Off-Season Player Activities

One of the greatest advantages of throwing open your design process to all you DIY rapscallions out there is that your feedback without fail tends to fire off the sagging neurons in my brain and goad me into delving deeper and deeper into the subject on hand. 

Sadly for my ever-stretching personal deadlines, one of the greatest disadvantages is that your feedback fires off my imagination and goads me to delve...

Looking at many of your comments from this week, it became increasingly apparent that I would have to start getting into the nitty gritty of off-season activities in “Pendragon D&D”--really I need a better working title at this point--before getting much farther in detailing the other methods.

Some rough guidelines for running the 6-10 month period that characters aren't actively adventuring:

Cultural Limitations. Very few societies in well thought out campaign settings will allow a character free reign in all activities. Depending on the political, economic, cultural, and religious contours of the character's home area, some activities will be limited or banned altogether. It's important for the GM to think about these limitations and convey them to the player before she plans her off-season activity.

In many cases hurdles can be overcome with the right application of “juice”, bribes, political favors, and/or other influences (weighted CHA checks).

A high medieval European-like setting, for instance, is likely to have a rigid guild structure that forbids a character from being taught a craft or profession. The character may have to grease a few palms of guild master to get a dispensation to be taught—or seek and find an errant journeyman willing to break the heavy hand of the guild.

Compensation. Each activity reaps benefits:

Gold. Money produced per activity.

Experience Points. Modest exp awards per activity.

“In Kind” Compensation. Goods produced in an activity: magic items, weapons, hides, furs, food, etc.

Social Benefits. Advancement in a political, religious, cultural, professional hierarchy. Children, relationships, etc.

Skills. All labor is divided into four categories based on training in a trade: unskilled, semi-skilled, craft and expert. These four areas correspond to the Hirelings list found here.

Time requirements for activities. Here's the carrot that some of you mentioned. A character can engage in a range of activities in the months of the off-season, but each has a time requirement.

Many tasks can be completed indirectly by hiring or compelling free or unfree labor. No experience points are awarded from the secondary activity, but the character is allowed to forgo the time requirement (did I really need to spell that out?). Wage and/or upkeep costs apply.

Training in new areas will give a character a rudimentary working knowledge of the subject—speaking a new language at a grade-school level or being able to work metal crudely, for example. Further applications of training will progressively hone the skill level at the discretion of the GM. (Keeping with the core spirit of D&D interpretation of skills are wholly non-mechanical and rulings-based.)

Brief (1 month)

Swords & Sorcery-style Debauch/Carouse/Paint Town Red

Bribe/Use Influence

Work/Practice Trade

Run a Business

Join Guild, Order, or Other Association

Conduct Religious Acts (Penance, Absolution, Sacrifice etc)

Travel, Civilized Lands

Craft Potion, Scroll

Build a Structure (varies)

Commission Expedition

Buy/Sell Stolen Goods or Other Illegal Activity

Seasonal (3 months)

Courtship (includes trying to have children)

Read and Write Native Language

Learn a Semi-Skilled Trade

Train with Weapons

Embark on Pilgrimage, Short

Conduct Spell Research

Conduct Scholarly Research

Craft Minor Magic Item

Class-Appropriate Training(thieving, tracking, kung-fu, etc.)

Trap/Hunt/Fish

Train an Animal

Use Ritual Magic

Quarterly (4 months)

Learn to Speak Easy Foreign Language

Learn to Read and Write Easy Foreign Language

Create a Work of Art (statue, epic poem, piece of music, etc)

Lead a Caravan, Civilized Area

Captain a Merchant Craft

Half-Year (6 months)

Learn a Craft 

Farm, Short Harvest Crop

Embark on Pilgrimage, Long

Learn to Speak Difficult Foreign Language

Read and Write Difficult Foreign Language

Long (9 months)

Switch Class

Farm, Long Harvest Crop

Rule/Govern

Found Settlement

Double-Season (18 months)

Learn an Expert Trade

Pendragon D&D: the Matrix Method

Today I trot out the first (and most bare bones) of four methods I am working on to help judges navigate the off-season in the “Pendragon D&D” section of the Domain Game. Note that all four are very rough at this point, almost more like a thinking out loud. 

