Last week, I gave a brief overview of a home-brew dungeon crawl I ran some months ago (working name: Free Delving).
First off, I was entirely remiss when I failed to mention The Landshut Rules and Free Kriegsspiel Revolution as inspiration to just get on with it and make something. I'm not sure that I'd ever fully embrace FKR, but it certainly provides a decent MVP-like reference point.
With that out of the way, here are some thoughts about those sessions.
Things that worked well…
- Playbooks—too well, in fact. (More on that in a minute.)
- Yes/No/And/But oracular dice with advantage/disadvantage as applicable.
- Looney Pyramids to indicate light sources (e.g., torches), yellow d4 to track oil for lanterns.
- NPC "business cards" with colour-coded pawns.
Things that didn't work so well…
- PbtA "moves"—common and playbook-specific—were too much cognitive load, even FKR'd.
- Electric Bastionland's "you share an enormous debt" felt surprisingly like railroading the PCs and wasn't actually necessary—they were sufficiently motivated without it.
- Choosing adventuring gear during character generation, especially when the players aren't yet familiar with the sorts of challenges they might face during the adventure, was something of a speed bump and also felt a little unfair. Fortunately, they decided to take a ten-foot pole.
- Theatre-of-the-mind positioning was difficult to track, especially with so many NPCs involved.
- Free-form combat.
Things I wanted to try but didn't get the chance…
- Player meta-currency (i.e., bennies, fate points, hero coins).
- Event timers, not counting the tracking of fuel for lanterns.
- PC help/interrupt moves, which rely on inter-character bonds.
Playbooks
Fanned out on the table, these evocative objects got the players' immediate attention, helping them become invested in their characters and giving them some idea of the world they inhabit.
However, their existence also strongly implied that the PCs had "plot armour" and that they wouldn't be susceptible to sudden death. This is at odds with OSR-style play and not the feeling I was aiming for, even though in retrospect it seems an obvious side-effect. As such, I'm not certain that playbooks are the way forward after all, at least not for the kind of game I'm interested in conducting.
Oracular dice
Looking back, I could have been much more consistent in using dice to answer questions about the world. If I don't actually know the answer—it isn't written down and I don't have a strong idea of what the "facts" are in a given situation—then I should be humble enough to let the dice decide. Two incidents involving the Thief, whose "job" is to find unorthodox solutions to problems, highlighted this for me.
In the scholar's tomb, there were some "indecipherable glyphs" on the wall. The Thief wanted to try reading them, but because they were "indecipherable" I simply said that she couldn't. It felt like a let-down and, in hindsight, there was information to be gained even if they were unreadable. If I'd allowed her to roll for it and the result was "yes" then she might realise that they were obvious gibberish or at least get the feeling that something was "off" about the false tomb. If the result was "no" then I still might have suggested, for example, that she take some tracings to show to one of her contacts, thereby creating a potentially interesting new thread.
Later, in the atrium with the pool (pictured above), she tried to set the "liquorice-smelling oily water" on fire by throwing a lit torch into it. At the time, I said "plop, you just wasted a torch" but I didn't actually know that the liquid wasn't flammable. Instead, I should have rolled to find out. If it had turned out that it was, this could have been an interesting cue for the "mummy claws" (severed cyborg arms in my case) to emerge from the flaming pool. If not, then at least it would have felt more nothing ventured nothing gained.
In future, I plan to be more self-disciplined in referring to the oracular dice when I don't actually know the answer. Doing so is both fairer to the players and ultimately more interesting for me as the ref.
Maps and miniatures
In the first session, we struggled to keep track of where all the PCs, NPCs and other creatures were located during certain action sequences, despite sketching out the environment on paper. (I have the sneaking suspicion this actually saved the Bard from an untimely demise at the stone hammer trap.) When we wrapped things up, the Thief's player suggested that maps and markers of some sort might help.
For the second session, I created custom paper minis for the three main PCs with one-inch steel washers for the bases—I'm rather proud of the results, actually—and used Ludo pawns for the NPCs and coloured dice for other creatures/objects. I also printed out sections of the maps for TotSK, roughly one room per A4 sheet of paper. At first, this seemed to work well and took the ambiguity out of positioning. However, there were at least two problems.
First, the scale of the printed maps was too small for minis with one-inch bases. Each 10-foot square should have been two inches to a side rather than one, since two characters should be able to stand and fight side-by-side within that space. As it was, things were a bit cramped, which somewhat distorted the visualisation.
Second, the playing space was small and things were made worse by the need to cover portions of the map outside the PCs' line of sight. As the party advanced through the upper tomb, I scrambled to find the right pieces of paper and set them up in a timely fashion. The added delay sapped the momentum and I sensed that the second session didn't "flow" quite as well as the first.
I think the lesson is that whilst maps and minis can be useful tools, they should be used sparingly. In future, I plan to use theatre-of-the-mind and sketches by default, placing minis loosely just to give a general idea of position, and switch to maps where the situation demands it, e.g., during combat where positioning may be critical.
Speaking of which…
Combat
I thought that the Yes/No/And/But die rolls might be enough to adjudicate combat in a flexible way, perhaps in combination with some pared-back "battle moves" from Apocalypse World, but the results were not what I expected. The key problem, I think, was that my choice of questions tended to bias the outcome of the fight in the players' favour. Subconsciously, I was holding back from allowing the monsters the possibility of inflicting deadly harm.
My goal in choosing simple mechanics for combat was, in part, to de-emphasise violence as a primary means of problem-solving. However, the effect was the opposite of what I intended: combat was overly easy for the players, which in turn makes it an easy default choice.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that clear, codified mechanics for what happens when violence occurs and/or characters suffer harm are an essential part of this sort of game. This neither glamourises violence nor makes a spectacle of it—on the contrary, when players know unambiguously how combat is handled, and the likely outcome, they are incentivised to avoid it.
But that's a topic for another day.
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