dungeon crawling

Ideas on using Notice in Worlds Without Number

One of the additions that Worlds Without Number adds to the common oldschool structure is skills. The system for skills is not bad. Basic skill checks are 2d6 plus the appropriate attribute modifier, plus the character’s level in the respective skill for the task. Skill level can be as high as 4 at 9th level, but with the way the cost for each skill level increases each time, I don’t think you’re going to see that often, except maybe for skills like Stab or Magic, which are not usually used as skill checks but rather as modifiers to attack rolls or how much magic a Mage can use per day. I think +2 and the the occasional +3 added to attribute checks is the most that will be commonly encountered in the wild.

However, one of the skills is Notice, which is something that is usually considered one of the big things that make newer D&D editions unsuitable for classic dungeon crawling, which in the defense of Worlds Without Number, it never claims to do. The GM tells the players the things in a room that are immediately obvious, and then it’s up to the players to ask the right questions to find the things that are not immediately obvious. “You can not roll dice to avoid playing the game.”

Worlds Without Number does not specify when Notice checks are supposed to be made, but after some pondering, I’ve decided that there’s still ways to both make the skill work and also make it worthwhile to put points into for players. One approach is to make the target number of a Notice check to “notice something unusual” very high. I would consider a character with a +2 Wisdom modifier and a +3 skill bonus to be highly specialized, and quite likely the highest total modifier that players might actually be able to field in play. Maybe a total of +6, but that’s probably really it. With a +5 bonus, a character would have a 28% chance to make a difficulty 14 check. A character with a more modest +3 would only have a chance of 8%. That doesn’t seem too bad.

But to still make players work for their progress, I’d add the following rules to making a Notice check to find hidden things: Since searching an area is a group activity, I’d only allow a single check for the whole group, with the highest modifier of any characters in the party. They don’t get four or five checks to maximize their chances of someone rolling a 12. Also, I am thinking that this method can only discover a single hidden thing. So the players better search the place as well as they can before they make that roll. You don’t want to waste it on something that you could have found yourself with two more minutes of thinking. Making a Notice check should be the the final gamble after the party has given up on finding anything else themselves.

Another way to use Notice checks is when it comes to surprise. Worlds Without Number only addresses surprise in regards to one character waiting in ambush to attack another character. In which case it’s a Notice check against a Sneak check. It doesn’t mention how you’d do that with groups of characters (if everyone rolls, it’s boils down to the defenders’ best Notice roll against the attackers’ lowest Sneak roll), and it also doesn’t go at all into the situation where wandering monsters just happen to stumble into the party entirely by accident.

The regular surprise system in B/X is rolling 1d6 for both sides, and on a 1 or 2, that side is surprised. (Both sides can be surprised, and neither side can be surprised.) This roll could instead by made by having both sides make a Notice check, rolled by the character with the highest modifier. Monsters and generic NPCs in Worlds Without Number usually have a +1 or +2 modifier in whatever skills they would likely to be good at. I think Notice checks to determine surprise should always fall under that. Players would easily have a +2 or possibly +3 advantage over the creatures they encounter, and since 2d6 give a normal distribution, that’s really quite big. But this can be addressed by tweaking the difficulty of the check.

In B/X, the chance to become surprised is 1/3rd, so the chance to detect the other group is 2/3rds. Since most monsters and guards in Worlds Without Number have a skill modifier of +1 or +2, setting the default difficulty to detect a group of adventurers exploring a room to 8 gets the closest to those 2/3rds odds. PCs will regularly have higher modifiers to that, since they also get to add their Wisdom modifiers to their check. But monsters prowling the dark tunnels of a dungeon are much less noisy, so to detect them, the difficulty should be a higher 10. And if you have really sneaky creatures prowling in the dark, that difficulty can increase to 12.

