About RPGs

Now that we've played AFF2 for a few months I can say a few things about the game:

It is flawed.

I will keep running it.

Usually these two things don't go together.

FLAWED!

Let's talk about why it's flawed for a moment.

Even for a second edition, it lacks editing. Rules contradict, are incomplete, or are, on a few occasions, missing altogether even though they are referenced. (Like for wounds, but there are more...)

PDFs lack "modern" features like... bookmarks?

When the rules are indeed complete, they might be hard to understand or posited in a way that might require some work to align them with each other. This should be the author's work, especially in a second edition.

Same goes for gear - that table is pretty lopsided at times.

So this makes this game one where you sometimes have to make house rules and rulings instead of relying on the rules-as-written. This can happen with OSR games which are often underdefined, supposedly intentionally.

In AFF2's case I'd say this is simply poor editing and lack of revision, not intentional at all. I think the rules could actually be complete enough and robust if they got a bit more love. Same for overall editing.

Actually good

Where AFF2 does good, and in fact better, than other RPGs (in my book) is the balance:

Characters feel varied enough and not limited by class (D&D clones) or not like they are one-trick ponies (Numenera / Cypher, Shadow of the Demon Lord).

Characters can grow and be upgraded (unlike Fate Accelerated where it's mostly changing) and can handle a wide variety of things without becoming overpowered.

You don't really need to sweat the modifiers overly much. Resolution is fast and simple.

The system is more forgiving of power differences than let's say D&D5e and not as random as Savage Worlds.

The core of the system is small and easy to retain.

And that's nothing to sneeze at!

In fact, quite few games manage this well. Characters either remain rather static or don't grow (simple systems) and have few options to be individualized (class-based systems). While other systems also have small cores you quickly feel like everything feels samey-same.

There are many fun fantasy anime, manga, and light novels out there. It's a big industry. But with many things going in quantity, quality can suffer.

Nowhere does this become as clear as in worldbuilding. A lot of stories feature a reborn/reincarnated/transferred protagonist who comes from modern Japan and has to make it in another world ("Isekai", which literally means "different world" if broken down). As such, they at times conveniently resort to their knowledge of the modern world to improve things in their new fantasy home or to come up with a new product to sell.

While sometimes this is well executed, sometimes it just isn't. "People just didn't think of it." doesn't really cut it.

The Hen-Egg-No-Problem

Take an example: In this Isekai world, eggs are a delicacy foraged in the wild. After nobody heard of a chicken-like bird before, our protagonist goes on a medium (2-3 day?) trip to the other side of the forest and finds a village where there are chickens in the wild (called "cluckers"), and in spite of them being in essence identical to our domestic birds, nobody ever had the idea to do so. (What a coinkidink.) All it takes is the main character to bring up the idea of keeping these birds for eggs and the obvious takes place.

In comparison, in our world chickens have spread with humans to tiny islands thousands of miles apart along the Pacific's currents. Even on the extremely remote Easter Island there was an extensive culture of breeding chickens. Because chickens are so easy to keep and the benefits are so obvious.

Yet, there was no actual reason in this fantasy story why people wouldn't domesticate a flightless bird for the obvious delicacy "egg" that they would have to risk the wilds to collect.

Now... if there had been an impediment to be solved, then the absence of chickens would have been explained. It's not harder than that.

Distance may seem as an easy reason, but if you don't believe how far things tend to spread eventually, consider this: Nothing is more common than seeing apple orchards in Europe, right? Nobody would think that this is a species that originates in Central Asia. It was spread by humans over thousands of miles, arriving in the Middle East as early as 3 millennia BC and already being common in Europe around the time of the Roman Empire. Apples had to travel 4,000 miles to arrive there, though.

Other side of the big forest, my ass.

If something is available in one part of the world, but uncommon or unknown elsewhere, there's always a reason. I mean, Europeans even eventually, at the risk of death, stole the secrets of silk-making from China. Stuff spreads.

Background knowledge for worldbuilders

If you want to know more about the kind of forces that shaped our world and the civilizations therein, I recommend Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". It explains how technology and domesticated animals spread among continents eventually and at what speeds, explaining how certain civilizations had worse starting conditions because of that, and how that affected them in the end. His book "Collapse" is a good guide if you want to add some ecological element to your world. And "The World Until Yesterday" is a great source about lost cultures and how the people preceding us on this planet viewed life. (Hint hint: So might people living in isolated places of your world.)

Everything needs a reason

This problem actually comes up a lot when making maps.

Why do a certain goods travel over a certain route? Boats are faster and cheaper (per transported unit) than land transport, for example. (Still today fuel is transported through river boats in Central Europe because that's a cheap way to do it.) Consider risks along different trade routes. In fact, maybe your heroes can even affect that. (Like a certain trade road being avoided due to bandits or a dragon.)

I review my maps to figure out if my reasoning for things being as they are makes sense. Maybe certain things need to be spaced apart further to fit into my logic. Maybe certain natural obstacles need to exist. Always think about what you want to do with a map. Draw a first version, then revise or start over. Consider what works. Review, spend some time on it on a separate day.

I'm playing Advanced Fighting Fantasy (2e) with my group right now. It's a beautifully simple game... at times. It's also an underdefined game with questionable editing. Which means things mentioned in one part of the rulebook might not appear anywhere else (referenced but not defined, e.g. critical injuries) or it is not described how certain things work together.

Already, humans tend to say things about AFF that don't seem to be evidenced by the AFF rules themselves.

Take this thread: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/advanced-fighting-fantasy-combat-confusion.633784/

It's being referenced all the time by the search engine because it's pretty much the only thread mentioning the initiative phases and or missile combat, but I think it's wrong.

The underlying assumption by some of the posters here is that the usual "one roll to resolve combat round" applies. This is grounded Fighting Fantasy philosophy, no doubt.

It doesn't mesh with the "order of events," though. Given that missiles (at a distance) and spells take effect before melee (I hit you before you hit me) - which is explicitly stated in the rules - they shouldn't be the same rolls (which it doesn't state one way or the other).

Even when using different modifiers, you already know the outcome. So unless everybody announces all their actions beforehand (which you would need to write down for bigger combats... fun!), how is that fair? If I know that you hit me and I will miss if I engage you right after, will I still do that? (You can predict the future from your combat total for defending.)

It makes much more sense to roll once for totals for the missile phase separately. You shoot, I defend. I charge you, you defend.

While AFF in general has a philosophy of only one side (the "winner") doing damage, does it make sense that I cannot hit you with a sword after you hit me with an arrow? I already took the damage, but why should I miss..?

The way I handle the order of events is that I ask:

Anybody firing a missile at a distance?

Anybody casting a spell?

Who is attacking whom in melee?

Then handle each individually as separate "phases of initiative" with separate rolls. It keeps the action economy intact (you can only attack, cast, or fire a missile, but not several) while also honoring the "order of events."

It also avoids another thing: Having to remember your roll total from phase 1. into phase 3. People tend to mess that up, anyway.

Anyway, it only applies to the special case. Normal missile combat means only someone with a missile weapon can return fire. Missiles when engaged in melee can be handled like regular combat. But firing at a distance and then being engaged? I'd say that is an exception to the rule and requires a "ruling."

What does the AI say?

As I mentioned, I was looking for answers on AFF. Google nowadays adds these things to your search:

For reference, my search terms were: "advanced fighting fantasy missile weapon in melee" (so I was asking a slightly different question to what I outlined above).

But when you ask about a little-written-about topic like AFF, AI is usually lying through its digital teeth.

If you follow the link it attributes, it leads to the link I mentioned above. Which does not say what is written here.

Note: Google AI Search, in my experience, often references articles and videos as "sources" that have no bearing on the topic if you go check them out. I encounter this all the time. It confidently tells you your answer is in this part of that YouTube video (marking the specific range of seconds), and when you click it and listen, it surely is not.

If you pay close attention to what the AI does here by reading the rest, I get the impression it is doing the following:

It finds very little direct information linked to AFF to answer the question.

But it "knows" AFF is an OSR system.

It then confabulates additional advice for handling this as some OSR systems do without flagging it explicitly as speculation or advice.

Here the "Targeting Constraints" are actually made up, but how would you know? The rest is actually correct but up for interpretation. The last paragraph in blue is actually the clue where it gets the idea from. Note the absence of a link/source on most items here.

I'm not saying this is a bad rule, per se. It would constitute a good "ruling" (as in "rulings, not rules"). But whenever I ask about niche topics I quickly find wrong answers or outright confabulation.

So, I just finished Citizen Sleeper, a short cyberpunk RPG video game.

It features two central mechanics:

A dice pool resource, refreshed every day.

Trackers: Counting successes to track completion, countdown of actions/days till a task needs to be completed, counting failures to decide when the player gets locked out of an opportunity.

Both of which might have some use in your tabletop role-playing games. The one I want to shortly talk about is how Citizen Sleeper handles dice pools.

