pcs did. Did they clear half the undead spawning cursed necromancy node? Go ahead and re-reanimate the corpses they left behind, maybe pull in some local wildlife to die & animate if the pcs didn't close the door behind them. Have they taken out a gnoll fort a day's travel from the gnoll castle? It's reinforced with more troops than before & the local random encounters are double encounter rate and the table is all gnoll partols, plus two gnolls of the patrol always go runner as soon as the pcs appear in order to start a hunt & kill mission from the nearest fort.

One trick I used was other adventuring groups. The pcs would hear about them clearing a dungeon or doing a quest the pcs had passed up earlier. Then, when the pcs were leveled up and ready for the next area I just had all the leftover quests & dungeons cleared off screen by the npc parties. Also trim the ransom encounter rate to half (depopulation of threats) and make it mostly super easy wildlife (intelligent encounters left the area because too many adventurers).

OldTrees1
2021-05-30, 05:42 PM
How to maintain challenge and stakes in a Sandbox:
Step 1: Create a PC with a proactive ambitious long term motivation with short term opportunities, or a PC that will naturally acquire one as they learn about the world around them.
Step 2: Pursue that motivation. Know that you are in a living world and your motivation is likely to face passive obstacles to overcome and active opposition to endure.
Step 3: Manage how far / little you overextend. Your opposition will take advantage of either mistake.

How to maintain challenge and stages as a DM in a Sandbox:
Step 1: Create the Sandbox with plenty of room for PC ambition and for opposition to that ambition. I suggest having several NPCs with meaty ambitions that create timers for conflict and the opportunity for the PCs to have foes.
Step 2: Require the PCs be created with meaty motivations and learn about those motivations.
Step 3: Continue creating the Sandbox.
Step 4: Run the Sandbox. The PC motivations will create enemies and those enemies will challenge the PCs resource management on a grand scale (not always a daily scale). Some days a 15 min workday is the right tactic, but others it will be a fatal mistake.

The PCs live in a dangerous world that grows more dangerous by the day. If they don't defend their goals, they will lose them. If the PCs want a safehouse:

They will need to put in the work to protect the nearby town they use for supplies. Not just from the bandits, but also from the army that will likely invade in a few weeks, and the elder evil that is likely going to awaken in a couple months.
They will need to put in the work to defend the security of their safe house. They got involved in disputes between local factions and one of those factions is interested in removing the PCs.
They need to put in the work to become stronger. Their safe house is in the middle of a dangerous land. If they get too lazy, eventually it will be too dangerous to do a grocery run.
They also need to be ready for when they are attacked. So they can't always overextend themselves.


Oh, and if they go to deal with a location / threat, then you have all the linear adventure skills of the enemy regrouping and preparing if given time.

In a Sandbox the PCs choose the stakes and the degree of challenge. Then they have to live with their choice (which could be dying from overextending, or dying from underextending).


Will this work for your group? I have no idea. I suspect nothing will work well enough in that specific circumstance.

Talakeal
2021-05-30, 06:06 PM
Important clarification btw; I was specifically referring to a hex crawl style sandbox where exploration and treasure seeking are the prime motivators.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-05-30, 06:11 PM
Important clarification btw; I was specifically referring to a hex crawl style sandbox where exploration and treasure seeking are the prime motivators.

To be honest? I'd find that kind of game quite a bit of a drag myself. Same with "old-school" plot-free dungeon crawls.

That doesn't excuse whining and moaning as your players apparently do, but it's certainly a niche style.

Thrudd
2021-05-30, 06:43 PM
They need motives beyond just surviving. You need a ticking clock, as you know, and also actual consequences for failing. If characters are after treasure, then waiting too long means there's less treasure, and they need to know that. If they want to stop an evil ritual, that means the evil ritual might happen before they get there, and you need to prepare for how that affects the world. There can and should always be more treasure to go after, some means of continuing and undoing the results of the ritual, etc. The game goes on, regardless, but the results of waiting too long need to be seen and felt.

As the GM, you must resist the urge to insist that something in particular happen. If the players want to dawdle, only fight easy enemies and remain satisfied with making only minor gains or not gaining at all, then that's what happens. However, knowing what motivates your players (or what the system says should be motivating your players), you should be able to tempt them into taking risks. For instance, rumors of that magic sword or a book of spells hidden in the tower- but they are never the only adventurers with those rumors. Get there first or you will miss out. Maybe the game has mechanics for attaining reputation or glory as a resource, and being the second or third group of people to return from the dungeon gets you much less reputation.

Experience, progressing character power, needs to be directly connected to the activities you (or the system) want them to perform. IE, getting treasure, magic items, and/or reputation is what leads to the characters gaining power. If you don't want them grinding goblins to level up before going on a real quest, don't give much or anything for killing goblins, unless they are a serious threat to somebody. Having a reputation as the best rat killer in town shouldn't be equivalent to the reputation of someone that slew even a single dragon. Fighting a lot of rats won't result in becoming the strongest people in the world. The rewards for that probably ought to cap out at level 2.

So, both the system and the setting need to be tailored to specifically reward completing only the types of challenges you want the PCs to engage in. The 5MWD is avoided in part by smart system design, in part by narrative consequences applied for failure to act within a certain timeframe. Making the players care about those consequences requires some buy in, an understanding of how the system works and what sort of characters they are supposed to be playing. You can't trick people into playing a game they don't want to play.

Telok
2021-05-30, 06:52 PM
Important clarification btw; I was specifically referring to a hex crawl style sandbox where exploration and treasure seeking are the prime motivators.

For dungeons, have them be interconnected and not linear. The inhabitants are either a single extremely deadly encounter that they have to nova, or the inhabitants react to the pcs with reinforcements or leaving with the treasure and inhabiting a different dungeon the pcs have cleaned for them.

Something I used once was an underground crypt with a blocked entrance on a river bank. Opening the crypt started it flooding and the bank the entrance was at began to collapse. Called for a bunch of rolls (nature, engineering, dungeonology, history) and people could only make one each, extra info for each success. That gave hints of the layout; that it was built out of a cave system, approximate size, in a few days the whole area would sinkhole with unknown depth & sediment, it would be about 6 hours before the collapse really started, etc. So the dungeon had a timer, but not the overall adventure.

Sure, it's not something you can use with every dungeon. But collapsing the building when you lose is enough of a villan trope that it works every sixth or seventh dungeon. Plus the players get used to it and sometimes get excited about having to speed run a dungeon.

Alcore
2021-05-30, 07:51 PM
see... a sandbox is a completely different beast than a normal adventure. Ironically it is kinda the same.


Normally the PCs are "chosen ones" by the players and DM to solve some thing. No PCs, no adventure. Unless there is a deadline and the DM wishes to continue without the players the world stops. Narratively this is because the adventure is the one and only and the backdrop in the scenery. In many ways the characters are scenery too. The game cannot, and needs not, progress without the PCs.


Sandbox throws this on its head as the backdrop is the focus and something should be in motion to provide adventures. A kingdom X big should have Y factions (preferably split between all alignments) and if the 'heroes' spend a week in town both heroes and villains will triumph across the land. As any stable world it should be locked (for the most part) in a status quo. All sides are trying to end it but none can keep momentum for long. Combat is just a tiny piece of the world.



Most Important;

You need real PCs. Each one needs to have a goal that they must strive for. A sandbox is more like a novel; if all the characters have an arc it is more satisfying.

OldTrees1
2021-05-30, 09:09 PM
Important clarification btw; I was specifically referring to a hex crawl style sandbox where exploration and treasure seeking are the prime motivators.

Why are they exploring? Why do they want treasure? Or by "prime motivators" do you mean these PCs don't have any significant plans?

If all the PCs are doing is "exploring" and only for "treasure" then they will set their own pace and can defuse significant opposition by just going elsewhere. I don't expect you to be able to enforce your desired pacing under these conditions.

RandomPeasant
2021-05-30, 10:05 PM
It seems like the easy solution would be to start balancing around the assumption that players will use all their resources in one fight. There's nothing inherently wrong with that balance point, it's simply not the one that the game primes you to expect. Design bigger encounters, with enemies coming in over multiple waves, and just let the players blow their wad on that and rest up for the next one. If that's the play pattern they want, give it to them.

And this seems like a pretty natural way for a hex crawl to work to me. If you go to the hex where the gnoll tribe is living, that doesn't also need to be a gnoll-themed dungeon. Maybe there's one starter fight where you run into a gnoll hunting party, but once you've found the gnolls you can just fight the gnolls. The content is already divided into chunks by the nature of a hex crawl, it doesn't need to be further chunked within the hexes. And unlike a dungeon, once you've explored a hex, there isn't an obvious next encounter, and it feels quite natural that you would rest and poke around to see what the stuff you could claim from the hex was, leaving you rested for further exploration tomorrow.

icefractal
2021-05-31, 01:02 AM
The approach I've taken is to ditch the assumption of attrition through a long course of fights. Instead, there are a small number of closely-connected fights, so the majority of resource management is within a fight. This also works well with not having either the play time or the desire for large numbers of fights.

Now does this mean each individual fight requires a non-trivial chance of losing, and therefore that eventually a loss is all but guaranteed, especially in a sandbox where difficulty isn't tailored to the party? Pretty much, yes.

But that's only a problem if death is an unrecoverable state. My solution was to make resurrection much easier, to the point where even in a TPK it still happens. So even if PCs die on a regular basis, that doesn't mean constant churn.

But then, what's the cost to loss? A few things:
1) Whatever immediate goal you were pursuing in the fight isn't happening.
2) Part of the PCs power is inherent, including things that would usually be gear, but then you can accumulate as much additional gear as you can find. That gear is at risk in the usual way if it can't be recovered or there's a TPK.
3) Resurrection takes time - not enormous amounts of time, but enough to likely be out of action a scene and in the case of a TPK, often enough to interfere with their current plans.

But isn't time-pressure the same thing I haven't found to work? It depends on the amount. IMO, time pressure should be based on the world, not purely gamist. Meaning that "you have two weeks before this opportunity is gone, including travel time, delay for the PCs hearing about it, etc" is legit, but "you have three days from the point you reach the adventure site" isn't. And in that basis, timelines that tight enough to make 2-3 more days a dealbreaker could easily cause the PCs to miss the chance just through bad luck in travel. But a few weeks' delay? That's more significant.

Satinavian
2021-05-31, 05:04 AM
Important clarification btw; I was specifically referring to a hex crawl style sandbox where exploration and treasure seeking are the prime motivators.
Ok, specifically for hexcrawl that is more difficult. Without timepreasure, you would probably want each hex completely selfcontained, with no resting until the hex is done one way or the other nut assume that each hex is entered at full health/ressources. And again, the hexes need a failed-state beyond TPK.

Lord Torath
2021-05-31, 07:20 AM
Does each hex stay 'clear'? For a hex crawl, wandering monsters are imperative. I know you tried to get rid of them at one point, but I think they are pretty much required. If the PCs blow all their daily resources on the first encounter, then retreat to 'base', they will never make progress. I would have most of the encounters be hostile animals - things without much loot. If they want to find the rich, treasure-filled ruins, they're going to have to push on past the first encounter.

Also, check for random encounters at night, as well. Have encounters that are way too powerful for the group (let them know that such encounters will exist, and that they need to be willing to run away or hide instead of engaging) as well an encounters that are too easy, or animals that sensibly retreat (they want a meal, not to fight to the death - but don't be afraid to through in the occasional rabid 'bear' encounter, either).

Edit: Also, see Yora's post below about awarding XP. Give little xp for random encounters, and most of the xp for accomplishing exploration goals - bringing treasure back to the town, discovering magic springs, etc.

Quertus
2021-05-31, 07:23 AM
So, first off, *you* don't maintain challenge in a sandbox - that's on the players. *They* choose what they want to do, and it's as challenging - from "trivial" to "impossible" - as it is.

Quertus, my deep epic level Wizard, comes to your world? He attempts to open up a spell component shop. That is probably either trivial, or, if your world's Wizards don't use spell components, nearly impossible to make work. He attempts to study the unique magic system used by local Wizards. That is either easy for a being of his skill and resources, or, if denied those resources by local laws of magic, he didn't come in person.

As you may have noticed, the level of challenge here has nothing to do with whether or not Quertus decides to nova in a 15-minute workday, because it's not based on resource attrition.

But you aren't asking about a sandbox, you're asking about a hex crawl. Here, the implementation details matter, as there are several ways to run a hex crawl.

Challenge

Many things are always going to be equally challenging, regardless of when the party encounters them, puzzles being the most system-agnostic. In some systems / with some parties, a chasm, Nurgle rot, diplomacy, rations, ammo, time constraints, water, or mirror opposites will remain equally challenging.

Tension

Maybe we're using this word differently, but I think that a hex crawl should *not* have tension. That… kinda defeats the point.

Stakes

In a hex crawl, the stakes are "your life". The stakes strongly discourage your desired gameplay. I'm with your players on this one: death comes for the unprepared.

Failure? No, Obi-Wan, not failure.

At least, not the way you see it. Your Players have either attempted to test you system for you (quite successfully), or attempted to communicate with you (unsuccessfully).

What you wanted to hear

Now, I'm pretty sure that this would be the wrong answer for your group, but here's what I think that you wanted to hear: run a game like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or Risk of Rain 2, where the opposition levels.

Or…One idea I had was to implement milestone leveling fairly literally: certain hexes had obelisks, which, when activated, leveled the party. And only party, not NPCs, can level. There's even some legend about the obelisks making heroes or something. But, when activated, their power didn't just flow into the PCs, it also actively levels up the world threats, because they are "cursed" artifacts, designed to literally make the party heroes by forcing escalating conflict.

Eh, I didn't word that well, but hopefully you get the idea: what's a hero without a challenge? And these artifacts provide both heroic power, and threats for which that power is needed - which, eventually, the players might catch on to.

What I think you actually should do

Post some rules to the Playground. Let us evaluate them. Then use those "fixed" rules to run your hex crawl.

I will suggest making random encounters and travel two real considerations, encouraging the party to travel from hex to hex, rather than constantly back to town. Design sites around a nova party, one that wants to get back to their mounts and hirelings quickly, before random encounters eat them.

Ideally, you would be running a second group, whose PCs operate out of the same town, and each session *must* represent a preset amount of time (say, "a week", or "3 hexes" or something) in order to keep the groups in sync. So, if they *really* want to, they *can* spend several sessions doing nothing but fighting 1 encounter, backtracking to town, loading up on supplies, and hiking through random encounters.

Rules? That was… rest anywhere, eat daily (via supplies, foraging/hunting, butchering monsters, trading… however you can / think to), increased lethality - basically, the opposite of what you tried :smallamused:

Alternatives

A stranger in a strange land: per an anime (about a Lich?) I haven't watched and whose name I cannot remember, make them the most powerful beings in the world… and the only beings from their world in that world - a world completely unfamiliar to the players & PCs. There is no friendly town to fall back to. They advance carefully, learn about their opposition, or they die. Actually, this would be *really good* for your players, in several ways.

Or: the church of Fharlanghn teleported you here… wherever "here" is. Or the classic shipwreck scenario.

Your patron demands results: the BBEG wants his 12 stones of power, lieutenant, and he's not going to accept excuses. Here's going to keep executing random redshirts unless you bring him those stones in time for the once in a millennia planetary convergence.

A physical time limit: look, the world is going to blow up in a year. Your mission is to help fill this "Noah's arc" with as many species as possible. For added fun, make the "threat" be infection of the nonliving with animating spirits - that's right, you're fighting treasure, and collecting monsters! :smallwink:

Or:Elminster has hired you to sneak treasure into dungeon locations, to provide incentives for the next generation of adventurers, and he wants it done before the next edition change, dagnabbit!

Yora
2021-05-31, 07:49 AM
In Dungeon- and Hexcrawls, the challenges are not the individual encounters. The challenge is going in and out of the dungeon before the party is worn down, and getting into the wild and back to a town before resources run out.
A critical component in this style of play is that the players have no way to know what and how many encounters they will have to deal with on the return trip. Random encounters are an essential part of crawl campaigns, and I would argue for all sandboxes in general.

It is then up to the players to judge for themselves how far to press on and when to turn back to a safe position to recover and resupply. If players want to take things slow and carefully, that's on them. If they want to face great risks, that's also on them. By making random encounter rolls, the responsibility is handed to the player. It's no longer the GM who decides that it would now be a fun moment to annoy the player with very dangerous monsters while they are very vulnerable. The encounter happened at random, that the PCs are in the state they are in is the result of the players taking risks and gambling.
If the game allows the entire party to fully recover after resting once, then the random encounters have to be set up in a way that makes the chance to have the rest interrupted relatively high.

Also, running into hostile creatures should not be a reward in that easy XP come right to the party's doorstep. The amount of XP gained from wandering monsters should be rather low, with the bulk of XP coming from things that are not fights. Which is the reason why old edition of D&D award XP for treasure, and dungeons have big hoards of gold. The goal is to retrieve the treasure from the dungeon while getting around the guardians with minimal risk of injury and death.

OD&D, AD&D, and BECMI were literally designed for Dungeon- and Hexcrawls.

Satinavian
2021-05-31, 10:01 AM
Yes, but that is not something that meshes well with Talakeals table (as several threads show). That is why he is looking for ways to make a sandbox without ressource management. Pointing hm to the traditional way won't help much.

Talakeal
2021-05-31, 11:05 AM
Ok, so I guess I am looking more for technical advice than narrative advice; like house rules and stuff to make it so that the optimal decision is not to always play super slowly and methodically and rest after every encounter.

I tried numerous fixes; adjusting where the players could rest and how long rests took, upkeep costs, frequency and difficulty of random encounters, adjusting the penalty for defeat, but nothing changed that underlying fact; the optimal move is always to rest after every single encounter, and anything else is just playing dumb for the sake of a less tedious game.

In my opinion, games need some form of uncertainty as well as some form of meaningful tactical and / or strategic decision to qualify as games. RPGs with a 15MWD model don't really have that, every encounter (including non combat encounters) basically boil down to melee characters rolling a few dice for fun, results don't really matter, while the wizard blows their most powerful spells and resolves the situation.


Just to be sure: An RPG should be more than just a series of combats. Yes/no?

How do you feel about player choice...? Non-combat related choice, preferably.

I don't think I am the person who needs whatever advice you are trying to give.

My ideal game is one where the players only get into a fight once every few sessions, and much prefers to spend hours on end talking in character. Heck, my last group would literally spend entire sessions coordinating our outfits for a party and I had a great time doing it.

I have received advice on this forum that I "Need to get over myself and run a dungeon crawl," and that "You honestly think that drawing the floorplan for a 1st level character's house, or making an inventory of what's in the cupboard, is relevant to a game of D&D? If so, we're obviously playing very different games."

But my current group really only enjoys action / adventure games, so that's what we are playing.

Do also note that encounters don't necessarily have to be combats; traps, locked doors, environmental obstacles, even NPC negotiations can all be solved just as easilly by a wizard who can rest and get new spells on a whim.


But, maybe the party doesn't want "challenge" and "stakes". Maybe they want a more low-tier game, dealing with smaller issues. Maybe they have no desire to become level 20 god-tier characters. Sure, they'll miss out on some of the big epic things, but maybe they're okay with that.

The players absolutely want to be level 20 god-tier characters, they just want to get there by the safest and most optimal route.


In Dungeon- and Hexcrawls, the challenges are not the individual encounters. The challenge is going in and out of the dungeon before the party is worn down, and getting into the wild and back to a town before resources run out.
A critical component in this style of play is that the players have no way to know what and how many encounters they will have to deal with on the return trip. Random encounters are an essential part of crawl campaigns, and I would argue for all sandboxes in general.

It is then up to the players to judge for themselves how far to press on and when to turn back to a safe position to recover and resupply. If players want to take things slow and carefully, that's on them. If they want to face great risks, that's also on them. By making random encounter rolls, the responsibility is handed to the player. It's no longer the GM who decides that it would now be a fun moment to annoy the player with very dangerous monsters while they are very vulnerable. The encounter happened at random, that the PCs are in the state they are in is the result of the players taking risks and gambling.
If the game allows the entire party to fully recover after resting once, then the random encounters have to be set up in a way that makes the chance to have the rest interrupted relatively high.

Also, running into hostile creatures should not be a reward in that easy XP come right to the party's doorstep. The amount of XP gained from wandering monsters should be rather low, with the bulk of XP coming from things that are not fights. Which is the reason why old edition of D&D award XP for treasure, and dungeons have big hoards of gold. The goal is to retrieve the treasure from the dungeon while getting around the guardians with minimal risk of injury and death.

OD&D, AD&D, and BECMI were literally designed for Dungeon- and Hexcrawls.

Hey Yora! Your blog was one of the many things that inspired me to try running an exploration focused game, so I really appreciate your input!

The thing about random encounters is that they really only slowed down the game.

Basically, random encounters on the way back to town were both the motivation for and, ironically, the only thing stopping the players from resting after every fight.

Adjusting the frequency of random encounters never actually changed the optimum strategy, merely the rationale for it. It went from:

Explore one room of the dungeon, then go back to town and rest with the rationale of "Well, we can't risk spending any more resources here because we might get ambushed on the way back to town and killed!"
to:
Explore one room of the dungeon, then go back to town and rest with the rationale of "Well, there's nothing stopping us from going back to town and resting up, so we might as well do that before exploring the next room so we are at full strength for whatever might be ahead!".

So yeah, random encounters just make the game slower and more tedious, they don't actually change playstyle or introduce added uncertainty / challenge.

MoiMagnus
2021-05-31, 11:11 AM
Ideas of time pressure you can put:

(1) The night is coming, and is dangerous, as monsters come back to live and terrible creature roam around. Only a few places are safe during the night, and that does not include the dungeons/wilderness/etc. So if the PCs come back to the town after defeating the monster at the entrance of the dungeon, the monsters respawn during the night. If they want to every go further than the first room, they will need to do more than one encounter per day.

(2) You are tracked and on the run. Enemies stronger than you are tracking you (and you know you have no chance of winning). The best you can do is have few days (maybe a week) in advance, but they will eventually come. If you ever want to go deeper into a ruin to get some powerful magic items, and don't want to be catch and lose the campaign, you will need to do more than one room per day.
=> While it's not really realistic, you probably want to communicate explicitly how many days behind the bounty hunters are.

You might also have more ideas if you switch to longer time periods (long rest every week instead of every day, for example).

Telok
2021-05-31, 12:30 PM
Ok, so I guess I am looking more for technical advice than narrative advice; like house rules and stuff to make it so that the optimal decision is not to always play super slowly and methodically and rest after every encounter.

I tried numerous fixes; adjusting where the players could rest and how long rests took, upkeep costs, frequency and difficulty of random encounters, adjusting the penalty for defeat, but nothing changed that underlying fact; the optimal move is always to rest after every single encounter, and anything else is just playing dumb for the sake of a less tedious game.

In a sandbox with absolutely zero time limitations of any sort that is correct. The optimal thing to do is restore all your power & options between each challenge. The only way to "rule" that out is to make not resting a requirement to get any xp or loot.

Take a fantasy fighting video game with some form of recharging mana bar and a healing spell. If the fights have any space between them or you can hide somewhere, the optimal and common tactic will be to heal & mana up between them. It doesn't matter if it takes 15 minutes of sitting there spamming the "heal 1/10th of 1 HP of my 200 HP", they'll do it. That's basically what you're facing here, a video game design issue in your pnp game.

There is really only one way that I know of (you might check video game design resources for more info) to "fix" that via a hard rule. Make a linear dungeon, lock the door, run a timer that blows up the dungeon, put all the loot & xp at the exit of the dungeon.

Alcore
2021-05-31, 12:33 PM
Ok, so I guess I am looking more for technical advice than narrative advice; like house rules and stuff to make it so that the optimal decision is not to always play super slowly and methodically and rest after every encounter.

I tried numerous fixes; adjusting where the players could rest and how long rests took, upkeep costs, frequency and difficulty of random encounters, adjusting the penalty for defeat, but nothing changed that underlying fact; the optimal move is always to rest after every single encounter, and anything else is just playing dumb for the sake of a less tedious game.

In my opinion, games need some form of uncertainty as well as some form of meaningful tactical and / or strategic decision to qualify as games. RPGs with a 15MWD model don't really have that, every encounter (including non combat encounters) basically boil down to melee characters rolling a few dice for fun, results don't really matter, while the wizard blows their most powerful spells and resolves the situation.
I am aware you want a technical answer over a narrative one... but you asked about a sandbox. What you describe is a hexcrawl that reminds me of Arkham City were I (Batman) would walk into a room and fight a dozen dudes. Which can be good fun, it was exhausting after an hour, but it's likely only 15 minutes of fun.

The last paragraph of the quote leads me to believe you have an entirely different problem. Three in fact and none of them have any definite correlation to just hexcrawls.

1. Your wizard is too OP or you have no idea how to challenge him or both. A lot of unspoken nuance in that last sentence. Instead implementing new rules try talking to him/them.


I tried numerous rules tweaks; only resting in town, daily costs for supplies, reduced lethality, but all they did was slow down the game or open themselves up to player exploits and arguments about "gentleman's agreements".
2. You have already done technical solutions which opened up a different problem to me; you are not providing what they want and they are not providing what you want. You say you know what they want so i assume you guys talked so i can only assume there is some definition disconnection between both parties. Language can be funny that way.

3. If technical solutions have already failed why not a narrative solution?




At the end of the day i see a "players" vs "DM" mindset being cultivated.

Talakeal
2021-05-31, 01:00 PM
Post some rules to the Playground. Let us evaluate them. Then use those "fixed" rules to run your hex crawl.

If people want to workshop rules with me, I would be more than happy to do so. But, as I generally run my own system, there would have to be an added layer of difficulty as I would need to explain the difference between relevant game rules and house rules for the one campaign.


1. Your wizard is too OP or you have no idea how to challenge him or both. A lot of unspoken nuance in that last sentence. Instead implementing new rules try talking to him/them.

Its not really about my wizard. Wizards in general are more powerful because they are more limited in most RPG systems. The fact that wizards dominate games where you don't get your recommended 4-6 encounters per day in is very common in D&D.

But, honestly, unless the encounter has some sort of gimmick, four barbarians charging in and mindlessly hacking the nearest enemy would be just as pointlessly one sided, it would just take a little longer. Without some form of attrition, a balanced enemy encounter can't hope to win, and without any hope of winning tactical decisions are ultimately pointless.



2. You have already done technical solutions which opened up a different problem to me; you are not providing what they want and they are not providing what you want. You say you know what they want so i assume you guys talked so i can only assume there is some definition disconnection between both parties. Language can be funny that way.

3. If technical solutions have already failed why not a narrative solution?

At the end of the day i see a "players" vs "DM" mindset being cultivated.

Forget my players and our relationship. The game is over and I won't be running another hex-crawl with them or anyone else for years.

What I want is a situation where a theoretical player who is a perfectly rational actor doesn't have to choose between making the optimal decision for character success and having an exciting game where tactical decisions and dice rolls matter than moves at a reasonable pace.

Lord Torath
2021-05-31, 01:19 PM
Mechanically? Stop giving xp for monsters defeated, and instead give xp for accomplishing goals/acquiring treasure.

They clear the first room and return home to rest, repeating the process for the whole dungeon? By the time they come back to clear the 4th room, either something else has moved into the first room, or the other denizens see how things are going, grab their loot, and flee. It is no longer in their best interest to rest for a full night after each encounter.

Telok
2021-05-31, 02:24 PM
Mechanically? Stop giving xp for monsters defeated, and instead give xp for accomplishing goals/acquiring treasure.

They clear the first room and return home to rest, repeating the process for the whole dungeon? By the time they come back to clear the 4th room, either something else has moved into the first room, or the other denizens see how things are going, grab their loot, and flee. It is no longer in their best interest to rest for a full night after each encounter.

I did something like that once... memory... memory... May have been something like:
1 level per 4 general dungeons/quests
1 level per 2 major dungeons/main plot quests
1 level at each of 4 major milestones (which were main plot quests so yeah, 2 levels at once).
Replacement characters come in at -1 average party level (calculation included the character being replaced).
Anyone a level (or more) behind the average party level got 2 levels at a level-up.

Talakeal
2021-05-31, 02:44 PM
Mechanically? Stop giving xp for monsters defeated, and instead give xp for accomplishing goals/acquiring treasure.

They clear the first room and return home to rest, repeating the process for the whole dungeon? By the time they come back to clear the 4th room, either something else has moved into the first room, or the other denizens see how things are going, grab their loot, and flee. It is no longer in their best interest to rest for a full night after each encounter.

I actually did that.

Honestly that probably the only reason they travelled more than a hex or two from town in the first place.

icefractal
2021-05-31, 04:02 PM
Ok, so I guess I am looking more for technical advice than narrative advice; like house rules and stuff to make it so that the optimal decision is not to always play super slowly and methodically and rest after every encounter.
Well there is a simple solution - get rid of resting as a resource recovery method.

Or maybe just get rid of long rests, because taking a short (5-15 min) rest after a fight seems natural IC to me, and avoids overcompression (a D&D fight is typically under a minute, so 5-6 of them with no rests in between is a less than a 15m workday).

Most things (HP, spells, maneuvers) recover on a short rest. Anything that doesn't (consumable items, curses, etc) doesn't recover by any amount of resting.

Bam, no more incentive to go home and nap. This does mean that to have any challenge, individual fights are more of a threat, so you'd also want to make defeat not mean permadeath.

Quertus
2021-05-31, 04:48 PM
Yes, but that is not something that meshes well with Talakeals table (as several threads show). That is why he is looking for ways to make a sandbox without ressource management. Pointing hm to the traditional way won't help much.

What doesn't mesh with what why?

I'm not sure anyone has definitively answered exactly *why* Talakeal's table(s) is Bizarro World. So I'm quite curious to hear your theories on the matter, as to what won't work, and why.

NichG
2021-05-31, 05:56 PM
If the players actually don't like taking risks and don't like that kind of incautious/brave gameplay, wouldn't designing a game that makes anything other than risk-taking suboptimal just, y'know, make them hate the game?

Talakeal
2021-05-31, 05:58 PM
If the players actually don't like taking risks and don't like that kind of incautious/brave gameplay, wouldn't designing a game that makes anything other than risk-taking suboptimal just, y'know, make them hate the game?

No.

The problem is that the optimal path and the fun path are divergent.

The players don’t like spending all day on random encounters either, they just don’t want to lose.

Cluedrew
2021-05-31, 06:00 PM
Make resting expend resources.

Actually several other suggestions can be viewed in this lens. Track time is making time a resource and then using some every time you rest. Similarly respawning monsters causes a rest spend all of your "cleared rooms" resource (an abstract resource to be sure). But it seems you are looking for something a bit more immediate, exactly what that it is probably depends on system and setting.

But for an example how about going back to town for a full rest costs 100 coins. Clearing each "encounter" generates about 50-70 coins. So one encounter and heading home is a loss. Two encounters puts you safely even (with a bit of extra for other expenses). Its not until you handle three encounters that you start coming in ahead by any noticeable amount. And on a good run maybe you risk the forth, or spend 10-20 coins of expendables to end up an encounter ahead.

It probably wouldn't actually look like that. The amount of treasure would probably fluctuate a bit more so it would probably be more about pushing to one of the big payouts. And the 100 coins would probably actually be something more like resource/day and a "long rest" is actually a week or two of investment. Something like that.

I don't know where this came from. Some comment about tracking time probably.

Player 1: OK so we can sail out to the islands and grind there until we think we can beat the dragon.
GM: That's four months both ways, not including the training time.
Player 1: That's fine. This land isn't getting any more conquered.
Player 2: And it gives me time to upgrade my gear. I'm going to spend the maximum 500/month while we are on the boat.
GM: Are you sure you don't want to set that aside for retirement?
Player 2: No? Why would I do that?
GM: It's been 36 years in character since we started the campaign, your character is probably getting up there in years by now.

SimonMoon6
2021-05-31, 06:03 PM
Without some form of attrition, a balanced enemy encounter can't hope to win, and without any hope of winning tactical decisions are ultimately pointless.

What I want is a situation where a theoretical player who is a perfectly rational actor doesn't have to choose between making the optimal decision for character success and having an exciting game where tactical decisions and dice rolls matter than moves at a reasonable pace.

Attrition is not necessary if every fight is a boss fight.

If every fight is a significant fight, a climactic exciting thrilling fight, then having a fifteen minute work day becomes the only sensible option. The 1st level party fights nothing but CR 5 monsters. The 2nd level party fights nothing but CR 6 monsters. Et cetera.

I'm sorry if that sounds like a narrative choice rather than a rules choice, but honestly, the only change to the rules that would help would involve not using a game that has resources that get depleted. For example, you could make a house rule that wizards never forget spells that they have cast. That way, there's no reason for the wizard to rest after casting a spell. Of course, that would greatly increase the caster supremacy unless you also decrease the power level of spells to make up for it.

Or, you know, just use a different game system.

neonchameleon
2021-05-31, 06:30 PM
Spun off from my other thread.

My last campaign was an attempt at running a sandbox campaign in my system, and in one way it was a total failure.

I have no idea how to maintain challenge or stakes in such a scenario. In most RPGs, challenges are based on attrition and slowly wearing away resources, but when you only have occasional encounters that is hard to do, and to keep them challenging they need to be so deadly that player death is a real concern.

I find it pretty easy in some ways. Just hack the rest rules.

Short rests take 8 hours the way a long rest does by default
Long rests take a long lazy weekend and can only be taken in a secure base (i.e. back at town)

That way they know they need to trek back to recover their resources. And that gets slow and annoying especially if there is something afoot and you're using some vague semblance of a timetable. Which means you need a looming and growing threat so the players know they have something to work against. And the less they do the more the town is threaened.

Talakeal
2021-05-31, 07:10 PM
Make resting expend resources.

Actually several other suggestions can be viewed in this lens. Track time is making time a resource and then using some every time you rest. Similarly respawning monsters causes a rest spend all of your "cleared rooms" resource (an abstract resource to be sure). But it seems you are looking for something a bit more immediate, exactly what that it is probably depends on system and setting.

But for an example how about going back to town for a full rest costs 100 coins. Clearing each "encounter" generates about 50-70 coins. So one encounter and heading home is a loss. Two encounters puts you safely even (with a bit of extra for other expenses). Its not until you handle three encounters that you start coming in ahead by any noticeable amount. And on a good run maybe you risk the forth, or spend 10-20 coins of expendables to end up an encounter ahead.

It probably wouldn't actually look like that. The amount of treasure would probably fluctuate a bit more so it would probably be more about pushing to one of the big payouts. And the 100 coins would probably actually be something more like resource/day and a "long rest" is actually a week or two of investment. Something like that.

I honestly thought about that, but it was hard to rationalize in universe and I am certain player bitching would greatly intensify.

Still, that's probably the best idea so far and what I will go with if I ever try this again.


I find it pretty easy in some ways. Just hack the rest rules.

Short rests take 8 hours the way a long rest does by default
Long rests take a long lazy weekend and can only be taken in a secure base (i.e. back at town)

That way they know they need to trek back to recover their resources. And that gets slow and annoying especially if there is something afoot and you're using some vague semblance of a timetable. Which means you need a looming and growing threat so the players know they have something to work against. And the less they do the more the town is threaened.

That's actually what I did. And yes, yes it does get very slow and annoying.

NichG
2021-05-31, 07:16 PM
No.

The problem is that the optimal path and the fun path are divergent.

The players don’t like spending all day on random encounters either, they just don’t want to lose.

And 'they don't want to lose' is divergent from a game where the optimal strategy is risky.

OldTrees1
2021-05-31, 07:25 PM
No.

The problem is that the optimal path and the fun path are divergent.

The players don’t like spending all day on random encounters either, they just don’t want to lose.

I know you want a technical answer, but the best way to change the optimal path has to do with redefining the objective.

