And yes, this is dumb and groggy and pixelbitching. But only because there are no mechanisms in the game to give piton spacing mechanical weight, nor to limit the use of pitons in order to make it an interesting choice.
If there were rules to govern how likely you are to fall off while climbing, with the chance increasing the further you space your pitons; and limitations on spending money and inventory space that made pitons a real resource; and restrictions on time that made it important to decide whether you're leaving your pitons in or removing them as you go...
Then, the spacing of pitons would be an interesting decision to make.
I'm not really talking about D&D here. Pitons are totally trivial in D&D because even a starting character can probably buy an arbitrary number of them, and the wealth is only going to go up from there. Furthermore, there isn't enough climbing in a standard D&D game for a piton-related rule to be worth bothering with.
What I'm really dreaming of is an entirely new game, although it could rely on a very stripped-down core of AD&D as its base, if only because that's what I and other nerds are familiar with. But in this new game, all the stupid timewasting, pixelbitching questions that shitty DMs ask of their players would be transformed into actually interesting dilemmas. You could call it a second-gen retroclone if you like, in that it's realising the unfulfilled promise of something in the original game. Lamentations of the Flame Princess realises the promise of horror; DCC, the promise of sword & sorcery; ACKS, the promise of detailed domain level play. This game will realise the promise that's implied by an equipment list containing pitons, torches, tinderboxes and rope by the foot: a game of resource management, of scraping by with what little you have, of trying to start a campfire in the rain.
Pitons are just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some other mechanics that might be interesting:
- Setting camp: Where are you camping? Do you want to light a fire? What if it attracts monsters? Can you survive the cold? Do you want to cook your food? Can you build a break to hide the firelight?
- Dungeon exploration: do you have enough torches?* How long have you been down here? Can you find your way back out? How will you cross underground rivers, climb down shafts, traverse narrow ledges?
- Eating: How much food do you have? How far to the next town, and how will you pay for meals there? Can you hunt?
- Weather: Is it going to rain, snow, shine? How will that affect your chances of survival? Did you pack warm clothes?
- Inventory Management: If anything I would like to go out the far side of the spectrum and make the encumbrance system unrealistically punishing, so that you really have to consider what you want to take with you. Of course you can get porters, mules, etc. but they all come with their own set of challenges.
- Endurance: Walking, suffering cold or heat, eating, sleeping, warming yourself by the fire - all these things and more can affect your levels of energy. These energy levels are what replace your HP in standard D&D. If you're fit and well-rested, you have plenty of HP to spare when danger arises. If you're tired and bedraggled, you'll go down like a 1st-level wizard to a housecat.
- Injury: When danger does arise, and you don't have enough HP to evade danger, you are going to suffer serious and lasting injuries. A character who's been hurt previously may be a drain on the whole party's resources. Then the whispers begin: "We'd be better off without him..."
This game would be a challenge to design. On the one hand, it's intended that dealing with encumbrance limits and weather tables is now a key part of the game, not just stupid bullshit you have to deal with before diving into the dungeon. However, at the same time you want to streamline a lot of these mechanics so that the resource management section of the game is actually fun and dynamic. Striking a balance would be difficult.
Other things that would flow on into the rest of the game:
- Monsters, even low-level ones, are an extremely serious threat. If you picture the boss monster as D&D's "major threat" and the wandering mobs as "minor threats" - well in this game the environment itself is the "minor threat", and even a wandering monster is a "major threat". To reflect this, the setting would be much less monster-dense than regular D&D. Instead of table after table of wandering monsters, you could threaten the PCs with a wilderness area inhabited by nothing but wild animals and a single troll. Giants or dragons would be the upper limits of what PCs could hope to face, while things like demons and liches probably just don't exist.
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| in this game, lembas bread is OP as shit |
- All-new classes would be required. Can you imagine a Vancian Wizard in this game? Even if they weren't going to break the whole thing with their 2nd & 3rd level spells, it just doesn't fit the flavour. Magic-Users, such as they are, would be something more akin to druids or shamans, with low-key mystical knacks rather than flashy spells. Other classes might be: Fighter (remember, there's a lot less fighting going on than in a regular D&D game) Hunter/Ranger, Healer (non-magical), and perhaps some kind of 'foreman' to preside over issues of inventory and organisation? In fact, perhaps a freeform skill system would be better.