The dice set the actual difficulty

Each day the dice pool gets rolled and you have a pool of "dice" with values of 1 to 6. 6s allow you to auto-succeed in pretty much everything, everything else sets a difficulty for the actual challenge. A 5 makes mostly positive and neutral outcomes likely (depending on risk level). A 1 might only allow a neutral outcome at best.

So the player in Citizen Sleeper decides on which situation they would like to take which risk, introducing a resource management element. It's not a reroll. (Like your bennies or initiative.) It's simply something that helps the odds.

Imagine your players are on a heist.

Each has a role to play in the caper, each has risks to take. They still have to roleplay all of this, or rather, their scenes, but beyond that, why not give them that little extra?

They roll a limited amount of dice, let's say 3-4 (roughly how many rolls you expect them to make).

Each roll represents a certain difficulty. All they know is that each time they make a roll they have to use one of them.

Is that guard suspicious or basically asleep on the job? Is this person amenable to being charmed or fast-talked? How good is the security on that door?

You may have a rough idea about that in general, but why not let players skew that in their favor - or dare a bad "resource die" on something. One gives them confidence in critical situations - the luck of the daring, another increases suspense.

(Of course they don't know how many rolls they need to make and if they're worth saving up for. But in general, one really crucial roll should be expected - but always potentially more.)

Also, can you imagine how the players own acting in the situation changes accordingly? Watch your players showboat their way through situations buffeted by good resource dice. That should be fun!

As I mentioned here, I'm running "The Tower of Leorik the Bold" as a sample Advanced Fighting Fantasy (AFF) adventure for my players. It's a nice, 16-page dungeon adventure.

What does it remind me of? How much better structured information is in Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) modules...

Well, I know I'm a nag. When I write about DCC, I nag about DCC. But credit where it is due - those small booklets typically give the GM the information needed to run them in an easily digested way.

Let's contrast!

In any (Goodman Games) DCC module:

Front page/insert art: Gives us the recommended level. (Right, level scaling is baaaad... gnihihi.)

Intro: Tells the GM the backstory and giving an overview of how to get the party into the adventure and what the GM needs to know.

Dungeon part: Will provide descriptions of rooms, each numbered uniquely.

Room stanzas: Start with a readout text crafted for each scene.

Conclusion: Describes how to wrap and go from here.

Appendix: Contains everything added on top of the base game in the usual format (like a page for a patron spell).

Handouts: if any.

Map: A visually cluttered map that is fun to look at but not necessarily great at conveying information, but that's a DCC thing and fans adore it.

So, how about "Leorik the Bold"?

Opening paragraph: gives us the recommended party experience (no levels, after all).

Intro: Some general background readable by everyone, followed by a disclaimer for only GMs to read on.

Still more intro: Rumor, intro scene in an inn, important NPC.

Map: a refurbished Dyson Logos map without numbers.

You wouldn't believe it's still intro: road to the dungeon / wilderness encounter trek. Encounter table omits key stats for some monsters..?

Dungeon part: Repeats map segments for each floor, this time with numbers. (Very nice, good visual cue and structuring!) Forgot to do it for 2nd floor, though (editing...). Room numbers are not unique per floor.

Room stanzas: No readout text, so prepare to craft your own intro for each or on the fly. Adventure background is split over stanzas, so prepare for re-reading stuff in order to understand structure.

Conclusion: There's an aftermath section. It has a lot of issues for being only 7 paragraphs long (see below), but does a similar job to what you find in a DCC module.

Appendix: lists stats and info for a new faction.

Issues, issues, issues

So, I have more than a few issues with how information is structured here.

First: the intro (of the intro).

I guess it fulfills the same purpose as the back blurb on any DCC adventure, hooking you into buying it without giving too much away. Since these things weren't made for print, fair enough.

BUT!

Then there is no actual GM intro following, no synopsis for our chief executive, we go into medias res for running the adventure right away.

This whole document is written for the GM, so make their job easier! This is your audience. These guys buy this stuff. Think of their needs first.

Then: structure.

Hoo boy, this one is bad! In order to understand what is actually going on, you need to read the stanzas for the basement library, vault, and roof rooms.

Information is split like this:

Ground floor: Five rooms of absolutely no relevance except for leading either up or down. Up is found before down. (More on this later.*) One piece of very helpful loot for those exploring thoroughly.

Basement: Three rooms. One branch leads to uncovering what's going on. Another, if explored first (unlikely), mostly wastes resources without gain.

First upper floor: A potentially unbeatable encounter that should act as an obstacle. One room that actually contains the cool loot. A library with plot hooks that are not really plot hooks (see below).

Second upper floor: Two rooms, one containing the key MacGuffin.

Roof: Boss encounter. Unbeatable unless you "solved" the adventure first. Potential plot hole. A nasty curse that condemns the party to find a solution. (It's not a plot hook since you make them do it...)

A side note (*)

One thing I mentioned is that the placement of the stairs is an issue. Why? Because it makes it likely the players go up first. But in order to resolve the adventure, they need to go down first. This leads them towards two encounters they can only beat if they have found what lies below:

The wight can only be beaten with a weapon of solid silver. Guess where one is? Far end of ground floor. The least likely location to be explored at all.

The boss can only be beaten by a hidden sword. While it is hidden "en route" you're likely only to really look for it only if you read the book in the basement.

Unlike in D&D, having an unbeatable encounter is not that big an issue if you telegraph it right. But heavily telegraph it, you should! And backtracking is not necessarily a bad thing.

One thing, though: What hints do players have that silver beats the wight? Oops. Well, trying stuff you found is valid.

Conveying information

So, what we have here is a good story with issues in how it is presented to you. You basically learn it as the players might - if they pick "the right order." (Did I mention the stairs to the basement are somewhat HIDDEN??)

The map is the structure of presentation. Why is that an issue?

First of all, you'll probably read the adventure twice to actually understand how to run it. You're basically constructing the opening part of a Goodman Games adventure yourself.

Paragraphs with room details now double as exposition, repeat information, talk about loot, encounters, bad plot hooks - your pick.

How much easier to give the structure of solving / running the adventure first and then reference it? Leaves space for all the other stuff.

Other complaints

Why did I say the plot hooks are bad? What does this tell you?

Four out of five say simply "slightly different word for a dungeon" and nothing more. Two are tombs of regents. One begs an actual question - what is a "dragon prince?" What's his actual relation to dragons? Names themselves mean nothing.

It is left to you to figure out what could be possibly important about the library. (Given the ending of the adventure, the party might actually want to visit a library, though.)

In order to be a good plot hook a little more is needed than given it a character / place name ("Cal Dor", "Osarik", "Gwenyan"). There's no specific motivation given to go there except "possibly full of loot." And the worst thing: When players ask for more information - since they are holding a damn book - you have nothing to follow up with. Not even a hint to the location ("up north beyond the forests of Rhubarb").

The other thing is a potential plot hole. Nowhere is it mentioned why the boss is only vulnerable to magical weapons and couldn't just have jumped off a cliff, for example. (It's not the fact he's possessed, because the possession only has an effect when it is actually active. And it has no such effect on the players when transferred to them.)

Another plot hole: How did Leorik survive a generation in the vault? He didn't have food. And even if that's not an issue, how did he resist the possession for that long given how it is described in other parts of the adventure?

But he knew he could only stave off the spirit for so long. Maybe weeks. Maybe months, Maybe years.

(from: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/526613/the-tower-of-leorik-the-bold)

And a final plothole: Why are you fighting Leorik if he wants to die? Either he is possessed the whole encounter and hence will resist the players and the magic of the sword will work on him all the time, or he will offer himself willingly from all said before. (I will run the latter version, maybe start with one round of fight and then roll for each round to see which version of Leorik we get given the described chances.)

Then there is the aftermath. Cool idea that the party might want to sell the tower off, most player wouldn't even think about it. (Especially given how the locals feel about Leorik, supposedly.)

Unfortunately the numbers given make no sense:

20,000 gold for selling the thing at most. Which, according to the description, the players will never see. (Or not until way later, probably when convenient for the campaign.)

12,000 gold a month for maintaining and repairing it. I could understand a one-time cost for repairs, but given the cost of services in the main book, this is just plain bogus.

Funnily enough, Arion Games published something that could have helped here: the "Heroes Companion". It comes up with sensible numbers for both in its chapters on "Holdings". Guess what? 16,000 gold buy a major castle (not just a poorly defensible tower which doesn't even count as a small castle) and 640 gold is the monthly maintenance.

But that's not the point here, is it? The players are not meant to end up with the money, anyway. Or the tower, that is. Why not write that? The prices make this clearly undesirable. The thing with the reward could be resolved eventually, though. But all in all it's a bit like trolling the players.

Speaking of trolling. It is highly likely that several characters end up with a curse that requires a small campaign or adventure path of its own to resolve. Not sure how I feel about it. It's legit, though a bit heavy-handed, too. I mean, as player you must eventually do it or lose the character (and unleash evil back on the world). It also begs the question: Is this necromancer an endless scourge on this world? As described he spreads like a virus, but the conditions of overcoming him are tough.

