Comment on “Wine”

"If you'd rather they spent their money on something else, don't cripple their imaginations by making the game easy. If you want them to build safe-houses and castles, make the world more dangerous. If you want them to spend more time investing in local politics, don't invent rewards for chatter ... denude the dungeons of treasure. Denude the game world of dungeons. Push politics into the player's faces. MAKE them deal with it."

I'll keep this paragraph especially in mind as I think about what messages I want to send with the events to take place next session (recovery of a much-anticipated treasure, NPCs' reaction to party's finding it, etc.) and of course will think more broadly about WHY I want to send THOSE messages and not others.

Wow, you know what? I just realized that in my new gaming group (formed in February this year and having played ~20 sessions [summer was sparse]), they haven't actually been to a dungeon yet! I stuck one in a wilderness area they were exploring, but didn't light it up in sufficient neon -- and I'm not sure they even would have gone in.

I think my trade tables are sending a message that much of the game is "civilized" ... with much to do in towns, and much to do with money and goods. By the way, I haven't shown you my tables since years ago when they were just tabular text. Here's what they look like now. I also added some shots of the wiki-ish website I use to run the game.

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I forgot to tell you! Last sesh, one PC stayed behind with the animals while the others led an NPC off into a ruse. Combat ensued and the animal tender's player grew absorbed in his computer. I *thought* that was cause he was zoning out while the others fought...

But NO! When the fight concluded, he turned and showed me he'd built the beginnings of a freaking e-commerce shopping cart for my trade table webpages! "To help us buy stuff and copy it into our equipment spreadsheets!" This dude's been playing D&D for all of one month! I was so excited!