When I first started playing roleplaying games, way back in elementary school, I used to play RPGs all the time. As I got older, of course, gaming became a bit scarcer. There were times when I didn’t have anyone to play with at all. But even when I did, it became tougher to coordinate schedules; tougher to find the free time even in my own schedule.

For the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to have a regular gaming group. But regular for us has usually meant averaging about two sessions a month. And it’s not just that I was in a completely different ballpark from the days when we would play every lunch hour… it’s that I was playing a completely different sport.

And I figured that was just the way things had to be. As we get older, after all, time becomes more precious.

But over the past year or so, I’ve realized that while I’ll probably never get back to that “every lunch hour” ballpark, it actually is possible to start playing the same sport again.

THE WAY WE PLAY

The ballpark/sport analogy is actually rather apt because what I’ve realized is that my schedule wasn’t the only thing that’s changed over the years. I’ve fundamentally changed the way I play roleplaying games. And while I did it for all the right reasons, I’m pretty sure now that I threw the baby out with the bathwater.

To understand what I mean, let me cast your thoughts back to that time when I used to game all the time: Lunch hour (or any other snatch of free time) would roll around and we’d pull out our D&D manuals and our character sheets. One of us would volunteer to DM and that guy would grab whatever dungeon he was currently working on (or he had just read through) and we would start playing. Eventually lunch hour would come to an end and we’d pack up our things. And the next time we played, we’d either continue exploring that same dungeon or we’d start exploring some other dungeon (possibly with a completely different DM). Maybe we’d use the same characters; maybe we’d have rolled up a new character or feel in the mood to play somebody else from our stable. Whatever worked, we did it.

Compare and contrast with the way my regular gaming group plays: At the beginning of each month, I send out an e-mail listing the best days that I’m free this month for gaming. I wait for everybody to reply back. Hopefully a couple of those days will be free for all of us, but if they don’t then I’ll go to the second best dates and start wrangling. Eventually we’ll have a couple of days scheduled. But if a conflict comes up, then we’ll need to cancel that session.

Other groups may have a larger tolerance for handling one or two missing PCs, but I don’t think I’m in error when I say that this is the way most people play RPGs now.

The important difference here is not our modern, adult, crowded schedules: It’s the fact that our games have become rigid affairs. The default mode of play is to gather a group of 5 or 6 people who plan to all get together on a regular or semi-regular basis for 10 or 20 or more 4-8 hour sessions.

THE COMMITMENT

The sheer level of commitment created by the now standard form of play is, in my opinion, huge.

For example, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft describes itself as “a mini-campaign lasting around fifteen to twenty sessions, or roughly five months of real time (assuming you play weekly)”.

This is not atypical. When you agree to join a typical campaign, you’re making a minimum commitment of 80 hours or more spread over months or years of your life. Dropping out or missing frequent sessions is usually considered bad form, since losing a player (and, therefore, their character) can be incredibly disruptive to the tightly woven continuity of the modern campaign.

This is the root of the “I can’t play because it’s too hard to find time for a roleplaying game” problem that many gamers face today. But there’s also another side to this problem: It becomes incredibly difficult to ask new players to join your game because of the huge commitment of time and focus you’re asking from them.

And this is particularly true if you’re talking about players who are completely new to roleplaying games because there’s really no way to judge whether they’ll like the game enough to want to commit a significant portion of their lives to it for the next year or more.

PLAYING CATCH

Let me put this another way. Imagine that you had never heard of baseball before and someone said, “Hey, wanna join a baseball team?”

“What’s that involve?” you ask.

“Well, we practice for 3 hours every Wednesday evening and we’ll have a game every Saturday afternoon for the next 7 months.”

You’d have to be really, really curious about baseball in order to take that guy up on his offer, right?

But, of course, that’s not how people get involved in baseball. Most people start playing baseball when somebody says, “Hey, wanna play catch?” And playing catch is easy. You pick up a ball and you throw it. And if you get bored, you put the ball down and you do something else. Some people, of course, will never pick that ball up again. But lots of people will find they like throwing the ball around, and some of those people will eventually find themselves agreeing to spend 300 hours every year participating in amateur baseball leagues.

Where’s the equivalent of “let’s play catch” in roleplaying games?

Well, it turns out I had the secret of it way back in elementary school. And then I forgot about it. I became myopically focused on how awesome a baseball league could be, and forgot that sometimes just throwing a ball back and forth can be fun, too. (And a lot easier to pull off.)

