The sky is grey and the construction crew is digging up the street outside. Amália Rodrigues is singing sad songs in Portuguese about love, pain, and the sea. I don’t want to start working so I write a blog post.
This is a reply to Frotz Self’s blog post:
The root of my dissatisfaction comes from what I feel are the implicit acceptance of concepts that I abhor. It seems kind of silly, but I think that like many prevailing attitudes that are harmful to the development of our societies are so ingrained as to be invisible without a lot of introspection, games also have these harmful prevailing concepts or assumptions. – Dilemma
Modules have had a strange impact on the hobby. They are easy to write, but hard to get right. If many people play them, as happens when they are published by the same people publishing successful rules, they turn into touch stones. They are what people talk about, because they are an experience people have in common. And many years later, they are what people remember about the game because they talk about them, they analyse them, they recreate them, they go back to them. Some modules seem to be forever, it seems.
But many people don’t play like that. When we played “Das Schwarze Auge” I used three or four modules, and then we never used the, again. When we switched to AD&D, I never used modules. When I started running M20 many years later, I didn’t use modules.
Then, for D&D 3.5, I started buying 60 volumes of Paizo adventure paths and plenty of other modules of theirs. It tool me a while to realize that I didn’t actually like them.
So here’s what I want to tease out: what is it about modules that influences the game in ways I do not like, and what happens instead in my sandbox games?
First and foremost, the problem for modules is information delivery.
If modules contain a lot of information, the problem is how to organise it. Will you provide plot information in the introduction, the overview, the chapter opening, the room where the hint is found, the non-player character that’s kicking it off? And as a reader, where do you look for the information you know must be there, while you’re sitting at the table? And even if all the information is easy to find, the problem is that there is so much of it. Everything is defined. Later material depends on earlier material, which is why you don’t improvise as much as you would. You need to read it all, and that takes a long time, too. And you need to learn it, which takes more time. Are you going to read it twice? Will you take a marker to the material? That takes me back to university days, reading books, marking them up, transcribing them to index cards, writing summaries. That’s a lot of work.
If modules contain very little information, they need to focus on what cannot be quickly improvised at the table. Often, that means they contain a lot of “encounters”: interesting set pieces, rooms, monsters, traps, forcing players to engage with the system, roll for initiative, fight that fight, and if you’re lucky, engage with the environment while you do it, engage with each other, enjoying that synergy of D&D classes that rely on each other.
The solution I have settled upon is that I don’t use modules, or if I do, I only use them for inspiration. To make sure I only use them for inspiration and not to tie me down I only read text superficially, I only look at the maps, I only look at the pictures of non-player characters and monsters, I pay a little bit more attention when I like what I see, and then I write down some notes and that’s it. So the beginning of “Red Hand of Doom” turns into an ambush by 12 hobgoblins and 2 hell hounds, plus a HD 4+1 hobgoblin (“bladebearer”) and a cleric with three or four spells; the scene at the tower turns into 4 hobgoblins, 2 wargs and 2 goblins (“warg riders”), a minotaur, a manticore, and a sorcerer with three or four spells. Plus some names of people and places, warnings, and letters. A lot of pages get condensed into a tiny bit of text.
When I don’t use modules, things take less time. Figuring out that some hobgoblins and hell hounds would make a nice ambush, and that some hobgoblins, warg riders and a manticore would make a nice ruined tower encounter doesn’t take that much effort. And since I’m writing it up myself, I can just put it on a page in my notebook, roll up some treasure, and I’m done. I’ll improvise the rest.
Another problem modules and settings have is map density.
If the map covers a small area, then it’s easy to wander off the map unless you all agree to limit yourself to that one island, or you all end up in that small magical realm. Then again, this reduces the scope of the setting to that of an adventure. Basically, the locations are tied together by a plot because the plot dictates what sort of locations are on the map. It’s a “point crawl” – there may be some red herrings but all the locations contribute to a small number of plots that this setting “supports”.
If the map covers a large area – a sandbox with 300 or 400 locations – then it is often the case that many of these hexes have no description, or small, apparently random content. So what do you do: do you add your own content to 90% of the hexes? If so, do you keep in line with the 10% that came with the product, or do you ignore the existing style, or the existing content?
What I like to do is to generate content for every single hex. Back when I did it by hand, I’d just look at the surrounding hexes and fill in a dozen hexes. That would last me for at least a session and I would add more as needed. These days I fire up Hex Describe and use the tables I have written to generate a mini-setting. This ensures a lot of lairs, treasure, tribes, settlements, monsters – everything is already there. To further improve it, I’ll add rivalries and alliances between neighbours. Sometimes these also enter the game through improvisation, for sure. Since I know that all of these settlements were generated by random tables, I know that none of them have plot protection. I am free to change them without having to scan the entire book for references that need updating.
But these sorts of goods and services don’t just exist. Someone had to make them, and there was a reason they came to be. Thinking of why these goods and services came to be, and the consequence of their existence, is what I mean about worldbuilding. – Worldbuilding in My Own Way, by Frotz Self
Worldbuilding in My Own Way, by Frotz Self
Lately, as I’m reading the opening chapters of David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5000 Years” I’m starting to see that the societies I’m thinking of when I think of my games would probably not use a lot of coin. But then again, I also don’t want to play “Wolf-Packs & Winter Snow” – a tribe in the stone age. So what’s the right trade-off, here? I think money as the means to pay for an army works for me. The faraway dukes and kings force the subjects of their recent acquisitions to pay taxes in coin, these are used to pay the soldiers, and they pay the locals in coin. A circle of subjugation.
