Saturday, July 18, 2020

Scale is the most important thing in a campaign

Everyone is familiar with the scale of dungeon exploration - tens of feet in ten minute increments, but there's little guidance for any scenarios beyond that. Scale up your maps for outdoor movement, but let players describe their actions naturally, as if they were making normal decisions in an urban environment - where they want to go, what they want to see. Outdoor movement, especially in a city, should be in increments of hours - from half hour, to full hour increments, to eight hour "working days", and so on.

The D&D rule books only talk about overland movement in terms of days, and that's only good for macro scale adventuring, or mass army campaigning.

Playing D&D as written feels like playing a Final Fantasy game, where dungeons and towns are the same scale, but you instantly switch to a "world map" scale where your little character avatar is just so much bigger now. Altering time and movement scales removes that disconnect, and allows players to stay immersed through the eyes of their characters, and lets them make decisions naturally, without worrying about metagame issues such as hexes per day or treating time in a city as if it were frozen.

For that matter, combat while adventuring in the overworld shouldn’t be a Final Fantasy style instant switch back to dungeon scale. When players are talking as if they could only see what's through the eyes of their character, the DM can easily narrate that they see some wandering creature in the distance and what that creature might be doing. The players can then make natural decisions about how to approach or avoid, and engage in combat without just standing in front of it and hacking away, but by negotiating the environment between themselves.

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