Organizing RPG rules by timescale

Over the past couple weeks I've been working on my homebrew rules (basically a combination of Whitehack plus a half dozen other OSR sources). If you've been following this blog you've likely noticed this a bit as I've posted various ideas and and impressions of rulesets that I've read and house rules of my own.

I began writing out my thoughts on the importance of danger, time, and resources in a bit of an introduction to OSR style play:

While a RPG game can have many settings, and evoke many different narratives, this ruleset seeks to evoke the importance of danger, time, and resources, as the interplay of these three things help create dramatic tension.

Danger: Let us begin with danger. It is the most obvious factor in play. Danger comes in many forms and tends to add tension and consequences to action. Real and unpredictable danger is what makes an RPG session more than just a session of improvisational drama or comedy.

Time: Time is important. Time can only ever be expended, never truly be recovered by the players. The passage of time is the Referee’s greatest tool in bringing alive the world around the players, in showing the players that their actions have consequences and creating a meaningful game.

Resources: The players have resources. These range from items to abilities to contacts in the world to knowledge about the world. Resources are used by the players to interact with the world, circumvent danger, and come up with novel solutions to problems.

These three things are not interesting by themselves, no one likes a game that's all about micromanaging your inventory. But it's because the interesting bits (narrative milieu, setting, npc characters, mysterious locations, etc.) aren't conveyed through the rules. Instead the view of this ruleset is that the rules act to structure interaction with these interesting bits. These interesting bits are built through play and a setting shared by the players and GM.

 None of this is particularly new. But it did get me thinking about things and how rules are structured. For example if you open up most RPGs and look at the table of contents:

They tend to be pretty similar regardless of the edition or game. You have a section on character creation, a section on combat, a section on magic and spells, a section on items, a section on special conditions like drowning, fire damage etc. And if you're lucky you'll have a section on other game procedures besides combat like exploring. 

Overall most RPG books tend to organize their contents by category. While this makes sense for other types of books I feel like it can end up making RPG books more confusing and dense in some ways. I think the OSR is partially a reaction to this where a lot of how the game was played traditionally isn't covered in the rules, and a lot of original OSR blogging was about different modes or styles of play that weren't covered in your standard ruleset (like hexcrawls). 

As stated above I view the rules as sets of instructions which provide a structure for the players to interact with the setting and the things they find in it. In other words, a set of procedures. This idea isn't particularly new and another big point of the OSR.

However, for any given situation in the game there are different sets of instructions (often termed mechanics) which you could use to resolve interaction. For example take a chase. You could resolve it by simply flipping a coin. Heads the players get away, tails, the enemy catches up to them. Conversely you could resolve the interaction through a play-by-play of the players and Referee taking turns describing and resolving what they do and rolling dice. Like the players attempt to topple an apple cart to block the enemies. One of the players rolls and is successful and so the apple cart is toppled. The enemies roll to jump over the cart, etc.

The difference between these two procedures to resolve the players interaction with the world is their level of abstraction. Flipping a coin is resolving things with a high degree of abstraction. Doing a play-by-play resolves things in a low level of abstraction. I think neither is inherently better than the other, it depends on what kind of game you want to play. 

However, I think it's important to note of that what is being abstracted is time. That whatever set of rules, whatever procedure you make up or choose to resolve a player interaction with the world, it is going to abstract time in a certain way. Furthermore, you are probably going to want to abstract interaction in varying degrees. A game that resolved everything with a flip of the coin probably wouldn't be very fun to play. Neither would a game that tried to resolve everything in a very complex play-by-play with tons of dice rolling for every little action.

In this manner I don't see the rules in a game as an almost abstract mathematical modeling of the world where you're attempting to come up with a set of attributes or rolls or mechanics or whatever that you can use to model everything in how an imagined world works. 

Instead I see the rules as a set of compartmentalized procedures that exist like a set of Russian nesting dolls where each describes a different level of interaction. Once I started viewing rules this way I thought, hey, instead of organizing an RPGs contents by category I think they should be organized by time abstraction essentially by timescale. It just seems much more intuitive for me.

For example, I think there are about 5 different timescales used in most OSR games:

1. Timescale - Characters: This section has the static rules that represent the game world where time is not a factor mainly basic character creation and dice mechanics.
2. Timescale - Encounters: In this section time is generally measured in seconds to minutes and called an encounter. In an encounter there is often an adversary that will react quickly to the players and whom they have to react quickly to. Time is of the essence. Danger is often fraught!
3. Timescale - Exploration: In this section time is generally measured in hours. The players are most often engaged in exploring a location that is not immediately hostile, generally room by room or area by area.
4. Timescale - Traveling: In this section, time is measured in days where the players are traveling over great distances. Most of the day is assumed to be spent in the drudgery of travel with the chance to come across something interesting, along with certain time taken up having to do important logistical tasks related to travelling.
5. Timescale - Seasons: In this section time is generally measured in months and represented by seasons where the players have decided to spend an extended period of time in a (hopefully) safe and civilized location.

Now, I don't think any of these concepts or the procedures in these various sections are new. But I do think organizing and thinking about RPGs in this manner is. I don't think I've come across a rulebook or RPG that really organized itself in this way or to this degree.

