Adventurous Treasure Hunters

[cavesalamander]

(Branching from the 'Is the OSR Dead?" thread)

Maybe it's because I tweaked the rules in my 5e campaign a bit, and my player group are
grognards, but I find the 5e system supports "adventurous treasure hunters" very well. My Wilderlands 5e campaign bears very little resemblance to the 'heroic adventure path' play of the 5e
published campaigns or most Pathfinder APs, and 5e seems to support this play style well; 4e did not and 3e/PF isn't great at it either, but 5e seems fine.

I'd like to go a little deeper into this and ask for further thoughts on this. What is it about 5th edition (and 1st/2nd for that matter) that makes it so amenable to the "adventurous treasure hunters" style of play, and what is it about 4th that works against it?

Is it the resource tracking/strategic level of gameplay? 4th excels at the tactical level, but tends to gloss over 'bigger picture' elements like light sources and encumbrance that were mainstays of earlier editions. Not to mention that PC resources like hit points were designed to be mostly 'encounter-focused.' This makes for exciting and challenging individual encounters, but makes 'sandboxing' difficult.

What tweaks to 5th help with that? What would you change in 4th? (And would the necessary tweaks change the game too much?)

 

[cavalier973]

For 4e, enforce encumbrance rules, and slash the weight allowance. Instead of multiplying the STR score by 10, multiply it by 5.

Also, require the players draw their own dang map, and award xp for treasure acquired.

 

[cavesalamander]

award xp for treasure acquired.

I've thought about making recovering treasure a type of quest, whereby carrying a parcel's worth of treasure back to town is worth XP equal to an encounter of the same level. You could cut 'defeat monster XP' to 1/10 normal, so that killing monsters isn't all that rewarding in comparison to recovering treasure.

In such a game, encumbrance rules would have to be tougher, and rigorously enforced.

 

[S'mon]

4e is tightly designed for a very particular heroic-cinematic style, everything about it from encounter-based attrition to the encounter-build mechanics supports this, eg the way encounters need to be within a tight threat band. It does 'Pemertonian Scene Framing' well, it really fights back if you try to use it for status quo sandboxing (and I have a lot of experience trying both!).

5e's attrition mechanisms work well for traditional exploratory play; the shallow power curve after 3rd level works well for status-quo sandboxing, and unlike 4e it is designed to be malleable so I can tweak it* to encourage the stuff I like and de-emphasise what I don't. The simpler system, lack of magic item purchase, lack of build focus (esp if you don't use the multiclassing optional rule) all encourage an outward focus on the world, rather than inward on the character.

*Eg my 5e game gives xp for treasure, but treasure is generally fairly thin on the ground -
my PCs have found about one 'hoard' per level I think.

 

[cavalier973]

Another thing one might use is some form of "morale" rules. (I'm talking 4e, still)

Once at the beginning of the fight, once when the first combatant falls (whether PC or monster), and once when the monster's group loses half its members, allow the PCs to make an Intimidate Check vs the Will defense of the monsters' leader/captain to force a surrender. If half the monsters have been killed, even a failed check will impose a -2 penalty against the monsters' defenses, attacks, saves, and, perhaps, damage.

Monsters that surrender give up all their treasure, or provide the key to the safe, etc. If the PCs wish to slay the monsters anyway, then it counts as automatic coup de grace. Later monsters may not be so easily intimidated, however.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think its really quite simple. In 4e combat is INTERESTING, there are a lot of meaningful and fun choices to make. In other editions this is not nearly so much true. In 5e often a single spell or expenditure of some superiority dice will end a fight before it barely even gets started. In any case a lot of situations just don't give you a lot of real choices. There's no specific positioning or forced movement in 5e, in fact its actually hard to tell what tactical movement even means if you go strictly by the quite vague positioning rules.

The upshot is you have to find something else interesting to do. 4e really DOES have all the other elements, there are potions and traps and you can grant as much quest XP as you wish, nor do you HAVE to give out specific amounts of treasure either. So the game could incorporate whichever elements you want to support exploration, but combat will always be a big draw.

