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I was just sitting down to rework the rules, and remembered two more observations about the choice of the word "Delving":

1) The excellent game Dungeon World also uses the word Delving to mean 'explore' rather than 'excavate'.

2) Delving has the advantage of a nice noun form: a Delve. (In contrast to, say, spelunking.)

A Spelunk?

Excited to see what happens here... Once I get back from the park, I know I'm going to be working on some map goodness and the pregens.

For anybody still following this, what do you think of the following:

"Plight" increases by 1 whenever heroes choose to avoid an obstacle and look for another route. (Rationale is that the obstacle lies in the easiest/obvious path, and if you want to go around it you risk getting even more disoriented and lost.)

The only way to intentionally reduce Plight is to spend Fellowship points. (The LM may also introduce other opportunities, such as making a Lore role in a key location to recognize it and get your bearings.)

The effect of Plight is to raise the threshold at which Eye Awareness is triggered. So after the first time heroes choose to detour around an obstacle, Plight becomes 2, and now any common skill test with a Feat die of 2 or less increases Eye Awareness.

Pros: there are no "wandering monsters" or even "Hazards"; instead, Revelation Episodes are used for these sorts of things. Thus, increasing the rate at which Eye Awareness accumulates will accelerate this.
Also, this value is almost entirely in the hands of the heroes: if they don't want it to increase, they can tackle all the obstacles.

Cons: the math is wonky. When Plight goes from 0 to 1 the rate doubles, when it goes to 2 the rate increases by 50%, etc. So the first point gained is the worst one.

The rules as I have them now don't actually depend on the Plight rating for anything; I could get rid of it and almost nothing would change (although I'd have to increase the penalty for avoiding Obstacles). But I really like the idea of making "how f*cked are we?" a measurable variable.

Other ideas for Plight:
- It could trigger something else whenever the Feat die was equal to or below it...in general I like that mechanic...but that would mean that you have to check the Feat die for two things with every skill test: does it trigger Eye, and does it trigger Plight. So combining it with Eye rules felt like it didn't add much complexity.
- It could simply be added to delving TNs, but that just feels...uninteresting. Maybe it makes sense though: if you're lost (and bickering about it) then navigating becomes even harder.
- It could interact with the Light rules, by increasing the chance of torches going out. But it's a stretch to create fluff that makes sense (when you're lost everything takes more time, maybe?) Personally I find this route unsatisfying. Running out of torches is supposed to be worrisome on it's own; if all Plight does is increase that worry then it's two mechanics, one result.

So maybe, rather than starting with mechanics, we should start with storytelling philosophy: if you're lost, and you know you're lost....what narrative impact should that have? Should it cause people to despair more easily? (e.g., add Plight to Shadow when determining if you're Miserable?) Should it lead to poor judgment and bad decision making? (Increasing TN of Delving tests? Increase TN of Fear/Corruption rolls?) Should it make it more likely that bad things happen? (Eye of Awareness rule.)

Thoughts? Some of the best (imo) changes I've made to this system over the versions has been because of feedback from y'all. Keep it coming!

I like the idea of Plight reducing the Hunt Threshold. That way more Revelation Episodes are triggered. The need for making Common skill tests guarantees that Eye Awareness will be on the rise, and eventually the two will meet.

Narratively, it represents both the growing unease of the heroes (and thus the chance of them making a mistake) and also the environment itself (and its inhabitants) becoming aware of their trespass.

zedturtle wrote:I like the idea of Plight reducing the Hunt Threshold. That way more Revelation Episodes are triggered. The need for making Common skill tests guarantees that Eye Awareness will be on the rise, and eventually the two will meet.

Narratively, it represents both the growing unease of the heroes (and thus the chance of them making a mistake) and also the environment itself (and its inhabitants) becoming aware of their trespass.

Oh, duh. Yeah, Plight just gets subtracted from Threshold. That's genius.

I like Zed's idea, because it works so well thematically.

Glorelendil wrote:I was just sitting down to rework the rules, and remembered two more observations about the choice of the word "Delving":

1) The excellent game Dungeon World also uses the word Delving to mean 'explore' rather than 'excavate'.

2) Delving has the advantage of a nice noun form: a Delve. (In contrast to, say, spelunking.)

Fair enough. I don't mean to dwell overmuch on semantics. It only bothers me because it puts the cart before the horse, so to speak. The modern usage is in 'digging or searching for information' comes from the original meaning 'delve' of 'to dig'. It is a bit meta to apply this usage to underground exploration.

Ok, next bit of feedback needed on Light

Toying with the following rules:
- Each lighting source (torches, lanterns, magic swords, etc.) has a rating, similar to a skill, 1 to 6 (0 would be no light. Studying with Ormal the Lampmaker might result in a 4 or 5 lamp. Torches wouldn't normally go higher than 3, unless they had a little bit of magic in them.).
- If the total lighting carried by the company is equal to or greater than the size of the company, there are no modifiers.
- If the total lighting is less than the size of the company, everybody suffers Moderately Hindered (+2 to TNs) on Perception, Movement, Survival and Weapon rolls.
- Players could use Craft skill to try to make Torches of higher ratings than normal, thus potentially requiring fewer torches to be carried.
- For lighting checks, roll the rating of the light source as if it were a skill, against the ambient TN of the Delve.

