Location-Based Games, Part 2: Textured Worlds, and 5th Edition D&D

An Analogy: Scenes vs Moments, Connected to Location Design

Have you heard of the contrast in analysis of film and TV between “scenes” and “moments”? I mostly know it as an explanation for Zack Snyder films are overdramatic and silly (don’t tell anyone, but I’ve enjoyed some): the guy is a commercial director, and he’s always looking for the cool moment, the epic shot, the payoff. He wants the “moments”, but won’t pay in “scenes”. Scenes are where stakes are raised, promises are made, characters are endeared to the audience. A character you don’t know dying rarely affects you – a character who has been a constant, warm presence dying at the hands of the villain “puts the heel over”, to use wrasslin’ slang. People buy the villain as an evil piece of work because someone they care for has been killed by him.

Scenes don’t need to be boring – they shouldn’t be! But they are lower-key. They are, hopefully, beautiful and well-made stone blocks which build up the greater edifice. They form the base for the statuary and a background for the fine pillars of the building. They are absolutely necessary; they have quality of their own, and they make the big things matter and give them a context. To put it differently: there cannot be a payoff without stakes, and stakes need to be put on the table clearly and carefully.

How does this connect to location design in D&D? Put another way: why are so many 5e dungeons (and equivalents) linear or semi-linear, with branches that don’t connect to each other, whilst many or most Glory Day 1e products, and the best of the Old School Renaissance, rely on complex, inter-connected locations? Is it just that 5e is terrible?

That would be an ungenerous conclusion. It is rather that the locations exist in the two “typical” games for different reasons: in 1e, Basic, etc, they exist for exploring and interacting with; in 5e, they usually exist to hold a villain or a maguffin or the target of a rescue. They exist, that is, for a payoff. You go to the dungeon to finish the bit of story associated with it, and get your Story XP/Milestone. A branch might exist within the dungeon to hide a magic item, or a side quest – it’s an optional thing you can add on. But the location exists for the cool final battle, or the detailed puzzle, or whatever. It can involve compelling play – but it is not a compelling location. That is, it may include good moments, but it is not designed to include good scenes.

Now, of course, a bad “dungeon for exploration” can be boring, with no payoff at all. I’m certainly not saying the location-based game shouldn’t include hooks, goals, objectives, and so forth. The point is that they are achieved by exploration and roleplaying (and, indeed, when appropriate, combat) – not by finding the right Cinematic Backdrop and completing the dramatic task thereupon.

Someone might say “but my game is all killer, no filler; I don’t want these scenes you mention”. Your prerogative – but your game might be a Zack Snyder film.

But anyway, what about my game? If I’m going to cast doubt on your methods, I owe you an explanation of my own.

 

Controversial Excursus: Learning to Build Worlds from World of Darkness

Actually, wait, let’s go down memory lane. How did I end up preferring Location-Based D&D to the usual modern Story-Based style? My first two D&D campaigns were 4^th Edition, and initially very linear; the other main campaign I had run, Deadlands, was a “story of the week” sort of thing. Again, fairly linear.

A few things shifted what I was doing: engaging (accidentally) with a few Old-School or Old-School-leaning D&D outlets (including, for the latter, Matt Colville; this is relevant because it led me to include Reavers of Harkenwold in my then-current 4e campaign, and Reavers is actually a very decent basis for a good adventure), and, well, running a game of Werewolf: the Apocalypse.

Yes, World of Darkness taught me how to run Old School D&D. I’m sorry, guys.

How? Well, because this setting I built from the ground-up was textured. The locations, and different potential enemies and obstacles, were detailed. Why? I needed them to be. I needed to inhabit the world so I could make the storytelling experience rich and real for my players. Now, the campaign was still semi-linear – there were missions the players were given – but the manner of solving them was very open. In fact, in practical terms, it was a modified form of the Connected Location Story mentioned above. There were locations to investigate – in whatever order wanted. I wanted the world to be open.

It was an incredible amount of effort. I enjoyed it, at least. But the important lesson was: investment in the world makes the world plausible. An interactive world makes the world interesting. My 4e games probably hadn’t consistently displayed those qualities – I’d been more interested in the plot than the world. My White Pine Caern game broke that – and is still one of my proudest achievements as a GM, even though it wasn’t a very good game in a lot of ways.

 

Exploring Chult: A 5^th Edition Location-Based Campaign

Read this section for a working example of this kind of game.

My main D&D game – weekly, sometimes twice weekly, for 2 and a half years now – is a 5^th Edition game. This might surprise, given I mostly write Old School material, but it’s because when I worked at a gameshop I ran the RPG night and people wanted to play 5^th Edition. (I also run a fortnightly Dolmenwood game using Old School Essentials, and have two monthly Old School campaigns on Covid Hiatus – Temple of Elemental Evil in 1e, and Anomalous Subsurface Environment using a Basic hack, likely to be updated to Old School Essentials when we resume.)

The game: Exploring Chult, a vast development of Tomb of Annihilation, the 5e Tomb of Horrors/Dwellers of the Forbidden City. I redeveloped a lot of the material in there, researched historic stuff on Chult, added my own material, added in Huso’s jaw-dropping Night Wolf Inn. But really the biggest change: “plot”, and how players get XP.

There is no plot – or rather, the campaign did not start with strong hooks, NPC questgivers, and timeframes enforced on the characters to go and find the Tomb itself and do stuff there. The plot incentives in the hardback book have been excised completely. Instead, Chult is a fallen empire with colonial powers exploiting the wealthy fragments; it is full of amazing and mysterious locations; there are various powers and factions in play, both “civilised” and definitively not.

