The Birth of a World - part 5
“He looks like a giant smurf.”
- Quoted from someone at the X3 movie about Hank McCoy, a.k.a. the Beast in the first scene.
Here’s a couple of movie reviews.
X3 – Disappointing
I hope you’re happy with what you’ve left Brian Singer. I almost hope Superman Returns blows so bad it ruins your career.
Say thanks to the new hack-director for ruining what should have been an awesome trilogy-conclusion movie.
Hell, Tarantino could have directed the thing and it would have looked the same, just more blood.
The movie reminded me of a poorly done mercenary movie; all full of expected one-liners and people getting together simply for the sake of the plot than what their personae would actually do.
Seriously, would Juggernaut actually work for Magneto just because Maggie freed him? No he’d say “Thanks chump!” and then run off. Granted Magneto would have used his powers to “convince” Juggernaut to stay, but that didn’t happen.
We were delivered a Hollywood shoot-em-up movie with a mutant twist.
The DaVinci Code – Disappointing
I, like many others, expected better of Richey Cunningham and the guy who got it on with a fish.
I’ve never read the book and I saw the plot twists coming five to thirty minutes before they hit.
My wife did read the book and she enjoyed it a little more because she enjoyed seeing how the book was put to screen.
On a score of 0 to 10:
X-Men III – 5.5 – Not a horrible movie, but should have been a lot better.
The DaVinci Code – 4 – Mildly entertaining but not worth paying $35 to see it and eat popcorn & nachos.
For comparison of my tastes in movies:
Anything with the word Tarantino in it – 2 (and it should be happy to get that)
Strange Brew – 5.5
The Fellowship of the Ring – 9.5
The Two Towers – 8
The Return of the King – 9
Fargo – 1
Left Behind – 0 (Think of me as a wolf in a trap while watching that pile of crap.)
That should give you a good idea of my taste in movies.
So in conclusion, I’d like to say that the summer movie season is off to another poor start.
But anyway, time to move on to the thought at hand.
So far I’ve covered the bigger issues with this creating this game world.
That means that the remaining issues I’ll be talking about in future entries are going to be smaller and more defined. And as time goes on, they’ll get even more so as there is less to talk about.
This subject isn’t so small though; the world map.
I’ve said before that I’ll be using hexagons for the world map rather than a drawn map. This stems from my love of my first D&D world, The Known World, a.k.a. Mystara. That world was made of almost nothing but hexagons. Even the rivers actually flowed on the edges of the hexes.
It wasn’t realistic, but it didn’t matter.
My world map won’t be that bad, but it’s not going to be small.
The Mystara map never really had every single hex created to start with. Instead they chunks of it here and there.
That’s what I’m going to have to do because right now because the current size of the map is huge. I’m talking over 500,000 hexagons for me to fill in.
I have two words for that: “screw” and “that”.
A group of hexes at a time should be perfect. It also prevents me from being boxed into a corner, game-wise that is. If I want to add a new continent, then nothing is preventing me from doing so. I probably won’t do that, but you just never know when a new idea hits you and you just have to add it right this very minute.
When doing this world, something will have to be sacrificed; the numbers of towns and cities and a realistic map.
If you’ve played a Japanese RPG, then you’ve perhaps noticed that there are only a couple dozen cities in the whole game world and how the map was just as far across at the poles as the equator.
Even if you only count cities on this planet with over a million people, you’re going to get more than a couple dozen of them.
Okay, I could be wrong on that, but you get the point.
Even in the Forgotten Realms there are more than just the labeled cities. There are many small villages and farming communities out there that just aren’t named. There just isn’t space on the maps or room in the books to accommodate that much information.
And the same goes for this world, there will be only a couple dozen cities worth noting.
But that’s ok; I already have a reason for why that is. I just can’t list it here. It needs to be saved until that matters to the game itself and the players discover it.
Yes, this map will also have the polar areas be the same size as the equatorial areas. It’s just easier that way. Don’t blame me. If you must blame someone, blame Sid Meier.
The types of hexes in this world will be pretty simple; there is only going to be a few types:
Plains – for simple prairies and such
Hills – for hilly and transition to mountainous areas
Mountains, passable – giant rocky areas that can be traveled through with difficulty (a skill check will need to be made to traverse it)
Mountains, impassable – giant rocky areas that cannot be traveled through without magical aid
Desert, Ice – frozen wastelands
Desert, Dry – scorched wastelands
Water – lakes, seas, & oceans
Forest – woodlands where only happy elves live (ha!)
