howandwhy99
Adventurer
First, as I see it, the purpose of game elements in a game are almost never about "advancing the story of the adventure". They are about interacting with the other game elements in such a way as to make the game more challenging for players. This difficulty increases more when dynamic mechanics are used, like variable outcomes, rather than static ones, like a bonus which isn't derived. The ghosts in PacMan, as repetitive as they are, are more dynamic than gaining +1 pellet for every 10 eaten.
I think the term Encounter should probably be a game term, meaning it has a definition referring to the composition of the game. But I also think we should use common definitions whenever possible. So mine is: "An encounter are an unexpected meeting with someone or something challenging." That's perfectly useful in a game where the players move about and meet all sorts of unusual things in the game world. Sometimes those things are mobile, sometimes stationary. Running into moving game challenges, or wandering ones in D&D, isn't so much different than running into stationary ones. I think the actual distinction being made here is between set encounters, ones which are preplanned and probably "story" requirements, and ones which are not preplanned and irrelevant to the plot.
Knowing there are creatures who will find you if you sit and do nothing does affect people's strategies when playing a game. This could mean quietly staying in a secret space to hide away or getting flashy in an easily viewed spot in order to be found. Both of these presume one is playing a game though where actions alter potential outcomes. That's close to the heart of most game strategies. Something else affecting these is the density of wandering creatures (and lairing ones), which helps determine the difficulty level of a place. It's not just the types of monsters therein, but also spatial location design, like how easy it is to trail blaze across an area or find a safe and secure place to recuperate in. Backing out of a dungeon delve to an allied territory can be hard and helps judge effects which makes it easier, like Teleporting and Find the Path.
The rest I'm zipping up.
-- 3 Encounter Ingredients[sblock]I'm taking these 3 out of presented order:
History - what happens in a game is a result of its initial state, the rules, and the play of players. Later game states in the game are a result of previous moves. That's game history.
Significant Outcome - Actions taken in a game should affect the current state of the field of play. How significant or far reaching these are in altering other game elements is about results, not necessarily pre-packaged abilities.
Clear Objective - This is actually a really big design flaw as it relates to the design of D&D in my opinion. If each encounter were an individual, more traditionally designed game, then this wouldn't be bad at all.
[/sblock]-- Example Encounter[sblock]K30. Office of the King's Accountant
Dust, scrolls, tomes, walls, room, floor, scattered arrangement (taken as random), desk (probably custom), stool, paper, quill, rope, hole, ceiling, and person (human, which is a major design). That's a lot of detail, but still, it's far from overwhelming. DMs should have humans covered by any means and charting up all those books isn't as hard as it sounds. It's not like we have to write them all word for word. Anyways, the players aren't likely to scour every last thing. And whenever they do inspect something, that's simply another map.
The difficulty of this encounter lies not in the random monsters he can summon, at least not just so, but largely in interacting with Lief Lipsiege and/or his works. That he is so certain of his knowledge of where the Holy Symbol of Ravenloft resides speaks a great deal to possible reasons why he may be, like perhaps the style of its resting place, Lief's knowledge of the castle, its inhabitants, Strahd especially, and his own recent movements. The knowledge of the Symbol's location is a highly valuable treasure and it should be rated appropriately.
Gaining such a treasure through speaking or otherwise engaging with Herr Lipsiege should also be appropriately difficult. A boring way to do this is to make it a roll, which could be an option, especially for those looking to save real time. A more interesting, mechanically dynamic option is to treat this personality as a design we can play with, relate to, and even befriend. Beyond the accountant searching the room can reveal his imprisoned state, a "concealed location" not immediately revealed, which affects the difficulty of the room - both in rewarded knowledge of the monsters current condition (bound), and this condition not being known at start.
The books themselves should be accounted for in game terms. Texts teaching the NPC class of accountant aren't exactly relevant to PC classes, but they are potentially money if sold (or kindling, if not). Size, weight, material composition and design, written language, length of time to read (an important one), and other stats can be placed in an appendix. Accounts of anything else could be provided in player handouts. For example, lists of Strahd's possessions including purchases and sales, a history of activities in the castle, current wealth totals, maybe even the locations of said items, and a map of the castle (or maybe not) to refer the locations to. All of which are significant treasure items and likely part of Lipsiege's own knowledge.
