Posts Tagged "tao-of-dnd" from 2022

Oh, one more thing... In October or so, I had a small success -- with money in general, not taxation, but it seems relevant.

In the first or second session of this campaign, the broke-ass PCs were most bothered by having to pay a couple silver a head to enter a city's gates.

Several IRL months and some fifteen sessions later, they re-entered the same city. As they paid the fee, the fighter turned to the ranger and said, "Remember when that used to be a lot of money?"

Splendid work lately, Alexis. I'm visiting the wiki several times a day, and gobbling up all changes.

I'm glad you're addressing this specific topic. Taxes happen to be on my mind: I recently made a script to calculate the total income of the barony my players are in, accounting for the baron's vineyards, wheat fields, tariffs on certain imports that enter the kingdom in this area, and what I now know to be "socage." It calculates vineyards -> grape yield -> barrels of wine, multiplies the result by my trade tables' entry for the nearest market's price for a barrel of wine, subtracts off the cost of labor ... and so on.

That looks beautiful! I especially like the coins. Well done, Kelly.

Of course the players should pass through an area of backwardness before getting truly into the wilderness ... but since there's a lack of how such places are formed, or what they find important, it's difficult for a DM to present it in game terms.

yes indeed, have had trouble with this very thing. so consider this reader thankful for all your hard work recently on the nitty-gritty of detail-rich worldbuilding.

can we help somehow?

also, from the linked page:

"For example, a settlement of 195 would give a product of 3; the formula to determine cultivated land equals [3d4+(3x4)] times 50."

Now I'm very curious how you might reinvent the bread symbol along these new lines you've followed for hammers and coins...

OHHH YEAH

My players finally noticed the food/coin/hammer numbers on my (newly revamped) maps last sesh. When I explained them, they got so excited -- especially when I concluded by showing your Hammer page w/ the facilities list! Three dimensions, here I come.

Oh boy, I see more facilities pages turning blue :)

Absolutely loving the finished Hammer page and your farmland writeup.

"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.

I don't recall - why did you decide to turn maps into their own blog instead of main Tao material?

I meant to reply sooner and it just got away from me. I just ran a session tonight, though, so now is the time.

I tell you, I’ve re-read this post at least four times since you made it. I even printed out a (condensed) version of the list of tactics To go with my other materials before tonight’s running. I didn’t manage to introduce anything strictly along the lines of any of these, but I did at least manage to offer the players something that they really wanted, in a manner that they really didn’t want* — and they tied themselves into knots over it.

I'm happy you are running again. So am I -- after a long summer break, we're starting up again with a rare* weekend session on Sunday. Brunch and gaming into the afternoon.

* for this group

that red and white robe is quite eye-catching -- you'd have looked good in it!

Re-encountering this post in 2022 was a bit of a shock. I'm now at UCSC doing a master's under Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas, with my thesis project being exactly the kind of program you and I discussed here, five years ago.

Eagerly awaiting more along these lines.

I haven't had the problem for a long time of working too much on "listmaking content"... but I definitely struggle to create and present motivations, cultures, ideals. I feel I simultaneously go too big and too small. "Too big" means I know there's a war breaking out in the next realm over, but I have (some) trouble working through all the consequences that will have on the world (including how the rulers of this realm, where the players are, will respond.) "Too small" means I can come up with motivations for individual people, or small groups, but can't quite grasp how they would achieve that w/in existing power structures, hierarchies, etc.

JB: "7,500 GP revenue into 870 GP profit" got my attention. How do you calculate the longshoreman pay, tariffs, and other fees? "N longshoreman per ton of wood * Q silver per longshoreman", and so on? Nothing wrong with that , I just want to know how all that money got chipped away (if Alexis doesn't mind us taking a tangent to his original post...)

Lance,

My maps are also not adequate but that has not stopped me working on a trade system based on Alexis's model (and using his 2012 reference & production figures.) I'm up to nearly 700 items implemented now. You can do it!

