One-Page Dungeon Entry: Yesterday's Dungeon ... Tomorrow

After rejecting a number of time travel gimmicks for this year's One-Page Dungeon Contest entry, I stuck with the best kind of time travel ... the kind we are all doing, all the time. So, this dungeon has notes for a first play at beginner level, then for a second play at later levels when things have changed. It's also interactive, so that decisions players make -- to smash down a door, open sealed tombs, kill or leave an NPC -- have an impact on the higher-level profile of the dungeon.

I mainly wanted to make this adventure useful in a campaign, the kind that gets up to fifth level or so. Or, you can play it in a convention session, devoting 2-3 hours to each "half" and switching to higher level pre-generated characters midway through.

Click to enlarge.

Finally, here are some rough, old-school generic stats for the monsters I have jankily doodled herein.

"NOW"
Grimalkins: HD 1-1, AC 11 [8] +2 against 1 attack/round, MV 12, AT spear d6+1
Grimalkin Shaman: HD 2-1, AC 11 [8] +2 against 1 attack/round, MV 12, AT holy stick d6, spells: cure/cause light wounds, command, spiritual hammer
Beak Dog: HD 2, AC 12 [7]. MV 15, AT beak d6
Satyr: HD 4, AC 12 [7], MV 12, AT weapon
Psqualladir: HD 8+8, AC 18 [1], MV 15, AT bite d8+poison, DF +1 weapon to hit, immune to fire and lightning, half damage from cold and acid, 50% magic resistance, powers as described

"LATER"
Ogre: HD 4+1, AC 14 [5], MV 12, AT weapon +3
Half-Demon Ogre Fire Wizard: HD 6+3, AC 16 [3], MV 12, AT weapon +3, spells: burning hands (x2), magic missile, affect normal fires, flaming sphere (x3), fireball, protection from fire, DF half damage from fire and non-magic weapons, magic resistance 20%
Leucrotta: HD 6+1, AC 15 [4], MV 18, AT bite 3d6, back kick d6, voice imitation
Cray-leeches: HD 1+2, AC 14 [5], MV 12, AT 2 pincers (d4, fall on a 4) and mouth (d4, stays attached doing d4 blood drain/round, open wound still bleeds for 1 hp/round)
Wraith: HD 5+3, AC 15 [4], MV 24, AT hug d6 and 1 level energy drain (permanent or not), DF undead immunities, immune to cold, +1 weapon to hit
Evil Satyr Priest: HD 6, AC 12 [7], MV 12, AT spear d6+ d6 fire + 1, spells: cause light wounds (x2) (fingers become centipede pincers), sanctuary, cause fear, hold person, know alignment, feign death, cause blindness.
Flaming Skeleton: HD 3, AC 13 [6], MV 12, AT 2x flaming punches d6 +1, wrestle for d6 fire damage/round, DF mindless, immune to fire and piercing weapons, half damage from slashing weapons and lightning

One Page Contest Entry: Gripped in the Hands of Time

I had doubts, this year. Didn't think I was going to do the One Page Dungeon Contest. I had some vague idea about a dungeon with a time travel gimmick, but nothing definite. Besides, all my game design time was going to writing rooms in volume II of my megadungeon. Getting nigh on 50 of them.

Then I came to the part in my map where I had a little suite of 4 rooms, earmarked for something secluded and weird. I cast some randomness on it and one feature - a clock - came up. And I started getting ideas. And pretty soon I realized those ideas would fit on one page, too...

The title describes each of the four rooms in a different way, but it was only an afterthought.My initial impulse was to fill in the blanks in the classic roleplaying madlib: _____ of the ______ ______. Then I saw an adventure that broke that trend and the title came to me.

It's conceived as a module, an abandoned hideout that can be dropped into any setting. The fight is probably going to need high levels and the puzzles are definitely going to need sharp minds. What I like is the way the different elements can interact in an emergent way without having to write it all out with "if-then" prolixity. The diary tells of the time sacrifices which gives you a clue what to do at the bas-relief. Bari-ritu's gifts can help you with the clock lock if you are stuck in there.

The Latin, as translated: "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT."

Bari-Ritu is played by the Burney Relief.

Enjoy! (link to pdf)

Decision Under Pressure As Player Skill

Something I've never been really tough on as a game-master is the enforcement of realistic decision limits on the players. In the middle of a combat they are usually free to take as long as they like to debate strategy, positioning, and maneuvers. Occasionally, especially when taken by surprise, I will try to hustle them along.

The same is true when talking to an NPC, although here the players do a little more self-policing as they realize they can't really be having these kinds of discussions in earshot. A simple way to deal with this is to have a single spokesperson for the party step up, and have any objections dealt with by sleeve-tugging, whispering, or in extreme cases breaking off for a huddle - with all of this noted by the NPC.

But back to the combat example. The hardass argument states that doing the correct thing quickly is part of player skill, and the chaos of battle is only realistic. There's plenty of time to think over strategy while others are stating their actions. If players want to work on their playbook together, they have to find time before the encounter, through reconnaissance or contingency planning. Once made, the plan has to be carried out quickly and without much detailed communication. Only this way can the real tension of combat even be approached.

The softer touch recognizes that there's a gulf between the players and their battle-hardened characters - that the minutes of dithering are a way to encapsulate combat-honed reflexes and canny decisions that players can't be expected to simulate, any more than they should simulate feats of strength or lockpicking.

Certainly I've found that my table style doesn't really flow smoothly with pre-declared actions, even though they can help deal with odd paradoxes of "I-go-you-go" combat, like the time the players busted through a door, lost initiative and couldn't rush all the main fighters through before the enemy closed. In general, anything that requires tight discipline or tracking is a drag; keeping track of the turn sequence is my bare minimum, and even that can be taxing. So even though it seems that imposing a decision time limit might speed up play, subjectively it seems that it would make play more effortful and less fluid.

