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Post by Starbeard on Jul 1, 2022 14:12:52 GMT -6
These sorts of dice minigame abstractions for resource management have floated around for 10-15 years, conspicuously right around the same timeframe as the rise of indie "boutique" RPG design from one angle and the dominance of FFG's fantasy adventure-themed boardgames from the other angle. They do give a certain boardgamey feel to exploration, which is fine really. I can imagine a game like HeroQuest using hazard dice and variable resource dice, and I think it would really rock the game up to the next level.
But for D&D I think it's, ironically, too constricting. The systems rely on a very strict interpretation of abstraction to govern a specific type of exploration method within strictly bounded environments—basically, if every D&D game always read exactly like the example of play page in the the LBB—but a real D&D game provides so many potential narrative and environmental variables that anything that rigid very quickly hits the stress test. I've tried my own back in the day and gave up because at the table we found ourselves as often as not getting mixed up over how the rolls worked, or fudging the results or circumventing the rolls with special case procedures, and still there was record keeping to keep track of the interpretations of the rolls. So I ditched it and went back to the simple ruler of x feet per turn, x turns per resource; it fits all situations and can be modified for special circumstances without any further confusion.
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Post by captainjapan on Jul 1, 2022 21:59:41 GMT -6
Marcia B. seems to think it starts in 2011 with this post about tracking arrows fired. I know it as the usage die from The Black Hack. I didn't think The Black Hack was that old at all; maybe five years?. My problem is that my juvenile players, in all their excitement, tend to forget to track their resources until I remind them. If I was refereeing older, more deliberate players, I wouldn't give this a second look. This Hazard die is the most extreme implementation I've seen. Although, if nothing else, it puts those funny dice to good use. Also, ironically, explaining the results of a Hazard die requires more roleplaying than tracking the resources individually.
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Post by Starbeard on Jul 1, 2022 23:47:26 GMT -6
Marcia B. seems to think it starts in 2011 with this post about tracking arrows fired. I know it as the usage die from The Black Hack. I didn't think The Black Hack was that old at all; maybe five years?. My problem is that my juvenile players, in all their excitement, tend to forget to track their resources until I remind them. If I was refereeing older, more deliberate players, I wouldn't give this a second look. This Hazard die is the most extreme implementation I've seen. Although, if nothing else, it puts those funny dice to good use. Also, ironically, explaining the results of a Hazard die requires more roleplaying than tracking the resources individually. That's a good argument you make, so let's focus on that. My players weren't juveniles, but weren't exactly used to record keeping in tabletop games beyond accumulating resources in Battlemist or Axis & Allies. What I personally found was that I/they frequently forgot in our excitement to remember exactly which resource rolls to make from turn to turn. So it evened out: either the players failed to keep track of points, or they failed to keep track of and interpret rolls. In that case, the onus was on me to keep track of those things, and once it falls to a single person then one method of bookkeeping isn't any quicker than the other. So I'd think that if you can come up with a way to make the resource rolls somehow central to the game—so that the young players aren't remembering to roll and record results if necessary, they are instead making the rolls as their primary way to explore—then you'll have hit something special that can really work well. A few ideas come to mind. One is to get rid of scale maps and just stick to what people call "node" maps now. Each action & movement between zones requires some sort of roll. I played a few games of Torchbearer and was surprisingly impressed by the way it handles exploration this way, since I didn't really like Burning Wheel at all. Another is to stick to grid maps with miniatures, like HeroQuest or Descent. Rolling to move, rolling for encounters, rolling to deplete resources, lots of possibilities here. They do make it very gamey, but in a gridded miniatures/tokens context they lose their abstraction and become very straightforward, because the players literally see the scope and results. So don't overlook it as a possibility, especially for younger players. In fact, I can attest that around 2007-08 I was doing exactly this to upgrade a HeroQuest campaign into something more like D&D: if a player rolled 2 for movement outside of combat then that meant the torch went out. Maybe it ran out, was dropped or broke, whatever; the point was that a torch was used up and the poor movement that turn represented fumbling about to get another torch going. A missile attack that rolled more than one black shield meant ammo was "depleted," and a second depletion meant ammo was out. And so forth. If you'll let me toot my own horn I'd say it all worked pretty darn well.
