turns to inventory

[tetramorph]

I've finally gotten to the point where I feel pretty confident about my assessment of rounds and turns.

Going by feet was my first initiation. Then getting the "vibe" of exploration without movement (looking for secret doors, fiddling with tricks, etc.).

But I've been hand-waiving dealing with treasure. Once they've won the treasure (through combat or figuring something out) I usually just have them load up the treasure and start dealing with encumbrance.

But taking inventory, finding out how many pieces they are, and what they are, deciding what to take out and what to leave takes time.

How do you guys judge that?

Do you have a rule-of-thumb to share?

Fight on!

[EdOWar]

I've recently started running a Whitebox game at my FLGS. My intention was to do everything by-the-book, even encumbrance. Initially it's pretty easy: record weight for armor, shield, weapons & ammo, and then add 10 lbs. for general equipment. But once the PCs start loading up on salvage and treasure, it gets harder and harder to make sure they're really tracking the weight. Last session I sort of eye-balled the weight of their treasure. But I didn't make them divide it up between them, which I probably should have done in case one of them fell down a bottomless pit, or something. Ideally though, in future sessions I want them to track encumbrance scrupulously, so I'm think maybe an inventory slot type system would be easier to track.

[tetramorph]

EdOWar, thanks for the reply!

No, I've been tracking encumbrance. I've been using my own house-ruled simplification, but it is still something they must deal with in an 0e / old school kind of way.

No, what I am asking is, how to you track turns when they are counting pieces, taking inventory of what they find, making decisions about what to loot and what to leave, packing up their sacks and bags, etc.?

[Deleted]

One wandering monster check.

[EdOWar]

Dec 10, 2017 13:53:51 GMT -6 tetramorph said:

EdOWar, thanks for the reply!

No, I've been tracking encumbrance. I've been using my own house-ruled simplification, but it is still something they must deal with in an 0e / old school kind of way.

No, what I am asking is, how to you track turns when they are counting pieces, taking inventory of what they find, making decisions about what to loot and what to leave, packing up their sacks and bags, etc.?

Ah, sorry, I completely misunderstood your question. I'd probably do one or two wandering monster checks, depending on how long they're taking.

[talysman]

I'd probably use real-time discussion as a guide to how long it's taking to pack or unpack treasure. If there's no discussion, it takes 1 turn (or one wandering monster check, as Gronan put it.) If there's a debate about which items to take, who carries what, and so on, and it lasts more than 5 minutes, add 1 turn per full ten minutes, or a minimum of +1 turn.

[howandwhy99]

Dec 10, 2017 13:53:51 GMT -6 tetramorph said:

No, what I am asking is, how to you track turns when they are counting pieces, taking inventory of what they find, making decisions about what to loot and what to leave, packing up their sacks and bags, etc.?

Time is the most important resource in the game IMO. Everything the players do spends time.

That said, I try and keep it easy. Beer & Pretzels. I only shrink time fractions when there are consequences for not doing so. Like asking for initiative. Or when the design becomes dynamic or response, as with monsters or traps. Otherwise I take actions to last minutes (rounds), 10s of minutes (turns), even hours or days depending on what they are doing. If I'm ever in doubt, I actually ask the players how long they choose to take.

All kinds of actions have a time requirement, but mostly it's the players who say how long they want to do something. It's their action after all. And usually they stop when they get what they are looking for or quit trying. (That might mean they actually stop before an action is resolved).

Game time as Real time (per the clock) I find works best when the players are in conversation, either with themselves or with NPCs. And even that I round up to a minute on the time tracker.

Less than a minute actions are really fussy to track, but sometimes it's necessary. Psionic combat for instance. Newer games get really fussy with combat seconds. I do use a kind of segmentation and order of actions for initiative, but it rarely gets taken by the players or applied. I like to keep things simple until they need to get specific.

For me, I find Search Times are important to know. Not just because digging deeper into the detail of the game design is a basic action. But also because stuff like: How they search, how many search, what is the search area like, is something of a game unto itself. I find square footage (Size) matters in old school games beyond your basic inflating fireballs.*

*(that doesn't sound quite right)

[clownboss]

I measure every action, from disarming and looting a chest, interviewing captives, scouting ahead, etc in 10 minute chunks. I always keep a tiny notepad at the ready with segments where I write:
7:00
7:10 - Lantern started
7:20 - Battle started
7:21 7:22 7:23
7:33
7:43

And so on. That includes finding chests with more than 100 coins. I just say "You have a very heavy chest in your hands that's full of coins, but you don't know how many." They usually don't count the money either until they get back to town.