In spite of all I said, this is a serviceable adventure that has enough meat on its bones to tell a good story and provide a good, varied experience to players:

There's an introductory roleplaying bit (the inn) which you can use to convey exposition organically through rumors and pub talk.

You could enlist an NPC to help you which might trigger more RP opportunities. (Unfortunately motivations of players and NPC might clash - good for RP drama, bad for player goals.)

A bit of wilderness wandering for variety on the way to the dungeon. I made use of the table to warn players of a dangerous bear as part of the rumors.

A dungeon that in general has a good balance between rewarding exploration and being thorough in general, and some cost for doing so.

A memorable story and finale.

Two potential follow-ups: What do with the tower? How to get rid of the curse?

I'm currently running a premade adventure for my group called "The Tower of Leorik the Bold". In general, it's an okay adventure - an intro with some roleplaying opportunities, a short trek to the dungeon, and a storied dungeon to explore. Unlike "The Weird Wood" this has a clear structure and way to be run without relying on GM fiat to decide what to run next.

The devil is in the details.

There is a major school in the OSR, the Old School Revival/Renaissance, that thinks that Dungeons & Dragons was meant to be a game of wits, not mere dice rolls, and this is implied (not stated) through the game itself:

Combat awards almost no XP, treasure awards almost all of it.

Characters are fragile and rolling dice often resulted in failure.

Published modules were deadly and full of traps that could be avoided with some good thinking.

So, some people posited that the way they used to play the game was how the game was meant to be played:

You exercise caution and plan your every move,

Describe your actions in a way no rolling dice was required because success was guaranteed, and

Avoid combat where possible and go for treasure instead.

This is indeed a valid way to play the game, especially if you're playing the original modules published for early D&D.

Other people have claimed that's not how they played the game. Since almost no published material existed, or even published material suggested you roll your own ("Keep on the Borderlands", "Temple of Elemental Evil"), they did just that. Characters died and surviving to see an elf reach level 2 was a reason to be excited. (A style of play closer to Dungeon Crawl Classics, if you think about it.)

In fact, I would say, the properties of early D&D are mostly accidental, especially in the way they came together, and hence nobody wrote down a reason for it:

Early published modules were often tournament modules recycled for that purpose, so they were meant to be a deliberate, deadly contest with measurable progress.

Characters were fragile because nobody had any experience with a game design different from wargaming where units were disposable.

Well-designed traps and similar things may have also been a result of the people designing these things just loving what they do and putting lots of thought into it.

The game was underdefined because nobody knew how to design a roleplaying game to begin with.

Personally, I think we're having a case of "death of the author" here where people project more into a work than it actually contained by the author's intention.

Having said that, however, there's a lot to be said for applying some of these ideas into your own adventure design in order for them to be good (dungeon) adventures.

In comes Advanced Fighting Fantasy...

Now, what might be implied in the design of AFF?

Characters are much more resilient and capable to begin with.

They have further protection through the LUCK mechanic.

There's a unified resolution mechanic that allows most situations to be handled by either a simple, an opposed, or a LUCK test.

Combat awards no XP, surviving an adventure does, so the key things rewarded are success and survival.

The basic life of an adventurer burns through a fair amount of gold, so getting gold is a necessity to remain prepared.

So, in principle this kind of game can accommodate a different kind of play where you risk more and roll more.

And sadly, at times it does.

"The Tower of Leorik the Bold" features several traps, and one is especially tricky. It's basically described like this:

(from: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/526613/the-tower-of-leorik-the-bold)

Several things to observe here:

Many starting characters in AFF have less than 12 STAMINA at the beginning and are at the risk of dying here. (Dropping to 0 is unconscious and slowly bleeding out, and -4 is dead.)

Saving only reduces harm but does not prevent falling in (like a last moment change of balance preventing falling in).

Very little is said about size and working of the trap (but enough to probably fill in missing details yourself).

By the way, the trap as presented is not an artifact of the adventure, but a slight variation of the pit trap presented in the core rulebook. The adventure fails to mention a Dodge special SKILL check is allowed also. (The trap as presented is different from the core rules where a LUCK check avoids the trap instead of reducing damage. But in the core rules the pit always does 2d6 damage...)

The core rules also define a way to find traps by rolling. So, if you want to roll-play the situation, a Awareness or Trap Knowledge special SKILL check is allowed. The game has no real classes as such, so anybody can try and if you want to be good at it, buy the special skill and/or a talent to match (like "Hawkeye" or "Trapmaster").

What I would do

(from: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/186396/aff-advanced-fighting-fantasy-2nd-ed)

Personally, I don't like rolling for my players. So I would generally have them make a roll, and tell me the result and their special SKILL rating they want to use. In other words, I don't tell them the modifier or if they succeeded, they just know how well they did in general and can decide if they want to rely on it.

(Players can finicky about "their rolls" and what dice are being used. If I would always play in-person, I would let them put their dice in a cup, roll them, but only I get to peek at the result.)

In principle, this "secret modifier" could be further affected by the players mentioning what they would try to do. Then the GM can decide what the chances are and also avoid the roll if an action has a sure-fire way of succeeding.

In no way will you ever get the OSR school style of play here, though. If you have a way of disarming traps comparably reliably by a SKILL check once detected, only very poorly skilled parties would ever chose to rely on the "I avoid the roll by describing precise actions" method.

It's a bit of a loss, really, depending on how you want to play. The style of play mentioned by some proponents of the OSR does have a certain "game of wits" charm, yet it also leads to a paranoid style of play where you inch through a dungeon at times. Then the GM is given the advice to roll random encounters to "keep them on their toes..."

It also requires module authors to plan for this style of play, making encounters avoidable or specifying traps in detail. (Adventures designed for OSR systems wildly vary in their attention to such details.)

One thing that makes this adventure old school in another way is the kind of design it exposes. No answer is given as to why the trap is there and how the owner of the place circumvented it when needed, so when my player asked for it, I was drawing a blank.

The whole scene plays more like an 1980s computer RPG where you get a saving throw or had your "Detect Trap" spell cast or you take damage, and traps never needed justification in any sense.

Which is another kind of Old School, really. The one where you roll up dungeon rooms and a dragon is stuck in a room the size of itself. People played like that, too, rolling up dungeons and having their players romp through them. Dungeon rooms were either random or mini-adventures, depending on who your GM was.

You could argue this dungeon, however, is in general a designed and storied one, so the trap seems quite a bit... random. Adding in traps like sprinkling powdered sugar over a cake at the end.

In general, the core rules of AFF handle traps not a lot different than D&D 5e might, except it doesn't really need to balance them that much against the player "level" (or tier) in comparison. Characters get better but in a different way than the "hit point explosion" of D&D. A character maxed out at 24 STAMINA is still vulnerable, after all.

So, I've been prepping to run a game for my group in Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2nd Edition (AFF), and while in general a well-rounded, robust game, the books sure do have issues I want to mention.

This is likely a part one of an ongoing series as I deal with the quirks of the system.

(Also have a look at my review for one of the published short adventures.)

Let's start with some major blunders.

Combat

The game has a simple action economy, but fails to describe it. The few people posting on it on the internet seem to have noticed, too, because it was one of the few questions I got answers for.

Basically, you can take one action - shoot a missile, cast a spell, or attack in melee, or focus on defense. This is implied by the rules but not spelled out, so the question does arise if you can do several of these things in a combat round.

You're also half on your own to figure out how combat works, even though the rules do fit well together. It is described how many attacks monsters get and that a monster can use only one of its attacks on one player character. It is also described that if a player is in melee with multiple monsters, they can do damage to only the one they designated to attack. If they beat the total of the other combatants, they don't damage.

If you stick it all together, you do get a really robust and usable system:

You can only do damage to one opponent once in melee. (A monster can do damage to different opponents if it has more than one attack.) If a combatant is fighting in melee, still has an attack left, and beats the other's total, they do damage. If there's a draw, you lose one attack, anyway. This even works if one side has used up their attacks, in which case they can be attacked but can do no damage if they win the opposed test. Distribute monsters to players before resolving each melee separately.

It would be a lot easier for the GM to grasp if it was spelled out, but you can piece this together yourself.

If the GM happens to roll a critical against the players, it gets funny: Being hit by a critical also reduce your SKILL by 1 until healed. How do you heal criticals? Here wording is wonky. It says "major wounds" heal at 1 SKILL point per week. (And no magic healing, it seems.) Since criticals seems to be the only thing dealing SKILL damage in the core rules, that's probably what they meant. Too bad, "major wounds" are mentioned nowhere else in the rulebook. (Thanks to my player for pointing it out.)

As you might notice or conclude, many of my complaints should have been spotted by an editor. It is my impression, that the game had some basic editing when it comes to text, but much less for rules consistency and wording. It keeps repeating certain rules over and over, quite redundantly so, but omits how other things actually work, work together, or fails to use words consistently.

It's a Pen & Paper

When you run the game you will notice you flip pages a lot, a table here, a table there. Helpfully, the tables have been repeated in a section at the end (as a player pointed out). Would have been great to put in a separate document or on a GM Screen. In fact, this game would probably massively benefit from a well-rounded GM screen - its rules core is tight enough that putting the tables in a sensible fashion will actually be useful. Alas, there is neither.