Additionally these areas may have a road, river, village, city, castle, ruins, or dungeon added to them.
How am I going to do random encounters since I made such a big deal about them before?
I’m glad you asked.
Well once again we’re throwing out believability in favor of playability.
Also, for this next part I must give credit where it is due. Back in February, the group went to a game-day in Dayton. While there we played under some local DMs who did random encounters in a way I liked.
The DM rolled a d12, and the players each rolled a d12. If the DM’s die matched any of the player’s dice then there was an encounter. If multiple players had the same result as the DM, then the number of critters that would appear was multiplied.
In a 10,000 monkeys at a typewriter kind of way, that could lead to a TPK on a freaky night of dice rolls.
So I’m taking their idea and making it work with my world with some changes.
First only one d12 will be rolled by only one player while I will roll a number of dice based on the terrain with other modifiers increasing or reducing the number of dice I roll.
If multiple dice match the players’ die, then I increase the EL of the random encounter by one for each die that matches beyond the first.
I will also keep my rolls secret in order to fudge things in a way I choose. But don’t expect me to make things easy on the party if they’re took weak from overextending themselves. Remember that sometimes you have to run and if you have a character that can’t run, well then you didn’t think things through very well now did you?
If there is no encounter then the party has survived a day of travel and they’ve moved to their intended hex. But if there is an encounter, and they survive it, then we roll dice again. I will roll less dice for each repetition of this until they finally pass through, but I will never roll less than one d12.
It has the potential to create some kind of nightmare of never-ending random encounters, but I’m not that bad of a DM so as not to ruin the real fun for a freaky dice night.
Yes, you did read that correctly, each hex of travel takes one day of travel whether you’re crossing a mountain or riding a horse on a paved road. But the road will probably only have 1 or 2 dice being rolled while the mountain may have 8 dice being rolled.
You also might have noticed that I have not given a distance that a single hexagon spans. And I never will either. In order to keep the whole thing simple one hexagon = 1 day, nothing more, nothing less.
Sometimes actually giving numbers to work with just gives unneeded complication to a game. Yes we all know that a horse has much more stamina and a greater stride than a man, so it can cover more distance because of that. But can it move twice as far than a man? How about on a forced march? What about hilly terrain? How much does a paved road help either one of them? What if there’s a fraction in the result? Forget all of that, 1 hex, 1 day, and 1 handful of d12’s and those problems go away.
When believability gets in the way of a good time, believability can take a back seat for a while.
For those of you who must know all the little things about how every little thing works in a fantasy game, haha they cancelled Star Trek.
(Well I thought it was funny.)
To backtrack just a bit here, the EL of the encounter will be determined by a variety of factors, but the PC’s levels will not affect the base EL as much as the terrain and the danger level of the region, if their level affects it at all.
The dangerousness of a region is based on how far away it is from a city versus how close it is to a bad site.
This acts as a natural “bouncer” for the PCs, and is also a kind of radar for the players to use on those nights where they know about where to go, but not exactly. This supposes that my plans to speed up combat works.
This system gives the poor, neglected, d12 a lot more use.
Here’s something else I’ve thought about to speed the game up a little bit.
When you first make your PC, you go crazy and buy all of the stuff your PC will possibly need, and then you never ever worry about it. I think Kal still has 6 of his sling bullets he had back at level 1. I don’t think we’ve ever really worried about the amount of food he has, the number of waterskins that are full, or even whether or not we’ve had to worry about if we had enough sacks to carry around our gold in.
So I’m just going to say that every PC has a basic list of equipment that they have and wipe 50gp off their starting gold each. This gives them the standard starting junk would commonly be bought (backpack, belt pouch, clothes, food & water, ranged weapon ammunition) but nothing non-standard like weapons, spyglasses, alchemical items, masterwork anything, animals and so on.
If a player tries to abuse the system, well he’s going to feel pretty foolish by the end of the night as I force him to write every single thing his PC owns, including weight. Then we compare what the PC’s strength score compare to weight. Then for the rest of the night he has the weight, or higher, and a correspondingly low combat speed.
That should probably put an end to any of that.
