tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6111427000351828107.post5705665181525985999..comments2024-03-27T23:06:18.364-05:00Comments on A Knight at the Opera: Game Design vs Level DesignDwizhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17255968459773708115noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6111427000351828107.post-41572592268659416442021-05-24T17:29:19.812-05:002021-05-24T17:29:19.812-05:00Thank you for such thoughtful feedback! This is be...Thank you for such thoughtful feedback! This is best feedback I've received on these rules by far. I'm going to try and reply holistically to everything, but let me know if I miss anything important.<br /><br />You're absolutely right that my rules weren't handling hex-by-hex exploration, or fog of war. You're also right that my speed rules were a bit too detailed for something that isn't much fun, and that calculating the speed for multiple terrains required too much math. <br /><br />I've iterated on the design to address all of these concerns at once. The speed table has been massively simplified, and I've returned to the standard "hours per hex" format. I initially thought this format required too much math, but the "hexes per day" design ended up creating more problems than it solved.<br /><br />The article you linked got me thinking about different hex sizes, and so I've included a conversion rule to handle other sizes. I've also included a new "one hex at a time" variant rule for fog of war gameplay. It's not as clean as it would be if the system was designed for it from the ground up, but as you say, that style of gameplay isn't as common, so I think making it a variant rule is a good middle ground. <br /><br />Your comment about searching hexes is an interesting one. Overall I think my system works well with content premade by the DM, but I see what you mean about "picking the route" not making sense if the party is searching. I've rephrased Step 1 of travel to better handle this. It's a small change, but a powerful one I think. <br /><br />All of the above changes also resulted in Step 2 being merged into Step 1, and a new Step 6 being created for forced marches. I think the resulting procedure is a lot cleaner, especially for the different hex sizes and fog of war rule variant.<br /><br />I'd love to know what you think of the changes, if you have more time. Your feedback has already been immensely helpful though, and I really appreciate it. The level design is still missing pieces, but I've yet to think of a solution that isn't a tonne of work. Maybe rolling on multiple random tables and combining the results is enough, but I suspect "hex stat blocks" are necessary to do it properly. Caesarrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03064114182646141804noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6111427000351828107.post-50754623374853224952021-05-23T23:45:41.247-05:002021-05-23T23:45:41.247-05:00Meanwhile, an EXCELLENT decision is the emphases o...Meanwhile, an EXCELLENT decision is the emphases on activities. Designating activities while traveling is, I think, the key to solving most of the design challenges with making wilderness travel into an actual adventure. It keeps everyone involved, it incorporates challenges other than speed of travel, it can give a meaningful role to different character types, etc. And allowing the Ranger to do 2 activities instead of 1 is, I think, one of the most elegant ways to automatically boost the Ranger class as head-and-shoulders superior to other classes in this arena without allowing the Ranger to trivialize it entirely (in my own RPG you can find on this blog, I included this as a Ranger ability as well).<br /><br />I do find it a bit confusing that the "Support" and "Motivate" actions get significantly harder the higher level you are. Presumably, one's skill bonus will be increasing as well but I find it weird that low level parties have an easier time getting good rest in the great outdoors compared to experienced parties.<br /><br />One of my other issues is the procedural generation of Monuments, Weird Locales, Lairs, and Strongholds. Don't get me wrong, procedurally generating the world and allowing the DM to be just as surprised by the session as the players are is a noble design goal. But it's at odds with the decision to frame wilderness adventure from the initial player decision of "pick a destination and your route to get there." I don't know about you, but most of the kinds of destinations that me and my party would be interested in seeking out would be things on the Monuments/Weird Locales list (especially the ruins!) or Lairs and Strongholds. But if those things are only introduced into the world randomly in the course of the travel procedure, then I can't know about them and their location at the start of the journey when I'm picking my destination. See the problem?