So you end up printing the tables, either to paper or PDF (I did the latter, the game is online).

Speaking of printing. We found an error in one of the pregens. Good luck finding the errata (which do mention this) - they are not included in your DriveThru files and hard to find.

Even more annoying is that they have never been updated into the PDF. If you really feel there should be a file representing a printing, include two files. DriveThruRPG won't charge you rent for putting more files...

The same goes for the pregen characters. They are plastered into the book in sideways format. If you have the printed book and xerox them, fine. If you print from the book PDF, fine. But it took me using a PDF editing tool to extract them and share them with my players directly for screen reading. (Because you need to rotate them - something you could also leave to your players. PDF readers should support it...)

This is so common with AFF that I have a feeling that there is a certain discomfort with digital tools involved. There are pretty much as many files as went to print in the end. That's it.

Where this gets beyond ridiculous is with the monster book, "Out of the Pit". Here you have a book sold as part of the AFF line, listing hundreds of the most common monsters, lovingly taken from the Fighting Fantasy books.

You will soon notice that this is a reprint and these are indeed taken from the original FF books. Because they lack AFF stats. Which was a big bummer, initially. There are two more books, all new issues designed for AFF with new monsters, but the classics from the 1st book aren't repeated. Bummer, right?

Actually, no.

The missing information is in the core book. In a long table listing all monsters from "Out of the Pit", adding the missing stats. (Phew.)

Why not include this table as a separate PDF with the "Out of the Pit" book download?!?

Seriously.

Who wants to cross-reference all the time between the appendix of one book and another. I can understand that reformatting and editing the other book would have been a major hassle, fair enough. This is a small project compared even to most OSR releases. But spreading the information between two books is annoying enough. Repeat the information in its own PDF, please.

Get me some monsters, stat!

The monster stat format is simple, yet inconsistently handled.

This is the description for a wolf from "Out of the Pit":

This is the missing information from the core rules (weapon, armor, damage modifier):

These are the wolf stats from "The Tower of Leorik the Bold":

What the hell is "?" supposed to mean?!? Look it up yourself??

Whereas in the adventure "The Weird Wood", a wolf is described like this:

The stronger bite might be due to corruption, that's not my issue. My issue is that most of the monsters feature no armor entry. But wait, some do:

That's from the same adventure (and same page!!), begging the question whether there is a difference between omitting a stat and mentioning it as none...

Yes, editing... Line editing, rules editing. It is funny that the chosen font is rather consistent (but not the italicization), but the stat format is not.

Minimal stats: Name, SKILL, STAMINA, Attacks, Weapon, Armour, Special, Damage Modifier.

Optional, but important: Number.

Truly informational: Habitat, Type, Reaction, Intelligence.

The core rule book also mentions a "damage modifier" separate from the Special. This is useful, especially for simple lists, but apparently not done by anybody else or even for the sample monsters in the core book itself. Sigh.

I was looking for a sample adventure to run for Advanced Fighting Fantasy (2e, AFF from here on), and came across "The Weird Wood". It seemed like a reasonable choice, having two 5 star ratings. Little did I know...

I had just read up on AFF, and I like the system in general. As with many old school systems, rules organization over all can be improved, but the system itself is solid and should be fun to run. I just needed some example adventure to bring it to life.

After buying the adventure, I notice one thing immediately: The back story is way too long. It's two long columns (= 1 full page) of read-out text. And quite frankly, it needs to be cut down and edited, because most of it is just plain unnecessary (or maybe hides real info among the redundant). The real story is that two wicked brothers warred over who gets to keep the kingdom, and they and their armies died due to having been tricked into using cursed swords (the leaders, that is), and now the forest has become dark and corrupted.

It's poorly motivated why the players would actually go in and solve this. The only time treasure is mentioned, it is a measly amount. Comparing the prices in the core book for a day's food rations, the 2d6 gold pieces they may find here and there may just cover the cost of prepping for adventure, if even that. (You would want to eat one provision per adventuring day to avoid losing stamina to hunger, and maybe a second, depending, as it is an easy way to get stamina back.)

So, I guess it's just for XP and glory.

The adventure has so many issues (from my point of view), it's astounding. Where to start...

Good Grief...

First of all, it's basically all combat. You see, no map is included - it's not a hex crawl, point crawl, or anything else to mimic a notion of choice, if only where to go next. It's basically a string of combats with almost no exploration. You basically roll on tables to determine every 10 minutes of game time to see what happens. 5 out of 6 times, that's combat - else nothing. And if combat happened, there's 1 in 6 chance that it is followed by more combat. Neat!

Then, there's nothing connecting adventure elements. It literally has no structure. Having foregone the idea of a map or dungeon structure for the adventure, there's almost no guidance when to put stuff. The GM can mention "mounds" between the trees whenever they feel like it, I guess. Finding the more important "barrows" is described to happen "after a bit of wandering"...

So, no progress tracker, no real sequence of events, and no decision to make. Just keep fighting combat encounters until the GM decides to release you from purgatory and let you find what you need. And going in only serves to tell them that this is not the solution, keep hiking.

Now they find, also at random (through GM fiat), the willow where the swords are hidden. This is something they are supposed to remember from the overlong intro, but I bet that most players will find it significant because the GM is mentioning and describing it. Now they have the swords.

Now find each of the mounds again. Aaaand - it's a random chance whether they give the right brother the respective blade. There's no decision, no clue to avoid effing up. It's literally 50/50, roll for it. If they fail their roll, they are punished by having to retrieve the wrong sword before proceeding while battling an invincible encounter.

At the end, the players are trapped in the climactic battle that ends... at some point. Again, without any progress tracker, the GM decides when to describe the final scene. The adventure ends, no reward is given. What is this... fricking "Lamentations of the Flame Princess"?

I mean, AFF awards no combat XP. So the amount of combat encounters is off-putting to say the least.

Also: Why is the solution the same as what originally happened? The two brothers succumbed to their cursed swords, and eventually everybody rose again. Now give them the same two swords, leading to the same battle, and this is the solution... how?

How to do this better (hopefully)

One of the ways to run an adventure like this is a point crawl. Create a series of locations, each with their own description, like it is a "point and click" adventure computer game. Each scene/screen is distinct enough to be told apart.

For example:

The Eaves of the Forest,

the Barrows (one for each),

the Mounds,

the Willow,

and maybe one or two more for flavor.

Actually, it could be even more than flavor. Let players discover part of the story through clues, not an exposition dump. A long-dead soldier carrying a half-rotten letter (handout) in a waxed leather pouch. Something carved into a tree. Just spread it out over your "map."

Your players will likely not question the premise/ending too much, even though it is a bit of a plot hole. You probably don't need to fix that.

A random encounter can be rolled every time the players travel from one location to another.

And each barrow contains some form of clue to allow players who ask about their surroundings to identify which sword belongs to whom. And if they fail to do that, ask them which they give - you know which barrow is which, the players had to chose which point in the crawl to travel to - and then you just hand them their well-deserved result.

The amount of combat is now predicated on how long they need to figure the locations out - and a bit on luck dependent on the order in which they first traverse the forest.

You probably also want to thin the encounter table a bit. Take a bigger die or roll 1d6 to determine the chance of an encounter (maybe 1-3) and then a separate roll for the encounter (and instead of nothing happening and a separate roll, add the damn trees into the original table).

As for the climactic battle - add a progress tracker. Make it a fixed number of rounds and run the same already logic given in the adventure.

Finally, make the GM's life a bit easier: When describing the mounds earlier, the adventure gave it's only hint for treasure to be found. Either give an amount the GM can roll for what they find on the dead corpses or in the mounds they rose from (or both). Also, how about something else that can be looted from the brothers? After all, before they were invincible for plot reasons. Why not hand out something nice to make up for that?

I was trying to assess whether I should be playing "Daggerheart", but I was using this review for it, which half of the time talked about something else. At length.

When it was commenting about D&D 5th edition I found this gem:

If you don’t use encumbrance, rations, ammunition, spell components, and donning/doffing rules, of course the combats are going to be weightless and tedious. Of course the game will lack a significant feeling of exploration. You’ve just surgically removed all of the mechanics that would have supported that feeling.

(from: https://gamingtrend.com/reviews/daggerheart-review-more-than-a-heartbreaker/)

Now that's some sizable amount of ... bull.

Which one of these conveys a "significant feeling of exploration?" Tracking rations??? If you're thinking about tracking rations and encumbrance, some significant contributions here happen only early in the game, after which characters can conjure and forage food easily without much challenge, for example. (I've seen players argue their characters would eat neutral-tasting summoned sludge all day because the rules allow it. Proving that rules do not a character make.)

Rations, ammunition, light sources... all of these matters in terms of resources largely in early game, before the uneven economy of 5e drowns the characters in gold with no obvious sinks for it. (Unlike 3e, which constantly drains the characters' coffers.)