THE MEGADUNGEON

I rediscovered how to play catch in the Caverns of Thracia.

The Caverns of Thracia are an old school megadungeon designed by Jennell Jaquays. I’ve recounted some of the sessions I’ve run within its hallowed halls. I’ve also used it as the primary example of how to xander your dungeons. But it’s also taught me how the classic megadungeon campaign structure can be used to open up your game table and triple or quadruple your gaming.

The basic megadungeon campaign structure is pretty simple:

1. There’s a huge dungeon. So big that it can’t be cleared out in one or two or even a dozen gaming sessions. In fact, it’s so huge that the parts you’ve already cleared out will probably start repopulating with new monsters before you finish exploring the rest of it.

2. There’s a nearby “gold rush” town where PCs can form adventuring parties to explore the megadungeon.

3. At the end of each session, everybody heads back to town. At the start of the next session, a new adventuring party forms and heads back to the dungeon.

The last point is the the crucial one here: The megadungeon campaign structure fundamentally lends itself to variable playing groups. Who showed up for this week’s game? Which characters do they want to play? That’s your adventuring party for the week. Go!

This structure means that you don’t have to worry about wrangling schedules. Feel like playing on Thursday? Send out an e-mail saying, “We’re playing on Thursday. Who wants to come?”

It’s also incredibly easy to invite new players to join the game. Even if they only play the one time, they can have a great time without causing any disruption to “continuity”. In fact, if you can couple the megadungeon campaign structure to a fast-and-simple character creation system, it can be as easy to play a pick-up roleplaying game as it is pull a boardgame off the shelf.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Since putting a megadungeon back into my gaming repertory, I’ve radically increased the amount of roleplaying I’m doing. In fact, I can play now pretty much whenever I want to: I’ve got a mailing list of 30 players that I can send my invites out to, and from that list I’m almost guaranteed to get at least 3 or 4 people on any given night.

In the past year, I’ve also been able to play with a half dozen players completely new to roleplaying games and another half dozen players who hadn’t played in half a decade or more. (This is a large part of the reason why I have 30+ players on my mailing list now.)

With that being said, open table campaign structures are not the be-all and end-all of gaming. (Any more than catch is the be-all and end-all of playing baseball.) I’m still running my regular campaign, which has now reached its 60th session. And there’s a ton of depth, detail, and complexity in that dedicated campaign which is impossible to achieve in the loose style of the open table.

But, on the other hand, when I needed a replacement player for my regular campaign, I had developed a “stable” of players at my open table that made it easy to find a replacement.

The megadungeon, of course, is not the only form of play which can support this kind of open table. But it can be surprisingly hard, actually, to find the right mix of “I can GM this any time” and “the players can disengage at any time without making it difficult to pick things up again with a completely different group of players next week”. For example, for the past several months I’ve been trying to figure out how to build an open table campaign structure for Shadowrun… and pretty much failing. (A series of one-shots can work in a pinch, but they require a lot more prep work on the part of the GM and require a very precise sense of exactly how much gaming you can get done in a single evening.)

Another open table technique from my “golden age” of gaming was the use of multiple DMs all supporting the same stable of characters. In those elementary school games I used to be able to play the same cleric in Matt’s campaign, then take it over to Nick’s campaign, run it through Steve’s campaign, and then bring it back to Matt’s campaign without any problem. Haven’t really tried that lately, but I can’t see any reason why it can’t work now.

ADDITIONAL READING FOR OPEN TABLES
Open Table Manifesto
(Re-)Running the Megadungeon
Treasure Maps & The Unknown: Goals in the Megadungeon
Keep on the Borderlands: Factions in the Dungeon
The School of Turin: An Open Gaming Table in the Real World
Escaping the Dungeon

As I mentioned a couple days ago, the fun I’ve been having with the Castle Ravenloft board game has recently inspired me to read (or re-read) I6 Ravenloft and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. This has put me in the rather interesting position of comparing all three. And this has, in turn, forced me to ask a simple question:

Are we really this stupid?

Let me expand on that a little bit.

The Castle Ravenloft boardgame is a dungeon-crawler without a Dungeon Master. Out of necessity, therefore, it is forced to provide a “program” for each monster in the game. When the monster is activated, it simply follows the program and takes the actions described. It’s a relatively simple mechanic which provides some interesting strategic wrinkles. (Since you know what the monster will do when presented with a given set of stimuli, you can exert some degree of “control” over them in a semi-prescient fashion.)

