Stars/Worlds Without Number (General Thread)

[Aldarc]

Apparently, someone on Reddit also had asked Kevin Crawford about running WWN for low or no magic campaigns. He supplied optional rules for slow healing, no magic, as well as the Wise (an expert that's a bit of a witch or medicine man with subtle curses and the like) and the Alchemist.

 

[Yora]

What really has be curious is how System Strain will interact with sandbox campaign structures. As long as you still have System Strain capacity available, healing is effectively free. Once you bottom out, it's a single healing per day. Best case 2d6+Healer level. Then you might go three days without getting injured, recover 30 hp and back to full health, but still go into the next fight knowing you can't get healed.

Where it gets interesting is that this is something that happens to each PC separately, depending on how much they got hit and their Constitution scores. Perhaps you might get situations where players decide to hole up in a defensible place for a few days to let one or two PCs recover System Strain, with possibly some low level experts fighting off attackers because they are still without System Strain.

But I think the biggest factor is going to be the length of time between opportunities to rest and recover in a safe place for a week or two between adventures. If the adventure takes only a single day, PCs can take so much damage that they require 10 or 12 healings but still reach home again at full hp. If on average, each PC doesn't require more than one healing per day, they can basically go on forever.

These could be very interesting things in a sandbox campaign in which the players have free choice how far and how long they want to travel, and which dangerous areas to go into. It adds an interesting new resource that players have to learn to effectively monitor and manage. Something I definitely want to play with in my next campaign.

I just had an idea for a house rule right now: Instead of healing 2d6+Heal skill(+Healer level), Healing Touch only heals 1d6 plus modifiers. That's the amount you heal with first aid, but as a Main Action instead of a Turn, and potentially even at range. Having a healer in the group means you still only heal about the same amount (until Empowered Healer comes in), but you can have healing in the middle of an ongoing battle.
The difference between 2d6+2 and 1d6+2 is about a reduction to two thirds the total. However, not having run a campaign with it yet, I don't have a reference how much impact that actually has. But I am considering putting it in the rules info sheet for my campaign that 2d6 is experimental and might be reduced to 1d6 later if Healing Touch turns out to be too effective.

This seems like something that really can't be determined without having playtested it for a couple of adventures.

 

[kenada]

We had our second session today and our first major combat. The barbarian (full warrior) is incredibly effective at destroying anything with only a few hit dice. She massacred a bunch of dark creepers and finished off a dark stalker using a whirlwind attack. They all combusted or exploded when they died, so she ended up Mortally Wounded, and the priest ended up blinded, but it was impressive what she did without even needing an attack roll.

The remaining dark creeper made his morale check and instinct check, but I figured he’d just try to get out of there anyway. His monstrous drive is theft, so I figure he would just bolt and live to steal another day. I guess he could try to take the treasure, but he’s not got the tool, and he probably doesn’t want to risk having the party wander up on him.

That does make me wonder instinct checks. Has anyone here gotten any good mileage out of them? We’ve had a few other combats, but they were one-sided or against effectively invulnerable creatures (coffer corpses can only be damaged by magical attacks). Is all the extra rolling worth it on top of morale checks and the rest of what’s happening in combat?

Otherwise, I seem to be getting two to three sessions out of the adventure I generated, which is really good. That makes the amount of time spent prepping about equal or possibly less than the time spent running the session. Depending on how things go, I may be able to drop Halls of the Blood King into the game. One of the treasures is a deed to a manor, and the core conceit would work pretty well as an iterum.

 

[Yora]

Instinct is one of the things I didn't really see the point of. It's clear what it us meant for, but it doesn't strike me as something that needs mechanics to handle it. Unnecessary additional dice rollingis the impression I get, and with it being one of the very few things that are explicitly stated as optional, it seems a bit like the decision to have it in the book wasn't very enthusiastic.
Rolling dice only when really necessary is what's pulling me to this game framework.

 

[kenada]

I hadn’t even noticed instinct was explicitly optional ….

I realized this morning that you only act “normally” when you roll over, so I actually got it backwards (though holding off and not trying to shank or rob the PCs is arguably sub-optimal). I guess it’s kind of like a d10-based saving throw to act normally. I’m not ready to abandon it quite yet, but I’d like to see it have an effect with a group (e.g., spiders not fighting tactically*).

Speaking of saving throws, my players continue to be confused by them. I don’t know if we just need to get used to having classic saving throw mechanics with modern categories, but they keep thinking you need to roll under. I may add a “+” to the entries on their sheets like WWN does for monsters as a way to emphasize how they work.