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Post by hamurai on Jul 4, 2022 22:20:45 GMT -6
To engage younger players, I'd say a more haptic approach might yield better results. Some may prefer a small card with nice torch artwork and boxes to tick off, or you might even use flickering electric LED tea light candles to switch off one by one after each turn. It's really visual, especially when you're not playing in full daylight. Once all candles are out, it's dark. I've used these for a Torchbearer game and my (adult) players really liked them, it did help them remember to switch one off after each turn.
Another idea for younger players is to give each one a token to remember their tracking job by, like a LED candle for the player tracking light sources, for example. Something they can have close by and which is big enough to not get lost in the other play materials.
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Post by Starbeard on Jul 4, 2022 23:32:58 GMT -6
Absolutely! Even I would enjoy any of those.
Drawing from a deck of cards is another often overlooked possibility as a sort if poor man's haptic method. In my old wargame club we used to put on participation games, and the member who designed most of them would reduce as much of the system as possible into drawing a card or playing a card. If you've ever played the Wings of War WW1 miniatures game, then you know the concept. It worked exceptionally well, as all ages could jump in and play the games after only a minute or two of explanation, and there's was never any need to track anything beyond what the cards told you.
For dungeon exploration, once you have all of the resource and time ratios the way you like them, you can turn those into a deck of cards that the players draw from to see what happens next. They can also have cards in hand to play as an alternative to record keeping.
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Post by SebastianDM on Jul 13, 2022 13:52:34 GMT -6
[...] Concerning your 2nd question: As far as my maths say it's a 1:36 chance (1/6 * 1/6) to roll the exact same number twice in a row, and I know it's statistically not unfair, but as we all know, it happens. And for me, this kind of stuff would be an immersion breaker. By freak chance I might be required to rest twice in a row, even if the odds are low, we all know, this stuff happens. Since the first roll could be anything, and only the second roll needs to match the first, I would argue that there is a 1 in 6 chance to roll the same result twice in a row. I have played using this Hazard dice system for maybe around the last 10 sessions and I really like it. I don't use exactly the same results but mostly the same and I really like it. I also disliked the chance of back to back identical rolls. For nearly all the results it does not make much sense. I thought about adding in fiction explanations like minor injuries for the rest result but ended up just adding the rule that the same result twice in a row is re-rolled. It is interesting that Marcia points out that the Hazard dice removes the chance of things happening at the same time. I never thought of that and now that I think of it it is a significant difference to the OD&D rules. I might have to adapt the system a bit to accommodate that, though hopefully not in a way that would add complexity to an, in my opinion, otherwise elegant simplification. [/quote]
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Post by hamurai on Jul 14, 2022 7:13:13 GMT -6
Yeah, the context was missing in my reply. Without checking, I think I was referring to a result of two 4s in a row to burn through the candles in two turns.
For any result, I agree.
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Post by Marcia B. on Jul 23, 2022 9:44:57 GMT -6
Hi y'all! I wanted to respond on the topic of hazard dice and abstract supply First, the hazard die was less a product of the 'indie'/boutique culture and more a product of the early-to-mid G+ OSR culture. The original post was called " Overloading the encounter die" and, as y'all have discussed already, it emulates manual bookkeeping through random probability. For example, instead of torches lasting 6 turns or having to rest every 6 turns, both become one of six possible random events each turn (or, since the author played B/X, I think it's meant to be every other turn). This is a distinct development from usage dice and similar abstract resource management, since it is integrated into the very flow of the game instead of being something that happens when triggered ("When you shoot an arrow, roll to see if you run out of arrows!"). I wrote my take on it because the predominant play culture in my larger circle, i.e. Twitter, is extremely forgetful. They basically received the ultra-light rulebooks of the G+ culture, but none of the informal conventions about play procedure, and it's not like they're reading the ancient texts either. So, it was my attempt to inject some old insights into new discourse. If a ruleset only has rules for making characters and attacking monsters, what good is it to structure a play session or a campaign? This is also, incidentally, the 'boutique' culture which is why I made a print-out pamphlet instead of a blog post. That being said, hazard dice are not actually my personal preference for many of the reasons y'all bring up. I don't like how resource depletion is unreliable and overly abstract, and I don't like how it makes random events independent of each other. There is zero chance of your torch burning out and you becoming exhausted and you getting jumped by monsters. There have been some attempts to remedy this. In a ruleset called Errant, resting on a turn requires you to make two hazard dice rolls that turn. In TURN, resting is an action which carries over until after the next hazard roll, meaning that there is a chance you will be caught as sitting ducks. This doesn't fix the issue in general though, which might bug some people. Most of all, I don't like rolling on a whole table each turn. It's much easier for me to handle the plain 1-in-6 chance of a wandering monster, and then find simpler solutions for resource depletion if that's at all a problem. One thing I've liked the idea of lately, but haven't had the chance to try out, is setting the depletion rate of torches at 1 per turn rather than 1 per 6 turns. I thought of it while reading OD&D and realizing that, although torches don't explicitly burn out, they could be read as analogous to rations for wilderness exploration, which you purchase in sets of 7. Purchasing torches in sets of 6, then, might imply that you also spend 1 per turn. That's not corroborated by any historical reading to my knowledge, though; it's just a possible path never traveled. That's just my preference, though! So much of this discussion depends on how you play at your table and what's most intuitive for you, so I can't judge any method as being better than any other.