I would be happy to share details, screenshots, etc. if you like; I was thinking about preparing a brief presentation on it anyway for a programmers' interest group.

"There is no sadder evidence of the utter failure of D&D as a game than the fetishism of character making over character running."

Amen!

The people I know in this hobby all seem to treat character creation as an exercise in creative writing. the games that they typically play explicitly mandate or strongly encourage that, but those players do so even if not required or prompted. to them it's just part of playing an RPG.

I think this fetishism played a large role both in the degradation of the centrality of the rules, and the decline of campaign play.

It really is quite extraordinary how piss-poor published RPG equipment is as training material. Even the indie game material I've seen has been unable to resist inserting lots of fluffy language and prevarication which obscures the ability to actually, you know, learn from it.

Gadzooks! A nice bit of luck, Alexis. Have a good time.

This series is very useful to me Alexis. my players are currently exploring the wilderness, and I am struggling to run the periods whenever they are not interacting directly with monsters/NPCs. I think now I know, thinking in terms of this series's framework, how I can start to rectify that.

Byoooootiful, thank you! Memory did not fail me, these are still damn good.

Alexis you made a bunch of images afew years ago that listed all the druid's PLant Life studies out, al the way up to sage level.

I can't find those despite digging and digging thru this blog, the old wiki, and higher path. The Web Archive doesn't show them on the old-old wiki either (tao-dnd.wikispaces). Do you know what posts those are in?

new player is joining, playing a druid, and as a phd student in botany he's very excited about having his player possess in-game knowledge/abilities related to plants.

FWIW, I don't have any rules yet for purchasing a whore, seducing someone for quick sex, or courting someone for romance -- so those would be good additions before or after I've got sex characteristics in the generator.

For a while I've wanted to add secondary sexual characteristics (penis size, breast shape, etc.) to my character background generator. (IIRC you have them in yours.)

But when I've asked players, they've always said something like, "I wouldn't mind, and that fits the granularity of your game. But what if you get someone new who sees that right off the bat and gets the wrong idea about your game -- thinks you're the kind of DM who's going to use the game to act out his fetishes?"

I accepted that argument at the time, when I was a bit more worried about retaining players, but your post prompted me to think again. I suppose the counterargument is that anyone who would be put off enough to quit playing over sex characteristics without so much as asking, "Hey, why are these here?" is someone I don't want to play with anyway!

What do you mean, "dangerous?"

Oops, d4-3 above should read d4-1.

Thanks. I learned from the best...

Did this particular ladleful of gallimaufry have a specific influence on your D&D? (The snakelike movement visualizations on the computer screen on page 5 remind me of your use of arrows on the combat grid.)

Apropos of the character generator, if not this table in particular: you had a result on the 2012 table which I stole with relish: "Character has been made a member of the Illuminati."

Lo and behold, the very-high-stats-across-the-board ranger in my current party got that result. I'm treating it as a juicy bonus sage study in which he earns points at the slow rate (d4-3) and have written up abilities such as "Attend Council*", "Recruit Agents" (specially-obtained hirelings sworn to serve a single Illuminatus), and later on in the study, "Ascend to Council," "Induct Illuminatus", "Recruit Worthy Agent" (someone in a high position - guildmaster, minor noble), "Manipulate Politics" (get an agent, or yourself, placed into an important position with less or none of the usual campaigning or favors...)

I'm so blessed by the players I've been able to attract this year since I started running again in February.

Have you any other experiments you'd like to propose? I like this sort of empiricism. You've had plenty of influence on my style as it is, but I quite like this idea of you handing small, specific things for us to try in our home games, with us reporting back.

As promised, I tried this at the beginning of my running last Thursday. Before the game, I filled a plastic cookie jar with rocks, then hid it in a brown bag. After doing recordkeeping and answering player questions from last session, while the players were finishing up some notes I dropped the bag on the table.

