How to roll a 7+ on 1d6

TONKS, by apocrypha_now, is an adorable little minis game which uses minis-standard D6 rolls, where you need to roll a 4+ or 5+ or 6+ a lot of the time to hit various things. This is a very common system for wargames, where you often want to roll several troops at once. The numbers are low, the math is easy, the die is common.

However...

With this kind of system, what do you do when the target number goes above 6, or below 2?

A sensible solution on D6 is to assume that if you need a 7+ or worse, you can never hit, where as a 1+ or better always hits.

(Note that this is not a common D20 rule, which is to say that a 20 always hits and a 1 always misses, no matter what the actual TN.)

In TONKS target numbers can get up into 7+ or higher ranges pretty easily and it doesn't make sense to say these auto-miss. In fact from watching a tiny AP of it probably all the TNs could come down by one. (Heck, because TONKS is a single unit kind of game it could probably have a 2D6 hit roll like CAR WARS; single D6 rolls make the most sense for masses of minis. OTOH there is a lot to be said for a flat distribution without too many buckets. But that's a different topic.)

TONKS resolves this in a very cute / clever way! If you need higher than a 6+, you roll 2D6, and succeed if you roll EXACTLY the target number. This scales nicely from 6/36 down to 1/36 at 12+.  There's the silght issue that a 6+ is just as easy to hit as a 7+, but I'm okay with that.

But is it possible to do better? With something that would work for minis figures where you need to do multiple at once?

Another Cute Idea...

So what about a true open-ended solution?  I'm sure this has been thought of before, even by myself, but I think it's worth writing down.

If you roll a 6, add 5 to the sum and reroll, and repeat on 6's only. (Smooth explosion.)

If you roll a 1, subtract 5 from the sum and reroll, and repeat on 1's only. (Smooth implosion!)

It's pretty easy to add and subtract 5 so you can do it on the side. For example if the target number you need is a 9, that's 5+4, therefore: you need to roll a six then a four.

So there you have it, a D6 system that can handle an infinite range of target numbers, in a symmetrical, strictly monotonic way.

Making Mazes Fun & The Case for Long Corridors

This is written after the Mazes in D&D episode of the Wandering DMs.

There's a lot of maze haters out there! I'm not interested in them.

The question I'm interested in is: what would make mazes fun? How could they be used in design of megadungeons? I have been thinking about this awhile and I have a couple ideas rolling around:

1. Riddles or Partial Maps

This can be as simple as a partial map, but what might be interesting are instructions givine a route through the maze.  Players could find a scrap of paper with a route like, "BLUE ROOM, From Gorgo's Face R L R S R RR R Y S L".  This could be a series of turns, but WHAT is Gorgo's Face?  Is it one of the big faces painted on the wall in room 12?  Is it the statue in room 23?  Is this something a rumor roll can reveal: Gorgo is the nickname for the bull statue in room 14?  And what about the directions themselves? R and L make easy sense, and S is probably straight (or is it stairs?), but what is "RR"? The second right? And what could 'Y' mean?

And what if the directions are backwards? The players know the Blue Room and want to get to Gorgo's Head. How easy is that to figure out?

What if the dungeon has changed since the directions were written, a new hole knocked in a wall?

This is in a sense the DM injecting things that might come about from having a shared world.  Have your other groups and factions deal with the maze, take actions on it, and have lore about it.

In other words, treat the maze as a location that you flesh out and breath life into, that's not just a harassment zone.  Give the players a head start with the layout of the maze to make exploration of it more purposeful, more directed, and less pointless exploration.

Somewhat counterintuitively, my other solution idea is to make the hallways more boring.

2. Twisty Passages w/ Room Anchors, aka Drunken Circuit Diagrams

This is an idea that I got from Empire of the Petal Throne, and a glance at a photograph of MAR Barker's underworld map (which was quite large). It is not exactly what I saw on that map, but it has made me think of it.

First to talk about other designs you may have seen out there.

There's the standard Gygaxian mapper-hostile design with some tricky areas of hard-to-describe things like angled hallways, curved passages, slopes -- along with a fairly dense layout because the map is trying to fit on a single piece of paper. The complexity and density make these a nuisance for the DMs to describe and there's often not much purpose to it.

There is another kind of layout, the well-Jaquayed dungeon, which is more of a grid really; you can generally get from place to place. By contrast there's the Unjaquayed-but-not-linear dungeon (think Stonehell L1) which is more like a maze of rooms.

Ok, stop imagining those and let's imagine something else.