<br /><br />Otherwise I mostly just have good things to say about it. Aside from clearly being a tremendous amount of effort, you made a lot of choices that I think boost the experience significantly. Terrain has many meaningful effects, a lot of tools are provided, information is gathered and presented better than in vanilla 5E, the actual process of using these rules would definitely make the act of wilderness adventure seem "real" the same way a dungeon is, rather than a handwaved montage, etc. But this is indeed a system that seems to want to provide the entire experience, the WHOLE adventure, from a source of Game Design rather than Level Design. The Level Design comes into play when you actually make the hex map itself, and I assume that you'd also sprinkle at least a few pre-designed bits of content into those hexes, but this is an impressive effort towards trying to make a robust set of rules that can provide the adventure on their own.Dwizhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17255968459773708115noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6111427000351828107.post-79974016907929780422021-05-23T23:45:00.366-05:002021-05-23T23:45:00.366-05:00Let me write out my thoughts on your system as it&...Let me write out my thoughts on your system as it's currently written. I have come across similar ones before. It's even quite like my first attempt to make a wilderness procedure for 5E. My comment will be split in half.<br /><br />One of the big dividing lines in hexcrawl procedures is whether a procedure expects the players to choose their destination hex-by-hex or if they should plot the whole route up front. Yours leans pretty heavily towards the latter. Even though it acknowledges the possibility that the party might just "generally explore an area," the procedure doesn't seem to account for what they'd do if that's the case. I guess you could allow them to simply make a stop at every hex so they can think about where they'll go next, but it doesn't seem built for a "fog of war" situation where they don't have a map going in (or rather, they only have a BLANK hex map going in). Being able to do both of these kinds of adventures, both the "travel from point A to point B" AND the "explore an area you don't know anything about and you don't know where you'll end up" is, in my experience, incredibly difficult to design for. Obviously the latter adventure is not going to be nearly as common as the former unless your whole campaign is about exploration, but it's a frustratingly common blind spot I find. Still though, just having this procedure to bolster content for those "travel from City A to City B" sessions is a huge improvement.<br /><br />Your system largely assumes that gritty realism will be in effect (as I read elsewhere in the document), and reinforces it by withholding long rest benefits outside of civilization. I LIKE this a lot, but it's yet another step removed from vanilla 5E D&D. 5E is designed with the assumption that you will get a long rest every single 24 hours, and theoretically, I'd love to see a good wilderness system that can work WITH that design choice rather than against it. And yet... The default assumptions of vanilla 5E, in this case, are probably just bad ones anyway. Nobody on earth actually does 6-8 encounters per day, they do 1 to 2 (3 at MOST), so your altered assumptions are probably just better design than the vanilla ones. That said, the "no long rests in the wilderness" rule is a significant enough change that, if used, means you are functionally not playing 5E D&D anymore. At that point, you're playing a different game. Maybe a better one, and maybe one that 6E D&D should pay attention to, but definitely something quite different than what new 5E players are probably signing up for.<br /><br />A note on hexes: I once wrote an article about a couple weird properties of hexcrawls (you can find here: https://knightattheopera.blogspot.com/2021/04/how-do-you-handle-inside-of-hex.html) and I think it's interesting to note that 1: your system falls cleanly under "Version B" as described in that article, and yet 2: it does largely concern itself with travel speed and various speed modifiers as being the single most important variable of the procedure (which I'm personally not crazy about). One of my issues with how it's presented here is that the table for "Hexes Travelled Per Day," organized by terrain type, seems to assume that you'll be traveling in the same terrain type for the full 8 hours. What if we travel by vehicle on the road for 3 hours and then reach the dangerous swamp, where we'll continue on foot at a slow pace for the next 5 hours to keep an eye out for the many sneaky goblins trying to ambush us and the secret entrance of the dungeon we're trying to find? How do you figure out the total number of hexes travelled? I guess you could calculate it ("the vehicle-on-road speed is 6 hexes/8 hours, so if you're only doing it for 3 hours then it should be 2.25 hexes, round down to 2...") but that seems like a pain in the ass.Dwizhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17255968459773708115noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6111427000351828107.post-75750851697214360252021-05-23T18:46:06.500-05:002021-05-23T18:46:06.500-05:00I agree with Gus that this is a fantastic article....I agree with Gus that this is a fantastic article. I love the distinction between macro procedures and gameable pieces of content. <br /><br />I also think Gus is raising a good point about "scene-based" design versus "room-based" (or "hex-based") design. 