Now, that’s a tricky business. I don’t want to emphasise these injustices, but I do like to put them out there. Slavery exists, sometimes. Occupation happens, sometimes. The rich are corrupt. The powerful are sociopaths. If the players look for it, they’ll find it. And if they do, they have the choice to turn this into their goal for the campaign: shake of the yoke, free those slaves, right those wrongs. This is how I like to have my politics in the game: things are wrong, but you can fix them.
I also happen to think that the doing good is its own intrinsic reward. If you are rewarded with gold for good deeds, the entire thing is corrupted because taking money to do a deed is the easy way. Evil wants a payment. Good needs the struggle.
Let me come back to the question of goods and services not existing. What I like to do in a campaign is to start at zero: no high-level non-player characters exist in the area; no spell-casting services are available, not for any price. Or, if I generate a mini-setting randomly using Hex Describe, the power non-player characters have their own unique spell selection and it’s rare for them to have the spells the players need. Finding and befriending the right people is part of the game. In any case, we can play multiple campaigns in this setting, and any time player characters retire they turn into non-player characters in the setting. The new high-level player characters are former player characters. That’s what I like best.
Similarly, my mapping algorithm generates trails between all the settlements in a way. Any further trails, or any roads between bigger settlements, need to be built and paid for by the player characters, using treasure found. This is what eats up all the treasure: infrastructure. Castles, inns, bath houses, roads, bridges: all of them carry a price tag and this is how treasure is spent, experience points are gained, and the setting is transformed.
It’s hard to imagine how that would work in a game based on modules.
Modules also have the unfortunate tendency to emphasise combat. The rules talk a lot about combat. Gaining levels enables characters to take on bigger foes. The rules talk about, the rewards facilitate it. Of course people would like to fight! Well. It depends. They do if they stand a chance. The key is to make fights unfair. At low levels, a single hit can kill them. Spells run out quickly. As soon as characters can withstand a few hits, add monsters with save or die effects: losing levels, paralysis; later instant death and petrification… all of these make sure fights are short and very dangerous. Survival depends no on knowing how to fight (tactics, character abilities) but on when to fight (strategy). And strategy is independent of character level: what friends to bring, what traps to set, how to split the enemy forces, how to rob them of their support, to deal and to threaten, all these things don’t depend on levels. They’re also hard to put into a module, or at least they’re not currently in vogue. Perhaps those old modules for character levels 20 to 100 had this sort of game play.
Around level 3 and definitely starting with level 5, there’s less dice rolling in my games. That also means that there is less actual fighting. It��s about planning, talking, negotiating, travelling, and those things just aren’t resolved using many die rolls, or they’re all resolved using a simple fortune roll, reaction roll, or something like that.
In my Classic Traveller game, the campaign started like that and just kept on going like that. Combat was so dangerous that after the first round, people had already dropped on all sides. It was random. To simply engage was bad strategy. So the players talked and dealed and travelled. All the weapon skills went unused for long stretches, and there are no social skills to speak of. We rolled Streetwise a few times, and that was it. The rest was just talking with each other. Sure, the thread of combat was always there. The rebels, the criminals, law enforcement, they were all armed. But it was rare for people to pull out their guns and start shooting.
This, too, is hard to put into modules.
So what we get instead is modules that refer to the rules a lot: for disarming traps, for ambushing enemies, for the fight, and we get scenarios with a lot of traps, ambushes, and fights. And if you play without modules, perhaps those things aren’t all that important, unless you learned how to play with modules and you think that’s how one is supposed to play the game. Or worse: you learned how to play with “tournament” modules without realising what you had done. And don’t get me started on the need to seel a “level appropriate” adventure, meaning that you need a way to quantify the danger using a “challenge rating”, which in turn requires the idea of a “level appropriate” power level (and magic items to match). I see it as a corrupting influence that keeps spreading, and I want no part in it. It makes the game harder to run and more boring to play.
I’d like to hear how you play the game, if you’re not using modules. Does it look like endless Keep on the Borderlands and Against the Giants? How does it play?
Links:
2013-03-01 Old School Red Hand of Doom
Hex Describe (pick Alpine mini-setting to get started)
#Old School #RPG #Sandbox
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Lance Duncan writes:
… any game session I run will be better if I do a half-assed completely improv session, than if I do a module which I just skimmed through or read completely only once. And sure I can do a well-run session using a module, but at that point it must be practically memorized, and in the time it takes to get to know the module to that degree I could have prepared so much more material myself. – On Modules
– Alex 2021-12-22 00:28 UTC
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Valinard writes:
The linear story and the treadmill lend themselves well to commodification. A game where the narrative emerges organically from structural mechanics, from a sprawling network of relationships, factions, domains, some run by PCs, or a narrative created by the DM skilfully weaving together the threads of half a dozen lovingly written backstories doesn’t require a lot of external content. – Commodification & the Treadmill
Commodification & the Treadmill
– Alex 2022-06-05 11:48 UTC