Imagine large rooms, but the space between them is almost filled with mazey passages that have relatively few branches or intersections outside of rooms. To get from Room 1 to Room 2 you don't just open a door and go down a thirty-foot hallway to another door: you enter a hallway that goes 60', turns right, goes 90', take the left tee 100', and there's the door.

Most importantly, the corridors are long, and snakey, but there are few decision points and locally simple geometry that gets complex on a larger scale.

Something like this conceptually:

Lots of long twisting passages: possibly minor level changes will be useful to do crossings. Crucially, I think, a "northern" exit will not necessarily take you generally north. You need the map! Or landmarks.  There should probably be more corridor intersections so there is usually one decision in the hallway between rooms.

This is something like the mazes from Zork or other old text adventure games, but here the passages are real and not mysterious.

I think it's also very important to go very light on tricks and traps. A little should go a long way.

POSSIBLE BENEFITS

You might think I'm only making things worse by adding more corridors. But long boring hallways are a feature! These hallways can be described and mapped by players very quickly. You can cruise quickly to the next decision point. Your non-mapping players will not have time to get bored.

However game time will pass. Torches might go out. Wandering monsters might appear. This is good! The corridors are a place where things happen now. Combat in corridors is fast and pretty simple; tactics are boiled down to the essence and this is where old D&D shines IMHO.  Also in a corridor the DM does not have to work as hard to mesh wandering monster encounters into the action of whatever silly stuff players are doing inside a room. Simple geometry is good!

A large space of between-room filler corridors also creates a more believable kind of "buffer zone" where, believably, monsters can emerge from and disappear to. In other dungeons there can be feelings of "Really, where did he run to?" and "Where do these monsters come from, we've cleared all the rooms over there??" The labyrinthine hallways of the dungeon I'm describing can never be fully clean.

Another contrast is it makes rooms more special by contrast. Rooms are destinations, landmarks, decision points, and can be more standalone things. As a designer, you can get by with fewer dull rooms, because the hallways will carry some of that dead space, and not require as much DM effort to fill with some interesting but essentially pointless little bit of dressing.

DRAWBACKS

This map might require a smaller grid size, and/or multiple pieces of paper.

It's not that easy to draw dungeons this way, avoiding trivial loops. A little while in dungeonscrawl gets me something like this (adding in some "complexes"):

The dungeon might seem extremely unnatural. But we're talking about a megadungeon here, not "old single-level basement of the watch tower that's now a bandit lair" design. I think for the EPT Jakallan underworld it's even more reasonable, when it's understood what's being represented here is centuries of a city being built on top of itself, and not anything that was a functional whole at any time.

Maybe players will miss DM's trying to describe a T-intersection where one of the corners is a diagonal bevel and there's a door ten feet south of what would be directly ahead, and the north hallways ends after 20 feet in a door on the east side and the south hallway bends SE be a like, 15' wide corridor after 30 feet with a door on the west wall 10' before the bend??? I don't think they will..

Black Hack, Early Thoughts

I've played a couple sessions of Black Hack (2E) now. That's not many at all, but I think I can say some things, tentatively.

0. A minor formatting boo-boo that they did a global search on game terms like "Turn" so you get sentences like, "Your character Turns into a mouse." For a second there I thought there was some kind of transformation subsystem.

1. Rolling strictly under is weird, but not as annoying as I feared. I still don't like it.

2. Usage dice are still a bit annoying.

(2a) If I have Ud4 arrows and I acquire another stack of Ud6 arrows, can I combine them?  The question can be answered, but it's silly. And the result is, now I'm still managing a number but it's weird and vague.

(2b) It's not clear when usage rolls happen. If I have Ud8 rations, is that days, sessions? Per meal? If I used arrows, I have to remember *after combat* to do a usage roll, which seems more annoying than simple tracking where I mark off an arrow right at the time I use it.

(2c) I think it removes some interesting resource management. "I'm trying to conserve arrows" is interesting when you have 5 arrows left. It's less interesting when the choice is, "Am I going to fire 0 arrows, or as many as I please this combat (in fact I should shoot a whole bunch to get the most out of my usage roll)?"

3. Rolling for prices for basic items is cute but is annoying if you want to buy like 3 different things; and is thus immediately annoying in character creation where four different players are trying to buy four overlapping sets of things. I think I'd rather be hit by random money loss and gain; "make a save vs fees & taxes".

4. Armor dice hasn't really come up (I think some players have forgotten to use it; maybe including me? lol), but the totally different meaning of the usage die and the wording for 'breaking' are confusing.

