Let’s assume you want to replicate medieval travel in your fantasy world.
How fast can people move and how do people typically move?
Most people walk, and most people don’t ever stray more than five to ten miles from their home at any point in their lives, save maybe for a pilgrimmage. Serfs have to ask permission from their lords to travel outside their Lord’s territory, so a lot will depend on them.
Your average peasant, out walking, can cover perhaps 3 miles an hour or 20 miles in day, barring interruptions.
Professional couriers could move more swiftly, as much 30-40 miles in a day.
An ox cart could carry a lot, but slowly, only make 10 miles in a day.
A horse cart might make 20 miles in a day.
Purely on horseback, you might make 40-60 miles in a day, but for most, horse travel was limited to nobility and knights.
Soldiers (closest to adventurers perhaps) might march 20 miles in a day, in full gear with a pack, and still have the energy to fight at the end of it.
A carriage drawn by a team of horses might be able to make as much as 50-75 miles in a day, more and faster if there are changes of horses available.
A medieval sailing ship might cover an average of 5 miles per hour (120 miles in a day), though in fantasy games ship technology is typically more advanced and akin to Renaissance technology, though the speed isn’t that different, perhaps 8 mph. With fair wind and conditions, a ship could travel twice as fast. Sea turtles can swim at up to 10mph, for comparison.
This likely makes very clear just how disruptive and special magical transportation can be.
Figuring out what to publish as a supplement is always a bit of a puzzler. You see, what sells are corebooks, which was the philosophy at WOTC during the 4th Edition days, and which has bled over somewhat into 5th Edition publication. They say they’re moving away, a bit, from the heavy hardback tomes for everything, but it remains to be seen.
Why have these big tomes become the norm?
Well, supplementary material can be a hard sell. Let’s say you have a GM’s book and a Player’s book.
In practice you’re going to sell one GM book per group (typically 4-6 players) and maybe slightly more Player’s books. That’s still only about one sixth your potential audience, and that’s the most you’re going to sell of just about anything.
Once you get into supplementary material, class books, race books and so on, you’re carving that fraction down more and more. Even the best possible market is only a fraction of the number of players.
What has traditionally sold worst of all (apart from during the early days of gaming when people were starved for material) has always been adventures.
Why?
Because adventures tend to be one-and-done. You can’t very easily play through the same adventure again, especially not with the same players. Reusable materials might be a couple of interesting traps, some monsters and some magical treasure, but it’s not convenient to flip through dozens of adventure books to find the material you want to re-use.
If you want to sell supplements they need to have a purpose and some longevity.
You are always safe when you’re playing RPGs. At any time you can get up and leave, log off of Roll20, or whatever else you need to do. The only thing that is a threat to you, is the prospect of stepping on a dropped d4.
Jesus H Tapdancing Christ on a two-stroke moped, gaming is an opportunity to experience things you normally wouldn’t. Adventure, excitement and really wild things, all in a completely safe environment. Learn some anti-fragility, for the love of Klono’s Iron Balls.
Setting a game against the backdrop of natural disaster can add flavour and drama to an otherwise mundane scenario.
To take just one example, flooding.
An underground dungeon is inherently dangerous during flooding as the rooms fill with water, necessitating water breathing, even far inland, and giving normally sea-bourne races a chance to shine.
Flooding can also act as a natural timer, the longer you wait, the more the dungeon fills with water and the more creatures and monsters are forced to head towards the surface, while you’re trying to get down. Much of this can also apply to modern or sci-fi urban games, or post-apocalyptic games.
Flooding can also have deleterious long term effects on areas in a game, leading to plot points and stories related to te natural disaster.
Floods can wash away topsoil (though they can also refill groundwater reserves and aquifers) and crops.
Crops that survive a flood can be stricken by mould.
Animals can be washed away or drowned.
They can cause migrations and emergence of monsters and creatures.
They can make people homeless or destroy their communities.
They can taint drinking water and flood sewage into living areas.
They can spread disease.
They can wash away roads and bridges, making travel difficult.
They can turn solid land into muddy swamp, making even everyday movement harder.
