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Exploration based adventures/campaigns: how do you do it?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5167016" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Yeah, I realized that toward the end of the post.</p><p></p><p>Let me be frank, if you are thinking about 'PC choices' in terms of 'did we go left or did we go right', I think its going to be very hard to make those choices matter in the sense you seem to mean it. At that level, the PC's are taking a random walk even if you aren't using a random table to fill in the blanks. To make PC choices matter they must be goal driven and have long term consequences. And that's what I was trying to get to with the use of random encounter tables. As the PC's move through the area, the choices they make in interacting with what they find there should have consequences, regardless of how the sites, encounters, and secrets got to be there.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The thing is, you won't have time to do this. Even if you keep the scale of your sandbox really small - say 40x40 miles - you won't be able to really detail things at even the 1 mile grid level (1600 1 mile grid entries), much less the detail level you might feel you need for villages and lairs. Some amount of detail can't be completed ahead of time, and the success of an exploration game is heavily dependent on not having alot of empty spaces that look just like the other ones. You just won't be able to prepare enough material.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>What you have there is just a badly designed random table. Your random table should not regularly kick up answers you don't like or can't use. If your intention is to keep really valuable resources from being easily exploited, you might have a table that goes from 1-150 and uses a d100 to determine result. The table repeats some resources several times at higher levels. Then you add +1 to the roll for each hex removed from the starting point you are to determine the result. Or you might detail all hexes within three of the starting point, and then leave the rest random. Or you might have several tables corresponding to different regions.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 5167016, member: 4937"] Yeah, I realized that toward the end of the post. Let me be frank, if you are thinking about 'PC choices' in terms of 'did we go left or did we go right', I think its going to be very hard to make those choices matter in the sense you seem to mean it. At that level, the PC's are taking a random walk even if you aren't using a random table to fill in the blanks. To make PC choices matter they must be goal driven and have long term consequences. And that's what I was trying to get to with the use of random encounter tables. As the PC's move through the area, the choices they make in interacting with what they find there should have consequences, regardless of how the sites, encounters, and secrets got to be there. The thing is, you won't have time to do this. Even if you keep the scale of your sandbox really small - say 40x40 miles - you won't be able to really detail things at even the 1 mile grid level (1600 1 mile grid entries), much less the detail level you might feel you need for villages and lairs. Some amount of detail can't be completed ahead of time, and the success of an exploration game is heavily dependent on not having alot of empty spaces that look just like the other ones. You just won't be able to prepare enough material. What you have there is just a badly designed random table. Your random table should not regularly kick up answers you don't like or can't use. If your intention is to keep really valuable resources from being easily exploited, you might have a table that goes from 1-150 and uses a d100 to determine result. The table repeats some resources several times at higher levels. Then you add +1 to the roll for each hex removed from the starting point you are to determine the result. Or you might detail all hexes within three of the starting point, and then leave the rest random. Or you might have several tables corresponding to different regions. [/QUOTE]
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