Usage Dice for Random Encounters?

 I like the mechanics of Usage Dice but they seem to be used primarily for consumables which I tend to just sell by days worth (4 days food, 4 days worth of torches) and otherwise forget about. 

For those that don't know the Usage Dice works it goes like this. An item, usually a consumable has a die number U12 would be a 1d12, U10 would be 1d10. If you roll 1-2 your Usage Die drops one die, so down to U10, then U8, U6, U4. Naturally the odds of rolling a 1-2 increase as the size of the die drops. You roll 1-2 on 1d4 and your item is depleted. Usage Die are typically used for torches, food, and arrows but I think the idea can be expanded far more than that.

In my previous post on Usage Dice I mentioned a few alternate uses but it just occurred to me that the Usage Dice would make a nice mechanic for Random Encounters.

Random Encounters

Create a random encounters table with 8 entries,  another one with 6 slightly tougher entries, a third one with 4 tough entries, and the last is the boss encounter in the area. So when you enter the area you roll 1d8 anytime you would normally roll for random encounters. If you roll 1-2 you get an encounter but also switch to the 1d6 table next time. By having multiple tables you also limit the number of repeat encounters. For a big area you could have the tables escalate only on a 1, or you could have a table with 10 or 12 entries.

I haven't  played this out, it should work but might lead to to much bookkeeping.

Wizards is Hiring... and not on the Coast

Lead Writer (Skeleton Key) job

WIZARDS OF THE COASTAUSTIN, TX

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JOB DESCRIPTION

At Wizards of the Coast, we connect people around the world through play and imagination. From our genre defining games like Magic: The Gathering® and Dungeons & Dragons® to our growing multiverse, we continue to innovate and build new ways to foster friendship and connection. That's where you come in!

Skeleton Key is a new game development studio and division of Wizards of the Coast. We are a group of industry veterans who are guided by the belief that empowering our teams and providing the proper time, tools, and support we can foster a creative culture where everyone can do their best work.

Our new studio will be located in Austin, TX, and we are looking for a passionate and dedicated Lead Writer to join us. We are open to on-site, hybrid, and full-time remote working options for potential candidates.

Reporting to the Creative Director, you will play a meaningful role on the project by helping to concept, build, set the vision, and implement the story for our critical path as well as cinematic narrative moments. The ideal candidate has proven experience leading teams and building engaging worlds, characters, and stories in other AAA titles. You will need the ability to take high level direction and story concepts and translate them into complete stories, scene descriptions, and dialogue.

What You'll Do:

• Work with the Creative Director to own and drive the main crit path story, side stories, cinematic scripts, and character dialogue for the project.
• Build requirements for core writing/editing, VO, and other narrative systems for narrative production pipelines.
• Collaborate with other teams, and ensure the appropriate partners are involved and informed throughout development.
• Act as a strong quality advocate for the team, crafting compelling narrative moments, environmental story-telling, world-building, character development, and help other team members achieve the same high quality.
• Lead and develop a narrative team including one additional writer and editor, inspiring and empowering them to do great work.
• Build and maintain documentation for all owned features, script, story, and scenes.
• Help evangelize the game's vision to the rest of the team at large.
• Provide constructive feedback to team members.
• Remain current with industry trends and competitor games.

What You'll Bring:

• 5+ years experience having published writing work in video games with a focus on narrative and character.
• Clear and concise creative writing skills.
• Familiarity with first-person games.
• Ability to translate story concepts into cohesive and engaging stories.
• Willingness to take high-level direction and feedback.
• Ability to deliver both original stories and engaging adaptations of existing IP.
• Passion for and experience with the science-fiction and fantasy genres.
• Strong communication abilities with outstanding written English skill.
• Please provide links to YouTube/Vimeo videos highlighting 3-5 scenes or moments from your published game projects that highlight your work.

We are an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer

The above is intended to describe the general content of and the requirements for satisfactory performance in this position. It is not to be construed as an exhaustive statement of the duties, responsibilities, or requirements of the position.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you are selected to move forward in our application process and need to request an accommodation, please let your recruiter or coordinator know. 

