Quite possibly. I mean, look at this thing:
Now look at it from the side:
That’s a redheaded chick with a staff, flying aloft purely on the thrust provided by her vomiting blood.
The adventure pretty much writes itself once you’ve got her on the board.
So, what is this really? It’s a figure from the DC HeroClix game — specifically, Mera, who is Aquaman’s wife apparently. In case you were thinking of ordering one or a couple dozen.
This post from ENWorld is a must-read analysis of dungeon layout.
Dungeon layout, map flow and old school game design
Clever, clever work.
Is this just about the neatest thing ever? It’s the Fallcrest map, built up into a 3D model with Google Sketchup. We live in wonderful times.
This just in: apparently there’s a new version of Gamma World in the works, based on the D&D 4e chassis.
At least, according to Amazon.
This is shaping up to be a good year.
By any measure, the 2009 One Page Dungeon Contest was a smashing success. With the 2010 edition underway (deadline is March 1st), I thought it’d be a good time to think about the concept.
I found the remarks of one of the judges to be very instructive. In examining which dungeons were really successful, I came to realize a shift in perspective.
Rather than thinking of them in terms of a dungeon on one page, they’re really more like One Page Settings. The setting typically revolves around a dungeon, but it’s still a setting. And the good ones have all the attributes of a good setting. Good characters, good atmosphere, good locations, good plot.
That’s the current state of the art as far as my thinking on the subject goes. So far.
(Inspired by Chgowiz’s “Finding things in a 5 mile hex”)
So there’s basically four variables in the equation.
1. How big the hex is
2. How far they can look
3. How fast they can move
4. How likely it is that they recognize the target when they see it.
1. How big the hex is:
Unlike labyrinth maps, wildness maps are usually recorded on graph paper with hex grids, at a scale of 6 or 10 miles for each hex. -LL pg 45
Assuming this is ‘centre to centre’ distance, which is the ’short width’.
“t” is the length of one of the hex’s six edges:
>> Hex Width (opposite sides, aka short diameter) = 1.732t
For our example, we divide 6 by 1.732 and get 3.464 miles.
>> Hex Area = 2.598t^2
So the area of our example hex is 31.178 square miles.
This is more useful in square yards (3,097,600 square yards to one square mile):
96,576,443 square yards. Yes, almost 100 million square yards.
2. How far they can look:
when monsters are encountered the Labyrinth Lord will roll 4d6 x 10 to determine how many yards away the characters are from the monster. -LL pg 50
Assuming weather conditions are normal, other ships can be seen when up to 300 yards away. -LL pg 58
4d6 averages to 140 yards.
The party can decide to use whatever “search footprint” they like, though. A large value is a quicker but less thorough search, while a small value is a slow but methodical search.
Whatever value they choose (called the Search Radius), the search footprint is 2*pi*r:
For 140 yards, this is 61,575 square yards.
Note this is per observer: If four characters spread out 140 yards apart along the search line, then their search footprint is four times larger (and help is that much farther away if a wandering monster attacks.) Furthermore, there are fewer characters to spot a hidden or secret target.
It’s useful to figure out how many search footprints are contained within the hex, simply by dividing the area of the hex by the area of the footprint:
For our example, 96,576,443 / 61,575 = 1,568.4 footprints. Expressed as a percentage, the odds of a terrain feature falling into any given footprint is about 0.064%.
3. How fast they can move:
A character that moves at 120 (feet or yards, depending on environment) can move 24 miles in the wilderness per day. -LL pg 45
Given our search footprint, how many footprints can a character move through?
This depends on the character’s inherent movement rate and also the Terrain Movement reduction amount, if any.
Determine the modified movement rate, and then divide by 12 to get a movement rate per hour assuming 12 hours of marching and 12 hours of rest.
An unencumbered human moving through the plains moves at 2 miles per hour, or 3520 yards per hour.
Divide that by the diameter (twice the radius) of the search footprint to determine his footprints/hour rate.
For our example: 3520/280 = 12.57 footprints/hour.
This can be multiplied by the number of independent searchers, so for a party of four we have about 50.3 footprints/hour.
Hours are not necessarily the most useful unit of time here.
Wilderness Wandering Monsters: This check is only made 3 to 4 times per day of game time in wilderness adventuring. –LL pg 125
4 times per day is once every six hours. Our party is searching for 12 hours a day, so six hours is a useful division of time (perhaps as “morning” and “afternoon”.)
Multiplying by six hours gives us 75.4 footprints/quarter-day per person, or 150.85 footprints per day of searching.
That is close to 10% of the hex’s footprints per day, or 5% per quarter-day.
Thus, for our example, based on these rates of searching, every searcher has a 5% chance every six hours to run across the terrain feature. A generous DM might make this cumulative.
4. How likely it is that they recognize the target when they see it.
The first thing to test is whether the party chose a sufficiently tight search pattern.