What are the PCs' objectives beyond "explore, loot, and rest"? Why will they fail those objectives if they are too slow when they go exploring / looting?

Tada! Now the optimal path is to find a balance between doing the maximum amount of progress each day while balancing their efforts to avoid losing progress by over or under extending for the day.

So add a rule:
Each PC will have a meaty objective that will lose progress if not maintained. Lost progress might be due to maintenance costs, or hostile conflict. To reward these objectives, we will use milestone leveling and notable/famous/legendary progress will be rewarded with a milestone.

icefractal
2021-05-31, 07:48 PM
So add a rule:
Each PC will have a meaty objective that will lose progress if not maintained. Lost progress might be due to maintenance costs, or hostile conflict. To reward these objectives, we will use milestone leveling and notable/famous/legendary progress will be rewarded with a milestone.
I have to say, at that point it doesn't feel like a "sandbox" to me any more, it feels like a series of mission-based adventures.

YMMV, but when I think sandbox I think exploration. And exploration is not the same thing as survival! Star Trek is (in most series) exploration. And part of that is being able to say "Hey, that planet looks interesting, let's take a closer inspection!" rather than "It looks interesting, but it'd waste time without getting closer to our goals, and it might exhaust too much resources, so pass."

So I guess I'd say that while challenge certainly has a place, too-tight resource management (particularly when there are strategic-scale resources that make 'wasting' a day a general downside) makes it feel less sandbox-y to me.

OldTrees1
2021-05-31, 08:45 PM
I have to say, at that point it doesn't feel like a "sandbox" to me any more, it feels like a series of mission-based adventures.

YMMV, but when I think sandbox I think exploration. And exploration is not the same thing as survival! Star Trek is (in most series) exploration. And part of that is being able to say "Hey, that planet looks interesting, let's take a closer inspection!" rather than "It looks interesting, but it'd waste time without getting closer to our goals, and it might exhaust too much resources, so pass."

So I guess I'd say that while challenge certainly has a place, too-tight resource management (particularly when there are strategic-scale resources that make 'wasting' a day a general downside) makes it feel less sandbox-y to me.

It is still a sandbox. You are just requiring the PCs have significant proactive motivations rather than "just explore". The PC can still want to explore, but they will also come up with their own proactive motivation too that will interact with the sandbox and create tension.

Say I want to create a new city state that will be separate from the nearby nations. That will take a long time but might be possible in a 1-15 Sandbox. It would not be a fulltime endeavor, but if I ignore it for a month because we took a month to clear out a 3 room dungeon, then I should expect to have lost some ground. Some 1 month trips will be worth the lost ground by satisfying other motivations. However it sounds like the Players in Talakael's group are unhappy with what they accomplish.

You don't need to make it so tight that every day needs to progress the plan. You just need to avoid the 15m workday always being the optimal solution. You do that by having a timer. In a sandbox the best timer is one the player initiates with their PC's motivations.


That said, I don't like to require such timers, so my Sandbox style is a bit different than what I suggest for Talakael. I still want the proactive motivations (to help drive the group since I prefer PC action over PC reaction) but I don't need them to have timers.

Grod_The_Giant
2021-05-31, 09:01 PM
Weirdly, I think you need to take some inspiration from board games. I've played more than one competitive game where the entire gameplay cycle revolves around gambling on risk/reward tradeoffs. Every turn, you have to choose between gaining an ever-increasing amount of treasure (but possibly dying and losing everything) or retiring (banking the treasure but resetting the progression, or even ending your game entirely).

I would suggest doing something similar in your game. And, because it's an inherently gamist mechanic, link it to the most gamist reward--experience points. The players are mostly motivated by leveling up their characters? Use that.

Every time the party completes an encounter, their "exp multiplier" goes up. Every time they rest, it goes down (for short rests) or resets (for long). Beat the first band of goblins, and the second gives you 125% as much experience as normal. Beat the second, and the third is worth 150% as much. And so on, and so on. Give the players a reason to keep going. Make the question of "do we press on or rest on our laurels" one with rewards as well as risks.

-----------------------

Mind you, "switch to a system that's not as dependent on attrition as D&D" is also a good answer.

Frogreaver
2021-05-31, 09:16 PM
Spun off from my other thread.

My last campaign was an attempt at running a sandbox campaign in my system, and in one way it was a total failure.

I have no idea how to maintain challenge or stakes in such a scenario. In most RPGs, challenges are based on attrition and slowly wearing away resources, but when you only have occasional encounters that is hard to do, and to keep them challenging they need to be so deadly that player death is a real concern.

Now, everyone who has played D&D is familiar with the 15 minute work day, but in a sandbox that really seems to be the default method of play, go nova every fight and then fall back and rest in a safe place.

In a linear adventure I can have time pressures to keep them going forward, usually limited opportunities or enemy action. But that really strains verisimilitude and tone in a sandbox.


I tried numerous rules tweaks; only resting in town, daily costs for supplies, reduced lethality, but all they did was slow down the game or open themselves up to player exploits and arguments about "gentleman's agreements".


Any advice on how to do this successfully?

TLDR: How do I maintain challenge, tension, or stakes in a game where proactive players can fall back or rest whenever they like?

Thanks!

IMO, a sandbox style D&D game doesn't work well as an oblivion style 'go explore ruins' style game. At least not without significant pressure to keep going which you noted doesn't feel very natural. One pressure might be ships full of adventures landed on the New Continent along with some townsfolk and guards to build a small town for trading here. Waiting to long to adventure may make other sites already looted. This can then evolve into a factions style sandbox for more of a living world feel.

No matter how you start I would change the Sandbox style game to one more about factions that you can make friends or enemies of. Now you have reasons for pressures. Your friends might need something now and if you always take too long to complete a task they may stop being friendly or turn against you. Waiting to long might allow your enemies to achieve what they want first or to send a force to follow and attack you. This gives you a nice way to have a living breathing world by having factions compete off screen.

RandomPeasant
2021-05-31, 10:24 PM
Attrition is not necessary if every fight is a boss fight.

Exactly. I still think this is a perfect solution to OP's problem. If players want one fight a day, give them one fight a day. No reason you can't give them a challenge that way, it just requires different encounter designs. It seems like that solves the problem, and it also seems like a solution that works in principle (consider how e.g. raids in MMOs generally allow you to come into each fight with full resources, but are still challenging).


Or, you know, just use a different game system.

Hell, just hack D&D so that people don't have significant daily resources. If your (3e) party is a Crusader, a Warlock, a Rogue, and an Incarnate, they aren't going to rest after every encounter because there's no point -- all their resources reset between fights (barring HP, but you can trivially change that). Similarly, if you make all 4e Dailies into Encounter powers, you get pretty much the same dynamic. I can't speak to 5e enough to say what you'd need to do there, but I can only assume it's doable.

OldTrees1
2021-05-31, 10:46 PM
Hell, just hack D&D so that people don't have significant daily resources. If your (3e) party is a Crusader, a Warlock, a Rogue, and an Incarnate, they aren't going to rest after every encounter because there's no point -- all their resources reset between fights (barring HP, but you can trivially change that). Similarly, if you make all 4e Dailies into Encounter powers, you get pretty much the same dynamic. I can't speak to 5e enough to say what you'd need to do there, but I can only assume it's doable.

The 5E equivalent is somebody taking the Inspiring Leader or Healer feat and all casters multiclassing into Warlock (half caster / Warlock at a 2:1 ratio will result in a short rest half caster). Although 1/3rd casters like Eldritch Knight or Rogue could focus on cantrips instead of multiclassing. If you are willing to hack the rules then you can skip the multiclassing step and just import short rest casting.

False God
2021-05-31, 11:10 PM
The players absolutely want to be level 20 god-tier characters, they just want to get there by the safest and most optimal route.

Then they will be spending time. LOTS of time. The kind of time it takes IRL for someone to rise from the dirt to be a king.

The "challenge" and "risk" they're going to be taking in this situation is going to be opportunity cost. People who want to be level 20 RIGHT NOW are going to be taking the fast and dangerous and high reward quests. Sure, many of them will die, but the few that live will reach higher levels and get to exert their will over the world. Enact their laws. Rule the countries the party cares about. Become renowned for their heroism and not the actions of the party.

If they're okay with that and simply focused on "being max level", have a demon/angel/elder thing show up and just make them level 20 in exchange for some service or grand quest or something. Or just call it a montage and make them all level 20 themselves and then see what they do.

Satinavian
2021-06-01, 02:22 AM
Then they will be spending time. LOTS of time. The kind of time it takes IRL for someone to rise from the dirt to be a king.
Unfortunately Talakeal is bored with this way sooner than his players are.
He always offers them "risk vs reward", they always choose "low risk, low reward" and he always complains about that and calls them cowards in this forum, writing about how real heroes should act instead
He also regularly complains about not getting to use all the fun "high risk, high reward" scenarios he prepared and which he is far more interested in actually running.

What doesn't mesh with what why?

I'm not sure anyone has definitively answered exactly *why* Talakeal's table(s) is Bizarro World. So I'm quite curious to hear your theories on the matter, as to what won't work, and why.
I don't have an explaination for Bizarro World per se. But i can see that the old-school hexcrawl is a very bad fit for this particular table.

- He has players who don't like consumables and prefer to spent all money only on permanent upgrades. They hate the bookkeeping and they feel like spending consumables makes them permanently weaker because it postpones permanent, "real" upgrades. That is bad when you want to run a game based on supply tracking and attrition.

- They don't like taking risks. They never go to their limit, never explore as far as they could. They only go until it starts to get a bit challanging and then return.

- They really like to stomp enemies by just being more powerful than them and would seek out fights where they can do that and avoid thoose where they can't. But T doesn't like to run those. That is also part of the reason why they always try to engage each combat at full power.

Does this sound like a group that can have fun with traditional old-school resource-based hexcrawl to you? Of course it is not working and T has several times tried to change the rules to make his players behave like he thinks PCs should in a hexcrawl even if his players seemingly don't actually want to play in one.

Quertus
2021-06-01, 03:42 AM
If people want to workshop rules with me, I would be more than happy to do so. But, as I generally run my own system, there would have to be an added layer of difficulty as I would need to explain the difference between relevant game rules and house rules for the one campaign.

What I want is a situation where a theoretical player who is a perfectly rational actor doesn't have to choose between making the optimal decision for character success and having an exciting game where tactical decisions and dice rolls matter than moves at a reasonable pace.


No.

The problem is that the optimal path and the fun path are divergent.

I think I gave you several ways to encourage certain behaviors. But let's be more explicit.

No town to go back to / no value in going back to town will prevent towns from being the optimal path.

Rewards for Exploration will encourage exploration.

Random encounters slowing things down will encourage "clearing" an area over "1 room, back to town". OK, not for your group. "Random" encounters *not* being fully random, but escalating, will make "triggering the minimum number is random encounters" be the optimal path. Difficult, bit not impossible, for versimilitude.

Having "competition" (even if it's their old party's progress) to compare against will encourage improvements / competition.

Having "living dungeons" that leave after the first room is cleared may encourage completing a dungeon. Especially if there is an actual cost in random encounters to get there.

I think all of that is pretty system-agnostic.

Also,
Honestly that probably the only reason they travelled more than a hex or two from town in the first place.

Sounds like your players, unlike me, don't inherently enjoy Exploration. I doubt that a hex crawl is appropriate for those who do not enjoy Exploration.

That said, what rewards is there for Exploration in your game? Does it grant story elements to utilize, like

An orcish invasion. A lonely Driad. Dungeon mummies who "just came in to get out of the rain". A kidnapped princess. An evil king and his noble vizier. Cabbage migrations. The elemental plane of taffy. Phoenix extinction. A new technique for ascension. Floating rocks. A Wizard war. An underwater portal to the elemental plane of taffy, with invisible, incorporeal guardians. Troll bridges viewed favorably. Sentient bats. Dragonfire legions. The library in the mirror realm. The source of freckles. Suicidal immortals. A beaten dog. An artifact ice cream truck. Contagious visions. A lake of gilding. Mass enslavement of Kaorti for their weapons. Pumpkin-headed zombies spontaneously appearing.

And, these things that the PCs discover, how open to diverse usage are they? If the PCs find Floating Rocks, can they research it, and utilize it? Use it to make Shoes of Water Walking, or super skipping stones, or juggling statues, or flying castles. Or do they find that it's already been Explored, and is the home of the Flying Rock School of Martial Arts, the one and only possible use for this anomaly ever. :smallannoyed:

(This is more for a sandbox, but) if the evil princess has kidnapped a helpless dragon, do you allow the party of brave knights to charge in, slay the princess, and marry the dragon? Sneak in, carry the dragon out, and earn the princess's ire? Nuke the site from orbit, killing them both, then loot both bodies? Animate both bodies? Hire a famed dragonslayer to "kill" the dragon, then revive the "corpse" and set it free? Sell the evil princess a new line of dragon care products? Feed a love potion to the evil princess, marry her, and share the dragon? Kidnap a different dragon, and offer to trade? Or just straight up give / sell the second dragon to the evil princess? Ignore the scenario altogether? Or do you railroad that the only possible response is to recover the McGuffin of Freedom from the Elemental plane of Taffy?

If they encounter metal flowers, can they not care, and ignore them? Or maybe they pin one to their lapel, as a statement that "I've been somewhere exotic". Or maybe they do the same by having them grow around their home/base. Or maybe they create custom spells or enchanted items that require them as components. Or maybe they learn that the plants turn *any* matter into metal, and begin farming them for profit. Or maybe they genetically engineer new variants to create other substances. Are all of these valid?

To encourage Exploration, you need to include sufficient "generic parts" that the PCs can utilize however they desire that they hit upon one or more ideas that utilize them, and begin poking at it successfully.

So, pick a "cool" thing that the PCs can Discover. Figure out how it works under the hood (the metal flowers convert matter to metal, growing like flowers. They operate at the "Platonic ideal" level, and, as such, are "unnatural", and die out in areas where "physics" overrides platonic ideals), then let the players take actions and experiment per the rules of the game. (For example, using my underlying physics, "genetic engineering" would have been useless, as they have no genetics - "Platonic engineering" would be required. Just as theories about them being / plans requiring them to be engineered by nanotechnology would have been provably false / failed.)

Or maybe your players would prefer a more videogame approach, where their Exploration and Discovery unlocks capabilities in the town NPCs. Maybe after sharing the discovery of floating rocks, the Flying Rock School of Martial Arts opens up; maybe after discovering metal flowers, the town aesthetic changes; maybe after discovering micro dragons, they become available as "pets" (ie, videogame style power ups for the PCs) from one of the town NPCs. Maybe having that interaction between "cool discovery" and "cool town changes" will encourage discovery.

And these need to be upgrades, not "gotcha" moments; otherwise, if the PCs innocently share their discovery of splitting atoms, and the man turns it into a bomb, you may get players who never want to share their PCs' discoveries ever again.

Quertus
2021-06-01, 04:07 AM
Unfortunately Talakeal is bored with this way sooner than his players are.
He always offers them "risk vs reward", they always choose "low risk, low reward" and he always complains about that and calls them cowards in this forum, writing about how real heroes should act instead
He also regularly complains about not getting to use all the fun "high risk, high reward" scenarios he prepared and which he is far more interested in actually running.

I don't have an explaination for Bizarro World per se. But i can see that the old-school hexcrawl is a very bad fit for this particular table.


- He has players who don't like consumables and prefer to spent all money only on permanent upgrades. They hate the bookkeeping and they feel like spending consumables makes them permanently weaker because it postpones permanent, "real" upgrades. That is bad when you want to run a game based on supply tracking and attrition.

Honestly, I don't see the issue here.

I have a finite HP bar. The goblin waves slowly erode said HP. I don't want to spend money on healing potions. So I plan accordingly, and try to leave before my HP get too critical. Too many random encounters on the way home, and I may have to pop a healing potion anyway.

This sounds 100% compatible with a hex crawl to me.


- They don't like taking risks. They never go to their limit, never explore as far as they could. They only go until it starts to get a bit challanging and then return.

This sounds like a requirement for a successful hex crawl. The wilds should be littered with the corpses of those foolish enough to do otherwise, for the Necromancer to animate.


- They really like to stomp enemies by just being more powerful than them and would seek out fights where they can do that and avoid thoose where they can't. But T doesn't like to run those. That is also part of the reason why they always try to engage each combat at full power.

This is something Talakeal will need to work on - you cannot have proper "attrition" without scaling your "encounters" (including traps, natural hazards, cool extras to explore, etc) to individually be trivially stomped, but collectively represent a drain on resources.

Until Talakeal can accept that almost every encounter should be trivially stomped by the PCs, they will never be able to run a good attrition-based game.

Which, honestly, probably explains why the players are so reluctant to over-commit, because every encounter is so individually dangerous. Because it makes the optimal path so clearly be to minimize the number of encounters, rather than to try to push on.


Does this sound like a group that can have fun with traditional old-school resource-based hexcrawl to you? Of course it is not working and T has several times tried to change the rules to make his players behave like he thinks PCs should in a hexcrawl even if his players seemingly don't actually want to play in one.

The group? Yes. Talakeal? Not so much. Talakeal will probably only be happy designing single nova fights for this group. But I think that a different GM, who wasn't so hung up on "Challenge", could run a resource-based hex crawl with that group.

Satinavian
2021-06-01, 04:47 AM
Until Talakeal can accept that almost every encounter should be trivially stomped by the PCs, they will never be able to run a good attrition-based game.
But he doesn't want to do that.

And that is why this whole thread is about asking how to do hexcrawl without atrition.

Yora
2021-06-01, 05:03 AM
I wouldn't say it with full certainty, but I also think that that is a key feature. At least for a Dungeon- and Hexcrawl campaign.

A nonlinear story campaign in an open world is of course an option, that could also justifiably be called a sandbox (and fit even better as a term), but that's a pretty different beast overall.

Segev
2021-06-01, 09:59 AM
In a hex crawl, the things that weigh in for attrition are time and supplies.

While exploring the wilderness, they have whatever supplies they brought with them. They do not control encounter rate, and stopping and resting doesn't necessarily reduce the number of encounters. It just changes when those encounters find them. It is possible to set up the party with a ranger outlander who can forage for all the food they need if they are willing to "rough it" for days or weeks on end, making no progress as they travel for a half hour to an hour, have an encounter, and then stop and take a long rest. But if they complain that they're bored, that's their own fault at that point. The world should move on around them; non-hostile encounters might pass them coming and going, as people find this random localized nomadic group that just lives off the land a bit odd.

But that's not the only pressure, either. Time is a pressure because the world isn't static. Give them rivals. I don't mean one set of enemies specifically out to get them; I mean have others after the same goals they are.

One way to set up a premise for a hex crawl would be to have an Adventurer's Society modeled on the kind of Gentleman's Society that features in Around the World in Eighty Days. Set up a contest or bet to see which party can find the most loot in a specified amount of time, using a common starting map that a wealthy patron or bored member of the Society brings to the table. Now there's a race to get to the sites that are common knowledge, first, and to get back with the loot secured. There's a race to discover new sites with valuable loot, and reasons for rivals to want to move faster than each other.

If the party picks up hirelings to help them manage wagons of supplies and for loot-carrying, or to take guard watches at night, or to maintain a base camp to protect their stuff while they dungeon crawl with a load designed only for adventuring, then the time it takes to travel costs them money in wages.

Further, in a sandbox, you can and probably should have multiple plot threads running at once. These aren't "linear adventures," just things that are going on in the world with NPCs who have interest in advancing or thwarting or controlling them. Players not being involved still can have these things impact them. Players being involved can alter the course of them (hopefully) more to their liking, according to their choices and abilities. Some of these will involve exploration to find macguffins related to them, and timing could be critical.

gijoemike
2021-06-01, 10:58 AM
D&D is a system that is particularly bad for sandbox games. In fact, it's a system that's pretty bad for almost all narrative structures other than "here's a dungeon, go kill stuff". So, my advice would be "don't use D&D" if you want to run a sandbox game. One of the main problems is that if you have five different possible adventures available that would challenge a 5th level party, well, once they finish one of these adventures, the party is no longer 5th level, so the other adventures (that they might then go on, if they are still relevant) can no longer challenge them.

As far as "going nova" and the "fifteen minute day", well, to me that has nothing to do with sandbox adventures. If one plot thread leads the party to investigate a dungeon, then it's just the same (for the most part) as if they had been railroaded into finding the dungeon. If they can beat it by using up all their daily resources and then taking a nap, then they can do that regardless of whether they chose to be here or were forced to be here. The problem here is simply adventure design. Dungeons are bad for precisely this reason (which is another reason to avoid using D&D since the presumption here is that adventures lead to dungeons since "Dungeons" is in the name of the game). But the issue can be managed by putting time pressures on the party. They need to have a reason to do things in a timely fashion. This can be difficult to get right in a D&D setting since the PCs will probably expect to take a nap after fighting every single orc and so they may fail the adventure rather spectacularly if (a) they are not given evidence that makes them realize that they need to hurry or (b) they are put in a situation where they have to use up their resources early on and therefore can't be expected to continue. Resource management is the problem. Games with a lot of resource management (like D&D) are just hard to work with as a DM/GM.

The first part of your post is not true at all. I have played many sandbox style games in D&D. We the players uncover various plot hooks and approach them in an order of our choosing. Or we decided to develop a component of our town, city, fort, team and create a pathway to achieve it. Being D&D doesn't stop this at all. The plot hooks we didn't take get resolved or the big evil plans move forward on their own path. Now they are entrenched, or higher level, or more widespread.

I agree with your second part. Going nova has nothing at all to do with the GM style. It has to do with the players. Even in sandbox games if the PCs discover that the cultists will do something during the eclipse the PCs only have a few days to resolve the problem. The orcs are getting reinforced just after sunset, better attack now instead of waiting until tomorrow. Time constraints still exist.

Also, if the PCs clear out the front 2 rooms and retreat to rest. The bad guys will realize they have be found out and take their cool lootz and leave. Adventure failed. Or they will entrench and it will be MUCH MUCH MUCH more difficult for the rest of the entire adventure. They may call for reinforcements, and have more pre-battle buffs running based specifically on what they saw on the bodies of their fallen comrades. Adventure has a large difficulty spike. Or while the pcs have no resources the Bad guys will surround and attack them in mass. TPK. I mean 3 encounters at once 3 hours after the NOVA. The final option is the bad guys set up spells and booby traps in the rooms already cleared and wait in ambush for when the PCs set one of them off. Combines a trap and up to 2 encounters where the bad guys attempt a surprise round. Very dangerous encounter.

Talakeal
2021-06-01, 12:29 PM
This is something Talakeal will need to work on - you cannot have proper "attrition" without scaling your "encounters" (including traps, natural hazards, cool extras to explore, etc) to individually be trivially stomped, but collectively represent a drain on resources.

Until Talakeal can accept that almost every encounter should be trivially stomped by the PCs, they will never be able to run a good attrition-based game.

Woah, woah, woah. Where is this coming from?

I have repeatedly said in this thread that I don't want every fight to be a big deal, and for years I have been saying that my adventures as a whole contain 4-6 combat encounters, 4-6 non-combat encounters, and all together use up ~80% of the parties resources.

Of course most encounters are trivially stomped when the total of 8-12 of them only adds up to ~80%.

The problem with a hex-crawl is that my players want a situation where they only have 1 encounter per day AND they want it to be trivially easy on its own, which makes for a very slow boring game where tactical decisions and dice rolls don't really matter.


Unfortunately Talakeal is bored with this way sooner than his players are.
He always offers them "risk vs reward", they always choose "low risk, low reward" and he always complains about that and calls them cowards in this forum, writing about how real heroes should act instead
He also regularly complains about not getting to use all the fun "high risk, high reward" scenarios he prepared and which he is far more interested in actually running.

Wow, rude.

While the gist of what you are saying is correct, you are putting a lot of words in my mouth.

I don't believe I have ever called my players cowards, although its possible I said something I didn't mean for dramatic effect.

I have said I don't feel they are as brave as adventurers should be, but that is very different from cowardly. Cowardly characters wouldn't leave town at all.

Also, it isn't that they don't see "high risk high reward scenarios;" its that they don't see any planned content at all, just random encounters. Nothing in my last game was high risk high reward, it was all perfectly medium challenge, scaling up the further the party traveled along with an average advancement path. Although as it was a sandbox they could have made it high risk / high reward by jumping the gun and going for the more dangerous areas early.


But he doesn't want to do that.

And that is why this whole thread is about asking how to do hexcrawl without attrition.

Did we have a major miscommunication here? This seems to be the opposite of what I was saying.

I said we need attrition precisely because each individual encounter is trivial.

kyoryu
2021-06-01, 12:44 PM
Make combat Not The Currency Of Advancement.

If combat is what advances you, then any combat is as good as any other. Instead, make combat a cost of getting to what you want.

So, let's use GP for XP, ala old school D&D. You want to get into the dungeon, because that's where the treasure is, and the deeper the treasure is, the better the treasure is.

So, you get into a fight on the way to the dungeon. Do you turn back? If you do, you still can face more encounters, and you don't get treasure. It's all a waste of time. You can rest, but you may get attacked during the rest, and you won't be further. 15mwd at that point is not a great call, really.

Okay, so you're in the dungeon. You get into a fight. Do you keep going? Do you use consumables? Do you rest? Do you head back?

If you head back, you don't get the good treasure deeper in the dungeon. Consumables are a good choice. If you rest, you have a chance of getting attacked (interrupting the rest) and don't get treasure from the wandering monsters anyway, so no real reward.

Now, a lot of this is based on how variable and dangerous it is to get an extra encounter. If you know that an encounter is likely 20% resource consumption (and maybe it should be even lower), then you can make some educated guesses about when you need to turn back. If every encounter has a decent chance to kill you, then going into any encounter with less than full health is dangerous.

If you're doing a hexcrawl, similar things can happen, if you make "finding new cool places" the exp gain.

Talakeal
2021-06-01, 01:02 PM
Make combat Not The Currency Of Advancement.

If combat is what advances you, then any combat is as good as any other. Instead, make combat a cost of getting to what you want.

So, let's use GP for XP, ala old school D&D. You want to get into the dungeon, because that's where the treasure is, and the deeper the treasure is, the better the treasure is.

So, you get into a fight on the way to the dungeon. Do you turn back? If you do, you still can face more encounters, and you don't get treasure. It's all a waste of time. You can rest, but you may get attacked during the rest, and you won't be further. 15mwd at that point is not a great call, really.

Okay, so you're in the dungeon. You get into a fight. Do you keep going? Do you use consumables? Do you rest? Do you head back?

If you head back, you don't get the good treasure deeper in the dungeon. Consumables are a good choice. If you rest, you have a chance of getting attacked (interrupting the rest) and don't get treasure from the wandering monsters anyway, so no real reward.

Now, a lot of this is based on how variable and dangerous it is to get an extra encounter. If you know that an encounter is likely 20% resource consumption (and maybe it should be even lower), then you can make some educated guesses about when you need to turn back. If every encounter has a decent chance to kill you, then going into any encounter with less than full health is dangerous.

If you're doing a hexcrawl, similar things can happen, if you make "finding new cool places" the exp gain.

This is actually exactly how I did it, and also exactly how I expected it to work.

The problem was, the players knew the treasure was still waiting for them in the dungeon, so they would always choose to turn back after each fight, random or planned.

kyoryu
2021-06-01, 01:08 PM
This is actually exactly how I did it, and also exactly how I expected it to work.

The problem was, the players knew the treasure was still waiting for them in the dungeon, so they would always choose to turn back after each fight, random or planned.

And so they got no rewards? No real XP, no treasure, no nothing? They went home empty handed?

I think the most important thing is trust.

So, after an encounter, the group has to make a choice. For each option (stay, go, whatever), they're going to look at possible benefits, costs, and the level of risk.

So I think the most important thing is the level of risk here. Even if 90% of the encounters are walkovers, if that last 10% is "potentially deadly if you don't have enough resources" then people are going to balk. They're going to calibrate to that. They're not seeing it as "mostly losing 20% of resources" (or less). They're looking it as "10% chance of death". So one of the keys there is that people need to be given an opportunity to figure out what's going on, and then also retreat and/or avoid dangerous encounters. If encounters are "roll initiative", and if the random encounter has a 10% chance of "rocks fall, you die", then it makes sense that they'd retreat after every encounter, especially if the world state is "saved", and if there's no cost to doing so.

Quertus
2021-06-01, 01:15 PM
But he doesn't want to do that.

And that is why this whole thread is about asking how to do hexcrawl without atrition.

If you are correct, then Talakeal seemingly doesn't understand that, because

Ok, so I guess I am looking more for technical advice than narrative advice; like house rules and stuff to make it so that the optimal decision is not to always play super slowly and methodically and rest after every encounter.


I tried numerous fixes; adjusting where the players could rest and how long rests took, upkeep costs, frequency and difficulty of random encounters, adjusting the penalty for defeat, but nothing changed that underlying fact; the optimal move is always to rest after every single encounter, and anything else is just playing dumb for the sake of a less tedious game.


In my opinion, games need some form of uncertainty as well as some form of meaningful tactical and / or strategic decision to qualify as games. RPGs with a 15MWD model don't really have that, every encounter (including non combat encounters) basically boil down to melee characters rolling a few dice for fun, results don't really matter, while the wizard blows their most powerful spells and resolves the situation.


Adjusting the frequency of random encounters never actually changed the optimum strategy, merely the rationale for it. It went from:

Explore one room of the dungeon, then go back to town and rest with the rationale of "Well, we can't risk spending any more resources here because we might get ambushed on the way back to town and killed!"
to:
Explore one room of the dungeon, then go back to town and rest with the rationale of "Well, there's nothing stopping us from going back to town and resting up, so we might as well do that before exploring the next room so we are at full strength for whatever might be ahead!".

So yeah, random encounters just make the game slower and more tedious, they don't actually change playstyle or introduce added uncertainty / challenge.

Seems to suggest that Talakeal has not embraced the 15MWD nova party.

Talakeal, I say make your muggles actually useful, just let the party nova, and make "we go back to town, rest, and come back" a 10-second, "OK, then what?", not a time-waster. That might work for this group.

Quertus
2021-06-01, 01:39 PM
Woah, woah, woah. Where is this coming from?

Were I posting from computer rather than phone, I might try to answer that, and see exactly where the communication failed.

That might actually be instructive for us both.

For now, let's try to suss out the differences between what I thought I heard, and what you thought you said.


I have repeatedly said in this thread that I don't want every fight to be a big deal, and for years I have been saying that my adventures as a whole contain 4-6 combat encounters, 4-6 non-combat encounters, and all together use up ~80% of the parties resources.

Of course most encounters are trivially stomped when the total of 8-12 of them only adds up to ~80%.

This might be a player vs GM perception thing. Or it might be an "I'm a grognard" thing. But, when I think "attrition", I think big dungeons, with 50 rooms and 20 set encounters, plus random encounters, both in the dungeon and during travel. I think "how much ammo you can physically carry" actually matters, and the 10th level PC casting sleep on the goblins to save the party 5 HP is actually an important strategic decision. Where *maybe* the party calls those goblins "trivially stomped", or maybe the party realizes that that decision wasn't trivial at all, and only the poison gas room, that the all Necropolitan party was immune to, actually qualified as "trivially stomped".

Note: that poison gas room would have been *tough* for most parties. This party spanked it. *That* is the kind of thing that makes *this party* look cool. In case that helps you understand one of our other conversations.


The problem with a hex-crawl is that my players want a situation where they only have 1 encounter per day AND they want it to be trivially easy on its own, which makes for a very slow boring game where tactical decisions and dice rolls don't really matter.

Then give them that? And keep giving them that until they realize that that isn't what they want, and all ask for something else.

Only, don't make it slow! Just instantly skip to the next day / encounter.

If they cannot take their turns quickly, nova quickly, and breeze through many, many encounters per night, there's something more wrong in Bizarro World than most of us suspect.


Wow, rude.

While the gist of what you are saying is correct, you are putting a lot of words in my mouth.

I don't believe I have ever called my players cowards, although its possible I said something I didn't mean for dramatic effect.

You said that their PCs were not heroic. You've spilled a lot off virtual ink to that effect. I can totally see why someone would have that takeaway. And how that attitude could contribute to the toxic cycle in your group, too.

Lord Torath
2021-06-01, 06:38 PM
This is actually exactly how I did it, and also exactly how I expected it to work.

The problem was, the players knew the treasure was still waiting for them in the dungeon, so they would always choose to turn back after each fight, random or planned.What if it wasn't? What if, after clearing a few rooms a day at a time, they get back to the dungeon the next time and discover that the loot was gathered up by the inhabitants who then fled for safer locations? Sandbox doesn't mean the players do whatever they want without consequence. It means they do what they want, and the world reacts with verisimilitude.

icefractal
2021-06-01, 07:09 PM
What if it wasn't? What if, after clearing a few rooms a day at a time, they get back to the dungeon the next time and discover that the loot was gathered up by the inhabitants who then fled for safer locations? Sandbox doesn't mean the players do whatever they want without consequence. It means they do what they want, and the world reacts with verisimilitude.I find that's tricky to do in a way that really feels like a natural consequence rather than a gamist push though.

Like, this ruin has been around for decades or centuries, it's been known as a point of interest since at least two months ago, when we initially heard about it, and remained undisturbed until we reached it 10 days ago. But now, right as we start to clear it, that's when a rival group showed up? Not "before we even heard about it" or "during the six weeks between hearing about it and reaching it" or "in another week or so after we were done with it", but right now during this relatively narrow window? Honestly, even with a GM I trust, I'd perceive that as "the GM introducing some rivals" rather than "a natural consequence of events" - not that I'd generally have a problem with that.

I think for this to make more sense IC, you'd need the PCs entering it initially to change something. Perhaps most ruins have guardian monsters, more powerful than most things inside. Once you defeat the guardian, the ruin will be easier to access for anyone else, so you probably want to delve it ASAP.

Alcore
2021-06-01, 07:52 PM
I find that's tricky to do in a way that really feels like a natural consequence rather than a gamist push though.

Like, this ruin has been around for decades or centuries, it's been known as a point of interest since at least two months ago, when we initially heard about it, and remained undisturbed until we reached it 10 days ago. But now, right as we start to clear it, that's when a rival group showed up? Not "before we even heard about it" or "during the six weeks between hearing about it and reaching it" or "in another week or so after we were done with it", but right now during this relatively narrow window? Honestly, even with a GM I trust, I'd perceive that as "the GM introducing some rivals" rather than "a natural consequence of events" - not that I'd generally have a problem with that.

I think for this to make more sense IC, you'd need the PCs entering it initially to change something. Perhaps most ruins have guardian monsters, more powerful than most things inside. Once you defeat the guardian, the ruin will be easier to access for anyone else, so you probably want to delve it ASAP.
Alternatively... you are going to this specific ruin for a specific magic item (unless you never researched why this is a point of interest). Lets say a sword of doom. So you go there to claim it from lab experiments gone rogue and possible undead and constructs.

Instead the place is filled with harpies in the upper floors and scavengers (think animals) on the bottom. Any players of mine might assume they are WoW harpies and diplomacy is not off the table; while they are monsters they are also scantily clad women. A good situation to chuck your Conan look alike at for diplomacy, lots of new eggs and an all access pass.

The sword? long gone. There might be clues, treasure or other items to make the journey worth it. Thing is is that you still need to loot now as when you return others will know it is "safe" and if they don't believe the party barbarian's "tall tale" of his wooing is free for the pickings. Harpies might also explore and arm themselves with the stuff as well; humans and other races don't go that far out into the wilds for nothing...


Of course all that is narratives...

Calthropstu
2021-06-01, 09:36 PM
In my sandbox games, the pcs can do whatever they want. Hey, they want to slow tackle the dungeon with 15 minute days? Maybe teleport back to camp after a few rooms?