The loud thud and table shake certainly got their attention!

I must agree with Sterling. A written contest seems more likely to attract entrants than a video one. Everyone can write, at least on the functional level taught by primary education (hopefully); not everyone can do decent video editing. And it must be an order of magnitude more time to create video content than written content, even accounting for high quality of output in both media.

I understand you are committed to giving the money away to others, but I feel that, whatever method you choose, it should somehow contribute to your game design. AFAIK, the sum of $1050 came from Patreon support, and they (we) paid so as to see you more comfortably supported while working on your game. [If I'm wrong about the source of the $1050, then I'm wrong and I'll change my position.]

So, "paying wiki editors" is the only thing on the list you've made that seems right to me. One good use for such labor could be a final transfer of pages from the old "tao-dndwiki" blogspot page, to get all your content under one website (even if it's outdated; editors could of course mark with a "From Old Wiki" category.)

It seems to me a major theme of this post is that the wilderness should be legible. (Maybe legibility not the best word but I will run with it.) Players, especially with a druid or ranger in the party, should be able to observe and intelligently traverse the landscape, follow the routes made by animals, notice or discover the presence of “builder” type creatures, and so on.

When should the wilderness be *less* legible? NOT confusing - don’t want to completely stymie and discourage the players - but with answers less readily at hand. A related question might be: how much should ability to successfully traverse wilderness be mediated by sage abilities, versus be available to all characters/parties?

I'll try this for my running this Thursday.

Thanks for the vote of confidence in my editing skills. It means a lot given you've spent your lifetime writing (and I imagine you've encountered a master editor or two in your time!)

Go make your fortune and I'll be right there ready to soak some of it up :)

Something that seems to be evidently true because it's been five, six posts and fifteen days since getting a comment.

I must be missing something - there were 9 comments in the last two days on the previous post...

For what it's worth, I think shutting down the comments would be a loss for the blog. A number of posts over the years have had their origins in reader comments, as I recall - whether as something you could build on, or something you could deconstruct. The people who comment here are mostly on board with your 4th form of RPG expression, and doing their best to follow along and understand Alexis-style game design for the 4th form; and since not all of us have blogs, your site serves as a valuable gathering point for us.

Please write here only as much as you care to, Alexis. I can't speak for anyone else, but as your loyal "disciple" and I'll take whatever you want to share with gratitude.

I was going to ask some questions about how to improve an aspect of my game, but given this post I will try and answer them myself for a while instead. :) better in the long run anyway. Gotta spread the wings.

By the way, I continue to enjoy reading the updates on the background generator page. In the last couple days I've been making updates to my own generator as well. but as with the previous paragraph, I'm trying as much as possible to just rely on myself before consulting your page to get more ideas.

Your world is so damn big! Such a huge area to explore - with not a single market town in sight, if I'm not mistaken. Woe to the party who comes to Romania ill-equipped.

Thank you! All the help I needed and then some.

Regarding character generation, although not the character background generator specifically gone I could use a bit of help.

The new fighter in my campaign took the Falconry study. Since you haven’t written that one yet, I got to work on the abilities. I’m having a ball, and learning a fair bit!

“Rouse to Hunt“ went down easily. “Bird Companionship“ I can manage in my own way, though not sure what you intended. “Train Falcon“ coming along. The one I am stuck on is rules for “Waken Regard”.

I got as far as thinking that local authorities may invite the character to participate in a hunt with them, If the local game animals are those that a falcon could hunt. But I’m not really sure what else would apply here. What would you do?

It feels so right to have sage abilities heavily reused in the design of the "progenitor's legacy" feature of the BG generator.

I figured you must have done more work on this since 2012, and that you'd just never posted it. I'm glad you are!

Oh cool, I’m really excited to see how the random placement of blocks turns out.

