Yora
Legend
I've been a huge fan of the Dungeon Exploration and Wilderness Exploration of the early D&D editions for a good while now. But I've never really been a fan of the core game mechanics of D&D, like how you make attack rolls, how you cast spells, and how characters advance by discrete levels within specific classes.
Dragonbane is a game that aims for a kind of fantasy that is very similar in scope, scale, and tone to early D&D, and the current version that came out earlier this year approaches the very same mechanical elements that I don't like in D&D in ways that I really like.
Now I really would love to run a Dragonbane campaign that uses game structures and mechanical procedures of B/X to let the players go on adventures about exploring a dangerous wilderness full of ruins. In a way that lets them pick their objectives and targets all by themselves and find and create adventures on their own instead of being handed a scripted experience.
While most of the procedures of B/X can easily be used in a Dragonbane game, the issue that I am seeing is that the Classic style exploration game is based on two core features of early D&D that Dragonbane does not have.
Character Advancement
While in all editions of D&D characters gain some XP for defeating enemies in a fight, the recommended guideline in the B/X rules is to have PCs only get some 20-25% of their total XP from that source. The overwhelming majority of XP is recommended to come from the treasures. This is very important because only then you have the situation where having additional fights from random encounters is actually a bad thing that players want to avoid. Players want to find large treasures that can be stolen from their guardians with minimal risk of personal injury, and they really don't want to get into potentially deadly fights that will only provide them with a pittance of XP.
The other thing that this does is that it is at the heart of enabling the players to be proactive and seek out adventures by themselves. Players know they need to collect treasures to advance their character, and they have the knowledge that treasures can be found in old ruins out there in the wilderness. They can ask around in taverns or consult sages for leads on ruins that they could check out, or they can find maps showing the locations of interesting locations in the belongings of defeated enemies or as part of other treasure caches. And if everything fails, they can always just head out blindly into the wilderness and see what they stumble upon. You don't have the situation where the players have to ask the GM "Okay, what is the next adventure you have for us?"
Which also is hugely important for the Classic campaign style because when the players choose to investigate a place instead of the GM telling them what place has been prepared for them next, you have the big element of uncertainty how much stuff could possibly be found in that place and whether the party is even capable of overcoming its dangers and obstacles. When the GM tells you that this next dungeon is the next main adventure in the campaign, you have a strong expectation that there will be something big and shiny to be found, and that the GM will not have set up any dangers that will seriously endanger the PCs. By picking the dungeons themselves, the players never know if they found everything there is to be found, and how much of a danger they are in.
Now Dragonbane does not have Experience Points. Instead, characters advance by advancement marks to their skills. Any time you use a skill and the die rolls a 1 or a 20, you mark that skill. At the end of the game session, you make an advancement roll for all the skills that you have marked. If the skill is a low rank, the chance of making the roll and advancing the skill by 1 rank is high. If the skill is a high rank, the chance of advancing it further is low. This kind of advancement has nothing to do with what actually is happening in the fiction of the adventure.
However, there is also a second kind of advancement. At the end of the game session, each PC also gets a number of free advancement marks to mark any skill that hasn't already been marked by rolling a 1 or a 20. You get one mark for free for having played in the game session, but other recommendations are additional marks for having explored a new location, having defeated dangerous adversaries, and having overcome an obstacle without use of force. I think this is probably the best place where we could introduce something similar to the XP for Treasure system.
Third, there are also Heroic Abilities. Which you normally get any time you max out a skill at rank 18, but can also be awarded for a special "grand heroic deed". Perhaps those could be awarded for the party recovering a really special legendary artifact?
Resource Management
In B/X, there are many kinds of resources. There are hit points, food rations, water rations, ammunition, spells, light, and also money (to pay for animals, hirelings, and new supplies between expeditions). But there is also movement speed and time, which I guess are really the same thing. All of these things are in some way tied to carrying capacity.
B/X has four different levels of encumbrance, which might be a bit much, but Dragonbane has only two. There's only unencumbered normal movement and being over-encumbered. I don't think the rules for being over-encumbered would work for an exploration game where you want to be swift. You have to make a STR roll any time you want to move one round in combat or one shift (6 hours) of overland travel, and if the roll fails you don't move at all. I feel that having a movement speed lever that players can switch by picking up resources or dropping resources is a pretty important aspect of that play style. Say you're running out of water and you don't know when you will find the next source. Do you keep going and hope for the best, or dump most of your treasure and leave it behind to increase your chances to make it to a spring before the remaining water has run out? Or you're being pursued by enemies wanting their treasures back. Keep going at the current slow pace and take your chances when they catch up to you? Do you drop some of the treasure to move faster and shake them off? Do you drop some food and ammunition to move faster and keep all the treasure? If we run out of food, we might have to stop to forage and hunt, which could cost us more time than we made by moving faster. This is super exciting to me and what makes the whole difference between wilderness exploration adventures and having exactly one random combat encounter between A and B.
Any thoughts on the subject by people passingly familiar with both game systems? What adjustments would it take to make Dragonbane work well for this kind of adventures?