That's fine. The second day they try that, they come back to a completely empty dungeon. Or maybe, after a week of thisthe adventurers guild assumes they are dead and sends a recovery team to grab their bodies Or after a month they come back, find out there had been a power struggle and their main benefactor is dead. Or the quest they were on was invalidated by the guild because they took too long.

Just because it's a sandbox doesn't mean there isn't any plot. And if the plots aren't interacted with, things happen. Opportunities are missed, villians escape, people are born and die. Have dates for important events (give or take a day or two) which WILL trigger if not interacted with. And if the pcs are dragging their feet elsewhere? So be it.

RandomPeasant
2021-06-01, 10:13 PM
Having bad stuff arbitrarily happen because the PCs aren't moving as fast as you'd like is a terrible idea. Consequences should be tied to the actions of the PCs, or at least deducible from information available to them. Otherwise the game immediately devolves into "guess what number I'm thinking of". Should we rush the dungeon because we'll get punished for delaying? Should we slow down because we'll get punished for pushing our luck? Should we do whatever we'd do normally, because the DM will punish us for metagaming the scenario? How do you expect the PCs to figure out that the reason arbitrary bad stuff is happening to them is because they're moving too quickly, and not because they're not taking enough prisoners or not investigating thoroughly enough? For players to be able to make meaningful decisions, events have to follow logically from their choices based on the information they had when they made the choice. "You come back to the dungeon and find it's empty" isn't that, it's the DM being unwilling to communicate with the players when he's not getting what he needs out of the group, and is no better than coming to the table with an intentionally min-maxed character that stomps on the DM's encounters.

Calthropstu
2021-06-01, 10:34 PM
Having bad stuff arbitrarily happen because the PCs aren't moving as fast as you'd like is a terrible idea. Consequences should be tied to the actions of the PCs, or at least deducible from information available to them. Otherwise the game immediately devolves into "guess what number I'm thinking of". Should we rush the dungeon because we'll get punished for delaying? Should we slow down because we'll get punished for pushing our luck? Should we do whatever we'd do normally, because the DM will punish us for metagaming the scenario? How do you expect the PCs to figure out that the reason arbitrary bad stuff is happening to them is because they're moving too quickly, and not because they're not taking enough prisoners or not investigating thoroughly enough? For players to be able to make meaningful decisions, events have to follow logically from their choices based on the information they had when they made the choice. "You come back to the dungeon and find it's empty" isn't that, it's the DM being unwilling to communicate with the players when he's not getting what he needs out of the group, and is no better than coming to the table with an intentionally min-maxed character that stomps on the DM's encounters.

Yeah, you're not getting it. Things happen regardless of thePCs. In a sandbox, the pcs are open to explore and investigate. They are free to drag their feet, they are free to rush. The gm needs to take into account an entire worlds activities.

When the PCs leave for a dungeon, there may be early whisperings of discontent. There may be a rumor of a dragon making trouble in a far off land. There may be whispers of a cult kidnapping someone.

It's the job of a sandbox gm to keep his reality up to date. Not only bad things will happen, but tell me... when was the last time it was a good idea to drag your feet at work? Telling the boss "sorry" only goes so far.

And if you're repetedly raiding someone's lair and getting closer to the boss... Why would you expect them to sit around waiting? Either they'll throw everything they have at you all at once, or they'll flee the dungeon and set themselves up elsewhere. Or flee, wait a few days and come back.

They aren't going to just sit around waiting. It has always bothered me that modules do precisely that.

Telok
2021-06-01, 11:16 PM
PCs wander into town (well, 2gp toll bridge so a couple of them swam and got bit by a giant catfish), mayor doesn't like adventurers and is rude but still offers 200gp to deal with farmers complaining about scary lizards & not delivering food. PCs go a days walk down river and deal with the pair of mated basilisks in an orchard. Leave the corpses and take a long trip 150 miles away to get the sorcerer un-petrified. They return a month later, walk in, insult the mayor, ask for the reward (also one swam the river again, 2gp). Mayor was all "Dudes, my guards like, killed them and hauled the like, corpses in as proof like, three weeks ago and like, I paid them the like, bounty. Now go **** ***** **** yourselves."

Sandboxy. Ticked them the heck off but they didn't complain. They started plotting to kill the mayor.

Chauncymancer
2021-06-01, 11:22 PM
I tried numerous fixes; adjusting where the players could rest and how long rests took, upkeep costs, frequency and difficulty of random encounters, adjusting the penalty for defeat, but nothing changed that underlying fact; the optimal move is always to rest after every single encounter, and anything else is just playing dumb for the sake of a less tedious game.



Make resting expend resources.

So I'm curious about the bit I bolded, because I have basically the same idea as Cluedrew. The simplest idea in a game about going out to explore for treasure is to say something like "Character abilities require constant training and raw materials and a diet and lifestyle to boot and we are going to track all of that through the concept of use it or lose it. Each day you lose 100 xp for each level you are, and if that drops you below the level up threshold you lose that level. A gold piece will buy you 10 xp." And then the size of all the treasure hordes in a hex is equal to [the number of encounters in that hex divided by two] times the number of players times 10. So you can tread water by long resting after every other encounter, gain ground by resting every three encounters, and lose ground by resting after one encounter. With some exceptions and stipulations, as the treasure doesn't have to be divided evenly between the encounters, it just has to add up. If you ever end a day with 0 xp you die, roll up a new character.


I find that's tricky to do in a way that really feels like a natural consequence rather than a gamist push though.

The trick is to establish that either A: I have it preprinted in my notes that on March 4th this party will get five encounters into this dungeon, unless one of those encounters is the silver serpent, in which case they stop early. If you ask the third level fighter Humphrey he'll tell you that he's putting together an excursion on the 4th to seek the silver serpent. It's currently the second.
or B: people are specifically coming up to you all the time and trying to swap stories of daring deeds with you, perhaps at a special adventurers' inn. NPCs will ask you what you did today all the time so unless you engage in a complex disinformation campaign your party's movements are common knowledge. Run away from a dungeon on Monday? Even the blacksmith will know about all the defenseless treasure you left behind by Thursday.




Then give them that? And keep giving them that until they realize that that isn't what they want, and all ask for something else.

I think the question at hand is: Given that these players are prevented by the laws of physics from ever asking for something else, even though they want to, how do we push the rope?


I have to say, at that point it doesn't feel like a "sandbox" to me any more, it feels like a series of mission-based adventures.

YMMV, but when I think sandbox I think exploration. And exploration is not the same thing as survival!
I think one thing that happens in sandboxes but not anywhere else is the metagame understanding that at any moment you can choose for your character to disengage with a play element and never come back to it and this is not you as a person motioning to end the game. Don't like a location? Leave and never come back. Don't like an NPC? Stop talking to them. Get two rooms into a dungeon and lose interest? Just leave, buy a cart, and become tin merchants.
And you can technically achieve that metagame autonomy with a mission based game, if the party always has multiple completely different missions they can choose from.

thirdkingdom
2021-06-02, 05:02 AM
The thing about a sandbox game that has been alluded to in previous posts is that the world is not static, and events in the world will occur independently of the party's actions. What I typically do is start them off with a half dozen or so plot hooks, like this:


With winter over and the bitter cold receding to the north the town of Junction comes alive once more. No longer choked with bobbing chunks of ice and slush, work continues to repair the great stone bridge spanning the Sarn and promising to open up the west once more to the civilizing forces of Man. The streets of Junction are filled with explorers and tradesfolk, mercenaries and merchants, all drawn to the frontier town at the call of the Scarlet Prince and his promise of untold wealth for those willing to brave the uncivilized wilds.

Over dinner the previous night the party's factor, a tall, stout woman named Madam Fleur had spread out the wrinkled, faded map on the table and succinctly recounts what they know.

“This map dates back to the end of the Fifteenth Cycle of Law, and has potentially changed. You may find that the landscape – or the inhabitants found there – are not what is indicated.”
“Here,” she says, pointing to the road leading to the town of Rocky Mount, “a pride of manticores is said to lurk, devouring all who attempt to pass. Their lair is said to be in these mountains here, overlooking the forest below. I have spoken to a merchant who claimed they are denning halfway up an almost sheer cliff, with a difficult approach.”

“A man has made contact with me, wild-eyed and bushy-bearded, claiming to know the location of a lost gold mine that he is willing to sell for the sum of five hundred gold alcedes. Ordinarily I would discount such tales as the raving of a lunatic or the sugary words of a con man, but I have sources who confirm that there was at one point an attempt to mine a lucrative vein somewhere about here.” She points to a section of the map labeled “70.44”.

“Explorers tell tales of Pesh, a fabled city far to the west. However, in order to get there one would have to either pass through Rocky Peak or take a longer and more circuitous route south, and then west.”

“There are also tales that the land west of Junction and south of Rocky Peak are exceptionally fertile. They tell me the Prince has his eye on expanding this way, at some point, as his domain is somewhat lacking in rich soil.”

“The Rufous Baron, ruler of Junction, has offered a reward of 1,000 gold alcedes for anyone able to clear the land directly opposite the bridge of all threats, so that he may garrison a squad of troops there and begin construction of a watchtower.” Her finger traces a ring around hexes 73.46 and 73.47.

“There’s a community somewhere to the north of Alice,” says Madam Fleur, “called Kimrid. It’s a largely unremarkable village, heavily fortified against the incursions of Chaos, and valuable only because it is contains a monastery that trains holy warriors, known as dervishes, that are well-regarded in the Principality as bodyguards and assassins. We haven’t had any contact with Kimrid since the end of the previous Cycle of Law. The Prince is willing to pay 2,000 alcedes if the road north to this monastery is cleared and contact re-established, should it still exist.”

“The Principality in general, and Junction in particular, relies on the mining camps to the north,” her fingers trace the Sarn north to where the woods thin out and give way to hills. “Ore, especially iron, is in short supply, not just in the Principality, but the Variagated Kingdoms in general. There are a number of mining camps spread throughout these hills, run by private mercantile concerns. The largest company, the Red Sky Mining Company, is offering a bounty on beastmen heads. Their main office is here, but they’ve established a semi-permanent camp here,” she indicates hex 72.43. “That’s about as far north as the riverboats can go before bottoming out. Goblin heads are five alcedes, orcs ten, hobgoblins twenty-five, and ogres one hundred.”

Madam Fleur takes a sip of wine and warns the adventurers that they surely will not be the only brave souls called to the frontier. “There are two other parties that I am aware of currently in Junction, and more will certainly follow with the warmer weather. I have told you what I know and leave the final decision to those more experienced in such matters. I will be here, looking after your concerns. You can reach me via the magic mirror every seven days”. With that she sits back, cradling her wineglass in both hands, and lets the adventurers have time to decide their next course of action.

The party is free to pick any of the initial plot hooks, or, if they don't like what is offered, they can spend some time and money tracking down other options. Or, they can just decide to do something else entirely, but usually they'll pick one of the hooks that is offered. At this point, all of the other options are placed on a timer; other adventuring parties composed of NPCs might be hired to deal with one hook, or maybe one resolves (or gets worse!) on its own.

As was mentioned above, if the party delves into a dungeon, gets in one fight, and then leaves, the (intelligent) inhabitants aren't going to sit around in stasis waiting for the PCs to return; they're going to reinforce the perimeter, set traps, make alliances with other denizens to repel the invaders, etc. Traditionally, too (in older versions of D&D) dungeons are actually the safe space compared to wilderness travel, so spending time traveling to and from a dungeon each day *should* be dangerous. In a dungeon you've got a rough idea of the level of opposition you're facing, with increasing challenge as the party descends deeper, but in the wilderness you can encounter *anything*.

kyoryu
2021-06-02, 10:38 AM
The first thing is that, really, the sandbox isn't static. If you have an encounter in Hex A, that doesn't mean there won't be one there next time you come back.

And the dungeon will "restock" itself. Different monsters will move in, power vacuums will happen, etc.

If you take long enough to go back to town and rest up, any "progress" you made will be gone. You're fighting your way back there. Good luck.

If you make it so things don't "repopulate"? Then, yes, clear a room, go rest, and repeat forever is the optimal strategy.

Yora
2021-06-02, 10:58 AM
Good rules are designed to make the desired narrative structures sensible mechanical choices.

If you want a game for a certain type of stories, the rules should make behaving in that way the most rewarding option.

Segev
2021-06-02, 11:44 AM
Good rules are designed to make the desired narrative structures sensible mechanical choices.

If you want a game for a certain type of stories, the rules should make behaving in that way the most rewarding option.

Absolutely. This is something that game designers need to keep in mind at all times.

Talakeal
2021-06-02, 12:13 PM
Good rules are designed to make the desired narrative structures sensible mechanical choices.

If you want a game for a certain type of stories, the rules should make behaving in that way the most rewarding option.


Absolutely. This is something that game designers need to keep in mind at all times.

I agree, but a lot of people, some of them in this very thread, act like this is a form of arrogantly strong arming people into playing the game how you want them to play it.

thirdkingdom
2021-06-02, 12:48 PM
I think what it boils down to -- more than having mechanics that support the style of play -- is to have a robust social contract with your players. The DM needs to sit the players down and have a discussion about what their expectation is, what the players' expectations are, and how to come to an agreement on how the game will be played. Because, correct me if I'm wrong, not having that much experience with the current editions of D&D, the general assumptions of 5e aren't based around a single daily encounter, either.

If I were the DM I would lay it out to the players: "I notice you've been playing like this, which is fine, but you should now that taking it slow like this is going to have in-game consequences. The denizens of the dungeon will likely take time to organize and mount a resistance, other adventuring parties may take advantage of your slowness, etc."

Segev
2021-06-02, 01:10 PM
I agree, but a lot of people, some of them in this very thread, act like this is a form of arrogantly strong arming people into playing the game how you want them to play it.

It's all about buy-in with the players. If you're playing a game that is to have a particular tone, or mimic a particular genre, or otherwise engage with tropes that make for a particular feel, then presumably the players are playing the game with the intent of playing that kind of game.

A "Resident Evil" RPG is ideally going to be about zombie fighting with conceits around how that's done. A superheroes game will ideally enable people to act like superheroes in comic books and cartoons tend to (so if you catch a falling reporter, she is saved, not broken in your super-strong arms). An action heroes game will encourage dashing into combat and pounding the enemy with your awesomeness, while a game trying to emulate a stealth-focused game would have mechanics that help play stealthy and penalize stealth failures with more than merely a combat to win.

Mutants and Masterminds 3e has a mechanic that relates your falling damage to a height rating from which you fell, and a rule for catching people that subtracts levels of superstrength from that height rating, for exactly the kind of superheroic catch that would, by realistic physics, be just as bad as them hitting the ground, but in comics always saves the day.

You need the players buying into the genre conventions your game is going to showcase, so that they agree that mechanics that encourage them to play to those tropes are a good thing.

Satinavian
2021-06-02, 01:20 PM
I agree, but a lot of people, some of them in this very thread, act like this is a form of arrogantly strong arming people into playing the game how you want them to play it.
Well, guilty of that.

I believe, It is.


Making rules that strongly favor behavior that you want the PC to do but the players don't want their PCs to do, could very well be described as arrogantly strong arming people into playing the game how you want them to play it.

I already said the same thing as Yora. But i qualified it with the whole group having to be on the same page about what actually is desirable behavior first. If you have reached it, you can write rules to guide it there and the players will even help you. If not, it is a waste of time at best.

kyoryu
2021-06-02, 03:51 PM
Well, guilty of that.

I believe, It is.


Making rules that strongly favor behavior that you want the PC to do but the players don't want their PCs to do, could very well be described as arrogantly strong arming people into playing the game how you want them to play it.

I already said the same thing as Yora. But i qualified it with the whole group having to be on the same page about what actually is desirable behavior first. If you have reached it, you can write rules to guide it there and the players will even help you. If not, it is a waste of time at best.

All rules suggest favored ways to play. Inevitably.

Good rules provide multiple choices that are all valid. IOW, good rules don't promote a single path, but rather suggest a number of decisions to the players which don't have clearly superior answers to them.

RandomPeasant
2021-06-02, 06:45 PM
I agree, but a lot of people, some of them in this very thread, act like this is a form of arrogantly strong arming people into playing the game how you want them to play it.

That's the exact thing that rules do. Rules exist to say "things work in this way and do not work in other ways". That's the whole point of rules. When you say "I want rules that support this sort of playstyle", you are implicitly dismissing other playstyles as not being worthy of consideration. That is perhaps the most arrogant thing you can do. That's dampened somewhat by the fact that there are a lot of different sets of rules that support a lot of different playstyles, but it is absolutely true that a set of rules forces people to play in a particular way, because forcing you to do things in a particular way is what makes them rules.

Segev
2021-06-02, 07:57 PM
When you say "I want rules that support this sort of playstyle", you are implicitly dismissing other playstyles as not being worthy of consideration.

Er, no, that is not what you're implying. You are stating, outright, that the game for which you are making or seeking these rules is one where this sort of playstyle is desired.

It makes no value judgment on other playstyles except that they are less desirable for the game you want to play/run.

It is no more "arrogant" to do that than to say that you want to play a standard game of chess, and therefore do not want to bring in Knightmare Chess cards.

NichG
2021-06-02, 09:49 PM
I don't think it's always arrogant to make rules to encourage a specific desired playstyle. But I do think it can be, if the playstyle you're trying to encourage is one that the people you're playing with don't actually like.

Good design:

- A player says 'I want to play a heroic, brave character who takes a lot of risks, but this game really punishes suboptimal play'. The designer says 'Okay, I'm going to design a game that actually rewards taking risks more than not taking risks, to enable the kind of play that you want.'

Bad design:

- A player says 'I really don't want to take risks or have a chance of losing or failing just because of what the dice decide, so I'm going to play very carefully and defensively'. The designer says 'I want you to take risks, so I'm going to design the game so that careful and defensive play is strictly suboptimal, so that you'll end up having to do risky things if you don't want to fail'.

It's reasonable to say for example 'I want to run a game about taking risks, so I'll design rules for that and then find the players who are on board with that idea'. It's unreasonable to say 'I have a fixed set of players, and I'm going to design rules to shape their behaviors so they're playing the kind of game I want to run even if they don't normally like playing that way'.

WindStruck
2021-06-03, 06:05 AM
My last campaign was an attempt at running a sandbox campaign in my system, and in one way it was a total failure.

I have no idea how to maintain challenge or stakes in such a scenario. In most RPGs, challenges are based on attrition and slowly wearing away resources, but when you only have occasional encounters that is hard to do, and to keep them challenging they need to be so deadly that player death is a real concern.

Now, everyone who has played D&D is familiar with the 15 minute work day, but in a sandbox that really seems to be the default method of play, go nova every fight and then fall back and rest in a safe place.

In a linear adventure I can have time pressures to keep them going forward, usually limited opportunities or enemy action. But that really strains verisimilitude and tone in a sandbox.

I tried numerous rules tweaks; only resting in town, daily costs for supplies, reduced lethality, but all they did was slow down the game or open themselves up to player exploits and arguments about "gentleman's agreements".

Any advice on how to do this successfully?

TLDR: How do I maintain challenge, tension, or stakes in a game where proactive players can fall back or rest whenever they like?

Thanks!

Only read this and not any of the other responses. And my answer is... you can't.

Sandbox games are supposed to offer players a lot of freedom, so they are therefore free take things at their own pace, make all the well-thought-out decisions they want, and generally speaking, unless they have really messed up (or that's what they want) danger will not be seeking them.

The only thing you can really do is throw time-sensitive plot hooks their way. And upon taking the bait, your players are now involved in a quest or campaign. Of course, if the going is too risky and difficult, your players could also just give up on that and go back to what they were doing. Because after all, it's still a sandbox.

RandomPeasant
2021-06-03, 06:42 AM
It is no more "arrogant" to do that than to say that you want to play a standard game of chess, and therefore do not want to bring in Knightmare Chess cards.

Well, yes, that's the mitigating factor I mentioned where you creating one set of rules doesn't destroy others. But imagine that neither Knightmare Chess nor regular chess existed, and you had the option to create one or the other. Making the decision to create regular chess is deciding that it's (in whatever sense) more valuable or more important than Knightmare Chess. That decision is, in itself, arrogant. You're deciding that the thing you want to do is better or more important than the things other people want to do. Now, you might point out that no one game can support every playstyle, and that's totally true. But it doesn't make the dismissal of other playstyles any less hurtful for the people who would rather you supported them instead. That's why the idea of a "universal system" is so tempting, even if it's ultimately impossible.

kyoryu
2021-06-03, 09:55 AM
Only read this and not any of the other responses. And my answer is... you can't.

Sandbox games are supposed to offer players a lot of freedom, so they are therefore free take things at their own pace, make all the well-thought-out decisions they want, and generally speaking, unless they have really messed up (or that's what they want) danger will not be seeking them.

The only thing you can really do is throw time-sensitive plot hooks their way. And upon taking the bait, your players are now involved in a quest or campaign. Of course, if the going is too risky and difficult, your players could also just give up on that and go back to what they were doing. Because after all, it's still a sandbox.

Well the other thing is look at what your rules implicitly recommend.

Again, let's look at a hypothetical situation: The dungeon is three hexes away. There are five rooms in the dungeon. At the end of the dungeon is a treasure. Rooms and hexes, once cleared, stay cleared, and there's no resource cost or penalty to going back to town after a combat.

Well, of course people are going to rest up in that situation, after each fight.

Same if all the rewards are from combat - of course people will just rest up if the benefits from a fight in the first hex are the same as the deepest room of the dungeon. Why wouldn't they?

There's also the variability of cost (given an attrition based game like this is described as). If you have 100 resources, and an encounter could take 10-60 resources, then it really makes sense to return to town any time that you have 40 resources depleted or more than one potential encounter on the way back. If an encounter can take 5-10 resources, then as long as you have (encounters*10) resources available, you're still "safe". The math gets wonky here combined with perception, but it doesn't even really matter if there's only a 10% chance of that encounter taking 60 resources, it's still going to throw off the probability and perception of risk.

Note that resource cost shouldn't presume you just attack the monster. If you "encounter" a red dragon at level 3 (and who put that there or on the table anyway???) then that "encounter" should be signs that a red dragon is near, seeing it in the distance, etc. The goal should be avoid/bypass, not attack. Encounters should be survivable with that level of resource loss, not beatable

So, no, if somebody really really wants to be super cautious, you can't make them not be. But you can ensure that your game actually makes the behavior you want a reasonable choice.

Segev
2021-06-03, 10:30 AM
Well, yes, that's the mitigating factor I mentioned where you creating one set of rules doesn't destroy others. But imagine that neither Knightmare Chess nor regular chess existed, and you had the option to create one or the other. Making the decision to create regular chess is deciding that it's (in whatever sense) more valuable or more important than Knightmare Chess. That decision is, in itself, arrogant. You're deciding that the thing you want to do is better or more important than the things other people want to do. Now, you might point out that no one game can support every playstyle, and that's totally true. But it doesn't make the dismissal of other playstyles any less hurtful for the people who would rather you supported them instead. That's why the idea of a "universal system" is so tempting, even if it's ultimately impossible.

I'm sorry, I reject any assertion that creating something because it's what you want to create is inherently "arrogant." By that logic, everything ever made was made out of sheer unadulterated arrogance. Which, at best, dilutes and alters the meaning of the word "arrogant" to the point that it is sometimes a virtue. Arrogance, by definition, is never a virtue.

Google's top (and only, as far as I bothered clicking) definition for "arrogant" is: "having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities."

RandomPeasant
2021-06-03, 10:42 AM
I'm sorry, I reject any assertion that creating something because it's what you want to create is inherently "arrogant."

That's great, because I've never made such an assertion. What I said was arrogant was excluding the things you don't like. Deciding that things shouldn't exist just because you dislike them is absolutely "an exaggerated sense of one's own importance".

Calthropstu
2021-06-03, 10:52 AM
That's great, because I've never made such an assertion. What I said was arrogant was excluding the things you don't like. Deciding that things shouldn't exist just because you dislike them is absolutely "an exaggerated sense of one's own importance".

I have to disagree here. Making a game you like is not arrogant. It would be arrogant if someone then said "I made this game to be the besterest game ever played so why are you still playing that dumb old game we were playing when we first met?"

If someone dislikes penguins, why should he put penguins in his game? He doesn't have to. It is HIS game. It is the height of arrogance to try to force him to include penguins because you like them. Same goes with everything else.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-06-03, 11:10 AM
That's great, because I've never made such an assertion. What I said was arrogant was excluding the things you don't like. Deciding that things shouldn't exist just because you dislike them is absolutely "an exaggerated sense of one's own importance".

I'd say that dreaming that you can make a universal system is the arrogant one. Humility would be to accept that you can't please everyone all the time and trying to build something that does a few things well instead of trying to build one that does everything.

Knowing your limits and the scope of the project is entirely not arrogance.

At the campaign and worldbuilding level, I don't add things I don't like. I try to make sure I like everything that needs to go in--if I don't like it, one of two things has to happen. Either it gets left out[1] or I change my tastes[2].

[1] An example of this is alignment as a cosmological factor. It doesn't exist in my setting, period.
[2] I thought I liked low-power, "slow" things. That's changed.

kyoryu
2021-06-03, 11:41 AM
I'd say that dreaming that you can make a universal system is the arrogant one. Humility would be to accept that you can't please everyone all the time and trying to build something that does a few things well instead of trying to build one that does everything.

Some things are directly opposed. The only way to try to support both of them is to have a system with so many options that it ceases to be a system any more, and is more of a "make your own game" toolkit.

GURPS heads this direction, but only partially - GURPS games still feel like GURPS.

There is no truly universal system.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-06-03, 11:58 AM
Some things are directly opposed. The only way to try to support both of them is to have a system with so many options that it ceases to be a system any more, and is more of a "make your own game" toolkit.

GURPS heads this direction, but only partially - GURPS games still feel like GURPS.

There is no truly universal system.

Exactly. "Universality" is a pipe dream. All rules, including foundational "what dice do we roll" and "do we have a DM role" exclude certain play styles. That's rather the point of rules--to narrow the field. Even free-form, which only has meta-rules, excludes certain play styles.

Quertus
2021-06-03, 01:04 PM
Boy oh boy, where to start?

Talakeal, your problem wasn't with making rules to encourage "good" behavior. It was with making epically bad rules that strongly encourage degenerate gameplay.

Now, is trying to handle a player issue by changing game rules, as game designer and GM, bad form? Well, in a word, yes.

Granted, I'm biased, but I think that any form of railroading, of invalidating otherwise valid choices, is bad, and that giving the players as many options as possible is good. A less biased version of that probably looks like this:

Good rules provide multiple choices that are all valid. IOW, good rules don't promote a single path, but rather suggest a number of decisions to the players which don't have clearly superior answers to them.

Simply put, your players are Determinator style Spike players. That's great for testing your system!

So, assuming good faith from your players, here's what I might do, were I in your situation:

1) open with confirmation of beliefs and acquisition of buy-in: "you guys really didn't like the 1-encounter per day, tediously slow game that the hex crawl turned into, right? But you did it because it was the optimal path, right?"

2) admission of fault, statement of desires: "I was trying to find a way to engineer the rules to encourage the opposite: to get the party to behave in a way that I consider 'heroic', to tackle an entire dungeon or even multiple dungeons before returning to town. Clearly, my attempts failed."

3) request for assistance: "so, how would you guys handle it? What rules would encourage your characters to tackle whole dungeons? If it's an 'optimal path' issue, what rules would make this behavior the optimal path?"

4) evaluation of options "I asked online, and got back several responses that would also work. They include 'scaling XP', 'living world', and 'rival parties'. What do you think of these ideas?"


Only read this and not any of the other responses. And my answer is... you can't.

Sandbox games are supposed to offer players a lot of freedom, so they are therefore free take things at their own pace, make all the well-thought-out decisions they want, and generally speaking, unless they have really messed up (or that's what they want) danger will not be seeking them.

The only thing you can really do is throw time-sensitive plot hooks their way. And upon taking the bait, your players are now involved in a quest or campaign. Of course, if the going is too risky and difficult, your players could also just give up on that and go back to what they were doing. Because after all, it's still a sandbox.

And this. Sandbox play - and especially "fall back whenever they like" - is not conducive to linear game concepts of challenge tension and stakes.

kyoryu
2021-06-03, 01:12 PM
And this. Sandbox play - and especially "fall back whenever they like" - is not conducive to linear game concepts of challenge tension and stakes.

Why not? That doesn't track, unless you have a very particular, narrow definition of sandbox play.

Like, in a sandbox, things should still happen. The clock advances.

If anything, the right kinds of sandboxes are more conducive to stakes, because you're not, as a GM, invested in a particular outcome, and so "the bad guys win" (or even just "the bad guys win this part") is completely viable. That means you can let it happen, and it's up to the players. Knowing that there are real stakes, and that the result is not predetermined is huge for creating tension.

thirdkingdom
2021-06-03, 01:16 PM
Why not? That doesn't track, unless you have a very particular, narrow definition of sandbox play.

Like, in a sandbox, things should still happen. The clock advances.

If anything, the right kinds of sandboxes are more conducive to stakes, because you're not, as a GM, invested in a particular outcome, and so "the bad guys win" (or even just "the bad guys win this part") is completely viable. That means you can let it happen, and it's up to the players. Knowing that there are real stakes, and that the result is not predetermined is huge for creating tension.

I agree with this totally. In a sandbox game the PCs can take whatever action they want, but the world continues to exist beyond their choices. They can totally make a decision not to challenge the bandit king and instead quest for the velveteen hare, but that choice means that the bandit king is going to keep doing bandity things in the background; maybe another party ends up taking the contract to end his thiefly reign of terror, or perhaps he gets bolder and shuts down a major route of commerce between kingdoms, or maybe something else. But the one of the major aspects of sandbox play is that, regardless of what the players decide to do, the world is happening around them.

Talakeal
2021-06-03, 02:20 PM
Talakeal, your problem wasn't with making rules to encourage "good" behavior. It was with making epically bad rules that strongly encourage degenerate gameplay.

Out of curiosity, which rules are the epically bad ones?

As I said, I shifted several times over the course of the campaign to account for player feedback / behavior.

kyoryu
2021-06-03, 02:45 PM
Out of curiosity, which rules are the epically bad ones?

As I said, I shifted several times over the course of the campaign to account for player feedback / behavior.

"Death means you teleport back to town with no loss of any sort" comes to mind.

Lord Torath
2021-06-03, 02:56 PM
I think this is some of the best advice I've seen on this thread:

So, assuming good faith from your players, here's what I might do, were I in your situation:

1) open with confirmation of beliefs and acquisition of buy-in: "you guys really didn't like the 1-encounter per day, tediously slow game that the hex crawl turned into, right? But you did it because it was the optimal path, right?"

2) admission of fault, statement of desires: "I was trying to find a way to engineer the rules to encourage the opposite: to get the party to behave in a way that I consider 'heroic', to tackle an entire dungeon or even multiple dungeons before returning to town. Clearly, my attempts failed."

3) request for assistance: "so, how would you guys handle it? What rules would encourage your characters to tackle whole dungeons? If it's an 'optimal path' issue, what rules would make this behavior the optimal path?"

4) evaluation of options "I asked online, and got back several responses that would also work. They include 'scaling XP', 'living world', and 'rival parties'. What do you think of these ideas?"Get the players on your side, and get them helping. Try out the rules you come up with for a session or two, then have a review.

Talakeal
2021-06-03, 03:18 PM
"Death means you teleport back to town with no loss of any sort" comes to mind.

Yeah.

But do keep in mind that was the fourth or so iteration of the rules, and it was put in to prevent the problem of overly cautious play, not the as the cause of it.

And it worked... it was just and over-correction that introduced the opposite problem.

Quertus
2021-06-03, 09:16 PM
Why not? That doesn't track, unless you have a very particular, narrow definition of sandbox play.

Like, in a sandbox, things should still happen. The clock advances.

If anything, the right kinds of sandboxes are more conducive to stakes, because you're not, as a GM, invested in a particular outcome, and so "the bad guys win" (or even just "the bad guys win this part") is completely viable. That means you can let it happen, and it's up to the players. Knowing that there are real stakes, and that the result is not predetermined is huge for creating tension.

Ah, I guess it depends on what you mean by words like "stakes" and "tension".

Drop me in a sandbox labeled, "real world"? I might well spend the whole session reading books at a library, or posting to online forums.

I'm pretty sure that's not the kind of stakes and tension that Talakeal would like to guarantee, regardless of whether or not he shoehorns in some random overarching threat, like political upheaval or a plague, yet it's a perfectly valid use of the sandbox.


Out of curiosity, which rules are the epically bad ones?


"Death means you teleport back to town with no loss of any sort" comes to mind.

That one is… obviously bad. But all the ones that logically produced the exact opposite of the "intended" results, that encouraged degenerate gameplay of, "one encounter, rest", that nobody enjoyed? They were a different kind of terrible.

Really, I suspect that the Lethality of the system, the size of the drain on resources a single encounter can represent, and the exorbitant price of consumables, are all contributing to the problem.

But the real issue is that there's nothing to encourage moving forward, and death to discourage it. It's kinda a no-brainer that "1 encounter, rest" is the optimal play.

As a trivial fix, I might try something silly and Gamist like "X free healing potions, recovered at the end of the dungeon" as a class feature (where the value of X varies by class and level) as one step towards encouraging more enjoyable gameplay.


I think this is some of the best advice I've seen on this thread:
Get the players on your side, and get them helping. Try out the rules you come up with for a session or two, then have a review.

Thanks! I'm always glad to hear when someone thinks something I've said might be useful.

OldTrees1
2021-06-03, 09:56 PM
Out of curiosity, which rules are the epically bad ones?

As I said, I shifted several times over the course of the campaign to account for player feedback / behavior.


Since I read through the rules to do the math for the other thread I remember something that might be relevant.

IIRC
HP = Vitality = Endurance(an ability score) + 0. You suggested estimating a 6 Endurance.
A hit dealt 1 Wound (2 on a critical) and each Wound is 2 damage that combat (1 damage after out of combat healing).
You also told me it was balanced around the assumption of 1 hit every 4 rounds.

Let's be conservative and assume 4 round combats, so an expected outcome of 1 wound each.
Encounter 1 (6/6): Expect 1 Wound, can survive a Crit, but die to 3 Wounds
Encounter 2 (5/6): Expect 1 Wound, can survive a Crit, but die to 3 Wounds
Encounter 3 (4/6): Expect 1 Wound, die to a Crit or 2 Wounds

However if anyone was unlucky enough to get hit twice in the first encounter they are already acting like they suffered 2 encounters.

Furthermore if someone started with an odd Endurance (5 or 7) then the dramatic shift happens after the 1st encounter rather than after the 2nd.

I think rules like this would encourage whatever actions are needed to remove Wounds rather than merely treat them. Even if it meant resting after only 1 encounter per day.

Of course I am probably missing something, and you were probably using a different system for this campaign.

Frogreaver
2021-06-03, 11:37 PM
A group of players not accustomed to sandbox play rarely play well in their first sandbox. They like the freedom of being overly cautious so they don't 'lose'. Which ultimately sucks the fun out the game. A good sandbox player will choose fictional goals and drive the game toward those goals. A bad sandbox player only has the goal of survive and get more Loot. A good sandbox dm will typically have the world set up where they can't simply take their sweet time with no repercussions. 'Problems in the world should need solved now and if the PC's don't do it someone else will or they will fester into a bigger problem.' If all the problems can wait till when the PCs can eventually get around to solving them then they are 'skillfully' playing the sandbox game you have set up for them presuming that their goal is 'survive and get loot'.

*Note that if players have their PC's be driven beyond 'Survive and get Loot' that even static sandboxes without pressures play pretty well as their will be player created pressure due to roleplaying their PC's as people with goals and lives that won't last forever.

Yora
2021-06-04, 04:44 AM
Years ago someone made the great advice that a good way to get players into a sandbox is to drive them to the train station (on rails).