Just caught up on the new village wiki page, as well as the town one which was linked from that…. I appreciated the “running the town game” section on the latter page. Going to set myself to mentally downscaling that to running the hamlet game, and the village game, based on what you have written in the last several posts and on the wiki. I think I have found a couple more players; hoping to pick up campaign again this weekend.

[sorry if this posted a couple times erroneously while on mobile]

Exactly, Shelby! Each sentence matters because in Alexis' world (and hopefully our worlds!) all details are meaningful points of interaction for players.

Contrast with the endless waves of pointless fluff and window dressing in any 3e or later splatbook :^(

(had difficulty posting on mobile - sorry if this post went through more than once)

Thank you for writing these. The whole series has of course been enjoyable and useful, more than I can put into words at this moment, but I am especially grateful that we have you around To show us the way (or your way, at least) on these types of facilities. There is only so much of life that I have experienced, and none of it has involved docks or quays - or boating, or sea shipping*. More than anything else, the facilities posts are valuable for giving me launching points to do my own reading, whether on the Internet or in the university library**, about the things that you bring to my attention from your larger pool of knowledge.

Well you certainly answered my question, Alexis! Thanks.

Please delete the test comment that might have gone through, I can’t tell.

I could use some help understanding the economic/manufacturing productivity of hamlets and villages in your taxonomy.

In your 2019 thoughts on the assignment of hex benefits (hammers, coins, food for those who don’t know that term), I recall you gave figures for how many people those benefits might represent in the food production, manufacturing, and service industries. This was motivated by your proposal that more benefit symbols would mean higher and higher tiers of specialization and facility available related to those things. I believe the phrasing you used was that 1/2/3/4 symbols would mean the presence of Production/processing/manufacture/administration.

Also, regarding lack of comments versus lack of interest: when some dork publishes a bunch of rehash nonsense, anybody can comment - anybody is qualified to have an opinion - because rehash nonsense has no barrier to entry. Your work, which required more thought going into it, naturally imposes Some minimum amount of thought to compose a meaningful comment.

The answer must lie in either the quality of the game or the type of people I am trying to introduce to it. I will go away and think about it.

God dammit, I lost another fucking player. How in God’s name do you guys keep people around? I find that I have this problem where all the people who are my friends, who would want to play the game, are doing so many interesting things with their lives that they see no reason to play a game in which their _character_ could do interesting things. They’d rather… Go do cool stuff in real life than sit around playing a game about it. Damn!

Don't forget to update this index :)

You were right, Alexis - I still think about this fight from time to time. Wish the online campaign had come at a better time for me. Or that I'd made more time for it.

I wont do that because there’s a chance the player will return to our game in the summer, after her job gets less hectic. If something bad happened to the character while working as an NPC prospector, that player would have a loss of trust in me - “Sorry, you left the game for a while and now you can’t be your character anymore because they died while being an NPC” would be awful! Far better to just put the druid in stasis, or have her wander off into the forest until the player returns.

Thanks for the coin explanation. And thanks for mentioning that 259 was a mistake! I*was*wondering about that When assigning infrastructure on my 20 mile map a couple weeks ago… I elected to go with dividing the population into the correct number of mi.² in a 20 hex. Which IIRC is 346 sq mi.

Forgot to mention: while I have been enjoying the entire campaign forge series, of course, this post and the previous one have been particularly valuable for the scenario I mentioned with my current players. Thanks! I’m glad you’re doing it now, of all times.

(And I’m also glad that I actually sat my ass down and followed along with the continental mapmaking posts at the beginning... Even my cruddy little raster image has grown into a little chunk of a world that I can see more clearly with every passing week.)

I won’t go into the details, but the players in my campaign have just been awarded a teeny tiny land grant. Five acres, undeveloped. They are excited to begin making improvements By calling on the 500 GP of credit one of the characters got from the background generator.