They can wash away woodland, orchards of forests.
The aftermath of truly terrible natural disasters can cause people to turn to banditry in desperation, can leave communities cut off and leave them to self govern. They can lead people into cultish behaviour, milleniallism, human sacrifice, zealotry and other dangerous mindsets – even foment revolt if their ruler doesn’t help them.
There are always second and third order effects to anything, it’s just down to you to think of them.
How the very devil do you play a superintelligent villain (or other magnificently intelligent NPC) with only your own pedestrian intellect to go on?
Well, there’s two or three things you can do to simulate someone smarter than yourself.
The Wisdom of Crowds
If you have some other friends who don’t play in your games (or at least aren’t playing in this one), you can get in touch with them and lay out the situation. You can then get their input on what’s going on and their suggestions for diabolical schemes and contingencies.
Unfortunately, groups of advisors also tend to ‘go off on one’, in much the same way that players do when coming up with their own plans. It can get wild, crazy and amusing, but isn’t necessarily useful exactly.
Prep Time
Include the Big Bad Evil Guy’s sceheming in your prep time for the game. Take the time to consider how they might set things up to favour themselves, what sort of fallbacks and escape plans they might have. Try and anticipate the players, their spells and powers, what they’re likely to do and what precautions the BBEG is likely to take. Right down to the choice of henchmen to pair off against each adventurer to the best effect (EG: Spell resistant creatures to attack spellcasters).
Make a note of the plans and the triggers that will set off the BBEG’s adaptation and keep them in mind. BBEGs don’t fight fair, and just that outlook can make a big different to an encounter.
Cheating
There’s no way you can prepare for everything, but a superintelligent BBEG certainly can. So what you can do is wait for the players to enact their scheme, and then have the villain have the perfect counter because they anticipated that.
To give it a little structure and to make it a little more fair, give the BBEG the opportunity to make an Intelligence Save (in D&D terms) to have a contingency you didn’t think of, but the villain did. Each time they make the save to counter something, increase the DC by 5. When they fail they’re out of plans.
If you want to make a realistic sort of encounter table for a wilderness (or indeed a dungeon) there’s a neat little rule about biomass you can follow.
Basically, you need to create a pyramid, where each level is 10 times the amount of the level above it.
Apex Predators
Other Predators/Large Prey
Smaller Prey
Baseline Food
10 times is a basic rule of thumb, you can measure it by weight (mass) if you have those statistics, or by size.
Let’s abstract it and call it ‘size units’, with each one being about the size of a ‘Medium creature’ in D&D terms. Each scale up or down in D&D can be approximately four times the size (doubling each axis).
So, to survive with enough prey, a LARGE red Dragon would need 10 LARGE prey animals.
So for every LARGE red dragon we need 10 LARGE bison.
Those bison need 100 5×5 squares of grass to feed upon, save that foliage probably isn’t going to fill the whole square, so let’s multiply that by 5 to reckon on wild grasses on average 1ft high. So that’s 1 dragon and 10 bison in an area of grass approximately 2500ft on each side. That’s about a half mile.
‘Grass’ doesn’t really count as an encounter, so an encounter table might consist of a d12 with 1: Dragon, 2-12 Bison, but only a 1/6 chance of encountering anything interesting each half-mile covered.
But you’re not just going to have dragons and bison in a plains environment. You can do the same working with other predators and prey and have multiple tables of possible encounters, with a dice used to differentiate between them.
For a dungeon example:
A Mimic is a medium creature. It’s going to need the equivalent of 10 medium prey creatures inhabiting the dungeon, in order to survive.
Let’s put some goblins in the dungeon, and they’re what ends up – mostly – as the mimic’s prey. Goblins and albino lizards. Goblins are small (4 times as many needed), and lizards are tiny (16 times as many needed. That’s 80 lizards and 20 goblins to sustain the mimic.
The lizards and goblins are going to need a mix of vegetation and insects ten times as big as 100 medium creatures.