Don't start the campaign with dumping them into a tavern in the wilderness and saying "You can do whatever you want." Instead start with an adventure you prepared in advance, and that ends with multiple hooks for other things the players could do out in the unstructured wilderness. Once they get out of that first adventure (the train station), they understand where they are and have purpose of where they want to go next.

Quertus
2021-06-04, 06:46 AM
Since I read through the rules to do the math for the other thread I remember something that might be relevant.

IIRC
HP = Vitality = Endurance(an ability score) + 0. You suggested estimating a 6 Endurance.
A hit dealt 1 Wound (2 on a critical) and each Wound is 2 damage that combat (1 damage after out of combat healing).
You also told me it was balanced around the assumption of 1 hit every 4 rounds.

Let's be conservative and assume 4 round combats, so an expected outcome of 1 wound each.
Encounter 1 (6/6): Expect 1 Wound, can survive a Crit, but die to 3 Wounds
Encounter 2 (5/6): Expect 1 Wound, can survive a Crit, but die to 3 Wounds
Encounter 3 (4/6): Expect 1 Wound, die to a Crit or 2 Wounds

However if anyone was unlucky enough to get hit twice in the first encounter they are already acting like they suffered 2 encounters.

Furthermore if someone started with an odd Endurance (5 or 7) then the dramatic shift happens after the 1st encounter rather than after the 2nd.

I think rules like this would encourage whatever actions are needed to remove Wounds rather than merely treat them. Even if it meant resting after only 1 encounter per day.

Of course I am probably missing something, and you were probably using a different system for this campaign.

Yeah, *I* certainly wouldn't be Incentivized to run a "heroic" character in that system. Narcolepsy would be my friend!

(Of course, I'm biased, as I'm known for playing C&C - Cowards and Corpses :smallbiggrin:)


A bad sandbox player only has the goal of survive and get more Loot.

Talakeal wasn't actually talking about a sandbox, but a hex crawl. Isn't "survival and loot" (and Exploration) the name of the game in a hex crawl?


Years ago someone made the great advice that a good way to get players into a sandbox is to drive them to the train station (on rails).

Don't start the campaign with dumping them into a tavern in the wilderness and saying "You can do whatever you want." Instead start with an adventure you prepared in advance, and that ends with multiple hooks for other things the players could do out in the unstructured wilderness. Once they get out of that first adventure (the train station), they understand where they are and have purpose of where they want to go next.

Beginning a sandbox in media res is an interesting idea. But I don't think that it's really a "sandbox" unless they can freely choose any course of action. That is, if they're limited to just picking from a few pre-made hooks, it's a branching linear game, rather than a sandbox.

(Yes, I place plot hooks and numerous other tools for the players to play with in my sandboxes, but the players neither have to engage the plots, nor do they need to play with the toys a particular way.)

Yora
2021-06-04, 06:49 AM
No, the point is that you get them rolling by have them interact with the starting area of the sandbox, and then leave them with knowledge of what other interesting things might be found nearby. And then you release them and let them do what they want.

OldTrees1
2021-06-04, 07:27 AM
Talakeal wasn't actually talking about a sandbox, but a hex crawl. Isn't "survival and loot" (and Exploration) the name of the game in a hex crawl?

Depends, however generally I would not recommend it.

Survive? -> Start fishing or farming.
Loot? -> Why?
Explore? That one is reasonable. Is this character on a exploring vacation? If so then we should expect them to lower the stakes by taking the time they need. Boredom is their only downside for taking things slow.

Of my characters the one best suited for a hex crawl is my city state necromancer. They would see the unknown untamed frontier of these unknown hexes as a chance to find some suitable land to form a city. They would explore for a good place to settle. Then tame that area and tame some trade routes. They would scout nearby hexes for threats to deal with. They would explore ruins for loot that will be directly useful, or indirectly useful as trade fodder.

Survive, Loot, and achieve your proactive goals. That 3rd part is generally a good motivation for any high agency character to have.

Frogreaver
2021-06-04, 09:07 AM
Talakeal wasn't actually talking about a sandbox, but a hex crawl. Isn't "survival and loot" (and Exploration) the name of the game in a hex crawl?

If so then surviving and looting actually need to be challenged.

I would say exploration comes in a distant third in importance compared to surviving and looting for his players. So I wouldn’t personally call it a goal of his players.

Talakeal
2021-06-04, 01:54 PM
Since I read through the rules to do the math for the other thread I remember something that might be relevant.

IIRC
HP = Vitality = Endurance(an ability score) + 0. You suggested estimating a 6 Endurance.
A hit dealt 1 Wound (2 on a critical) and each Wound is 2 damage that combat (1 damage after out of combat healing).
You also told me it was balanced around the assumption of 1 hit every 4 rounds.

Let's be conservative and assume 4 round combats, so an expected outcome of 1 wound each.
Encounter 1 (6/6): Expect 1 Wound, can survive a Crit, but die to 3 Wounds
Encounter 2 (5/6): Expect 1 Wound, can survive a Crit, but die to 3 Wounds
Encounter 3 (4/6): Expect 1 Wound, die to a Crit or 2 Wounds

However if anyone was unlucky enough to get hit twice in the first encounter they are already acting like they suffered 2 encounters.

Furthermore if someone started with an odd Endurance (5 or 7) then the dramatic shift happens after the 1st encounter rather than after the 2nd.

I think rules like this would encourage whatever actions are needed to remove Wounds rather than merely treat them. Even if it meant resting after only 1 encounter per day.

Of course I am probably missing something, and you were probably using a different system for this campaign.

This is the correct system, however missing some context.

You do not die when you run out of vitality, you are merely dying. If you do not take anymore actions at this point, you are in no actual danger.

The more defensive characters will be out front trying to "tank" hits, and the softer characters will typically be hiding in the back. So the three hits to go down and 1/4 odds when fighting an evenly matched foe rarely actually come up in play.

Characters get rerolls equal to their charisma score. So this actually their main defensive resource that gets worn away, as most people will reroll any critical hit against them or regular hit that takes them down.

Also note that the system does not restore resources (except for exhaustion) from sleeping.



Really, I suspect that the Lethality of the system, the size of the drain on resources a single encounter can represent, and the exorbitant price of consumables, are all contributing to the problem.

I have used the system numerous times for more linear games without these problems though.

The game is not particularly lethal, and as I said upthread, I generally calibrate my adventures so each mission has a ~95% success rate and use up ~80 of the party's resources. Player deaths only happen maybe once a year, and TPKs are all but unheard of.

Likewise, consumables are relatively cheap and plentiful, especially if you have an alchemist in the party (which they did). The problem is that, while the system is balanced around a certain level of consumable expenditure, players always want to get further and further ahead of the wealth curve and will thus be bitter about ANY consumable expenditures, no matter how small.

Also, thinking back to the campaign, the party generally had a "close call" every third session, and all but one of these was easily explained. Two of them were extreme bad luck, one time a lucky crit taking out their mercenary on the first round of the adventure, and one time they fumbled a survival test on the way back to town and were bushwhacked by a strong enemy while already hurting.

The rest were actively bad decisions on their part or simply mismatched character builds; they got into a fight and one player refused to participate or even attacked the other players, they got the drop on an obviously superior enemy and then rather than sneaking past or ambushing them they simply announced their presence and attacked, they were fighting fire resistant enemies when their main damage is a fire mage, they were fighting a mind controlling enemy when they all tanked their willpower, the whole debacle with the avatar of violence, etc.


A group of players not accustomed to sandbox play rarely play well in their first sandbox. They like the freedom of being overly cautious so they don't 'lose'. Which ultimately sucks the fun out the game. A good sandbox player will choose fictional goals and drive the game toward those goals. A bad sandbox player only has the goal of survive and get more Loot. A good sandbox DM will typically have the world set up where they can't simply take their sweet time with no repercussions. 'Problems in the world should need solved now and if the PC's don't do it someone else will or they will fester into a bigger problem.' If all the problems can wait till when the PCs can eventually get around to solving them then they are 'skillfully' playing the sandbox game you have set up for them presuming that their goal is 'survive and get loot'.

*Note that if players have their PC's be driven beyond 'Survive and get Loot' that even static sandboxes without pressures play pretty well as their will be player created pressure due to roleplaying their PC's as people with goals and lives that won't last forever.

In character the synopsis of my campaign went like this:

You are the grandchildren of a legendary hero and want to follow in his footsteps. Your noble family would prefer you stayed at home and entered into political marriages to secure the future of your estate.
The city-state which you call home is under the thread of invasion from Duke Redborne, and most of the city's military forces have been deployed south of the river to hold him off, but it is only a manner of time until the city of Meridia falls.
Meridia was once the capitol of a much larger kingdom, but a plague and a series of earthquakes two centuries ago destroyed most of it, and now the countryside is dotted with ruins that are home to bandits, monsters, and worse.

Your motivation is to explore these ruins, to find treasure, to gain experience in combat, and to find allies for Meridia. Only by going this can you hope for your city to remain free and can you grow into the heroes that your bloodline gives you the potential to be.

The game was set up as a hex-crawl.
There was a linear mission the first session, half way through the game, and the last session; as well as a solo quest for each character and an epilogue for the group.
There were forty legendary monsters in the region, twenty in dungeons and twenty roaming the land. Defeating these monsters was the only source of XP.
There are twenty adventure sites in the region, most of which are traditional "dungeons", these contain the majority of the treasure in the region.
During their introductory mission, the players will come into contact with the town wizard, Corrigan Geomanthus, and will require a favor of him (this might be something as simple as learning to control their own magical powers); in return he will ask them to travel to The Pit, the furthest and most dangerous dungeon in the region, and acquire an artifact for him.
The further you get from Meridia, the more dangerous the land becomes, but also the greater the treasures.

And now that I have said that much, I guess its time for house rules:

Ordinarily in Heart of Darkness, exhaustion is removed by sleeping and half of all damage can be treated by a medic; this is the equivalent of a long rest.

Spells, rerolls, concentration, all remaining damage, long term injuries, and expended ammunition or charged items are restored during the recovery phase after the adventure, this is the equivalent of a long rest.

Characters have an essence score which improved with every 20 XP, it is essentially the tier of play. Ordinarily, you can buy equipment with a quality equal to your essence score at normal value, and the cost increases 10x for every further level of quality.

For this campaign:

A long rest can be performed any time by returning to Meridia.

Rerolls can be used to reroll hits after seeing the damage result.

Exhaustion is automatically converted into damage.

Concentration (the currency used to working on downtime projects) is replenished once per session rather than upon resting.

Overland travel has a speed determined by terrain, weather, pace, and the character's agility scores.

Traveling at a fast pace inflicts one exhaustion damage per day.

Traveling at a slow pace allows characters to forage for food and the opportunity to evade or ambush random encounters.

Characters can carry a number of days worth of food equal to their strength score + unused encumbrance. You may discover locations in the wilderness where you can resupply.

Arid regions also require an equal amount of water.

Each day of travel the group must make a survival check. On a fumble, they are attacked by a legendary monster, on a failure they encounter a wandering monster or environmental hazard, on an exact success they encounter a curiosity of neutral NPC, on a success the day passes uneventfully, and on a critical success they find something valuable; lost treasure, resources, a clue, a friendly NPC, or the like. These are all taken randomly from tables for each region.
*I amended this rule part way through the game so that player's no longer had to roll on the way back to town, only on the way out.

Followers do not count towards or against the food limits; unless specifically hired as a pack bearer they are assumed to be self sufficient.

Disabled characters may act by expending a point of mana each round. Further wounds result in serious injuries that impose a -2 penalty to a random ability score for the rest of the adventure.

Vitality represents morale, fatigue, and pain threshold rather than literal meat. If a character is out of vitality
If the entire party runs out of vitality, they are scattered and forced to fall back. When this happens they must:
Iteration 1 (Roll on a table of random mishaps including stuff like lose or break a random item, suffer a lingering injury, be captured and ransomed, being cursed, etc.)
Iteration 2 (Lose all treasures they are currently carrying).
Iteration 3 (Lose half of their total wealth).
Iteration 4 (No penalty. Regroup in town).

There are ten random magic items placed randomly in the region. Players with the appropriate skills may craft their own.

Equipment does not follow the usual scaling cost scheme. Instead +1 equipment is double price, +2 x4, +3 x8, +4 x16, +5 x32.

Equipment beyond +2 quality is not available for purchase in Meridia, although you may find specialist merchants in the wild.

Likewise, materials to craft equipment beyond +2 quality is not available in Meridia, although it may be found in the wilderness.

Characters may not purchase guns, explosives, or other mechanical equipment or the materials to make them in Meridia, there is a tinker somewhere in the wild.

Characters may not purchase spellcasting services, magical grimoires, runes, scrolls, elixirs, or the materials to make them in Meridia. There are numerous witches in the ruins who can provide these services.

There are numerous Mercenaries in Meridia who can accompany you on your journeys. Most will require an equal share of the treasure and a deposit at least equal to the value of their gear held by their family, although some especially competent or incompetent characters will charge more or less. Each of these is written up as a specific individual.


In retrospect, I think I should have also given them a time frame for Duke Redborne's invasion which would allow them to take 20-30 rests over the course of the game.
I also probably should have doubled all of the treasure rewards, but cost them 1 gold a day for supplies such as food and drink, lamp oil, ammunition, medicine, and equipment maintenance, and stressed that their family does not support their adventuring ways and will not support them financially.


Also, if anyone wants a more detailed description of how it played out, I did a campaign diary here: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?593170-Campaign-Diary-Heart-of-Darkness-The-Daughters-of-Rojukan

I never finished posting it as there was a long IRL delay in gaming combined with extended forum maintenance, although I do have the rest written up if anyone cares.

OldTrees1
2021-06-04, 03:17 PM
This is the correct system, however missing some context.

You do not die when you run out of vitality, you are merely dying. If you do not take anymore actions at this point, you are in no actual danger.

Also note that the system does not restore resources (except for exhaustion) from sleeping.


Okay so 0hp is stable but removed from combat.

Wait, if the system does not have sleep restore resources, then why are the players running off to sleep?

Also if sleeping does not heal damage or recharge resources that do, I need to read more to learn how PCs recover from the 1st encounter.
Page 480 has a Heal spell (DC? 20) that cures 1 damage.
Mana = Willpower(a 1-10 ability score).
Page 150 has a cast a spell action and the spell costs 1 mana.
How do you regain mana?

Page 105 mentions a recovery phase which does heal and restore resources. However this is downtime between missions (usually 1 mission per session but slow play can draw it out).

Talakeal
2021-06-04, 03:41 PM
Okay so 0hp is stable but removed from combat.

Wait, if the system does not have sleep restore resources, then why are the players running off to sleep?

They were returning to town and taking an extended rest.


Also if sleeping does not heal damage or recharge resources that do, I need to read more to learn how PCs recover from the 1st encounter.
Page 480 has a Heal spell (DC? 20) that cures 1 damage.
Mana = Willpower(a 1-10 ability score).
Page 150 has a cast a spell action and the spell costs 1 mana.
How do you regain mana?

Page 105 mentions a recovery phase which does heal and restore resources. However this is downtime between missions (usually 1 mission per session but slow play can draw it out).

Generally, you don't.

You get a finite set of resources to accomplish a mission, and if they are insufficient you either bust out the Tonics (page 224) or call the whole thing off.

That being said, a properly balanced mission shouldn't put the players in this situation unless they were inordinately unlucky or foolish.

thirdkingdom
2021-06-04, 03:56 PM
This is the correct system, however missing some context.

You do not die when you run out of vitality, you are merely dying. If you do not take anymore actions at this point, you are in no actual danger.
<snip>


Did you ever explicitly have a discussion with your players to talk about your issues? It seems to me that this is the real problem; either you talked to the players and explained the kind of game you wanted to run and they ignored you, or you didn't talk to them, changed rules, and they kept doing what they were doing.

Talakeal
2021-06-04, 04:07 PM
Did you ever explicitly have a discussion with your players to talk about your issues? It seems to me that this is the real problem; either you talked to the players and explained the kind of game you wanted to run and they ignored you, or you didn't talk to them, changed rules, and they kept doing what they were doing.

Yes, but I think we just kind of talked past one another.

They said they were afraid of character death, and I tried to make the game less deadly, but it never modified their behavior until the game was so consequence free they just stopped trying at all and started acting stupid.

They felt that they were entitled to an ever growing hoard of consumables and getting further and further ahead of the wealth curve, and complained if they ever made less on a mission than they had on the previous mission, and I dismissed them and told them the game was designed with a standard wealth curve in mind and they were not falling behind so I didn't feel the game was too hard.

OldTrees1
2021-06-04, 04:19 PM
They were returning to town and taking an extended rest.

Generally, you don't.

You get a finite set of resources to accomplish a mission, and if they are insufficient you either bust out the Tonics (page 224) or call the whole thing off.

That being said, a properly balanced mission shouldn't put the players in this situation unless they were inordinately unlucky or foolish.

Quick question, if a character has 6 Endurance (so 6 hp), has 1 treated wound (so 1 damage), and is hit 3 times (so 3 wounds for +6 damage). Are they at "dying" despite taking more damage than their Vitality (7 > 6)? I assume so.

I see. So the party has a very limited amount of health and almost no healing.
Remember: Talakeal uses Tonics but several Players don't want to use tonics and using tonics is more expensive than extended rests.

This means that after a couple / few fights the party cannot full recover until they go have an extended rest. Even a single point of damage is a handicap. This gradual decline encourages frequent extended resting in a way that spending out of combat resources to be in peak combat form does not encourage.

However I could easily see myself fighting if I was at 5/6 hp because damage arrives 2 at a time. So I would still expect to get 2-3 encounters before anyone in the party dropped to 4/6. However once someone is at 4/6 (and stayed there), then the optimal move is recover before advancing.

Talakeal
2021-06-04, 05:00 PM
Quick question, if a character has 6 Endurance (so 6 hp), has 1 treated wound (so 1 damage), and is hit 3 times (so 3 wounds for +6 damage). Are they at "dying" despite taking more damage than their Vitality (7 > 6)? I assume so.

I see. So the party has a very limited amount of health and almost no healing.
Remember: Talakeal uses Tonics but several Players don't want to use tonics and using tonics is more expensive than extended rests.

This means that after a couple / few fights the party cannot full recover until they go have an extended rest. Even a single point of damage is a handicap. This gradual decline encourages frequent extended resting in a way that spending out of combat resources to be in peak combat form does not encourage.

However I could easily see myself fighting if I was at 5/6 HP because damage arrives 2 at a time. So I would still expect to get 2-3 encounters before anyone in the party dropped to 4/6. However once someone is at 4/6 (and stayed there), then the optimal move is recover before advancing.


Yes, you are dying when your damage equals or exceeds your vitality.

Aside from a few extra-normal means, such as artifacts and mutations that allow you to regenerate or steal health, or a critical success on a medical test, healing has a cost and will cost you something.

As I said, the difficulty of the game is based on attrition rather than the chance of death in any given battle.

If you are injured, you are at a disadvantage, and generally the only time you have a chance of defeat is if you are down a significant amount of resources.

If you are injured, you get a choice:

1: Tough it out and assume it won't mean the difference between victory and defeat.
2: Drink a tonic of vigor and convert wealth to vitality.
3: Cast a healing spell and convert mana to vitality.
4: Find someplace to hole up and heal, assuming that the time, supplies, and chance of random encounters doing so won't cause you to fail the mission.
5: Give up the mission and the associated rewards and head back to base.

If you absolutely can't stand the thought of going into combat not at full strength, then this game probably isn't for you. Of course, nor is any other attrition based game, which includes all of the traditional RPGs I am familiar with except for D&D played in a setting that encourages the 15MWD.

OldTrees1
2021-06-04, 06:57 PM
If you are injured, you get a choice:
And the optimal move at 4/6 hp is options 2, 3, 4, or 5 depending on price. In the Hexcrawl, without consequences, option 4/5 is the optimal.

PS: I am confused what is option 4? I thought resting did not heal unless it was the "give up the mission" resting?


If you absolutely can't stand the thought of going into combat not at full strength, then this game probably isn't for you. Of course, nor is any other attrition based game, which includes all of the traditional RPGs I am familiar with except for D&D played in a setting that encourages the 15MWD.

I know your group is prone to miscommunication, so I will remember that when reading this rude misrepresentation.

There are many ways to do attrition and starting an encounter with 1/6 hp is not required for a system to have attrition. D&D (when it is not a 15MWD) specializes about burning out of combat resources to recover to combat ready health while your combat offensive resources also suffer attrition. A 5E Wizard at 1hp is different from a 5E Wizard at 0 spell slots and 0 hit dice.

Your game is accurately described as high lethality because your idealized form of attrition is getting the PCs to fight with fewer and fewer hp until there is almost a TPK. However this form of attrition backfires because it tells the players to have only a few fights per day.


As I said, the difficulty of the game is based on attrition rather than the chance of death in any given battle.

This is a false dichotomy. Your game is based on attrition of health to create an increasing fragility and chance of death. Unfortunately players don't react the same way to different forms of attrition.

Talakeal
2021-06-04, 07:24 PM
And the optimal move at 4/6 HP is options 2, 3, 4, or 5 depending on price. In the Hex-crawl, without consequences, option 4/5 is the optimal.

I have not found this to be the case.

Generally you won't take more than a couple of wounds in a given battle, so you don't usually need to be topped off; doing so is sort of like insurance, you are spending resources on vitality you probably won't need incase things go south.


PS: I am confused what is option 4? I thought resting did not heal unless it was the "give up the mission" resting?

Some missions are not time sensitive, in which case you can just call it off, go back to base, take a recovery phase, and then start over.

Basically, its taking a mulligan on the whole thing rather than aborting.


I know your group is prone to miscommunication, so I will remember that when reading this rude misrepresentation.

There are many ways to do attrition and starting an encounter with 1/6 hp is not required for a system to have attrition. D&D (when it is not a 15MWD) specializes about burning out of combat resources to recover to combat ready health while your combat offensive resources also suffer attrition. A 5E Wizard at 1hp is different from a 5E Wizard at 0 spell slots and 0 hit dice.

Your game is accurately described as high lethality because your idealized form of attrition is getting the PCs to fight with fewer and fewer HP until there is almost a TPK. However this form of attrition backfires because it tells the players to have only a few fights per day.


I'm sorry?

I don't actually see the misrepresentation, it seems we are still on the same page, but I didn't mean to be rude.

I legitimately don't see how my system is different from the D&D model except that the time scale is based on missions instead of adventuring days. Could you please elaborate?


This is a false dichotomy. Your game is based on attrition of health to create an increasing fragility and chance of death. Unfortunately players don't react the same way to different forms of attrition.

Death is rarely on the line unless players are choosing to do something risky.

The way dying works, it takes several rounds of beating on a dying character before there is a serious risk of death (and even then, rerolls and in combat healing are further resources which will need to be depleted first), and enemies are extremely unlikely to do so if the wounded character withdraws from the fight and lets their healthy companions take front row.

A warrior type who is out of vitality is not functionally any different from a caster type who is out of mana; and if you have access to healing magic in the party you can freely convert one resource into another.

Squire Doodad
2021-06-04, 08:15 PM
Yes, but I think we just kind of talked past one another.

They said they were afraid of character death, and I tried to make the game less deadly, but it never modified their behavior until the game was so consequence free they just stopped trying at all and started acting stupid.

They felt that they were entitled to an ever growing hoard of consumables and getting further and further ahead of the wealth curve, and complained if they ever made less on a mission than they had on the previous mission, and I dismissed them and told them the game was designed with a standard wealth curve in mind and they were not falling behind so I didn't feel the game was too hard.

This seems a bit like the issue with consumables in video game RPGs, especially ones where certain consumables have very limited quantities.

My suggestion: make it so they have the means to heal themselves slightly if needed, and put a cap on how many consumables they can carry. Let's say they can bring 2 Tonics per "bag" to a dungeon, if they find more Tonics in the field they can nab 1 more per "bag", maybe with every other enchantment level counting as a spare bag. The exact numbers is up to you, I picked a low amount since some people like to go into a dungeon with 3 tons of storage space so I don't know what would work best.


They can store as many items as they'd like outside of a dungeon by going to one of a set of "Holding Banks", which can be found in most notable towns - you can decide what this is defined as, so if you'd like you can say that village between the Forest of Despair and the Veinborn Citadel has some basic utilities to act as a rest stop, but isn't big enough to have a bank, so they can't refill their consumables from their personal stores. However, when it comes time to set out, they can't have more than 2 Tonics per bag. They can have 3 Ironskin Potions, a pair of Vials of Alchemist's Fire or whatever, and so on. Maybe consumables would be better split into like 5 "tiers" at that point, but I'm not sure...

The idea here is that they'll find healing items they can't hold more of every so often during actual campaigns, and so they'll be inclined to use their consumables in battle or to pop one as they find a health potion.
Does this seem like a good idea, or am I running in the wrong direction?


Death is rarely on the line unless players are choosing to do something risky.

Players should not be in a world where they can do absolutely anything and magically manage to win. "Doing something risky" should happen reasonably often, and I'd recommend having some non-lethal answers to those going wrong. A curse that can be used as a plot hook, temporary stat damage that lasts for the next fight or two, etc etc.

That said, random "you did bad action so you have to roll or die" stuff is pretty lame. Unless it's an absolutely atrocious idea or the player is explicitly aware it will get them killed. Like "I'm going to fire a grappling hook at the dragon's mouth and set fire to its insides as it eats me!"
Actually, at that point you might as well do a roll they don't see and then say "The grappling hook lands in the dragon's mouth as it clamps its mouth shut. Your grappling hook is destroyed and the dragon takes 2 points of damage, and it is now very angry with you."

You know, not immediate death

Talakeal
2021-06-04, 08:45 PM
This seems a bit like the issue with consumables in video game RPGs, especially ones where certain consumables have very limited quantities.

My suggestion: make it so they have the means to heal themselves slightly if needed, and put a cap on how many consumables they can carry. Let's say they can bring 2 Tonics per "bag" to a dungeon, if they find more Tonics in the field they can nab 1 more per "bag", maybe with every other enchantment level counting as a spare bag. The exact numbers is up to you, I picked a low amount since some people like to go into a dungeon with 3 tons of storage space so I don't know what would work best.


They can store as many items as they'd like outside of a dungeon by going to one of a set of "Holding Banks", which can be found in most notable towns - you can decide what this is defined as, so if you'd like you can say that village between the Forest of Despair and the Veinborn Citadel has some basic utilities to act as a rest stop, but isn't big enough to have a bank, so they can't refill their consumables from their personal stores. However, when it comes time to set out, they can't have more than 2 Tonics per bag. They can have 3 Ironskin Potions, a pair of Vials of Alchemist's Fire or whatever, and so on. Maybe consumables would be better split into like 5 "tiers" at that point, but I'm not sure...

The idea here is that they'll find healing items they can't hold more of every so often during actual campaigns, and so they'll be inclined to use their consumables in battle or to pop one as they find a health potion.
Does this seem like a good idea, or am I running in the wrong direction?

I have tried something very similar to this, the players complain that it is too "gamey" and breaks their verisimilitude, and they try and come up with all sorts of ways to get around it, from pack mules to a custom spell which replicates Tenser's floating disk.


Players should not be in a world where they can do absolutely anything and magically manage to win. "Doing something risky" should happen reasonably often, and I'd recommend having some non-lethal answers to those going wrong. A curse that can be used as a plot hook, temporary stat damage that lasts for the next fight or two, etc etc.

That said, random "you did bad action so you have to roll or die" stuff is pretty lame. Unless it's an absolutely atrocious idea or the player is explicitly aware it will get them killed. Like "I'm going to fire a grappling hook at the dragon's mouth and set fire to its insides as it eats me!"
Actually, at that point you might as well do a roll they don't see and then say "The grappling hook lands in the dragon's mouth as it clamps its mouth shut. Your grappling hook is destroyed and the dragon takes 2 points of damage, and it is now very angry with you."

You know, not immediate death

In this case "doing something risky" almost always entails continuing to fight while dying rather than falling back and waiting to be healed.

Squire Doodad
2021-06-04, 09:04 PM
I have tried something very similar to this, the players complain that it is too "gamey" and breaks their verisimilitude, and they try and come up with all sorts of ways to get around it, from pack mules to a custom spell which replicates Tenser's floating disk.

Let them bring pack mules.
And then suddenly, without any mention in the quest description, they have a very stiff ravine they need to climb down with an orc horde waiting below (the vanguard of Chieftain Skurlgnar the Verdant or something, meant to be a major encounter to kick off the dungeon), and their noble escort suddenly becomes terrified and offers to take the mules back to the town.
They have three options.
a) Try to get at the orcs and have major difficulties doing so; the orcs have cover, archers, and a handful of spells to block anyone trying to jump down (which, it so happens, only come up if the players actually try to brute force their way into it). The players would have to spend the entire day slinging arrows and spells to make any headway, and the mules would likely get killed in the process from stray arrows.
b) Magically lower the mules in, at which point the mules get attacked by the orcs
c) Let the mules go back with the noble, where they'll be perfectly safe.
Hopefully, the players will pick the items they want to bring with, and then send the mules back before going after the orcs.

There's a difference between railroading and enforcing certain circumstances onto the dungeon crawl.

Also, it's fine if they're technically holding more items than they should be, just don't let it get out of hand. "I'm spending a spell slot a day to be able to hold a few more items" is fine if they're enjoying it, it's "I have burned 7 scrolls a day to make me have access to every potion, ever, and will use none of them" that's problematic.

OldTrees1
2021-06-04, 09:14 PM
Some missions are not time sensitive, in which case you can just call it off, go back to base, take a recovery phase, and then start over.

Basically, its taking a mulligan on the whole thing rather than aborting.
Oh I thought that was option 5. That makes sense.


I have not found this to be the case.

Generally you won't take more than a couple of wounds in a given battle, so you don't usually need to be topped off; doing so is sort of like insurance, you are spending resources on vitality you probably won't need incase things go south.

A couple usually means 2-3 but I am guessing you mean 1-2. That is 2 or 4 damage. If someone is at 4/6 hp there is a reasonable chance they will go down. If everyone is at 4/6 suddenly the chance of a TPK is much higher than when everyone was at 5/6. If there is no reason to be reckless, the rational move is to not be reckless.

Please see the rest of this thread for ways to have reasons to risk recklessness.


A warrior type who is out of vitality is not functionally any different from a caster type who is out of mana; and if you have access to healing magic in the party you can freely convert one resource into another.

From what little I know of your Players, I doubt much mana was spent on healing. Personally I would probably specialize in Restoration magic if I could so I could delay when the party hit the 4/6 threshold. That is why I worded it as if everyone got to 4/6 (and stayed there).

However there is another difference between the warrior that is out of vitality and the caster who is out of mana. The caster can tank a few attacks. The warrior is downed.


I legitimately don't see how my system is different from the D&D model except that the time scale is based on missions instead of adventuring days. Could you please elaborate?

The attrition in D&D vs your system differs in 2 main ways. These differences create a slightly different tone and set of incentives.
1) D&D splits its attrition between offense and health.
2) A majority of D&D attrition of health is attrition of the out of combat health. It is attrition of the healing/restortion/revivify spells. The party still enters fights with the vast majority of their combat health. But they have run out of healing.

An 8th level Wizard that runs out of spell slots and resorts to Cantrips feels different than an 8th level Wizard with only 1hp level. The former is less effective than normal. The latter feels like a dead man walking.

You were already at risk for this feeling. I keep describing the PCs has having 6hp, that is not entirely accurate. The PCs feel like they can survive 2 hit in the morning. By noon they feel like they can survive 1 hit. In the evening they feel like the next hit will be their end. Sure the dying state means they will survive unless it is a TPK, but you are still talking about PCs that feel very fragile.



Now these rules are consistent and if you are okay with the behavior they encourage, it can make for a neat gritty game. However I think they contributed to the Players frequent extended rests.

kyoryu
2021-06-05, 10:58 AM
I have not found this to be the case.

Generally you won't take more than a couple of wounds in a given battle, so you don't usually need to be topped off; doing so is sort of like insurance, you are spending resources on vitality you probably won't need incase things go south.

"Generally" doesn't matter. What matters is the upper limit. (And, to a lesser extent, how frequently you hit it).

If you are within the upper limit of death, then continuing risks death - and that needs to be weighed against the costs of not continuing. (Note that the upper limit should include reasonably evasive behavior - it's the upper limit on the minimum damage you can take in an encounter. So seeing something tough and running away doesn't spike the upper limit, unless doing so is impossible or would result in that damage anyway)

Talakeal
2021-06-05, 11:11 AM
"Generally" doesn't matter. What matters is the upper limit. (And, to a lesser extent, how frequently you hit it).

If you are within the upper limit of death, then continuing risks death - and that needs to be weighed against the costs of not continuing. (Note that the upper limit should include reasonably evasive behavior - it's the upper limit on the minimum damage you can take in an encounter. So seeing something tough and running away doesn't spike the upper limit, unless doing so is impossible or would result in that damage anyway)

To clarify, are we talking about the odds of the party as a whole being defeated or of an individual character being killed?

OldTrees1
2021-06-05, 11:42 AM
To clarify, are we talking about the odds of the party as a whole being defeated or of an individual character being killed?

In your system there are roughly the same odds if I understand correctly. Once someone hits 0hp they can't act or risk dying but the enemy can't efficiently finish them off. This means the chance of an individual character being killed is the chance the party fails to fully retreat from an encounter that is heading towards a TPK.

If an encounter deals 1 wounds to each person on average (the harder to hurt characters are also getting attacked more) then starting with everyone at 2/6 Vitality is a reckless move. However since critical hits double the damage, some of that risk happens even if everyone is at 4/6. However the risk shrinks much further when everyone is at 5-6 Vitality because it takes 2 hits minimum instead of a lucky crit*.

*And if characters generally have enough Charisma to ignore crits, then it is still 3 hits rather than 2 hits. The ratio of consecutive numbers is large when the numbers are small.


If there was a consequence to being overly cautious, then the characters would have a harder judgement call. However without consequences, there is little reason to go in at 4 Vitality instead of recovering to 5 Vitality. (See the rest of the thread for ways to add consequences). Even once consequences exist, going from 3 hits to 2 hits (or 1 crit) is still a steep health attrition (which will encourage caution).

Talakeal
2021-06-05, 12:33 PM
In your system there are roughly the same odds if I understand correctly. Once someone hits 0hp they can't act or risk dying but the enemy can't efficiently finish them off. This means the chance of an individual character being killed is the chance the party fails to fully retreat from an encounter that is heading towards a TPK.

If an encounter deals 1 wounds to each person on average (the harder to hurt characters are also getting attacked more) then starting with everyone at 2/6 Vitality is a reckless move. However since critical hits double the damage, some of that risk happens even if everyone is at 4/6. However the risk shrinks much further when everyone is at 5-6 Vitality because it takes 2 hits minimum instead of a lucky crit*.

*And if characters generally have enough Charisma to ignore crits, then it is still 3 hits rather than 2 hits. The ratio of consecutive numbers is large when the numbers are small.


If there was a consequence to being overly cautious, then the characters would have a harder judgement call. However without consequences, there is little reason to go in at 4 Vitality instead of recovering to 5 Vitality. (See the rest of the thread for ways to add consequences). Even once consequences exist, going from 3 hits to 2 hits (or 1 crit) is still a steep health attrition (which will encourage caution).

Pretty much, yes.

The odds of a TPK increase with every resource spent, hence the attrition based difficulty curve.

Individual characters will not typically die unless they refuse to back down when out of vitality / destiny or if their companions totally abandon them, which virtually never happens. In addition, you must have an enemy who is unwilling to simply take prisoners, accept surrenders, or allow their enemies to retreat.

But yeah, I have very little problem balancing resource loss, difficulty curves, and incentives to keep going in a standard linear game (although I do have that one player who complains its too hard if he ever has to use a consumable or doesn't get further ahead of the wealth curve each session), its only when I get into a hex-crawl that I can't figure out how to de-incentivize players turning back after every encounter.