The real resource usage game of 5e is not rations, or what you can carry. It is spells slots and limited use powers and planning your short rests and healing dice, all of which have major impact on the party's ability to deal damage or sustain damage - or even do significant exploration (flying, breathing under water, truesight, etc) or puzzle solving (speak with dead, all of the above, etc).

Why do so many players fudge ammunition, encumbrance, rations, etc? Because they're neither meaningful nor fun. Insisting (falsely!) that these matter for game aspects like exploration is just silly.

If it really mattered...

Other games, old school or new school, that actually get into dungeon exploration often provide different rules... for everything mentioned. Significant, helpful equipment will occupy limited slots. Light sources are not for free (cantrips, anyone?) and their use might be tracked in some form that matters at the table, be it actual play time (= real time) or through a number of game turns - which will be visibly tracked by a marker.

Stuff like this forces choices or makes the party hurry to reach their goals, increasing suspense, rewarding choices (or bemoaning bad ones) and prep. Players who love to packrat can really get their "always prepared" / "deep pockets" mojo going. But why would they in 5e? Often there is no incentive.

In 0e/1e (original Dungeons & Dragons and AD&D), combat was unrewarding and often punishing, so a whole class of players avoided it as much as they could. Only treasure really mattered. And was the main source of XP. In fact so much so, they kept that for the Gold Box computer game adaptations.

But since AD&D 2e, combat is directly rewarded with higher XP values, until it has become the main generator for advancement (unless you replace it with GM Fiat milestone rewards). Why would you bring items like caltrops along? 5e parties almost never run, and if they do, they usually die, anyway. (I paraphrase.)

Encumbrance, in turn is a clunky thing that completely omits how bulky something is (cue fight with rules lawyer) and is handled in units so small, you might better have a spreadsheet ready to do it. (Actually, some character sheets do this automatically, turning them into simple spreadsheets, considering.) Never a sign of good game design.

But you know, that's beside the point. How many items can characters in 5e actually buy that are really useful? Healing is hand-waved by taking short breaks and spells, so don't need to carry anything for it. There isn't really much incentive to carry much beside armor, weapons, ammunition, a bedroll, and some minor items. Encumbrance really only matters when you lug stuff out of the dungeon, and then it can become a real pain in the ass, considering. But if you pull "the treasure is heavy" too often, you will be short of the key resource of the game - players.

And don't get me started about spell components!

3... 2... 1...

Anyway, spell components have next to nothing to do with exploration itself. Almost none are consumed or tracked, thanks to the component pouch and similar replacements. The components that are tracked are actually one of the few actual resource sinks of the game, which can put your wizard in a tight spot. (Players are more willing to shell out for the cleric since the benefit for them is direct, giving money to the wizard makes the wizard look good - and who wants that?)

Beyond being a minor irritation ("I have to spend money to cast this!") or an early obstacle ("Is there a gem worth 100 gold in the loot?!?"), spell components don't matter (and aren't meant to be more than flavor) unless you're in an exceptional situation. You're a prisoner and they took your stuff. Which spells can you cast with hands bound or with the stuff at hand? (I've been there, for the want of an iron nail...)

And finally, donning/doffing...

Big breath... good grief!

Use in small amounts

So, basically you're telling me that 5e combat is tedious because people don't use rules that severely diminish their fighting capability.

Imagine a combat where..

the archer type has no arrows left,

the wizard can't fire most of his spells because lack of components,

the party is exhausted for lack of food, and

the main fighters wear no armor because they doffed it for camp, but combat happened anyway.

Sounds like fun in a bun, right? Only pull this shit if you want a TPK, because this completely messes up the game balance. It's special, not intended. What CR can the party handle if they are at a severe disadvantage? Not written.

All of the rules referenced above are minor impediments and matter mostly at gross neglect or in somewhat extreme circumstances. And since so little care was given designing them or making them easier to track or central to the game, it's good that they aren't.

Mixing it up a bit by taking these serious can be fun. But D&D is already a resource management game at heart. Making it more of it with smaller sub-systems of suboptimal design doesn't increase the fun of it. It increases - resource tracking!! Is this Accountants & Adding-up? In a game like 5e that actually does not really have the notion of an actual game economy? (Money sources and sinks in a rough balance.)

Tedious tracking does not decrease combat tedium.

You can use these things occasionally, in small amounts, to put the players on the spot or make them deal with them, but 5e isn't designed to deal with them all the time and be any fun at all.

But it’s also partially because players ignore important rules, refuse to learn the rules, and spend time having to figure out and relearn aspects of their character or the combat encounter that they should already be aware of.[...] As soon as anyone goes “uh is that a move action or a main action? Let’s see, it’s in the combat section, okay [page flips]…” I have lost interest, and you are unlikely to get me back. 

(Same article.)

So, we already have a problem with tracking major rules, and even well-designed rules (like the action economy) can become tedious unless the players and GM know their stuff. If you want to have fun with 5e, ignore the original quote about how lack of minor resource tracking makes the game tedious and consider your players.

I'm currently replaying the shooter RPG "The Outer Worlds", something which I actually reviewed at length before. And something bugged me, finishing one of the many, many quests on Monarch...

The Halcyon system/colony has a few habitable places, primarily the Earth-like Terra 2 (the third planet) and Terra 1 / Monarch, a habitable moon orbiting Olympus, the gas giant fourth planet.

Terra 1 has a problem. After settling and further terraforming it, the colony got into trouble with extremely aggressive native lifeforms mutating and endangering the colony. The corporate board, the governing council of Halcyon, decided to cut losses and abandon Terra 1. Except one corporation, MSI, decided to pull a fast one and stay - in order to claim sole ownership of the whole moon due to a legal loophole. They renamed the moon Monarch after themselves, but the other board companies got pissed, suspended MSI, and spread propaganda to make Monarch seem uninhabitable and hide the existence of the colony from most people in the system, while also blockading the moon with gunships.

Pretty much everyone on Monarch you meet tells you how dangerous the place is. The problem is right in your face - and everyone's, apparently.

All in name of the message

And then, in an abandoned research outpost, you find a terminal entry talking about how lowering oxygen content would actually kill off the dangerous wildlife. Read it here.

This is sort off an offhand joke. You see, the game jokes around mostly with its heavy-handed anti-capitalist message. How corporate greed prevents sane decisions, and kills people in the Halcyon colony. And this logged message exchange fits right in that.

Except they completely dropped the ball with it.

Think about it.

This is the one fact that in the right hands could completely transform the problem everybody has. And nothing comes of it!

Now, if you were just a lowly grunt with no connections, fine. But at this point you're likely in bed with MSI already and its current local executive, Sanjar. You have somebody who could conceivably make use of this information.

The gun must fire

Nobody thought of this when writing that log. It doesn't trigger a quest, it will not change the world. In other words, your ability to do anything with it is completely taken away by the writer's obliviousness to what they've just done.

So, if you put information in the players' hands think about that. Might this alter my setting fundamentally? Would this, in the right hands, become a powerful lever to change the world? Could my players conceivably get this information to a place or person where it truly matters?

I'm a collector of the original Buck Rogers role-playing game, about which I wrote early on. A game of uneven quality, but frankly with a brilliant core at its center. I loved the boxed set, even though it puzzled me at times. It's a great example of turning anything into a setting sandbox for players to go wild in. As such, it's actually great.

The accompanying novels are another matter entirely...

In a land far, far away..?

The second Buck Rogers computer game, while mostly "more of the same" compared to the ingenious first one, had some interesting elements in it.

The entry to the late game is that you leave the inner solar system behind and go on this journey out of your control to the outer solar system on this big bio-ship. The journey is made out to be this big transition between two different worlds - a known, familiar one and the Outer Worlds, as the box would name them. Jupiter is the closest of these distant giants and both Jupiter and Saturn constitute their own microcosms, their moons acting as different locales as mostly planets do in the Inner Worlds. They always intrigued me.

Contrast this with "Genesis Web", the first book in the last trilogy. The book starts out with an interesting prospect - it's set in the "Jovian Trojans." Jupiter, as a planet, clears its own path of other projects, but as it does so, it retains two clouds of smaller objects - the Trojans in front of it and the Greeks at its back, named such because Greeks then eternally chase the Trojans. So the Jovian Trojans are a cloud of objects on Jupiter's orbit.

This would naturally make for a distant and isolated setting, mysterious and lonely, for hidden research bases. It would, but the book makes nothing of it!

A little math

The book in fact notes that people go back from the Jovian Trojans and Mars (to interact with the omnipresent RAM conglomerate) several times in the book like it's a day-to-day thing. Nothing special.

Talk about wasting the magic.

I unpacked the box to see which had the more realistic approach - the computer game or "Genesis Web". The game actually doesn't help directly... it only maps the inner planets. But! It gives us a scale of the map of 1 inch / 33 million miles. It also gives us a fuel-to-distance calculator. At 20 units of fuel burn, you get an inch per day. These rates halve at 10 and double at 40.

Looking at the setting book, we can somewhat infer what is needed to get from Mars to Jupiter - the closest of the Inner Planets. And also the riskiest for players, but the differences are minimal, for game purposes.