That’s all fine. But let me give you a sampling of the text from the boardgame:

Place the Start tile on the table. Place each Hero on a square adjacent to the stairway on the Start Tile. When a Hero reveals the Laboratory […] place Klak on the bone pile.

(…)

If the Skeleton is adjacent to a Hero, it attacks that Hero with a scimitar. If the Skeleton is within 1 tile of a Hero, it moves adjacent to the closest Hero and attacks that Hero with a charging slice. Otherwise, the Skeleton moves 1 tile toward the closest hero.

And here’s some text from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (pg. 32):

Have the players place their figures at the end of the tile, with the single circle closest to them and the other two farther away. Place a figure for Balam in the close circle.

(…)

On its turn, each zombie moves from its starting position toward the closest enemy it can attack. A zombie behind a door opens it as part of its first move action.

Both carcass eaters attack the closest PCs. If an adjacent character drops to -1 hit points or fewer for any reason, a carcass eater uses its rend fallen ability.

Is there a reason why we’re treating modern Dungeon Masters as if they were only barely more competent than an inanimate piece of cardboard?

Are we really this stupid?

ISOLATED ENCOUNTERS

Expedition to Castle Ravenloft was one of the earliest adventures to use the “delve format”. But this isn’t just a matter of growing pains: This kind of “so prepackaged you can just turn off your brain” method of designing encounters has remained a staple of WotC’s adventure design right up through today.

Conceptually, there’s one thing I really love about the delve format: Putting everything you need to run an encounter area in the description of the encounter area. That just makes good sense. But in practice, the delve format suffers from two problems:

First, it artificially isolates the “encounter”. This tends to fatally sabotage the entire point of the delve format to begin with.

For example, take encounter E6 in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft:

This encounter takes place the first time the PCs enter this crossroads from any direction.

Tactical Encounter: E6: Ghoul Foray on page 38.

Development: These ghouls are not part of the necromantic infection, but an independent pack of undead taking advantage of the chaos. After venturing out of the cemetery (area E8), the ghouls are moving from house to house in search of valuables and still-living creatures. They are upset by the quick conversion of zombie victims to yet more zombies, but they are so hungry that they consume even the rotting undead. They lust for fresh corpses.

That information is, in my opinion, rather crucial for running the encounter. Attempting to isolate a tactical encounter from the context in which that tactical encounter occurs, in my opinion, results in a very choppy, ineffective style of play.

But even if you moved that information into the tactical encounter itself, the problem still wouldn’t be solved because encounters shouldn’t be taking place in a physical vacuum. For example, encounter E6 here takes place just one block away from Barovia’s church, which is encounter E7. What happens if the battle with the ghouls goes poorly and the PCs decide to retreat towards the church? Now I’m forced to go back to the adventure key, reorient the encounter within the context of the other geographical features around it, and then flip to the delve format presentation of E7 in yet another section of the book.

Rather than making it easier for me to find all the information I need, you’ve got me flipping back and forth through the module just trying to orient myself.

(Most of these problems were solved by Keep on the Shadowfell, which simply keyed the adventure to the tactical encounters. But after Keep on the Shadowfell, Wizards went right back to doing it the broken way they’d been doing it before.)

THE PERFECT ENCOUNTER

The other problem with the delve format, in my opinion, is that it tends to encourage the unproductive false idol of the “perfect encounter”. (Partly because it isolates the encounter and partly because the format inherently forces all encounters to be designed to the same specs.) Each of these encounters is designed to be “perfectly balanced” with monsters who have been pre-selected, pre-positioned, and pre-programmed.

This tends to limit flexibility. You’ve invested a lot of preparation into carefully arranging the “perfect encounter” involving goblin bombadiers and guard drakes scurrying about a half-excavated room:

But if you have those goblin bombadiers respond to a cry for reinforcements from the goblins just down the hall, you’re throwing all of that preparation away.

Plus, when you’ve put this much effort into prepping an encounter, you can’t just let the PCs avoid it.

And, to make a long story short, that’s how you end up with adventure modules which are just long, linear strings of isolated, prepackaged encounters.

ENCOUNTERS ON THE FLY

The counter-argument, of course, is that encounters shouldn’t be boring.