Now you might be wondering: “Why do this much more complicated approach to get basically the same result?” That is a good question, Timmy. If I’d design a game from scratch, I just wouldn’t bother with a Notice skill in the first place. And as GM, I totally have the option to just modify the rules and kick out Notice entirely. But each small change you make to the system comes with a cost when it comes to recruiting players when you’re not in the position to tell your existing group that this is what you’re going to play from now on. Getting players for a more obscure system (that is, everything that isn’t D&D 5th edition) is not quite trivial to begin with. Having a somewhat well known and highly regarded name like Worlds Without Number helps a lot in that regard, but when that’s your way to lure in players to your campaign, many of them will show up to play Worlds Without Number. And every change you make to the default rules slightly decreases the enthusiasm people will have to join your campaign. There’s already a good number of changes I am making to the system, like ditching a couple of foci, two of the magic traditions, and completely overhauling the High Magic spells. I’m ditching much of the weapons and armor lists and the whole equipment modification system. All of this adds up to make the game less of what people think of when you ask who wants to play in a new Worlds Without Number campaign. A change like this doesn’t really change anything on the player facing side of the game. They still can get their Notice skill and all the foci that give bonus skill levels to Notice, and they are still going to make plenty of Notice checks while they play the game. Even players who know the rules might not even notice (huh huh) that anything has been changed at all.

Re-associating exploration speed

Many rules in OD&D and B/X look very weird on paper, when you approach them as “new rules” that are added to what you consider a typical Dungeons & Dragons system. Giving XP for picking up treasure instead of fighting enemies is perhaps the most famous of them, but there are plenty others, like encumbrance, random encounters, or reaction rolls. But I think the purpose of all of these in a greater exploration system has become fairly well reestablished, and I believe I’ve written quite a bit about all of that already.

But one of the things that to me still stands out among these is the unexpected way in which movement outside of combat is handled. In Basic/Expert, the default movement rate for characters exploring a dungeon is 120 feet per 10 minutes. That’s 12 feet per minute, or about one step every 8 seconds. The rules explain that this doesn’t actually mean characters are moving that slowly. What happens is that the characters are carefully searching their environment and drawing reasonably precise maps. Dungeon has become a fairly generic term for any complex of passages, but I think the original idea of what a dungeon is like was less strolling through a castle and more exploring a cave. While very few dungeons are actually natural caves and most have long been used as regular passages by humanoid inhabitants, cave explorers often only manage to progress 300 to 500 meters per day, or say 1,200 feet. If they are at it for 10 hours per day, that’s 120 feet per hour. Even if the PCs are heavily encumbered and have their speed reduced to a quarter, that’s still faster than cave explorers. So maybe not actually a ridiculously low speed.

But where things start feeling strange is when encumbrance comes into the picture. In B/X, encumbrance reduces your encounter speed from 40 feet per round to 30, 20, and eventually 10 feet. And the same modification is also applied to exploration speed. When you take, on average, one step forward every 8 second, you spend almost the entire time of exploration not actually moving forward at all. Heavy loads slowing your movement to half or even a quarter is somewhat believable (maybe the characters are literally dragging heavy bags of loot behind them). But that also reducing the speed at which you can look and poke at things the same way is a cognitive disconnect. It’s a dissociated mechanic. A party with more heavy gear making slower progress makes sense, but representing this through reduced movement speed doesn’t feel very plausible.

However, B/X already has a small, seemingly mostly forgotten rule, that can be adapted for the purpose. Part of the rules for exploration movement is that after every 5 turns of exploration, the party must rest for 1 turn or the characters suffer a -1 penalty to hit and damage from exhaustion. Of the eight retroclones I have, only one carried over this rule. It just seems pretty pointless when you can assume characters are already getting sufficient rest for their legs during the regular exploration turn. And maybe people are right to throw this one out, but I think it’s a great place to apply penalties for encumbrance during exploration instead of reducing speed.

Instead of reducing the movement rate during an exploration turn to 90 or 60 feet, you can instead increase the rate for required rest to resting for one turn after every 3 turns or every 1 turn of exploration. This seems like a huge decrease of time actually spend on making progress, but because of how the math works out, this system actually makes parties progress somewhat faster than under the default rules. Which is fine with me. Numbers in D&D have never been an exact science anyway and are always simplified approximation. Being 10% faster than by the book isn’t going to break anything. But I feel that this change makes it much easier for players to intuitively grasp why their characters are making slower progress with heavy loads and don’t have to accept it as something that just is because the rules say so.