Let's simplify. Mars is 140 million miles in orbit, Jupiter 480. This puts their minimal distance at 340 and their maximum at 620 (in opposition), using the values from the setting book. So we can say at 33 million miles per day that a journey from Mars to Jupiter would take roughly 10 days when burning 20 units of fuel per day, and 20 when burning only 10, and only if Mars and Jupiter are closest. This becomes a whooping 19 to 38 days if in opposition.

That's not your planetary neighborhood or something you should just brush off as with a sentence or two. This is a major journey.

Distance matters

The trip to the Outer Worlds is then a major undertaking. Your starting point matters, your starting time matters. It makes in average a difference of around 10 days when you travel, including all the resources involved. All things considered, you won't do it on a whim and without planning.

Traveling in-game would probably be a decision not taken lightly and under the assumption you would be there quite a long time. And Jupiter and Saturn each pose its own choice! You would be isolated, rely on different resources, resources that are local. Your current reputation might be left behind and you might build a new one. This is traversing between micro-settings, almost like continents or into an unknown realm in a fantasy game.

Effectively, to a degree, you start over. Maybe not from square one. But all your connections, most or all of your friends, your known allies, they're left behind. You take risks with new contacts, unknown faces. You go to new places. For a GM, that's a chance. Keeps your players on their toes, and you go back to enjoy a bit the unknown together.

Location should matter, too

And that's why "The Genesis Web" drops the ball so hard. Nothing in it screams "Jovian Trojans." Any rock in the asteroid belt would have done just the same. In fact, that's exactly how the locale is treated. Except nothing is exactly nearby. No trips to nearby Jupiter or its mysteries, either. Mars is mentioned over and over, and the omnipresence of RAM. Everybody and their dog knows where Wydlin Corporation is doing their secret project.

In other words: The location is completely wasted. Not even the sense of isolation is played much upon. The station seems more like an office building somewhere in the distant countryside. There's no real sense of mystery as we look over the shoulders of everyone, all the time. The original "Power Play" series books accompanying the computer games, in contrast, are built to be mysteries following a trail. Not this book.

The lesson to take away from here: If you drag your crew, party, or outfit to a distant, out-of-place location, don't serve up the usual. Make location matter. Make the remoteness a factor. Put them back to square one, make them do with limited resources and without known allies. Put surprises in there, the unusual, even a new setting secret, something outright unexpected or maybe impossible.

Make it matter.

Nobody wants to go to the end of the known world to do yet another run-of-the-mill dungeon. Use the location to evoke an image.

If you play "The One Ring", you don't go into the fallen lands of Erebor or Angmar on day 1. You dick around in known lands, just a bit off the beaten trail. A remote and lost kingdom should stand out - be more arduous, challenging, remote - and something you couldn't have tackled on day 1. Let the location add to the challenge and justify it.

Distance then becomes a measure of danger and difficulty, as it well would be. An expedition needs to be planned. Resources spent. A plan is needed. From planning to execution, challenges should arise or some sort of expense or compromise forced.

Kickstarter was greeted with great enthusiasm especially by the indie and 3rd party publisher community initially. Suddenly you had a way to collect money to make exciting things.

Then a good number of projects actually failed to deliver anything. From my point of view, back in the day scamming wasn't the cause. Mostly it was just that many people new to publishing overestimated their own capabilities or their ability to deliver. In some cases, especially when it came to third party publishers, the licensor stepped in to protect the brand.

All was not well, but from my point of view, most still was.

Still, you could hit a few projects, collecting lots of money, which would then never deliver. Or deliver very little and then go silent. Enticing projects as such, promising to deliver lots of goodies on long-dead game lines people had once fallen in love with. Hard to resist!

I came into KS a bit after the initial rush, and I must say, besides pumping a lot of my money into crowdfunding, looking at the early lessons of others (as published on social media at the time, especially the now-defunct RPG discussion heaven Google+) and being also lucky, helped.

Some statistics, anecdotical, of course

I started getting lured into Kickstarter around fall 2012. In the time up until now I have backed 332 projects, mostly indies and third party products, but also some quite big publisher preorders.

Out of these 332 projects (only counting those that funded), I identified 11 problem projects that failed to deliver so far and some of them will likely not until the end of time. So, so far up to 96.7% of projects I would deem as delivered or sure to deliver (the 332 contain some recent pledges).

Let's look at those duds:

There's 3 'zine projects. So basically small, indie products that cost almost nothing. Most of those projects still delivered, but these three stopped updating up to four years ago. (Still amazed how mad people can get over an amount of 3-4$ in the comment sections of those failed projects.)

There are two full-priced (double-digit pledge) indie projects that petered out and didn't deliver.

Another cheap indie by a person I've known and followed for a while had a rewrite mid-project and has been stuck in art without updates since last year. Not promising but might revive.

Another project is horribly, horribly late (4 years by now) but I like this creator's output and the updates are still coming and they just finished another project, so this one is in all likelihood not a dud. Just a test of patience.

I really don't want to call out indies, though. But here's a few I'd like to name:

"City State of the Invincible Overlord": Judges Guild products were originally big campaign settings from the really early time of gaming. Their reissue projects have seen massive failures to deliver, and so has this one. Scandals surrounded the project. Partially extant since 2014. IIRC, even an indie publisher stepped in to partially deliver to protect his own brand.

"Distant Realms, a guide to the land of Leviathan": By now in its 9th year of being overdue, this project is notorious for its many updates of why the dog ate their homework, how the project was handed over from people that got money to people who do it out of a sense of obligation to people who basically just seem to write updates when they should give a damn refund. If you want an education in how to write bad excuses for not doing one's job, look to this project's updates. The chutzpah of some updates is quite impressive. And this publisher had many projects. They were also rude and unhelpful when contacted, even before this mess.

Delta Green hardcovers (two projects): Delivery promised for 2016 and 2019, respectively. I love Delta Green, and they did these campaigns promising lots of hardcovers. This was a "might not come again" thing - at least for the first one. The second one was on me. Now, I'm not overly unhappy with this one in spite of having spent hundreds of dollars on them. Thing is, they're delivering good stuff, beautiful stuff. But. So. Slow. We will get our shiny things, it's been trickling in. But I wonder how many people would have backed if they'd known their rewards would take almost ten years to deliver. I think that's worth calling out.

What to look out for

First of all, as Kickstarter makes you confirm, deliveries aren't guaranteed. That certainly covers their liability but helps us backers very little.

In general, look for these signs in KS projects:

Good: The project text has been already written as a final draft (not covering stretch goals). Look for projects that basically want to fund art and print.

Bad: Projects that are not written yet often overrun their time table terribly. Writing is very unpredictable. I had projects where I got updates for years about their writing progress, sometimes with elaborate tables and progress bars to prove they're still going. Chances are, you won't care anymore when they deliver.

Good: A known publisher with a good track record of delivering stuff. (There are known publishers that have a sordid record for delivering on their crowdfundings, so better check.)

Bad: An unknown or indie publisher who seeks funding for a whole line of books. They almost always vanish at some point, leaving you with less than you backed, too late, too little.

Good: A small project (one book, zine) with a limited scope. Very likely this publisher has a plan and can keep to it.

Bad: Projects with endless stretch goals. Typically this entices more backers, like a pyramid scheme, but makes project failure or partial delivery very likely. Even if delivered - how likely is it that the book #7 is still of good quality? Notable exception: Modiphiüs! They started really small (I even did some proofreading for them back in the early days), got some big projects funded, and they delivered everything. Talk about bucking the trend!

Bad: Reviving a long-dead (possibly old school) game line as an indie publisher, even if known people from back in the day are involved. This does seem unfair, because some of these have delivered top-notch products, but some really high profile failures cluster here. This includes often offerings of shiny new books for projects from earlier editions of D&D, things people remember fondly even from 3e which has been old enough now to trigger nostalgia in adults with spending money for quite a while.

Good: Zine projects! Yes, some of them will fail, but you get crazy and interesting ideas for a few bucks, so failure won't really hurt much in comparison.

Bad: Never trust a shiny project page with lots of art and stretch goals. Look for other signs this will work out, everything else is smoke and mirrors.

Hard to predict: The project owner is the main or only artist of the project. Some of these projects may turn out fantastic, but these are very likely to get overwhelmed as well (and then not deliver).

Good: The project owner has delivered similar size projects before. They either delivered similar projects through known RPG selling sites, or, if through crowdfunding, they not only delivered similar things but within a reasonable time frame.

Bad: One person projects. Yes, there are some amazing project creators out there who deliver like clockwork. But if it hinges on one person, be prepared for them to fall sick and all the other things that just happen to humans. It's simply riskier, so just be aware of that.

So, given how much time I spent on the Gold Box games lately, I wanted to share some notes on the games, maybe also some relevant bits.

Pool of Radiance

Overall style: Mega Dungeon and Sandbox.

Overland Map: Traverse on grid, random and hidden locations

Quirk: Extensive level scaling which ups the challenge, especially in the beginning.