I couldn’t agree more.

But I don’t think we need to try so hard. I think when the original Ravenloft module reads:

The maid, Helga, is a vampire who will attack the PCs only when an opportunity to do so without having to fight the entire party presents itself. She also attacks if commanded to do so by Strahd. Helga will join the party, if asked to. She claims to be the daughter of a villager, cruelly forced into service of the Strahd.

We don’t need a pregenerated tactical map showing where Helga is standing in room K32 with accompanying text telling the DM to have the players position their miniatures within 10 feet of the door when it opens in order to have an interesting encounter.

I think publishers can put a little more trust in DMs (and, as DMs, we can put a little more trust in ourselves). So that when we ask the question–

Are we really this stupid?

–the answer can be, “No. We’re not.”

And maybe that means the goblin bombadiers don’t lay an ambush in their excavated chamber. Maybe it means that the PCs end up barricading themselves in that chamber. Or the goblins all retreat into that chamber. Or the PCs return to find animated goblin zombies have been stationed in that chamber as guards.

Once you remove the shackles of believing that the “perfect encounter” can be predesigned, you’ll be tapping into the strength of the RPG medium in creating encounters which are perfect for your gaming group because they were created by your gaming group.

As a roleplaying game, 4th Edition sure makes a great boardgame.

… Zing!

But in all seriousness, I’ve been looking forward to getting my grubby paws on a copy of the new Castle Ravenloft game for awhile now. For the better part of two decades now, I’ve been looking for a boardgame that could be played when you were in the mood for a little dungeon-crawling but didn’t have anyone to DM.

(Over the years I’ve dabbled with dungeon-crawling boardgames that require DMs, but I’ve pretty much sworn off them at this point. Descent is a decent game, for example, but I can’t imagine a scenario when I would ever play it: Since it requires a DM, I might as well just grab my copy of Dungeons & Dragons off the shelf. The full-fledged RPG is a richer and more rewarding experience in almost every way, and with the speed of OD&D character creation you can actually get the game set-up and start playing much quicker, too.)

Most recently, Munchkin Quest looked like it might fill that slot for me. It had some pacing issues, but after fixing those problems the game saw a couple months of intense use. But after that, the game started collecitng dust: The competitive aspect meant it still wasn’t quite scratching that dungeon-crawling itch. And it was too long (3-5 hours) given the relative shallowness of its gameplay. Way too many sessions ended with all of us wishing that the game would just end already.

Castle Ravenloft is pretty much at the opposite end of that spectrum: The prepackaged adventure scenarios all feel lightning fast and can easily be completed in 60 minutes or less. I’ve played it more than a dozen times already (having gotten it only a week ago). The real test, of course, will be whether or not the game endures after the first flush of excitement. But for the moment I wanted to talk about some of my first impressions.

RANDOM DUNGEON, BUT SHALLOW EXPLORATION

TACTICS, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW THEM

Although Castle Ravenloft offers a setup superficially similar to 4th Edition, this can actually be quite deceptive. As a result, I’ve seen quite a few reviews complain that Castle Ravenloft doesn’t have any tactical depth.

This is not, strictly speaking, true: Castle Ravenloft does have tactical depth; it’s just a tactical depth that looks absolutely nothing like 4th Edition’s tactics.

The primary tactical crux of Castle Ravenloft lies in the fact that heroes move by spaces but monsters by tile. (For example, a typical hero might move 5 spaces on their turn. A typical monster, on the other hand, will move 1 or 2 tiles.) Thus, the core tactics of the game revolve around managing the placement of monsters and heroes around the tile borders.

These basic tactics are complicated by the necessity to manage the monster’s control sequences; the panoply of variable hero abilities; and the random crises generated by a fair-sized chunk of the game’s encounter cards.

(The game may also suffer in the opinion of some because it’s very easy to brute-force your way through the early, introductory scenarios. It’s thus possible to completely ignore the tactics and strategy of the game and still pull out early victories, leading one to the false conclusion that the game has no strategy. In that respect it’s kind of the inverse of Settlers of Catan — a game which you think has a strategy when you first start playing it and then eventually realize is dominated completely by dumb luck.)