I find organizing rules this way makes them much easier to understand and reference at the table. The referee just has to think, what are we doing? At what pace are things happening? If danger is present and things are happening fast, then I should probably look for rules within the Encounters section. If they're really slow with little danger present, probably in the Season section.

I find thinking about rules this way also really helps to find what level to abstract things to when making new procedures. Like take my chase example from above. Imagine a typical chase from a movie. Running through a market square. Stuff is happening pretty fast. You'll probably want to resolve things on the Encounter level of abstraction. It seems to naturally fit there. 

But also, what about more long distance chases? Like the party see's a group of enemies on the horizon and they begin to chase them? Well, that's a different level of abstracted time that seems to fit in with traveling. You may need some procedures there also. Maybe call it pursuits instead of chases as it better describes the situation. Maybe a "chase" can even lead to a "pursuit" where the Referee is able to seamlessly switch from different levels of abstraction. If the players escape the bad guys in the market square and get out of the city, they find themselves being pursued across the dusty plain. You as the Referee can switch from the one scene to the other, switch from the one set of procedures to another.

Additionally, by grouping your procedures based on the level of abstracted time, you're able to come up with some core mechanics for that level of abstracted time. For example in Encounters to me one of the core mechanics is having an initiative order. Where things are happening fast. Who goes before who and does what is really important because actions are resolved in sections. 

So if I were making chase rules for this level of abstraction I'd probably include an initiative order. Where while the party is running as a group, they all have to make some kind of attribute roll in order to outrun whomever is chasing them. If a person fails, they begin to stumble a bit and lag behind. The next person in the initiative order has a decision. Do they try and grab whomever is lagging and help them to their feet and run faster? Do they try and create a distraction by toppling that apple cart? Do they turn and fire an arrow at an enemy and hope that causes some commotion? 

Likewise, if I were to make a set of procedures for pursuits I'd probably use the the core mechanic for that level of abstracted time. Mainly, by using a hexmap for travelling and the concept of a watch. Where each watch represents eight hours. Where the players have to decide, do we try to march faster and cover more ground than we normally could in 8 hours? Do we explore the hex we're in and try to setup an ambush or just hide? Do we try to go slower but conceal our trail? Where are we going? Which route should we choose on the hexmap? What do we want to spend our 8 hour watches doing?

If you have a couple really good core mechanics or procedures for each level of abstraction, it becomes pretty easy to modify or interpret them to handle new interactions and situations in the world. Oftentimes the hardest part is picking the the level of time abstraction that feels right, a task made much easier and more intuitive if the rules themselves are arranged by order of time abstraction.

In conclusion, ever since I had this little revelation about organizing RPG rules this way I've been revising my house rules in this format. It's been a bit slow going and is tedious at times. I don't think anything that I've talked about is particularly new in the OSR scene but I have found in re-organizing my house rules like this has forced me to fill in a lot of gaps. 

As mentioned before I'm using Whitehack 3rd edition as the base for my homebrew ruleset. When I'm done writing it up I'll probably post it here on my blog for all to read. I don't think I would ever publish it or have ambitions to that end. I've stolen waaaaay to many mechanics and rules and things from various OSR systems to feel comfortable publishing it.  

Decolonizing Your OSR Game

So the issue of whether or not D&D is racist and/or colonialist with overtones of 80s American capitalism seemed to have reared it's head again as it seems to every couple of months.

I'm not going to write about these views in particular. Other people have written about them in better ways than I could at length.

I always find myself feeling like a middle child when this topic comes up, kind of stuck between my older sibling (hardcore TSR oldschool grognards) and my younger sibling (5th edition fanboy's) as they argue vehemently all over twitter while I just kind of stand to the side ignored by mom and dad.

I do think there are some problematic themes in D&D. But I don't think the issue is as polarized as this topic is often treated and talked about. Where either you run your table with all the problematic content in it's 80s glory, or you remove anything that could be seen as problematic to anyone and run a game that begins to not resemble D&D much anymore and is firmly family friendly.

I don't think the issue is so stark and there are multiple ways to decolonize your game and keep it interesting. In fact, some of these things I (and I think the OSR sphere) have been doing for a while and have been doing so not for any particularly 'woke' reasons (at least not initially) but because they lead to a much more interesting game.

1. Use the Early Modern Period as Inspiration instead of the Medieval Period or Tolkienesque Fantasy

I know this is kind of a general point but I find a very useful one. In terms of the general level of technology and political/cultural organization that goes on in most D&D settings and games, it more closely resembles the Early Modern Period (approximately 1400 or 1500 to 1800). 

It's kind of the sweet spot. You have individualism becoming a thing, the printing press and rising literacy, the beginnings of capitalism, the beginnings of scientific investigation, and the rise of the nation state. 

Anything earlier and it's really hard to understand the thinking and perspective of the people who lived back then. Anything later and technological development begins to change things so much it wouldn't really be D&D.

It may seem weird to suggest this time period to decolonize your game as it's kind of when colonization was happening and the slave trade was in full swing.