I'm not sure you can really change this all that much, you'd have to deeply alter the encounter mechanics of 4e and at that point you might almost as well just play 5e, its not like it falls apart or anything. Making encumbrance more strict and such things might be useful, though honestly I think you'll find that for heavy armored characters 4e encumbrance is already pretty significant.

 

[The Fighter-Cricket]

(Branching from the 'Is the OSR Dead?" thread)

I'd like to go a little deeper into this and ask for further thoughts on this. What is it about 5th edition (and 1st/2nd for that matter) that makes it so amenable to the "adventurous treasure hunters" style of play, and what is it about 4th that works against it?

Is it the resource tracking/strategic level of gameplay? 4th excels at the tactical level, but tends to gloss over 'bigger picture' elements like light sources and encumbrance that were mainstays of earlier editions. Not to mention that PC resources like hit points were designed to be mostly 'encounter-focused.' This makes for exciting and challenging individual encounters, but makes 'sandboxing' difficult.

What tweaks to 5th help with that? What would you change in 4th? (And would the necessary tweaks change the game too much?)

I think a (not THE) very general definition of sandboxing and treasure hunting (at least in the tradition of 0Ed) has to do with resource management and a kind of grittiness. Somehere have already mentioned things as encumberance, managing mundane but hugely important items like torches, rope, rations etc. How you manage your HP is also a theme here. You don't have that much of it and you have to be very careful how you explore. You don't want to find yourselve in a nest of Owlbears because even if you survive you won't have a fun time exploring the presumably treasure filled forest afterwards. So managing different layers of the game is a central part of the classical sandboxing experience. That is the "bigger picture" somebody did mention earlier.

You can have sandboxy treasure hunting in 4E, quite easily even. But it won't be the gritty resource management simulator I tried to describe above. Sandboxing in 4E will be more of a free narrative experience. You have your rope and your torches and maybe even your 10 feet pole and you will use them to tell a story about how you enter this cave you stumbled upon and how you prod the ground for traps etc. But you won't worry so much about unseen traps or about the time after a fight because you will be refreshed. With all your HP at its max you can go deeper, explore further, see more of the sandbox, find more threats and maybe even aquire more treasure. The ride only ends when you see your Healing Surges drop - but this will take some time.

tl;dr: 4E sandboxing and treasure hunting can last longer than in previous editions and will be more of a narrative experience instead of counting down your rations, torches and blister patches.

 

[cavalier973]

I would add to Fighter-Cricket's analysis that fights in a 4e sandbox would be interesting and fun, but no so very terrifying. There will be more of the team fighter charging into a line of hobgoblins, and less dousing the corridor with oil and setting it on fire.

 

[The Fighter-Cricket]

There will be more of the team fighter charging into a line of hobgoblins, and less dousing the corridor with oil and setting it on fire.

I like both play styles btw: classical inch-by-inch crawling terrified through a dungeon as well as story driven or encounter based cinematic hero brawls.
I'm currently having kind of a let's call it "cinematic sandbox" campaign with my group in 4E. I give the players two to three paths they can take or sites they can explore. And at every path or site I have special encounters readied.

As a small side thought - could the classical experience be recreated in 4E just through dropping the Healing Surges dramatically? In making 4E characters more vulnerable could one emulate a certain oldschool crawl/sandbox feel? Or does it take much more mechanical changes?

 

[cavesalamander]

So I'm picturing a 4e sandbox as the world map from the Baldur's Gate games. The PCs are in a place, a town perhaps, and surrounding that town are encounter 'hot spots' they can travel to. If they go north, they find encounter X, if they go west, encounter Y. Travel between these encounters are elided ("after four hours of travel through light woods, you come upon..."), so the focus isn't on the journey, but the destination.

Or imagine Keep On The Borderlands. From the keep, the party can go find the mad hermit, or the lizardmen, or the giant spiders, each of which is its own encounter (perhaps the lizardmen's lair is broken into multiple encounters, some outside the nest and some inside). There's no wandering around the wilderness hoping to run across them (maybe there's a 'getting lost in the wilderness' skill-based encounter).

Each encounter is its own scene that may or may not be related to other scenes (a scrap of parchment in the lizardman's nest suggests someone was trying to recruit them into their 'caves of chaos clique.'), but the party can learn rumors about them in town, and decide which ones to visit and in what order.