Let’s give the goblins a mushroom farm, plagued by pests, taking up 50 medium creatures (giant fungus) with a couple of shrieker fungus to act as an alarm. That’s a nice room for our dungeon too, The remaining 50 is taken up by 250 ‘spaces’ of slimy walls, moss, rotting material and squirming bugs – and otherwise empty.
Dungeons don’t have to be realistic of course, and many of these creatures aren’t going to wander (in many cases because they get eaten by mimics), but following realism can help the creative process.
Trust is in extremely short supply across nerd media, but let’s try and limit it to gaming.
There are lots of remakes, reimaginings, properties old and new being brought to the gaming sphere by various companies, but there’s not a lot of trust from the fans that these companies will do it justice.
There’s also not a great deal of trust, or maturity, between players, including games masters. It’s even decreasing at our own tables.
This might seem counterintuitive, especially when conventions and stores are implementing ‘safety tools’, when these are also pushed in game books themselves as well. Companies are even running their material past ‘sensitivity’ readers and doing all they can to not offend one particular segment of the market.
Problem being, it’s not a particularly big segment, and it’s one whose actions and demands negatively impact the hobby for people outside their clique.
I’ve banged on about safety tools enough, but TL;DR they don’t make any difference (Adam K), they create a sense of entitlement and abuse (UKGE) and they negatively impact RP and creativity. Similarly con policies have gotten tighter, to the point where they can be restrictive and censorious (Dragonmeet, though they’ve somewhat fixed that now). All these attempts to earn and maintain trust have had the opposite effect, creating a culture of comfort and victimisation, rather than one of creativity and adventure, of experiencing the ‘other’.
The broader lack of trust is more widely seen in the recent Masters of the Universe reboot, or more infamously with The Last Jedi. In gaming it has been seen in the reboot of Kult, the sanitisation of Howard in the Conan RPG by Modiphius, the absurd stance around FATE of Cthulhu, the de-fanging of Ravenloft and so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes…
Publishers can’t be trusted to treat a property with respect, or to allow it to be different. Some players no longer seem to be able to tell the difference between writing villains or being them. A segment of gamers seem to think that anything transgressive, surprising or negative (a downward story beat) is some sort of gross violation of their mental health.
Much vaunted tolerance and wokness disappears instantly, at the cost of more effective art or difficult subjects.
It’s not just grognards getting pissed off and losing trust, it’s not just conservatives. People don’t object to the gutting of Conan because they’re sexist or racist, they object because it’s no longer what it claims to be after you’ve sanitised it.
Diversity doesn’t even every contributor comes from a rainbow, at least not meaningfully. It comes from a range of ideas, approaches and topics. Many of which might even be challenging. That’s the diversity worth having. Not this ironically homogeneous pablum.
There’s a saying that the medium is the message, which is a slight overstatement, but one with a great deal of truth to it. The form in which information is conveyed affects both the message itself, and the way in which it is percieved.
Take a book, for example. A book can be incredibly thick, incredibly long, be packed with small text and we can dip in and out of it as much as we want and take our time with it. If you translate that book into a film, you have to stay within a certain runtime, even if you turn it into a trilogy it will have to be made in three similarly long chunks. In a similar way, a short book can end up stretched to fill the amount of time needed for one or more movies.
DVRs have enabled people to watch films in a way more like the consumption of books. People can skip around, or go through things frame by frame to pick up on hints, clues, fanservice and references in a way they never could before.
RPGs have often been compared to oral tradition, sitting around a hearth and telling stories in a small group, sharing heritage and myth and creating a common – small – culture.
RPGs aren’t really that, they’re interactive story creation, not story telling. Even more than with computer games, normal forms of analysis fail, whether they’re normal literary analytical techniques or inherently subjective and biased critical analyses.
RPGs are made up of the text of the boos, the rules in the books, interpretations thereof, on the fly rulings, the storyline the GM has in mind, the storyline the players have in mind and the intersection of all of these. Increasingly in more modern times we also have increased amounts of online play, which affects the way games are played and how they’re presented (maps, tokens, built-in systems and options). Additionally we now have games as performative, where it’s not just the players who are the audience, but there is also a passive audience.