In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation range for this role. The range listed is just one component of Wizards of the Coast's total compensation package for employees. Employees may also be eligible for annual and long-term incentives. In addition, Wizards of the Coast provides a variety of benefits to employees. Here's a look at what your benefits package may include: Medical, Dental & Vision Insurance, Paid Vacation Time & Holidays, Generous 401(k) match, Paid Parental Leave, Volunteer Program, Employee Giving & Matching Gifts Programs, Tuition Reimbursement, Product Discounts, and more. 

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$88,960 - $146,400 USD

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Wizards of the Coast

Wizards of the Coast, headquartered in Renton, WA, is a company that develops games for customers and the public. Wizards of the Coast is a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. They have a team of developers and other staff that is highly professional and experienced. They have a culture of diversity and inclusion in the workforce. Employees working at the organization are offered various benefits that include employee health programs, parental leaves, generous time off programs, free and discounted products, and various other benefits. Wizards of the Coast is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate based on age, sex, caste, creed, religion, nationality, social background, or any other basis. Currently, vacancies are available for the Art manager, Lead technical artist, associate gameplay engineer, and various other vacancies.

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Medium

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$100M to $500M

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Austin, TX, 78701

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Niche Manufacturers, Hobby / Games Retailers

Founded

1999

CEO

Christian Cocks

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New D&D movie Trailer dropped

If I was making a D&D movie I'd have everyone with vaguely English accents. All except one guy who speaks in modern American English complete with modern slang and metaphors. The others would occasionally role their eyes or tell him to get serious and then he'd have a vaguely English accent for a sentence or two before lapsing into modern speech again.

I would also have one actor play/voice every NPC the way Deerstalker Pictures does. This guy is the DM of course.

The thing is based on a game after all, not on a book. So treat it like a game.

Usage Dice

I've been fascinated off and on by the Black Hack. I appreciate the simplicity of the system, I'm fascinated by the idea of player facing rolls in combat, but haven't really played it yet. Anyway this little post is about the Usage Dice. 

For those that don't know the Usage Dice works it goes like this. An item, usually a consumable has a die number U12 would be a 1d12, U10 would be 1d10. If you roll 1-2 your Usage Die drops one die, so down to U10, then U8, U6, U4. Naturally the odds of rolling a 1-2 increase as the size of the die drops. You roll 1-2 on 1d4 and your item is depleted. Usage Die are typically used for torches, food, and arrows but I think the idea can be expanded far more than that.

Reputation

A new character might start with U20. Nobody has heard of them. Whenever they complete an adventure they roll the usage die. Then construct reaction tables to use the Usage Die. I don't roll reaction for the big bad or lieutenants but different NPC and lackeys, why not. In this system you either have a group Usage Die or use the lowest Usage Die in the band. The reaction table provides randomness. So construct the table so that low results indicate lackeys running away or surrendering and high results indicate the NPC And lackeys have no idea and assume the characters are just another group of push-overs to bully and threaten.

So the idea is that the mechanic ensures the reaction of NPCs is random but different as the character or party becomes more and more (in)famous. When/if the players journey a good distance the Usage Die can go up again.

Weapon Damage

Weapon damage is easy. The usage of the weapons equals the damage die of the weapon. Roll a 1-2 on your attack and the usage die and damage die both drop to the next die. So Aleena uses a weapon that does 1d10 damage but rolls a 1 on her to hit roll. That drops her weapon to U8 and does 1d8 damage now. If she rolls a 1-2 again it'll do 1d6 damage. She better get the thing fixed or have a backup. This provides a slow ticking warning about the weapon quality.

Once that weapon breaks Aleena will scrounging weapons which might not start at full value.

Ship Damage

I've always liked the way RuneQuest handled ships. Each ship had what in effect were armor and Hit Points and if you run out of hit points the thing sinks. I think using a usage die might be better than Hit Points as it is less, precise. In the heat of battle you might not know that a few cannonballs hit you below the water line.