How does it fit in the line: This is probably the hardest title until the very end of the series. You find your bearings with the engine, its quirks, how the spells work, you have to sort out effective combat tactics. And then you're set. It's a great intro to both the Gold Box line and AD&D, but it surely does not tutorialize you. At. All.

Variety: You get the feeling of visiting many varied locations, some quests/sites have a different feel, some missions bypass the focus on combat. They crammed a lot into this one. Due to the limitations of the early engine you still feel like you battled a lot of the same enemies, over and over, and in waves. Still, many challenging set piece encounters that break the mold.

Notable NPC: Cadorna the Traitor.

What I think: See this article.

What can we learn from it: Healthy mix of environments. All missions lead to the end goal, but not all derive from the same big bad. Good, explorable individual locations. How to vary the same enemies into evolving encounters that keep challenging you. And it really did a good one on backtracking - more of that would have done the series good.

What it could have done better: Give a tutorial or intro to the game, or guide you at the start. Maybe. Sometimes figuring stuff out the hard way is also very rewarding.

Curse of the Azure Bonds

Overall style: Separate locations, spanning multiple maps each (episodic).

Overland Map: Point crawl. Mid-game, additional optional locations become available to explore.

Quirk: Cameo by Elminster... if you happen to know him.

How does it fit in the line: Curse of the Azure Bonds feels like a sequel. It is not as tight as POR, nor as focused. It evolves the engine somewhat. You get a bit of a feel for the politics / conflicts south of the Moon Sea.

Variety: Yes, there are many varied locations, but to me most of them don't have much flair. Dracandros' tower and the thieves' guild / sewers at the beginning seem most memorable in terms of dungeon design. Definitely a lot more variety in enemies. It has a damn beholder - probably one of the most complex monsters in the whole line.

Notable NPC: Dragonbait, the saurial paladin whose emotions you can smell. (Nacacia, my ass!) He's on the cover, too.

What I think: COTAB feels a bit weak compared to POR. It starts a trend in Gold Box games' dungeon design - you can enter a lot of rooms in a non-linear way, but most of them feature just unrewarding combat you may skip. And you want to skip lots of it, really. Most of the game I don't remember, having played it one week ago. In POR, set piece encounter rooms often featured some reward - a clue, a story, a piece of gear, needed money and XP. You often had to do many of them, anyway, might as well tie them up in a good way. Not in COTAB - they just feel so skippable! And while you may spend your sweet time exploring optional stuff and could do the middle part in any order, the game rubs a recommended order in your face, so it narrowly escapes feeling linear after all. (The illusion wears thin but holds, I guess.)

What can we learn from it: COTAB tries its best to keep the point crawl lively by tying stories to each leg of the journey, and tries to avoid being too repetitive by making routes previously traversed safe.

What it could have done better: While it works for COTAB, the idea of "the GM can do things to me" bonds is... highly questionable. The party suffers "consequences" for things they never intended to do and had no chance to avoid - and for example gets banished from a whole country. In the context of a CRPG that's no big deal. But in your campaign, this could suck big time.

Gateway to the Savage Frontier

Overall style: Separate locations, spanning typically a single map each (episodic).

Overland Map: Huge map. And yet almost completely unused except for conveying amount of travel needed - there's only one location you visit which isn't a city and it is in the most obvious place imaginable.

Quirk: We're the heroes, and we're gonna walk into every house in town. Oh look! We surprised some spies!

How does it fit in the line: As a game Gateway seems considerably less complex, it feels almost like a tutorial to the other games. You spend considerably less time on each location, making each feel even less memorable than COTAB locations. Given the restrictions of character import/export you should play Gateway right after COTAB. Could of course be considered its own line.

Variety: Quite a bit, it reuses a lot of stuff all over. You don't spend enough time anywhere to let it bore you, anyway.

Notable NPC: Krevish, the harmless-looking fighter. He actually has quite some useful stuff to say over the course of the game.

What I think: This is the tutorial for gold box games you never got. The game is easier, features difficulty controls. It is actually fun in its own way but also rather simple - it's essentially a MacGuffin hunt with some clues, and if you fail to decipher the clues, you can traverse the map and ask a friend. A super quirky sage friend.

What can we learn from it: Gateway, by virtue of having a big map, helps us envision the sheer size of the frontier. Different regions of the map have matching encounter tables - something you quickly learn if you travel through the Troll Moors...

What it could have done better: Gateway should have utilized that map better, placing locations in the wilderness you need to look for. Instead it opted to place practically all its crawling in cities - and adding some "cities" / "dungeons" off the world map on islands. In comparison, POR's overland map was smaller and more condensed, and yet there was plenty of original content to discover, including randomly placed monster lairs. What seems bizarre are all these city maps that double as explorable dungeons, so you get attacked by barbarians or stirges on your way to the inn.

Secret of the Silver Blades

Overall style: Mega Dungeon all the way.

Overland Map: None. Instead you have a central teleport hub you can use to avoid traversing the huge ass dungeon over and over. Only Gold Box title without an overland map, and it shows.

Quirk: Enormous plot convenience with a wishing well oracle that can generate riddle answers for money and has teleporters wherever you need them to break the game into manageable chunks.

How does it fit in the line: Even at the time, I read a review of the game that was rather dismissive and biased me against it. It is, in a sense, the most linear of the games. On the other hand, it broke the mold in making all these maps that were not simple 16 x 16 grids but huge-ass sprawling and branching dungeons to explore and map out by hand.

Variety: The game sends you through a sequence of locations - ruins, mine, dungeon, glacier/frost giant village, boss castle. Each area is themed. It sticks to its themes well, and yet that makes it feel less varied, somehow.

Notable NPC: Vala, the original plate mail bikini girl. To complement her picture (eyes up here, buddy!) you get a combat icon that shows a lot of mid riff. No wonder she takes way more damage than my (overleveled) party!

What I think: This game shows the importance of imagination in early computer RPGs. It might have fared better and distracted better from its linearity if these locations featured in a modern remake in third person or 3D style. But by lacking any overland map and you returning to this village for resupplying the game feels smaller than it is. It actually took me the most time to beat due to its sheer size. And it still feels like you're nowhere, getting nowhere. They tried to break the mold on this one, but psychologically they failed. You need to manage your players' perceptions, too.

What can we learn from it: Most people probably would get bored of the same Mega Dungeon sooner or later, no matter how much variety you contrive for it. (Leaving "Diablo" aside, an entirely different gameplay experience.) It's not that they failed to try for variety, they really tried, it's just the psychology of the whole thing. Which tells us that in RPGs, the setting matters a lot. If you feel cramped into this tiny nowhere psychologically, the actual total size of the combat maps doesn't matter much. The story feels terribly local and limited through the way it is told. The game itself is massive.

What it could have done better: Lots, actually! - Combining size with lots of random encounters is rather tiresome! I kept lowering the difficulty to finish combats faster and since the manual said it lowered the likelihood of encounters. - The game treats giants as regular encounters, making you wade through hill, fire, frost, and cloud giants like they are a nuisance. By the end, even three Ancient Red Dragons at once become a mere blip on the difficulty curve. This shows us rather neatly why even AD&D 2e did a rebalancing there. If ancient dragons feel like somewhat challenging enemies, then it reduces the sense of adventure. - The game massively relies on a particular sort of enemies in mid- and end-game: Monsters with flesh-to-stone gazes. If you don't have mirrors, this is basically a save-or-die encounter and winning initiative is extremely important. If you have mirrors and equip them in time, it trivializes a lot of encounters instead. It's rather satisfying to turn a medusa to stone, though. (The Gold Box games do not consider the penalties, I think, for fighting while averting your gaze.) Most sought item in the game: Reflective magic silver shield - total: 1. Save-or-die needed to go away and won't be missed. 5e does this much better. - Iron golems suck big time.

Let's enter the wayback machine and travel back to... 1988? Yes, that's when "Pool of Radiance" came out, an "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" computer RPG that's still rather playable today (I replayed it last week) and was innovative to boot.

Computer games had taken a massive leap forward in terms of complexity when floppy disk drives became wide spread, allowing new content to be loaded into a game after it had been started. This took games from simple recreations of arcade classics (pew pew!) or little action adventures to complex roleplaying games very quickly. The Wizardry series, the Ultima games (Ultima V released in 1988 as well), the Bard's Tale games... and yet there was still plenty of room left to innovate, and Pool of Radiance occupied a lot of it in one feel swoop.

(The picture references "Nox Archaist", a game intentionally programmed to run on the decades-old Apple II, but released around 2020.)

POR did several things that games had not done before it. It implemented mass combat on an actual grid like you would see when playing tabletop (with dozens of enemies acting in their turns), and it implemented a rather big subset of the AD&D roleplaying game, down to some of its most obnoxious quirks. Gary Gygax may have been the first person to formalize an RPG rule system for publishing (though we should credit Dave Arneson with pioneering the idea of an RPG and being the first Dungeon Master before that), but his rule/game designs... had room for improvement. (Hey, being first ain't easy!) AD&D wasn't a balanced game, and oddly enough, the developers of POR took that and ran with it.