Honestly, it might be less of a problem if I was running a MORE lethal game, as if every random encounter had a chance of killing someone, they might not be willing to take on dozens of reward-less random encounters on their way to the dungeon.

Cluedrew
2021-06-05, 12:48 PM
I have tried something very similar to this, the players complain that it is too "gamey" and breaks their verisimilitude,There is so much irony in this statement that I could make a three course meal out of it.

For the appetiser we will discuss why this statement is ironic: Because of all the gamey things that work in their favour that they did not complain about. For the main course we will get into the meat of what that means: I don't think they were lying so much as it was an obstacle, so they started engaging with it more critically. Compared to the respawning (That's the same campaign right? Or at least the same group? Also I'm assuming that there was no detailed non-gamey explanation for it.) which was given a pass because the likely immediately jumped to how they could use it. So they want tools but aren't really interested in working around restrictions. For a dessert a little observation: Your group wants a challenge free power-fantasy.

OK, so I just wanted to say the observation again while following up on the three course meal joke. But I think its true, I of course can't say for sure but its my best theory. My recommendation remains the same as well, find a group that wants to play the game you want to run. You just never seem to have anything good to say about your campaigns.

Talakeal
2021-06-05, 12:56 PM
There is so much irony in this statement that I could make a three course meal out of it.

For the appetiser we will discuss why this statement is ironic: Because of all the gamey things that work in their favour that they did not complain about. For the main course we will get into the meat of what that means: I don't think they were lying so much as it was an obstacle, so they started engaging with it more critically. Compared to the respawning (That's the same campaign right? Or at least the same group? Also I'm assuming that there was no detailed non-gamey explanation for it.) which was given a pass because the likely immediately jumped to how they could use it. So they want tools but aren't really interested in working around restrictions. For a dessert a little observation: Your group wants a challenge free power-fantasy.

OK, so I just wanted to say the observation again while following up on the three course meal joke. But I think its true, I of course can't say for sure but its my best theory. My recommendation remains the same as well, find a group that wants to play the game you want to run. You just never seem to have anything good to say about your campaigns.

Yeah, fully aware of the irony.

The thing is, in my experience people generally look for something to blame when frustrated, and will thus fixate on unrealistic rules that hold them back. When a rule works to their benefit, they are unlikely to examine it under the lens of looking for something to lash out at.

OldTrees1
2021-06-05, 01:12 PM
But yeah, I have very little problem balancing resource loss, difficulty curves, and incentives to keep going in a standard linear game (although I do have that one player who complains its too hard if he ever has to use a consumable or doesn't get further ahead of the wealth curve each session), its only when I get into a hex-crawl that I can't figure out how to de-incentivize players turning back after every encounter.

When you ran the hexcrawl the PCs had very basic goals (survive, explore, loot) and those goals agreed that being cautious was the right course of action.

What if their goals conflicted with caution? Ask the player to give their characters goals that would encourage their characters to do more than 1 encounter per day. If my city state necromancer took things that slow they would be impatient with how little progress they were making.

kyoryu
2021-06-05, 04:52 PM
To clarify, are we talking about the odds of the party as a whole being defeated or of an individual character being killed?

Individual character. Very few players take the mindset of "well, I might die, but we won't get TPKed, so that's fine."

Just out of curiosity, how much do you focus fire in encounters?

Squire Doodad
2021-06-05, 08:25 PM
There is so much irony in this statement that I could make a three course meal out of it.

It's also a bit gamey because it has a similar texture to pheasant.

Talakeal
2021-06-05, 09:03 PM
Individual character. Very few players take the mindset of "well, I might die, but we won't get TPKed, so that's fine."

Just out of curiosity, how much do you focus fire in encounters?

That’s what I thought. Going into battle injured does not noticeably increase the odds of a given character dying, because it is not practical to finish off a downed foe while they still have allies nearby, and the odds of killing someone outright are not increased by previous injuries.

I generally don't focus fire, I have enemies divide up evenly, favoring the nearest unengaged enemy. Smart or stealthy enemies might also try and slip into the back lines and get at the more vulnerable characters.

Single enemies do not generally randomly switch targets though.

Time Troll
2021-06-06, 06:14 PM
The big thing here might be to make the world a lot less easy button. OSR style.

1. Few safe places. Maybe the city of High Point with it's tons of guards, BlueDale the small unknown fishing town, and the hidden elven isle of Khas. That's it. The whole rest of the world is, at best, sort of safe. So character's can expect to be attacked or robbed at nearly all times...even more so if they "look" like rich adventurers.

2. There are very few NPCs world wide that have any sort of desire to help. Most are indifferent, but plenty are down right hostile. Trust no one. Plus the vast majority of NPCs are weak or otherwise not much help, even if they want to help.

3. Few stores. Magic shops are tossed right out the window as simply not existing. The vast majority of stores sell tools and basic farm goods, not potions and weapons and alchemy items. Weapon and armor shops are very, very, very, very few and far between. Most places might sell simple weapons like clubs, daggers or spears...but not much else. Few towns or cities have a weaponsmith or worse an armorsmith that just sits around and makes weapons or armor all day. You won't find any armorsmith with like 50 suits of armor on there Armor Mart shelves. And this is about ten times worse for magic items.

4. Only the Basics. The vast majority of places only craft, make and trade the most basic, mundane items. Like food and clothing. Every town does not have a master swordsmith....in fact, swords are rare. There are few, if any "public for hire" swordsmiths...most work for private people. The same is true for just about all "adventuring gear", except things that are also common tools...like a wooden bucket. And few places have anything exotic.

5. Only Basic trade. The elves don't trade wagons full of admantium elven thinblades, they trade wagons full of nuts. Dwarves don't just randomly make wagons full of human sized full plate mail, but do make lots of farm tools.

6. The adventure is in far off places. The adventure should not be even slightly close to a "safe space" to rest. The adventure should be in far off, far away exotic locations.....far, far, far, far from anything. To use the USA, you don't go on an adventure a mile from New York City, you head out west...off the main path. Your going to places that are one light towns and even have no radio stations except that one AM crop report one. And that is just the USA....Canada, South America, Africa and similar places are way beyond New York City.

7. Barriers. Mountains, swamps, rivers, canyons or even magic time lock portals. The town of Fair Haven is the site of an old stone bridge across the rough Rocky River.....and it's the ONLY bridge for 100 miles in both directions. Once the characters cross it, they will have a hard...or impossible time crossing the river back. This can also work with a toll road or such.

8 Get rid of healing. And all cures too. Make the characters "live"(game) with injuries and afflictions. Get rid of all PC healing and cures.....and remove them from the world too. Not much point in resting if you can't hit the heal reset button.

9. Cut the stuff. Get rid of the warehouse full of items too many characters carry around. Make the limit only a couple things.

10. Character Death. 'Nuff Said.

Quertus
2021-06-06, 10:02 PM
Talakeal, you should really listen to your players and OldTrees1 (and me) when they/we are all saying that your game feels hard, such that what we feel isn't "attrition", but "1 fight, then rest".

In 3e D&D, a mid-level character might have 60 HP. An average enemy hit might deal 10, or 20 on a crit. A casting of Faith Heal heals 9 a pop (11 for Lesser Vigor). Sounds comparable to your system, except for 2 things: a mid-level healer can heal more than 6 times, and the damage you take at the time is double that in your system, even if half of it heals up after the fight is over. Also, wands exist. A Wand of Faith Heal costs 750 GP for 50 charges. IME, most mid-level parties aren't going to complain when they finish off their first wand, that they bought back at 1st or 2nd level, and have to buy a second, that the game is too hard, or that these consumables are such a waste - and my parties generally hate wasting funds on consumables.

Even if that depiction of 3e doesn't sound like attrition to you, consider that even in 2e D&D, a mid-level dedicated healer would have a lot more than 6 healing spells.

So your system has a lot fewer of these resources that are being slowly eaten.

And they're being eaten much faster, in that a single crit can drop ⅔ of your HP.

But, you say, you've got a pool of 6 rerolls, that people commonly use to not get crit / not lose their last HP. You know what doesn't feel good, what makes the game feel hard? Using rerolls on defense. Knowing that every single fight against an animated eggplant might well cost you such a precious resource, that you'd rather use on doing something cool and seeing it succeed.

But wait, you say, it's not that bad. No?
the party generally had a "close call" every third session, one time a lucky crit taking out their mercenary on the first round of the adventureTheir very first fight, they lost someone round 1. And
Disabled characters may act by expending a point of mana each round. Further wounds result in serious injuries that impose a -2 penalty to a random ability score for the rest of the adventure. I'm not gonna be Incentivized to be brave when my options are "sit out" or "swing a nerf bat" when I overcommit. And the mercenary overcommitted by being involved in the first round of the first fight of the campaign.

Nothing about this system says "attrition" to me. Nothing about this system encourages me to use any strategy other than "rest after taking more than 1 hit".

But it's worse than that.


I generally calibrate my adventures so each mission has a ~95% success rate and use up ~80 of the party's resources.
Also, thinking back to the campaign, the party generally had a "close call" every third session, and all but one of these was easily explained... The rest were actively bad decisions on their part It's "guess what the GM is thinking, or risk a TPK". You've given them no wiggle room here, either.

Then, on top of other ways of making the game feel hard, you make the PCs feel incompetent in so many ways. By making only roughly ¼ of attacks connect. By giving them sneezing Ogre riddles that are impossible to see at the time (regardless of whether they could be obvious in retrospect). By giving them Avatar of Hate poorly worded hints. By not fixing things when they do something "pants on head" for fear of playing their character for them.

And then you complain that they're unheroic when they behave as your system encourages them to.

It's no wonder that they game the system, and want to abuse your NPCs - they're desperate for the win that they otherwise cannot get out of your games.

If you want them to act brave, you've got to give them more wiggle room in the number of encounters they can go through before feeling "a hit away from death", more wiggle room to be creative / on how many remaining resources your expected attrition has them end a "perfect" run with, and less wiggle room to run with scissors in their hands and pants on their heads.

Rather than being heroic, they should be walking on eggshells, fearing that doing even a single thing wrong with your unreliable guidance will result in severe punishment. That's not a description of a fun game, or a healthy social dynamic.

You claim that the Avatar of Hate was intended to teach them a lesson, but the thing is, your players seem quite brilliant at determining what lesson your system is teaching (even if it isn't the lesson you expected), and are willing to endure unfun and unrewarding game cycles to follow said lessons.

It seems you would benefit of you stopped trying to challenge your players so much, and instead worked on trying to figure out how to give them the game that they want.

One where they can feel competent, can feel their progress, one where the system and the encounters don't encourage degenerate gameplay.

Satinavian
2021-06-07, 02:26 AM
The big thing here might be to make the world a lot less easy button. OSR style.
How would that help with "the PCs don't take enough risks" ? Do you want to make them never leaving town at all ?

Vahnavoi
2021-06-07, 06:32 AM
Risks and challenge are largely orthogonal when talking about a dice game - and that's what many RPGs reduce to. Or, more exactly: in a dice game, you don't challenge yourself by taking bigger risks. From a game design perspective, increasing risks on a die roll does little by itself to change quality and quantity of player skills involved.

The actual challenge in a dice game is figuring out the best risks-to-rewards ratios given your available resources. This involves a type of math (probability) that most people naturally suck at, so they never develop any real skill and instead their tactics and strategies rely on superstition and fallacies (such as the gambler's fallacy).

Because of these things, trying to math out appropriate level of risk in a dice game to create a challenge is a largely pointless activity: increasing risks doesn't by itself make the game more complex or harder to figure out and players won't even be seriously engaging with that dimension unless they're in it for the math.

So abandon talking about risks for a moment. Instead, focus on player psychology and try to find out what is the actual skill (and level of skill) they're actually using while they play.

For my sandbox games, the primary challenge isn't combat or anything to do with combat: it is instead an epic crossover game of Twenty Questions and Chinese Whispers where the players have to read, decipher and cross-reference notes left by other players in order to understand causality of places and events. I know what skill they're using to puzzle that out (reading comprehension and synoptic logic) and based on their actual performance at my table I can easily make the challenge easier or harder by altering how many and which kind of notes I'm giving them, thus controlling their level of engagement. Here's one usefull graph. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Challenge_vs_skill.svg)

kyoryu
2021-06-07, 10:19 AM
Risks and challenge are largely orthogonal when talking about a dice game - and that's what many RPGs reduce to. Or, more exactly: in a dice game, you don't challenge yourself by taking bigger risks. From a game design perspective, increasing risks on a die roll does little by itself to change quality and quantity of player skills involved.

At a quick pass at definitions - challenge is how good your decisions have to be to win, risk is how much you can lose.

A puzzle that you can try infinite times at no penalty can be quite challenging, but poses little risk.

A door that you have to go through that will kill you 50% of the time poses a lot of risk, but little challenge.

kyoryu
2021-06-07, 10:52 AM
Talakeal, you should really listen to your players and OldTrees1 (and me) when they/we are all saying that your game feels hard, such that what we feel isn't "attrition", but "1 fight, then rest".

Talakeal, read this post. I haven't done the math on your system, but this generally seems to check out and would explain the behavior you're seeing. And I do not agree with Quertus in anything approaching lockstep.

There's a lot of gold in here not only about how your system seems to work, but how it is likely perceived by your players.

Talakeal
2021-06-07, 01:00 PM
Quertus, I really do value your feedback. I consider you one of the smartest and most reasonable people on the board, but this post is full of baseless claims and bad-faith arguments, and it is really frustrating. I will try to maintain a civil tone, but I apologize in advance if I get overly defensive.


Talakeal, you should really listen to your players and OldTrees1 (and me) when they/we are all saying that your game feels hard,

I agree that the game feels too hard for my players. I disagree that it is too hard in any objective sense; after all the players have a ~93 win rate, which is far better than any sports team in history. Heck, even Marvel Comic book heroes don’t have that high a win rate.
Not that there is any objective way to measure “too hard”.

This is probably not due to any actual objective level of difficulty, I would surmise it is based on:

1: I am too good at creating the illusion of danger, and trying to make the PCs feel like heroic underdogs surviving against the odds despite the fact that the deck is heavily stacked against them.
2: My system is not a good fit for "submission gamers," those who simply want to relax and veg out during their game time rather than engaging with the game tactically to overcome challenges.


isn't "attrition", but "1 fight, then rest".

I really, really, don't see it.

Any game where you can expend resources and have no penalty for recovering them means recovering as often as possible to avoid attrition, like that's literally what the words mean.

There is no edition of D&D, even the much maligned 4E, where the optimum strategy is not to take a long rest after every encounter if you can get away with it and which becomes increasingly hard and risky the longer you go without resting.



you make the PCs feel incompetent in so many ways. By making only roughly ¼ of attacks connect.


In 3e D&D, a mid-level character might have 60 HP. An average enemy hit might deal 10, or 20 on a crit. A casting of Faith Heal heals 9 a pop (11 for Lesser Vigor). Sounds comparable to your system, except for 2 things: a mid-level healer can heal more than 6 times, and the damage you take at the time is double that in your system, even if half of it heals up after the fight is over. Also, wands exist. A Wand of Faith Heal costs 750 GP for 50 charges. IME, most mid-level parties aren't going to complain when they finish off their first wand, that they bought back at 1st or 2nd level, and have to buy a second, that the game is too hard, or that these consumables are such a waste - and my parties generally hate wasting funds on consumables.
.

Your numbers seem a bit low for "mid-level" D&D, and do keep in mind that at mid-levels virtually everything has multiple attacks and a potential to one shot an enemy with a max-damage crit or save or lose ability. The optimal strategy for a healing mage in my game would usually be to fight, treat the wounds after the battle, and then magically top people off, in which case they should have the mana to last the entire adventure. Six mana is also not a "mid-level" character, it is a starting character, and one who made the odd build choice to play a healer but not boost their longevity in any way. That being said, I do think that healing magic in my game is a bit weak, and am looking for ways to buff it without throwing the whole system out of whack.

I wouldn't use wands as an argument. They are a unique, and probably unintended, quirk of 3E that isn't present in most editions of D&D or other games, and they make the whole concept of HP attrition, battlefield healing, and indeed the role of a healer pretty much meaningless.



But wait, you say, it's not that bad. No?Their very first fight, they lost someone round 1. And I'm not gonna be Incentivized to be brave when my options are "sit out" or "swing a nerf bat" when I overcommit. And the mercenary overcommitted by being involved in the first round of the first fight of the campaign.


First of, when you say "first round of the first fight of the campaign" that is just flat out wrong. It was early on in the first fight of the session, which was in no way the beginning of the campaign.

Second, there is always a risk of death in combat. That's life. That's also any even remotely realistic game.

Third, this was an NPC. They don't have rerolls. This would never happen to a PC and is not the same thing.

Fourth, the mercenary didn't die, and I was explicitly talking about PC death in the passage you quoted. He was merely wounded to badly to keep fighting and the party didn't feel it worth feeding him a bunch of potions they might need for themselves.


But, you say, you've got a pool of 6 rerolls, that people commonly use to not get crit / not lose their last HP. You know what doesn't feel good, what makes the game feel hard? Using rerolls on defense. Knowing that every single fight against an animated eggplant might well cost you such a precious resource, that you'd rather use on doing something cool and seeing it succeed.

But that's what rerolls are for; to protect you from the worst effects of bad luck. Saving them to "do something cool" is just a poor strategic decision, there are far more efficient ways to pull that off.



you make the PCs feel incompetent in so many ways. By making only roughly ¼ of attacks connect.


Wait, so is 1 wound every four rounds too low or too high? I think you were arguing the other way earlier. Which is, actually, a very common complaint. The game isn't lethal enough when the PCs are attacking, the game is too lethal when the PCs are being attacked, and the game is unfair when PCs and NPCs play by different rules. This is, of course, impossible.



It's "guess what the GM is thinking, or risk a TPK". You've given them no wiggle room here, either.

Oh come on now. None of those examples had anything to do with guessing what I was thinking. It doesn't take a mind-reader to know that attacking your ally in a dungeon or stepping out of cover to announce yourself to your enemies might be dangerous.

I swear, the more I hear it, the more I think "guessing what the GM is thinking" is just forum slang for "putting any thought into the game whatsoever".


By giving them sneezing Ogre riddles that are impossible to see at the time (regardless of whether they could be obvious in retrospect).


I really wish people would stop talking about the "sneeze ogre". Hell, I wish people would stop calling it that, as they have turned my statement (I wanted the encounter to have the feel of a fairy tail ogre like puss and botts) into me giving special abilities to a normal ogre. It was not an ogre, it was a fomorian who had traded out its evil eye attack for something weaker and non-lethal because I thought it would be fun change of pace for the players to learn about a monster's abilities in a safe non-damaging environment. And, as far as I know, it was.

Though the forum has spent an ocean of digital ink decrying the encounter, the only negative comment I actually got in the game was from one player, who prides himself on not caring about lore and wouldn't know a fomorian or a monster manual if it bit him in the butt, making a single comment about how he thought I added the gust of wind attack on the spot in an effort to railroad him.



By giving them Avatar of Hate poorly worded hints.


It wasn't "poorly worded hints" or "unreliable guidance" it was a plain statement of fact. Could I have worded it better? Sure. But I didn't think we were playing "******* genie" where I needed to find the perfect verbiage that could not possibly be twisted or misinterpreted. Heck, I even brought it up to one of the players the other day, and their response was, "Wait, that was what you said? I don't know what the Hell we were thinking." (I would hazard a guess that only one player was actually paying attention at the time and the others got a distorted version second hand, but that's just a guess).

And that still doesn't explain why some of the players tried killing it again, some tried doing random stuff, and some tried trapping it, and why they blamed one another for their failure.

Let me give two more examples, one more grounded and one more relevant.

If I am at work and a piece of machinery breaks, and my boss sees me loading up a tool-box and says "Its a software issue. You won't fix it by banging on the machine with a hammer," this is a perfectly reasonable straightforward statement, and no reasonable person is going to walk away thinking "Oh, clearly he wanted me to start banging on it with a MALLET".

Likewise, in many Godzilla movies there is a scene where a soldier comes to a scientist and wants them to make an anti-godzilla weapon, and the scientists responds with some varient of "Godzilla was born of mankind's desire for bigger bombs, and the problem will not be solved by an even bigger bomb." Neither the characters nor the audience should walk away from that scene thinking "Oh, clearly the scientist wants him to make a bigger ROCKET."



on how many remaining resources your expected attrition has them end a "perfect" run with.

80% is an average resource expenditure. The theoretical "perfect run" would be 0% resource expenditure.


If you want them to act brave, you've got to give them more wiggle room in the number of encounters they can go through before feeling "a hit away from death", more wiggle room to be creative...and less wiggle room to run with scissors in their hands and pants on their heads...By not fixing things when they do something "pants on head" for fear of playing their character for them.

Sure, players can and should be allowed an occasional pants on head moment without it ruining the character / game. What I object to is the notion that if the DM doesn't step in to shield themselves from any negative consequences whatsoever, the player has the right to lose their stuff and berate the GM and / or their fellow PCs for what was, ultimately, their own decision.

And being allowed to make decisions with consequences is a very, very, good thing. Nothing is less fun than a game where you aren't allowed to fail.



And they're being eaten much faster, in that a single crit can drop ⅔ of your HP.

A single crit in D&D can often drop a player in a single hit, and often kill them ontop of that. a 3E monster manual orc can do approximately 30 damage in a single attack, enough to take any level 1 PC from 100% to dead.

Also note that the 1/4 chance of a wounding hit is only when two perfectly evenly matched characters are fighting one another in a 1 on 1 fight in an empty room, such a white room scenario is unlikely to ever actually occur in the game outside of a fencing tournament.


Nothing about this system encourages me to use any strategy other than "rest after taking more than 1 hit".

If you are specifically talking about the final state of house rules for my hex-crawl, no crap, that's what I started the thread for; to come up with ways to encourage it.

Now, if you mean my combat system as a whole, which you seem to be, well...

You can do that. But you character will never earn enough treasure to fund your own expeditions, let alone strike it rich. You will never get enough XP to become independent, let alone make your mark on the world. You can't really even call yourself an adventurer, a treasure hunter, an explorer, or a mercenary, let alone a hero. You are just a weekend warrior whose day job allows him to occasionally mount an expedition out into the wild and then turn around the moment things get dangerous.

And then you can take it up with the dozens of PCs who have survived to high level and changed the world about what the system does or does not encourage.


If you want them to act brave, you've got to give them more wiggle room in the number of encounters they can go through before feeling "a hit away from death", more wiggle room to be creative

Ok, you say there is no wiggle room, yet we are talking about close calls, not losses. This isn't, game over, roll up a new character, get your face punched in, the villain takes over the world, return home in humiliation, see your life go up in flames. We are talking about dipping into your stockpile or giving up on a few optional objectives so that the mission is slightly less profitable than it otherwise would have been.

Heck, even actual losses in my game aren't full on defeat, they are usually things like the villain getting away, failing to secure the macguffin, a hostage getting killed, the party deciding it is more prudent to return home before fully exploring the dungeon, or siding with the wrong guy than they are actually losing combat. Player deaths only happen once or twice in entire multi-year campaigns at my table, and I don't think there has ever been an actual TPK outside of me experimenting with a new rule set for the first time or players committing suicide to spite me / one another.

Honestly, I suspect the problem at my table might be too much wiggle room rather than not enough. The idea of actual death and defeat is so alien to the PCs, that they associate lack of maximum rewards with absolute failure. That is just conjecture on my part though.



Rather than being heroic, they should be walking on eggshells, fearing that doing even a single thing wrong with your unreliable guidance will result in severe punishment. That's not a description of a fun game, or a healthy social dynamic.

Again, you talk about "severe punishment" like its some big scary thing, when we are actually talking about something like reducing your profit by 2% or spending one round sitting out of combat.

I agree, it isn't a fun game or a healthy social dynamic. But it isn't actually based on anything except hyperbolic fear of failure.


And then you complain that they're unheroic when they behave as your system encourages them to.

I never said they weren't heroic. That is something I said on the forum about why I wouldn't want to run a hypothetical game where every adventure was a cake-walk. It is not a real complaint about real players in a real game.


It's no wonder that they game the system, and want to abuse your NPCs - they're desperate for the win that they otherwise cannot get out of your games.


So what about the hundreds of missions they have completed successfully? The millions of lives they have saved? The thousands of enemies they have killed? The dozens of evil organizations and civilizations they have toppled? The handful of gods that they have usurped? None of these "feel like a win"?

But stealing the mayor's pants while he is giving a speech does and beating up goblins who are ten levels below you somehow does?


Talakeal, read this post. I haven't done the math on your system, but this generally seems to check out and would explain the behavior you're seeing. And I do not agree with Quertus in anything approaching lockstep.

There's a lot of gold in here not only about how your system seems to work, but how it is likely perceived by your players.

I will read it again, but could you do me a favor and spell it out for me a little more plainly?

All I am seeing is "players like to start each combat at full HP," which, while true, doesn't really hold up in any RPG (or indeed most video games) I have played except maybe World of Warcraft. And while it is certainly possible to play my game that way, it is not, imo, the best use of resources.

Vahnavoi
2021-06-07, 01:23 PM
At a quick pass at definitions - challenge is how good your decisions have to be to win, risk is how much you can lose.

A puzzle that you can try infinite times at no penalty can be quite challenging, but poses little risk.

A door that you have to go through that will kill you 50% of the time poses a lot of risk, but little challenge.

Those are good simple examples of the principle, yes.

It's worth noting that many computerized sandbox games get away with being really difficult by just kicking you to last checkpoint, or allowing easy use of save states. The idea of just starting over at last town with full health works, it's been playtested by hundreds of really succesfull games, there is no reason it can't work at the tabletop beyond silly hobbyist hangups. But minimizing risk this way guarantees nothing about player enjoymenent, the actual difficulty curve still needs to be calibrated to suit skill level of players.

kyoryu
2021-06-07, 01:38 PM
Those are good simple examples of the principle, yes.

It's worth noting that many computerized sandbox games get away with being really difficult by just kicking you to last checkpoint, or allowing easy use of save states. The idea of just starting over at last town with full health works, it's been playtested by hundreds of really succesfull games, there is no reason it can't work at the tabletop beyond silly hobbyist hangups. But minimizing risk this way guarantees nothing about player enjoymenent, the actual difficulty curve still needs to be calibrated to suit skill level of players.

The key in the video game example is that, for the most part, you don't get to keep the stuff.

Even Dark Souls, a game known for being punishingly difficult, is pretty good about this - while you don't go back to your save state, and can retain some items, you really only risk losing whatever souls you've collected in the meantime. Challenge is very high, while risk is low to moderate. In the save game version, challenge is whatever it is, while hte only thing you're really risking is time.

I suspect the reason that people don't like it in TT is it's more "meta" and yanks people out of immersion more. Dark Souls managed to do it in an immersive way with a very specific story/mechanic/setup. Also I think it's one thing to rewind a few minutes of game play, and another thing to reset to potentially hours of play in the past, not to mention the difficulty of "saving" that state so you can get back to it.

Vahnavoi
2021-06-07, 02:44 PM
Immersion is one of those things I had in mind when I said "silly hobbyist hang ups". :smalltongue: :smallwink:

As for "only risk is losing time", that is the most important real risk of all. I play roguelikes where it's possible to lose dozens, even hundreds of hours of progress. What keeps me trying those games again is that even when starting over, the early game is still interesting. So it doesn't really matter if a game risks you losing ten hours at once or five minutes over and over again. That's just the bet, what matters more is what you get.

Squire Doodad
2021-06-07, 03:13 PM
snip

To put it simply:
If taking more than one hit leads to penalties, then that means unless you're at full health you have lowered combat potential. If hitting 0 HP happens semi-frequently and means you cannot do anything meaningful, even if actual death is unlikely without a TPK, no one will want to come and heal you because it means risking themselves getting hurt and the entire fight becoming a TPK.

In other words, if everyone's combat potential is tied to whether they have a scrape on them, then everyone will stop to heal instead of pushing through minor injuries.

"93% success rate" does not apply if you feel like you have to do each fight in optimal conditions or risk dying.

Talakeal
2021-06-07, 03:31 PM
If taking more than one hit leads to penalties, then that means unless you're at full health you have lowered combat potential.[/B]

Are you under the impression that my system has some sort of wound penalty / death spiral system? Because it doesn't.


If hitting 0 HP happens semi-frequently and means you cannot do anything meaningful, even if actual death is unlikely without a TPK, no one will want to come and heal you because it means risking themselves getting hurt and the entire fight becoming a TPK.

In other words, if everyone's combat potential is tied to whether they have a scrape on them, then everyone will stop to heal instead of pushing through minor injuries.[/B]

And this is different to combat in other RPGs how exactly?



"93% success rate" does not apply if you feel like you have to do each fight in optimal conditions or risk dying.

They don't.

Player deaths are extremely rare and mostly result from someone going off on their own, not through combat attrition. Actual TPKs are so rare that, despite more or less running biweekly games for the last 25 years, I can't actually think of one of the top of my head except for a few one shots using experimental rules.

Squire Doodad
2021-06-07, 04:14 PM
Are you under the impression that my system has some sort of wound penalty / death spiral system? Because it doesn't.
I was, I think I misread what "attrition" meant in this context.

OldTrees1
2021-06-07, 04:14 PM
I will read it again, but could you do me a favor and spell it out for me a little more plainly?

All I am seeing is "players like to start each combat at full HP," which, while true, doesn't really hold up in any RPG (or indeed most video games) I have played except maybe World of Warcraft. And while it is certainly possible to play my game that way, it is not, imo, the best use of resources.

Players don't like to start combats at low HP. Your system has 4HP feel like critically low HP and 6HP does not feel very healthy. Part if this is damage always comes in 2 or 4.

In many RPGs the Party can heal to or almost to full HP. This ability it targeted by attrition of out of combat recovery resources. When the healing is sufficiently depleted, then the party starts to consider resting.


I was, I think I misread what "attrition" meant in this context.

In D&D "attrition", in this context, would be the Cleric using spell slots out of combat to cast Cure Wounds / Lesser Restoration and the Wizard using spell slots in combat to cast Fireball. The poison that affected the Rogue and the gash that hurt the Fighter would be healed out of combat in D&D at the cost of the Clerics spell slots. Eventually the party runs out of spell slots and they enter a combat with the Fighter at 80% HP and the Wizard is using cantrips/crossbow.

Talakeal's attrition is a bit faster / steeper and there are less out of combat resources to deplete before you see low health at the start of the fight.

BRC
2021-06-07, 05:05 PM
I think what this really comes down to is the fact that, absent any other factors, resting after each fight is a sound strategy, regardless of what you're doing. So long as
1) The possibility exists for any sort of failure
and
2) The cost to reduce that possibility is minimal
The sound decision will always be to do that.

Even if it's just a matter of healing up 5 out of your 100 HP, when you're expecting to take maybe 30 damage in a combat. With no in-game constraints, resting to heal just makes good sense.

and from a realism standpoint, if you and your dangerous friends were just wandering around the countryside doing violence for money, you'd take a breather after every fight.




What I want is a situation where a theoretical player who is a perfectly rational actor doesn't have to choose between making the optimal decision for character success and having an exciting game where tactical decisions and dice rolls matter than moves at a reasonable pace.


I'm not running a Sandbox, but I'm currently running a D&D game with a mechanic where a lot of the action takes place in places under the influence of malignant entities, and several actions, resting among them, in such places causes the players to accumulate "Taint". after each adventure/arc, they must roll against their taint score to resist Corruption, a mutation or other detriment.
(note, you only gain taint if you take the mechanical benefits of a rest. You can stand around for an hour without taking short rest taint, and you can sleep for 8 hours without taking long rest taint so long as you don't recover health or resources from doing so).

That's not generalizable, but it's the sort of principle you would need. Some way to make Resting a limited resource, such that it's optimal to go as long as you can without a rest.

You mention Supplies, and that's a good start, but can lead to arguments or finagling, especially since most heroic fantasies involve some method of being able to gather supplies spending only Time (like Foraging), and if time is not a limited resource, you can't use that.


The other thing to do is take the positive, push-your-luck approach. Rather than trying to limit the PC's ability to rest, or punish them for doing so, build in some incentive for NOT resting.

For example (and this is just making something up), let's say the party is a group of heroes stomping their way through the Ogre Hills fighting the Ogre clans for Loot and Glory.

As they Achieve things (Fighting a gang of Ogre bandits, crossing a treacherous chasm, freeing some captive slaves, ect) give them "Valor Points" or whatever.

Then, when they decide to long rest, they get to play a game of Yahtzee, rolling a d6 for every Valor point earned. You cook up a menu of potential rewards (Thinking back, some of the things you heard about today can be put together to give you a clue about the location of the Ogre King's Treasury! You clean off a mud-covered dagger you looted and find that it is made of gold and studded with precious Gems! Word of your deeds has reached the nearest town, you will be treated as Heroes if you stay there! Ect ect), and assign each one a value.

For example, to discover something Extra Valuable, they may need to match at least 2 dice. To improve their reputation, they may need to match at least 3 dice. To get a clue to the Ogre King's treasure, they may need to match at least 4 dice.


This rewards them for doing a lot of Heroic Deeds before resting, since it gives them more dice to roll, and increases the chance of doing good stuff!

(if Yahtzee doesn't appeal to you, you could do something like have them draw a card for each point, and set rewards based on Poker Hands. The point is that the probabilities should be such that it's better to have one day with 6 valor points than 3 days with 2 each)

Edit: You could just let them spend points on stuff directly, but I find that adding the RNG element motivates people to get as much as they can, rather than enough to get whatever thing they want. Also, it's fun.

Squire Doodad
2021-06-07, 05:38 PM
Players don't like to start combats at low HP. Your system has 4HP feel like critically low HP and 6HP does not feel very healthy. Part if this is damage always comes in 2 or 4.

In many RPGs the Party can heal to or almost to full HP. This ability it targeted by attrition of out of combat recovery resources. When the healing is sufficiently depleted, then the party starts to consider resting.

Seems like a good solution here would be to significantly increase the player's health and then the average foe damage, such that there's more room to allow for foes to inflict minor damage without dealing with "1 damage is an eighth of my health"

Cluedrew
2021-06-07, 06:58 PM
Quertus, I really do value your feedback. I consider you one of the smartest and most reasonable people on the board, but this post is full of baseless claims and bad-faith arguments, and it is really frustrating. I will try to maintain a civil tone, but I apologize in advance if I get overly defensive.Bad-faith arguments? Do you actually think Quertus is making stuff up to fool you or make you look bad or something? Well I have had many long and enjoyable disagreements with Quertus and although I can't say that it is impossible I will say: I don't think that's what's happening.

More I think Quertus is using their limited (and second hand) experience combined with the imperfect communication we have to try and figure out what is wrong with game. And maybe there are wildly off base but its probably all based in something you said. And generally I think you would be better off figuring out what people are getting at a bit more when you get feedback. I mean that is almost universally true, but let me head into an example:

Feedback: "We think the game is too hard." What does this mean? Probably some combination of:
They aren't looking for the challenging game you want to run. I've said this before and I do think it is the primary one (I could be wrong).
Your "Illusion of Danger" is too strong. Maybe combined with "we are optimizing so much and its still this hard" (or they think they are optimizing that much).
The strategies they are used to being effective aren't working. For instance the specialization thing that leaves them with weaknesses that get targeted way more than they were expect. (Not talking about how much is appropriate, just what they are expecting.)
The challenges they are facing aren't of the form they enjoy. Maybe they would rather have a single harder encounter at full strength than a series of encounters where they go into each weaker than the last.
So to summarise: I don't think anyone here is acting in bad faith, even if they are wrong don't just dismiss what they are saying.

Talakeal
2021-06-07, 07:06 PM
Bad-faith arguments? Do you actually think Quertus is making stuff up to fool you or make you look bad or something? Well I have had many long and enjoyable disagreements with Quertus and although I can't say that it is impossible I will say: I don't think that's what's happening.