But I find reading up on actual history of this era really forces you to discard general romanticized ideas it, of both the oppressor and oppressed that are often formed after colonization happens. It also gives you an idea of how and why colonization happened and who benefited. And it often gives you gives you insight into what these colonized societies were actually like before they were colonized, (as pre-contact history of colonized places can be fragmented). 

If you're going to play a game set in the past with multiple cultures, being knowledgeable on how colonialism happens and what leads to colonialism, can help you portray the setting in a way that's sensitive and multifaceted rather than pretending that colonization as a form of conflict simply doesn't exist or is a simple affair.

Knowing how and why colonialism happened also helps with coming up with reasonings as to why conflict between nations and cultures is not taking the form of overt colonialism and racism. If you know what societal structures, institutions, and forces lead to colonialism, then you can probably come up with societal structures, institutions, and forces in your game that prevent it. I don't think colonialism and racism are inevitable, but a certain degree of conflict, posturing, and cultural misunderstanding is. 

I tend to take this approach in my games. I don't like to have any systemic colonialism or racism in my games. But I do like to have multiple cultures and nations and am not going to pretend like racism and colonialism is not an inclination of humankind and that individual cultural conflict can't be handled in a way that creates interesting and engaging situations and stories.

Like, do we really want to help or sign on with these pirates? They were all once captives themselves and half were refugees, but they do seem to like to raid costal villages of an unfriendly nation a lot.

Or, this trading company has opened an office in this foreign city. The two cultures get along okay, and exchange needed goods, but there's been cultural misunderstandings and conflicts in the past. Do we want to side with one over the other? Do we want to even get involved? Which cultures is better? Can one culture be better?

2. Get rid of evil humanoid races and just have humans

One common criticism of how D&D may be racist is it's depiction of evil humanoid races as inherently evil who, depending on what art of what edition you're looking at, may resemble people of colour. 

It's part of the whole Civilization vs Wilderness theme in D&D where the 'civilized' cultures are generally modelled after European ones and the 'wilderness' cultures are modelled after indigenous or nomadic cultures.

A great solution I find to this is just replace them all with humans. Humans are pretty good at being awful to each other. Banditry and groups of people living outside the law were also very common in the early modern era. Simply replace all your generic bad guy humanoids with actual humans. You don't need to have an actual untamed wilderness to have dangerous people about. Bandits in the countryside kind of ensure that even in the middle of a settled, western European nation state, you can still have an area without a lot of law and order.

As an added twist you can vary encounters with them to make some of them morally gray. Like are these bandits bandits because they were farmers and their crops failed and they need a new way to feed themselves? Or are they ex-soldiers who don't give a fuck commanded by a sadist who genuinely loves his job? 

Also, by having humans as your generic enemy with interesting motivations it makes the actual monsters and strange creatures more strange and interesting in comparison.

3. Have starting cultural backgrounds instead of races or ethnicities

A lot of games will let you play as other races with racial traits or abilities. Some games which tend to use humans more will let you pick a starting ethnicity.

I tend to just let players roll a local starting culture for their character instead. This local culture represents experiences a character has had and communities that they have been part of that have granted knowledge about a particular place, way of life, and social class. Culture tends to be the main thing which ideals, attitudes, and practices are transmitted from human to human anyways. More so than race or ethnicity. This stuff isn't genetic after all.

I tend to opt more for a local culture that is reflective of a certain lifestyle in a certain geographic place than one defined by a nation state. While the idea of a nation state was forming during the early modern period it was still all somewhat ambiguous. People probably identified first and foremost with the local village and lifestyle they were from and then larger more collective things like the nation state they found themselves part of. 

I use this chart and let my players pick their nationality after based on what area of the world the game is set in:

1d12	Name	Description
1	Agricultural	You grew up in one of the many small agricultural villages that dot most landscapes. One of many brothers and sisters, you worked the farm and life was hard. Life was dictated by the seasons, both spiritual and earthly, a time and place for everything.
2	Nomadic	You grew up taking care of your families herds. Moving with the seasons you brought them to graze upon the open grasslands in the summer and sheltered in the forested vales in the winter.
3	Itinerant	You grew up with your family living in a wagon, trading items here and there, your father doing odd jobs where he could find them. Whether because of persecution or the call of the open road, your family lived in many places and spoke many languages.
4	Religious Urban	You grew up cloistered in a tight knit urban religious community. You attended religious schools and celebrated religious holidays with your community. At times persecuted, the pain of one was shared by all within the community.
5	Seafaring	you grew up on a small town or village on the coast. The open sea called to you every morning and the gulls awoke you. Songs were sung as the catch of the day was delivered and all eyed the ocean carefully when storms rolled in. Some people in the village would even go on fishing expeditions that lasted months or even years.
6	Nobility	Once upon a time you had it all. You lived in an ancestral hall with a silver spoon in your mouth. Then one day it was gone, the rest of your family killed by your uncle.
7	Free Town	You grew up in a tall house in town. Your father was a tradesman and your life was filled with the gossip of the town. It was a small but industrious community, proud of it's work and civic ethos.
8	Impoverished	You grew up in the streets of a big filthy city. Wild dogs your only friends, cats your competitors, other orphans your comrades.
9	Servant	Your mother was a scullery maid, your father unknown. You grew up in the servants halls of your employer. Working for them just as your mother did until you decided enough was enough.
10	Mountain Folk	You are from the mountains and of the proud folk that fill them. Forestry, mining, it doesn't matter, you learned much from the hard but friendly folk that you grew up among. You can drink almost anyone under the table.
11	Pastoral	You took care of your family's flocks, letting them graze upon the hilly meadows in your youth. Long hours you spent guiding them, making sure none got lost. Most of the time spent outdoors you learned how to navigate and survive in the rocky landscape.
12	Militaristic	Coming from a long line of men who have served, you grew up playing with toy soldiers and hearing stories of war. You longed for the day when you could serve gallantly and bring honour to your family.

