Deeper in the Game

This weekend my players said, “Errant feels like playing Dwarf Fortress except everything flows better.” A lot of that has to do with the way the Event Charts in Errant make GMing events and world bits very easy.

1. Hexmap and World Prep

• Create or use a region hex map
• 1-2 sentence descriptions of areas/towns. Broad outlines (“Valuable cash crop, worker exploitation”)
• Create or get a set of encounter tables appropriate to the regions you’re dealing with

While I certainly have a lot more involved options for prepping maps (Down the Road, Ring Maps), I can skip that because the event rolls in play will fill in a lot as I go. I do take the extra step to prep some encounter charts for sub-regions; 2d6 tables, with double tiers for variety.

2. Errant’s Event Rolls

As we’re playing, you make an Event roll, once per “turn”. (Turns in Errant scale depending on what you’re doing; in exploring ruins or dungeons, a turn is 10 minutes, when traveling overland, it’s 4 hour turns, etc.

These charts might seem minimal and thin, but they’re sort of the fulcrum that gets the rest of everything else moving in play. The mechanical effect is one thing, but you want to back it up with some reasons and context, and that’s where the third part of this kicks in.

3. Assign causes to the outcomes

Now here’s the only thing that isn’t in the book; you take the roll and you describe a reason it makes sense. You pad it with an in world reason:

“Ah, yeah, of course you have to take a bit of time to rest/eat food, you just hiked down a rough hill without a road or path and dragged the horses along for it too. You need a break.”

“Well, you were in combat 20 minutes prior and cast that loud spell. Someone was bound to come looking.”

“The villagers saw the wyvern fall out of the sky. They ran thinking you were the holy knights, but now seeing that you’re just a wandering band of adventurers, they’re disappointed, wary and anxious.”

• You can look at what the party is doing, or the conditions in the area around them
• Use the prep description of the local area to figure out what would make sense
• You can random roll some details to tie into the Event Roll if you really need some, either with a table of your own making or something like Procedures to Discover the Path Ahead. I have a couple of tables to inspire ideas for random NPC personalities that get used a lot.

Trained in the Apocalypse

Now, all of this is a skill I pulled from the advice and running lots of Apocalypse World. AW also advises a loose prep, but also two things that really improve your improv world building. Sometimes you ask the players questions about the world, then take that in as totally true and build on it, which improves your flexibility. And you bring those things back up later in play; they’re part of the world, not one off things.

The other thing is, when you find things that don’t make sense, and you can’t quite make sense of them, is you let it be but specifically not as “I guess it’s just weird” but as a mystery to maybe be answered when things fall into place. And in play, you try to make sense of it as you go.

The Dice are Reminders

The thing that the Event rolls do in Errant, is they remind me, intermittently, to look at the factors in the environment or events and bring them back into play. It’s a pain to remember, all the time, “It’s been raining, the ground is muddy” but if the dice say “Rest” then I can look and be reminded “Ah geez you’ve been trudging through muddy roads for 8 hours, god your legs are burning”.

And of course, if the players have something that would mitigate an issue, they get a free pass; they had summoned a fire elemental and depletion simply was not coming up on the Event rolls, so they had a good way to survive the blizzard they had camped out in, which would have probably been brutal if not fatal for some of them.

So it’s not that I’m doing more work with this, I’m doing less. The Event rolls mean I do prep, but I don’t prep deep details outside of dungeons. I don’t really need to plan to make sure interesting things happen; the charts will make sure things happen, I mostly just ask “what is the probable reason?” and pour it in.

ETA, timely and relevant: Daddy Rolled a 1’s Why Does D&D Have Wandering Monsters? midway through he talks about the fun part of being a GM and being surprised as you play because the charts throw unexpected results, building custom charts to world build/tie into the world, etc.

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