Session 29 of the Astral Borderlands open campaign last night, which was part two of the rescue-the-caravan scenario. As expected, the road encounter table (https://plus.google.com/+EricNieudan/posts/3eEPnQYrx2U) bothered me and I ended up switching to the region encounter tables most of the time.
The issue is simple: as the dR gets stepped down, the encounters tend to be the same. I suppose that's fine when you start at d12 and play a short journey, but over several days, with three rolls every day, well the Proudface goblins and Robber zombies show up everywhere.
Interestingly enough, the weather table ended up being the star of the show last night. The dR kept stepping down and the rain kept falling on the poor adventurers. Progress was slow even on the road, people got sick, aerial reconnaissance was made difficult, it felt (at least from my point of view) like a real journey. Everyone was happy to make it to the Keep in the end.
Long story short, road encounters are out. I'll have to test this formula again for overland and dungeon crawls.
Camp hobo ogres are the best. :-)
ReplyDelete(I never even rolled it once...)
ReplyDeleteSo we've been guinea pig all along for your encounters table !!?
ReplyDeleteJoke aside, from the player side here my point of view :
I've nerver felt that the encounters table exist, but i'm very aware of the weather table. Why ? Cause we allways see the weather changing and when it change, it fall right on our faces.
From my point of view the encounter table seems to be used only to show us in the far distance some dangers that we do not want to confront.
I understand that is not a PbtA game, so encounter table are not here to throw us danger to overcome every minutes but more to give us some hint, and lead to investigate and explore the world around.
Maybe you have to put more mysteries, or "i want to go there" in your table. Some encounter that will lead us to leave the road. To find out what happen...
Here the PbtA reference seems more relevant, cause for me old school and new school are here very close in there design.
Mathieu Mazzoni This whole campaign is for guinea pigs! ;p
ReplyDeleteThere's always a 33% chance (when I roll a 3 on the dR) that an encounter will be distant and unaware of the characters. You were also followed by goblins and attacked by rocs last night.
I'm not sure my goal as a referee is to make you want to leave the road. It is to portray an engaging, living world. Sometimes the world is happening away from the road, but not always.
Thinking about it, I think encounters on the road would be best handled with a simple 6-entry table of written encounters: a weird altar on the side of the road, folks with a broken wheel, a bandit ambush, a set of intriguing tracks... It's what most modern campaigns do and it works very well.
But I'm trying to come up with tools to avoid having to do all that writing, you know ;)
For stuff happening outside of the view of the PCs have you played around at all with things like countdown clocks (ala AW or BitD) or something like the Faction Turn from SWN?
ReplyDeleteShane Liebling I do referee turns between adventures (or inside a session if everyone wants to let a few days pass to recover and replenish resources).
ReplyDeleteNothing as formalised as fronts, countdowns or the SWN mini-game though. I roll a few risk dice for factions going after each other, detail the setting as necessary, etc.
But if you mean tools that work seamlessly at the table, I haven't thought of that yet. I guess I've been focused on what the characters experience, rather than off screen stuff.
In my opinion, Encounter dR makes sense when you explore an area, and stay within that particular area/dungeon/cave...
ReplyDeleteThe longer you stand, the higher are your chances to attract unwanted attention (hence the Proudface Tribe showing up everywhere ;-))
When you are merely travelling from point A to B, there is no reason for you to stumble upon bad things rather than good ones.
Maybe a simple footnote "Encounter dR does not work as a dR when characters are just passing through" is sufficient.
I've juste GM'd MM once, with a semi-random setting, and I wrote a Encouter table for each biotope (forest/plains/swamps/...) and I rolled the dR as I explained.
Jean-Marc CHOSEROT You're on the money with this first statement - this is why the road encounters weren't working.
ReplyDeleteEncounters should be location specific, I need to keep that in mind before I rush to make yet another dR table =)