[clownboss]

(Sike! It's counterfeit!)

[Starbeard]

Lately I've been thinking about this as well. I've tried a few solutions, sometimes eyeballing encumbrance weights for treasure, sometimes requiring the party to take time sorting it all out.

This is (more or less) the germ of my most current idea, and I'll be trying to flesh it out in my next few games. It's rough, and I still plan to streamline it and make it less "rulesy" overall:

1. Small treasure (say, a sack of 100 coins, a few items, etc) can be described by weight ("a bag of mixed coins including a gem or three, weighing 6 pounds"). No sorting out coins unless they want to take a turn or two to do it, though!

2. Heavier treasure should only be described generally, usually in terms of how many people it might take to carry it. They can choose to take the time to sort through it right there (I'm thinking of letting one character sort, say, 500 coins a turn), or they can just throw it into sacks and haul it. A character can load up treasure indiscriminately into 2 bags in a single turn.

3. Anyone hauling unsorted treasure automatically counts as being fully encumbered, regardless of how much it actually weighs. They can split the treasure or find out its actual weight if they take turns sorting it.

That's about it. The idea is: you don't have to take the time to sort the treasure until you get to safety, but in doing so we just assumed you are fully weighed down, regardless of what you actually have.

There are a few kinks to sort, like how to rule 'indiscriminately throwing treasure into bags'. Perhaps once they stop to count out the bag's contents, we roll to see how much the bag was actually filled up with treasure, between 60% and 100% of its total capacity. As usual, the more detail they use in describing how they're loading the treasure (and thus reducing the random nature of what they haul), the more time it takes to do.

I'm also thinking of padding each treasure's description by up to +50%. That way, if they want to guarantee that they haul all of the treasure in one go, they'll need enough free bags to carry the whole lot +50%, otherwise there will always be some treasure left in the pile. For example, a treasure weighing 5,000 coins might be described as requiring as many as 12 large sacks to carry (actually enough to haul 7,200 coins). Taking the time to sort through it will allow them to haul it in fewer sacks, but it will take extra time and wandering monster checks.

[talysman]

Dec 13, 2017 6:54:19 GMT -6 Starbeard said:

Lately I've been thinking about this as well. I've tried a few solutions, sometimes eyeballing encumbrance weights for treasure, sometimes requiring the party to take time sorting it all out.

This is (more or less) the germ of my most current idea, and I'll be trying to flesh it out in my next few games. It's rough, and I still plan to streamline it and make it less "rulesy" overall:

1. Small treasure (say, a sack of 100 coins, a few items, etc) can be described by weight ("a bag of mixed coins including a gem or three, weighing 6 pounds"). No sorting out coins unless they want to take a turn or two to do it, though!

2. Heavier treasure should only be described generally, usually in terms of how many people it might take to carry it. They can choose to take the time to sort through it right there (I'm thinking of letting one character sort, say, 500 coins a turn), or they can just throw it into sacks and haul it. A character can load up treasure indiscriminately into 2 bags in a single turn.

3. Anyone hauling unsorted treasure automatically counts as being fully encumbered, regardless of how much it actually weighs. They can split the treasure or find out its actual weight if they take turns sorting it.

I'd drop that last rule, myself. The other two are better.

I've long been an advocate of converting to a sack system for encumbrance. And the more time passes, the more fully I embrace it. So now, I'm thinking:

• Characters can carry 5 sacks at half move, or 10 sacks at 1/4 move.
• Treasure isn't listed in coins, it's listed in sacks (5 sacks worth of gold coins, 3 sacks of mixed coins.)
• Each sack holds either 30 pounds or 300 coins/coin-sized objects and look like a 30-pound sack of potatoes. Bags (small sacks) hold 5 pounds/50 coins and look like a 5-pound bag of sugar. Belt pouches hold 2 pounds/20 coins.
• One person packs one sack in one turn. One person sorts one sack in one turn. One person counts one sack in one turn.
• Write contents of each individual sack on an index card. Each line on an index card indicates one average-sized item, and each sack gets six lines of text. List up to six small items on one line.

What I'm thinking about doing next is rewriting equipment costs in terms of sacks, bags, pouches and individual coins as well. Or, at the very least, improvising many item costs in those terms, sort of like the various improv item cost rules similar to Zak Smith's coin system. You might not actually need to deal with individual coin counts, ever. But that's something to think about for a while...

