This will ultimately lead to, at some point in the future, a set of rules I've made based on what I've learned. I'll include those in my RPG Brave when it's released, but whenever I make a first draft I'll probably post it on my blog as a standalone procedure. If you find any other unique takes on mazes in RPGs I'd love to read them, but this isn't meant to be exhaustive.
Once again, I need to credit Gundobad Games for sparking this thought process, albeit in a completely different context from last time. It was many months ago when I was trying to do research on domain-level play and I dug up a bunch of reddit posts about it and read people's game recommendations and blablabla and one of the most fruitful things I found were these blog posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. I could say a lot about those posts but right now I'm just gunna focus on Part 3, and I'm gunna re-write everything relevant from it here.
So the writer was putting a spotlight on Chris McDowell's Into the Odd, a nifty minimalist old-school RPG, and in particular, on its faction system. He calls them "enterprises" which is a decent name. Here is the full text of Into the Odd's enterprise rules, reproduced here:
Between expeditions, you can try your hand at business, or muster a military force. DETACHMENTS and ENTERPRISES each cost 10 Gold to establish. Detachments demand a further d6 Gold in upkeep each month, or else they revolt.
Income: New ENTERPRISES generate 1d4 Gold of Income each month. They also face a Threat that will cause 1d4 Gold in Losses unless dealt with. If an Enterprise cannot pay its debts, it collapses. Growth: If an ENTERPRISE ends a month with Profit, its income moves up to the next type of die, to a maximum of d12. However, this larger die also applies to losses from Threats.
By the by, a "detachment" is his name for a group of warriors fighting together, which we won't be discussing here. Maybe another day.
Anyway, today I'm gunna talk about the strengths and weaknesses of this system, the more immediate ways in which I've thought to tweak it, and then how I might go about reconciling it with all those other thoughts I vomited up in my last post.
I've been thinking of posting an article about "freeform mechanics" in RPGs, and I still might. But the basic idea is "resolving stuff in the game using your imagination and judgement rather than actual rules or mechanics," but, like, to the extreme. Like, say, maybe you want to run a war between two armies. On one end of the spectrum, you'd have a military simulation board game that defines each of your assets and unit types and whatever kinds of fictional resources you spend like "action points" or something, and it has a list of moves you can take and blablabla. Nothing freeform about it. On the other end of the spectrum, you'd ask the players to describe what they command their army to do. Just, like, from their creative thinking skills. Intimidating, right? But liberating. Exciting.
[EDIT: I was provided the source for this story so I'm re-writing this chunk to be accurate]
I've been reading a truly ridiculous amount of literature on the subject and I want to share this anecdote from Gundobad Games:
My favorite example so far: from Tony Bath's old Hyboria campaign - one player was concerned about a potential rival's construction of a naval fleet, but didn't want to openly provoke hostilities. So he asked Bath whether he could arrange an 'accident' - merchant ships sinking [scuttling!] right at the mouth of the rival's harbor, blocking their port for the near future! Bath agreed, came up with a range of likely results, and then rolled the dice...
I love that. I love the freeform potential of RPGs and I keep finding myself drawn to that direction of design. But it's a double-edged sword. Because of the "tyranny of the blank canvas," many players find freeform gaming to be really unintuitive. When you ask them what they want to do, they don't have an answer. They're more comfortable if you give them options to pick from.
So here's something I've found in the middle that I'm working with and I'd like to share. I'm going to give three examples that illustrative something like what I'm approaching. These are all examples of "freeform but with a little bit of structure, just, like, for help."
“Game time is of utmost importance. Failure to keep careful track of time expenditure by player characters will result in many anomalies in the game. The stricture of time is what makes recovery of hit points meaningful. Likewise, the time spent adventuring in wilderness areas removes concerned characters from their bases of operations – be they rented chambers or battlemented strongholds. Certainly the most important time strictures pertains to the manufacturing of magic items, for during the period of such activity no adventuring can be done. Time is also considered in gaining levels and learning new languages and more. All of these demands upon game time force choices upon player characters and likewise number their days of game life…YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”
It is equally well-known that most people utterly fail to adhere to this advice. It is incredibly rare that DMs implement tools like calendars in their game and maintain it carefully. Many DMs advocate and understand the value of doing things to make the consumption of time meaningful and to keep the world alive with ongoing events and other things that reinforce verisimilitude. But, like, it's hard. Bookkeeping sucks.
Hence, the search for something that achieves the function of time passing but without needing to meticulously track it. Most attempts I've seen at something like this involve rolling dice to determine passage of time, and I'll be following that lead. What follows is my first effort stab at this.
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| Art credit: Trina Schart Hyman |
But I have more content to add in. While many gamers prefer "rulings over rules" and don't want the game to tell them how to do every single last tiny activity imaginable, the implication is that they'd rather come up with their own rules for those activities. Maybe on the fly, but their own rules nonetheless. These same people often advocate making sure to use your on-the-spot ruling consistently from then on if possible, meaning that it would best be codified somewhere. Well, while I have shared Brave with the world with the intention of other people using it, it is fundamentally a collection of my houserules for my table. If I played something like 1st Edition AD&D and rejected their rules for an activity, then the substitute I come up with would go in Brave, because Brave is "the rules DwizKhalifa uses in his campaign." I've made a special effort to make the whole thing as modular and hackable as possible, just as most other DIY games do. Just like any good OSR game, nothing will break if you substitute my HP system or my magic rules or how I run wilderness stuff. But on the other hand, I know I'm not the only one tired of buying "incomplete rulesets" because creators are just a little too dedicated to the DIY ethic. In my mind, my own rules wouldn't be worth putting out to the world unless they were comprehensive enough to cover all of my needs. So, yes, it's worth including, say, the rules I use for sailing.
So we have a problem. I want the "core rules" to remain simple and easy to offer up to a player (like how 1st edition AD&D had the Basic counterpart, or how 5E D&D offers free Basic Rules online). But I also want to add more content, and when that sort of content is adopted for your campaign and you find yourself commonly using it, you'll wish it were included in the core rules. I play 5E D&D and ever since Xanathar's Guide to Everything was released, my group has been using the expanded rules and guidelines for toolsets. They're great! But we constantly find ourselves wishing that stuff had just been in the Player's Handbook rather than looking it up in the "miscellaneous other shit we're adding into the game" chapter in a supplement book. I'm sure if 5.5 Edition ever came out, they would relocate that stuff to the PHB. The only reason it wasn't there all along was because those rules didn't exist in 2014.
So how do I package all my content? I have a few ideas, so strap in.