Mass Combat

The last example, for now, would be mass combat. Maybe not a really big mass combat but a large skirmish where say the players stand with a bunch of allies. Break the local combatants down into groups that correspond to a die. Then roll the players combat as usual, and roll the usage die for the other combatants and tell the players the results. The guys on the flank, well they've got like 6 standing at this point. Their enemies don't look any different. 

So that's the basics. This might add more bookwork than desired, especially the weapon damage one, but I don't think so.

Best of the Web - Coins, One Class Campaigns, City Adventures

Dansumpton at Peakrill has a post called Money and coinage in RPGs. It's an interesting post as it dances around the issue of historical simulation and gaming fun as Trollsmyth more or less points out in the comments. Games do a lot of unrealistic things to amp up the fun and remove the boring. Which circles back to coinage nicely in my mind, people talk about gold being unreal and the silver standard being better which is true, but to me misses the point. 

If you were in the USA and found a purse with 2 dollars in it would you tell the cops (or your dishonest pals you owe money too) that you found 2 dollars, or would you say I found six quarters, three dimes, two nickels and ten pennies? It is somewhat absurd to track coins separately unless there is something special about some of the coins (difficult to cash because of size or rarity) in which case the coin should be considered along with jewelry and gems. 

Personally I think a generic coins should be used with terms like Guilders, Florins, Crowns or Marks to give a horde some kind of color/history. I'd also say that Merchants in Venice would probably hesitate to take English Marks without an exchange fee, that sort of thing is very far on the dull side of the scale and it should just be assumed to be built into the value of the coin(s).

Noism has a post on Monsters and Manuals called The Single Class Campaign which is an interesting idea and I think would be a lot of fun as one-shots rather than as a campaign thing. Imagine a series of one-shots each starring a different class, or as a side adventure. For example if the group has a Druid, you have one adventure where everyone else rolls up a Druid and join the party Druid in some side adventure, that sort of thing could be a lot of fun, but I just can't imagine an entire campaign.

DwizKhalifa at Knight at the Opera has a post titled A Thorough Look at Urban Gameplay in D&D, and its pretty thorough and well worth a read. It really sparked for me at the end of Point 6 when he says:

In a way, the "answer" to how you should create a usable town or city for D&D in a sandbox game is to follow the same logic you do for anything you prepare in a sandbox game: create and provide lots and lots of information. You don't plan for what'll happen. You don't tell the players the steps to follow. You don't try to categorize their actions. You just give information to players and they decide what, if anything, they want to do with it. They'll come up with stuff that'll very quickly break your attempts to structure their actions. The more information you provide, the more they have to work with and, in all likelihood, the more they'll do. The real skill is in being able to know 1) how much information you need to provide for things to be satisfying (since no one likes doing more work than they have to), and 2) what kinds of information is useful and gameable to PCs. This is why providing every single shop in town is unreasonable, but providing a list of 5-15 "special, important, or otherwise notable landmarks" in town is a great starting point. A lot of players will gladly look at that list and say, "alright, I'll bite: let's go to this 'undead labyrinth bazaar' I see next to the river."

This seems the correct way to handle a city. Have encounter tables for when they enter streets (either from another street/alley or from inside) and combine with handouts (which he covers in Point 7) and you should have a workable and very fun city.

Don't describe the city beyond the basics (stone first floor, waddle and daub above, and shale shingle grooves with a cobblestone streets and dirt alleys for example). Give the players a map of the city with some details and let them decide what to do. Give them a handout from time-to-time with rumors and scuttlebut to help define factions and whats going on. With enough detail you could turn a boring trip to the sage to learn about some magic item into a trip into the district controlled by One-eyed Frank and his gang (that want the characters dead because of a bar room brawl they think the characters started that smashed up one of their places). The players can try to sneak in, pay an urchin to try to convince the Sage to come out, but hopefully the players noticed in the handouts that One-eyed Frank is the main distributer of Pipeweed in the city and that the Cult of Gax has forced the City Guard into a major crackdown so the load aboard the Northern Storm, a Carvel in port at the moment, is lingering and may go bad before long. The Toothless Wizard staying in the Sea Shanty tavern is believed to be going into withdrawals and has threatened One-eyed Frank over the delays. Or that the Red Princess and her gang that runs the dockyard have an ongoing rivalry with One-eyed Frank and might be willing to help take him out in order to take over the territory and the Pipeweed trade. 