The potential target-finder should roll 4d6 and multiply by 10 for a monster-sized target or by 20 for a ship-sized target.
If the roll is less than the search radius, the target is not found after all — it has slipped through the coarseness of their search pattern. Otherwise, the target has been found, but it might not be recognized.
If the target is not hidden in any way, then the character has found it. Otherwise it is detected only on a 1 in 6 chance, as a secret door. Elves and dwarves might find it on a 2 in 6 chance, if it is related to their racial abilities. Thieves may use their Find Traps skill percentage.
A failure here means the searchers have walked right past their target; they must complete their search of the rest of the hex before trying again.
Synopsis: By the Diaspora rules-as-written, “Slipstream points (slipknots) are located at a distance roughly 5 AU (astronomical units) above and below the barycenter, which is the point around which all bodies in the system revolve.” This hack suggests that the slipknots are in the plane of the ecliptic. As such, they are occasionally disrupted by the passage of Jupiter-like (Jovian) bodies orbiting at roughly 5 AU; this event is called occultation.
I wrote an important post (important to me, anyway) about D&D 4E (among other things) but lacked the good sense to actually post it to my own blog. But here’s a link, mostly so I can find it again if and when I need to.
The following are some house-rules about compels, scenes, and agendas. I haven’t had the chance to playtest them out; if you do try them, please let me know how well they work.
House-Rule 1: You don’t just get to be important in any scene you like. Sure, you might be there, standing around in a corner somewhere, but by default you don’t get to do anything useful. This doesn’t confer any sort of immunity, however — innocent bystanders get shot just like anyone else.
House-Rule 2: The way you get to do something useful in a scene is by being Compelled. The specific Aspect that is Compelled is, in effect, your Agenda — why the character is involved in the scene. You get a Fate Point for this Compel, of course.
House-Rule 3: If you want to be involved in a scene but can’t or won’t pick an Aspect to Compel, you can take a Minor Consequence, and then Compel that. Assuming your enemies don’t give you a Consequence first.
House-Rule 4: Since you’re very likely to want to Invoke your Agenda during the scene, you get one free Invocation with no Fate Point cost.
Discussion:
I’ve been a big believer in starting scenes with Compels, and this is a more extreme extension of that.
The underlying problem I’m trying to fix with this is characters who just kinda wander around scenes without any clear motivation or agenda. By Compelling themselves in, they know why they’re in there and what they want, and so does everyone else.
Although this is the main thrust of these house-rules, I think there are also some useful secondary effects that may arise.
Consequences have a tendency to be pretty weak as far as Aspects go. “Twisted Ankle” is… well, weak. “That Bastard Shot Me!” is nice and strong, and exactly the sort of thing I expect people to use for Compelling themselves in.
It encourages teamwork Aspects — things like “Always There For My Friends” and “All For One, One For All.” Of course, characters with those Agendas need to actually be in there helping their friends.
The last rule seems like a good idea — otherwise you get a fate point for the Compel, spend it back when you Invoke, and after all the chip shuffling nothing much has changed. It seems like a good idea to further encourage characters to pursue their Agenda, and this seems like a decent way to do it.
It may come to pass that in a particular scene, no one can or will Compel themselves into it. This is a great signal to the GM that they’re just not interested in the scene, so everyone can just skip over it.
I think it’s also a good hint to the GM about when he’s playing his cards too close to his chest. If someone can’t get involved because he doesn’t know the shopkeeper is secretly a Nazi, then the pressure is on the GM to get that fact established sooner rather than later.
Examples:
Example 1: Nazi Shootout
Scene Setup: The characters are casually hanging out in their favourite zeppelin hangar when suddenly Nazis burst in and start shooting up the joint.
Biff McClung Compels his own “Nazis! I Hate Those Guys!” Aspect to enter the fray, guns ablazing.
Timmy Dootz Compels “I Wanna Be Like Biff When I Grow Up” to tag right along.
Madama Lechiffre decides to take the Minor Mental Consequence: Fainting Spells, Compels it, and passes out so that she can pull some of her quasi-magical stunts.
Big John remains in the background until a Nazi mook hits him with the Minor Physical Consequence “That Bastard Shot Me!” at which point he goes totally berserk.
Example 2: Library Research
Having escaped the Nazis who turned out to be zombies full of tentacle spiders, the gang decides they need to read up on these eldritch horrors.
Doc Sausag has all sorts of researchy sorts of Aspects; he goes with “Insatiable Thirst For Knowledge” and digs into it.
Madame Lechiffre is at it again; she’s still carrying around the Moderate Mental Consequence “Such Things Should Not Be”, so Compels that to again enter some sort of trance.
Lord Orangutan isn’t really the reading sort, so he could easily sit this scene out. On the other hand, he could take a Minor Mental Consequence such as “Lord Orangutan Grows Impatient!” and Compel it to, say, leap from stack to stack and haul down reams of books from the topmost shelves.
