Often when I read complicated RPG rules I think to myself, "There is no way that this is actually playable at the gaming table.
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@juergen_hubert
Yeah, I like random tables, I just don't want them to generate a world for me.I have had fun gamemastering the randomly populated wilderness hex crawl "Dark of Hot Springs Island" (2017). And I've signed up to run four sessions with it at cons this spring semester. Maybe this this is what you mean by a world generator?
First, a disclaimer: I love worldbuilding as an expression of the #ttrpg hobby, and putting a lot of effort into this makes it easier for me to improvise setting details when the PCs go off-script.
For me, random tables are a useful starting point which allow me to break out of my own habits and assumptions, similar to how I assign NPC gender randomly these days.
As an example, let's say I want to add a village to the map. I use the random tables from p. 159 in "Worlds Without End" to get a basic idea of what the village is all about. I get:
Rationale for the Village’s Existence: (8) "A bandit camp that went legitimate"
Who runs it? (8) "A pragmatic warlord"
Significant Locals: (10) "Native hedge mage"
A Current Pressing Problem: (1) "Vital food stores have been lost or stolen"
Local Likely to Interact with Adventurers: (3) "Gentry who wants no local gossip about their need"
Interesting Things the Place Can Offer Heroes: (1) "An unusually large amount of saved coinage"And within a mere minute or two, I already have a vision of the place and some local flavor which I can use to improvise things when the PCs are poking around the place. And I can build upon these concepts and make the village more fleshed out if the PCs stay there for an extended time. I find this _tremendously_ useful.
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First, a disclaimer: I love worldbuilding as an expression of the #ttrpg hobby, and putting a lot of effort into this makes it easier for me to improvise setting details when the PCs go off-script.
For me, random tables are a useful starting point which allow me to break out of my own habits and assumptions, similar to how I assign NPC gender randomly these days.
As an example, let's say I want to add a village to the map. I use the random tables from p. 159 in "Worlds Without End" to get a basic idea of what the village is all about. I get:
Rationale for the Village’s Existence: (8) "A bandit camp that went legitimate"
Who runs it? (8) "A pragmatic warlord"
Significant Locals: (10) "Native hedge mage"
A Current Pressing Problem: (1) "Vital food stores have been lost or stolen"
Local Likely to Interact with Adventurers: (3) "Gentry who wants no local gossip about their need"
Interesting Things the Place Can Offer Heroes: (1) "An unusually large amount of saved coinage"And within a mere minute or two, I already have a vision of the place and some local flavor which I can use to improvise things when the PCs are poking around the place. And I can build upon these concepts and make the village more fleshed out if the PCs stay there for an extended time. I find this _tremendously_ useful.
@juergen_hubert
I get it!Rationale for the Village’s Existence: in Scandinavia, Germany and Poland, this is usually up to 3000 years in the past and forgotten.
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@juergen_hubert
I get it!Rationale for the Village’s Existence: in Scandinavia, Germany and Poland, this is usually up to 3000 years in the past and forgotten.
Though places reinvent themselves often enough. Take #Oldenburg , where I live - it used to be a remote provincial town for centuries when it belonged to the Danish crown, but in the 19th century it became the seat of a Ducal court, which had a massive impact on the character of the city.
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First, a disclaimer: I love worldbuilding as an expression of the #ttrpg hobby, and putting a lot of effort into this makes it easier for me to improvise setting details when the PCs go off-script.
For me, random tables are a useful starting point which allow me to break out of my own habits and assumptions, similar to how I assign NPC gender randomly these days.
As an example, let's say I want to add a village to the map. I use the random tables from p. 159 in "Worlds Without End" to get a basic idea of what the village is all about. I get:
Rationale for the Village’s Existence: (8) "A bandit camp that went legitimate"
Who runs it? (8) "A pragmatic warlord"
Significant Locals: (10) "Native hedge mage"
A Current Pressing Problem: (1) "Vital food stores have been lost or stolen"
Local Likely to Interact with Adventurers: (3) "Gentry who wants no local gossip about their need"
Interesting Things the Place Can Offer Heroes: (1) "An unusually large amount of saved coinage"And within a mere minute or two, I already have a vision of the place and some local flavor which I can use to improvise things when the PCs are poking around the place. And I can build upon these concepts and make the village more fleshed out if the PCs stay there for an extended time. I find this _tremendously_ useful.
I wouldn't have been able to come up with that much flavour if you gave me a week to create a map settlement.
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@crabsoft
Unworkable rules are often the result of simulationist over-ambition. But the combat system in Swords of the Serpentine manages to be both unworkable AND non-simulationist.It's a 2008 rules-lite system that by 2022 had mutated into a hideous bush of exceptions and odd links to the game's skill system, all because the designer wanted to insert hard-coded narrative opportunities into combat. Also unintended exploits...
@mrundkvist @crabsoft I am increasingly weary of these games that think the part that needs mechanistic work is the storytelling part.
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@mrundkvist @crabsoft I am increasingly weary of these games that think the part that needs mechanistic work is the storytelling part.
@zdl @mrundkvist I always chalk it up to me not having a ton of experience with a wide variety of systems. I assume that there is probably a good reason to add mechanics for roleplaying but, in the back of my mind, it always feels so strange.
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@zdl @mrundkvist I always chalk it up to me not having a ton of experience with a wide variety of systems. I assume that there is probably a good reason to add mechanics for roleplaying but, in the back of my mind, it always feels so strange.
@crabsoft @mrundkvist I do have a ton of experience with a wide variety of systems. It feels "strange" to me too. (I'd use stronger language, honestly.)