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Post by Starbeard on Jul 26, 2022 22:45:27 GMT -6
Hi y'all! I wanted to respond on the topic of hazard dice and abstract supply First, the hazard die was less a product of the 'indie'/boutique culture and more a product of the early-to-mid G+ OSR culture. The original post was called " Overloading the encounter die" and, as y'all have discussed already, it emulates manual bookkeeping through random probability. For example, instead of torches lasting 6 turns or having to rest every 6 turns, both become one of six possible random events each turn (or, since the author played B/X, I think it's meant to be every other turn). This is a distinct development from usage dice and similar abstract resource management, since it is integrated into the very flow of the game instead of being something that happens when triggered ("When you shoot an arrow, roll to see if you run out of arrows!"). I wrote my take on it because the predominant play culture in my larger circle, i.e. Twitter, is extremely forgetful. They basically received the ultra-light rulebooks of the G+ culture, but none of the informal conventions about play procedure, and it's not like they're reading the ancient texts either. So, it was my attempt to inject some old insights into new discourse. If a ruleset only has rules for making characters and attacking monsters, what good is it to structure a play session or a campaign? This is also, incidentally, the 'boutique' culture which is why I made a print-out pamphlet instead of a blog post. That being said, hazard dice are not actually my personal preference for many of the reasons y'all bring up. I don't like how resource depletion is unreliable and overly abstract, and I don't like how it makes random events independent of each other. There is zero chance of your torch burning out and you becoming exhausted and you getting jumped by monsters. There have been some attempts to remedy this. In a ruleset called Errant, resting on a turn requires you to make two hazard dice rolls that turn. In TURN, resting is an action which carries over until after the next hazard roll, meaning that there is a chance you will be caught as sitting ducks. This doesn't fix the issue in general though, which might bug some people. Most of all, I don't like rolling on a whole table each turn. It's much easier for me to handle the plain 1-in-6 chance of a wandering monster, and then find simpler solutions for resource depletion if that's at all a problem. One thing I've liked the idea of lately, but haven't had the chance to try out, is setting the depletion rate of torches at 1 per turn rather than 1 per 6 turns. I thought of it while reading OD&D and realizing that, although torches don't explicitly burn out, they could be read as analogous to rations for wilderness exploration, which you purchase in sets of 7. Purchasing torches in sets of 6, then, might imply that you also spend 1 per turn. That's not corroborated by any historical reading to my knowledge, though; it's just a possible path never traveled. That's just my preference, though! So much of this discussion depends on how you play at your table and what's most intuitive for you, so I can't judge any method as being better than any other. Very thoughtful post. I think we are in agreement with quite a lot—though the only thing I'd quibble over is whether it's particularly useful drawing a distinction between the 'indie scene' of the 2000s-2010s and the 'G+ scene' of the 2010s. Instead, I'd argue that there was never any single G+ 'community', any more than we can refer meaningfully to 'the St. Swordigans High School community' or 'the Facebook community'. Rather, there were a large number of loosely touching communities using the same platform, one of which was both interested in the OSR as a label and the development of design sensibilities inherited from the post-Forge era of early PDF publishing. The impulse to replace record keeping with system output such as (and particularly) interpretive dice rolls goes back to the early 2000s at least, both in RPG designs like Burning Wheel and boardgame designs by Fantasy Flight. Torchbearer in 2013 even distilled the broad interpretive dice concepts of Burning Wheel into an explicit system for managing the appearance of hazards and loss of resources. I can't imagine that groups churning out 'game hacks' on G+ were blissfully unaffected by these developments (hot off the heels of Torchbearer, in particular) when they began proposing ways to graft such features onto the D&D encounter die. But none of that is really to your point, so fight on. I'm just airing my gut feeling to nobody in particular that the general concept of what the hazard die is attempting to do is much older than that first 2014 post would suggest.