The summoned monsters by a gong is probably a magical summoning effect, unless all those listed creatures are loyal and trained to behave so, and if it is magical it likely requires a save from the PCs too.[/sblock]-- Wilderness populations
[sblock]Wandering Monsters exist wherever there are, well, monsters wandering. That's any environment really, but certainly some less than others. Dungeons like underground complexes or large urban areas are going to have A LOT of wandering monsters usually because of the density of the populations. When judging these in relation to the wilderness, or basically all areas that aren't heavily populated, cities and monster ruins can be treated largely as lairs. A sort of Points of Light and Darkness, if you will. The wilderness is its own dungeon with places where warring tribes may send out troops to fight intruders into their territory. Population sizes, density, layout of the area, its makeup, and plenty of other factors still matter, just as in a traditional dungeon. In fact, trailblazing in the wilderness tends to be much faster and rewarding than when done underground.
I for one really like that monster frequency might be back in as the article goes into at length. I actually use these things for dungeon levels too as a lot of monsters tend to show up underground and others use the topmost levels as lairs. Cities are fun too as they are usually made by a race or pact of races as part of a larger state or even self-contained culture. It's in big populations like these when those frequency tables get really interesting. As the article says, when the history of a place's development is defined by three separate elven communities living in relation to each other, then their culture, community, and all of the other creatures living amongst them reveal certain characteristics. Maybe not like "Elf Dogs", but their breeding, behavior, and training certainly would have elven influences reflected within.
Another thing I do is take a page from ecology with the pyramid of creatures in a food chain. D&D only tracks monsters within the challenge level spans fit for the PCs, but others can exist too as part of the environment. As they say, "Nature abhors a vacuum". When a species is wiped out or beaten back the predators which survived off of them must look for new food sources or starve to death. But even if they do survive, there is a gap, a veritable bounty of food supply (or other resources) the wiped out species lived off of. And so other creatures, constantly darting out into other niches from their own, evolve, change, and fill this fruitful space and grow in wild abandon. That is until new predators move in to take advantage of this next new food source and diminish its population in the ever balancing ecosystem.[/sblock]
I think the term Encounter should probably be a game term, meaning it has a definition referring to the composition of the game. But I also think we should use common definitions whenever possible. So mine is: "An encounter are an unexpected meeting with someone or something challenging." That's perfectly useful in a game where the players move about and meet all sorts of unusual things in the game world. Sometimes those things are mobile, sometimes stationary. Running into moving game challenges, or wandering ones in D&D, isn't so much different than running into stationary ones. I think the actual distinction being made here is between set encounters, ones which are preplanned and probably "story" requirements, and ones which are not preplanned and irrelevant to the plot.
Knowing there are creatures who will find you if you sit and do nothing does affect people's strategies when playing a game. This could mean quietly staying in a secret space to hide away or getting flashy in an easily viewed spot in order to be found. Both of these presume one is playing a game though where actions alter potential outcomes. That's close to the heart of most game strategies. Something else affecting these is the density of wandering creatures (and lairing ones), which helps determine the difficulty level of a place. It's not just the types of monsters therein, but also spatial location design, like how easy it is to trail blaze across an area or find a safe and secure place to recuperate in. Backing out of a dungeon delve to an allied territory can be hard and helps judge effects which makes it easier, like Teleporting and Find the Path.
The rest I'm zipping up.
-- 3 Encounter Ingredients[sblock]I'm taking these 3 out of presented order:
History - what happens in a game is a result of its initial state, the rules, and the play of players. Later game states in the game are a result of previous moves. That's game history.
Significant Outcome - Actions taken in a game should affect the current state of the field of play. How significant or far reaching these are in altering other game elements is about results, not necessarily pre-packaged abilities.
Clear Objective - This is actually a really big design flaw as it relates to the design of D&D in my opinion. If each encounter were an individual, more traditionally designed game, then this wouldn't be bad at all.
