Funny Little Charts

Another playtest of Delta happened last night, and a funny thing happened. In Delta, we aim to being a fun miniatures game, with a couple MMO-isms thrown in for fun. One of these is trade-skilling, and gathering raw materials. In the game, we have a fun mini-game where you wander a map, and gather raw material nodes. With each node flipped, you have a chance of getting some mats, encountering a hazard, or tripping a random monster encounter. It's a bit gamey, but fun stuff.

Well, the charts got horribly out of whack last night, along with the per-turn encounter chances. Bad roll after bad roll sent wave after wave of monsters onto the map, and the poor party felt like they were on the front lines of some war somewhere, and not out happily gathering ore and flowers. I have never seen so many waves of goblins and wolves enter the map in such a short time, and to have wolves fighting goblins, goblins fighting the party, and wolves massing to chomp down on party members was a sight to see. We play these things straight, because if we make a bad rule, we have to play through and live with the results - it makes the fixes obvious, and gives us something to laugh about.

It brought up a realization that sometimes all the little random charts in games can sometimes throw things terribly out of whack. Random charts are fun and cool, but they can destroy a game, even in in-obvious ways. In our game, the encounters were stretching out a normal 30-miniute gather and fight romp into a 4 hour mega miniature combat ordeal. Our little fun mini-game started to take up a night's play, and become a serious effort. We will need to fix those charts, simplify them down to something manageable, and streamline the game tomorrow.

SBRPG has its fair share of charts, but none that would impact what happens on the board, or the items you can find during play. Pre-DnD4 has plenty of magic item charts, with random rolls for all sorts of items pre-assumed to be in the game world. The huge list of spells, monsters, and items in DnD across all editions makes every DnD world like another, so much so DnD itself is a genre of fantasy all its own. The random charts and the items on them are very difficult to change, and the rolls on them impact a game world for the good and bad with every throw.

Stepping back, this is part of why we made SBRPG the way we did, all magic items are custom designs, along with the powers and classes, and we didn't provide charts to put any of them on. When you entered a world, the players got it rolling, but past that point, nobody knew what was around the next corner, or what that strange new item could do. Part of the fun was not knowing, and finding things out for yourself.