- Quoted from someone at the X3 movie about Hank McCoy, a.k.a. the Beast in the first scene.
Here’s a couple of movie reviews.
X3 – Disappointing
I hope you’re happy with what you’ve left Brian Singer. I almost hope Superman Returns blows so bad it ruins your career.
Say thanks to the new hack-director for ruining what should have been an awesome trilogy-conclusion movie.
Hell, Tarantino could have directed the thing and it would have looked the same, just more blood.
The movie reminded me of a poorly done mercenary movie; all full of expected one-liners and people getting together simply for the sake of the plot than what their personae would actually do.
Seriously, would Juggernaut actually work for Magneto just because Maggie freed him? No he’d say “Thanks chump!” and then run off. Granted Magneto would have used his powers to “convince” Juggernaut to stay, but that didn’t happen.
We were delivered a Hollywood shoot-em-up movie with a mutant twist.
The DaVinci Code – Disappointing
I, like many others, expected better of Richey Cunningham and the guy who got it on with a fish.
I’ve never read the book and I saw the plot twists coming five to thirty minutes before they hit.
My wife did read the book and she enjoyed it a little more because she enjoyed seeing how the book was put to screen.
On a score of 0 to 10:
X-Men III – 5.5 – Not a horrible movie, but should have been a lot better.
The DaVinci Code – 4 – Mildly entertaining but not worth paying $35 to see it and eat popcorn & nachos.
For comparison of my tastes in movies:
Anything with the word Tarantino in it – 2 (and it should be happy to get that)
Strange Brew – 5.5
The Fellowship of the Ring – 9.5
The Two Towers – 8
The Return of the King – 9
Fargo – 1
Left Behind – 0 (Think of me as a wolf in a trap while watching that pile of crap.)
That should give you a good idea of my taste in movies.
So in conclusion, I’d like to say that the summer movie season is off to another poor start.
But anyway, time to move on to the thought at hand.
So far I’ve covered the bigger issues with this creating this game world.
That means that the remaining issues I’ll be talking about in future entries are going to be smaller and more defined. And as time goes on, they’ll get even more so as there is less to talk about.
This subject isn’t so small though; the world map.
I’ve said before that I’ll be using hexagons for the world map rather than a drawn map. This stems from my love of my first D&D world, The Known World, a.k.a. Mystara. That world was made of almost nothing but hexagons. Even the rivers actually flowed on the edges of the hexes.
It wasn’t realistic, but it didn’t matter.
My world map won’t be that bad, but it’s not going to be small.
The Mystara map never really had every single hex created to start with. Instead they chunks of it here and there.
That’s what I’m going to have to do because right now because the current size of the map is huge. I’m talking over 500,000 hexagons for me to fill in.
I have two words for that: “screw” and “that”.
A group of hexes at a time should be perfect. It also prevents me from being boxed into a corner, game-wise that is. If I want to add a new continent, then nothing is preventing me from doing so. I probably won’t do that, but you just never know when a new idea hits you and you just have to add it right this very minute.
When doing this world, something will have to be sacrificed; the numbers of towns and cities and a realistic map.
If you’ve played a Japanese RPG, then you’ve perhaps noticed that there are only a couple dozen cities in the whole game world and how the map was just as far across at the poles as the equator.
Even if you only count cities on this planet with over a million people, you’re going to get more than a couple dozen of them.
Okay, I could be wrong on that, but you get the point.
Even in the Forgotten Realms there are more than just the labeled cities. There are many small villages and farming communities out there that just aren’t named. There just isn’t space on the maps or room in the books to accommodate that much information.
And the same goes for this world, there will be only a couple dozen cities worth noting.
But that’s ok; I already have a reason for why that is. I just can’t list it here. It needs to be saved until that matters to the game itself and the players discover it.
Yes, this map will also have the polar areas be the same size as the equatorial areas. It’s just easier that way. Don’t blame me. If you must blame someone, blame Sid Meier.
The types of hexes in this world will be pretty simple; there is only going to be a few types:
Plains – for simple prairies and such
Hills – for hilly and transition to mountainous areas
Mountains, passable – giant rocky areas that can be traveled through with difficulty (a skill check will need to be made to traverse it)
Mountains, impassable – giant rocky areas that cannot be traveled through without magical aid
Desert, Ice – frozen wastelands
Desert, Dry – scorched wastelands
Water – lakes, seas, & oceans
Forest – woodlands where only happy elves live (ha!)