So if the game was located primarily in Western Europe and two characters rolled a 6 one might be a minor ex-noble from Lyon, France while another might be a minor noble from Genoa, Italy. They've have insight into local intrigue and would probably have more common understanding with each other than a pastoral goatherd from the French Alps even though the two French characters are from the same nation state. 

I find this creates more flexible and interesting backgrounds than race. 

4. Have your world be post-apocalyptic

In most OSR games the players are delving into ruins and looting treasure. At heart this is somewhat problematic as that treasure probably belonged to someone. While this is a core part of OSR games I think it you can make your games a lot less problematic if you make the culture the treasure comes from long dead culture. 

While characters are still looting treasure (they aren't exactly conducting archeological excavations) it's generally a little less problematic if the people they are looting it from has no real living descendants or cultural connection. 

It's also less problematic if the culture is some weird culture like the dungeon was built by an alien culture from the stars on a windswept isle. Or a bunch of giants made from living stone living deep within the mountains dug out the dungeon and then abandoned it.

And less problematic if the culture was kind of evil, like the strange religious cult that inhabited the dungeon practiced human sacrifice and used to raid others.

These aren't perfect solutions but I find most players are willing to accept them.

5. Have no land be truly uninhabited

Humanity has pretty much spread all over the globe and lived in just about every type of geography you can find. I'm not talking about modern times, I'm talking about pretty much the last couple thousand years. While population density may vary greatly, there are very few parts of the earth that have ever truly been unclaimed. No matter how few people there are living in a place, no matter how spread out they are, generally someone will consider every part of the earth their home and belonging to them. 

This may make it seem like it's hard to have wilderness but it kind of feeds into making the world post-apocalyptic. If every part of the earth has had humans living on it and considering it their home, as time goes on and cultures drift and conflict happens, you're going to end up with tons and tons of ruins and remnants of these old cultures, regardless of how few people live in the region currently. 

Indigenous peoples in an area should be seen as more than just obstacles or potential conflict. They are the ones who best know how to live in and navigate the geography. They are the ones who probably know where the ancient ruins are that the players are most interested in and what is dangerous about them. 

If you read the accounts of expeditions of early explorers, most times they survive purely by the help or advice of the natives. Navigation and exploration of an area should be very, very, difficult for the players if they don't get to know the local indigenous people and their culture. Doing so can create a lot of interesting gameplay. Like how do they feel about the ancient culture that built the ruins? Do they see the treasure as a resource to be exploited or lost technology to be regained? Something to be protected as a heritage treasure? Something that can help them understand their forgotten past? A painful reminder of the past? Do they actively re-use parts of these ruins (stone from ruins used to build present day buildings etc.)? 

Additionally, frontiers tend to from not because a land is empty wilderness but because it's the rough geography and mutable borderlands in-between two, often competing, cultures. They tend to be full of competing factions and interests and ripe for adventure as the two competing cultures press up against each other. Instead of having a civilization vs wilderness setup, make it a borderlands. 

6. Keep the weird things relatively uncommon and very weird

This is another big one. Have a firm distinction between your weird or strange elements and your recognizable more normal elements.

I personally hate the overall trend that seems to be present in most WOTC materials to normalize the fantastic or weird elements in fantasy in order to present a setting that seems well thought out where fantastic things are part of daily life. This is both present in low magic stuff like the Forgotten Realms and high magic stuff like Eberron. 

In my settings people are aware that there are weird things in the world. They're aware that occult magic is real and exists. That strange creatures can be found in certain area's. That there is much unknown about the world. But is the average peasant really exposed to all this? No, probably not. In the early modern era people rarely travelled more than 30 miles from their village. While weird things exist, it's really not part of the daily lives of most people and most people in my setting are fine with that. They avoid the weird because it's dangerous and likely to kill them.

I find integrating the fantastic elements of the setting into the daily lives of the people to much makes the interesting parts of the setting way less interesting and tends to open itself to problems. If you want to try to explain everything about your weird elements and have everything logically congruent you're going to have to fill in a lot of 'gaps'. When you fill in gaps you tend to draw upon what you know about the normal real world to make it feel realistic. This creates real world analogues. The more you do this the more you open yourself up to interpretation that these fantasy elements represent real world things and thus comparison to these real world things.