My feelings are still mixed. It seems like a time limit would increase the "fun" in combat in the sense of unpredictable things happening, but decrease "fun" in the sense of being the masters of your characters' survival. It would increase the reward of combat in the sense that you would feel great accomplishment for doing something right or carrying out a complicated play, but decrease the reward in the sense that you didn't feel you got to play the game at your own pace. Perhaps it's telling that I far prefer turn-based to real-time computer games. Anyway, there things stand, so I'm not going to be changing things in the near future, unless I run a game for a set of experienced, hardcore gamers who would find it a suitable challenge.

Four Clocks: Real, Play, Game, Leveling

Time passes in four ways when you're playing a D&D-based campaign. Real time marches on; in that real time, you are playing at a certain pace and length of sessions; on top of that, you're keeping track of in-game time, or Gary's no friend of yours; and your players' characters are leveling at a certain rate, which determines how fast they can progress to new challenges.

Not quite what I meant ..

Here's how my currently longest running, Band of Iron campaign is tracking in terms of the three clocks:

Real time: About 13 months
Play time: About 35 roughly 4-hour sessions
Game time: About 3 months
Leveling time: Near or at Level 5

While I think the ratio of play to leveling time under my 52 Pages rules is just about right, and the ratio of play to real time is about as good as we can make it, game time is progressing awfully fast. Spring has barely turned to summer in the game world. But in the space of 3 months the party has visited 6 adventure sites, had two extended wilderness treks, dealt with business and pleasure in 5 different towns and cities, and gone from zeroes to heroes.

AD&D did a better job, as I recall, of pacing out the action in game-time. My characters only have to train one day per level they're gaining. AD&D had a system which nobody ever followed strictly, in which players got graded on a 1 (best)-4 (worst) scale for how they'd played their characters, and then had to take that amount of weeks times their level to train up, paying a brutal 1500 gp a week. The costs may have been impossible, but leaving them aside, the long passage of time between adventures lent a certain grace to the campaign. Also, the different experience amounts to advance meant it was rare that two characters trained at the same time, so that's more time waiting, visiting home villages while your companions level up and so on. In the high school campaign I played in, long travel times also advanced the calendar, especially combined with the requirement to visit fixed sites for training or plot reasons.

Better.

And yet ... A stately pace is realistic and satisfying, perhaps, to the world builder, but it's also anathema to a certain kind of scenario where there's time pressure, or things get scarier under the players' noses. In that case, players can end up frustrated, able to level but unable to spare a month or two while a villain still remains at large or the world slides into danger.

It is possible to just arbitrarily key time to adventures, as in some of the suggestions on this thread - take a year in between scenarios, and so on, making sure all the level advancement happens when adventures are not on. I'm not entirely happy with this, for the same reason I prefer experience points to session-based leveling. I like players to have an in-world reason their characters are passing  time, rather than just enforcing artificial time-outs.

Perhaps a good compromise is to have players get their hit points as soon as they level - representing the development of their instinct - but get other level-related stuff only after training. I could also stand to examine some of the other features of the system, such as prophets being able to heal up a seriously injured character who doesn't get a terrible death and dismemberment roll at zero hit points or less. Maybe those seriously injured guys need to spend some time in bed, prophet or no prophet. The "Pow! Healed! Walk again!" does get a little disconcerting when a character, by all rights and rules, ought to be spending some time in the penalty box, if not outright dead.

Any other thoughts on how to handle the long-term passage of time?

How to Remember Time in the Dungeon

By Haku, via b3ta.net

In running dungeon adventures, one thing that has always eluded me is the careful in-game timekeeping needed to judge things like torches burning down, explorers getting hungry, or wandering monster checks. It's something that's easily forgotten in the heat and fun of the moment. So that makes me suspect that draining precious attention to do a careful, minute-by-minute accounting of time would be both doomed to fail, and detract from enjoyment. This is the same consideration that led me to drop pre-announced actions from my game.

What's needed, I thought, is an insight like James Raggi's list-based encumbrance (see also the Alexandrian's Stone system). Take something players do anyway - like write down what stuff they have - and simplify the bookkeeping to follow directly from that. To be exact:

1. As with list-based encumbrance, switch to more natural units: from "minutes" to "scenes." Exploring 1 room is a scene, unless it's a huge cathedral-like space. A combat is a scene. Walking carefully down more than about 50' of corridor is a scene. Taking extra time to do something like skin a lizard or eat lunch is a scene. Each scene is roughly - very roughly - about 5 minutes. That means a 30 minute torch lasts 6 scenes, a 1 hour flask of lantern oil lasts 12, and you roll for wandering monsters every 2 or 3 or 6 scenes depending on your rules.

2. To keep track of time - this works best if you have more than 4 or so at the table - pass some kind of visible token around. Start it at a random player and say it passes to the left whenever you change scene. If you forget a scene change, just do it retrospectively. I tried this in the first test of the One Page system today with eight players at table, one of whom volunteered her toy ninja, and it worked like a charm. It's easy to remember how many times it has gone around already, and to say things like "The current torch will go out when the ninja gets around to Connor."

3. As a bonus, I found myself designating the player with the ninja token as a kind of democratic caller. This meant that the temporary token-bearer had the responsibility to propose motions on decisions, like which way to go, and put it to a vote. This tended to cure the paralysis that eight at table can cause. In combat, because I use side-based initiative, I would start with the token-bearer and ask for actions clockwise. That worked pretty well too. Oh, and finally, whoever has the token gets to roll the initiative die.

This rule looks like a keeper in my games, especially for large dungeon crawl sessions.