Additionally these areas may have a road, river, village, city, castle, ruins, or dungeon added to them.
How am I going to do random encounters since I made such a big deal about them before?
I’m glad you asked.
Well once again we’re throwing out believability in favor of playability.
Also, for this next part I must give credit where it is due. Back in February, the group went to a game-day in Dayton. While there we played under some local DMs who did random encounters in a way I liked.
The DM rolled a d12, and the players each rolled a d12. If the DM’s die matched any of the player’s dice then there was an encounter. If multiple players had the same result as the DM, then the number of critters that would appear was multiplied.
In a 10,000 monkeys at a typewriter kind of way, that could lead to a TPK on a freaky night of dice rolls.
So I’m taking their idea and making it work with my world with some changes.
First only one d12 will be rolled by only one player while I will roll a number of dice based on the terrain with other modifiers increasing or reducing the number of dice I roll.
If multiple dice match the players’ die, then I increase the EL of the random encounter by one for each die that matches beyond the first.
I will also keep my rolls secret in order to fudge things in a way I choose. But don’t expect me to make things easy on the party if they’re took weak from overextending themselves. Remember that sometimes you have to run and if you have a character that can’t run, well then you didn’t think things through very well now did you?
If there is no encounter then the party has survived a day of travel and they’ve moved to their intended hex. But if there is an encounter, and they survive it, then we roll dice again. I will roll less dice for each repetition of this until they finally pass through, but I will never roll less than one d12.
It has the potential to create some kind of nightmare of never-ending random encounters, but I’m not that bad of a DM so as not to ruin the real fun for a freaky dice night.
Yes, you did read that correctly, each hex of travel takes one day of travel whether you’re crossing a mountain or riding a horse on a paved road. But the road will probably only have 1 or 2 dice being rolled while the mountain may have 8 dice being rolled.
You also might have noticed that I have not given a distance that a single hexagon spans. And I never will either. In order to keep the whole thing simple one hexagon = 1 day, nothing more, nothing less.
Sometimes actually giving numbers to work with just gives unneeded complication to a game. Yes we all know that a horse has much more stamina and a greater stride than a man, so it can cover more distance because of that. But can it move twice as far than a man? How about on a forced march? What about hilly terrain? How much does a paved road help either one of them? What if there’s a fraction in the result? Forget all of that, 1 hex, 1 day, and 1 handful of d12’s and those problems go away.
When believability gets in the way of a good time, believability can take a back seat for a while.
For those of you who must know all the little things about how every little thing works in a fantasy game, haha they cancelled Star Trek.
(Well I thought it was funny.)
To backtrack just a bit here, the EL of the encounter will be determined by a variety of factors, but the PC’s levels will not affect the base EL as much as the terrain and the danger level of the region, if their level affects it at all.
The dangerousness of a region is based on how far away it is from a city versus how close it is to a bad site.
This acts as a natural “bouncer” for the PCs, and is also a kind of radar for the players to use on those nights where they know about where to go, but not exactly. This supposes that my plans to speed up combat works.
This system gives the poor, neglected, d12 a lot more use.
Here’s something else I’ve thought about to speed the game up a little bit.
When you first make your PC, you go crazy and buy all of the stuff your PC will possibly need, and then you never ever worry about it. I think Kal still has 6 of his sling bullets he had back at level 1. I don’t think we’ve ever really worried about the amount of food he has, the number of waterskins that are full, or even whether or not we’ve had to worry about if we had enough sacks to carry around our gold in.
So I’m just going to say that every PC has a basic list of equipment that they have and wipe 50gp off their starting gold each. This gives them the standard starting junk would commonly be bought (backpack, belt pouch, clothes, food & water, ranged weapon ammunition) but nothing non-standard like weapons, spyglasses, alchemical items, masterwork anything, animals and so on.
If a player tries to abuse the system, well he’s going to feel pretty foolish by the end of the night as I force him to write every single thing his PC owns, including weight. Then we compare what the PC’s strength score compare to weight. Then for the rest of the night he has the weight, or higher, and a correspondingly low combat speed.
That should probably put an end to any of that.
posted by BlueBlackRed at 8:45 PM
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