The easiest thing I find is to just draw on and use actual history for the normal stuff in your game and keep your weird stuff very, very weird, at times without much of an explanation to the players. The weird stuff just is. 

I find the work the OSR is doing to make the weird things weird again has, whether it intentional or not, helped decolonize D&D and remove problematic elements in some ways more than the work WOTC is doing by simply rewording references or removing material.

Patrick Stuarts conception of what the Drow could truly be like and how strong their hate could be to me does more to remove a lot of problematic elements from the Drow, more than anything WOTC has done. Where after reading his description of them it's pretty clear they aren't just dark skinned BDSM themed matriarchal goth elves. They are something different, something that feels beyond the human range of emotion, of expression, of thought. Something that feels alien because it's so irrationally extreme.

Experience Points for Different Modes of Play

This a follow up for my other post thinking about experience points and design considerations about them. In this post I will try to use those guidelines to come up with some solutions.

Experience Points for Different Modes of Play

In my previous post I talked a bit about how there are different modes of play in most OSR games and that XP for treasure only really rewards dungeon crawling. This is great if your players are mostly dungeon crawling. Such as exploring a megadungeon and only really going back to town at the end of the session, mainly to sell and buy stuff. It's not so great if your players are doing other things like hexcrawling which is supposed to be an activity in of itself and not just something you do to get to the dungeon to dungeoncrawl.

I think for each major activity of play you need a different way to gain experience points. It's why I think a lot of OSR blogs develop experience point rewards for exploration. However, I also try to want to satisfy the other main guidelines I created:

1. XP rewards should not be given for something the players will already do

2. XP rewards should encourage risk

3. XP should be given at the end of a session

You can read my reasoning for these guidelines in my previous post.

Three Main Activities of Play

The main modes of play that I would want to grant XP for in my games are:

1. Dungeon Crawling: composed of encounters and exploration of rooms.

2. Hexcrawling: composed mostly of traveling about the map.

3. Investigating something big in the setting: composed of seeking out answers for various aspects of the setting.

There are arguably other major activities of play. Such as spending time in town buying and selling items. But I wouldn't grant XP for engaging in such things as players are likely to do them anyways and they contain very little risk. XP should be used to encourage player risk, and given as a reward for players successfully taking a risk. Dungeon Crawling and Hexcrawling definitely involve lots of danger and risk. Investigating knowledge, not as much, it's a bit more dependent, but I think there are some cases where there is genuine risk. I'll explore that more when I come to that activity.

XP in Dungeon Crawling

For dungeon crawling I'm just going to use the tried and tested XP for treasure via carousing with the following rules:

Carousing 

Carousing is the easiest and the main way for character to gain experience points, especially in earlier levels where they have yet to venture very far from their starting settlement. In short, carousing is action taken in a settlement in which the group spends a large amount of their hard earned money, having a good time about town, blowing their fortune as they blow off steam, before becoming desperate enough again to raid another crumbling ruin for treasure.

Carousing lets a player turn money directly into experience points at a 1:1 ratio. First they choose an amount of money to convert into experience points. Then they roll on the following table to see how their bender went. After they may have to roll on the carousing mishaps or fortunes table to see how their relationship with people in the settlement has changed.

 

2d6	Result
2-6	Experience is gained. However, you've all made fools of yourself in some manner. Roll on the carousing mishaps table.
7-9	Experience is gained.
10+	Experience is gained. You've all had a stroke of good luck! Roll on the carousing fortunes table!

 

	Mishap	Fortune
1	Start a brawl. You all are involved in a brawl that gets out of control. Start the next adventure with a black eye and -1 health per level. The local tavern keeper is no longer quite as amicable.	Jackpot! One of you strikes it rich at the card tables! Gain level x 100 coins.
2	Minor misunderstanding with local authorities that you’re unable to smooth over. You all spend the next 1d6 days in jail. Now seen as local troublemakers.	Gain a local reputation as the life of a party! Those of ill repute much more friendly and see you as one of their own.
3	One of you insulted a local person of rank. They will hold a grudge unless you all publicly apologize and humiliate yourself before them.	Whoa what a trip! The strange powder you sniffed revealed mystic truths about the universe. Young people in the settlement see you as cool and not one of the squares.
4	Hangover from hell. The first day of adventuring all luck rolls are done with a bane.	Well fed, well rested, and ready to go! The first day of adventuring all luck rolls are done with a boon.
5	Gambling binge. You’re party owes a collective debt to someone you don’t want to owe money too.	Citizens arrest! You catch some criminal in the act and are able to restrain them until the authorities arrive. You are seen as hero’s by the settlement for a short time.
6	You've ruined the local economy! Your excess spending means that all prices are now double until next season.	The local blacksmith, due to your influx of cash, has been able to order in an exquisite weapon that he’s willing to sell to you guys for the normal price.
7	Major misunderstanding with local authorities. All weapons, armour, and magic items confiscated until fines and bribes totalling 1d6 x 1000 coins paid.	The local clergy see you guys as protectors of the settlement. They offer you a blessing before your next adventure.
8	When in a drunken stupor and in some trouble, you sought refuge in a church. They took care of you but now as repayment have begun hounding you to perform a charitable act.	Impressed by your ability to drink for days and keep standing, a local hireling is willing to join you on your next adventure if you wish at no initial cost.
9	Invest all your spare cash in some smooth-tongued merchant's scheme. Turns out it’s bogus! One of the towns merchants flees!	Invest all your spare cash in some smooth-tongued merchant's scheme. Turns out it’s real! It returns 75% profits next Season.
10	Due to a lost game of darts at the tavern. You make bitter enemies with a local rival adventuring party.	Your ability to carouse with the common folk as lead them to see you as one of their own. The peasants of the settlement are thankful to have you around. You receive free room and board in this settlement of poor quality.
11	Beaten and robbed. You are waylaid by a bunch of thugs during your drunken carousing. Loose 1d100 coins.	Your time spent carousing has let you in on some juicy gossip. You learn one secret about a person in authority.
12	The roof! The roof! The roof is on fire! Accidentally start a conflagration Roll 1d6 twice. 1-2) burn down your favorite inn 3-5) some other den of ill repute is reduced to ash 6) a big chunk of town goes up in smoke. 1-2) no one knows it was you guys 3-5) one other person knows you did it 6) everybody knows.	A local elder has warmed up and begun to approve of you despite your antics. They let you in on a secret about a nearby adventuring site.

