Saelune said:
The Underdark... is far too large and elaborate to actively map out. It is tens of thousands of passages crisscrossing and going above and below each other. It is far harder to map out in detail than a surface adventure would be, which is why all Underdark maps I've ever seen are very vague.
When I said to have pre-written encounters, what was unspoken is that they should be flexible. Wizard throws out a lightning bolt in combat while crossing a mountain? Bring out the "rock slide blocks mountain pass" encounter out of the folder as a consequence, saying the lightning bolt set off the rock slide. Boom, continuity, and you've got a framework for the next encounter rather than making it all up ad-hoc. As part of the blocked pass encounter, have in your notes a couple ways for them to get past it that you can nudge them on if they get stuck; a scroll of Fly hidden in a nearby cave behind an owlbear if they look around for shelter, or climbing gear in a ruined caravan they can see from the blocked point and investigate if they choose. They think of something else? Cool, roll with it. Maybe the last encounter was with a group of tribesman that live in the area, and they want to go back to see if they know a way around. Just bring back the NPC from that encounter. And after they pass the encounter, you can bring it up again in another several sessions with a different flavor; perhaps its winter and an avalanche has blocked another mountain pass, or move it to a river where the dam broke and the ford's become impassible. Keep the old solutions that weren't used while adapting them with whatever window dressing is appropriate. Your players will have no idea. They only know what they see.
The key to good improvisation is preparation. Read up on improv comedy groups. The inexperienced ones make it up as they go along, and it shows through awkward timing and stilted dialogue. The good ones follow a few different sets of pre-arranged framework that can be adapted to whatever the audience throws at them. Having a framework for "character's appearance becomes unusual" can fit scenarios for missing pants, transforming into an alien, carrying an orange on their head, or losing a body part, and the audience never knows the difference without having it spelled out for them. The key to good improv is
adapting prepared material to random circumstances. Good improv is 70% pre-determined before the random factor is introduced. That is how you ensure consistent results.
It doesn't matter what road the party chooses. Orc patrol can happen on any of them. Any road through a potential natural obstruction can have the obstruction present complications. A fey spirit spontaneously challenging the adventurers to go through a maze can happen at anytime in the wilderness. A written bandit king NPC can be adapted to a bounty hunter or hobgoblin chieftain or bellicose captain of the guard, depending on what is logical for the players to find due to their actions. You don't need to construct a Call of Duty-esque railroad of spectacle. You just need to have several frameworks on hand that you can adapt to the natural consequences of the party's actions, and you'll be able to generate a spontaneous, satisfactory session that has a logical flow dictated by the players' agency funneled through prepared encounters. No scrambling to make up an encounter with an appropriate level of challenge in the space of a couple minutes before your players zone out. No trying to construct simplistic puzzles on the fly. No trying to make up a simplistic facsimile of a character with no personality for the party to interact with because that's all you can do without any thought beforehand.
I argue that instead of making up a system that attempts to generate encounters from nothing but the players' actions, that more satisfying encounters can be generated from applying the player's actions to a prepared framework. If you come up with an encounter where the party has to flee the city into the wilderness at night to escape from a danger, yet they do some actions that prevent it, that encounter doesn't need to be thrown away. Put it back in the deck and bring out something appropriate to what is happeing. Adapt it later when the party does flee from an encounter, whether it is running from a lich's tomb to hiding in the city sewers to flying an airship away from danger. The meat of the encounter can stay exactly the same; they can be pursued by a unique Bounty hunter with 6 human soldiers, which can turn into an Orc chieftain with 6 hunters with the same stats, or a pirate captain with 6 buccaneers with the same stats. How will your players know the difference? How much time do you save from flipping through the Monster Manual cobbling together monster stats? How much more satisfying is it to face a named enemy with a unique ability and a cool saber, no matter what window dressing you apply to that enemy from the circumstances?
Improv heavy DMs aren't geniuses. They haven't hit on the magic set of rolls that will spontaneously generate satisfaction completely at random in a timely fashion. They're
organized.
You should look at some of the better Sandbox roleplaying games. Stars Without Number is a great example. Know what it does? It has you generate a sector of space through rolling on random tables. Each star system has 1 habitable planet by default. You roll the planet's tech level, biosphere, and population. You then roll up 2 attributes for that planet from a table of 100, leaving 100^100 unique combinations, that are then further differentiated by the previously rolled tech level, biosphere, and population. Each attribute has a list of potential enemies, friends, complications, things, and places, 3 each. Here's an example:
Oceanic World
The world is entirely or almost entirely covered with liquid water. Habitations might be floating cities, or might cling precariously to the few rocky atolls jutting up from the waves, or are planted as bubbles on promontories deep beneath the stormy surface. Survival depends on aquaculture. Planets with inedible alien life rely on gengineered Terran sea crops.
