Big J Money
Adventurer
(Reposting from Dragonsfoot. I'm not sure which is the more active OSR community)
I had a dream last night where this idea came to me in the morning, heh.
The purpose of this is to add yet more strategic options for tackling the dungeon. The party can recruit hirelings to be dungeon scouts. Scouts will try to explore and map sections of the dungeon while the party heads elsewhere. This could be useful in cases where time pressure is an issue, however scouts are error prone and less reliable than a party handling the business on their own. There are risks of using scouts.
These are the things they can fail at:
- Remaining quiet/hidden; which causes encounters and potentially warns dungeon inhabitants
- Surviving said encounters
- Properly identifying said creatures as they retreat
- Noticing traps
- Avoiding traps
- Accurately mapping
- Continuing on their mission (morale)
- Honoring their word when tempted with treasure (loyalty)
- Honoring the party when tempted to turncoat by dungeon inhabitants (loyalty)
- (You better hope to the gods they don't encounter anything that can charm or otherwise mind-influence them...)
Whenever a scout is sent off in a direction, make some random rolls to determine things like: which direction they take, what mistakes, if any do they make on their map, and for each of the above mentioned items.
I haven't formulate this into the requisite series of tables, but was curious what people think. I wouldn't say the costs always outweigh the benefit, but I will say the intention here is that the mistakes and confusion will likely outweigh the accurate information. The players have to decide what they do with the scraps of information they get from a returned (or killed) scout. Most likely, I intend to give each scout a secret set of stats that influence which things they are best at, along with how loyal/trustworthy they are.
I had a dream last night where this idea came to me in the morning, heh.
The purpose of this is to add yet more strategic options for tackling the dungeon. The party can recruit hirelings to be dungeon scouts. Scouts will try to explore and map sections of the dungeon while the party heads elsewhere. This could be useful in cases where time pressure is an issue, however scouts are error prone and less reliable than a party handling the business on their own. There are risks of using scouts.
These are the things they can fail at:
- Remaining quiet/hidden; which causes encounters and potentially warns dungeon inhabitants
- Surviving said encounters
- Properly identifying said creatures as they retreat
- Noticing traps
- Avoiding traps
- Accurately mapping
- Continuing on their mission (morale)
- Honoring their word when tempted with treasure (loyalty)
- Honoring the party when tempted to turncoat by dungeon inhabitants (loyalty)
- (You better hope to the gods they don't encounter anything that can charm or otherwise mind-influence them...)
Whenever a scout is sent off in a direction, make some random rolls to determine things like: which direction they take, what mistakes, if any do they make on their map, and for each of the above mentioned items.
I haven't formulate this into the requisite series of tables, but was curious what people think. I wouldn't say the costs always outweigh the benefit, but I will say the intention here is that the mistakes and confusion will likely outweigh the accurate information. The players have to decide what they do with the scraps of information they get from a returned (or killed) scout. Most likely, I intend to give each scout a secret set of stats that influence which things they are best at, along with how loyal/trustworthy they are.