Dragonbane is a game that aims for a kind of fantasy that is very similar in scope, scale, and tone to early D&D, and the current version that came out earlier this year approaches the very same mechanical elements that I don't like in D&D in ways that I really like.
Now I really would love to run a Dragonbane campaign that uses game structures and mechanical procedures of B/X to let the players go on adventures about exploring a dangerous wilderness full of ruins. In a way that lets them pick their objectives and targets all by themselves and find and create adventures on their own instead of being handed a scripted experience.
While most of the procedures of B/X can easily be used in a Dragonbane game, the issue that I am seeing is that the Classic style exploration game is based on two core features of early D&D that Dragonbane does not have.
- Characters gain XP to advance based (primarily) on the value of treasure they can find in dungeons and successfully carry home to a town.
- Tension is created by the conflicting priorities of traveling fast to minimize the number of random encounters that can eat up limited resources and potentially kill PCs for no treasure gain, and being more capable at dealing with unexpected complications by carrying lots of heavy special equipment and large amounts of supplies.
Character Advancement
While in all editions of D&D characters gain some XP for defeating enemies in a fight, the recommended guideline in the B/X rules is to have PCs only get some 20-25% of their total XP from that source. The overwhelming majority of XP is recommended to come from the treasures. This is very important because only then you have the situation where having additional fights from random encounters is actually a bad thing that players want to avoid. Players want to find large treasures that can be stolen from their guardians with minimal risk of personal injury, and they really don't want to get into potentially deadly fights that will only provide them with a pittance of XP.
The other thing that this does is that it is at the heart of enabling the players to be proactive and seek out adventures by themselves. Players know they need to collect treasures to advance their character, and they have the knowledge that treasures can be found in old ruins out there in the wilderness. They can ask around in taverns or consult sages for leads on ruins that they could check out, or they can find maps showing the locations of interesting locations in the belongings of defeated enemies or as part of other treasure caches. And if everything fails, they can always just head out blindly into the wilderness and see what they stumble upon. You don't have the situation where the players have to ask the GM "Okay, what is the next adventure you have for us?"
Which also is hugely important for the Classic campaign style because when the players choose to investigate a place instead of the GM telling them what place has been prepared for them next, you have the big element of uncertainty how much stuff could possibly be found in that place and whether the party is even capable of overcoming its dangers and obstacles. When the GM tells you that this next dungeon is the next main adventure in the campaign, you have a strong expectation that there will be something big and shiny to be found, and that the GM will not have set up any dangers that will seriously endanger the PCs. By picking the dungeons themselves, the players never know if they found everything there is to be found, and how much of a danger they are in.
Now Dragonbane does not have Experience Points. Instead, characters advance by advancement marks to their skills. Any time you use a skill and the die rolls a 1 or a 20, you mark that skill. At the end of the game session, you make an advancement roll for all the skills that you have marked. If the skill is a low rank, the chance of making the roll and advancing the skill by 1 rank is high. If the skill is a high rank, the chance of advancing it further is low. This kind of advancement has nothing to do with what actually is happening in the fiction of the adventure.
However, there is also a second kind of advancement. At the end of the game session, each PC also gets a number of free advancement marks to mark any skill that hasn't already been marked by rolling a 1 or a 20. You get one mark for free for having played in the game session, but other recommendations are additional marks for having explored a new location, having defeated dangerous adversaries, and having overcome an obstacle without use of force. I think this is probably the best place where we could introduce something similar to the XP for Treasure system.
Third, there are also Heroic Abilities. Which you normally get any time you max out a skill at rank 18, but can also be awarded for a special "grand heroic deed". Perhaps those could be awarded for the party recovering a really special legendary artifact?
Resource Management
In B/X, there are many kinds of resources. There are hit points, food rations, water rations, ammunition, spells, light, and also money (to pay for animals, hirelings, and new supplies between expeditions). But there is also movement speed and time, which I guess are really the same thing. All of these things are in some way tied to carrying capacity.
B/X has four different levels of encumbrance, which might be a bit much, but Dragonbane has only two. There's only unencumbered normal movement and being over-encumbered. I don't think the rules for being over-encumbered would work for an exploration game where you want to be swift. You have to make a STR roll any time you want to move one round in combat or one shift (6 hours) of overland travel, and if the roll fails you don't move at all. I feel that having a movement speed lever that players can switch by picking up resources or dropping resources is a pretty important aspect of that play style. Say you're running out of water and you don't know when you will find the next source. Do you keep going and hope for the best, or dump most of your treasure and leave it behind to increase your chances to make it to a spring before the remaining water has run out? Or you're being pursued by enemies wanting their treasures back. Keep going at the current slow pace and take your chances when they catch up to you? Do you drop some of the treasure to move faster and shake them off? Do you drop some food and ammunition to move faster and keep all the treasure? If we run out of food, we might have to stop to forage and hunt, which could cost us more time than we made by moving faster. This is super exciting to me and what makes the whole difference between wilderness exploration adventures and having exactly one random combat encounter between A and B.
Any thoughts on the subject by people passingly familiar with both game systems? What adjustments would it take to make Dragonbane work well for this kind of adventures?