Since we will not play again for a couple weeks (after spring break) I’m busily expanding My conception of the island they are on. I already broke it into 2 mile hexes near the beginning of the campaign, and over the last two days I followed your 2019 series “Mapping Hammers/Food/Coin/References “on The Higher Path to place benefits on the island at the 6 and 2 mile levels.

448 is the threshold to have a full complement of type one. Given that you mentioned two examples with infrastructure in the 1000 range, and infrastructure above 3000, I can’t help but wonder if there is another threshold… 448×2 To get to a full complement of “super type one”? And so on.

I shudder to imagine a “super” version of the big table you made to determine precise distribution of types of subjects given a certain infrastructure value… But I know you would make it work, if that’s the direction you took it in

It goes to ultra super levels of civilization!

That is exactly the right attitude, Shelby. There’s a reason I haven’t played in anybody else’s world in a long, long time. Mostly that they don’t think of their games as “worlds” to begin with…

“Tazlau is rich; with a type-1 hex it's as civilised as nearly any place in the world (there are exceptions, but that's another post).”

I see beans, and I would like them spilled, please :-)

I wish I had started my current players off somewhere this small. Still a lot of agency on the parts of the players, but fewer moving parts than a large area. Fewer possibilities. Feeling it very hard to get my descriptive faculties back, and other DM skills, after years away from the table, and could’ve used a smaller start.

I wish more people had your perspective on things like substituting facts for rumors. I suppose most game worlds do not assume that much knowledge on the part of the NPCs.

I had the fourth session of my new campaign last weekend, and I want you know I was able to make good use of the jousting piglet menu. A dinner was to be thrown in the players’ honor, so before the game I selected several items to form a list of courses being served for the meal.

The players really dug it!

It’s just a pity that we didn’t have any of the dishes on hand for real…

My new players (2 sessions so far in the campaign, my first in years) are effing marvelous. They have exactly the right entrepreneurial spirit to become fantastically good at the game and they are down with gritty rules. (2 of the 3 have never gamed before, and another girl wants in who has never played either.)

They are already chattering about opening a bakery, or starting a farm, or building a "home base." So I am pleased to see you return to this topic on your blog! I'm now carefully rereading your series of posts on Higher Path laying out the bread/hammer/coin system as of 2019 and intend to apply it to, at least, the 2-mile hex mapped-out island on which I started the players.

Im preparing to begin running new players in about a week .New both to my table and to RPGs overall. Very excited, they are an intellectual, curious, and artsy bunch who I believe will grow into fabulous players.

Letting the back of my mind process half-ideas for the contest.
No more concrete questions or comments yet. Dealing with a family emergency this week.

I have a question about submission content.

Is it acceptable for the submitted video to make reference to supplemental materials Which may or may not be fully detailed within the video?

For instance, suppose that I distill some piece of adventure making knowledge down into a worksheet. Then in part of the video, I provide a free download link to the worksheet; explain why I chose these and not those prompts/pieces of information to go into the work sheet; And perhaps do an example of making effective use of the worksheet.

I’m asking because I think that, while the video is of course supposed to provide a structured guide to doing adventure design, it might be helpful to give the viewer something concrete to hang onto after the video has been watched. Some thing that can also be more easily referred back to than a full video.

Absorbing the rules now…

My guess was that the contest would be creating a campaign setting/world, but I like this more.

I appreciate that there is (What seems like) a generous timeline. Video production takes work.

Do I dare enter? I think I would kick myself if I didn’t…

I made a map by mashing up Japanese and Hawaiian islands. I was taken with the "personalities" map above; now I'm looking for historical illustrations that speak to me the same way, to distribute about my map and inspire different types of polity. Will share here when I'm done, probably this evening.

COOL!

Having trouble doing comments on my phone, where the good (well, least bad) dictation program is.

Do I understand correctly that trees in the Antilles, as shown in the photo, are blown by such strong winds, and for such a long time, that they grow up to be permanently bent over? Or is this photo just meant to show that the winds are so strong that otherwise-normal trees get blown completely sideways?