 

The above table I use is a modified version of Jeff Rient's one. It's meant to make the gaining experience points a little more interesting and to change the characters relationship with the settlement their in to make their interaction with it a little more dynamic.

XP for treasure meets all of my guidelines. It encourages risk, it is done at the end of the session, and it's given for something they wouldn't normally do. They have to purposely search for treasure in the dungeon and seek it out. I make the players choose between spending the coins on equipment and things and spending it on XP. I kind of like this as it keeps them somewhat broke.

XP in Hexcrawling

Hexcrawling is a bit more difficult than dungeon crawling. I don't want to just give a straight XP amount for every hex explored or new place discovered. Most of the time, players are going to do this anyways as a normal part of moving around the map, even if it's just to get to the dungeon. I want to encourage them to take risks. 

I'm going to borrow a rule I found in Neoclassical Geek Revival by Zzarchov Kowolski. Basically in it he had a rule where for every room the players explored they'd gain cumulative XP. So if they got 10 XP the first room, they'd get 20 XP the second room 30 XP the third 50 XP the fourth, 80 XP the fifth etc. I'm going to do something similar but for hexcrawls and call it Telling Tall Tales.

Telling Tall Tales

Telling tall tales is another way characters can gain experience points. It involves spreading word of your travels and exploits, generally telling tall tales in places like taverns, at court, to the high and the low, shamelessly boasting and self-promoting, and to simply entertain or achieve status.

This method of experience gain is generally used during the mid levels as the characters begin to venture from their starting settlement more and more and begin to explore the world that surrounds them.

Telling tall tales lets a player gain a certain amount of experience points for every hex of the hex map they have explored since they last left the settlement. The experience gained is cumulative per hex. This is calculated by giving 30 XP for the first hex and adding the previous two hex's together for every additional hex. A table below is provided as an example.

Hex Total	XP Amount
1	30
2	30
3	60
4	90
5	150
6	240
7	390
8	630
9	1020
10	1650
11	2670
12	4320

Once the players have calculated how much experience points they will gain they need to roll on the following table to determine how their telling of tall tales went. After that they may have to roll on the Telling Tall Tales Mishaps and Fortunes table to see how their relationship with people across the land has changed.

2d6	Result
2-6	Experience is gained. However, you've all made fools of yourself in some manner. Roll on the Telling Tall Tales mishaps table.
7-9	Experience is gained.
10+	Experience is gained. You've all had a stroke of good luck! Roll on the Telling Tall Tales fortunes table!