[sixdemonbag]

If my group took longer than 10 minutes to divvy up treasure, then I would certainly roll a die loudly and dramatically so that every knows the clock is ticking and their DM is starting to fall asleep lol.

In practice, however, I have never encountered this particular issue because record-keeping is not very strict in my game (in order to keep the game moving). The main reason for this is that our time is very limited and precious and no one is particularly interested in it.

EDIT: For context, we generally don't track encumbrance or movement rates so that we don't get bogged down in minutia. But, I suppose if we could manage more than a few hours a week (optimistically), we could actually incorporate encumbrance/movement rates/XP for Gold/etc. I doubt that will ever actually happen, though.

[tetramorph]

Dec 13, 2017 23:41:42 GMT -6 sixdemonbag said:

If my group took longer than 10 minutes to divvy up treasure, then I would certainly roll a die loudly and dramatically so that every knows the clock is ticking and their DM is starting to fall asleep lol.

In practice, however, I have never encountered this particular issue because record-keeping is not very strict in my game (in order to keep the game moving). The main reason for this is that our time is very limited and precious and no one is particularly interested in it.

EDIT: For context, we generally don't track encumbrance or movement rates so that we don't get bogged down in minutia. But, I suppose if we could manage more than a few hours a week (optimistically), we could actually incorporate encumbrance/movement rates/XP for Gold/etc. I doubt that will ever actually happen, though.

I used to worry that tracking time and encumbrance would slow things down and bore the players.

Then I tried it. It took me a couple of session to get used to it. But once I got good at it the game changed. It became about resource management, figuring things out, and getting out (or the mcguffin) in time.

I highly recommend giving it a try. Especially if you are going for old school style play.

[tetramorph]

Starbeard and talysman , I like where you guys are going.

I have a generic encumbrance system: standard gear does not encumber. Take armor class X100 and that is the pieces (pcs) count one can hold. I abstract this to a group total. Metal pieces 1:1; gems 1:10; jewelry 1:100 pcs. Etc. per other similar items.

I need to match satchels / small sacks / large sacks to this encumbrance system. I realize now that that will help. Plus I need to start getting stricter about checking that the party actually has the means to carry stuff out.

Still, when they are sifting through a pile of treasure piled up over years, perhaps via magical insanity and the swishing about of dragon tails, that is going to take time. Brushing through copper coins to find that giant gem buried underneath -- time. I mean all this abstractly.

So I may come up with a turns per gp value count. Or I might try a "needle in the haystack" approach. If they grab and dash, they just get coin. They have to search through the piles to find the gems and jewelry and that takes time. So perhaps I could develop something based upon how many turns it takes to uncover gems (harder) and jewelry items (less difficult) in a big pile of coppers.

Then again, maybe I could just go with @gronanofsimmerya and keep it simple: one wandering monster check.

I guess I just want to raise the threat level and give them the feeling of the pressure of time upon them while they are rifling through for magic items (oh yeah, I forgot about those), gems and jewelry.

I'll keep thinking.

Fight on!

[EdOWar]

Dec 14, 2017 14:03:36 GMT -6 Piper said:

Dec 14, 2017 12:51:34 GMT -6 tetramorph said:

I used to worry that tracking time and encumbrance would slow things down and bore the players.

Then I tried it. It took me a couple of session to get used to it. But once I got good at it the game changed. It became about resource management, figuring things out, and getting out (or the mcguffin) in time.

I highly recommend giving it a try. Especially if you are going for old school style play.

tetramorph runs a good game. I've sat at his table and he's one of the few referees besides myself who uses time and encumbrance. I enjoy it and believe it enhances the level of engagement.

I've seen this in my own game, as well. Players have to make hard choices whether to spend several turns thoroughly searching a room for hidden treasure and secret doors, or to just move on. It really affects their gameplay, and they've missed some significant treasures because they didn't take the time to thoroughly search. And they ran into trouble a couple times when they did stop to search and I rolled a wandering monster.

So far encumbrance hasn't been as big of an issues, but when they find their first real big treasure haul, it will be. Especially when they're laden down with treasure, trying to crawl their way out of a dungeon with a movement rate of 3.

[tetramorph]

Thanks, Piper. Hope to see you at my table again soon!

EdOWar, nice point about the move rate of 3. I apply that pretty strictly. When encumbered, they move at half rate.

I've had parties take significant losses through sheer greed!

