Lamentations of the Flame Princess: my job as GM
rabindranath72:
Quote from: happysmellyfish on November 09, 2011, 02:27:45 PM
I'm about to start running an OSRIC campaign, embracing the sandbox concept wholeheartedly. One thing I'm uncertain about is the treasure economy, and basically how much freedom I should have in generating rewards.
Vincent - what would have happened if the party had taken your spider bait, and traipsed out to the treasure? After the (probable) fight, would it have been a random amount of coinage? Would it just be that monster's lair? Or something else?
I don't want to mess up the tight economy - although maybe I'm over thinking it. Even so, I have absolutely 0 D&D experience, so anything you can shed on this would be helpful.
Just go with the treasure tables and random rolling, and you can't go wrong. The tables are designed for a certain level of treasure in the campaign, which in turn is tied to the difficulties of the challenges via monster and dungeon level. I am not sure that the OSRIC tables mimic exactly the AD&D distributions, but knowing the authors, I suppose they are quite close.
Cheers,
Antonio
lumpley:
Stefoid, on when to roll and how I choose scenes: Oh, it's all logistical, not dramatic. We roll for the outcomes of uncertain actions, dramatically significant or not, dramatically satisfying or not. Same with scenes. I can maybe go into this, but it's complicated, and we'll need to find a good starting place first.
I hope that "oh, it's all logistical, not dramatic" answers your question. Does it?
Moreno, on prepping encounters: In Lamentations, statting up a monster at the table is trivially easy. I suppose I could stat them up in advance, but there's no reason to, the result will be the same.
I have a random encounter table prepped, yes - well, it's a capricious encounter table. It's a list of monsters they're likely to encounter in this monster-infested wilderness, in rough order of most common to least common. I chose the spider-monsters from it by whim.
-Vincent
stefoid:
Quote from: lumpley on November 15, 2011, 08:16:12 AM
Stefoid, on when to roll and how I choose scenes: Oh, it's all logistical, not dramatic. We roll for the outcomes of uncertain actions, dramatically significant or not, dramatically satisfying or not. Same with scenes. I can maybe go into this, but it's complicated, and we'll need to find a good starting place first.
I hope that "oh, it's all logistical, not dramatic" answers your question. Does it?
yep, ta.
David Berg:
Re: logistics and scenes, is it a case of, "If Vincent deems a situation logistically relevant, we play a scene about it; logistically irrelevant stuff does not beget scenes"?
Teataine:
David, I can't say for Vincent's game specifically, but for this kind of (o)D&D play, scenes are largely dictated by dice rolls (and resource management), too.
If the players decide to go out in the wilderness, you roll for a random encounter for (say) each day of travel. If the roll dictates there's an encounter, that's a scene, otherwise we move on, lightly describing the journey.
If you're hexcrawling, there's a roll to see if you're lost. If you're lost and realize it, that's a scene otherwise we move on.
If you run out of food that's a scene, you decide to hunt or whatever, and we roll to see if you catch anything.
If there's any scene-setting, it's done by the players. I believe concrete scenes are initiated by player action. You might be sailing on a ship, doing a totally uneventful journey, that could be ended with a sentence of narration from the GM, except the players decide to break into the captain's cabin.
It is, from a gameplay standpoint, pure logistics, as Vincent says. But I'm just now reading through the Dying Earth novels (particularly Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's saga) and it's also incredible how strongly the result resembles its literary inspiration. Vance might write off a few days of travel with a simple sentence if the journey is uneventful, but if something crosses Cugel's path or Cugel decides to do something out of the ordinary, then we get a "scene".
I'm currently running Pathfinder in the same way and it's a lot harder to pull it off, because of how much bulkier the mechanics are. In LotFP you can stat up a spider monster by giving it AC, HP and an attack bonus and you're done, whereas in PF that hardly suffices. I've developed my own tools to handle this issue which technically means I'm cheating in the opposite sense to what Vincent mentioned. To control pacing in LotFP would be cheating, to achieve this hands-off oldschool play in Pathfinder is cheating.
Callan S. wrote:
Essentially to get over a procedural leak in the system, eg "What if the players just decide to grow cabbages forever?" or suchlike.
It might appear as a leak, but I think it comes pretty naturally that "we're not here to grow cabbages" is part of the social contract. In short, when you agree to play D&D, you've agreed to play a game about treasure hunting monster killers. I mean, if I decide to play in Apocalypse World a guy who drives off into the sunset in the ten seconds of of play and refuse to make a new character, is that a procedural leak? Or if I decide I want to play a weasel-employed traitor in Mouse Guard, and attack Gwendolyn during the briefing? I'm not "playing along", I'm not playing the game we agreed to play, so we better revise our agreement.
It would be trivial to add a rule to most editions of D&D that says: "If your character decides to retire from the life of adventuring, that character leaves play as a PC. Make a new character." But do we really need it?
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