Something I’ve spent literally years struggling with as a GM is transitioning from one scenario structure to another within a dungeoncrawl.

Let me see if I can clarify that:

I find it really easy to switch scenario structures at the same time that the venue of action is being switched: If the PCs enter the dungeon, we swap to dungeoncrawling. If they seek out a specific character in a tavern we roleplay that conversation; if they exit the tavern and then start hitting the streets looking for information we handle that a different way.

After a few false starts as a neophyte GM, I also eventually found it relatively easy to switch scenario structures within most venues: Renting rooms at a local tavern is handled at one level of abstraction, but when they wake up in the middle of the night to find the tavern haunted by ghosts we switch to a different structure.

These days, this sort of thing is pretty much automatic for me. But swapping structures in the dungeon still routinely thwarts me.

The type of structure I’m talking about is mainly the one found in adventures like Night Below or Thunderspire Labyrinth: A large, underground complex in which there are isolated pockets of “interest” which are designed to be run as a room-by-room crawl.

For awhile, I thought it was the difficulty of presenting meaningful navigation choices to the players in these environments. But once I came to think of them as “underground wildernesses”, this wasn’t a problem any more.

No, the primary problem was the transition from the room-by-room crawl to the underground wilderness (or vice versa): When the PCs enter a room with three exits and two of them lead to another room but the third leads to the more abstract labyrinths of the wider complex.

I mean, it’s relatively easy to just do it. But it’s more difficult to do it effectively.

Partly it’s the difficulty of finding a smooth narrative description of the shift. Mostly, however, it’s the damage to roleplaying and immersion caused by the imposition of the metagaming structure on the decision-making of the characters.

See, in most other circumstances it’s either the passage of time, the changing of circumstance, or the decision of the characters to do something different which smoothly transitions us from one game structure to another: But not so in this case. Circumstances remain unchanged and the PCs are making the exact same type of decision they’ve been making for the past twenty rooms… but suddenly the scenario structure is changing.

And, like I say, this can be handled pretty simply by saying to the players “we’re switching structures now” (or some equivalent thereof). But that has consequences on the decisions they’re making. (As a simple example, if I didn’t tell them “all the rooms beyond this point are empty, so we’re going to be switching to underworld exploration” then they might waste time searching those empty areas… which might have an impact when they return to the occupied rooms.)

In a lot of ways, this is all a mountain out of a molehill because it just doesn’t come up that often. But it’s something that my recent discussion of using multiple scenario structures has brought to mind.

Recently, though, I had an interesting discovery in my Ptolus campaign. Part of the vast megadungeons beneath that city are immense labyrinths built by the warlord Ghul. Ghul’s Labyrinth is filled with a number of bluesteel doors which are extremely difficult to bypass (being resistant to knock and lacking any normal lock to pick).

And these doors have proven to be ideal transition points between dungeon scenario structures because they’re natural transition points within the game world: Not only do they require a significant decision on the part of the PCs in order to pass through them, but they were actually built by Ghul to logically divide his demesne.

All of this, of course, ties back into the larger issues of making sure that your players’ decision within a scenario structure are associated with the decisions of their characters: Something I not only aesthetically prefer, but which is absolutely necessary if the scenario structure is actually unknown to the players.

As a brief tangent to our discussion of game structures, how could we go about plugging the “hole” in Traveller’s scenario structure?

Since Traveller’s starmaps are hex-based, we could start by rifling through the pockets of the hexcrawl and snagging the concept of “when the PCs enter the hex, trigger the hex’s keyed content”. But what we’ll quickly realize is that there’s a reason Traveller doesn’t do this already: Planets are really, really big.

If we think of a dungeon room or a wilderness hex as a “container” which holds keyed content, it’s pretty easy to recognize that a planet-sized container completely dwarfs the scale of any single encounter or location. Take an encounter and stick it in a dungeon room; it fills the room. Take the same encounter and put it in a wilderness hex; it gets a little bit lonely but there’s still enough to quench our thirst. Stick it on a planet, on the other hand, and the glass still looks completely empty.