In one "famous" (ha ha) encounter, the party was greedy, agreed to half move rates, and one of their best, most loyal NPC henchmen got killed. They wound up giving more than that character's portion of the treasure away to the family and village to keep in good with everybody back home! But they had actually grown affectionate with this character so they actually "felt" some kind of "real loss." You can't pay for that kind of goodness.

[tetramorph]

Okay, EdOWar, talysman, howandwhy99, clownboss, Starbeard, sixdemonbag, Piper, so, remember I'm going for abstraction here.

How about this:

Each character can sort through 1K pcs per turn.

I base this upon very exacting calculations (ha ha): If we can count about two "pieces" a second: 10 minutes times 60 seconds is 600 seconds, times two per second is 1,200 "counts." But 1,200 is a weird number for gaming. So I rounded it to 1K. I know, I know. Brilliant, right? But really, the point is meaningful abstraction in order to give the players the sense that time that they take doing something matters and is dangerous.

Now, I count gems as 10 pcs and jewelry items as 100 pcs for encumbrance. I figure I can use the same for this measure of "counting time." I think it can still fit the abstraction: you need a few seconds to discern that diamond in the midst of all that gold and then fish it out separately. And you need about a minute to pull out, dust off, ogle and bag an item of jewelry.

So, in a concrete instance I would calculate the number of pcs (I usually have this added up before I come to the table), count the characters present, multiply by 1K and compare. Each turn they take sorting I roll for an encounter.

I realize this may create further problems for me, e.g., what do I do if they count half of it and bolt? Which "half" do I judge that they dashed off with? Sheesh.

Anywho. In terms of the basic gist, what do you think?

[EdOWar]

Sounds fair to me, and I think I might adopt it for my game. Many thanks.

[talysman]

Sounds like it could work for you, although I still prefer 1 sack per turn for my own purposes, even if it's slower. I figure a lot of time is spent taking treasure out of containers and putting them back in.

For a situation where the party randomly grabs only part of the treasure, then leaves, there's two main concerns:

1. If gems and jewelry are mixed with the coins, which ones are taken, and which are left behind?
2. If there are two or more types of coin, frex gold and silver, how much of each is taken?

For the first, if for example the party takes half the treasure, then there is a 50-50 chance per gem or piece of jewelry is in the treasure taken. So, I'd just roll a 1d6 for each one to see what was actually retrieved.

In the second case, if each coin container has only one coin type, the situation is the same as for gems if the party doesn't see the contents. If, though, the coins are stored in several urns with open mouths, the party could glance quickly to see if an urn they are grabbing looks like it's mostly gold. If the coins are all mixed together, I'd assume the party takes half of the total gold and half of the silver as a base, then shift it a little to one side or the other based on some improvised roll. Maybe +/- 0-10%?

[howandwhy99]

I like it. Seconds aren't really a measure for almost all of D&D, so going decimal means less work for you.

So a treasure horde, say, has 100s or 1000s of coins, and an assortment of other goods. One piece each (for every item). 100 items/round is a quick calculation. So is 1000/turn. (or PRE-CALCULATE!)

I like to be accurate with what I inform players without worrying about creature INT for stuff like this. "You see 14 gnolls running down the hill". For me, all 100 pieces in 1 minute of inspection would be correctly known (barring illusions, disguise, etc). And if they aren't searching the loot? "Opening the bulging pouch you discover a pile of gold coins"

As addendum,
I pre-roll wandering monster encounters by area. It's helped me in all kinds of ways. But then I rarely have many 1000s of anything anywhere to count.

Plus I tend to average large quantities when it doesn't matter. Like assessing gems "Are you a jeweler? They're both roughly 100gp gems". Or even distances "You fall... hmm... let's say 10 feet".

[sixdemonbag]

I like your system tetramorph . Very thorough and detailed!

From a practical standpoint, I would only haul GP and replace them with gems as they are found. I'd completely ignore and avoid silver and less precious metals since they are a waste of valuable space. FWIW, our current campaign is theater-of-the-mind, so movement rates (and thus encumbrance and XP for Gold) don't really apply to us.

However, I'd DIE to play in a campaign where all movement is tracked on grid paper; and every coin and XP is accounted for. One of these days, I want to enforce strict resource management (including food, water, light sources, et al) just to see what happens . For now, I'm liberal with bags of holding and handwave it all since I assume that's why they are in the treasure list lol.