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I wouldn't have been able to come up with that much flavour if you gave me a week to create a map settlement.
It gets easier with practice. But yeah, random generators like this are a great starting point.
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Though places reinvent themselves often enough. Take #Oldenburg , where I live - it used to be a remote provincial town for centuries when it belonged to the Danish crown, but in the 19th century it became the seat of a Ducal court, which had a massive impact on the character of the city.
@juergen_hubert
I've been thinking about that "Rationale for the Village’s Existence" thing. It seems very American to me, like something out of a Western movie. Or perhaps something from the German Ostsiedlung period of 1150-1350. It assumes that adventures are set in a wilderness with only a few recent settlements. And they're named "Grayson's Freehold" etc.Similar to how Americans think that a house from 1930 is super old and possibly haunted!
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@juergen_hubert
I've been thinking about that "Rationale for the Village’s Existence" thing. It seems very American to me, like something out of a Western movie. Or perhaps something from the German Ostsiedlung period of 1150-1350. It assumes that adventures are set in a wilderness with only a few recent settlements. And they're named "Grayson's Freehold" etc.Similar to how Americans think that a house from 1930 is super old and possibly haunted!
@juergen_hubert
In northern European #history and #archaeology, I guess we assume that the Rationale for the Village’s Existence is a combination of two things:* Population pressure in 800 BC
* Availability of agricultural land -
@crabsoft
Or it's a yearning to do another kind of work than functional RPG design. Akin to coding a physics engine for video games.@mrundkvist @crabsoft It really depends on what the system pretends to be simulating. Most of the heavy rules crunch RPG design is attempting to be a physics engine, which is a fool's errand.
Trying to simulate physics with a high-speed computational platform is hard enough that there are specialized several hundred thousand lines of code designed for a machine that can think a lot faster than a human being to do. That still falls short.
It doesn't matter how many pages fit in the book, you're not going to simulate physics. Yet, they keep trying.
But there are other things to simulate. Some mechanical systems attempt to simulate the structure of stories via mechanical aids, and those can actually be quite small because when you're talking about fictive narrative space, the rules can be relatively abstract. The interpretation engine is the human brain, and we're used to telling stories to one another.
Rules-minimal systems tend to be narrativist because narrative rules are simpler to express.
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It gets easier with practice. But yeah, random generators like this are a great starting point.
@juergen_hubert @GracelessHippo @mrundkvist
It also gets a lot easier/effective, once you‘ve entered those tables into obsidian and thus are able to generate all of that with a single click, on the fly. Quite a bit of work setting it up, but very rewarding. Still working on it atm.
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@juergen_hubert
I've been thinking about that "Rationale for the Village’s Existence" thing. It seems very American to me, like something out of a Western movie. Or perhaps something from the German Ostsiedlung period of 1150-1350. It assumes that adventures are set in a wilderness with only a few recent settlements. And they're named "Grayson's Freehold" etc.Similar to how Americans think that a house from 1930 is super old and possibly haunted!
@mrundkvist @juergen_hubert "Americans think a hundred years is a long time. Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way."
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@juergen_hubert
I've been thinking about that "Rationale for the Village’s Existence" thing. It seems very American to me, like something out of a Western movie. Or perhaps something from the German Ostsiedlung period of 1150-1350. It assumes that adventures are set in a wilderness with only a few recent settlements. And they're named "Grayson's Freehold" etc.Similar to how Americans think that a house from 1930 is super old and possibly haunted!
I think this _was_ written by an American, and the setting does follow D&Desque fantasy conventions - which have a bunch of "Wild West" tropes.
That being said, I am not too bothered by this. The random rolls are always just a _starting_ point for me, and creative reinterpretations to make them a better fit for the setting are part of the exercise.
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@juergen_hubert @GracelessHippo @mrundkvist
It also gets a lot easier/effective, once you‘ve entered those tables into obsidian and thus are able to generate all of that with a single click, on the fly. Quite a bit of work setting it up, but very rewarding. Still working on it atm.
@Morgunin @GracelessHippo @mrundkvist
Useful, though I personally prefer to switch it up and use a bunch of different random generators throughout the worldbuilding process.
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@Morgunin @GracelessHippo @mrundkvist
Useful, though I personally prefer to switch it up and use a bunch of different random generators throughout the worldbuilding process.
@juergen_hubert @GracelessHippo @mrundkvist
Nothings stops you from getting the individual results and recombining them as needed.
I enjoy using books more than computers, but they’re just not very portable
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@juergen_hubert
In northern European #history and #archaeology, I guess we assume that the Rationale for the Village’s Existence is a combination of two things:* Population pressure in 800 BC
* Availability of agricultural land@mrundkvist
I think there are a few more. The peat swamps in the border region north Netherlands/Germany were developed only once peat became economically interesting (17th c?). The developments were owned by capitalists from the urban region (Holland) so not only was development late, the socio-economics were also special.
Another are the regions with poor, sandy soil. The virgin forest was cleared very late and even then I think pasture of sheep remained more important there.
@juergen_hubert -
@mrundkvist
I think there are a few more. The peat swamps in the border region north Netherlands/Germany were developed only once peat became economically interesting (17th c?). The developments were owned by capitalists from the urban region (Holland) so not only was development late, the socio-economics were also special.
Another are the regions with poor, sandy soil. The virgin forest was cleared very late and even then I think pasture of sheep remained more important there.
@juergen_hubertYeah, in the Oldenburg area in northwestern Germany where I live there are actually quite a few villages that were founded in the 19th century, when all those boglands were plowed by giant steam plows.