And this isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. It impacts the GM’s ability to logically transition the scene: If the PCs are traveling through a wilderness, it’s relatively easy to find a transition from the macro-level of wilderness travel to the micro-level of the keyed encounter. You just say something like, “As you pass through the forest, you see a bunch of orcs.” But this method doesn’t work quite as well if the PCs are approaching a planet.

Perhaps more importantly, this also affects the ability for players to make meaningful decisions within the context of the scenario structure. If the GM of a hexcrawl says, “You see a castle perched upon a rocky crag of blackened stone.” The players can say, “Okay, that looks scary. I think we’ll just skirt it as far to the west as possible.” And they can do that. But if they were to say, in this hypothetical game structure for spacecrawling, “Okay, I don’t want to deal with this settlement of murderous cannibals. Let’s lift-off and land somewhere else on the planet.” Suddenly they’ve exited the purview of the scenario structure.

One logical leap from this conclusion is that we simply need to key more content to the planet. Maybe, for example, we could just map the entire planet and key it as a hexcrawl: Thus, just like a hexcrawl contains dungeoncrawls, our spacecrawl would contain hexcrawls.

But hexmapping and keying an entire planet in any sort of meaningful or interesting detail? That’s an absurd amount of work. It’s obviously completely impractical.

HAILING FREQUENCIES OPEN

So maybe, instead of that, we let our logic take us the other way. Maybe we accept our limitations and implement a structure where each planet is keyed with a “hail”: When an intrepid band of interstellar scouts enters orbit, they’ll receive the hail.

This basically handles the problem of scale by embracing the old pulp SF trope of “every planet is a village”. The result is less Traveller: Firefly and more Traveller: Star Trek. But as long as the players are onboard with the fact that they have to either engage with Oxymyx and Krako or bypass the planet (i.e., they can’t just decide to head over to the other side of the planet and talk to a different set of gangsters), you’ll probably be in pretty good shape.

Unfortunately, the structure starts to breakdown once you’re dealing with civilized planets (instead of exploration). But, of course, this is also true for traditional hexcrawls (which provide no guidance for PCs once they pass through the gates of Greyhawk).

ABOARD THE KING ARTHUR

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to start thinking this way about Traveller. Back in 1981, FASA produced Action Aboard: Adventures on the King Richard. In addition to detailing the ISCV King Richard and providing two sample adventures, this module included a dozen or so “Outline Adventures”, all of which constitute primitive scenario structures into which any number of specific scenarios could be poured. For example, the Hijack:

I. HIJACK

The forcible capture of the vessel and its contents may come from either inside or outside the ship.

A) Internal

A hijack from inside assumes that the hijackers and their equipment are all aboard at the beginning of the scenario.

1) Players as crew – the players may or may not be issued weapons from the ship’s locker, depending upon the level of surprise.

2) Players as passengers – The players will not be given weapons and, unless they have social standing A-F, they will be abandoned at any habitable planet (roll 1-4 on  one die) or shot, and/or dumped into a vacuum (roll 5 or 6 on one die). If they have high social ranking, they will be ransomed.

And so forth.

Primitive? Yes. Still incomplete? Sure. But you can see how this begins to provide a basic structure into which a few stats can be poured to give you something that can be used in play. In combination with the other “Outline Adventures”, Action Aboard begins to give you enough structure to run an entire campaign based around the voyages of the ISCV King Arthur.

As I mentioned awhile back, the Russian spammers figured out my math captcha. The intensity has died down again in the past couple months, but I’m still scanning through a couple dozen spam messages per day that slip past the captcha and hit the Akismet spam filter.

Usually it’s pretty easy to spot the false-positives and restore comments that should be seen by the world at large, largely because the spam comments are always complete non sequiturs that have nothing to do with anything I’ve ever talked about here on the Alexandrian. But a couple days ago I ran into this:

On the topic of AC being movement based, etbolusaly NOT!! While Dex does affect AC, AC is not dependent on Dex. AC is based on the ability of the armor to prevent damage to the wearer; which is why plate is better than chain is better than leather is better than clothing In the real world in medieval europe, clothing was a layer of wool on a layer of linen, leather was boiled (hardened) leather on a padded jacket (basically a moving blanket), chain was riveted iron rings on a padded jacket and plate was 1/32 to 1/16 inch think steel plate with small ring chain at the joints all on a padded jacket.Sheilds ranged from all but disposable Viking duelling sheilds (see the duel in 13th Warrior) to seriously stout wooden rounds and tear drops (kites much better for fighting from horseback, but very useful on foot too) to proper steel traditional shapes in late periods.Your dexterity might make you move a bit more fluid in your armor, but it did little for the actual defensive ability of the armor. If you get hit with a mace, the blunt force impact can still break bones in lessor armors (chain, leather, cloth). If you are stabbed, you are almost definately getting hurt in lessor armors (chain, leather, cloth). If you get knocked down in plate, you aren’t just jumping back onto your feet and returning the attack, you might even need help to stand again.Watch some YouTube videos of SCA combat to get a decent idea of what D&D combat would be like.

A little on the ranty side, but my first impression was that this was a legitimate comment. But then I noticed that it had been posted on the page for “Opening Your Game Table“… which has absolutely nothing to do with armor class. A little digging around then confirmed that the user name was linking back to a known spam domain.

So, apparently, the spam bots are playing RPGs now. Which, frankly, I’d be fine with: They just need to stop posting random comments on my website and start running some games on Google+. Ya know, contribute something to the community.

I was thinking about writing a full and proper review of the Star Trek: New Frontier novels by Peter David. It was not necessarily going to be a review full of sunshine and happy thoughts (the prose and plotting are both sloppy; the characters are frequently off-model; the exposition is clumsy and redundant; the continuity is inconsistent and contradictory), but I was certainly enjoying them as pulp fiction.

But having just finished the fifth book (Martyr) I’m afraid I’ve hit the straw that broke my back:

Robin Lefler’s mother was kidnapped by an alien race called the Momidiums? Her MOM was kidnapped by the MOM-idiums?

No. Sorry. After a book filled with clumsy puns, you have officially crossed the line from “eye-rolling” to “Cheap Xanth Knock-Off”. And I want no part of it.

If you look at the history of mechanical design for roleplaying games, I think there’s a very clear arc:

(1) You start with games that have very specific game structure that has been placed into a wider “world simulation”. (The influence from wargames is clear here.)

(2) The level of detail in the world simulation begins to grow, but is still largely contained to clear game structures. (Basically, the desire to simulate reality found within the existing wargames community began to expand as the focus of the games expanded beyond the battlefield.)

(3) Generic games appear. In seeking to provide universal rules, however, these games actually end up stripping out the vestigial game structures that still existed in RPGs. (Reading contemporary documents, it seems pretty clear that people at the time weren’t really conscious of the game structures in RPGs. In fact, most gamers still aren’t.)

(4) Between the universal focus and the removal of game structures, the desire for simulation metastasizes. Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, every game that came out tried to graft on more and more detail, accuracy, and specificity. (For example, look at the first edition of Paranoia: Hilarious, evocative game universe. But the rule system is completely obsessed with detailed simulation.)

(5) Around the mid-’80s, however, you start to see the backlash. A growing body of games are being designed with deliberately simpler rules because other games have gotten too complex (this is even talked about in the rulebooks themselves). (I generally point to West End Games as an early instigator for this with Ghostbusters and Star Wars, but that may just be a perspective bias on my part.)

(6) The first wave of these “rules lighter” games generally just scaled back the rules while maintaining the same focus on world simulation, but by the early ’90s you start seeing some designers really embrace the rules-light movement by looking at radically alternative approaches. (Amber Diceless Roleplaying and other diceless games are a really noticeable part of this.)

The fallout from this, IMO and IME, was that the entire spectrum of RPG system design was basically open for business: We’d explored rules heavy, bounced back to rules light (now featuring unified mechanics), and now people were basically experimenting all over the place.

If there was a major trendline in the ’90s it was the boom of splatbook-universes (Torg, World of Darkness, Legend of the 5 Rings, Deadlands, Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Fading Suns, AD&D’s campaign worlds, and a ton of wannabes). As you hit the late ’90s, these product lines all burn out their supplement treadmills. Shortly thereafter you get the D20 boom and the STG revolution.