	Mishap	Fortune
1	Inspired by your tales of treasure the road to places you've explored becomes clogged with fortune seekers slowing your travel.	The local authority, upon hearing of your discoveries, is willing to buy maps of your travels for 1d6 * 1000 gp.
2	Jealous of your fortune, a rival adventuring party begins to trail you next time you set out with ill intentions.	Enamoured by tales of your exploits, a local orphan child has begun tending to your belongings in hopes you'll bring them along.
3	Word of your mighty deeds has spread. A mighty warrior has arrived in the settlement to challenge the strongest among you to single combat.	Word of your crimes have spread. There is now a bounty of 1d6 * 1000 on all your heads across the land.
4	Word of your brave exploits has spread. A powerful wizard has arrived in the settlement to challenge the wisest among you to a wizards battle.	Due to your exploits in a region you have explored, you have been granted a deed to a small tract of land and honorary title by the local authority seeking to capitalize on your popularity among the common folk.
5	Sensing a power vacuum, bandits have moved into a location you recently explored and begun raiding the countryside. People are not happy.	Your recent explorations have opened up the land to new settlement. The roads become full of travellers seeking a new beginning. A sense of optimism and hope is in the air.
6	The local authority does not like you intruding upon and causing mischief in lands they see as their own. They forbid you from venturing into them again.	You've become well known among merchants as experienced travellers. They let you in on the location of some exotic trade goods if you're willing to accompany them there.
7	Too late! Your explorations and exploits have upset the unseen balance of things. One enemy you thought defeated or vanquished has struck back! Something big has happened! Refugees begin to flood the area.	A powerful but frail wizard seeks you out. They've found the location of a small trove of spellbooks and wish you to accompany them there.
8	Your heroics have garnered many unseen enemies. Assassins strike out in the dead of night. Defend yourselves!	Word of your righteous deeds has spread among the common folk. You can always find poor accommodation for free in any settlement.
9	Fire! A major forest fire is occurring in several hexes. People are fleeing the area.	Because of your growing renown, a local merchant is willing to pay you for endorsing their products and/or services.
10	Flood! A river or body of water has flooded occluding travel in the area.	In telling tales of your travels, you encounter some old travellers with tales of their own. You learn the details of three unexplored hexes.
11	Pestilence! Plague has broken out in a random settlement. A quarantine has been put in place.	A strange monstrous beast has been seen in an area you recently explored. It's capture or scientific notes on it's behaviour would be worth a lot of money.
12	Word of your exploits has reached the ears of the local authority. They have 'granted' you a non-voluntary audience with them. You suspect they are becoming concerned about your growing fame and popularity.	Strange visitors from beyond time and space have been seen in an area you recently explored.

So while they players aren't likely to gain a level from exploring a few hexes. The amount of XP they gain really begins to ramp up the more they explore. This encourages them to not just make a beeline between the town and the nearest dungeon, but to push into the wilderness a bit, to wander, to seek out the dark corners of the map. The deeper into the wilderness they go, the more dangerous it gets and the more they begin to run out of health and supplies, and the more XP they gain. 

The Telling Tall Tales Mishaps and Fortunes table is meant to make gaining XP this way a little more interesting and kind of reflect the characters growing renown. Where people are taking note of them and it feels like the landscape and setting is reacting to them. I find something like this is needed every once and a while so the landscape isn't just a static thing that only moves when the players interact with it. That dramatic things can happen that they have no control over or never saw coming. In this manner the table is meant to change the characters relationship with the landscape.

Unravel a Mystery

The world is full of strange mysteries. I think players should be rewarded for seeking out answers to them. These aren't small monster of the week mysteries, like who stole the chickens or where did the bandits run off to, but larger mysteries about the strangeness of the setting. Engaging in them means the players are often pursuing a very open ended quest and not just decided to tackle the low hanging fruit of lets just clear another bandit lair this week, or lets just come up with some quick scheme. 

Unravel a Mystery

The world is full of strange mysteries, age old questions, and wonderous places. Things from so long ago their origins are unknown, or seem to exist wholly outside reason. Things that just are, that are whispered about.

This method of experience gain is generally used during high levels as the players seek to truly plumb the depths of their world and try to explore and unravel the mysteries of it's age old wonders.

These wonderous things are not plot goals. They are often just that, things, not people, or events. or happenings. They can be pursued or ignored as the players wish. Taking this action represents the players returning to a settlement with some form of proof about the wonder, some form of answer to it's mystery.

Each mystery is phrased in the form of a question. The players must explain to the Referee the 'answer' to the mystery. What exactly is a sufficient answer is up to the Referee and players to determine but generally involves being able to sufficiently answer who, what when, where, where, why, and how about the mystery. Once they do they must roll to see how such an unravelling went. For the unravelling of such a mystery often comes as a shock or surprise to the wider world. It will often draw attention from those with great power and influence who will invariably seek to exploit it and the players knowledge about it.

There is no set value for the XP reward but it's in the 10,000-100,000 range. Mysteries are highly dependent on the setting but a couple examples are provided below:

• What lies up top Bald Mountain?
• Does the lost city of Xu exist?
• What happens when you put the Rod of Many Parts together?

There is no table of mishaps and fortunes to roll on for unraveling a mystery. Age old mysteries are important enough and specific in nature that each should have natural consequences from their pursuit. Big players in the setting will take notice if the characters are successful in their investigation of them.

Normalizing Treasure and XP Progression

This a follow up for my other post thinking about experience points and design considerations about them. 

Normalizing Treasure and XP Progression

I find most XP charts used in the OSR seem to be largely copied and pasted from older versions of the game without a lot of thought into why the are the way they are, or the progression of advancement they provide. 

Based on my experience as a Referee I find most XP charts for level advancement require an absurd amount of gold if you're using a XP-for-treasure rule. So much so, that characters either don't really make it past the first couple of levels, or after a while I just begin levelling them every couple of sessions or adventures.

I think both treasure values and XP progression needs to be normalized. My first solution is to first come up with a standardized value for treasure and then come up with a revised XP chart based off of this. 

This is the chart I'm going to use. If the players found any treasure in an adventure I'd probably ignore it's written value and just roll on the below chart when they go to sell it. I find adventures tend to vary wildly in the value of treasure they have so having a chart like this that calibrates treasure to XP progression in your game is necessary.