- Urban adventures wouldn't really work; it's got to be uncharted wilderness for the restrictions on resources to become meaningful. The implied setting for this game would be vast, wild and largely empty - the "howling emptiness of AD&D" turned up to eleven.
- Strangely, extraplanar adventures and other gonzo environments might actually work if you focused on the environment itself as the danger, while keeping the monsters to a reasonable level. How do you adventure on the Plane of Fire when it's not just handwaved with everyone getting a Ring of Fire Resistance?
*Apparently some people deal with this problem already in D&D, but I can't really see how it ever becomes relevant unless a) the players simply forget to pay a handful of silver pieces for a roll of torches or b) some sort of Grinding Gear scenario where you're stuck in the dungeon for an unreasonably long time.
For some reason I think this would be great if it was either a post-apocalyptic survival setting or something like caveman/copper age days.
ReplyDeleteTake a look at "Otzi the Iceman" and check out what he was carrying. It paints an interesting picture of ancient wilderness travel.
And now we come back full circle to Wilderness Survival! :)
ReplyDeleteHow many pitons can you use before your hammer is worn down too far to work anymore?
ReplyDeleteNow I'm reminded of an apocryphal mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that was so realistic you had to trim your fingernails to stop them from jamming the trigger of your gun.
ReplyDelete9 years later, I find this blog on a random search for recommended piton spacing IRL to fact-check my GURPS game, where a sourcebook (GURPS High-Tech, for early industrial to current modern era equipment) gives an abstraction of piton spacing effects. The equipment rules say someone who fails a climbing roll will generally fall a maximum of twice the distance from his current position to the last anchor point (due to slack in the line). The climbing itself isn't rated any more difficult for more widely spaced pitons -- just the consequences are more severe in case of failure, since falling damage is based on distance. Different rope working loads, slow and careful climbing versus rushed modifiers to skill rolls, future SF ultra-tech, historical low-tech going back to Paleolithic humans, GURPS covers the majority of your brainstorm ideas.
ReplyDeleteThe downside is that a less flexible GM or player can get stuck on trying to flip through a thousand pages to find a specific reference. The core book and multiple sourcebooks all say it's acceptable for the GM to slap a modifier on a task and roll the dice. It's a check against an average 50% chance at 10 or less on 3d6 to succeed. Typical target number modifiers range from +10 (tying your shoes) to -10 (shooting the wings off a fly in a tornado). Bad skills are lower target numbers, good skills are higher target numbers. Usual playable range for gritty, real characters is about 5-15 for incompetent to highly skilled. I prefer the 3d6 bell curve because each additional marginal + or - can rapidly tip you into increasingly critical hit/miss territory in extreme situations, which is often how real life situations can snowball badly (or more rarely, well).
And that's basically the entire game. The remaining 1000 pages or so are just situational explanations for WHY such-and-such situation deserves a -2 instead of a -3 modifier -- and the sourcebooks will explicitly stress ONLY FOR THOSE WHO CARE ENOUGH. You can pick and choose how fast and loose you go with it.
I've participated in AD&D campaigns from 2nd Ed up through 5th Ed, with most of my friends preferring Pathfinder.
I think an adaptable GM who knows how the core random number game mechanic works can easily make all your wishlist items happen in either AD&D or GURPS. GURPS just happens to provide a sometimes overly burdensome amount of playable verisimilitude if you are selective about how much content you reference in any one gaming encounter or session.
Your thoughts on realistic monster niches in ecosystems, dying from bad mushrooms, even the idea you dismissed about how to create fun, playable resource scarcity in an urban environment -- I've seen or used GURPS sourcebooks that touch on all those things.
The practical considerations of going to the Plane of Fire can be constructed as well. GURPS has magic spells/rules for how many degrees of heating/cooling you can affect a certain amount of space or mass per turn for X input of magical energy, as well as different limits on effectiveness of lesser or greater fire/heat resistance spells or materials. Melting points and flammability are covered, and their interaction with normal, slow, or magically intense flames. Anything not explicitly listed, you can use a Google search to look up other burning/melting points and/or extrapolate for speed of play, since GURPS generally provides IRL comparisons for context.
The breadth and depth of info and choices is kind of GURPS' strength and weakness. Just roll and shout if it gets too much, whether you bash AD&D to fit your dream, or you dip into GURPS. :D