HORRIFIC RULEBOOK

The Castle Ravenloft rulebook is quite possibly the worst I’ve ever read. It’s poorly organized, fails to explain basic terminology, establishes other terminology which it then proceeds to use inconsistently, and then compounds all of these problems with an atrocious (lack of) organization. And given the relative simplicity of the rules, the experience of the designers, and the fact that the game is built on the back of a fairly well-established ruleset… well, it’s completely inexcusable.

It’s also disappointing that WotC failed to leverage their existing stock of high quality fantasy art to spice up the cards. The lack is particularly felt, in my opinion, when it comes to the treasure cards.

MONSTERS & SCENARIOS

The argument could certainly be made that it’s worth buying the game just for the 42 miniatures that come with it. I don’t think I’d disagree: Amazon is selling the game for $50 right now, so the price per mini comes out to about $1.20. Since that includes a Huge Dracolich, I’m pretty happy with it. (And that’s ignoring the general utility of the interlocking dungeon tiles.)

Laying that aside, I do wish the game had a bit more variety when it came to monsters. There are basically ten varieties of “grunt” in the game (zombie, skeleton, blazing skeleton, wraith, ghoul, wolf, kobold, spider, rat swarm, gargoyle) and you’ll see a lot of them all. While the varied scenarios are keeping much of the game fresh for me right now, the monsters have all become rather hum-drum.

Fortunately, this is an aspect of the game which is surprisingly easy to customize. Although game balance probably requires that you keep 10 different types of creature for each adventure, swapping them out for equally challenging monsters isn’t a problem. There’s a ton of fan-created monsters already available, and there are cheap D&D mini singles available all over the place.

Speaking of scenarios, the game comes with 12 (including two solo scenarios) and 2 more have been released through Wizard’s website. The scenarios are varied (often completely changing your strategic approach to the game) and have been easily supporting multiple play-thrus for me. For example, in this scenario:

The heroes start play having been randomly teleported to different corners of the dungeon. You have to reunite with each other and shut down a demonic summoning while the villain of the piece continues to assault the heroes with teleportetic assaults.

(In the image above you can see where we’ve set off an Alarm trap — which summons additional monsters each round — in a section of the dungeon we were subsequently teleported out of. One of the (blue) heroes has been abandoned in a dead end corridor. And both of the heroes are dreading the possibility that the villain is going to teleport them back up to where all those monsters are waiting to devour them.)

But I do wish there were more of them. When I compare the relatively anemic number of scenarios offered by Castle Ravenloft to the dozens of scenarios offered by Betrayal at House on the Hill (another game I received this Christmas which features variable scenarios of roughly equivalent complexity), I do feel this was an opportunity missed by the designers.

FINAL WORD (FOR NOW)

Castle Ravenloft is fun.

I’m enjoying it a lot, and I keep roping in more and more people who all seem to agree.

It’s not perfect, but its only egregious flaw (the atrocious rulebook) is relatively easy to overcome.

Having just reviewed my early thoughts on Munchkin Quest, I realize that initial success may not translate into a permanent or even long-term success. But as I write this I’ve already gotten more than a dozen plays out of the game, and I’ve only touched half the scenarios it shipped with. A couple scenarios have already seen 4+ plays. Even if that’s where the game tops out, I’ll still get 40+ plays out of it. That’s pretty good compared to most of the games I own.

Go to Castle Ravenloft: Rulebook Woes

I’ve recently been reading my way through I6 Ravenloft and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Although I haven’t finished the latter, I am so far impressed with the way in which it remains faithful to the original module while expanding the material in interesting ways. (It even includes functional notes for stripping out the extra material in order to return the module to something very close to its original form if a shorter adventure is desired.) I am less impressed with the textual bloat which has become endemic in most modern adventure modules. Much of this text seems to be included in the name of being useful (reminding the DM of basic rules like how trip attacks are adjudicated), but it has the practical effect of making it more difficult to rapidly gloss the truly necessary information at the game table.

But I digress.

What really inspired this little post is the Weird Happenings table on page 15 of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. It’s a nice little table, the first entry of which reads:

The sound of a voice screaming comes from somewhere in the castle; it sounds exactly like one of the PCs.

As I normally do when reading module text, I immediately visualized how I would handle that at the gaming table. It would go something like this:

1. Randomly determine the PC. (Let’s say a ranger named Afrau.)

2. Hand that player a note reading, “Write two sentences on this note and then hand it back to me.”

3. Take the note back.

4. Say, “You suddenly hear the sound of screaming coming from somewhere in the castle. It sounds exactly like Afrau.” (point at Afrau’s player)

In doing this, I would be practicing something that could be called “metagame special effects”. The idea is that I’m using purely metagame activities in order to influence the players’ perceptions of the game world.