Any input as always is greatly appreciated.

Method One: The Matrix Method

Have each player put together--at the end of the last adventure season session or in-between--a short narrative about what their character has been up to during the off-season. This can be accomplished either in a written pre-session format or in a round-robin oral manner as you go around the table calling on players--alternately this could be done in individual one-on-one sessions.

(In my own experience, handing out writing assignments will produce highly uneven results: some players will jump at the chance, others will roll eyes and bellyache, and some will just vote with their feet.)

Whatever format you decide on you should keep the same framing questions:

What are your character's goals for the season? Wealth? Fame? Experience? Knowledge?

What's he going to do to accomplish these goals? Packed up the elf henchman and visited the oracle? Captained a merchant vessel? Hired on with that crank of an alchemist in town?

Now on your end you match the logic of this argument to your own “counter-argument”.

How did the players preparations stack up against the dangers of your campaign world? What did she accurately take in to account or not? What is the endeavor going to cost the player, financially or other cost? Given the stated goals, how dangerous of an endeavor is the player embarking on?

With these questions in mind the GM makes an arbitrary call about the relative soundness of the plan. Detail, anticipation, and forethought are hallmarks of a stronger argument. Using the simple Engle Matrix chart below the GM finds the category that fits closest to this call. Now think about the dangers move the category up and down if you think that the danger warrants

Strength Of Argument	Dice Score To Be Successful
Very Strong Argument	6, 5, 4, 3, 2
Strong Argument	6, 5, 4, 3
Average Argument	6, 5, 4
Weak Argument	6, 5
Very Weak Argument	6
Stupid Argument	No Roll

If the roll is successful grant the player their goal. If the roll is two higher than the minimum grant them some extra boon. Make sure to account for any costs in the final reckoning.

Example: Umma the Undying says that this off-season she will turn “corsair” along the coast of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes with loot, loot, loot as her stated goal. She doesn't have money for a galley of her own, so she cooks up an elaborate plan to hire a crowd of rowdies and commander a vessel in the creepy seaside village of Ennsmuth.

The plan seems to account for a number of reasonable dangers (Strong Argument) but fails to account for the singular danger of Ennsmouth being a town infested with demons from the deep (move the Argument down to an Average one).

Umma rolls a “5” a success. The GM thinks up some appropriate loot for her level and risk and she leaves the off-season richer and refreshed. 

“Pendragon D&D”: Starting Points

Just got back from flying through 60 pages of manuscript of the Domain Game, and boy are my arms tired. Badum-ching.

Seriously though, it's a bit of a roller coaster doing this kind of project: an exuberant high when you are pounding the keyboard and making progress, side-splitting agony when you get bogged down. 

[Me finishing whiny screed and pontification on the high lonesome of writing.]

One byproduct of my recent burst of activity is going a bit farther in fleshing out the bits around “Pendragon D&D”, my shorthand for custom-fitting to classic D&D one specific—yet significant—element from Pendragon RPG: the long-haul timescale that punctuates annual adventures with longer off-table down seasons.

The “why” for this was kicked around here a few months back. As a reminder here was what I sad back then for its possible relevance to the Domain Game project:

A simple innovation [Pendragon's campaign phase] but one that added several layers of depth. Players could realistically play not only a character but a characters' children and grandchildren. The managing of realms—almost inherently a long-term project needing months if not years of “off-stage” time to be interesting—becomes an easier fit. The real sweep of history, more of a thing of years, decades, and centuries even, becomes something tangible in gameplay.

Sounds easy enough, right? Here's a peek at how I have started to over-complicate and badger this simple notion to death.

Part I: The Campaign Season

Like modern combat, adventuring is a physically, mentally, and psychically exhausting profession. Surrounded by near-constant danger, the body is flooded with stress hormones over and over again. The persistent tension, the hyper-vigilance, the physical toil of exertion and combat add up over the weeks. Even the most durable of grizzled veterans find themselves only able to sustain that kind of activity over a few months without starting to feel serious wear and tear.

Long periods of rest can relieve this pressure, allowing the would-be adventurer space to recoup and enter the fray anew.

In game terms, this is modeled by having each campaign year be divided into a “campaign season” of 2-4 months--or 1-2 multi-session “adventures”--and an “off-season” composed of all the time between each active adventure period.

