One of the reasons I don't begrudge paying the TV license fee is BBC wildlife documentaries. (Do foreigners know that if you have a TV in Britain you have to pay a tax of £150 or so which goes to fund shite like Dr Who? Well...you do.) Blimey but we, as a nation, make bloody good wildlife documentaries. I have serious reservations about the way things have gone in recent years - there is way too much slo-mo and musical grandstanding in the recent big budget hits like Planet Earth II and Africa - but we are still streets ahead of the competition, and the excellent Springwatch is a great counterbalance to the OTT Attenborough flagships.
Ever since I was doing my old Monstrous Manual thread on rpg.net (see links to the right of this page), I have always had it in mind to do a game about the "sages" who appear in almost every entry speculating about monster origins, habits and behaviour. A campaign in which the PCs are a band of scholars heading out into the wilderness or underworld in search not of treasure but of knowledge about its denizens. Making records ("Ah, so the death mold uses sverfneblin tears as an aphrodisiac!") and getting XP for it.
You could do something similar about wildlife photographers - on MARS! or other alien environment of your choice. (Another variation would be idle aristocrats exploring the Lovecraftian Dreamlands or similar, taking Daguerrotype photographs with incredibly long exposure times and trying to stay alive long enough to get good shots.) PCs going out with the aim of documenting rather than looting - at most collecting samples.
The problem I invariably stumble against is how to measure success in such a game. So let's muse aloud. Getting XP for documenting facts about monsters can be calculable on a rarity basis (50 XP for uncommon, 250 XP for rare, and so on) but from there things would get complicated. You could divide or multiply the number of XP based on the clarity or accuracy of the information. You could also do it with the significance of the facts learned (appearance alone being a low XP reward; information about abilities being higher, and so on). And you could increase the ratio for the obscurity of the fact - it is harder to learn some abilities than others. If photographs were being used, the XP reward could be clarified by quality of the shot.
The problem is that you would end up spending a lot of time, I think, caught up in calculating XP, and consulting lists of XP for different monsters and/or categories of fact (how much XP is it worth to learn about a vampire's restriction on entering a home uninvited?, etc.). This would be a lot of work for DM and players alike. Are there any alternatives? Answers on a postcode or - at a push - a comment.
The older Monster Manuals give guidelines for breaking down how much XP comes from a monster's Hit Dice, how much comes from its special abilities, and so forth, don't they? So there might be some way to use that to divvy up the experience across multiple encounters.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively, they could get the full monster XP each time they encounter the monster AND LEARN SOMETHING NEW about it. So, let's say you see a rhino in the jungle eating low-hanging leaves. That's worth the creature's full XP. Next time you witness it charging a goring a fellow naturalist before you run away. That's worth the full XP again. The rhino doesn't really have any other abilities (except it's high AC hide?) so at that point, you've pretty much exhausted the experience you can get from rhino-watching. If you encounter one again, you probably won't get anything out of it.
Photos seem like they demand something like attack rolls or skill checks to adjudicate the quality of the shot, but then they maybe become like a kind of treasure, and you get XP for developing them or selling them to collectors. The treasure value of the photo is presumably based on both the rarity of the monster and the quality of the shot. Reaction rolls (or something like them) could determine how eager the buyers are, and tell you when the market's gone cold on a particular animal. So the first rhino photo, you roll a 7, and get the normal price. Next you roll a 10, get 150% of the usual price, and a bonus on your next roll. The next roll (with bonus) is a 12, so you get double the asking price and a bonus on the next roll. Good thing, because it was a modified 4, so half-price only for that one, and a penalty next time. Your final roll's a 2, no buyer and no further rhino photos will sell around these parts.
Anyway, this is just musing. Sorry if it went a little long. I like your ideas about adding exploration/discovery incentives like this to a campaign.
I like all three of those ideas. Especially the photos. You could do something similar for the sale of sketches of monsters, or for that matter maps.