In the case of this Weird Happening, I specifically want to create for the players the uncertainty, fear, or paranoia which would be experienced by their characters if they suddenly heard their companion (standing right next to them) screaming from some distant corner of a haunted, vampire-ridden castle.

1. I’m secretly rolling dice without any apparent reason for doing it. This creates uncertainty and curiosity in the players. Why am I doing that? What am I hiding from them? Is something about to happen? What?

2. By exchanging notes with a player, I’m specifically creating the awareness that there is secret knowledge being exchanged. That knowledge could be anything. In this particular case, it’s a bluff. What I’m creating is the legitimate possibility that the character may have been secretly teleported away and replaced with a double or an illusion.

Something happened. Only one of them seems to know what it was. And that character is now both (a) standing calmly beside them and (b) screaming from another part of the castle.

Without creating a legitimate atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty at the game table (however subtle it may be), the scream can be easily dismissed as “flavor text”. Some players may find it “spooky” or “creepy”. But they probably won’t take its deeper threat seriously.

EXTRANEOUS SPOT CHECKS

Another example of metagame special effects is my use of “extraneous Spot checks”. In my games, I will periodically call for Spot checks regardless of whether or not there’s anything interesting to be spotted. Newcomers to my games tend to get paranoid when their high rolls fails: “There must be something. What did we miss?”

Eventually, of course, all of my players eventually figure out that I’m frequently “crying wolf” with these checks. I don’t care. The more experienced heroes may no longer be quite so skittish or paranoid as they jump at imaginary shadows, but the tool is still useful: First, it obscures the metagame knowledge of “he’s called for a Spot check, must be something interesting”. Second, it can be a useful way to passively refocus attention on the game world when extraneous distractions and chitchat have derailed the players.

(I don’t simply make the Spot checks secretly because: (a) I’d rather avoid the hassle of needing to track the PCs Spot modifiers. (b) I’d rather have the players actively involved in that moment rather than passively waiting for me to roll dice. (c) It eliminates any arguments about, “Whaddya mean we got ambushed? Don’t I get a Spot check? Did you remember that I get a +3 versus spotting cyborgs?” (d) I really like the utility of being able to gently refocus attention through applying a game mechanic instead of saying, “Please focus.”)

FOCUS ON THE “HOW”

In short, it’s not just enough to know the “what” you’re trying to communicate; you also need to give some thought to how you’re communicating it.

For example, here’s another Weird Happening from that Ravenloft table:

A random PC hears the soft giggling of a little girl; no one else can hear it.

How would you handle that at as a GM?

One of my long-standing concerns with the D20 system was the skewed probabilities of opposed group checks. For example, consider the example of a PC making a Move Silently check opposed by an NPC’s Listen check where both characters have the same skill modifier. In this scenario, a single PC attempting to sneak past a single NPC has a 50% chance of succeeding.

Compare this to a situation in which 5 PCs are attempting to sneak past 5 NPCs (with, again, all of the characters involved having the same skill modifiers). This effectively becomes a check in which the 5 PCs are rolling 5d20 and keeping the lowest result, while the NPCs trying to detect them are rolling 5d20 and keeping the highest result.

The average roll of 5d20-keep-lowest is 3. The average of 5d20-keep-highest is 17. That 14 point differential means that it’s virtually impossible for a party of characters to sneak past a group of evenly matched opponents. (And even sneaking past a single watchman is difficult as the average party roll of 3 is opposed by an average roll of 10.)

Of course, the odds are actually worse than this: A successful stealth attempt will also usually require a Hide vs. Spot check, so you need to succeed at not one but two checks at these outrageous odds. And this assumes that the PCs all keep their stealth skills maxed out (which in practice they won’t, particularly since it’s so pointless to do so).

The argument can certainly be made that this is realistic in some sense: A large group should have a tougher time sneaking past a sentry than one guy and more eyes means more people who can spot you. But I would argue that the probability skew is large enough that it creates results which are both unrealistic and undesirable.

In practice, the effects of the skew are obvious: Group stealth attempts quickly drop out of the game. When stealth is called for, it takes the form of a sole scout pushing out ahead of the rest of the group. And when the scout becomes too fragile to survive when the check finally fails, stealth stops being a part of the game altogether.