I also find keeping track of the worth of treasure during an adventure to be kind of tedious and don't like just telling the players the worth of the treasure when they find it as I think they should have to try and figure out what to keep and what to leave behind on their own. As a result I'd just roll on this chart when it came time to sell.

It has 4 general tiers of treasure. 

 

Name	Description	Value	Average Value (d10 = 5.5)
Equipment and Coins	Pretty much all of the standard equipment players can buy themselves and whatever small pocket change that would be on someone or in their trunk. This treasure is rarely hidden well.	1d10 * 10	55
Treasure	All non-descript treasure items. Things such as gems, silver goblets, bolts of fine silk, golden necklaces, exquisite painting. Things that aren’t unique, but are generally recognizable as being valuable. This treasure is often hidden and takes some effort to find.	1d10 * 100	550
Exquisite Items	Items that are of a particular unique nature. Either in their craftsmanship or material. They immediately strike one as one of a kind or something you don’t often come across. May or may not be magical. Things such as ebony bow with strange wire bowstring, silver gong with ancient runes and echoing boom, blood red opal that burns from within. This treasure is almost always hidden and often very dangers to recover.	1d10 * 1000	5500
Legendary Items	Items that are legendary. You often hear about them before you find them. Typically highly magical in nature in a way that could break the campaign/setting. If you do find them without hearing about them first, they're probably really, really hard to remove from the area and will often cause trouble. Once found, the question is often, not how do we sell this, but what do we do about this.	1d10 * 10,000	55,000

I'm not going to factor in the Equipment and Coins type treasure into my XP calculations. I always kind of consider it kind of an upkeep cost where the players are probably going to spend around the same amount of what they find to rest up and restock after the adventure.

I'm also going to leave out legendary items as they'd be the goal of some kind of grand quest. They're not found very often or randomly.

So, in a given adventure I'm probably going to assume about 20 rooms or so. This would be something that in my experience would probably take 2 or 3 sessions to cover. If you assume one third to half those rooms have treasure, but only about 25% of it is probably found by the players, that gives you approximately 5 treasure caches. This seems like a good amount of an average adventure.

Now I'm going to assume 3 of those caches have Treasure Items in them, and 2 also have Exquisite Items. Given the average value of all this it works out to be this grants a total of 12,650.

Split five ways for an adventuring party of 5 this equals 2530 coins at the end of the first adventure. Rounded to 2500, I think this is a reasonable amount and all the numbers I've used so far in these calculations kind of reasonable in the sense that the players aren't finding goblets worth 1000 or giant gold statues only worth 100 coins or some such thing. There feels like there is a proportionality to things and the numbers make sense given our modern understanding of money. 2500 coins kind of feels like a good amount for the average 'paycheck' for a dungeon crawl. Nothing that's going to let you retire but enough to let you live the high life for a bit before becoming desperate enough to go on another adventure.

I'm going to use this baseline of 2500 coins for what it takes to go from level 1 to 2 as I think characters should advance to 2nd level after their first adventure. I'm using a standard adventuring party of 5. Most of my players frequently begin a campaign with two characters but I find they'll tend to gravitate to one of their characters over the other so it's up to them if they want to level one faster than the other.

From here I'm going to increase the amount required each level but also pay attention to how many sessions of adventure it would take to gather that much if :

2500 individual share = 20 rooms = 3 sessions.

Worked out this grants the following:

Level	Total XP	Diff. XP	Diff. Sessions	Total Sessions
1	0	0	0	0
2	2,500	2,500	3	3
3	5,000	2,500	3	6
4	7,500	2,500	3	9
5	12,500	5,000	6	15
6	17,500	5,000	6	21
7	22,500	5,000	6	27
8	30,000	7,500	9	36
9	37,500	7,500	9	45
10	44,500	7,500	9	54

So, to reach level 10 one character would need 44,500 coins and a party of 5 adventurers 222,500 coins. While this doesn't seem like an astronomical amount the main way for players to get it is from dungeon crawling not from domain level play (which I dislike). Doing so, would take them approximately 54 sessions. Assuming 1 session per week this whole process would take a little over 1 year. The first 5 levels in three months and three weeks, the remaining 5 levels the rest of the year. 

All this is also assuming that the players do not get XP and their treasure. They get it for their treasure. In my games they have the choice of either spending their money on buying things like hirelings and equipment and other bigger ticket stuff like gypsy wagons or horses, or converting it to XP. This would further slow XP gain a bit as there are probably times when they are going to want to spend 5k or so on some elaborate scheme or another. There would also be wasted XP invested in characters who die, or if players choose to level multiple characters at once.

I have not tested any of these presented rules and all my calculations are kind of back of the envelope and rough, but overall I think most of my assumptions are fair and it all kind of ensures that players can reach higher levels through actual play in a reasonable number of sessions and not just DM fiat. 

I also think having five major caches per 3 session adventure is fair and an easy thing to remember. For most rooms the players will be finding small amounts of coin and equipment. But then once or twice a session they find a major cache of treasure. They have to try and discern what 'tier' it's in (fake treasure like glass gems could pose a further challenge) and right before they go to sell it, I randomly roll to ascertain it's true worth.