Underdark Part 2.0 - Pillars of Play Part 1 - Exploration Procedures, Hunger Mechanics

Before I begin I just want to credit Hack Slash Master, who wrote much of the Pillars of Play in an amazing publication title Mega Dungeon #1, the first in what is now three very solid and useful tools that are designed less as shiny stories or inspiration porn and more as useful tools to help a game master run a table effectively.

Go read his shit, n buy some of his material, it's super dope.

The hunger mechanics are reworded and lifted from Veins of the Earth, a grimdark OSR setting manual that I'm currently in love with. The discussion in the previous post about light as a currency was heavily inspired by that book and I highly recommend buying it because it will blow your mind.

PILLARS OF MEGADUNGEON PLAY 

The core procedural aspects of our Megadungeon play are going to be split into three-ish primary components; Exploration, which will happen at two different levels, (to be discussed later) Encounters, and Extraction. Each of these happens at different levels of scope and consume different levels of resources as well as invoking different kinds of decisions and dilemmas. 

Today I wanna talk about

Exploration : 

(And Hunger)

This is the process of exploring the environment. Far from being a movement across simple grid aligned rooms, this will be a delving through organic spaces, many alien and difficult to navigate. Safety and preparedness must be weighed against ever-mounting resource drain, in the form of food and light and hitpoints. 

The points of focus for exploration will be moving from area to area, navigation decisions and distances, all measured in hours, as oil spent and torches burnt, and examining things and searching for secrets, avoiding traps, and mapping. Your choices struggle to conserve resources against the encroaching darkness. Your approaches determines your preparedness for battle. Gaining knowledge about your environment allows discoveries of hidden chambers and the ability to flee or find safety in the dark. 

• Are you scouting ahead? Or will you be surprised by monsters? 

 • Will you avoid the traps and the relevant reduction in resources?

 • Have you made good choices to maximize your distance moved against the cost in terms of the various resources? 

Subpoint - Hunger Mechanics --- 

Rather than obsessively tracking rations, thereby adding another element of accountancy to the game, I am going to assume that the party is constantly foraging and resupplying. They are on the border of starvation at almost all times. The counter-effects of starvation versus drive and determination are considered to even themselves out in most cases. Instead of measuring and tracking food carried, all that matters is "What actions PCs have taken to get food?"

PCs begin as Hungry. In this stage the PCs get bonuses for performing certain actions to acquire food. So long as they perform at least one action every three days, they stay hungry. This is good. 

If the team fails to perform regular actions they enter the Starving stage. In this stage the PCs have to eat. If they have an opportunity to eat and do not then they suffer penalties. If the team incurs too many negative effects they enter the third stage. They are now Dying. Terminal starvation has set in. 

An edible opponent is one whose biochemistry matches yours. So, Dvargir, Goblin, or Dragon but not something like a Toxic Ooze, Silichominid or Archean. What matters is not the exact amount of food recovered but what the party are willing to do for for food. If PCs are willing to steal from starving refugees, or to attack an apparently peaceful group and consume them, to eat each other, or to eat their henchmen, then it doesn’t matter exactly how exactly how many calories they got out of it. It is the will to live that matters. The cash values listed only exist to give a general idea you guys want to do something dull like pay for food.  

STAGE ONE : HUNGRY -  The party must do at least one of these things every three days. If they do not, they begin to starve. 

PAYING FOR FOOD. The party must spend at least 300sp per party member. PCs can also try to steal this amount of food. 

EATING THE FLESH OF AN EDIBLE OPPONENT, PC OR HENCHMAN. If prepared by a Monster Chef, this gains PCs experience equal to the hit points of the creature or colleague consumed. However many creatures can cause adverse effects and disgusting mutations when consumed, (Monster Chefs can make rolls to attempt to remove these effects through cooking) and cannibalism, the consumption of a humanoid intelligence, is enough to drive any man into twisted states. At this stage the party can ignore the effects of one day on their "hunger bar" if they spend the whole 24 hours resting, conserving energy and doing nothing. 

So if they have spent 3 days exploring, and gained no bonuses, they can simply sit down to wait. If someone turns up, they can buy food, steal food or just kill and eat them to avoid moving to Stage Two. 

STAGE TWO : STARVING - At this stage the party is desperate. They must do one of the following within the next three days. 

PAYING FOR FOOD. You must buy at least 600sp worth of food per party member. PCs can also try to steal this amount of food. Doing this resets the party to Stage One. 

EATING AN EDIBLE OPPONENT, PC OR HENCHMAN. If the party performs one of these actions within three days, they go back to Stage One. They are simply Hungry. All exhaustion levels are lost. 

Every time the opportunity to perform one of the above actions occurs – say a henchman falls and breaks their leg and the party do not finish them off and eat them, or the possibility of stealing food exists and they do not attempt it – all PCs suffer a level of exhaustion. The party must act; if they spend 24 hours resting, conserving energy and doing nothing then all PCs will still suffer a level of exhaustion. After three days at Stage Two, PCs move to Stage Three. They are now Dying.  

STAGE THREE: DYING - PCs must eat or die. Every member of the party gains a level of exhaustion every 8 hours. 

PAYING FOR FOOD. PCs must spend at least 1000sp per party member. This will put them back at Stage One. PCs can also try to steal this amount of food. 