---

* We had a 4e GM who always tried to take optimal advantage of the abilities monsters had, so creatures like spiders would dance around to make sure they all could get Combat Advantage while doing their thing. That left a lasting, negative impression of 4e in my group. “Instinct means don’t do that” has obvious appeal.

 

[kenada]

I’ve been working on a replacement for the wilderness exploration rules in WWN. As mentioned previously, they’re a bit incomplete. The B/X rules also aren’t particularly good themselves. These rules draw inspiration from a few sources.

• The Alexandrian’s series on hexcrawls;
• Gavin Norman’s Dolmenwood hexcrawl procedure;
• A very casual scan of the Forbidden Lands Quickstart;
• Pathfinder 2e’s hexploration subsystem; and
• B/X’s exploration rules.

One of the requirements I have for this system is that hexes not be a player-facing structure. You shouldn’t know I am using a hex map behind the screen. While my procedure does describe things in terms of hexes, it’s used as a shortcut. The system should work without actually mentioning hexes at the table. After running Kingmaker, I’m a big fan of player-unknown hexes.

Most of the systems I looked at broke the day down into segments. The only one that didn’t also measure progress by hexes was the Alexandrian’s. I can understand why. Trying to track miles traveled using the Alexandrian’s system is a major pain in the ass. It’s tedious, and you end up fiddling with fractional progress or losing progress. Another issue I take with segments is non-exploration activities fit with them badly. If the PCs stop or do something while traveling, they either waste the segment, it throws everything off, or you ignore the time cost.

I want choices to be meaningful while exploring. One of the things I liked in my perusal of the Forbidden Lands Quickstart is checks are usually made by the PCs. That is one of the things I included in my system. I also want diegetic mechanics. If the players are deciding what to do, I want them to talk about it like they would with their characters would. Segments pretty badly violate that, especially with the issue noted above. I’m not sure what prompted it, but I realized there was an obvious solution.

Measure all activities using the same units.

Game handle travel using traditional units for distance: you can travel X miles per day, and that converts into so many hexes (at six miles per hex). However, they use the wrong units. How do we usually measure the length of a trip? We judge them by how long it takes. For example, it took us an hour and a half to drive to Dayton, Ohio, on Monday. A flight to China takes about 14 hours, but it can take 30 hours depending on layovers.

What I did was normalize all exploration activity costs on time. Each hex has a different time cost to cross. This lets us just use hours, and the PCs can decide what they want to do using intuitive reasoning. If we’ve traveled for three hours, there’s still time to forage for a bit even though we also spent an hour goofing off in the roadside tavern. This also lets me use hexes to track progress while simultaneously hiding them. How far away is the next town? Well, it’s through the forest and over the mountain, so it’s about a day’s travel.

For the activities themselves, I looked at various sources and tried to get a good collection. I replaced percentile or x-in-6 checks with PC skill checks. When you go searching for a previously found location, I don’t roll to see if you found it — the player rolls. I also distinguished between making camp and sleeping. That was something that feels weird about the segmented approaches. You end up wasting downtime at camp (because of the length of segments), or PCs don’t actually have time for the things they need to do (like preparing spells).

The random events section is based pretty heavily on Gavin’s procedure. I decoupled the checks from his phases, but I kept the tables. I accidentally ran my procedure wrongly in PF2, generating tons more events than normal. It created a very interesting and fun session, so I think he’s right on track. The note on weather is there because I’m currently leaning towards using the generator from the Wilderness Survival Guide to do weather, but I didn’t want to strip it out completely. The weather tables aren’t present though. You’ll need to get them from Gavin’s PDF.

I’ve attached a copy of my WIP draft. We’re not playing again until September 25, so we won’t have an opportunity to test them before then (and that assumes we actually do some hex exploration). These rules assume some of the WWN procedure is still in place (such as privation). It may be that this approach totally doesn’t work, but it feels like it should. I’m sharing it here before we’ve had chance to test it to get feedback. Note that the layout is designed to create half-letter booklets, but I’ve exported the spreads to make it easy to read just these pages.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I’ve been working on a replacement for the wilderness exploration rules in WWN. As mentioned previously, they’re a bit incomplete. The B/X rules also aren’t particularly good themselves. These rules draw inspiration from a few sources.

• The Alexandrian’s series on hexcrawls;
• Gavin Norman’s Dolmenwood hexcrawl procedure;
• A very casual scan of the Forbidden Lands Quickstart;
• Pathfinder 2e’s hexploration subsystem; and
• B/X’s exploration rules.