(One of the ideas here is that after a while underground, as the heroes start to worry about their supply of torches, they might intentionally take the penalty in order to conserve, making everything harder and more stressful.)

Problems/Questions:
- If the company designates who is carrying torches it allows the linking of torch checks to specific actions or failures, makes it clear who has to spend Hope to keep a torch from going out, and has the nice little benefit of forcing the players to decide who is only going to have one hand free if a fight starts.
- On the other hand, the reality is that torches would probably get passed around, depending on how was doing what at the time, and tracking that is too complicated. So it feels more TOR-like to not assign torch-bearers.

Thoughts?

EDIT: Using rating for both brightness and duration might be a bit much: it means that you need to keep more of them burning, and they go out faster, so the difference between rating 2 and rating 3 might be too big.

Maybe a way to abstract this is: a) just use rating to determine how many dice to roll, and b) allow the heroes to reduce the TN of torch checks by any amount they choose by adding the same amount (or half that amount?) to the TNs of Movement, Perception, Survival, and Weapon rolls. I.e., you decrease your light usage and pay the penalty for dim light. This has the benefit of not needing to add up your torch ratings.

Thinking aloud below:

I'd prefer something along the lines of a Light score being equal to some number 1-6 and then reducing the score at appropriate times. Once the score reaches 0, the company is Severly Hindered (+4 to TN) at all tasks. One time only, when they would normally reduce their Light score, they can elect to Conserve Fuel and all tasks from that point on are considered Moderately Hindered (+2 to TN), due to the bad lighting conditions.

Now when to reduce the Light score? It could be that we have tests and we roll for Lighting. Or we could just reduce the score any time a Common Skill is failed, representing the issue of time. Or we could reduce it any time a skill test/task is called for, but then we need a way to replenish the Light score. Maybe spending Hope or making Craft checks to make some emergency torches.

We could make a Lighting check every time we have a skill test; that might be the best way forward as we'd only reduce Light on a failed Lighting check.

Again, just some thinking out-loud, I'm not sure any of these are perfect.

zedturtle wrote:I'd prefer something along the lines of a Light score being equal to some number 1-6 and then reducing the score at appropriate times. Once the score reaches 0, the company is Severly Hindered (+4 to TN) at all tasks. One time only, when they would normally reduce their Light score, they can elect to Conserve Fuel and all tasks from that point on are considered Moderately Hindered, due to the bad lighting conditions.

Now when to reduce the Light score? It could be that we having tests and we roll for Lighting. Or we could just reduce the score any time a Common Skill is failed, representing the issue of time. Or we could reduce it any time a skill test/task is called for, but then we need a way to replenish the Light score. Maybe spending Hope or making Craft checks to make some emergency torches.

We could make a Lighting check every time we have a skill test; that might be the best way forward as we'd only reduce Light on a failed Lighting check.

Here are some considerations I've tried to factor into a design for Light:

- There needs to be "meaningful decisions" or it's not worth building a mechanic. The ones I've been working with are "Do we increase our Encumbrance by carrying more torches?", "Do we take this action that risks using more torches?", and now I've also added "Do we increase our TNs in order to conserve torches?"

- How does the math scale with party size? If "torch checks" occur more frequently with more companions, then either the chance of a torch going out needs to decrease, or the starting score needs to be higher. (Or maybe the relative consumption rate should change with size...?)

- The system also needs to scale with delve size. The darkness of relatively small delves should be just as scary as the darkness of large ones.

- Minimize the opportunities/incentives to assign roles based on lighting mechanics. I.e., avoid "Don't have Bill make the Explore checks...he's more likely to burn a torch."

Applying those to the idea of having a starting value 1 to 6:
- In order to allow heroes to increase the value by carrying more torches, and to allow it to work properly regardless of fellowship size, either the rating would have to be a function of both, or the probability/time of torches going out would have to be a function of fellowship size. Which could work. (For a while I've been working with some version of "If the Feat die is less than Fellowship Size, lose a torch." to represent the fact that a single torch probably isn't enough light for a half dozen people.)
- If the current rating is also the "skill" used for torch checks (as we've discussed in the past), it has the result of accelerating decay. Which might be great for building dramatic tension, but seems strange. Why should the last torch be more likely to burn out quickly than the first torch?
- In terms of scaling by Delve size, if a rating of "1" is an appropriate "amount of torches to take" for a very small Delve, then there's a chance that an unlucky roll results in running out of torches right away. The response might be, "ok, so take Rating 2 worth of torches" but such a small number is still subject to unlucky dice. I think "quantity" and "quality" need to be two separate values, although the latter one could be eliminated entirely for simplicity's sake.

But 1 to 6 could work. It could represent the quantity of light sources relative to the size of the fellowship, and thus the frequency of triggering events would have to be independent of fellowship size. So it could be linked to, say, the number of delving tests attempted, but not to skill tests made. My biggest concern is that with lower starting values an unlucky streak could burn all the torches before they get very far. One could respond, "Well, carry more torches to avoid bad luck." But then you quickly run into a situation where the rational choice for a small delve is to carry the same quantity of torches you'd take into, say, Moria.

Then again, another answer could be: if your most advanced lighting technology is torches, you've got no business going into Moria.

Lots to ponder...

EDIT: Your most advanced lighting Art, I meant...