DeleteDo you even need XP for a game like that? XP represents the character getting more powerful and (most saliently) better at fighting. But a sage isn't looking to gain new spell slots, they want what any academic wants. Money, prestige, and free food. Advancement in the game could be pure role-playing: the players have to "write up" monographs and fill out grant proposals (all of which could be resolved fun banter at the table). In exchange they'd get gold, which should be reward enough, or better and more survivable NPC assistants, or fame points or something. There's no upshot to killing the beasties you're documenting (unless you're Audubon, who needed still lifes for his paintings), so do you really need extra hit dice? The game would be more fun if you were a squishy dude trying to sneak around dragon lairs with a pad of paper and some charcoal, rather than an archmage summoning up demons just to check what color their underbellies happened to be. Right?
ReplyDeleteSpitballing: The player has two characters, the 1st level sage, who gets all of the gold, accolades, and roleplaying opportunities; and the bodyguard, probably a ranger, fighter, or thief, who is used in combat and gains all the experience. That's cool, because the sage, the fucking sage, never gets any smarter about his environment, and as the "real" character becomes a constant in-combat liability for the fightan' character to protect.
DeleteThe DM might even control the sage in combat like an NPC?
Again, I like all these ideas. The sage/bodyguard double act is a particularly nice one.
DeleteFor the photos of creatures scenario, you could just give them XP as if they had got the creature's treasure. Whether they found the treasure or not could be irrelevant if you assume they are already independently wealthy. If they do find it then they just add it to their existing wealth and let their accountant deal with it.
ReplyDeleteMy only issue with that is you'd get a heck of a lot of XP just for, basically, seeing monsters and avoiding them.
DeleteWell, the gold for XP could be a result of how much reward you get "back home" for pictures or specimens brought back from the wilderness and presented to whatever scientific authority is established in your campaign world.
DeleteJigger the treasure tables a bit to reflect the going rate for sketches vs. photos vs. dead specimens vs. live specimens, and now it's not so much seeing and avoiding them as bringing back proof that you encountered them at all.
Actually, you could kinda re-tool straight treasure in that system too, as the archeologists/animal behaviorists etc. would be very interested in what artifacts these fascinating creatures gather around themselves. Coins from lost kingdoms and obsidian knives of humanoid manufacture, etc. etc. would fetch good value from the museums.
Long story short just change the pawnbrokers and fences the murderhoboes usually deal with for curators and archivists and it's pretty much the same game with different names.
Yeah, that could work actually. 1/10 of the XP for a sighting, 1/4 for a sketch, 1/2 for dead, full for alive.
DeleteIf you wanted to add an 1800's Barnum-esque flair and do a variant on Reints style carousing rules, you could send your sage on lecturing tours of the salons and dance halls of the big city telling tales of their exploits to paying audiences. Success on a Charisma roll or persuasion check could get you an XP bonus, failure means you're getting rotten produce thrown at you from the audience or laughed out of the academy, depending on the venue.
DeleteFinding stuff out about creatures is tougher. I think you should watch some nature documentaries to work out what they can find out. e.g. Diet, mating, range, birth, lair, parenting, etc. Then you have to write that up for each monster, making it gameable. Then you have to assign XP to each one. Maybe default could be the monster's usual XP. e.g. an orc is 10xp for each of the above. If something is harder to find out then you increase the XP by some multiple.
ReplyDeleteDavid makes an interesting point about XP. It might be fun to think of gaining levels as gaining levels of employees. e.g. You start off at first level as a 0lvl bird watching schmuck with a 1lvl bodyguard. When you gain a second level you are so famous, or you have got that much richer from your monster research activities that you can either give your fighter a second level or get another first level employee.
ReplyDeleteIf you also want a generic bunch of natives following your noble around you might want to use The Extras class to do it! http://udan-adan.blogspot.com.au/2016/09/bx-class-extras.html
Yes, I like that. Building an entourage through XP. I feel a blog post coming.
DeleteSounds like Pokemon Snap. Your GM can award more points for getting better shots. That gets you out of the "I see the monster, I hide, run away. Give me XP." Now to get the big points you need to throw a rock at the Beholder's eyestalk to get an epic action shot.
ReplyDeleteThat is quite a cool one actually. Certainly that's what BBC wildlife photographers seem to spend a lot of time doing. If not chucking rocks, waiting for the "beholder" to do something dramatic that can be converted into slo-mo with a bombastic tune in the background.
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