One of the requirements I have for this system is that hexes not be a player-facing structure. You shouldn’t know I am using a hex map behind the screen. While my procedure does describe things in terms of hexes, it’s used as a shortcut. The system should work without actually mentioning hexes at the table. After running Kingmaker, I’m a big fan of player-unknown hexes.

Most of the systems I looked at broke the day down into segments. The only one that didn’t also measure progress by hexes was the Alexandrian’s. I can understand why. Trying to track miles traveled using the Alexandrian’s system is a major pain in the ass. It’s tedious, and you end up fiddling with fractional progress or losing progress. Another issue I take with segments is non-exploration activities fit with them badly. If the PCs stop or do something while traveling, they either waste the segment, it throws everything off, or you ignore the time cost.

I want choices to be meaningful while exploring. One of the things I liked in my perusal of the Forbidden Lands Quickstart is checks are usually made by the PCs. That is one of the things I included in my system. I also want diegetic mechanics. If the players are deciding what to do, I want them to talk about it like they would with their characters would. Segments pretty badly violate that, especially with the issue noted above. I’m not sure what prompted it, but I realized there was an obvious solution.

Measure all activities using the same units.

Game handle travel using traditional units for distance: you can travel X miles per day, and that converts into so many hexes (at six miles per hex). However, they use the wrong units. How do we usually measure the length of a trip? We judge them by how long it takes. For example, it took us an hour and a half to drive to Dayton, Ohio, on Monday. A flight to China takes about 14 hours, but it can take 30 hours depending on layovers.

What I did was normalize all exploration activity costs on time. Each hex has a different time cost to cross. This lets us just use hours, and the PCs can decide what they want to do using intuitive reasoning. If we’ve traveled for three hours, there’s still time to forage for a bit even though we also spent an hour goofing off in the roadside tavern. This also lets me use hexes to track progress while simultaneously hiding them. How far away is the next town? Well, it’s through the forest and over the mountain, so it’s about a day’s travel.

For the activities themselves, I looked at various sources and tried to get a good collection. I replaced percentile or x-in-6 checks with PC skill checks. When you go searching for a previously found location, I don’t roll to see if you found it — the player rolls. I also distinguished between making camp and sleeping. That was something that feels weird about the segmented approaches. You end up wasting downtime at camp (because of the length of segments), or PCs don’t actually have time for the things they need to do (like preparing spells).

The random events section is based pretty heavily on Gavin’s procedure. I decoupled the checks from his phases, but I kept the tables. I accidentally ran my procedure wrongly in PF2, generating tons more events than normal. It created a very interesting and fun session, so I think he’s right on track. The note on weather is there because I’m currently leaning towards using the generator from the Wilderness Survival Guide to do weather, but I didn’t want to strip it out completely. The weather tables aren’t present though. You’ll need to get them from Gavin’s PDF.

I’ve attached a copy of my WIP draft. We’re not playing again until September 25, so we won’t have an opportunity to test them before then (and that assumes we actually do some hex exploration). These rules assume some of the WWN procedure is still in place (such as privation). It may be that this approach totally doesn’t work, but it feels like it should. I’m sharing it here before we’ve had chance to test it to get feedback. Note that the layout is designed to create half-letter booklets, but I’ve exported the spreads to make it easy to read just these pages.

I appreciate the abstraction of using time now that I read your reasoning for it, but here's some feedback.

1. I notice that the random events being rolled three times per day feels like a lot if Journeys are on the longer side, a month of travel would be 90 random events, this is easy for the GM to season of course by just... pretending they rolled 'no event' for many of these results-- I'd be tempted to suggest a cooldown period when a random event actually happens, or just dropping the number of rolls to two, day and night.

2. Your random location area is interesting, I'm going to mark it, but overall I'm assuming you feel confident about your ability to run a tomb off the cuff for your players, or the contents of a portal-- portals in particular feel as though they should be keyed, unless you have an unlisted plan for where they go. I guess WWN itself might be lightweight enough to just do it?

I'd abstract some of these in general-- strange tree could be 'strange flora' so that they don't come across weird trees in the desert. That might be an adjustment you'd have made while running though.

3. I'd list some common movement rates for horses and such, just so you don't have to calculate them if your players take the obvious route or if you want to track NPCs running around on the map.