5. "Ritual casting", where you cast a spell out of combat for free, is very tempting at level 1, but the chance of failure is high and the mutations are pretty severe and permanent. While it IS interesting and fun that the cleric had one arm turn into a claw -- Crab cleric!!! -- it's kinda dumb that it happened just because she was trying to cast light spell.

(5a) Basic spellcasting is not the correct place for an influx of gonzo. An after-combat CLW top-up is not a dramatic moment.

(5b) So essentially casters SHOULDN'T be ritual casting unless it's important, which reduces them to old-school style. But Black Hack presents as a modern game, and if you give players a lever they will assume it should be pulled. Plus, they probably come from 5E...

(5c) The root problem is lowbie casters have too few spells, and if you're slaughtering sacred cows to make a cleaner modern game, that cow should go early into the abattoir.  Commit to the bit! Give casters a usage die for casts, or individual spells.  Or: only have powerful spells.

6. Continue to love/hate slot based inventory. My personal feelings aside, it is probably better suited for more types of players. Where slot-based inventory starts to have problems (eg when you're thinking about mounts and carts and tapestries and needing to carry dead/wounded companions) is where most players will check out anyway and maybe the DM should just wave their arms and adjudicate it quickly.

These can be hard calls, though, and the DM is going to face situations where it's tough to offer tradeoffs because (pre-5E) D&D has no fatigue mechanisms. There should probably be like a "Mishap Roll", which is like a 1-in-6 chance of something a little bad happening, so the DM can say, "Sure you can do it but there will be a mishap roll" to handle stuff like forced marches, overloading carts, etc.

7. Ability checks are the devil. I mostly have the usual trad player instincts of like, all ability checks, all the time.  But I have seen the light from old school ways, which is primarily this: ability checks are not interesting because pass/failure is often not interesting.  If a player is trying to do something that makes the situation more cool and fun, an ability check is an interruption in the flow and just reducing the possibility of things getting more cool and fun.

(7a) A corollary is that minor obstacles are not fun. Even moderate obstacles are no fun. If the players need to get down a deep well, then the DM should be part of their planning a little bit, letting them know things that won't work, or possible risks. If shimmying 7 people down 200' of rope isn't going to work, the DM should let the players know and let them come up with a better method. Obstacles are about establishing the players' procedure for passing them. Does the procedure rely on usable resources? Is it going to have to change if the players want to bring back big treasures or dead comrades?

A pass/fail check is a FAILURE STATE of a plan. It is not the thing that the plan is building up to, with good planning getting a +2 on the roll.

Like don't think of obstacles as random little events from a video game, or a board game with an event deck. In simulationist D&D, they should be little puzzles to solve.

Let players solve the puzzle. Then, their progress will feel earned.

Perhaps the complementary skill is, if the players go ahead with a bad solution, finding a way to punish them for it without a TPK. Sometimes I think you let them succeed but screw them from some other angle.

(7b) In addition, ability checks leads to fumble/crit discussions, which I think are overall bad. They are a big part of Casual Silly Keystone Cops kind of D&D. But most of the time it's better to advance the action and avoid the kind of phantom competency/incompetency that comes from dice.

All of this is not exactly particular to Black Hack, though its centralizing of ability checks does encourage it.  The DM I had for this game did fall into the ability check trap a little bit, but she realized it quickly. But it's something I have seen in TONS of games, and something I have fallen into problems with myself.

(7c) TBH the horses are so fully out of the barn on ability checks that I still think the real solution is a more deterministic, less random roll system. The more it's telling players "you can do that automatically" or "you can't do that", the more it's staying out of the way or firmly saying "think of something else", and that's better.

52 Pages Treasure

 I love Roger G-S 's 52 Pages a lot, and I often point to its treasure table as something glorious and mad:

This looks baffling but it's pretty easy. Roll 2D10+Level. Look immediately right for the monetary value. Then roll D6 & D8 to get the type of treasure and move it down so it's on the same row of the first 2D10+Lvl roll. And then, if initial roll was black, repeat.

It's a little tricky to calculate because of the reroll. A Monte Carlo approach would probably be best. A quick and ugly program later..

Level 1 Average: ~1640 sp
Level 2 Average: ~2290 sp
Level 3 Average: ~2890 sp
Level 4 Average: ~3610 sp
Level 5 Average: ~4200 sp

(I'm not sure why it's mostly about 600+ per level but then 720 from 3 to 4.)