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Post by Marcia B. on Jul 31, 2022 7:59:10 GMT -6
Very thoughtful post. I think we are in agreement with quite a lot—though the only thing I'd quibble over is whether it's particularly useful drawing a distinction between the 'indie scene' of the 2000s-2010s and the 'G+ scene' of the 2010s. Instead, I'd argue that there was never any single G+ 'community', any more than we can refer meaningfully to 'the St. Swordigans High School community' or 'the Facebook community'. Rather, there were a large number of loosely touching communities using the same platform, one of which was both interested in the OSR as a label and the development of design sensibilities inherited from the post-Forge era of early PDF publishing. The impulse to replace record keeping with system output such as (and particularly) interpretive dice rolls goes back to the early 2000s at least, both in RPG designs like Burning Wheel and boardgame designs by Fantasy Flight. Torchbearer in 2013 even distilled the broad interpretive dice concepts of Burning Wheel into an explicit system for managing the appearance of hazards and loss of resources. I can't imagine that groups churning out 'game hacks' on G+ were blissfully unaffected by these developments (hot off the heels of Torchbearer, in particular) when they began proposing ways to graft such features onto the D&D encounter die. But none of that is really to your point, so fight on. I'm just airing my gut feeling to nobody in particular that the general concept of what the hazard die is attempting to do is much older than that first 2014 post would suggest. Thank you! I agree that it's difficult to speak of any one community (I have a friend who uses the term family resemblance to refer to such vague assemblages of different groups or connections, especially w.r.t. the OSR), and that the particular influence of Torchbearer on this play/design style can't be understated, or the influence of other games in general. It's just, having to often engage with a more commercially-inclined network of hobbyists, I think it's really important to point out that there were or are communities that aren't just centered on making 'content' for sale.
Anyway, fully agree that the hazard die didn't just appear out of nowhere! It feels like a product of its time.
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Post by Starbeard on Jul 31, 2022 11:05:56 GMT -6
No qualms there, absolutely!
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flightcommander
Level 6 Magician
"I become drunk as circumstances dictate."
Posts: 370
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Post by flightcommander on Dec 21, 2023 21:38:39 GMT -6
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Post by captainjapan on Dec 22, 2023 1:12:00 GMT -6
Wow! I was skeptical, at first; thinking this resource would be a pain to set-up and require more experience than I have to make it work, but I'm totally going to try it after reading his stellar manifesto, #NoBadMaps. I don't want to pay for Photoshop. If the brushes (which are really stamps) will install in Gimp, then I pay nothing. I'm in. Update: Alas, I was not able to integrate the brushes into the free image editing program, Gimp; as I had hoped. Although the blog's author does link to WikiHow instructions for Gimp, I couldn't find the options menu in my installation, nor the directory path to put the brushes:(
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bat
Level 4 Theurgist
Mostly Chaotic
Posts: 144
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Post by bat on Dec 23, 2023 12:21:05 GMT -6
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Post by captainjapan on Dec 25, 2023 15:55:40 GMT -6
That's a long enough blogroll, and at over a decade old, that I expect there to be at least two stellar posts come out of it. bat, what are your favorite items from this list?
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bat
Level 4 Theurgist
Mostly Chaotic
Posts: 144
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Post by bat on Dec 26, 2023 10:47:40 GMT -6
I do add to the list, so not all are that old. I should go through it and prune out the dead links, although some have been left alone, too. I cannot pick a favorite, I put links there to support everyone who contributes to the OSR, if anything I feel bad for those that I have left out as I am still discovering new OSR blogs and relevant pages from time to time.
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