That's the sort of thing that should drive day-to-day sort of things in a city. The entire campaign doesn't have to be based in the city but the campaign will be more memorable if the city isn't just an offscreen safe space.

Best of the Web - GM Challenge Compilation, Hommlet, & Politricks

 Hillcantons has a GM advice PDF called The GM Challenge Compilation which is a super-old post from 2011 but new to me and worth checking out if you missed it way back then, its well worth the time.

Greyhawk Grognard has a post called T0 Journey to Hommlet which includes a PDF download of a short adventures for characters on the way to T1 (or T1-T4). I ran across B4 expansion once upon a time and love the idea and wish more would take up the task to fill out areas that modules left blank (for lack of space I presume). The missing T2-T3 in the Temple of Elemental Evil seems ripe. I might have to create interior maps for a few of the T1 buildings if I ever get any time.

Matt Strom at Ice and Ruin has a post called Politricks about giving goals to factions. Its short and worth a read and mostly seems to deal with lower level politics. Politics can make a game, especially a high level game. I'm talking wars, civil wars, and secession crosses. Bback in the day I GM's a game on Harn and had Rethem fall to civil war and their neighbors Kanday and the Thardic Republic moving in to take advantage of things and I guarantee the players remember it to this day (the world of Harn made it easy with the high level of detail). This sort of grand scale gives lots of chance for players to get into the middle of things. Ice and Ruin does bring up one thing I somewhat disagree with:

If the players don't really seem interested in engaging in the politics of the setting, don't foist it on them. 

They don't need to be involved or know they are involved and the politics can still happen around them. They could end up working on behalf of a faction from time to time, or the bigger conflict could get in the way of their goals (enter the besieged city, or an army might show up and besiege a town if you take too long). 

I'm surprised that more games don't talk about this sort of thing. If you're gonna get out of the dungeon then make the world move around a bit and break things.

Best of the Web - LotFP and James Raggi

Travis Miller at Grumpy Wizard had an interesting post called The Best Thing LotFP did for RPG's. In the post he talks about how James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess fame changed things. I'll let Travis tell why:

He pays an advance and then a share of the profit to the designer. The designer retains copyright for the product and may choose to end the license when the term of service is over. This last bit is very significant and almost no other publisher offers that.

Most importantly he assumes almost all of the risk involved in the product. He pays for art, layout, editing, printing and shipment to the distributor. All of that before the first book is sold. If you haven’t seen LotFPs books, they are some of the highest production quality in the business. 

In short he does what most publishers do but gives the creator a lot more in return.

Why? Wouldn't it be far more profitable to profiteer off the writers? In Raggi's words:

So anyway, this has good and bad effects. Good, because after years of running my metal zine and talking to musicians who didn't have the rights to their own work and were making pretty much no money while their record label was, when I got into RPGs I wasn't going to do the same thing. Even if that means certain titles going bye-bye because their creators weren't sticking around.

So he saw how it sucked and had integrity to not pull that same shit on others even when he was small time and could easily justify it as the way the system worked. Raggi gets a lot of grief online because of the shock aesthetic of LotFP artwork, and because he took a goofy picture with Jordan Peterson, and because he mostly sided with his most successful writer who was unpleasant online and accused of horrible things by his girlfriend. 

I've always been a bit neutral towards Raggi, but now looking at the way he does business when he didn't have to, without bragging about it as far as I can tell, makes me like the guy. I wish him success and hope LotFP survives.