Btw, Does anyone know if the 1 rest turn per 5 rule was a way to mitigate and abstract-away some of these issues or was it more intended to be a consequence of actual physical exertion and to slow the pace of travel? Or, was it basically just an old wargame convention? I always assumed it was an abstract period to divvy up treasure, apply bandages, lick your wounds, catch your breath and so on. This was so that we didn't have to track some of this stuff so closely. Otherwise, I'm not really sure what it's point is if not to encompass some of these brief moments.

I'm afraid after seeing everyone's systems for handling this, that I might be quite off in that thinking though.

In essence, would it be wrong to just fold all the post-encounter time-tracking into the rest turn? I don't want to veer too far from old-school style which I praise for it's speed and efficiency and it's lack of fiddly bits. So maybe someone could give me some historical context on the rest turn and why it doesn't apply in this case?

[Starbeard]

tetramorph : That's a sound system, I think I'll actually borrow it. I think talysman has a good point about erring on the side of extra time, especially since so many of the time units in D&D assume more time instead of less (adventurers are easily distracted!). If you want to take it in stages, you might say it takes 1 turn to sort 1,000cn of treasure, and 1 turn to bag 1,000cn of treasure. That way the players can do one or both, depending on available time and interest in the treasure.

On hauling treasure without counting it first, if you're happy to take the complicated route you can give each 100cn a percent chance of containing a random fancy item, based on how much of the treasure's total mass is taken up by fancy items. Actually, it's not that complicated if you are happy to use a calculator, especially if you prepare the treasure ahead of the game.

A more abstract solution might to make use of a simple "find secret doors" check. A character can spend 1 turn searching the treasure for good stuff, with a 1:6 chance of finding 1d6 items (as individual items, or in piles or containers, depending on how the treasure is being stored). The usual factors apply, so elves find special treasure more easily, and if you use thieves then perhaps they can use their Listen skill, making them quite useful as radars for special treasure. This way you have plenty of freedom to alter the probabilities to suit the specific treasure: if the gems are hidden inside a large amphora, maybe they can get a +1 on the roll to notice the amphora during the quick search; if they are looking for the Arkenstone within Smaug's hoard, then you might say that they only have a 10% chance of even being able to make the 1:6 roll. If they haul the treasure without counting it first, you can do the same thing: once they stop to count it, give each loaded bag's worth a 1:6 chance that one or more items found their way in.

Using turns either to search, count, or load treasure then gives the players several ways to tackle the problem, and it becomes a small game of determining the most time-efficient method for each treasure (and the wandering monster checks as the players bicker about whether to search, sort or haul). Small treasures might as well be loaded up and sorted later. Larger treasures might be better searching for good stuff first. Treasures that are obviously very mixed might be better off spending a turn or two sorting part of it out first.

[derv]

tetramorph, do your players usually grab and dash? Or, do you think your new rule will encourage them to grab and dash? Either way, if your treasure contains gems and jewelry, determine how much is there in relation to the whole. That is the percentile chance of grabbing a piece. If 90% of the hoard is silver coins mixed with 10% diamonds, they have a 1 in 10 chance of grabbing some diamonds. Simple.

I tend to lean more towards the real time crowd here. If they're piddling around, roll for a wandering monster. But, I like your idea of trying to quantify the sorting of treasure with time.

[hamurai]

Dec 15, 2017 2:36:43 GMT -6 sixdemonbag said:

Btw, Does anyone know if the 1 rest turn per 5 rule was a way to mitigate and abstract-away some of these issues or was it more intended to be a consequence of actual physical exertion and to slow the pace of travel?

I always saw it as 1) a means to abstractly account for small rests and 2) make movement and rest tracking easier especially for long time periods: each hour you can move 5 turns and must rest 1 turn.

[Starbeard]

Dec 16, 2017 1:14:54 GMT -6 hamurai said:

Dec 15, 2017 2:36:43 GMT -6 sixdemonbag said:

Btw, Does anyone know if the 1 rest turn per 5 rule was a way to mitigate and abstract-away some of these issues or was it more intended to be a consequence of actual physical exertion and to slow the pace of travel?

I always saw it as 1) a means to abstractly account for small rests and 2) make movement and rest tracking easier especially for long time periods: each hour you can move 5 turns and must rest 1 turn.

I've always assumed the details of the case rest turn were carried over from Chainmail's fatigue rule, where after 5 moves a unit becomes fatigued until it stops and rests for a full turn.