[/sblock]-- Example Encounter[sblock]K30. Office of the King's Accountant
Dust, scrolls, tomes, walls, room, floor, scattered arrangement (taken as random), desk (probably custom), stool, paper, quill, rope, hole, ceiling, and person (human, which is a major design). That's a lot of detail, but still, it's far from overwhelming. DMs should have humans covered by any means and charting up all those books isn't as hard as it sounds. It's not like we have to write them all word for word. Anyways, the players aren't likely to scour every last thing. And whenever they do inspect something, that's simply another map.
The difficulty of this encounter lies not in the random monsters he can summon, at least not just so, but largely in interacting with Lief Lipsiege and/or his works. That he is so certain of his knowledge of where the Holy Symbol of Ravenloft resides speaks a great deal to possible reasons why he may be, like perhaps the style of its resting place, Lief's knowledge of the castle, its inhabitants, Strahd especially, and his own recent movements. The knowledge of the Symbol's location is a highly valuable treasure and it should be rated appropriately.
Gaining such a treasure through speaking or otherwise engaging with Herr Lipsiege should also be appropriately difficult. A boring way to do this is to make it a roll, which could be an option, especially for those looking to save real time. A more interesting, mechanically dynamic option is to treat this personality as a design we can play with, relate to, and even befriend. Beyond the accountant searching the room can reveal his imprisoned state, a "concealed location" not immediately revealed, which affects the difficulty of the room - both in rewarded knowledge of the monsters current condition (bound), and this condition not being known at start.
The books themselves should be accounted for in game terms. Texts teaching the NPC class of accountant aren't exactly relevant to PC classes, but they are potentially money if sold (or kindling, if not). Size, weight, material composition and design, written language, length of time to read (an important one), and other stats can be placed in an appendix. Accounts of anything else could be provided in player handouts. For example, lists of Strahd's possessions including purchases and sales, a history of activities in the castle, current wealth totals, maybe even the locations of said items, and a map of the castle (or maybe not) to refer the locations to. All of which are significant treasure items and likely part of Lipsiege's own knowledge.
The summoned monsters by a gong is probably a magical summoning effect, unless all those listed creatures are loyal and trained to behave so, and if it is magical it likely requires a save from the PCs too.[/sblock]-- Wilderness populations
[sblock]Wandering Monsters exist wherever there are, well, monsters wandering. That's any environment really, but certainly some less than others. Dungeons like underground complexes or large urban areas are going to have A LOT of wandering monsters usually because of the density of the populations. When judging these in relation to the wilderness, or basically all areas that aren't heavily populated, cities and monster ruins can be treated largely as lairs. A sort of Points of Light and Darkness, if you will. The wilderness is its own dungeon with places where warring tribes may send out troops to fight intruders into their territory. Population sizes, density, layout of the area, its makeup, and plenty of other factors still matter, just as in a traditional dungeon. In fact, trailblazing in the wilderness tends to be much faster and rewarding than when done underground.
I for one really like that monster frequency might be back in as the article goes into at length. I actually use these things for dungeon levels too as a lot of monsters tend to show up underground and others use the topmost levels as lairs. Cities are fun too as they are usually made by a race or pact of races as part of a larger state or even self-contained culture. It's in big populations like these when those frequency tables get really interesting. As the article says, when the history of a place's development is defined by three separate elven communities living in relation to each other, then their culture, community, and all of the other creatures living amongst them reveal certain characteristics. Maybe not like "Elf Dogs", but their breeding, behavior, and training certainly would have elven influences reflected within.
Another thing I do is take a page from ecology with the pyramid of creatures in a food chain. D&D only tracks monsters within the challenge level spans fit for the PCs, but others can exist too as part of the environment. As they say, "Nature abhors a vacuum". When a species is wiped out or beaten back the predators which survived off of them must look for new food sources or starve to death. But even if they do survive, there is a gap, a veritable bounty of food supply (or other resources) the wiped out species lived off of. And so other creatures, constantly darting out into other niches from their own, evolve, change, and fill this fruitful space and grow in wild abandon. That is until new predators move in to take advantage of this next new food source and diminish its population in the ever balancing ecosystem.[/sblock]