Depending on the setting, the former season should be a contiguous, travel-friendly season, the warm summer and late spring months, for instance, in a cooler, temperate campaign setting or the dry season in a monsoon-drenched tropical one.

Because Pendragon D&D rests on a quicker pace, time moves quicker between table sessions. Where as older editions of D&D typically recommend that one game day elapses for each real day away from the game, this campaign style works better with three game days equaling one real day away. GM's can and should modify this baseline ratio as the need to contract and telescope action arises at the table.

The players can also elect to campaign over the four month limit, but will increasingly be susceptible to campaign fatigue and stress. At the beginning of each game-time week a check will be made against the character's WIS or CON (player's choice).

In the first month past the campaign season limit, the player rolls 3d6 against the attribute score in his weekly checks. If the score exceeds the attribute the character loses a one point of a randomly-chosen attribute (1d6 in order). For each month past the campaign season limit, 1d6 is added to the check, on the second month 4d6 are rolled, 5d6 on the third, and so on down the line.

A rest period of six, back-to-back months is required to restore lost attribute points.

In the next two parts I will take up four experimental methods to play out the off-season: two narrative and two mini-game methods.

Thoughts? Can you see this working in part or in whole? What would you change, spindle, mutilate, or fold?  

Adding Pendragon Epic-Time to D&D

Given the sweep of subjects it has dealt with in its many editions, D&D has had many curious omissions. Time is not one of them.

Indeed one of the more enduring legacies of the game's older editions has been how time inside rpgs is framed. The handling of game time has become so accepted as a bedrock concept that the founders' creativeness in conceptualizing it is almost purely taken for granted.

Most of D&D's wargame predecessors had rigid conceptions of what a turn was. Turns invariably puttered along on a single linear frame of time units (with the obvious exception of miniature campaigns that alternated play with battle-level time and a campaign-level time).

From the little brown books onward, time in D&D has run on multiple levels.

Given the central importance of site-based exploration, “dungeon time” a relatively small-scale timescale subdivided by 10-minute turns, is stressed as the most basic, fundamental game timescale. (I would hazard a guess that the centrality of this portion of play is why we ended up with “turns”, the most traditional of game terms here).

Right below it lay “combat time”: a quick, compressed timescale broken up by minute or 10-second “rounds” (further complicated in AD&D by “segments”). Right above it lay the longer timescale of “wilderness time” with its game days or day portions.

Much hazier was the layer of time right above wilderness time: “town time” or “campaign time” depending on your druthers. In my own experience both as GM and player this almost always meant the exact amount of time it took the party to heal its wounds, stock up, train, consult a sage, recover from hangovers, etc before promptly returning to the at-the-table time of the wilderness or dungeon. Time in this scale was days and weeks—with months on the very longest side.

(Even rarer was the punctuation of “hand-waving time” as the GM needed to move you great distances to a new adventuring site, but it's rarity makes it a decided exception.)

All good and fine, but did D&D--and the games that trailed in its wake--missed an important opportunity by not hard-wiring higher layers of time into the game?

Think of the some of the problems that we have heard here on running the kingdom-ruling part's of Paizo's Kingmaker series or Birthright. On both occasions players and GMs complained about how difficult it was to integrate play between the long sweep of the domain management pieces and the traditional adventuring timescales we are all used to.

It makes me wonder if the problem is in the domain rules of each product or the entrenchment of what D&D game play should be like in our minds. (Likely both, but why spoil a good set-up.)

Now let's take Pendragon. One of the game's core innovations was its handling of campaign time. Each scenario (linked multi-session adventures never lasting more than a season or two) is supposed to be bookended by a year of downtime.

A simple innovation but one that added several layers of depth. Players could realistically play not only a character but a characters' children and grandchildren. The managing of realms—almost inherently a long-term project needing months if not years of “off-stage” time to be interesting—becomes an easier fit. The real sweep of history, more of a thing of years, decades, and centuries even, becomes something tangible in gameplay.

My thinking out loud thread of today is simply this: would this work for classic-play D&D? Is that hard-wiring inherent or merely an ossified piece of how we play the game? Is epic-scale D&D even a fun prospect?