To Be Resolved

Oafish Pratfalls and Brainwaves (Exploration)

Doofusmaxxing

I did a lot of writing yesterday in preparation for my next post - between the last two days I came up with a decent draft outline of what character generation may look like. While I was writing, however, I spilled a bunch of soda on my keyboard. I thought fast, took the caps off of the affected area, and poured dry rice on the switches. Unfortunately, the keys I spilled on were basically all function keys, and the rice did nothing, so when I tried to return to work my computer thought that F1-F5 were all depressed simultaneously. In my fluster, I brought out my vacuum and tried to suck the rice out of the switches and ended up sucking several other keys off the keyboard. At this point I conceded defeat and lost about a day of effort picking up a replacement.

Content Planning

My plan for this post was to summarize what I've come up with so far on character generation, but I want to let that cook a little bit more before it drops. As a teaser, I think I'm narrowing in on the bulk of character differentiation being:

Like I said, however, some of these ideas need a little more time to bake before I get into detail on them. I have ideas for oracular generation on this that should make chargen easy and breeze, so instead I want to talk about what the exploration pillar of our game might look like.

Today's Fun - Overloading the...Blackjack Table?

I received my physical copy of Knock! volume 5 this week and boy howdy. What a product. It included a nicely stylized writeup of Necropraxis' seminal contribution to the exploration pillar, Overloading the Encounter Die.

I have been familiar with the overloaded encounter die or hazard die in an oblique sense via His Majesty the Worm's Meatgrinder table, which drives the pacing of the Crawl Phase of play. Each "dungeon turn" or "watch" in HMTW, the GM draws on the major arcana of the Tarot, yielding a result of 1-21. This result is compared to the Meatgrinder Table, which is structured as follows:

So what insight can we draw from the Meatgrinder and from the core idea of the overloaded encounter die? Our goal is to provide time pressure and stakes to the exploration pillar of our game. I've played plenty of unstructured exploration sessions in 5e, I've accidentally run unstructured exploration sessions in Cypher, and sometimes that's exactly what you're looking for. If everyone is humming on all cylinders, the players know exactly what they want, and the GM has the right prep to support improvisation, then yeah you don't need rules for role playing. But as soon as one of the legs on that stool isn't carrying its weight, the session groans to a halt.

I don't think this game is a dedicated hex crawler or a dedicated dungeon crawler, I picture it more as a point crawl between deindustrialized towns and the beautiful Appalachian wilderness, so we want to have various levels of zoom on time granularity. I think there's something we can learn from another great NSR game with a new edition out, Trespasser. Trespasser explicitly calls out Frames of Play, each representing a different timescale. Overland exploration, dungeon exploration, downtime, and combat are all designed to follow a nicely structured procedure where time is tracked in rounds. Each round, players take actions and the GM makes some form of check to resolve the round and move forward. I think this is a good model, so let's say that we will do round-based exploration.

Structure of a Round, Overland Travel

One of the legendary haints of Appalachian North Carolina is the Demon Dog of Valle Crucis. If our party has a home base in Boone, it's a 3 hour walk to get from downtown Boone to the center of Valle Crucis, where our party is hunting rumors. Let's say for today that an exploration round is 4 hours - I think that this is probably more granular than we need to be, but that gives us 6 rounds per day. I think for my money I like three 8 hour rounds in a day, like in Mythic Bastionland but we are just spitballing. Players decide to spend their round traveling and they walk from Boone to Valle Crucis. Our resolution for how this round goes is played out as a hand of Blackjack; one of the players is dealt two cards (since we aren't playing adversarially, we do casino rules, all cards face up) and they compare the value to 21. The party can work together to decide to stay (travel conservatively) or hit (travel aggressively), but it's the player's decision on how to proceed. The final result is then evaluated as a hazard table. In the table below, H/D means that the last drawn card is a Heart or Diamond, S/C means the last drawn card is Spades or Clubs.

Hand Value Outcome
2-16 Very slow travel. H/D: light flickers, S/C: Clock advances
17-20 Cautious travel. H/D: Percept (clue, spoor), S/C: Clock advances
21 total Smooth sailing!
Blackjack Smooth sailing, and you may take an additional action
Bust (21+) Too reckless. H/D: Encounter, S/C: Setback/inconvenience and clock advances

Here I use "light flicker" as shorthand for some sort of resource consumption and "Clock advances" to represent some background threat or game state change escalating, like "Alarm" in Trespasser. My goal here is to fiddle with a few levers. I think hazard dice and overloaded encounter tables are a great technique for structuring travel/exploration, but I am really tickled by the idea of players making choices about how the time is going to pass. In HMTW, moving slowly means that twice as many meatgrinder cards are drawn per turn; here players know that if they move slowly, time will pass and/or resources will be consumed!

Structure of a Round, Dungeon Travel

I think the overall shape of our overloaded blackjack table looks the same, but our procedure is slightly modified. If we say that a round during zoomed-in exploration is ten minutes, then let's pick a marching order. Say we have three players: Alice, Bob, and Carol. The party moves to a new room, the GM describes the landmark features of the room and everyone takes a search action. At the end of that action, Alice is dealt her first card, a 5 of spades. The party's search action unveiled some hidden information, a book in a bookshelf facing the wrong direction, so they stay in the room and examine the book. The GM deals Alice her second card, a Jack of Diamonds. She is now at a 15 with the last drawn card showing H/D; if she decides to stay now, she knows that her lantern battery will deplete by a stage. If she decides to hit, the party may trigger an encounter...or everything could go fine! They make the decision to stay or hit now, before the examination action resolves; each time she hits, the party gets an extra round of exploration on her hand. Once Alice's hand is resolved by either an undershoot, a 21, or a bust, Bob goes through a blackjack hand as the ten minute turns proceed. After all three players have been dealt and resolved their hands, they need to take a breather, ten minutes of rest, and the current dungeon state is assessed.

I still need to refine how I want this to scale with party size. The nice thing about three blackjack hands before a short rest is that it's a minimum of six draws (an hour), but likely less than 12 draws (2 hours). We can tweak this, but it feels like a good tempo consistent with old school play. I wouldn't expect this to be a megadungeon game, so adventuring sites should probably be about 2-4 hours of in-game time. I haven't seen anything like this and it feels like a super gameable way to bring the overloaded encounter die into our system.

Let me know what you think!