There’s always been a gaming community, in the sense of ‘people with a common interest’, but every table, every group was its own subculture. With enhanced communication and shared experience online the sense of a, singular ‘community’ has become stronger. This isn’t necessarily good, it has damaged the sense of a plurality, a community of communities, and has led to many people trying to impose their own, personal community values on the broader community, and making assumptions about the other sub communities. Insulting, judgemental ones, even revising history to reframe games as something bad, something ‘unsafe’, that needs ‘fixing’.
We lose something when there’s a single, stifling culture. Whatever its values are. We lose something more, we’ve lost something more, when subcultures no longer have room to breathe. People take it personally when you crush them, crush the things they enjoy and reframe them – unjustly – as villains.
This has been enabled my the media changing. The rise of social media and the emergence of this ‘broadcast’ version of roleplaying, a ‘community’ that is more singular and ruthlessly enforced. We can’t change it back, so what can we do to re-emphasise the more accepting and open historical version of RPGs? The broad church, where the game was more important than anything else?
I don’t know, honestly. The Indie Scene would seem to be the way to do it, but it tends to just create a ghetto with its own stifling culture, whether that be the OSR or the old Indie scene that is now afflicting the mainstream.
Evolve or die, but evolution and change just isn’t that predictable.
I run an online, streamed D&D game (and cyberpunk on occasion) for a gaggle of porn people.
This usually illicits one of several reactions:
Horror.
Piqued interest.
Smirking.
Jealousy.
Arglebarglesexualexploitationmisogyny
My train of thought when there are suddenly boobs.
There’s not a lot to say about it really. It has some unique challenges and some unique rewards. It’s nice to be able to paid to run games, certainly, and there are also plenty of minge fringe benefits. It’s creatively challenging, to run an ongoing game with an adult theme, and there is tension between the performance and the game – not to mention the interruptions for more serious ‘porn time’.
That said, I have zero regrets and, honestly, I’m just treating it like virtually any other game I run. Taking it seriously, trying to show the real nature of RPGs without too much polish, unlike something like critical role. Tangents, improvised rules, mistakes, warts and all.
We have fun, we have a great game world we’ve created, and if blood rushes away from my brain for some reason and stops me being able to run an effective game, well, we can chalk that up to ‘genital derpies’.
Still, whether you’re there for the bewbs or there for the game, I think we make something worthwhile, and I’m proud as heck to be a part of it.
Starting small seems to be a lost art in a lot of modern games. We no longer seem to get the same rags-to-riches stories with adventurers, who faced distinctly horrible peril to gain in experience, skill and powerful items.
Instead we have narrative games – where you start competent and where character progress is limited and de-emphasised, or nominally old style games, where their ‘problems’ have been compensated for in newer editions. Even a first level character in 5e Dungeons and Dragons is a force to be reckoned with, and a lot less fragile than characters used to be.
Now, I’m not entirely in the ‘old skool’ camp, capricious and random (undeserved) character death isn’t so much my bag, but there is an undeniable payoff to struggling, to losing characters, to earning power and magical items or honing a character’s skill over time. To doing that, rather than having an easy time with everything handed to you from the get go.
Starting small also gives you the ability to build up a gaming world around you as you go along, to keep the lore and history manageable – even in a pre-existing settings – because you don’t need to know everything all at once.
Starting small and low-level lets you encounter things you can’t outright beat, forces you to consider tactics – and even to countenance retreat in the face of overwhelming odds, or numbers. It lets you build character relationships trough play, and invests you in your character’s survival, with the real threat of losing it.
Starting small is also a good way to build encounters.
A simple goblin raid?
Why are they raiding? Where did they come from? Who is the leader and why?
Maybe they’re hungry. They come from a cave complex in the foothills not far away. They’ve been sent as scouts by a bigger bad who is masterminding things, and sending lesser monsters out to test local defences. Maybe their leader is a just a slightly bigger, nastier goblin who bullies the rest. Bullying all the way down.
If you kill them all, maybe something nastier comes next time.
If some escape from you, they can carry word back about who and what is out there.
A simple, single encounter can inspire and suggest all manner of other possibilities, from a single seed of an idea.
Postmortem Studios 