Players get XP chiefly from six main things, in order of importance:

A.    Training: Characters have to spend gold to receive XP for training (1gp=1xp, or 1gp=2xp for Night Wolf Inn members training at the Inn). To ascend beyond 3^rd Level, a character has to train for a number of weeks, even if they have achieved the XP requirement in other ways.

B.     Exploration: Characters receive XP for discovering heretofore undiscovered (by them) locations. Minor random encounter locations might be worth 25xp; easy-to-reach “keyed locations” might be worth 100xp; important locales 300xp; the biggest, most inaccessible places might be worth 500xp or more. This adds up more than you might think, especially in the first “tier” of play (though I will simply increase Exploration XP for even stranger, harder-to-reach locations as we go - what’s Arcadia worth to you?).

C.     Combat: This is variable in value. I have a flat “XP by number of HD” system – not linear, but not very lucrative, and with no modifications for ability (e.g. 900xp for a 10HD monster). HD in 5e are very misleading anyway. At any rate, this makes some combats really worthwhile – e.g. particularly challenging “boss fights” with few henchmen or allies near at hand. On the other hand, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa was not very XP-heavy for the party, because they (intelligently!) recruited an army in various ways for the job, alongside a stealth element. Their reward: earning allies who could help guide them escape the Underdark, lots of gold, and magic items.

D.    Spell Transcription: A form of training, but just for spell-users – this covers both actual transcription, as by Wizards, but also ceremonies of prayer and meditation, as for Druids or even Warlocks. (Characters only have access to Player’s Handbook spells by default; everything else has to be found.)

E.     Real Estate: Buying property, and building Strongholds – 2gp=1xp.

F.      Miscellany: Ceremonies/charity/donations (1gp=1xp), carousing and apparel (each 1gp=1xp). Only donations really matter here. I might rebuild the carousing system to make it more generous but with complications.

You’ll notice that I’ve added a form of “Story XP”, that is, XP based on non-combat, non-gold accomplishments – Exploration XP – but there are two things to note: first, that it is location-based, not plot-based; and second, that it very loosely mirrors the concept of reaching different levels in the dungeon. The further “in” the characters get, the higher their XP rewards – exploration and risk-taking is encouraged to accumulate XP.

My players pick what their stables of characters do – they’ve been given dozens of hooks and rumours, and explore what they want. The story has emerged from that. The pirate Bard wants to build a pirate empire; the Lawful Good Paladin (of, it turns out, Ubtao; it’s a long amnesiac story) wants to rebuild the Empire of Chult, under the rightful heir; the Wizard is mostly interested in an arcane stronghold and unlocking secrets. They have chosen their “plot(s)”. To gain power to achieve their aims, they need to go and get money and adventure deeper in to the world, defeating monsters along the way.

We’ve spent about 9 months on a three-way split in the party – one group, led by the Lizardman Druid, went to a coastal settlement where he was sold as a hatchling. They explored the jungle hinterland from whence his egg was probably stolen, and got involved in a civil war between Lizardmen confederations. They earned XP, of course, for the exploration, the combat, and in future for any training from the gold – but they also achieved “story” goals that weren’t enforced, but organic. They sided with the less-destructive Lizardfolk, and stopped the Bad Guy Chief getting more powerful (but there was a discussion about whether or not to intervene – and them not intervening would have been fine, though with different consequences – as it is, two PCs died). Helping the weaker confederations coincidentally helps the Lizardman’s Stronghold, located at the northern edge of the jungle areas where the Lizardmen live – now he has lots more allies. And he found out more about his own background.

Another group (the least progressed of the three, due to work schedules) is led by the crusading Paladin, and has slain the ex-Queen of Chult, now a Medusa, before heading to the Holy City of Mezro, ruined over a hundred years ago in the Spellplague. There’s a colonial presence there (which infuriates him) and many mysteries. I’m very, very excited about this one – but I don’t require anything from it. I am, here, merely the World Spirit, observing developments, political and otherwise, with intent interest.

The final group headed off to Lantan, off the coast of Chult, where in a remote coastal area a flood had revealed the Deep Carbon Observatory. The Warlock’s patron had communicated she wanted him to go there; eventually it became clear she wanted an item. After many travails, this party lost the item and failed to defeat the rival party that had dogged their steps (though those guys didn’t get the item either). Chastened, accepting temporary defeat, the players asked where they could go to research the particular item, and also tapped their contacts in the Night Wolf Inn for help. The natural answer for research, anyway, was Candlekeep: not in Chult at all. And so off they’ve gone, to a new section of the Realms, which I’ve had to rapidly develop, build hooks into, offer different paths, and so forth. I don’t know how much material they’ll use – I don’t overdevelop, but I try to know where they’ll go based on their most likely decisions.

I’ve long loved this campaign, but in a funny way, I’ve loved Exploring Chult most – conceptually, not in terms of a particular location or cool event - when my players decided, just recently they needed to just go somewhere else in the Realms (for legitimate, story reasons – because they want the item, not because I’ve required them to, but because for various reasons their characters want it). The world, it turns out, is limitless and full of surprises, even for me. This is a direct result of a “plotless”, location-based campaign. That’s the purpose of gold in the game. Whole worlds of possibility, unconstrained by imaginary dramatic requirements.

In the final part of the series I’ll talk about what the gold itself – what does it accomplish? Aside from its uses for XP, what does gold do in the game?