5e's balance is ostensibly designed around 6-8 medium to hard encounters per long rest, and we see the effect of that in resources like spell slots. However we can also see how this design doesn't seem to be supported in almost any other part of the game, including pre-made adventures. Perhaps viewing 5e as "scene-based" would solve this tension.<br /><br />As far as wilderness procedures go, I've personally gone to great pains to develop such as system. You can find it here, in Chapter 8: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qp2IC_nsS6HBCS8B2_Wmq1X7JH60_Txr/view?usp=sharing <br /><br />While several kinds of gameable content are incorporated into the design, it stops far short of a "monster manual" equivalent, which I agree would vastly improve the level design. It's also hex-based, because I wanted to avoid the classic trapping of players knowing that there'll only ever be one encounter in any given travel montage (i.e. a scene-based approach). I'd love to know what you think of my system. Perhaps further development would bear fruit.Caesarrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03064114182646141804noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6111427000351828107.post-49515914578793385072021-05-22T20:31:59.507-05:002021-05-22T20:31:59.507-05:00I think Wilderness might work better then Dungeonc...I think Wilderness might work better then Dungeoncrawl in 5E - simply because wilderness exploration has traditionally been "scene based", lacking the step by step description of a dungeon crawl. It is more granular with longer "turns". <br /><br />5E the WotC way is a scene based game largely, and I think that's why something like Eyes of the Stone Thief (13th Age) or Castle of Mirrors (3pp 5E) with their limited maps and zone based design (also reminds me a bit of Trophy Gold and its scenes, which is interesting). A Classic wilderness encounter is likewise a scene, a discrete (often necessarily so as they are randomly generated) encounter without spatial connection to the other encounters (though some narrative ones may exist or form). Interested to see what you do with it. Gus Lhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14872819206286105195noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6111427000351828107.post-10905058549050447282021-05-22T19:29:38.923-05:002021-05-22T19:29:38.923-05:00Your comment has given me ae lot to think about. E...Your comment has given me ae lot to think about. Especially in regards to the in-development series of posts on wilderness adventuring, I've increasingly run into design issues that can't be reconciled with 5E D&D, but could definitely be options for another RPG designed with the system in mind.<br /><br />I don't want to give up on 5E because it's my favorite game, even if it isn't perfect for EVERYTHING that I enjoy in gaming. But you're undeniably right. The best version of X activity will come from a game that's built for X activity, so if you really want to do X activity then you'll always have a better time playing in a system that works with you rather than against you.Dwizhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17255968459773708115noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6111427000351828107.post-73618327808769942202021-05-21T14:02:30.241-05:002021-05-21T14:02:30.241-05:00This is a useful post, I hope it gets spread far a...This is a useful post, I hope it gets spread far and wide.<br /><br />It seems that a lot of the friction between classic, indie and contemporary traditional design space would be mitigated if there were a stronger understanding of how mechanics, design principles, and ethics of play work better or worse for certain styles of adventure and demand different adventure design.<br /><br />When running 5E for example I've given up on dungeon crawls using classic Turn and Random Encounter based risk reward, because 5E's not built for that. A 5E dungeon doesn't want detailed exploration in the same way a classic one does because the system supports encounter based rather then level based design. Set piece tactical combat within a narrative/scene structure rather then navigation/exploration with risk v. reward and tension building procedures built around turnkeeping, supply and random encounter as threat.<br /><br />I'd like to think if more folks would just be curious about the design space their favored game is working in and what adventure style works best for it there'd be more comity and a better cross pollination between playstyles.<br /><br />Anyway, great post.Gus Lhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14872819206286105195noreply@blogger.com