Since I’d prefer stealth to be a potentially viable tactic, a solution is called for.

QUICKIE SOLUTIONS

DISTANCE / DISTRACTION PENALTIES: A guideline that can really help the stealther is the -1 penalty per 10 feet that is supposed to be applied on Listen and Spot checks. Keep about a hundred feet away from the guy trying to spot you and you can quickly cancel out the probability skew of the dice.

Unfortunately, these modifiers become kind of wonky, particularly when it comes to Spot checks. On the open plains, for example, the “maximum distance at which a Spot check for detecting the nearby presence of others can succeed is 6d6 x 40 feet”. The minimum distance of 240 feet, therefore, is supposed to impose a -24 penalty and the maximum distance of 1,440 feet impose a -144 penalty.

I’ve tried a few different ways of fixing these modifiers, but am currently just using an ad hoc sense of what the range of the check is.

TARGET NUMBERS: Instead of making these opposed checks, set a target number for the PC’s skill check of 10 + the NPC’s skill modifier. (This essentially halves the probabilty skew.)

GROUP CHECKS: Make only one check for each group. But what skill modifier to use? Using the average value is cutesy, but impractical at the game table. Using the lowest value still effectively takes group stealth off the table. Using the highest modifier means that everyone except the rogue ignores the stealth skills entirely and also creates issues with determining surprise.

And how big can a group be? One guy with a decent Hide check shouldn’t be able to sneak an army of ten thousand soldiers under the nose of a watchtower, but where do you draw the line?

Maybe you could limit the number of people covered by a check to equal the skill leader’s skill ranks? Or impose a -2 penalty per person in the group?

COMBINE STEALTH / PERCEPTION SKILLS: I’ve been folding Hide/Move Silently into a Stealth skill and Listen/Spot into a single Perception skill intermittently since 2002, so I wasn’t particularly surprised when both Pathfinder and 4th Edition went in the same direction. It cuts down on dice rolls and eliminates the undesireable “need to succeed twice” feature of stealth checks.

This does create some interesting oddities around trying to resolve invisibility, and while I haven’t found the perfectly elegant solution yet, this slight corner case is (in my experience) preferable to the constantly degrading effects of splitting the skills.

Using some combination of these solutions tends to mitigate the problem, but I’ve generally been unsatisfied with the hodgepodge fashion of it all. So taking my unified Stealth and Perception skills in hand, I’ve been looking for a more elegant solution.

GUMSHOE’S PIGGYBACKING

I found the roots of what I think may prove a usable mechanic in the GUMSHOE system:

When a group of characters act in concert to perform a task together, they designate one to take the lead. That character makes a simple test, spending any number of his own pool points toward the task, as usual. All other characters pay 1 point from their relevant pools in order to gain the benefits of the leader’s action. These points are not added to the leader’s die result. For every character who is unable to pay this piggybacking cost, either because he lacks pool points or does not have the ability at all, the Difficulty Number of the attempt increases by 2.

Obviously the point-spending mechanics which underlie the GUMSHOE system can’t be translated directly into the D20 system, but the basic structure of a lead character making a check onto which others could “piggyback” was inspiring.

D20 PIGGYBACKING

When the whole group needs to perform a single task collectively (like sneaking past a guard or using group-climbing techniques to scale a cliff) they can make a piggybacking skill check.

(1) One character takes the lead on the check. This character makes the skill check using their normal skill modifier, just like any other skill check.

(2) Other characters can “piggyback” on the lead character’s check by succeeding on a skill check. The Piggyback DC of the check is equal to half its normal DC. (So if the leader is making a DC 30 check, the other characters must make a DC 15 check to piggyback on the check result.)

(3) The lead character can reduce the Piggyback DC by 1 for every -2 penalty they accept on their check. (They must make this decision before making the check.)

(4) The decision to piggyback on the check must be made before the leader’s check is made.

OPPOSED PIGGYBACKING CHECKS: The DC of the check is set by the lead character’s check. Just like any other piggybacking check, only characters who succeed on the piggybacking check benefit.

(To simplify the resolution, you can start by rolling only the lead characters’ checks. After you’ve determined which lead character succeeded, you can call for the necessary piggybacking checks. Anyone piggybacking on the failed check, of course, will fail no matter what their piggybacking check would have been.)