[/LIST]So to summarise: I don't think anyone here is acting in bad faith, even if they are wrong don't just dismiss what they are saying.

No, not really.

As I said, the post just came across as a lot more confrontational than Quertus usually is.

Frogreaver
2021-06-07, 08:23 PM
No, not really.

As I said, the post just came across as a lot more confrontational than Quertus usually is.

If Quertus is always reasonable and non-confrontational and then he is unreasonable and confrontational to you - maybe the best course of action is to consider what you may have done to cause that?

Quertus
2021-06-07, 08:26 PM
Talakeal, I struggle with expressing certain concepts online. Thank you for your patience, and your opinion of myself, however underserved it may be.

Music… has notes. But it has a tempo, a melody, a harmony. An orchestra can be operating at many layers, often simultaneously. Like me, you gravitate towards communicating at a particular layer. And, while there is value in communicating about my post at / in evaluating that post at that layer, it is not the… true message, the meat of that post.

Some of my facts were wrong. I figured that they would be. But I made the post anyway. Why? Because "factual" wasn't the key to that post - "feel" was.

I was trying to show you how, with just a little misunderstanding, someone… hmmm… intelligent that, well, that you consider more reasonable than perhaps I deserve, could construe your system to "feel" a certain way. And that feeling will color any judgements made in that system, beyond what a rational analysis of the system would say is reasonable or true.

The post also serves to illustrate just how easily information can be misunderstood or misremembered. Granted, I'm getting a little senile, so *maybe* I'm not the best person to illustrate such things.

So, if that post felt uncharacteristic of my standard communication, that is to be expected. That was me abandoning reason, and going with my feelings, with my gut, and trying to help you see how your players might be viewing your system / game.

That is the shape of the forest.

Senility willing, I'll circle back some day and address a few of the individual trees. There were several that looked interesting (including one that is very directly answering the thread topic). But I'll leave that for another time, so that you can focus on the forest, on why so many people getting a similar impression, saying similar things, is something that you should look into, and that doing so is one of several steps that I suspect will likely be required in order to get your game in the general neighborhood of where you want it.

And… my head hurts, from going meta, trying to explain thinking at those layers. Guess that was a step too far for my head. :smalltongue:

Cluedrew
2021-06-07, 08:29 PM
Great. (Nothing else to say there.)

But still I think you are dismissing possible problems with your system a bit too quickly. I could try and give you examples but honestly Quertus and OldTrees1 and other have enough of those. Just reread their stuff and ask yourself: "If there is a good piece of feedback in this comment, what would it be?" I've found that kind of trick helps a lot.

Onos
2021-06-08, 03:58 AM
Have you tried just running a pre-written module of D&D? No offence, a lot of the rules I've seen you propose don't really grab me (mainly subjectively) and my impression is something of a revolving door of different mechanics - is it possible your players are burning out constantly learning new rules and changing how things work?

Similarly, have you just asked the players what sort of game they want? Without making a bunch of changes? Or tried something other than D&D (again, as written for several sessions before you make changes)?

If the main problem is retreating after every fight, I'd likely react in one of two ways (assuming base rules and minor homerules); first, prevent this. Sure, it's railroady as all hell, but at this point you have bigger things to worry about, like enjoying your game. Bridges collapse, goblins make great guerillas, even simple things like noise or inclement weather can prevent characters from resting. Make them travel and fight for a full day since half the point of an adventure is to get (pushed) out your comfort zone.

My other approach would be to reduce the difficulty. I find it astonishing that apparently your players retreat after EVERY fight - surely there was one time they found the lone goblin scout to interrogate, or that time most of the bandits ran away after their leader was impaled, immolated and insulted. Have three fights that are an absolute walk worth nothing, sprinkle the loot and xp across the days non-combat encounters, then finish with a moderately difficult boss fight.

You seem like you can run a game competently and your players seem like they can play competently. Assuming it's the same gang every time, the only other common factor is the game itself. I suspect you're a bit too focused on creating an awesome system rather than having a fun session - you're creating some kind of Heston Blumenthal way to "experience" the food, when all your table wants is pizza and beer. While you can certainly find a balance, the easiest way to test would be to go full pizza and beer for a session or two.

Satinavian
2021-06-08, 05:04 AM
after all the players have a ~93 win rate, which is far better than any sports team in history. Heck, even Marvel Comic book heroes donÂ’t have that high a win rate.
Not that there is any objective way to measure “too hard”.

Oh come on now. None of those examples had anything to do with guessing what I was thinking. It doesn't take a mind-reader to know that attacking your ally in a dungeon or stepping out of cover to announce yourself to your enemies might be dangerous.

I swear, the more I hear it, the more I think "guessing what the GM is thinking" is just forum slang for "putting any thought into the game whatsoever".

But I didn't think we were playing "******* genie" where I needed to find the perfect verbiage that could not possibly be twisted or misinterpreted. Heck, I even brought it up to one of the players the other day, and their response was, "Wait, that was what you said? I don't know what the Hell we were thinking." (I would hazard a guess that only one player was actually paying attention at the time and the others got a distorted version second hand, but that's just a guess).

Let me give two more examples, one more grounded and one more relevant.

If I am at work and a piece of machinery breaks, and my boss sees me loading up a tool-box and says "Its a software issue. You won't fix it by banging on the machine with a hammer," this is a perfectly reasonable straightforward statement, and no reasonable person is going to walk away thinking "Oh, clearly he wanted me to start banging on it with a MALLET".

Likewise, in many Godzilla movies there is a scene where a soldier comes to a scientist and wants them to make an anti-godzilla weapon, and the scientists responds with some varient of "Godzilla was born of mankind's desire for bigger bombs, and the problem will not be solved by an even bigger bomb." Neither the characters nor the audience should walk away from that scene thinking "Oh, clearly the scientist wants him to make a bigger ROCKET."

80% is an average resource expenditure. The theoretical "perfect run" would be 0% resource expenditure.

Also note that the 1/4 chance of a wounding hit is only when two perfectly evenly matched characters are fighting one another in a 1 on 1 fight in an empty room, such a white room scenario is unlikely to ever actually occur in the game outside of a fencing tournament.


You can do that. But you character will never earn enough treasure to fund your own expeditions, let alone strike it rich. You will never get enough XP to become independent, let alone make your mark on the world. You can't really even call yourself an adventurer, a treasure hunter, an explorer, or a mercenary, let alone a hero. You are just a weekend warrior whose day job allows him to occasionally mount an expedition out into the wild and then turn around the moment things get dangerous.

And then you can take it up with the dozens of PCs who have survived to high level and changed the world about what the system does or does not encourage.

Honestly, I suspect the problem at my table might be too much wiggle room rather than not enough. The idea of actual death and defeat is so alien to the PCs, that they associate lack of maximum rewards with absolute failure. That is just conjecture on my part though.

Again, you talk about "severe punishment" like its some big scary thing, when we are actually talking about something like reducing your profit by 2% or spending one round sitting out of combat.

So what about the hundreds of missions they have completed successfully? The millions of lives they have saved? The thousands of enemies they have killed? The dozens of evil organizations and civilizations they have toppled? The handful of gods that they have usurped? None of these "feel like a win"?

But stealing the mayor's pants while he is giving a speech does and beating up goblins who are ten levels below you somehow does?


Talakeal

You make these threads searching for help.

We want to do that, but to be blunt, your communication style is not up to the task.

No one of us has any kind of proper idea about how your table works or doesn't work or where the problems are. We can only guess based on your descriptions but you blow off all our observations and conclusions and not really fitting. That might be justified, but if that is the case, then the reason is that you still have not managed to properly descibe your table and players.

You are really prone to hyperbole. But we can't judge how true or wrong that is. We only have your words and that habit is really hurting you.
You also often use the argumentum ad absurdum technique. Make up examples that don't come from your play just to make your point. But that is not helping us understand your table. Instead i is misleading when people take it as real experiences.

Then you switch in your argumentation always between one problem player and all the players, between your sandbox campaigns and your regular campaigns, between earlier and current rule implementation of your system and even D&D.

How the players get characterized changes all the time as well :
Once they are cunningly expliting your system to get every advantage they can, the next moment they play brainless without thinking tactically
Once they constantly argue, complain and whine, the next moment they are are mostly happy with your campaigns and disagreements are only some small percentage (percentage of what?) and they are less happy with all the other GMs.
Once it seems you and your players want totally different kind of games then you say that is not the case.

The reason people are so stuck on the sneeze ogre and the avatar of hate are because those events are one of the very few that offered more about your tables inner workings, not because they want to remind you of mistakes.


For years people have tried to make sense of your description but basically failed to get a coherent picture. And as such we can only guess at solutions.


---------------------------------------


Now for the problem at hand. It has become quite clear that you are not actually looking for a solution. You already have one. Your solution is "Create the illusion that the game has become easier without actually making it easier". Becasue you have decided that the player's perception of the game is the problem, not the game. And you want only help with that. Well, i can answer to this :

- because we really don't understand how your players tick, we can't give any hints about how to change their perception.
- I don't think your solution will work. I have never seen a table where a GM can really guide their players perception of the game to the required extend, much less in a sandbox.

Talakeal
2021-06-08, 08:58 AM
Talakeal

You make these threads searching for help.

We want to do that, but to be blunt, your communication style is not up to the task.

No one of us has any kind of proper idea about how your table works or doesn't work or where the problems are. We can only guess based on your descriptions but you blow off all our observations and conclusions and not really fitting. That might be justified, but if that is the case, then the reason is that you still have not managed to properly descibe your table and players.

You are really prone to hyperbole. But we can't judge how true or wrong that is. We only have your words and that habit is really hurting you.
You also often use the argumentum ad absurdum technique. Make up examples that don't come from your play just to make your point. But that is not helping us understand your table. Instead i is misleading when people take it as real experiences.

Then you switch in your argumentation always between one problem player and all the players, between your sandbox campaigns and your regular campaigns, between earlier and current rule implementation of your system and even D&D.

How the players get characterized changes all the time as well :
Once they are cunningly expliting your system to get every advantage they can, the next moment they play brainless without thinking tactically
Once they constantly argue, complain and whine, the next moment they are are mostly happy with your campaigns and disagreements are only some small percentage (percentage of what?) and they are less happy with all the other GMs.
Once it seems you and your players want totally different kind of games then you say that is not the case.

The reason people are so stuck on the sneeze ogre and the avatar of hate are because those events are one of the very few that offered more about your tables inner workings, not because they want to remind you of mistakes.


For years people have tried to make sense of your description but basically failed to get a coherent picture. And as such we can only guess at solutions.

It is hard to communicate massive amounts of information on a forum, especially in a way people will actually sit down and read.

Situations change; sometimes one player has a problem, sometimes its all of them; most people are happy most of the time, but someone complains every game, sometimes we play D&D sometimes we don't, we agree on many things but also vehemently disagree on others, sometimes I am asking for advice with a specific game other times I am asking for advice about RPGs in general.

I don't typically make arguments ad absurdum except in response to absolute statements, to illustrate how absurd an absolute position is. I find analogies and metaphors are useful to explain a concept without the attached baggage of the specific situation.

As for how they can be clever and dumb at the same time; I would probably say it has more to do with motivation. Its a pretty common trope that some people put more effort into getting out of work than it would be for them to just do the work, and my players are often the same way.

As for the avatar of violence and the sneeze ogre, those are gimmicks. I occasionally, maybe every 50 or 100 fights, like to introduce a gimmick to a fight to shake things up a little and break up the monotony. And yeah, they tend to create more issues than a standard fight (although they are also significantly more memorable), but trying to extrapolate the idea that these gimmick fights are the standard for what my games are like when they are the extreme minority is pretty much a waste of time.


Now for the problem at hand. It has become quite clear that you are not actually looking for a solution. You already have one. Your solution is "Create the illusion that the game has become easier without actually making it easier". Because you have decided that the player's perception of the game is the problem, not the game. And you want only help with that. Well, i can answer to this :

- because we really don't understand how your players tick, we can't give any hints about how to change their perception.
- I don't think your solution will work. I have never seen a table where a GM can really guide their players perception of the game to the required extend, much less in a sandbox.

It may be perfectly clear to you, but it isn't for me.

I explicitly said that I am looking for rules tweaks for managing resting in a hex-crawl, and that is still what I am after.

Talking about the difficulty of my games, the flaws in my system, or relationship issues with my players is orthogonal to the thread, and not really the advice I am after.

Now, I am more than happy to discuss it, but I don't think its especially relevant, because I have the same issues no matter which system I run or which group I play with.


Have you tried just running a pre-written module of D&D? No offence, a lot of the rules I've seen you propose don't really grab me (mainly subjectively) and my impression is something of a revolving door of different mechanics - is it possible your players are burning out constantly learning new rules and changing how things work?

Similarly, have you just asked the players what sort of game they want? Without making a bunch of changes? Or tried something other than D&D (again, as written for several sessions before you make changes)?

If the main problem is retreating after every fight, I'd likely react in one of two ways (assuming base rules and minor homerules); first, prevent this. Sure, it's railroady as all hell, but at this point you have bigger things to worry about, like enjoying your game. Bridges collapse, goblins make great guerillas, even simple things like noise or inclement weather can prevent characters from resting. Make them travel and fight for a full day since half the point of an adventure is to get (pushed) out your comfort zone.

My other approach would be to reduce the difficulty. I find it astonishing that apparently your players retreat after EVERY fight - surely there was one time they found the lone goblin scout to interrogate, or that time most of the bandits ran away after their leader was impaled, immolated and insulted. Have three fights that are an absolute walk worth nothing, sprinkle the loot and xp across the days non-combat encounters, then finish with a moderately difficult boss fight.

You seem like you can run a game competently and your players seem like they can play competently. Assuming it's the same gang every time, the only other common factor is the game itself. I suspect you're a bit too focused on creating an awesome system rather than having a fun session - you're creating some kind of Heston Blumenthal way to "experience" the food, when all your table wants is pizza and beer. While you can certainly find a balance, the easiest way to test would be to go full pizza and beer for a session or two.

Yes, I have. Generally I have a significantly lower success rate running other people's work than my own; the players don't like the system as much, get fed-up with bad scenario design, and I don't know the rules well enough to reign in the abuses.

D&D is ok, but it really doesn't have what any of us wants from a gaming system. Its just so stifling and inflexible.

The retreating every fight only lasted a couple of sessions before I compromised and took away the penalty for death. Of course, at that point there is only the illusion of difficulty or consequence, not really much of a game.



But still I think you are dismissing possible problems with your system a bit too quickly.

Lol, that's not what my players think! They are constantly telling me to leave stuff alone and that not everything needs to be fair and balanced when its good enough as is.


Talakeal, I struggle with expressing certain concepts online. Thank you for your patience, and your opinion of myself, however underserved it may be.

Music… has notes. But it has a tempo, a melody, a harmony. An orchestra can be operating at many layers, often simultaneously. Like me, you gravitate towards communicating at a particular layer. And, while there is value in communicating about my post at / in evaluating that post at that layer, it is not the… true message, the meat of that post.

Some of my facts were wrong. I figured that they would be. But I made the post anyway. Why? Because "factual" wasn't the key to that post - "feel" was.

I was trying to show you how, with just a little misunderstanding, someone… hmmm… intelligent that, well, that you consider more reasonable than perhaps I deserve, could construe your system to "feel" a certain way. And that feeling will color any judgements made in that system, beyond what a rational analysis of the system would say is reasonable or true.

The post also serves to illustrate just how easily information can be misunderstood or misremembered. Granted, I'm getting a little senile, so *maybe* I'm not the best person to illustrate such things.

So, if that post felt uncharacteristic of my standard communication, that is to be expected. That was me abandoning reason, and going with my feelings, with my gut, and trying to help you see how your players might be viewing your system / game.

That is the shape of the forest.

Senility willing, I'll circle back some day and address a few of the individual trees. There were several that looked interesting (including one that is very directly answering the thread topic). But I'll leave that for another time, so that you can focus on the forest, on why so many people getting a similar impression, saying similar things, is something that you should look into, and that doing so is one of several steps that I suspect will likely be required in order to get your game in the general neighborhood of where you want it.

And… my head hurts, from going meta, trying to explain thinking at those layers. Guess that was a step too far for my head. :smalltongue:

Bad faith was probably the wrong word, what I meant was "the least charitable possible interpretation". But if that was your intent, right on. It just had me really confused, because I was like, Quertus is normally such a mellow guy, what happened to get him so riled up?

And, of course, I am overly defensive and argumentative, so I couldn't help rebutting you line by line, wasting both of our time like an idiot.

But yeah, I hope there are no hard feelings, and if you want to discuss any of the issues further I am always eager to talk to you.

Quertus
2021-06-08, 11:38 AM
But yeah, I hope there are no hard feelings, and if you want to discuss any of the issues further I am always eager to talk to you.

Absolutely no hard feelings! (Glad that that seems mutual!) And your reply was not a waste of time (there's several things in there I'd like to circle back to (but I lost that post :smallfrown:)).

But, for now, let me tell you something I thought of while making that lost post: what if, for the next hex crawl, you gave the PCs a multiplier, like, say "x5". So they all have 5x the HP, 5x the mana, 5x the carrying capacity. And 5x anything else I've forgotten that impacts their staying power. (EDIT: x5 rerolls, x5 starting consumables, x5 "potency" of downtime)

And you *do not* up the difficulty / monsters stats.

Then you ask them to show you just how many dungeons they're willing to / they feel comfortable clearing at a stretch.

This should remove the degenerate play. And make the game "feel" more like what you want, and feel more like what they want. And maybe help you feel what they want.

Talakeal
2021-06-08, 11:59 AM
Absolutely no hard feelings! (Glad that that seems mutual!) And your reply was not a waste of time (there's several things in there I'd like to circle back to (but I lost that post :smallfrown:)).

But, for now, let me tell you something I thought of while making that lost post: what if, for the next hex crawl, you gave the PCs a multiplier, like, say "x5". So they all have 5x the HP, 5x the mana, 5x the carrying capacity. And 5x anything else I've forgotten that impacts their staying power. (EDIT: x5 rerolls, x5 starting consumables, x5 "potency" of downtime)

And you *do not* up the difficulty / monsters stats.

Then you ask them to show you just how many dungeons they're willing to / they feel comfortable clearing at a stretch.

This should remove the degenerate play. And make the game "feel" more like what you want, and feel more like what they want. And maybe help you feel what they want.

I actually tried something like that once, when I was calibrating the challenge guidelines for my system.

It worked out for a while, but eventually the players got so over wealth that their surplus of gear was starting to scew the results.

Maybe if I also increased prices by 5x? But that might also create unhappy players.

Quertus
2021-06-08, 01:46 PM
I actually tried something like that once, when I was calibrating the challenge guidelines for my system.

It worked out for a while, but eventually the players got so over wealth that their surplus of gear was starting to scew the results.

Maybe if I also increased prices by 5x? But that might also create unhappy players.

If they're only taking ¹/5 the breathers, each breather functioning at 5x the efficacy should not unbalanced things. :smallconfused:

And certainly not moreso than their "1 fight, rest" tempo would.

However, if "downtime" only resets on "clear area" (darn senility, maybe you said something like this), then the equivalent would be to allow them to "bank" up to 5 "downtimes".

The goal is to make exactly zero balance changes, except increasing their "stamina" / staying power.

BRC
2021-06-08, 02:07 PM
I'm personally not sure that increasing party survivability alone will do much except make things boring.

Fights with minimal stakes are generally inconsequential, and the pace of a tabletop game is too slow for Logistics-based pressures to feel good if most of what you're doing is fighting.
(Darkest Dungeon, where a combat takes minutes, can pull off logistics based pressures. I'm not sure D&D can).

The fact is, if all it takes to full-heal is to say "We sit down and rest", with no other consequences, and only seconds of gametime taken, that's what people are going to do, regardless of how much actual danger they're in.

Quertus
2021-06-08, 06:58 PM
I'm personally not sure that increasing party survivability alone will do much except make things boring.

Fights with minimal stakes are generally inconsequential, and the pace of a tabletop game is too slow for Logistics-based pressures to feel good if most of what you're doing is fighting.
(Darkest Dungeon, where a combat takes minutes, can pull off logistics based pressures. I'm not sure D&D can).

The fact is, if all it takes to full-heal is to say "We sit down and rest", with no other consequences, and only seconds of gametime taken, that's what people are going to do, regardless of how much actual danger they're in.

And that is another test Talakeal should make: where the players literally just say, "We sit down and rest" after every fight. "with no other consequences, and only seconds of gametime taken".

Frogreaver
2021-06-08, 09:18 PM
I'm personally not sure that increasing party survivability alone will do much except make things boring.

Fights with minimal stakes are generally inconsequential, and the pace of a tabletop game is too slow for Logistics-based pressures to feel good if most of what you're doing is fighting.
(Darkest Dungeon, where a combat takes minutes, can pull off logistics based pressures. I'm not sure D&D can).

I would think the correct response would be enough hp for a typical encounter to be challenging and then an easy way to recover hp but not necessarily other abilities after the encounter.

Satinavian
2021-06-09, 05:39 AM
As for how they can be clever and dumb at the same time; I would probably say it has more to do with motivation. Its a pretty common trope that some people put more effort into getting out of work than it would be for them to just do the work, and my players are often the same way. If that is the case, then they are not motivated for the kind of experience you want to provide. Which means that, as many people said, you and them wanting different things from the game might very well be the case.

As for the avatar of violence and the sneeze ogre, those are gimmicks. I occasionally, maybe every 50 or 100 fights, like to introduce a gimmick to a fight to shake things up a little and break up the monotony. And yeah, they tend to create more issues than a standard fight (although they are also significantly more memorable), but trying to extrapolate the idea that these gimmick fights are the standard for what my games are like when they are the extreme minority is pretty much a waste of time.I believe you. But we don't know anything about your 50 or 100 standard fights that are more typical. Also 50-100 is quite high a number, with weakly sessions and 1-2 fights per session that would mean only 1 special encounter per year. Are you sure about that ?


It may be perfectly clear to you, but it isn't for me.

I explicitly said that I am looking for rules tweaks for managing resting in a hex-crawl, and that is still what I am after.

Talking about the difficulty of my games, the flaws in my system, or relationship issues with my players is orthogonal to the thread, and not really the advice I am after.

Now, I am more than happy to discuss it, but I don't think its especially relevant, because I have the same issues no matter which system I run or which group I play with.
But there is nothing wrong with the hexcrawl formula you are following. But you are having problems making it work, To help you with those problems, we really need to understand what goes wrong at your table. That is where all the other questions come from.


The retreating every fight only lasted a couple of sessions before I compromised and took away the penalty for death. Of course, at that point there is only the illusion of difficulty or consequence, not really much of a game.So it seems that the threat of hard consequence for death really was what made your players retreat after every fight. And removing that was a proper solution. Unfortunately with the downside that you don't find it fun anymore.

Again seems like "you and your players want different things out of the game".

Maybe their actually is a potential compromise here. Would if work if defeat was neither utterly painless nor really punishing but something in between ? As your players obviously hate permanent damage or loss, maybe use a temporary punishment instead ? For example, if killed, people get ressurrected for free, but have a negative modifier on all stuff for the next session ? Would that be enough consequence for you ?

Lol, that's not what my players think! They are constantly telling me to leave stuff alone and that not everything needs to be fair and balanced when its good enough as is.Sounds more like people don't want to be constant playtesters instead of actually playing the game. They can only learn and properly use it if it remains somewhat stable.

Cluedrew
2021-06-09, 07:24 AM
Lol, that's not what my players think! They are constantly telling me to leave stuff alone and that not everything needs to be fair and balanced when its good enough as is.Well the improvements do have to be worth the effort of learning new rules. So a lot of tweaks with incremental improvements might not be worth it.

But going back to the general question if you want to up the challenge in sandboxes you options are (no particular order):
All encounters are a challenge in there own right but there is no need to recover after each one.
Encounter sets either reset or become unavailable after you abandon them part way through. (The enemies could call in reinforcements the first time and retreat the second time.)
Upkeep costs, the PCs loose something as time/recovery passes and so they need to gain more than that between rests.
Multi-encounter rewards. Someone (I forget who and I got to go, sorry) wrote a really go post on this already.
Something I forgot.
They all roughly brake down into two groups: time is not free or time is not useful. The main problem I can see with your loop is that time was free for the players to spend and it always gave them something. All these options are different methods to approach that.

kyoryu
2021-06-09, 10:33 AM
I explicitly said that I am looking for rules tweaks for managing resting in a hex-crawl, and that is still what I am after.


So let's presume for a second that the goal is "players will rest, take the risk of resting in the wild on occasion, and only return to town when completely exhausted".

That seems like more or less the usual target - and defining the target is usually the first step to designing a system to meet that target.

First thing is that more progressive exploration/adventuring needs to have a reward, otherwise there's no incentive to not return to town after every fight. If the orcs outside of town give the same reward as the orcs across the continent, of course you're going to fight the orcs outside of town.

Second is that the game shouldn't be static - things should "reset" or change if you leave for a while. If you invade the orc cave, but only get to the first few orcs? They'll be on high alert the next day. If you come back in two weeks, there might be more orcs or they may have moved and something else may have moved in.

Third is that resource consumption needs to be more-or-less predictable. The variance is critical. I'd consider separating out short-term (during a fight) and long term (days of supplies, healing, etc.) as two separate things. They might be slightly fungible in some cases (healing spells in a fight vs afterwards) but conceptually think of them as separate pools. The way to make sure that you can have challenging fights will still maintaining an attrition model is to make sure that the short-term resources are fairly easily replenishable, while long-term ones are hard. There's probably mid-term in D&D as well.... so in D&D, your short term resources are mostly HP and other immediate state stuff. Mid-term is going to be spells. Long-term is food and other supplies. So you replenish short-term resources after every encounter. You replenish mid-term resources at the end of a day's adventuring, and long-term when they run out (note that in a pure dungeoncrawl, there's no real long-term, as each 'session' is a journey into the dungeon. You're not doing that, but I'm pointing it out for the sake of completeness). Note that short-term resources are replenished with mid- or long-term resources, and mid-term resources are replenished with long-term resources.

Ultimately, any kind of game of this kind of attrition boils down to a 'push your luck' mechanic, like Blackjack. So, if you get the same reward for every "card played", wouldn't you just fold and take the win (retreat to rest) after every deal? Why ever push your luck? But if each card plays gets a higher reward, it makes sense to keep pushing forward - and if each card doubles the reward it makes a lot of sense to keep pushing. The point is that the "good stuff" needs to be worth pushing to - not 10% better rewards, but much better rewards. Old school games did this by emphasizing xp for gp, and having wandering monsters not give treasure. So those random encounters were less than useless.

Also keep in mind that even in such a system, if you've got the rewards right, players will retreat when they think they're at the limit of how many resources it might take to get back. And that's going to be impacted by variability, again. So, let's go back to our blackjack pseudo-analogy, again. If you bust at 11, and cards have a value from 1-10, then you're at risk of a bust on the second draw even in the best case scenario, and it beocmes a near uncertainty after a few draws.

OTOH, if you bust at 30, and each draw can be between 1 and 3, there's literally no reason to stand until you're at 27 - that's a lot of draws! In your scenario there's an additional wrinkle in that you have to have the resources to get back as well.

So how far your players are going to be willing to push is dependent on:

1) The ability to easily regenerate short term (basically, one encounter) resources. If they can't, and that impacts survivability, they'll head back quickly.
2) The amount of mid-term (basically, one day) resources available, and the ability to refresh them
3) The amount of long-term resources available
4) The reliability of regenerating mid- and short-term resources - while nightly ambushes can make sense, if they happen too much people won't rely on sleeping in the wild to regenerate, and will presume they need to head back
5) The level of variance of resource consumption
6) The reward for pushing

So, if I wanted to design a system? I'd look first at making sure that pushing deeper into the wilderness had greater reward. Much greater. The reward for pushing further is better rewards, and the reward for advancement is pushing further. I'd make most of the immediate attrition stuff (HP) easily recoverable - assumption should be going into most fights full or close to. If you don't do that (and treat HP as more of a mid-term resource) then you need to make sure encounters are pretty predictable in how much HP damage they do, and it needs to be low - the danger in most encounters at that point should be less "death" and more "it'll take 20% of our HP instead of 15% of our HP"). Nightly refreshes should be fairly safe - even if there's a fight, if you finish the sleep, you should get your mid-term resources replenished, in most cases. Otherwise it's just a death trap. And if you make the long-term resources too easily replenishable, you start removing the need to ever head back, so think about that (but it's obviously not the issue you're dealing with at the moment). You can have other things to force that (need to be in town to train, sell stuff, etc.) but if that's the overall rhythm you're looking for, having those resources (item wear can work too!) is a good way to incentivize it.

A system with no reliable way to regenerate short-term resources, and high variability of their consumption, will result in people heading back, especially if there's no way to regenerate mid-term resources as well. In that case, effectively everything is a long-term resource and people will naturally head back to town when long-term resources run out. A system that doesn't sufficiently reward pushing further will also generally result in people heading back earlier than "intended", as there's no value in ever pushing when there's a chance to "bust".

Talakeal
2021-06-09, 03:57 PM
Good ideas.

One big problem is that spell slots (a medium recharge) can effectively be transformed into any other sort of resource, including more spell slots.

OldTrees1
2021-06-09, 05:37 PM
Good ideas.

One big problem is that spell slots (a medium recharge) can effectively be transformed into any other sort of resource, including more spell slots.

Where is the problem? Why haven't you fixed it?

I suspect the fix is either self evident (Why did you have an infinite spells loop?), or posted in this thread.

NichG
2021-06-09, 05:41 PM
This is a system I'm sure Talakeal's players would hate, so it's not for them, but I don't like having to step around an interesting design problem because of a specific group of people who wouldn't like it. So I'm not going to really bother about 'my players would hate that' responses about this - yes, I know. Also, this system is explicitly not going to encourage heroic behavior or be about heroic behavior. So anyhow, that out of the way...


This would be a Xianxia cultivation-themed game, where old legacies re-emerge for limited amounts of time in inhospitable environments, until they're quickly seized by a set of highly competitive cultivators. Dungeons or opportunities for advancement are as a rule not sitting there waiting to be found - they come into existence on timers set by their creators or set by natural cycles and then quickly go through a series of stages which degrade them. Every opportunity and piece of loot in the dungeon is given a rating. The day it is discovered, it's pristine - all loot and opportunities are present, all dangers are present, etc. Dungeons and natural wonders as a rule announce themselves when emerging or unlocked - a great wave of miasma kills off a nearby town, a beam of light summons a meteor from the skies, a giant storm forms around an area and will not move with the prevailing winds, etc. So these are not things that are quietly waiting for just the PCs to discover them - the moment someone touches it, a clock starts on the exploitation of that resources. There are also many recurring dungeons - extradimensional realms that come into contact with the world at known places and times. These recurring sites don't get 'permanently looted' because they're e.g. cycling between contact with various worlds, or they contain natural wonders that refresh over the course of hundreds of years, or they're populated by animals that condense the energies of the plane as they grow into valuable ingredients, or they correspond to some kind of succession built by an immortal where there's always one 'Disciple of the Jade Realm' and when that one dies, the realm re-appears to choose another, things like that.

Each day following the discovery for a well-known dungeon or every three days for a hidden one, there is a d10 roll versus the danger level of the dungeon. If the die rolls over or equal to the danger level, then the lowest level of loot/treasures/opportunities is lost. A second roll against the highest level of loot in the dungeon is made - if this rolls under, then the number and strength of enemy cultivators on site increases by 1 up to a maximum of the amount of loot levels remaining in the dungeon. As this progresses, natural hazards (spirit beasts, etc) which may have bodily treasures that could be looted and refined will be replaced with enemy cultivators who as a rule have less valuable loot (they don't carry their level-up pills and the like into battle with them, so you'd get healing consumables or the occasional bit of gear, but the system would be slanted so that most of the 'big six' type bonuses should come from medicines and pills and blessings and such rather than magic items). In general, the highest ranked loot in a dungeon is only available in the deepest areas.

The campaign unfolds in a series of Eras. Each Era is ~10 years apart, and characters have a Lifespan stat generally around ~70 which decreases from Era to Era. Lifespan cannot be increased in an open-ended manner, though there are all sorts of resources which give one-off increases, and some class features which could give one-time Lifespan increases as well. So without pursuing those opportunities, a character will likely age and die over the course of a campaign, especially if they have to spend Lifespan to avoid serious injuries. However, a character pursuing these chances could get their Lifespan up into the hundreds.

At the start of the Era, the GM provides a 'state of the world' sort of update which basically lists all of the dungeons and locations that will be emerging within that 10 year period and all ongoing power struggles, etc. At the session at the start of the Era, the players state their plans for that decade (which can include things not on the list, including e.g. 'spend the decade training' or 'spend the decade searching for undiscovered dungeons). Everything on the list is run through and resolved in however many sessions that takes, but new agenda items cannot be added until the next Era. Characters can participate in any number of short-term events or adventures within an Era, but extended actions like 'training' are budgeted - you can't spend an Era searching for dungeons AND training AND inventing a new technique. Things like 'searching for new dungeons' are handled in the abstract rather than in a hexcrawl fashion - the character can pick a general area and a search strategy, and a single risk and reward roll is made to determine whether they discover one or more things, have fortuitous encounters, nothing, have inauspicious encounters, or directly suffer a long-term injury (only when searching in inherently dangerous places, and mitigated by character skills, but not played out in detail).

In D&D terms, an Era spent training will raise a character's level by 1 up to level 5, two Eras per level from 5 to 10, four Eras per level from 10 to 15, and eight Eras per level from 15 to 20. An Era spent training could also create a new technique (characters do not get these automatically just from leveling up), improve an existing technique, or allow a character to be trained in up to four existing techniques given resources spent to access archives and teachers.

But level-appropriate treasures and medicines from a dungeon can effectively outright raise a character's level, grant additional Lifespan, etc. Opportunities in a dungeon can transfer knowledge of multiple techniques or even give buffs that make future levels more beneficial (the equivalent of permanently upgrading a character's class hit dice, BAB progression, saving throw progression, or giving them the ability to ignore some prestige class prerequisites). For level-up pills and the like, there would also be the concept of 'medicine ebb' - even if you have 10 Sun-Seizing pills, a character can only ever benefit from 1 over the course of their cultivation and additional ones do nothing (so e.g. a party of 5 characters might find a repository with 20 level-up pills in a dungeon and not have to have the argument 'what if we gave all of them to one of us and made a super character who would just walk us through other dungeons'). Medicines below a character's level will have an exponentially reduced effect (so a pill at one level below would only give half of a level, a pill two levels below would give 1/4, and so on).

Characters suffer in three ways (aside from outright dying):

- Short-term depletion of Qi, which recovers at a daily rate or with medicines and generally speaking should be expected to be at maximum when a character has had a chance to sleep/meditate/etc. Wilderness fights are assumed to be entered at full Qi, whereas things within the dungeon may have chain fights since enemy cultivators will tend to go after the weak and try to steal their stuff. Abilities can restore Qi, and design-wise it's fine to have a party build that exchanges actions for a net positive change in party Qi levels (e.g. I spend 50 to heal 100 kinds of things are fine). At high levels, auto-regeneration builds where a character restores their Qi as a non-action even during fights are to be expected. Qi is both a defensive pool and powers abilities.

- Injuries. If a character's Qi pool is depleted and they suffer an attack, or they're hit by special attacks such as poisons, they suffer an injury with a corresponding debuff and advance a health track by one box. Injuries that are treated generally have the debuff go away over the course of a one week period, though some may be faster or slower. Injuries that are not treated, or injuries which exceed a character's number of health boxes produce Sequelae and knock the character out on a failed check to stay conscious. Innate abilities to remove the injury debuff instantly using Qi alone don't exist although there are abilities to accelerate recovery, but consumables (pills, etc) can do this. The health boxes associated with an injury go away when the debuff goes away.