4. What happens if I spend 3 hours fortifying my camp? Do I just take the best of those rolls? Does the GM just say no?

 

[Yora]

Instead of "x in 6" chances for random events, I prefer "1 in x".
You also get a range of different probabilities, but it's easier to remember what you're actually rolling. With a rule of "something always happens on 1", you can also roll in the open or let the players roll, and everyone knows immediately what the result will mean without having to explain it.

 

[kenada]

1. I notice that the random events being rolled three times per day feels like a lot if Journeys are on the longer side, a month of travel would be 90 random events, this is easy for the GM to season of course by just... pretending they rolled 'no event' for many of these results-- I'd be tempted to suggest a cooldown period when a random event actually happens, or just dropping the number of rolls to two, day and night.

#1 and #2 came straight from Gavin’s Dolmenwood procedure, so you prompted me to dig into the numbers a bit. This is what things look like assuming that the third event is from the Camping table.

No events	7.41%
One event	33.33%
Two events	44.44%
Three events	14.81%

Looking at it over the course of a month*, you should have about twenty days with events.

If we change the tables to use a d20 (filling in the new entries with “Uneventful”), the distribution changes to this.

No events	28.80%
One event	45.60%
Two event	22.40%
Three events	3.20%

This time it’s about 10 days.

I once accidentally ran the Alexandrian’s procedure with the wrong chance of encounters. It generated encounters very frequently, which made for an interesting session. I’d like to lean towards having events more often than not because otherwise nothing is happening while you explore. For example, the default frequency in WWN is just too low. Events basically never happen. On the other hand, the quantity of events looks weird over longer periods of time.

Hmm. Let’s see what a d16 looks like.

No events	18.75%
One event	43.75%
Two events	31.25%
Three events	6.25%

Over a month, about half the days should have at least one event.

I’m leaning towards a d12- or d16-based table. Even though the Alexandrian had you rolling six times, my dice luck was terrible. The chance of having at least one event was 4-in-6, but we’d have multi-day streaks of no events, which is just boring when you’re trying to explore.

2. Your random location area is interesting, I'm going to mark it, but overall I'm assuming you feel confident about your ability to run a tomb off the cuff for your players, or the contents of a portal-- portals in particular feel as though they should be keyed, unless you have an unlisted plan for where they go.

I'd abstract some of these in general-- strange tree could be 'strange flora' so that they don't come across weird trees in the desert. That might be an adjustment you'd have made while running though.

I raised an eyebrow at the portal entry when I first saw it, but I decided to keep it. “Portal” can be pretty malleable. For example, there is a tramway system in the region where the PCs are exploring, so a “portal” might be a new entrance to that (even one that occurred naturally due to a collapse or something). The same goes for the “strange tree” entry. WWN encourages you to roll with strange or incongruous results with generators. However, if things don’t work after playing with it some, I’m open to the idea of changing things.

I guess WWN itself might be lightweight enough to just do it?

WWN provides copious content generators. If an idea doesn’t come to mind, I can roll a couple of location tags and synthesize them into a location with a situation. The system is based on B/X with some stuff from 3e, so monster stats are pretty trivial (and generally things aren’t balanced to the capabilities of the PCs anyway).

3. I'd list some common movement rates for horses and such, just so you don't have to calculate them if your players take the obvious route or if you want to track NPCs running around on the map.

That’s a good point, though they’ll be in another section. I’m following the organization of OSE, which breaks things down by topic. Horses and beasts of burden will be in their own section.

4. What happens if I spend 3 hours fortifying my camp? Do I just take the best of those rolls? Does the GM just say no?

I’d just let them have a very fortified camp if they wanted that. Maybe they fail a bunch, or maybe they get everything. If they want to spend their time doing that instead of something else, I don’t see any reason to stop them.

The default assumption is a ten hour adventuring day. Maybe that’s worth calling out?

Also, sleep needs to be uninterrupted in WWN to benefit from natural healing or to get back spell slots or daily committed Effort. If you spend three hours fortifying camp, that’s at least half your day dedicated to sleeping and setting up camp. If you need to take watches, then you’re looking at three hours of adventuring at most.

---

* Calculating as a binomial distribution with p = no events, k = number of days, n = 30. The number of days with no events is the solution where Pr(X ≤ k) = 1.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Fair enough! Ultimately the intentionality of what you're trying to get out of it is most important-- so in terms of event frequency and timing, if the numbers make sense for the kinds of output you want, then that's what really matters. Personally then, I think it sounds like its in the phase where its very ready for playtesting at your table!