Return of the Mapper for online games?

Have you heard the good message of our savior Gus L? I learned entirely by accident that he didn’t stop writing RPG stuff but instead has been sharing new stuff on his new site All Dead Generations for the past three years. All the stuff on the site is about what he calls Classic Dungeon Crawling, which is basically OD&D and early Basic D&D, and how that style of Dungeon Crawling is an exploration fantasy game and not a combat fantasy game. A fantastic resource that I recommend to everyone, though it comes in hefty chunks that take quite a while to chew on.

After my overall pretty great D&D 5th edition campaign last year, I was throwing the towel on trying to make dungeons work, because I just could not figure out how to make a dungeon an interesting place that is not simply a warehouse for nonsensical puzzles. All the advice I was coming across on that front was “Well, sometimes funhouse dungeons can be fun.”But now, after 20 years as a GM, I finally get dungeons!

Dungeon Crawling and exploration in general isn’t just an aspect of an RPG, it’s even more a system of multiple mechanics than I previously had realized. Treating the whole dungeon as one big puzzle that will reveal the safest ways to the best treasures when figured is a great focus draw players engagement with the campaign. Especially when there’s no plot and characters don’t get shiny new toys every time they level up.

Part of solving that puzzle often is to fully grasp the layout of the dungeon and gain the ability to pinpoint the likely locations of possible shortcuts or otherwise completely inaccessible areas. Gus mentions that having players draw the map themselves is particularly bothersome in online games, where the GM can’t peak at a player’s pencil drawn map to spot obvious misunderstandings of his descriptions. (Minor errors in dimensions are desirable though.) But I took a quick look at Roll20 and found that at least in this case, this thing is actually very easy to do.

Roll20 has the paintbrush tool, which also has a shapes tool that draws rectangles by simply clicking and dragging. As a lifelong diehard user of pencils and grid paper, I think this is actually a lot easier and quicker than drawing lines around squares with a pencil. To correct errors, you can just click on one of these shapes and delete it, without any messing around with erasers. Now I’m definitely going to bring back this aspect of the game in my Great River Campaign. At least giving it a trial run. I’ve been told that there isn’t a function like this in Fantasy Grounds, but I’ve never used that myself. Which seems like a shame, since this is something really simple and basic. Though I guess when you do your mapping like this, you might not be bothering with something as fancy as Fantasy Grounds.

Recovering arrows after a fight

Thanks, Dewwy, for this suggestion.

Someone pointed out to me that when parties go on very long adventures far away from civilization, it’s not just food and light sources they can run out of, but arrows are also a limiting factor for how long they can go before having to return to resupply. But there’s always plenty of arrows around after a fight, many of which are still perfectly usable.

In D&D 3rd edition, there was a rule that all arrows are destroyed if they hit, and have a 50% chance to be recoverable on a miss. To that you’d have to add all the arrows still in the quivers of fallen enemies. I’ve never heard of anyone actually doing that because it’s just too fiddly to count the number of misses arrows that were fired, on the minor chance that a player actually cares to go looking for them. There’s a lot of such rules that are too fiddly for actual use that D&D has collected over the years. But here’s a very simple and easy alternative solution.

If PCs go collecting arrows after a fight, they recover 1d10 arrows for every archer involved in the fight.

It’s a complete abstraction, of course. But for something this minor, abstracting it is exactly the way to go. Those arrows might still be in the quiver of dead or captured archers. Some might stick in corpses or somewhere in the ground or trees. And a lot got broken on impact or disappeared into the undergrowth. 5.5. arrows on average per archer might be a bit low, but for the purpose of adventurers deep in the wilderness, we actually want arrows to seem like a limited resource. If there’s more around than the players would ever need, then there’d be no point in tracking them in the first place.

I also found out that someone who’s skilled at it can make a stone arrowhead in 15 minutes. It takes a bit more to make a complete arrow, so let’s say 2 arrow per hour. In a whole day of working, a character with the required skill could make 20 arrows, which just happens to be the default quiver size in most games I’ve seen. For my campaign, I’m thinking of treating stone arrows just like regular arrows, except that they use a die one size smaller to roll for damage.