- Sequelae. These are long-term consequences of past injuries which recover only over the course of one or more Eras and potentially never without appropriate medicines. These can be body, cultivation, and spirit, which are basically progressive ranks of severity, with Body sequelae taking one Era to heal, Cultivation taking two Eras, and Spirit taking three. Characters can be outright immune to body sequelae at a certain point in middle levels as they gain the ability to recreate their body from nothing - further purely physical sources of damage at that point can't advance their health track beyond injury levels. Health boxes filled by sequelae empty when the sequela goes away, but it's the specific box that remains filled. So this means that a character could have 4 open 'injury' boxes but only 2 open boxes on their 'double-fill' track - e.g. having a sequela doesn't reduce the number of wounds a character can take before they risk getting more sequelae.

Most hazards or attacks will have some Qi value but if it breaches the defender's Qi pool, it will only deal one or two wounds regardless of how much it exceeds the pool by. Attacks which deal larger numbers of wounds in one go are as a rule associated with much lower Qi damage. A cultivator can choose to expend 5 years of lifespan to avoid suffering an injury, 10 years of lifespan to avoid suffering a Body sequela, 20 to avoid a Cultivation sequela, or 30 to avoid a Spirit sequela. This choice doesn't require the cultivator to be conscious or aware or the situation, it happens automatically to protect their life if needed.

If characters double-fill their health track, further injuries that cannot negated by the expenditure of lifespan will kill them.

I'm not sure this is essential to the design, but I imagine a 'simultaneous resolution' type of system for fight rounds rather than sequential, to avoid e.g. dogpiling on the character or enemy whose Qi pool was zeroed. Maybe something where you have to declare who you're fighting and then specific moves/etc are done in initiative order, but you can't (or pay a price to) change your target mid-round as long as they haven't dropped. Maybe there's just some kind of party initiative, where the winner of party initiative gets to know how the enemy group is going to be moving and has a chance to change the match-ups (some kind of 'join battle' roll?). So it'd be a form of engagement mechanic where if you say 'I'm going to be fighting this guy' then you can't easily change your mind and run after the guy in the back whose Qi hit zero on your ally's last action unless the guy you're fighting also went down already.


So, the main things about this system design are:

- If you miss out on stuff at low levels, you permanently cripple the character

- If you try to just sit in town and level, you permanently expend a resource that is hard-capped over the course of the campaign

- You can also advance exponentially faster by going out and doing stuff

- The advantage gained from actually doing all of these things is crushing against characters of the same level who did less adventuring - you can play into the fantasy of absolutely dominating a higher level opponent if you had a lot of successful adventures. This system is intentionally designed to through the idea of synchronized progression tracks out the window - there is no 'Wealth by Level' curve and leveling on its own doesn't fully describe a character's advanement though it's a multiplier on their other things.

- Adventures have a natural time limit because the setting is super-competitive, and once a dungeon or ruin 'announces itself' everyone dogpiles it. If you don't rush there, it's a given that it will be more dangerous and less valuable.

- Attrition is in the form of progressive debuffs, rather than increasing fragility. Characters have their main ablative defense at full on entering every fight or risk, but may be weakened by previous times they were KO'd.

Talakeal
2021-06-09, 06:12 PM
Where is the problem? Why haven't you fixed it?

I suspect the fix is either self evident (Why did you have an infinite spells loop?), or posted in this thread.

Well, to use a D&D example, you have spells like Create Food and Drink or Goodberry which can be replenished every day and completely remove the need to carry any sort of food.

OldTrees1
2021-06-09, 06:41 PM
Well, to use a D&D example, you have spells like Create Food and Drink or Goodberry which can be replenished every day and completely remove the need to carry any sort of food.

Where is the problem?

1) Your system used in your hexcrawl is not D&D.
2) Examples like that just change which resources fall into which bucket. It does not contradict the multiple bucket model for attrition.
3) Please don't exaggerate so much. I took you at your word and thought you had an unbounded infinite loop in Heart of Darkness.

Talakeal
2021-06-09, 07:09 PM
Where is the problem?

1) Your system used in your hexcrawl is not D&D.
2) Examples like that just change which resources fall into which bucket. It does not contradict the multiple bucket model for attrition.
3) Please don't exaggerate so much. I took you at your word and thought you had an unbounded infinite loop in Heart of Darkness.

When I run a hex-crawl again, it may well be in D&D, and Kyoru was using D&D for his example.

But the problem is pretty system agnostic; as long as wizards have the sort of powers they do, spell-casting needs to be in the long-term bucket as spell slots can be converted into most other forms of resources.

In my system, for example:

Primalism can create food and other material supplies.
Transmuters can create gold.
Technomancers can convert spells into labor time.
Wyrd can convert mana into rerolls
Healers can convert mana into vitality
And Mystics can transfer spell-slots from one person to another or save spell slots for later.

In addition, every wizard can (potentially) cast spells with durations that last multiple days or anchor spells to go off at a future time.


I am not sure how I am exaggerating, spell slots can absolutely be converted into more spell-slots, its just linear rather than exponential. Simply spend the day resting, store all your mana in periapts (or transfer it to an ally) and then reclaim the mana the next adventuring day, and boom, you have double spell slots. Do this for ten days, and then when you finally set out on your adventure you have 10x the normal number of spells (although in practice it won't be quite 100% efficient unless you are a very powerful mage).

I don't know why you assumed I was saying it was a problem with infinite loops, as that would be an issue regardless of the hex-crawl style or Kyoru's advice. To my knowledge there aren't any in the system, but I am sure there are a few unintentional infinite loop combos hiding somewhere in the rules.


And yes, putting spells into the long bucket solves (most) of the issue, which was my point.

Time Troll
2021-06-09, 08:32 PM
How would that help with "the PCs don't take enough risks" ? Do you want to make them never leaving town at all ?

While some players will shy away from such a challenge, or even give up....not all players are like that.


Well, to use a D&D example, you have spells like Create Food and Drink or Goodberry which can be replenished every day and completely remove the need to carry any sort of food.

I guess this should be obvious, but: have you considered removing any "problem" spells?

D&D is a great example of a game with a LOT of spells that cause a LOT of problems. Many unintended, but it is what you get from years and years of adding random stuff to a game. Creating food and water sounds like a great cleric spell...to say feed some hungry peasants, but when a group of adventurers use it...it can really disrupt things in the game reality.

So....

1. Ban them, Easy, simple.

2. Require Sacrifice. D&D before 3E had plenty of this, and so do some other games. And you want it to be huge, not the "-1 to a roll" type. More like "casting create food and water drains the casters body of energy so their constitutions/health is lowered to 3 for 1-10 days and can't not be healed by any means."

3. Limited Effect. This is the simple "magic is good, but not as good as the real thing". So magically created food is a lot like "fast food" : it will keep you alive, but it is bad for your health. Any more then two meals, and you will start to feel cumulative negative effects. And again, they need to be big.

4. Limited Supply. There is only so much magic in the world that can ''create food" per day or week or such in a set area. So, after two meals the spell will simply fail to work.

5. Place magic. The spell only works in a set place. For example, saying create food and water can only be cast inside a temple.

6. Material Cost. The spell needs a material component: an expensive and or rare one.

7. Other Components. This is the sort of thing like "create food and water can only be cast in the presence of at least five hungry individuals that share your faith ". Or maybe "A group of weak hungry individuals that have no other ready means of obtaining food from themselves.. So your typical demi god adventurer could never feed themselves with this spell.

8. Afflictions. The magic food is dangerous to eat more then two meals. A good affliction is simple addiction to the magic food.

9. The Balance. Creating such food is fine in small amounts. Anything more upsets the Balance: you can expect the wrath of Nature.

10. Wild Magic. Anything might happen....the food might be poison...might explode...might be made of wood and so on.

kyoryu
2021-06-09, 08:59 PM
Well, to use a D&D example, you have spells like Create Food and Drink or Goodberry which can be replenished every day and completely remove the need to carry any sort of food.

Which require material components IIRC. So if the components aren't easily transferable, it can extend your long-term resources.

So either make sure that the resources are limited, or make sure there's another reason to head back to town periodically. Forcing the return to town through expenditure of long-term resources is the least of your worries right now.

RandomPeasant
2021-06-09, 09:24 PM
Which require material components IIRC. So if the components aren't easily transferable, it can extend your long-term resources.

Not create food and water. goodberry seems to depend on the edition. It does in 5e, but it doesn't in 3e (it requires a Divine Focus there, but those aren't expended in casting), of course, it requires some berries to cast it on, so if you really want to you can set your hexcrawl in a desert or a mountain range where those won't be available.

Talakeal
2021-06-09, 10:35 PM
Just gonna leave this here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dz65h6H5gM

Satinavian
2021-06-10, 02:48 AM
While some players will shy away from such a challenge, or even give up....not all players are like that. If Talakeal had the right players for this kind of campaign, he wouldn't be here asking. This whole thread is about making it work with the wrong sort of players.

They are already shying away from things or returning to town once it gets even a little bit interesting, even if that means they don't get any treasure. I think i remember there has been talk about sitting in town and just doing a regular job instead of going out already. Making stuff harder sure won't make them go further.

OldTrees1
2021-06-10, 06:21 AM
Just gonna leave this here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dz65h6H5gM

DM: "Right in front of the portal that could close at any moment?"
Also DM: Doesn't have the portal close even after a week because it would derail the quest.

This is partially why this thread has so many suggestions for narrative consequences.

kyoryu
2021-06-10, 09:52 AM
Not create food and water. goodberry seems to depend on the edition. It does in 5e, but it doesn't in 3e (it requires a Divine Focus there, but those aren't expended in casting), of course, it requires some berries to cast it on, so if you really want to you can set your hexcrawl in a desert or a mountain range where those won't be available.

Okay, so CF&W is a third level spell. Which means you can go indefinitely so long as you're willing to burn a 3rd level spell slot. Not a big deal at upper levels, for sure, but this is one of those situations, I think, where D&D suffers from legacy decisions being brought into a different context (AD&D was mostly focused on level 10 and below, 3rd has a stronger 1-20 focus).

At that point, sure, food is less of a concern, while in the proposed situation, there should still be other reasons to want to go back (again, old school hex crawls most xp came from gp, and that only when it got to town). Refreshing other supplies, leveling, etc, can still provide an impetus to not just hang in the wilderness forever.

But, yeah, without supply pressure it's a lot harder to have long-term resources, which is why I wouldn't include those spells if I was writing a hexcrawl- or dungeoncrawl-based game. Or at the minimum, they could be used to extend those supplies. Or, of course, you add another inherent time pressure somehow to disincentivize the 15mwd.

RandomPeasant
2021-06-10, 04:32 PM
Okay, so CF&W is a third level spell. Which means you can go indefinitely so long as you're willing to burn a 3rd level spell slot. Not a big deal at upper levels, for sure, but this is one of those situations, I think, where D&D suffers from legacy decisions being brought into a different context (AD&D was mostly focused on level 10 and below, 3rd has a stronger 1-20 focus).

I think it's a good thing. As a high level character it should be easy for you to overcome challenges that were difficult for you at low level. That's what it means to be high level. I don't want a character who stands a credible chance of personally killing Demogorgon to worry about whether he's got eight days of rations stored or only six.

Quertus
2021-06-10, 08:06 PM
Create Food and Water? Really? This is worse than the epic challenge of the locked door. If your standard modus operandi is to spend 2nd level spells to open doors, and 3rd level spells to eat, you're wasting your spells.

Yes, the existence of the spell means you actually have a fallback plan - something most adventurers are simply too dumb to have otherwise, and something most GMs just can't handle because it makes their rails visible.

But, all in all, it's a *terrible* use for your spells - especially if you're feeding all your retainers / henchmen, and everyone's mounts.

However, despite what a waste it is to spend a 3rd level spell on rations, having *small* decisions like that, like whether it's worth using a Sleep spell to prevent the average estimated 5 damage from the group of goblins, and slowly chipping away at resources like that through a series of meaningful choices is what Attrition *actually* looks like.

But in most scenarios, Create Food and Water is totally a trap option compared to spending a few gold on rations, or hunting on the move, or just eating the monsters / bandits / whatever was dumb enough to attack a band of hungry murderhobos.

Talakeal
2021-06-10, 08:18 PM
Create Food and Water? Really? This is worse than the epic challenge of the locked door. If your standard modus operandi is to spend 2nd level spells to open doors, and 3rd level spells to eat, you're wasting your spells.

Yes, the existence of the spell means you actually have a fallback plan - something most adventurers are simply too dumb to have otherwise, and something most GMs just can't handle because it makes their rails visible.

But, all in all, it's a *terrible* use for your spells - especially if you're feeding all your retainers / henchmen, and everyone's mounts.

However, despite what a waste it is to spend a 3rd level spell on rations, having *small* decisions like that, like whether it's worth using a Sleep spell to prevent the average estimated 5 damage from the group of goblins, and slowly chipping away at resources like that through a series of meaningful choices is what Attrition *actually* looks like.

But in most scenarios, Create Food and Water is totally a trap option compared to spending a few gold on rations, or hunting on the move, or just eating the monsters / bandits / whatever was dumb enough to attack a band of hungry murderhobos.

Right.

But as long as create food and water exists, and spells can be recovered with an eight hour nap, you can’t have scarcity of food being the reason PCs need to pop back to town now and again.

Time Troll
2021-06-10, 08:25 PM
Just gonna leave this here.

I don't get it....I guess it is some poor attempt a humor, but it makes no sense.

As I'm the GM that says "you take a long rest right in front of the portal? Ok, all your characters are now dead: game over."

And why did the GMs random encounter table suck? No matter what he rolled it was zero level minion in robes? Why no more powerful foes?

Like this group of characters would not survive a long rest in my game....but if they did, I'd just have a fire elemenal kill them.

And why does the GM act like a goof and let them long rest for hours.....BUT THEN he suddenly says "no more long rest" as some type of statement the players must follow? If he could do that after several hours...why could he not do it after several seconds?

RandomPeasant
2021-06-10, 08:51 PM
But as long as create food and water exists, and spells can be recovered with an eight hour nap, you can’t have scarcity of food being the reason PCs need to pop back to town now and again.

But I thought the goal was to get people to have a bunch of encounters all in a row. If you have to periodically go back to town to restock, people are going to respond to that by... going back to town to restock. Which is going to mean interrupting their encounters to go have downtime.

Talakeal
2021-06-10, 09:57 PM
But I thought the goal was to get people to have a bunch of encounters all in a row. If you have to periodically go back to town to restock, people are going to respond to that by... going back to town to restock. Which is going to mean interrupting their encounters to go have downtime.

No, the point is that the challenge curve in D&D (and similar games) is based on attrition.

Infinite resources, whether it is provided innately or by constant trips back to town, means no challenge and, ultimately, renders all dice rolls and decisions meaningless.


I don't get it....I guess it is some poor attempt a humor, but it makes no sense.

As I'm the GM that says "you take a long rest right in front of the portal? Ok, all your characters are now dead: game over."

And why did the GMs random encounter table suck? No matter what he rolled it was zero level minion in robes? Why no more powerful foes?

Like this group of characters would not survive a long rest in my game....but if they did, I'd just have a fire elemenal kill them.

And why does the GM act like a goof and let them long rest for hours.....BUT THEN he suddenly says "no more long rest" as some type of statement the players must follow? If he could do that after several hours...why could he not do it after several seconds?

The secret is that DMs don’t want the campaign to end anymore than the players do.

Segev
2021-06-11, 12:37 AM
The secret is that DMs don’t want the campaign to end anymore than the players do.

The trick is to have narrative consequences that aren't campaign-ending. The portal closes, and the villain achieves a victory, making the heroes' lives harder in some fashion as they now have to find another opportunity to make right what has gone wrong AND thwart the next thing the villain is up to.

Saintheart
2021-06-11, 12:41 AM
But I thought the goal was to get people to have a bunch of encounters all in a row. If you have to periodically go back to town to restock, people are going to respond to that by... going back to town to restock. Which is going to mean interrupting their encounters to go have downtime.

So I haven't been here for most of this discussion, and being infected with the same Attention Deficit bug as most everyone on the Internet I can't be bothered to go back and read whether someone already answered this, but as a thought: if we're going to admit that the game fundamentally changes as the magic gets bigger and stronger, why should we think that the method of providing challenge has to remain as attrition? Or if you're going to continue to keep using attrition as a major mode of challenge, maybe it's time to think of some other consumable but essential resource that the players have to ration?

My games usually start off with characters hauling rations around and choosing between that or foraging for what they can find. The players have a choice. They get to decide whether they want to live off the land or use up the consumable resource they've brought with them. It doesn't take long before someone starts memorising Create Food and Water and/or Heroes' Feast and starting to deal with that problem, but I don't actually see that as a monumental affront to my authority as a DM or an attempt by the players to frustrate My Imperious Will. That's a choice they make. At low levels, using up a spell slot as an emergency food source is not a small decision to make. But if the players want to make that choice, then they can do so. That, in turn, is because I don't think the DM's job is primarily to wear down the characters' consumables as such. The DM's job is to offer meaningful choices for the players to make. The consequences of "spell vs. ration" might not be large, particularly given the starvation/dehydration rules are very generous to players (at least in 3rd ed), but it is still a choice, one of many the players can make. And over time, consistently choosing one or the other might well have implications; I have no way of predicting it, but that Create Food and Water slot might preclude memorising Summon Monster III and so the party has to fight harder at the end of the day when they otherwise could've called on their flexible friend to eat the enemy. That's entirely okay. The players chose, and it achieves that wonderful state of affairs where all the little choices a character makes eventually add up to a wider consequence.

As time goes on and the character levels get larger, getting basic food and water and travel may well become minor if not entirely trivial concerns. To me, that's actually entirely okay. That's expected in the game. As your characters get more powerful, why should that sort of stuff remain a significant challenge to them? (On the other hand, just because it's a trivial issue for them doesn't mean it can't remain a consideration. As said - small choices can add up into larger consequences. You want to buy an Everfull Mug to take care of your water concerns for the rest of your adventuring life? Okay, but that money then isn't available for something else and you'll have to find it elsewhere, not to mention that you can't exactly gift your Everfull Mug to a starving pilgrim in the middle of nowhere, thus securing an important information source for yourself. Or you might even gift it to him and then have to cadge off other party members for water. Or you might have to let said pilgrim tag along sharing your mug until you reach a civilised place where he can be dropped off. Or you could just leave the pilgrim to die of thirst. And so on.)

What I'm getting back to is that I believe you should aim to give players choices about what they do rather than only consequences for a decision. "You're running out of rations, and you can make it back to town and restock, but the ruins may well refill as the hobgoblins reinforce and entrench their position, not to mention that they've now got a bead on how to fight you if you show your faces here again. That is, coming back might not mean significantly more enemies, but it might be a harder fight. Or you could press on and hope your rations hold out, and maybe take out the whole place, and then hope that the hobgoblins have their own food (and hope that it's consumable by humans), or risk starvation or dehydration on the way back to town. What's it going to be, pilgrim?" Or my old favourite when asking the party how it's getting somewhere: get there fast but take risks, or get there slow but take less risk. The party is not cheating you out of your fun as a DM if they choose the slow route. They're making choices, and those choices are what the game is ultimately about. Those choices tell you who the characters are.

I think the meaningless choices are the ones where there is no clearly-discernible consequence for one route over another. The 'fast but risky' versus 'slow but safe' decision is like a muscle - and a muscle requires two components to work, which is to say both a meaningful difference in risk and a consequence for time taken. (And notice that risk versus time is the easiest but not the only way to frame a choice. Immediate bonus versus long term benefit is one.
Resource versus payoff is another. Save the NPC cleric for extra healing potions during the battle, or save the NPC king for extra victory points? Take a +4 STR potion to win the five qualifying duels in the tournament now, or get by on your own mettle and save the potion for the final battle?)

Getting back to what I was saying to start with - maybe the solution is to frame the choices of consumables in some other way. "The underground cavern complex has plenty of food and even potable water, but what it doesn't have is light sources. As with the ancient stone altar in Conan the Barbarian, fire won't burn there, no fire at all. Not to mention that what the cavern complex does have is predators in abundance which not only have darkvision but who are adapted to smell photons from half a mile away. Oh, and it has walls made of a substance that blocks teleportation except at certain sites where the dwarves tunnelled through the rock and left teleport gates, where you can get back to the surface and restock, although these sites are few and far between."

Does the party go off and procure headbands of darkvision, thus dealing with the light problem before they descend into the depths? That's okay. That's their choice, that's their way of navigating that part of the challenge posed by the surroundings, and they will quite literally pay a price in gold to do that. Do they use up spell slots for lots of castings of Ebon Eyes? Same deal. Their choice, and less spells for them to use while down there. Do they buy phosphorescent, glowing moss which lasts a few hours per plant, and which supply they have to manage? That's okay too. Do they want to use some combination of all three? Absolutely okay. (And all of these solutions still leave a challenge open because, since fire won't burn down there, the characters don't have a very powerful way of dealing with the ice creatures down there that would otherwise be vulnerable to fire.)

What about the aasimar character who radiates light equivalent to a small torch at all times in a given radius? Do you ban that choice? I would be inclined to say no. That was something specific he did for himself and for his teammates to meet this challenge, that was his way of meeting the challenge you set for him. At worst you tell him that that light radiation ability shuts off if he's ever unconscious or asleep. Or maybe don't even try to hobble him; you've told the party that the monsters in those caves are attracted by light, if he takes the greater risk that statement implies, it is a choice he has made.

Don't wait for your players to obviate the encounters you have planned, get on the front foot and give them options to obviate!


LATER EDIT: In fact, this allows me some self-reflection too. Because I realise now that the reason I used to get angry or heavily frustrated when players bypassed or obviated aspects of resource management, or even clowned entire encounters, on the way to the planned objectives, was this: I was mistaking all those sorts of things - resource management, random encounters, all those things related to attrition - as requirements for the party reaching its objective/s. I was, in a real way, seeing all those things as a price the party had to pay to continue the adventure. Therefore, when the party knocked out encounters or the need for food with one magic item (for which they paid good money) I'd get snotty that they were "cheating" or being "lazy" about the whole thing. In short, I was thinking that they weren't earning their achievement or their presence at the scripted encounters or whatnot.

That is, the problem was entirely mine, and entirely in how I saw RPGs. I didn't see those aspects of the game as opportunities for player choice. I saw them only as opportunities for obstacles. I suspect the latter mindset is a holdover from when I wanted to be a writer (and at which I eventually learned I sucked, and saved myself a lot of heartache and isolation when I gave up). Because writers think in terms of obstacles the characters have to overcome, which allows them to develop. Ergo, if I, as the DM, am a storyteller, then I must put these obstacles in the path of the players in order for them to earn their Big Bad fight at the end. Corollary: if the players bypass said obstacles, I feel they are not earning their fight at the end, they are not being part of the story.

But the moment I reframed these sorts of things as choices for the players to make, and thought of the RPG as them telling the story of whether they ate trail rations or fresh-picked crabgrass for dinner on the 1,876th day of the adventure, all need to push encounters or particular outcomes on them faded away. I let them demonstrate their ingenuity and their left-field ideas and their capacity to end encounters with an inventive use of Tenser's Floating Disk. I could still let the monsters try to kill them all, and do so without hesitation and without mercy, because I could trust my players to make their choices. And if I did want to engage my sadistic side, I could simply look at giving the players choices where there were no comfortable answers. Again, not Hobson's Choice, not a choice which is meaningless, but a choice that would tell them about themselves based on how they resolved the problem: return the princess to Guilder, and forestall a war, but ensure the Rise of Queen Amidala The Tyrant, slayer of thousands of her own people ... or "remove" the princess, thus causing a war in which thousands of Florinese people including Sicilians, giants, and duelling masters would die? And I wouldn't need to worry about whether the story went in the direction I wanted or not: because the real pleasure is in seeing people choose what to do when given the option. It's in watching that moment where quantum theory says the universe splits down two paths but we only get to follow one ... and very infrequently the one we expect.

RandomPeasant
2021-06-11, 06:42 AM
No, the point is that the challenge curve in D&D (and similar games) is based on attrition.

But it's not? If you look at the 3e encounter guidelines, it supports a multi-encounter, attrition-based workday, but it also supports single-encounter workdays where the encounter is simply more dangerous.


Infinite resources, whether it is provided innately or by constant trips back to town, means no challenge and, ultimately, renders all dice rolls and decisions meaningless.

That's definitely not true. No amount of resources make a Hill Giant a trivial challenge for 1st level characters. "Infinite resources" still means a finite amount of resources at any given point in time, meaning that you can still have issues like "the village is being wracked by disease and we only have enough healing to save a fraction of the people". Some decisions are inherent tradeoffs, like "should we sell the MacGuffin we found to the Arcane Order or the Knights of the Realm". Lots of games provide meaningful challenges, let alone meaningful decisions, without being attrition-based.

thirdkingdom
2021-06-11, 11:32 AM
The trick is to have narrative consequences that aren't campaign-ending. The portal closes, and the villain achieves a victory, making the heroes' lives harder in some fashion as they now have to find another opportunity to make right what has gone wrong AND thwart the next thing the villain is up to.

This, one thousand percent. In a sandbox game there's a lot of stuff going on, and players won't be able to tackle everything. Some stuff will get shuffled off to low priorities, and with other things they may very well fail. Consequences will happen, and the players will have to deal with their choices.

kyoryu
2021-06-11, 11:46 AM
No, the point is that the challenge curve in D&D (and similar games) is based on attrition.

Infinite resources, whether it is provided innately or by constant trips back to town, means no challenge and, ultimately, renders all dice rolls and decisions meaningless.


Well, ultimately, you kinda do have infinite resources.

The trick is to make sure that resetting resources has some kind of cost to progress. So long as the world is essentially static (doesn't repopulate, doesn't react, etc.) then you'll have this issue. If "time" is the only cost to resetting resources, and time doesn't have any real cost, then resources are infinite.

I like the resetting progress thing (repopulate dungeons, can get encounters on the crawl, etc.) because it helps create a structure for a hexcrawl that's then "see how far you can push". Another option would be to use not-time as a cost for regenerating resources. If reacquiring resources cost money, and especially if the first few "hexes" or bits didn't generate enough money to reset them, then there's another incentive to go further, but that has an obvious failure mode (what happens if the players run out of money and are low on resources?) That's not an unsolvable issue, but it's one that needs solving.

Talakeal
2021-06-11, 01:03 PM
snip

I agree with everything you say here.

That's not really the issue though.

Create food and water is just an example of why using food as a limiting resource doesn't work when spells are an unlimited resource. Also, I would need to crunch the math, but I don't believe you actually need to have fewer spells while adventuring to obliviate the need for rations, just having a spell slot left over to cast in the evening before sleeping every few days should probably be enough.

Players being able to make decisions is fine, and even being able to bypass encounters entirely is fine (although as I said above, I do "idiot proof" encounters so there isn't some ultra obvious solution to a supposedly serious obstacle).

The problem is that the solution to virtually every problem is "cast a spell" or "walk right past it / up to it swinging my sword" and then take a nap. There is no interesting decision to be made there.


But it's not? If you look at the 3e encounter guidelines, it supports a multi-encounter, attrition-based workday, but it also supports single-encounter workdays where the encounter is simply more dangerous.

That's definitely not true. No amount of resources make a Hill Giant a trivial challenge for 1st level characters. "Infinite resources" still means a finite amount of resources at any given point in time, meaning that you can still have issues like "the village is being wracked by disease and we only have enough healing to save a fraction of the people".

That's true, but single challenging encounters tend to be a lot more likely to result in player death. They also kind of strain credibility, and make site based adventures like dungeons really hard to pull off.

A hill giant is more or less impossible for a standard first level party, and I imagine there is a very narrow band between "challenging to the entire party" and "impossible fight". And, this also means there is no degrees of victory, its either win or lose. Currently my players never lose fights, and if I started just using single big encounters that would change, and I don't think anyone at the table would be happy about it.

Also, non combat encounters become totally meaningless. Traps, obstacles, hazards, and social encounters can often be solved with a single spell or just walked through with no consequence if attrition is of the table, which makes many skills kind of meaningless.


Some decisions are inherent tradeoffs, like "should we sell the MacGuffin we found to the Arcane Order or the Knights of the Realm". Lots of games provide meaningful challenges, let alone meaningful decisions, without being attrition-based.

Yeah, storyline decisions still exist, but I was more talking about strategic / tactical decisions. If you are guaranteed to replenish spells / HP after every fight, you don't really need players there most of the time, the wizard can solo most things and the fighters can be replaced with a dice rolling app.


Well, ultimately, you kinda do have infinite resources.

The trick is to make sure that resetting resources has some kind of cost to progress. So long as the world is essentially static (doesn't repopulate, doesn't react, etc.) then you'll have this issue. If "time" is the only cost to resetting resources, and time doesn't have any real cost, then resources are infinite.

I like the resetting progress thing (repopulate dungeons, can get encounters on the crawl, etc.) because it helps create a structure for a hexcrawl that's then "see how far you can push". Another option would be to use not-time as a cost for regenerating resources. If reacquiring resources cost money, and especially if the first few "hexes" or bits didn't generate enough money to reset them, then there's another incentive to go further, but that has an obvious failure mode (what happens if the players run out of money and are low on resources?) That's not an unsolvable issue, but it's one that needs solving.

Its harder to do in my system because it has a more robust downtime system than a lot of games, so that time itself is also a resource.

But, this same problem still exists in many games.

Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

Like, that is seriously something my players have tried to do before, and afaict is fully rules legal.

In the past I have done things like telling them "You can do that, but the world isn't static, and three years from now the BBEG is going to flood the town with a horde of undead and kill you all if not stopped first," is one of my player's classic gripes about why I am a bad DM.


The trick is to have narrative consequences that aren't campaign-ending. The portal closes, and the villain achieves a victory, making the heroes' lives harder in some fashion as they now have to find another opportunity to make right what has gone wrong AND thwart the next thing the villain is up to.

True. And that is probably what would happen in a real game, the video is after all a parody.

But, on the other hand, the DM doesn't want the adventure to end prematurely either. I know if I prepped a cool climactic battle with lore and statted out NPCs on the other side of the portal, I would do everything in my power to make sure the player's interacted with it in some way.


Edit: Yeah, at least in 3E you only need to eat once every three days, so just take every third day off from traveling and you will never be down a spell slot of suffering penalties from hunger.

NichG
2021-06-11, 01:32 PM
Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

Like, that is seriously something my players have tried to do before, and afaict is fully rules legal.


I've played in games where the PCs had effectively infinite gold. It can still work - you just have to accept that that's what those characters are, rather than what the WBL curve says or what the system was designed to expect.

RandomPeasant
2021-06-11, 02:27 PM
That's true, but single challenging encounters tend to be a lot more likely to result in player death. They also kind of strain credibility, and make site based adventures like dungeons really hard to pull off.

They mean a greater risk of failure per encounter. But if failure means PC deaths, it means that in an attrition-based game too, and it's not obvious to me that overall risk should be lower in such a situation. Creating meaningful challenges in a TTRPG is a very hard problem no matter what you do, because there must be an enormous disconnect between perceived risk and actual risk. If encounters are 95% safe for the PCs (a level of safety that is going to feel pretty boring), only slightly more than half of groups will last through a single level before getting wiped out. I think it is, if anything, easier to manage challenge appropriately if PCs are assumed to always be at full resources, as that does not require you to ensure that encounters are appropriately risky a 50% or 66% or 10% resources as well as full.

I'm not sure why you think "all fights are EL = APL + 4" strains credibility more than "all fights are EL = APL". Either you're letting PCs fight whatever you put in the world, with no concern for danger, or you're tweaking encounters to be balanced, realism be damned. Similarly, I don't quite know what you think the issue is with dungeons here.


Currently my players never lose fights, and if I started just using single big encounters that would change, and I don't think anyone at the table would be happy about it.

If your players never lose fights, then how is there a challenge curve in the first place?


Also, non combat encounters become totally meaningless. Traps, obstacles, hazards, and social encounters can often be solved with a single spell or just walked through with no consequence if attrition is of the table, which makes many skills kind of meaningless.

I would argue if your encounter can be solved by using a single ability, it is probably not an interesting encounter for parties who have that ability. Traps, for example, are generally compelling only as part of a larger encounter (e.g. the classic "Iron Golems and fireball trap), or if the party is under sufficient time constraints that they can't carefully check for them every step of the way. Otherwise, traps are just an exercise in dice rolling, with a side of "guess what things the DM thinks can be trapped and what declarations he wants you to make to not trigger them".


Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

I would play under a set of rules where having large amounts of gold was not game-breaking. The issue there is the magic item christmas tree, not the idea that PCs could have jobs.


I've played in games where the PCs had effectively infinite gold. It can still work - you just have to accept that that's what those characters are, rather than what the WBL curve says or what the system was designed to expect.

Frankly, the real problem isn't infinite gold, but magic items, especially charged ones. And those are problems with amounts of gold way smaller than "infinity". You can buy a scroll of a 5th or 6th level spell with less than the treasure you get from a EL 3 encounter, and that scroll will win such an encounter every time.

Talakeal
2021-06-11, 02:54 PM
They mean a greater risk of failure per encounter. But if failure means PC deaths, it means that in an attrition-based game too, and it's not obvious to me that overall risk should be lower in such a situation.

In general:

If you are fighting a series of encounters, and one of them goes bad, you are unlikely to die, you can simply pull back and regroup, maybe use some consumables.

If you are fighting a single battle and it goes bad, your choices are either to fight to the end (and probably lose some PCs) or fall back and make no progress at all.



I'm not sure why you think "all fights are EL = APL + 4" strains credibility more than "all fights are EL = APL". Either you're letting PCs fight whatever you put in the world, with no concern for danger, or you're tweaking encounters to be balanced, realism be damned.

Agreed.

But you can take a middle ground; look at the average or total EL of a dungeon, find what level it is appropriate for, and then tell the PCs roughly how dangerous that region is known to be.




If your players never lose fights, then how is there a challenge curve in the first place?

Typically it is an issue of how much they accomplish; how much treasure they loot, how many rooms they explore, how many prisoners they rescue, how many enemies they kill, etc.


I would argue if your encounter can be solved by using a single ability, it is probably not an interesting encounter for parties who have that ability. Traps, for example, are generally compelling only as part of a larger encounter (e.g. the classic "Iron Golems and fireball trap), or if the party is under sufficient time constraints that they can't carefully check for them every step of the way. Otherwise, traps are just an exercise in dice rolling, with a side of "guess what things the DM thinks can be trapped and what declarations he wants you to make to not trigger them".

I agree. But not every encounter needs to be super interesting on its own. Stuff can enhance immersion or give the players a chance to show off their skills / cleverness without being some big, dramatic, time taking event.



I would play under a set of rules where having large amounts of gold was not game-breaking. The issue there is the magic item christmas tree, not the idea that PCs could have jobs.

Frankly, the real problem isn't infinite gold, but magic items, especially charged ones. And those are problems with amounts of gold way smaller than "infinity". You can buy a scroll of a 5th or 6th level spell with less than the treasure you get from a EL 3 encounter, and that scroll will win such an encounter every time.

Agreed... but a lot of these games are very popular.

And it really hurts immersion to have a game where treasure can't be leveraged into power in some way or another, and if you do find some ultra-contrived setting where you can't buy advantages, why are the PCs risking their necks for treasure in the first place?

kyoryu
2021-06-11, 02:55 PM
Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

Honestly, I'd probably say "no, that's not the game we're playing. We're adventurers, not tradesmen. If you want to play the tradesmen game, I'll figure that out, but the system isn't designed robustly in that area. And since for most people income and expenditures tend to balance, at best I'll come up with some system that lets fluctuation happen on a monthly basis based on some factors and randomization. But you wanted a hexcrawl game, so let's play that."