E Pirate raider, Violent ?salvager? gang, Tentacled sea monster
F Daredevil fisherman, Sea hermit, Sapient native life
C The liquid flux confuses grav engines too badly for them to function on this world, Sea is corrosive or toxic, The seas are wracked by regular storms
T Buried pirate treasure, Location of enormous schools of fish, Pretech water purification equipment
P The only island on the planet, Floating spaceport, Deck of a storm-swept ship, Undersea bubble city
And then there's the other attribute and its list of potentialities. Let's pull another example.
Flying Cities
Perhaps the world is a gas giant, or plagued with unendurable storms at lower levels of the atmosphere. For whatever reason, the cities of this world fly above the surface of the planet. Perhaps they remain stationary, or perhaps they move from point to point
in search of resources.
E Rival city pilot, Tech thief attempting to steal outworld gear, Saboteur or scavenger plundering the city?s tech
F Maintenance tech in need of help, City defense force pilot, Meteorological researcher
C Sudden storms, Drastic altitude loss, Rival city attacks, Vital machinery breaks down
T Precious refined atmospheric gases, Pretech grav engine plans, Meteorological codex predicting future storms
P Underside of the city, The one calm place on the planet?s surface, Catwalks stretching over unimaginable gulfs below.
Just from these two attributes, there are a myriad of opportunities for satisfactory encounters. What if the water world is perpetually stormy yet rich in natural resources under the waves, requiring flying cities for harvesting? Could the saboteur's name be Frank, and he's working for a storm pirate who attacks convoys between the cities and the water? Could there be a single island with advanced alien ruins that the separate flying cities are fighting over? And this is a simplistic take without the other planet stats, what if the planet's inhabitants are at an 1800's tech level? How do such people live on the flying city? I'm sure you had an idea begin to grow as you read this. That's the point. Inspiration does not appear out of the aether or from the Muses. It comes from the confluence of ideas and possibilities in your mind. Your mind works so much better if it has something to go from rather than next to nothing. It's the difference between driving a car with an engine and without.
It is so much easier to think of potential scenarios that can be in place for the PCs when they arrive with a simple framework like this, rather than look at a spot on the map and go "Um. Maybe there's a flying city, but, uh, why's it there, um, who could they get a quest from, um, what's a conflict they can be a part of, er, okay guys here's some space-orcs, lemme look up what the stats are...". Think the PCs are spinning their wheels, lost for what to do? Send in "Maintenance tech in need of help", take 10 seconds to give him a name and verbal tic. Simple. Engaging. Keeps the game moving.
SWN goes on to have entire factions rolled up with the setting with assets and beliefs and goals, and a system by which those organizations progress on their own or in response to PC's... but the above is enough for my point. Spontaneous play is not consistent play. Sometimes you'll have a good idea, sometimes you'll have nothing, and you'll have good sessions and bad sessions. It's far better in my book to have prepared, broad, modular frameworks that can be used in response to PC actions, where you can assure that the quality will always at least be good.
"Being prepared" and "being unyielding" are
not the same thing. A properly prepared DM will always have an appropriate response to PC actions. Thereby the game is kept engaging and moving. Let's actually talk about your current system. All you have is a system for DC checks. That's "rollplaying" rather than "roleplaying." In my mind, its busywork. You have the players roll a die. You compare it to the DC. You use the word "punish", which is toxic in a co-operative game. Never "punish." "Punishment" is neither fun nor satisfying. You let the players deal with the consequences of their actions. What's the action here? They tried to walk in the right direction? How does a bad roll still move the game forward? In your system, it doesn't, it stops the game or even reverses it. The PC's shouldn't be treated as dunces. They don't need to say they buy maps, interrogate the local populace, and follow road markers every time they want to move between cities. What's more satisfying? To say that they lose a day's travel from getting lost, or letting them travel and pulling out an environmental puzzle based on the terrain? Which keeps the game moving forward while providing engagement? Isn't satisfaction and engagement what everybody's there for? Why would you ever deny it?
Look, you're not a genius.
I'm not a genius.
HARDLY ANYBODY is a genius. What kind of a person can generate a high quality, engaging encounter with satisfactory play completely spontaneously? A genius. Why would you try to be something you're not? Why would any of us?
Sigh. I'm pontificating too long, and being badly sleep deprived is undoubtedly affecting me. It's not just about you. It is an ancient rule among both East and West that teaching, or attempting to at least, is another, higher form of learning. I engage with topics like this and say so much about them because it brings together various thoughts in my head simply by point of fact that talking about them organizes them; it probably benefits me more than whoever I'm spouting at, which is selfish and needs to be contained into something manageable without browbeating some poor innocent on the internet who accidentally engaged me, which this has ballooned beyond. That's my feedback. I'm leaving it to lay as it is. Hope you find a method that works for you and your group. Happy rolling.