I'm still undecided on including them. The exploratory move rate is so slow already that I have to explain it away to players as an abstraction that includes mapping, stopping to investigate things that come to nothing, resting and shifting your gear around, etc. After that explanation, adding a rest turn seems overkill, and honestly I haven't noticed any difference in how the game runs with or without forced rests. By the time 5 moves are up, they've usually found a room to waste the next 1-4 turns on anyway.

[Starbeard]

Dec 16, 2017 1:14:54 GMT -6 hamurai said:

Dec 15, 2017 2:36:43 GMT -6 sixdemonbag said:

Btw, Does anyone know if the 1 rest turn per 5 rule was a way to mitigate and abstract-away some of these issues or was it more intended to be a consequence of actual physical exertion and to slow the pace of travel?

I always saw it as 1) a means to abstractly account for small rests and 2) make movement and rest tracking easier especially for long time periods: each hour you can move 5 turns and must rest 1 turn.

I've always assumed the details of the rest turn were carried over from Chainmail's fatigue rule, where after 5 moves a unit becomes fatigued until it stops and rests for a full turn.

I'm still undecided on including them. The exploratory move rate is so slow already that I have to explain it away to players as an abstraction that includes mapping, stopping to investigate things that come to nothing, resting and shifting your gear around, etc., otherwise they write it off as 'one of those stupid old D&D rules'. After that explanation, adding a rest turn seems overkill, and honestly I haven't noticed any difference in how the game runs with or without forced rests. By the time 5 moves are up, they've usually found a room to waste the next 1-4 turns on anyway.

[tetramorph]

I assume a rest turn after I've made 5 tallies for turns.

Depending upon the dungeon and situation I either roll random encounter by turn or by hour. If by turn, I just roll twice when I make the fifth tally.

I assume this to mean that exploring a dingy underground frightening environment takes time and energy. The "rest" turn is also abstract for me. And may actual represent time dilation in one of the other turns.

Keeping clear track of time allows me to deliver consequences to players.

Especially when there are time-based details in the dungeon. Something I've been adding more and more now that I am actually keeping accurate time records.

[tetramorph]

Okay, thanks, talysman,sixdemonbag, Starbeard, and derv.

I think if they find themselves in a situation where they need to dash, as talysman brought up, I will go with sixdemonbag suggestion that they grabbed the gold and no other coin. Then I think I will add to that Starbeard's idea of using a mechanic similar to that of secret doors (with class and race differences accounted for) for whether d6 # of better items were inadvertently grabbed during the great escape. I would then roll those up in some equally random way. However, Starbeard, I don't think I will separate inventory from bagging. I think I'm going to assume that you are bagging while sorting -- the bag is helping you sort -- that kind of thing. derv, no, my players aren't the grab and dash type, but that is because I've been easy-going about this. You know "okay, we finally killed the monster and found the treasure! Whoop! Pass the Cheetos and lets find out what we got!" No more. This may make them more grab and dash -- but that may be fun! I'll report back after play testing.

Thanks for all the help with this, guys.

(With regards to your "theatre of the mind," point, sixdemonbag, I'd just say: we play that way too, meaning, we do not use miniatures. But we do use graph paper and there is a mapper. So if squares are 10' then you always know how far you've gone and, therefore, how much time you've spent (6 squares a move, 12 squares a turn).)

[sixdemonbag]

Very interesting stuff. I'm liking all these ideas so far. Good topic.

Oh and tetramorph , I REALLY like your hybrid-mapping/TOTM system. I may try that to ease in to that idea when the new year's campaign starts. Switching from 5E to OD&D was a big gamble for us and we love it so far. The plan is to slowly start incorporating more of these "grounded" elements to our game. Your method would be a great "bridge" model for us. Thanks!

[Starbeard]

Sounds excellent, let us know how it plays out. I spontaneously tried to apply your ideas in last night's session, but unfortunately it was only a mental exercise for me, since the party was grabbing loot in a cave that no longer had any wandering monster checks for various reasons.

sixdemonbag, our game is also TotM, but the players are responsible for mapping. Sometimes I use figure markers to show formation, who's attacking whom, or position in a room.

I've also had a group of players brought in on 5e, who never got the point of mapping, even after they got lost a couple of times. In that game I still used my own map, marking their movement across turns & describing the scenery to them as they explored (but without foot measurements or cardinal directions, since they weren't bothering to map), and that actually seemed to satisfy their itch for old school dungeon crawling. They still had to think about encumbrance and time, but all they had to track was their own encumbrance.