OldTrees1
2021-06-11, 03:14 PM
Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"

Like, that is seriously something my players have tried to do before, and afaict is fully rules legal.

In the past I have done things like telling them "You can do that, but the world isn't static, and three years from now the BBEG is going to flood the town with a horde of undead and kill you all if not stopped first," is one of my player's classic gripes about why I am a bad DM.

1) How would I run it?

Remember I am much more of a sandbox GM than you are so my campaigns are a bit more flexible in terms of direction. My way is not the only right way.

So the PCs are all skilled craftsmen / professionals and they decide to spend time in town making money? Okay. Here are the checks you would make. If you do it long enough then I will roll for random economic fluctuations. Any economic consequences of your economic disruption will occur. Any local NPC agendas that change to involve you will involve you (that might be a couple short in town adventures or even an antagonist depending on the plots). Oh and the plots of NPCs outside the town will also progress.

All of this means they will still be gaining xp, although they might gain more gold than xp. They will still be facing challenges. And unaddressed plots will continue to progress. If there was a BBEG that was already planning to attack the city with a horde of undead, that BBEG will reach the city unopposed. But then they have to face the PCs and their contacts rather than face the PCs and their loot.

Given your timeline estimates of 10 years to earn 10K gp, frugal lifestyle, and the BBEG invading in 3 years. I might say, "The world is not static, I expect a disruption to your plans around 3 years in. Additionally I expect you will probably reach level 2 within those 3 years. Do you want to stick to this plan?". When they say "yes" we will play it out and they might have 3K gp and be 3rd level when the BBEG comes knocking. Their characters probably had some warning from listening to news from the local town crier.

Maybe they decide to flee the BBEG and travel to another town to continue their trade. This might be a campaign about a bunch of merchants now. Not every D&D campaign needs to be about adventurers.

2) How would I listen?

It sounds like the players want their PCs to be wealthier than normal.
-> That is useful feedback about their desires. I wonder if they just want to be wealthier or if it was a symptom of something else. I should ask them about that.

It sounds like they wanted more magic items before reaching level 2.
-> Does that mean they feel the difficulty is too hard? I know their preferences can differ from mine. There is no objective "correct" difficulty. If they prefer it was easier, then they prefer it was easier. I should ask them about that. Maybe even find a compromise.

Satinavian
2021-06-11, 03:26 PM
Out of curiosity, what would you (not just Kyoru but anyone) do if the players just wanted to spend ages in town making money rather than adventuring? Like "We are all playing elves with high craft and profession skills, so we are going to spend the next ten years in town living like paupers and working our butts off so we have an extra 10,000 gold to spend on magic items before we hit second level!"
I would probably give them the crafting/basebuilding/town politics/NPC drama camapign they want. I actually like running those:smallsmile:. But i would not allow just skipping over ten years instantly just for higher start money. If they want more start money, they should just ask and maybe we can adjust the campaign boundaries for that, no reason to use exploits.

Talakeal
2021-06-11, 03:38 PM
I would probably give them the crafting/basebuilding/town politics/NPC drama camapign they want. I actually like running those:smallsmile:. But i would not allow just skipping over ten years instantly just for higher start money. If they want more start money, they should just ask and maybe we can adjust the campaign boundaries for that, no reason to use exploits.

The players absolutely DO NOT want to RP out the time gap or play out town drama. They merely want to gloss over the "boring part" and get straight to the power fantasy.

Satinavian
2021-06-11, 03:58 PM
Well, if i had players that were only interested in playing a powerfantasy, i probably would give them a powerfantasy, not an RP-heavy town drama or an old school hexcrawl. I don't provide stuff they fundamentally don't want. Waste of my time and theirs.

That is why i wrote that if they just want more start money, they should simply ask and forget the silly timeskip.

Talakeal
2021-06-11, 04:11 PM
Well, if i had players that were only interested in playing a powerfantasy, i probably would give them a powerfantasy, not an RP-heavy town drama or an old school hexcrawl. I don't provide stuff they fundamentally don't want. Waste of my time and theirs.

That is why i wrote that if they just want more start money, they should simply ask and forget the silly timeskip.

Its weird, because they don’t want-handout from the DM either. I think its more about the feeling of getting away with something.

OldTrees1
2021-06-11, 04:20 PM
The players absolutely DO NOT want to RP out the time gap or play out town drama. They merely want to gloss over the "boring part" and get straight to the power fantasy.

1) This sounds like the players want to be playing an easier difficulty but are not mature enough to say it directly. That is okay. There is not objectively correct difficulty. Maybe there is room for compromise. Maybe one of them wants to DM. Maybe you should split into different groups.

2) If they wanted to gloss over that part but want the system as it is, then I would gloss over that part. I would abstract that part as "3 years have passed. You are all level 3 and you made 3000gp. Unfortunately the local news has reported a Necromancer with a large army of undead is approaching the town. They will be here within 2 months. How does your plan adapt to this news?"

Squire Doodad
2021-06-11, 04:39 PM
At a further glance, I'd say one of the big issues is that you're starting at level 1.
If your players want to feel strong, you can't do that too easily with a freshly-baked adventurer. Try telling them to make level 3 or level 5 adventurers; early enough that they aren't already fighting demigods and omnidragons but still enough for them to have customized a fair bit and be ALREADY locally famous adventurers. Plus they can have a cool set of abilities at that point for their preferred playstyle.
People don't gasp when they walk into a shop, but the bartender knows them and is willing to tell them some good leads for decently tough dungeons.

Also, one other thing that I find key to "feel-good dungeon crawl" is having common "extra-minor magic items". Let's say each combat encounter has two pieces of gear a party member can equip that has an incredibly minor but cool enchantment. It can be something firmly numerical but uncommon and niche, like a shield that boasts "+1 AC against Orcs", a Longsword of Glinting "1d2 bonus Fire damage", or an axe with "2d4 bonus Acid damage when rolling a natural 20"; or maybe it has a neat but mostly pointless effect that an outside-of-the-box player can put to good use. Like a Brooch of Pyromancy that allows you to tell the relative location of flames within 50 feet.
Make it so each of these have modest impact on actual player strength, and are only worth something like +20 GP when present (and thus do not count as enchanted, maybe it's "Tinkered Gear" or something), but they're still cool to find and your players can play around with them.

Though this is on top of actual enchanted equipment popping up, as opposed to instead.

RandomPeasant
2021-06-11, 04:41 PM
But you can take a middle ground; look at the average or total EL of a dungeon, find what level it is appropriate for, and then tell the PCs roughly how dangerous that region is known to be.

Sure, but you can do that however the encounters in the dungeon are divided up.


Typically it is an issue of how much they accomplish; how much treasure they loot, how many rooms they explore, how many prisoners they rescue, how many enemies they kill, etc.


Those metrics are only meaningful in the context of time pressure, and time pressure can be applied regardless of whether resources are per-day or per-encounter. Without time pressure, resources are functionality unlimited unless you do very contrived things like "you must clear the dungeon to regain spells". With time pressure, players inherently have a limited resource (time) regardless of whether their character resources are limited or not.


I agree. But not every encounter needs to be super interesting on its own. Stuff can enhance immersion or give the players a chance to show off their skills / cleverness without being some big, dramatic, time taking event.

Again, sure. But if you're putting in filler encounters, those encounters should be resolved quickly and easily, or you risk spending more time on filler than things of consequence.


Agreed... but a lot of these games are very popular.

Games are complicated things, and popularity often has very little to do with mechanics. D&D 3e, for example, was (probably still is) enormously popular, but that doesn't mean all its design decisions were positive, even by the narrow metric of "helped popularity". Things are the sum of their parts, and large positives with small negatives sum to a positive whole.


And it really hurts immersion to have a game where treasure can't be leveraged into power in some way or another, and if you do find some ultra-contrived setting where you can't buy advantages, why are the PCs risking their necks for treasure in the first place?

You don't have to stop treasure from leveraging into power at all, you just have to stop it from leveraging into power that breaks the tactical game. It is okay if a party that finds a dragon's hoard is slightly ahead of the curve in fights. The game can handle that just fine. Similarly, even very large piles of money are small when considered on the scale of kingdoms and armies (and it matters much less if those things are precisely balanced to PC level).

Why PCs would risk their necks for treasure in such a situation seems fairly obvious: that's how you get treasure. If you want a +3 sword (perhaps because you need it to defeat the dragon that has captured your home, or simply because it's shinier than your +2 sword), and you can't get it by farming beets until you have 18,000 GP, your only option is to go into a dungeon, beat up the inhabitants, and hope one of them was sitting on a +3 sword. Alternatively, there are all kinds of external motivations you could have for adventuring like "I want to claim this land for my kingdom" or "if I slay a bunch of giant monsters, women will want to sleep with me" or "I can only do my thesis research in a planar convergence site and the only one of those is at the bottom of a dungeon filled with extra-planar monsters". PCs should have some motivation for adventuring beyond just "use my gear to get loot to buy better gear to get more loot", or you're basically just playing Progress Quest.

Talakeal
2021-06-11, 06:14 PM
1) This sounds like the players want to be playing an easier difficulty but are not mature enough to say it directly. That is okay. There is not objectively correct difficulty. Maybe there is room for compromise. Maybe one of them wants to DM. Maybe you should split into different groups.

2) If they wanted to gloss over that part but want the system as it is, then I would gloss over that part. I would abstract that part as "3 years have passed. You are all level 3 and you made 3000gp. Unfortunately the local news has reported a Necromancer with a large army of undead is approaching the town. They will be here within 2 months. How does your plan adapt to this news?"


At a further glance, I'd say one of the big issues is that you're starting at level 1.
If your players want to feel strong, you can't do that too easily with a freshly-baked adventurer. Try telling them to make level 3 or level 5 adventurers; early enough that they aren't already fighting demigods and omnidragons but still enough for them to have customized a fair bit and be ALREADY locally famous adventurers. Plus they can have a cool set of abilities at that point for their preferred playstyle.
People don't gasp when they walk into a shop, but the bartender knows them and is willing to tell them some good leads for decently tough dungeons.

Also, one other thing that I find key to "feel-good dungeon crawl" is having common "extra-minor magic items". Let's say each combat encounter has two pieces of gear a party member can equip that has an incredibly minor but cool enchantment. It can be something firmly numerical but uncommon and niche, like a shield that boasts "+1 AC against Orcs", a Longsword of Glinting "1d2 bonus Fire damage", or an axe with "2d4 bonus Acid damage when rolling a natural 20"; or maybe it has a neat but mostly pointless effect that an outside-of-the-box player can put to good use. Like a Brooch of Pyromancy that allows you to tell the relative location of flames within 50 feet.
Make it so each of these have modest impact on actual player strength, and are only worth something like +20 GP when present (and thus do not count as enchanted, maybe it's "Tinkered Gear" or something), but they're still cool to find and your players can play around with them.

Though this is on top of actual enchanted equipment popping up, as opposed to instead.

You know, I really don't think desire to be higher level is really it. I have had players pull this kind of stuff at high level, and I have offered to let players just start at higher level when whining about slow progression and been turned down.

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond or like they are getting away with something behind it.


Sure, but you can do that however the encounters in the dungeon are divided up.

Yeah. But if the party is stopping to recover all resources at every fight and so you are making every fight deadly, that means that every fight in the dungeon is the exact same ECL, which strains credibility when compared to the ~9 ECL range of a normal dungeon.



Those metrics are only meaningful in the context of time pressure, and time pressure can be applied regardless of whether resources are per-day or per-encounter. Without time pressure, resources are functionality unlimited unless you do very contrived things like "you must clear the dungeon to regain spells". With time pressure, players inherently have a limited resource (time) regardless of whether their character resources are limited or not.

Exactly. Hence this thread.



Again, sure. But if you're putting in filler encounters, those encounters should be resolved quickly and easily, or you risk spending more time on filler than things of consequence.

There is a difference between quickly and easily and pointless.

Walking through a trap that deals half your HP and then sleeping it off vs. walking through a trap that deals half your HP and then keeping on going both take about the same amount of time, but in the latter case you will be lamenting not being more careful / bringing a rogue, whereas in the first you just shrug and say "whatever".



Games are complicated things, and popularity often has very little to do with mechanics. D&D 3e, for example, was (probably still is) enormously popular, but that doesn't mean all its design decisions were positive, even by the narrow metric of "helped popularity". Things are the sum of their parts, and large positives with small negatives sum to a positive whole.

My point was not that they are popular because of the mechanics, merely that these are popular games and thus my odds of finding a group for them are high, thus I can't always afford to refuse to play them if I want to game at all.




You don't have to stop treasure from leveraging into power at all, you just have to stop it from leveraging into power that breaks the tactical game. It is okay if a party that finds a dragon's hoard is slightly ahead of the curve in fights. The game can handle that just fine. Similarly, even very large piles of money are small when considered on the scale of kingdoms and armies (and it matters much less if those things are precisely balanced to PC level).

A dragon's hoard is actually pretty big; your stereotypical dragon sleeping on a bed of gold is worth more than the GDP of many modern countries.

Even so, people will always wonder WHY they can't just spend enough cash to buy magic items or higher mercenaries ten levels higher than they are, and there isn't really a good in setting reason besides game balance.


PCs should have some motivation for adventuring beyond just "use my gear to get loot to buy better gear to get more loot", or you're basically just playing Progress Quest.

Sure would be nice.

NichG
2021-06-11, 07:22 PM
Frankly, the real problem isn't infinite gold, but magic items, especially charged ones. And those are problems with amounts of gold way smaller than "infinity". You can buy a scroll of a 5th or 6th level spell with less than the treasure you get from a EL 3 encounter, and that scroll will win such an encounter every time.

The particular campaign I'm thinking of used Slayers d20 rules, which are an adaptation of 'Advanced d20 Magic', which has a lot of craziness when seen from a standard D&D viewpoint. In that system, spells are not limited by level but have a DC of a Fortitude save you have to hit to cast them, which can be modified by the use of consumable components, time, etc. Standard D&D spells are retrofitted by taking the bonuses given by all their listed components, adding those to the DC, and then the spell can be cast without those things if you can manage to hit the (often very high) resulting DC. This means you can cast Wish with no components if you can hit a DC of 101 - as a 1st level Fighter if you could somehow pull that off without all the class bonuses/etc you get from the casting classes and could also make the check to learn the spell and could survive the drain (casting inflicts drain in the form of non-lethal damage that heals only through rest - the higher the DC, the more the drain).

Now, a particular thing about that campaign setting is that all of the protagonists and major antagonists are epic-level characters, and the players had at least enough familiarity with the setting to be able to do the math of 'if I want to have a goal of, say, being able to perform astral travel with impunity, I can actually look up in the book what the CR is of the thing that is going to show up to try to kill me' or 'if I want to overthrow the mazoku generals and take their place, this is what kind of power level I'm aiming for'. Those things all had published stat blocks (a point about the importance of telegraphing and communication incidentally, even if its unrealistic for the characters to know some things).

So as ~Lv12 characters, we used an infinite Wish engine (at a rate of 1 or 2 a day) to basically get inherent bonuses to all stats, as much magical gear as we could craft for ourselves with the arbitrary number of 25kgp diamonds we could produce, used that to be able to do things like cast Polymorph Any Object or Limited Wish at will, and basically shoved our way into the business of CR30-ish antagonists. And we were still fighting a losing battle the one time we went up against a mazoku general proper (though that was a holding action to pull off a ritual, so managing to not die long enough was enough there).

It would not have worked if someone looked at us and said 'you're Lv12, you should face CR 12-17 threats, have this much loot, etc'. It worked fine because we were proactive in our goals, looked at ourselves, and said 'okay, this is the biggest thing we can do with the power we were able to squeeze out of the system' rather than seeing ourselves as 'Lv12 characters doing Lv12 stuff'. And in retrospect, the magic items were a part of that, but on their own without the other ridiculousness that is the Slayers d20 magic system, I'd say infinite gear comes out to only about a +5 to effective level. I confirmed that for myself later on running a campaign for players with access to a similar Wish engine, and playing in a third campaign where standard items up to about 100kgp were more or less trivial to obtain (via three or four different ways, so I won't go into it).

Time Troll
2021-06-11, 08:08 PM
The problem is that the solution to virtually every problem is "cast a spell" or "walk right past it / up to it swinging my sword" and then take a nap. There is no interesting decision to be made there.

How though?

Sure A new DM might be fooled a couple times, but once you get some real life experience you can block the players "easy button".


Make encounters have no easy pass.

Or are you saying you don't know how to do that?

Squire Doodad
2021-06-11, 08:56 PM
You know, I really don't think desire to be higher level is really it. I have had players pull this kind of stuff at high level, and I have offered to let players just start at higher level when whining about slow progression and been turned down.

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond or like they are getting away with something behind it.

I think in that case the "extra-minor enchanted items" bit might work to make them think they have all this uber gear without actually giving them game breaking equipment, but that doesn't change the core issue.

At the end of the day, they don't just want to have a feel-good dungeon crawl that's just hard enough to be fun, but rather to go through smashing everything effortlessly.
At that point, go link them to Kingdom Hearts on easy on something, and then find a different group. Regardless of any issues with your DMing, the actual players clearly don't want to play the sorts of games you run in the first place. Maybe do a board game with them instead.

Alternatively, if you've offered but never actually done starting at somewhat higher level, go force them to do it. Start a new campaign and make them start with a few levels under their belt, and refuse to let them do level 1 instead if they ask. Just make it happen and see how it goes

Saintheart
2021-06-12, 01:06 AM
You know, I really don't think desire to be higher level is really it. I have had players pull this kind of stuff at high level, and I have offered to let players just start at higher level when whining about slow progression and been turned down.

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond or like they are getting away with something behind it.

Okay. So my next question is, and let's bear in mind, I'm not in any way talking about you, I'm talking about the players: is there a problem with the players wanting that, and can we better define that problem?

Maybe -- and I'm not saying this is the case or that it's necessarily valid to want one way or the other -- some playing groups don't want to earn their victories. Some players really don't know what they really want, in the same immature way that small children refuse to eat carrots and then suddenly can't get enough of it once they've tried it. Some players might conclude that by getting away with something they are having more success than they do in the real world. If so, would you consider that an invalid desire or motivation to playing a role-playing game?

I might have this wrong, and the solution might ultimately be "Stop playing with adolescents in adult bodies and find a better gaming group", but, on the assumption that you don't want to dump the game and you want to find a solution to make this situation tenable and/or desirable for you, but: can you precisely define what you see the problem is with the players wanting to speedrun through an adventure?

Satinavian
2021-06-12, 01:33 AM
Its weird, because they don’t want-handout from the DM either. I think its more about the feeling of getting away with something.
Well, in that case i would invest a lot of time until i finally understand what they actually want and wouldn't run anything until i have achieved this.

And if i had found it, i would reasonably expect no complaining about it and no attempts to avoid it in game.



But that is not really something we can help you with.



But if they really don't care about the game but instead are in it for the "feeling of getting away with something", as in they want to feel smart and smug for having been more clever than you and earned their victory, i would not play an RPG with them. A tactical board game with clear rules and a competitive setup would be way better. How about trying Descent (https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/descent-journeys-in-the-dark-second-edition/) ?

Quertus
2021-06-12, 07:54 AM
Infinite resources, whether it is provided innately or by constant trips back to town, means no challenge and, ultimately, renders all dice rolls and decisions meaningless.

No. Rubber banding challenges renders dice and decisions meaningless.


Its weird, because they don’t want-handout from the DM either. I think its more about the feeling of getting away with something.


You know, I really don't think desire to be higher level is really it. I have had players pull this kind of stuff at high level, and I have offered to let players just start at higher level when whining about slow progression and been turned down.

I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond or like they are getting away with something behind it.

"Get away with something" is, indeed, a real human motivation. However, this behavior can just as easily be explained by "want to earn".

There's also this Godzilla-sized "your players keep telling you in every way they know how that they want you to make the game easier". Maybe you should listen.

I return to my, "give them 5x staying power", and see just how easy they really want the game to be. Want versimilitude? Call it, "demigods of adventure", and have the final quest rewards be that they reset the rules for humanity.

(EDIT: How quickly PCs level is also something that should be available to be changed in the reboot, although it may just be a byproduct of wanting things to be easier, not an independent desire of its own.)


Yeah. But if the party is stopping to recover all resources at every fight and so you are making every fight deadly, that means that every fight in the dungeon is the exact same ECL, which strains credibility when compared to the ~9 ECL range of a normal dungeon.

Don't make every fight deadly - make every fight encounter interesting.

EDIT:
So as ~Lv12 characters, we used an infinite Wish engine (at a rate of 1 or 2 a day) to basically get inherent bonuses to all stats,

Does Slayers d20 ignore the "must be cast in consecutive rounds" clause?

Quertus
2021-06-12, 10:25 AM
Rather than one cohesive but huge post, that will be out of date even if it ever gets finished, I'll go ahead and start posting random excerpts.

Communication



I really think there is some element of wanting to feel like the big fish in a small pond
The players absolutely DO NOT want to RP out the time gap or play out town drama. They merely want to gloss over the "boring part" and get straight to the power fantasy.

Sounds like your players are communicating their desires to you. Try giving them what they asked for.

Stop changing the rules



<something about players wanting you to change the rules less often>

So don't change the rules. Hand authority of "when do the rules get changed" over to the players. Or have rules changes occur at set intervals - like between campaigns.

Healing



I wouldn't use wands as an argument. They are a unique, and probably unintended, quirk of 3E that isn't present in most editions of D&D or other games, and they make the whole concept of HP attrition, battlefield healing, and indeed the role of a healer pretty much meaningless.

Although I don't completely disagree, if you look at 2e, where only the box of bandaids Cleric got bonus spells, and look at my new "favorite" module, Halls of the High King, you'll see… each PC starts with 4 healing potions, provided by the quest-giver; the quest-giver, Panthras, is willing to give x100 coins of what he offered; unspecified how many more healing potions the party could negotiate for; the first encounter nets the party an additional 28 (16+12) potions of extra-healing; the party's first babysitter has copious healing potions, that they will hand out to injured individuals; the party's seconds babysitter / quest-giver (roughly 3 encounters in) will offer healing; accepting the second quest will earn each PC a potion of extra-healing; there is an encounter literally labeled "bandaid". Can you guess what it offers?; curiously, the rescued priests (roughly 5 set encounters in) only have 3 Cure Wounds spells between them; about 7 set encounters in, there's 2 more potions of extra-healing; about 8 set encounters in, the party gets healed up yet again *and* receives an additional 12 healing potions and 2 scrolls of Heal; about 10 set encounters in, I *think* that the PCs get healed again (or so I remember, but don't see reference to it in skimming); and then there's several more encounters and an extended dungeon crawl, with only 2 potions of extra-healing and two scrolls of Heal for loot (but you're fighting Clerics…)

For a 6 person party, that's… what… 36 potions of healing, 38 potions of extra-healing, and 4 scrolls of Heal? The equivalent (based on HP of characters at those levels) of healing about 212 wounds in your system, plus several stages of free healing (and resurrection), for fewer than 30 set encounters total. Which amounts to treasure to heal 7+ wounds per encounter.

And I've played in several oldschool adventures - both modules and homebrew - that were similarly rife with healing. So "lots of healing" isn't unique to 3e, even in D&D.

Progress



In general:

If you are fighting a series of encounters, and one of them goes bad, you are unlikely to die, you can simply pull back and regroup, maybe use some consumables.

If you are fighting a single battle and it goes bad, your choices are either to fight to the end (and probably lose some PCs) or fall back and make no progress at all.

I am reminded of the reverse:

Victory? Victory you say? Master Obi-Wan, not victory. The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun, the Clone Wars has.

One need not win a fight to make progress; one may not make forward progress even winning the (wrong) fight.

Consider structuring your game such that either a) progress isn't tied to victory in a 1 to 1 relationship, or b) where "retreat, learn, prepare, and retry the fight" is reasonable, and part of the gaming culture.

Towards that last one, consider making *every* encounter in a *very small* hex crawl be a(n Avatar of Hate style) puzzle monster and/or clues. Maybe 20 sites, 7 puzzle monsters, 40 clues (yes, that's multiple clues per site)… and "zero to many" trash encounters, easily crushed mobs to make your players feel good. These mobs drop treasure, that the party can use to buy consumables, allowing them to prepare for "boss"/puzzle fights, as well as allowing them to grind as much or as little as they want to.

But, if they hit a puzzle monster that they cannot beat, and cannot figure out how to beat, they can keep wandering the map, searching for clues. At 40 clues for 7 monsters, that's about 6 clues per monster out there for them to find.

Progress can be made against the puzzle monsters even on a failure by eliminating possibilities, eliminating said puzzle monster's allies, or even just evaluating the nature of the puzzle the first place.

Two Parties

Here's a novel idea: run a truly oldschool Gygaxian dungeon crawl. Have 100 encounters spanning 5 levels.

And have 2 parties taking turns going in.

For giggles, you could have the players running both parties. Although having a second group, that meets on a different night, would be optimal.

But definitely write the whole thing down as a module before any PCs are created - *including* expected tactics of the monsters, which you must play honest, and not rubber band the difficulty of.

Maybe they'll be able to evaluate cost/benefit - and be able to articulate their analysis to you - under such a scenario.

False God
2021-06-12, 01:00 PM
The secret is that DMs don’t want the campaign to end anymore than the players do.

Sure we do. I don't want to drag things out past a reasonable conclusion. I don't want to entertain mindless stupidity. I don't want to lessen our achievements by taking on unnecessary elements beyond them. I don't want to force people to carry on with something they're not enjoying.

As both a player and a DM: Stories end. Sessions end. Campaigns end. Endings are necessary. Endings are good.

Talakeal
2021-06-12, 01:01 PM
Sure we do. I don't want to drag things out past a reasonable conclusion. I don't want to entertain mindless stupidity. I don't want to lessen our achievements by taking on unnecessary elements beyond them. I don't want to force people to carry on with something they're not enjoying.

As both a player and a DM: Stories end. Sessions end. Campaigns end. Endings are necessary. Endings are good.

*End prematurely

NichG
2021-06-12, 01:18 PM
Does Slayers d20 ignore the "must be cast in consecutive rounds" clause?

Nope, I remember this being pretty tricky for us since only one of us (not my character in that one) was able to pull off the full Wish. I don't remember the numbers exactly but I think the drain was more of an issue than the DC - it was something like 10d10 slow healing damage per cast, halved if you beat the DC by 10+, and 'take drain as lethal' was worth a +10.

False God
2021-06-12, 01:24 PM
*End prematurely

If the game is not running well, it may be time to end it. If the players or the DM are not enjoying themselves, it may be time to end it.

It may not be where you want to end it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be ended.

Talakeal
2021-06-12, 01:38 PM
Nope, I remember this being pretty tricky for us since only one of us (not my character in that one) was able to pull off the full Wish. I don't remember the numbers exactly but I think the drain was more of an issue than the DC - it was something like 10d10 slow healing damage per cast, halved if you beat the DC by 10+, and 'take drain as lethal' was worth a +10.

Isn't it just easier to create tomes at that point?

NichG
2021-06-12, 01:58 PM
Isn't it just easier to create tomes at that point?

Wish to create magical items directly has additional XP costs, which then further increase the DC and drain. For +5 tomes, that's 11000xp (137500/12.5), which is +110 to the DC. I think the maximum bonus you get for taking as long as you like to cast (barring things like rituals cast over multiple years) is something like +35 (I don't have access to Advanced d20 magic right now so I can't confirm this, but actually that might be high). So at that point if you can survive the drain, it's better to just cast the five Wishes in a row. However, I think there are more clever things than that using metamagic (which just adds to the DC, so you can metamagic up Wish to your heart's content if you can pay the price and hit the expanded DC). So a Twinned Repeat Wish gets you a +4 inherent at the cost of 7 spell levels = +35 to the DC. I don't remember if that's how we did it though.


Casting check is a Fort save, but there are various class features and optional modifiers you can use to fiddle with it.

Start as a Loremaster, prestige into (Slayers) Sorceror from Lv6 on. This means a base Fort save of +3, but also gives +5 to casting checks from a Loremaster secret, +7 to casting Wish from Sorceror levels. It might be worth fitting in two levels of standard D&D Paladin to get +Cha to saves and the good fort save, which would sacrifice one Sorceror level and one Loremaster level, but that definitely wasn't what this player did. For reference, that would give a base Fort save of +6, +5 casting from Loremaster, +6 casting from Sorc, and +Cha mod to the fort save.

For feats, take Great Fortitude (Slayers d20 variant feat, +4 to Fort saves but you have to eat like crazy), Spell Mastery (+5 to cast specific spells), Magical Blood (+2 to casting checks).

Coop-cast with another two casters to gain 1/2 their CL to the save each = +12

Name and Incant = +10

Use a 10kgp material component = +10

Use a focus = +2

Take drain as lethal = +10

So if you have (with items) a +5 modifier from Constitution and a +5 from Charisma and a +5 resistance bonus from an item, that gets you to a +87 to cast Wish in one round for the Paladin build, which has a chance of success (but failures are painful). I think there's probably some pre-buffing I'm missing here to close the gap a bit further.

Talakeal
2021-06-12, 09:06 PM
So, ugh.

Remember what I said about the older players poisoning the well with newer players?

Well, we interviewed a new player into the group, and one of the younger and less drama free players warned him "Talakeal will kill your character and then get mad at you for dying.

Which is, like, so damn out of the blue; apparently she has been holding a serious grudge for two years over something that never happened?

Like, it was literally impossible for them to die in my last campaign and there were zero player deaths, and the closest I ever got to getting mad at them for "dying" was when they decided they wouldn't even try and fight the monsters and instead just grab the treasure and let the monsters beat on them until they got a "free teleport back to town".


New game hasn't even started yet and its already of a great start.

FML.


No. Rubber banding challenges renders dice and decisions meaningless.

In theory yes, but not in any implementation I have ever actually seen. Normally it just serves to minimize the tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor to get power, creating more of a graduated curve.

Squire Doodad
2021-06-12, 09:15 PM
So, ugh.

Remember what I said about the older players poisoning the well with newer players?

Alternative solution: Move across the country, change your name, grow a mustache and enroll in a witness protection program. Then, you can finally get a new party. This is the best idea ever and nothing can go wrong.



In theory yes, but not in any implementation I have ever actually seen. Normally it just serves to minimize the tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor to get power, creating more of a graduated curve.

Can I get two of those?

Cluedrew
2021-06-12, 09:25 PM
[Just go back to the original post.]I don't think anyone replied to this and I think this is a pretty good design doc and that should be said.


New game hasn't even started yet and its already of a great start.My same recommendation applies: Don't run it.

Duff
2021-06-14, 12:58 AM
As noted, there's no point running a sandbox if the players aren't interested in playing pro-active characters. If the PCs are just going to sit there until something pokes them with a stick, to get them to move, you may as well be running a more typical campaign where the party does the next adventure in the series.

A sandbox works best as a dialogue
Party - "We want to do this"
GM - "Here's your first step on an adventure to do that". The adventure might then be a normal adventure with all the attrition and tension you want. And, just like in a normal campaign, pulling out or failing the adventure is likely to have consequences. I'll give an example of a small scale sandbox below, and contrast it with a non-sandbox game but first...



D&D is a system that is particularly bad for sandbox games. In fact, it's a system that's pretty bad for almost all narrative structures other than "here's a dungeon, go kill stuff". So, my advice would be "don't use D&D" if you want to run a sandbox game. One of the main problems is that if you have five different possible adventures available that would challenge a 5th level party, well, once they finish one of these adventures, the party is no longer 5th level, so the other adventures (that they might then go on, if they are still relevant) can no longer challenge them.

As far as "going nova" and the "fifteen minute day", well, to me that has nothing to do with sandbox adventures. If one plot thread leads the party to investigate a dungeon, then it's just the same (for the most part) as if they had been railroaded into finding the dungeon. If they can beat it by using up all their daily resources and then taking a nap, then they can do that regardless of whether they chose to be here or were forced to be here. The problem here is simply adventure design. Dungeons are bad for precisely this reason (which is another reason to avoid using D&D since the presumption here is that adventures lead to dungeons since "Dungeons" is in the name of the game). But the issue can be managed by putting time pressures on the party. They need to have a reason to do things in a timely fashion. This can be difficult to get right in a D&D setting since the PCs will probably expect to take a nap after fighting every single orc and so they may fail the adventure rather spectacularly if (a) they are not given evidence that makes them realize that they need to hurry or (b) they are put in a situation where they have to use up their resources early on and therefore can't be expected to continue. Resource management is the problem. Games with a lot of resource management (like D&D) are just hard to work with as a DM/GM.

I'd contend that D&D is neither better nor worse for sandbox play than any other where characters' abilities increase by a similar amount. The less the character's abilities change, the less re-tweaking will be needed, but you always have to either re-balance adventures regularly or have the tempo of play where you're always fleshing out an adventure after the party has accepted it. Even if you're running a game where the character's numbers don't change much, their motivations will and their knowledge will. A sandbox always requires you to be building the world in front of the characters.
But I will say that the quicker it is to build an engaging adventure suitable for the party, the easier it is to sandbox.


Now, an example of a sandbox type game with a small scale setting...

Session 0.1
GM "I want to run a sandbox type game of my homebrew where your goal will be to build and defend your village. Are you in?"
Party "Yes"
"OK, I'll give you a basic layout of the village. You've got orcs in the north threatening, a range of strong personalities in the village with different goals, We'll start just after a hard winter so the spring will be hungry until summer starts to provide some fresh harvests and the hard winter means when the thaw gets up into the hills there'll probably be some flooding. Work out what general kinds of characters you want to play now and we'll have a look at them next session.

Session 0.2
Introduce the major NPCs, show the map and the players discuss their characters. Characters get tweaked. Relationships to each other and NPCs are fleshed out.
NPCs and the village might also get tweaked if it seems like a good idea.
GM provides a more concrete list of resources and challenges. The level of detail here is a matter of taste. Do you say "You have 437 roofing nails" or "You're short of roofing nails"
GM "What do you want to do first?
Party discusses amongst themselves. "We want to go and see how the orcs are faired over the winter and see if they're getting ready to raid this way"
GM goes and prepares an adventure "The recon of the orcs"

Session 1
You've decided to check out the Orcs. Here's the map of the lands in the direction of the orcs. How are you traveling?
Session 8
We're going to raid the orcs for food. We'll take the foresters with us as guides and soldiers. GM prepares "Raiding the Orcs"
Session 47. The food problem has been addressed. The flood has not.
GM "You're awakened by the thunder of the river in full spate. Clearly the thaw has reached up into the mountains and your village is being threatened. What do you do?"

Or for the same setting but non sandbox...
Session 0.1 - This can more easily be combined with 0.2
GM "I want to run a non-sandbox type game of my homebrew where your goal will be to build and defend your village. Are you in?"
Party "Yes"
"OK, I'll give you a basic layout of the village. You've got orcs in the north threatening, a range of strong personalities in the village with different goals, We'll start just after a hard winter so the spring will be hungry until summer starts to provide some fresh harvests and the hard winter means when the thaw gets up into the hills there'll probably be some flooding. Work out what general kinds of characters you want to play now and we'll have a look at them next session. (more optional - you can just run the threats and opportunities at them one at a time if you want)

Session 0.2 -
Introduce the major NPCs, show the map and the players discuss their characters. Characters get tweaked. Relationships to each other and NPCs are fleshed out.
NPCs and the village might also get tweaked if it seems like a good idea.
GM provides a more concrete list of resources and challenges. The level of detail here is a matter of taste. Do you say "You have 437 roofing nails" or "You're short of roofing nails"
Or not. This can be cut down to a really basic "this is the village, these are the important people"
GM "The village leader tells you the first job of the spring is to go and check out the orcs"
They might then need to go a write that, but they might have written it last year and it's still probably good

Session 1
Here's the map of the lands in the direction of the orcs. How are you traveling?