But in any case, these averages are pretty high to start with, but don't increase by that much, which is probably not desirable for a mega-dungeon kind of campaign where the party has pretty free choice over what kind of depth they want to go to.

 

The BX/OSE Treasure Problem

So now that I'm trying to make a dungeon more methodically for #dungeon23, the question arises. How much treasure to put in it?

Note that my focus here, since I'm designing for #dungeon23 and this is January, is the first level of a dungeon and how it must bootstrap a campaign by being fairly generous with treasure. I'm also assuming BX (OSE).

I'll start with three data points from experience:

1. Level 1 Stonehell grind is a miserable experience. I think that the dungeon does not actually work if you have a PC death rate in line with the supposed OSR theme. After ~8 sessions in Stonehell, where I believe the DM actually upped the treasure amounts somewhat, I projected it would still take ~16 more sessions to level my dwarf. If this is the game -- if you're supposed to survive 24 sessions with a level 1 character to earn level 2 -- that's just not viable.
   
2. In BX/OSE games with satisfactory level advancement speed, characters end up with too much money, with extremely little to spend it on.
   
3. In the strictly-by-the-book 1E game I'm playing, it's very intrusive how 1E tries to claw back low-level wealth with training costs. The system is punishing and not exactly fun, and I don't think it can even work unless you give all the players superb ratings all the time. It's also not fun to be hounded by debt, interest payments, and cost of living. This is supposed to be an adventure game. And on top of all that it's a bit ludicrous how our PCs are dumping thousands and thousands of gp into this little town, paying 2 gp to hire a soldier for a day, but like 4,500gp to pay a trainer for a week -- better to have less wealth to start with, then gain so much of it. To say nothing of Gygax's other encouragements to nickel and dime PCs.
   

So those are the problems: Through lower levels, there needs to be more experience points than people know to give out, but there needs to be less PC wealth, and giving lots of money then taking it all away through huge fees is annoying.

And let's stipulate I'm interested in true OSR games and don't want to add xp from other sources like exploration or milestones or personal goal achievement. 

What's to be done?  Carousing rules are a common, simple change. Are they necessary? Are more drastic measures required?

Investigation 1:

A few months ago, Spriggan's Den crunched some numbers on B/X treasure and investigated the BX recommended rate of 75% of treasure coming from experience points by looking at how many monsters you fight. Over 18 rooms, it works out to 8 encounters and 5 treasures. If we say the average encounter is 3.5 orcs, worth 35 xp, then on the level there's 280 monster xp and 840 treasure xp.

So, 1120 xp on the entire level. With a five-person party, that's 224 xp to be gained. Assuming you cleaned the whole thing out, you'd need to actually do ~9 levels like -- 161 rooms! -- to level up your fighter.  At six rooms per session, that's 27 sessions to level up, assuming you milked every single experience point from the level (a big assumption).

Most people probably expect 3-10 sessions required to get from level 2, so the OSE base rate of treasure gain is three to ten times too slow.

A more typical OSR dungeon level would be about twice as large -- 36 rooms, 16 encounters, 10 treasures. If this has 35 xp per encounter, that's 560, and we need 9440 treasure to make up for the deficit, so 944 gp per treasure. That's a lot of treasure to be handing out to the PCs.

Investigation 2:

Way back in 2014, Delta investigated BX's 75% rule. The ugly truth is that no version of early D&D gives clear, reasonable rules for random stocking of dungeons when it comes to treasure amounts. One option is to ignore monster treasure types entirely and just use the "unguarded" room treasure for all tables. Delta explores this for OD&D but not for BX. In this he discovers that a level of about 50 rooms ~~~kinda~~~ gives an appropriate amount of total experience for the level.

Let's look at BX!  BX is a lot like 0E, but it is a little skint with gold pieces at low levels, and its gems and jewelry don't escalate in value. Here are its average treasure yields, and how fast it will level up our five-fighter party.

So if you're expecting to level up your party off vanilla OSE treasures, it's going to be a long campaign. (Though of course you'll be getting xp from monsters as well.)

Using a 50-room dungeon to compare to the 0E values from Delta's post:

Given that OD&D gave ~roughly~ acceptable numbers, this shows an estimate of how much BX/OSE treasure needs to be magnified.

And for most levels, it's pretty close to 2!  So carousing (in its full, unrestricted form) is actually a fairly good way to make BX roughly equivalent, but it isn't enough at first level.

Thus a rule of thumb could be: have carousing, but in addition, double the treasure on dungeon level 1.

That may be enough to get on with.