CONSUMING AN EDIBLE OPPONENT, PC OR HENCHMAN entirely will also send them back to Stage One. If a party member’s exhaustion level reaches level 6, they die.

 You'll note that food is very expensive, that is because food is very rare deep in the earth, and even the great matriarch in the towering drow cities beneath the granite wastes are hungry despite their jewels and their silks. It is also because buying food is boring and you should be actively seeking out interesting ways to acquire what you need.

Procedure - 
Exploration will usually be measured in 10 minute "Turns" however there will often be times when I will tell you that something will take a number of turns or even hours to accomplish, generally the time it takes to complete any significant action or interaction will be counted as an Exploration turn. Lockpicking, Scouting, Climbing your speed, (climbing will be discussed in detail during session zero) Etc all usually take 1 turn.

At the end of every other turn, or if the PCs make a bunch of noise, or if I feel like it, we'll roll a D6 Hazard Die, this helps us track lots of stuff and adds that random dice smell that we all know and love.

The Hazard Die for our campaign will be as follows.
1. Encounter
2. Rest or gain a level of exhaustion
3-4. Torches & Lanterns burn fuel, Ongoing effects, conditions, and statuses tick down
5. Monster Sign
6. Dungeon or Regional Effect

For our purposes 3-4 will allow us to burn through about 1 lumen of oil an hour without having to meticulously track these things, it also gives us a simple hour flag for diseases, effects, conditions, poisons etc. Whenever this result is rolled, each active lantern consumes its hourly rate of fuel. This result can be rolled back to back, as time work strangely beneath the Earth. If it is ever rolled a 3rd time in a row, ignore it and treat the turn as a free turn.

I have purchased Megadungeon #1 which discusses what to do for each of these other Hazard Die results, but if you wanna know more about them then you gotta go buy it yourself.

 

 

This post is probably not useful

Just as the title says; this post is going to be a lot of rambling and will probably help no one. But that's okay because I'm here to rant about some shit that's in my brain, and if it happens to ever be useful to someone that's great.

5E is a combat rules system masquerading as a roleplaying system.  The main purpose of mechanics in roleplaying systems that I run is to inform the storytelling and to add an element of risk/reward to the interactions. The problem, of course, is that in order for that to be true or for such mechanics to be useful the DM must have a certain amount of foundational knowledge about gameplay etc. That makes it hard to market a product based on this assumption and so instead the rules are designed for simplest possible accessibility and there is nothing wrong with that. At the end of the day though, mechanics inform the gameplay experience for players and by designing more combat mechanics you inform the players that this game is about combat. Today I'm picking on Monks as an example of a few overarching 5E design critiques and then maybe somewhere in there I can produce useful ideas.

I Got Beef With Monks - 

So this isn't a fair title, monks themselves have done nothing to me or my family. (Unlike warlocks, who know EXACTLY what they've done!) I mean I do think they're a bit over tuned that's not really important here. I'm just using Monks as a punching bag because I was thinking about design and monks and what monks could be, but this same thing stands true for basically all classes.

You ever notice how much of a monks kit is combat oriented? I could replace "monk kit" with 5E and still feel comfortable making that accusation, but again, we're gang beating monks today. Monks have a variety of moves and styles and the like, but all of their abilities are essentially geared towards combat, (The open palm is an interesting exception) and almost universally these are boxed in by very specific rules. And those rules get in the way of the Cinematic Bullshit that I want to see out of my monk players.

Jackie Chan doing Cinematic Monk Bullshit

So, remember earlier I said this would be a discussion about how mechanics inform gameplay right? So what kind of gameplay do we want from monks and how can we inform the player what the monk class means in terms of gameplay through mechanics which encourage the type of play we want? (The idea of class decisions informing DMs about the type of gameplay a player wants is a whole other discussion, but for now, let's just assume that you know about that.) 

What 

I mean what the actual fuck is happening here? 

Answer: Cinematic Monk Bullshit

Okay okay, at this point you're really irritated and you want me to just make my point and shut up already so here it is. Monks should be able to use their Ki points to just will things into existence. Or, more accurately the Monks should be able to will thematic (shadow monks have different abilities than open palm monks have different abilities than a kensei) bullshit into existence. 

You're fighting an Ogre, it misses you with an attack and you go "I use a ki point to slip inside his attack and try to land a blow to make him drop the club" and yeah dude, fuckin roll an attack and make that dude drop his club.

Your party is facing an adult red dragon and you know it's going poorly. You're front lining but you know you're hit dice aren't exactly huge so you'll need to find ways to introduce some Cinematic Bullshit to save yourself. The dragon lands a bite but only barely, you burn a few Ki points to boost your AC by doing the classic "grab the teeth" cinematic bullshit move. This creates an absurd tug of war between you and the dragon that can reduce it's DPS significantly or be rendered useless after around, either way, it's cinematic and simple. 

So how do you write rules for this? To be honest, I don't think you write the rules for this, I think you just put a big label of "Cinematic Cutscene Fights" and explain to your players what monks look like in your world. (Jackie Chan is a level 20 monk in my example characters list)  I love the cinematic bullshit, and I love the idea of using Ki as a resource that can be spent to do various cinematic bullshits.