The series of games started by POR, which later on became known as "Gold Box games" due to their packaging, kept many of the bizarre "features" of 1st edition D&D. There were level caps for demi-humans in most classes, you could multi-class demi-humans (level up in multiple classes in parallel) and dual-class humans ("change jobs" and acquire a second class to level up in). There was "To Hit Armor Class 0" (THAC0) rolls and descending armor class, and many other things that have ensured that AD&D is the least emulated old school system, largely confined to the mostly forgotten OSRIC and the setting-focused "Hyperborea" game with that looong name. (And the "Advanced Edition" companions for games that focused on being more like "Basic D&D", of course.)

Oh, and the bizarrely huge list of medieval and early modern melee weaponry.

And somebody packed all of that into a game fit to run on the Commodore 64 (where it became one of the first three games I bought, beside "Ultima V" and "Pirates!") or the Apple II, gaming systems that were still wide-spread but nearing the end of their technological relevancy at that point.

But this is neither an article about early computers and their games, nor is it an article about Gygaxian "realism" in gaming, or AD&D itself. It's about the actual content of POR and what we can learn from it.

Background

The back story of the game is that Phlan was a city north of the Moon Sea, a major trading hub with the barbarian lands of the North. It never got to rival the big cities of the South, but Phlan was a thriving merchant community. Given its exposed position it fell twice to monster onslaught. And now the second time to rebuild has come.

The tabletop companion module says the city was overrun by armies of monsters 50 years ago with a unique level of organization. The game hints that this was due to a corrupted Pool of Radiance being used by the general commanding the onslaught.

After the ruin of Phlan the plot thins a bit, as somehow the general is still looking for ways to actually spread his power further. (The adventure module hints at a back and forth of forces that hardly explains why someone could stop such a unique force without any other major conquests.)

Within recent time an expeditionary force led by some of the older powers and families once reigning over Phlan cleared out a small part of the ruins and erected a stockade. They are hoping they can commission adventurers to clear out the rest of the city, while providing the essential services needed as well.

Story and Structure

The basic hub of your adventures is this stockade of New Phlan where you can buy gear, rest, sell your loot, level up, hire NPC help, and ... have bar fights? This is where the central questgiver resides, the Council of Phlan, or rather, its busy clerk.

The game then mixes mega dungeon, gating, and sandbox to let you set Phlan free. The mega dungeon aspect is the bulk of the city south of the river, with another smaller subsection north of the river.

The city blocks of the south are:

An area of slums.

A former residential area around the city's major well.

The library of a sage.

An open-air marketplace.

An area used for warehousing.

The gate to the city's castle and the castle itself.

(This alone translates to 11 maps crammed within the same 16x16 grid dimensions. Each step represents multiple 5' spaces and in fact the game generates battle maps from the actual game map you're traversing!)

The northern block housed two areas of mansions and the city's major temple, a veritable cathedral. Further removed from the city (and separate) is its graveyard.

The city itself also had a fortress protecting it from the sea, Sokol Keep on Thorn Island. It's now overrun by undead.

All the blocks of the south are connected (also with the block containing the stockade). You can in principle roam around here and look for adventure as far as your power permits. While the game attempts to structure your adventures, it doesn't prevent you from mucking about in this part - except through the increasing nastiness of "the residents."

Gating occurs at several points. If you set over to Sokol Keep and bring it back under council control, some sea lanes open. Then you can reach the northern blocks and the surrounding wilds (which you can explore on horseback on an overland map). There are entry points to the western part of the city from the wilderness map as well, allowing you to circumvent the ruins in between.

In fact, in the beginning you have only two points of access, the slums and the island keep.

A rough start

There are quite a few posts even from recent years of people complaining that this game kicks their butt. The beginning of POR is indeed challenging to overwhelming as it is neither as linear as it seems nor does the AD&D-based engine work as many computer gamers have come to expect.

You see, your best bet to survive in this game is to get your characters up to level 2, but since this is AD&D 1st edition your major source of XP are not monsters, it's gold and treasure. In other words, it's the loot that matters, not your kill count.

It would be better if the game made this more obvious as your first missions are to clear the slums and retake the keep. Clearing the slums does indeed involve a lot of combat, and you are required to beat a certain amount of random encounters and all set-piece encounters in order to progress. (The game doesn't tell you this, it just awards you the mission of, well, "clearing the slums" with no clue what it entails. I've seen guidebooks for this game disagree completely on what this means in game terms.)

There's just a few problems. First of all, as mentioned, the random encounters don't give much XP. Second of all - they scale! The stronger your party is, the more enemies you will face. In fact, at first you meet a handful of orcs, kobolds, or goblins. Then there are more per patrol, and joined by slightly tougher "leaders" with bows. Then goblin patrols might even be led by a bug bear! In other words, you don't really outgrow this mission, and yet you have to beat it.

The best way to level up in the beginning is venturing deeper into the slums and find the hidden treasures. The loot will level you up faster than any combat would. Besides, given that there are a few magic items hidden about, your combat power increases faster. (In turn you can safely rest in any rooms where you have beaten an encounter. Too bad nobody tells you so.)

Being at level 2 increases your staying power a lot. Besides, you need all the loot to pay for leveling up? Tough break, heroes. But you can't beat the slums just yet. You probably need to be level 3 to do that... because hidden in the most dangerous part of the slums (harder encounters) is a TPK in the making, a close quarter combat with trolls and ogres.

Say what?

So, your real best strategy is to level up through finding treasure, then venture to Sokol Keep where most of its quest can be beaten by paying attention to clues - and one sizable combat you won't survive at level 1 because you fight 50 enemies. This becomes doable around level 2 or 3, go figure. That second spell slot, mages!

In fact, you're better off eliminating a group of bandits in Kuto's Well first. Also, around this time Mendor's Library opens up for you - the area around it is safe to rest (making it a good forward base for exploring further into the city), but you can't get into the building proper without obtaining the Knock spell at level 3.

And then you return to clear out the slums for real, thanks to the OP Stinking Cloud spell, also unlocked at level 3.

In other words, you're backtracking. When you're stuck, you can explore new avenues opening up around you.

(A bizarre artifact of this system is that you can clear the required number of random encounters faster if you don't level up your characters - which you only can in town anyway - and handle all the random encounters by staying close to the city gate in "search mode." But that's really gaming the game. And a tad boring to do 15 times in a row.)

Linear and not

Another way to keep track is how the council awards missions and rewards (hey, more XP through treasure). But not all of them are created equal. You can optimize the order to match with your party's capabilities.

Example: Valhingen Graveyard. This is a threat not only to New Phlan, even the big baddie gets scared of the undead pouring out of the cemetery and tries to send his toughest cleric there. (Too bad you learn this by taking a letter from the priest's dead body... oops.)

Basically someone is making undead. And the threat grows. Now, in the tabletop module it grows exponentially, which makes no sense. (They're not breeding, duh, nor is one undead making the next two.) In fact, each section has a specter beavering away, making new undead. In the computer game this is tied to the strength of your party. (Which grows as time passes.)

The mission ends up being raiding the site, battling your way through the undead legions, eliminating the specters making new undead, and finally finding the vampire behind it all and end it. If you don't eliminate the vampire, he will raise the specters again. If you don't eliminate the specters, they will make more undead. Both with some delay, but that just gives you breathing room and the ability to do the mission in chunks if you want. (You better not delay too much "between visits." If you do, you're doing it over.)

Even though the game does try to motivate you to do this mission ASAP, you're better off holding off until you're level 6 - at least your cleric(s). Because then their ability to "turn undead" makes a huge step forward. This actually makes the mission substantially easier.

In fact, at this point your cleric will outright destroy lower level undead. Good luck figuring this out with the little the manual - see above - gives you. The real table is in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (T means "turned" without a d20 check, D means "destroyed" - you just roll for how many are affected):

But I digress.

The quest is offered to you twice. At first you're kind of pointed the way. Then you are even formally commissioned (and given magic items to help) to do it. And yet, it's still wiser to wait. In fact, on my latest run-through I delayed clearing the Temple of Bane because not doing so meant a NPC cleric stayed in my party, I leveled both clerics up, and then did the mission with two level 6 clerics as my holy "firepower."

No matter what, the mission is hard. It's oddly one of the few real chances to grind, though. Skeletons and such don't give much XP, but you're given treasure rewards by the council for each undead killed in the graveyard, effectively boosting the XP you receive.

But the decision when you feel ready to do this is up to you. In different playthroughs by different people it will have happened at different times.

Quest marker vs sandbox

There's a general structure to the game, tracked by the missions the council gives. Only after you make enough progress on this quest marker will you open up the finale. But it's up to you to delay some missions. Fighting large groups of enemies becomes substantially easier after you gain the Fireball spell at level 5, for example!

It's reaching these milestones that makes you feel your party's growth in power vs the difficulty curve. When your fighter starts cleaving multiple goblins or kobolds at once. When you cast Stinking Cloud or Fireball for the first time. When your cleric just turns low level undead to dust instead of making them flee.

And so this also influences how you do missions. You can wait for being awarded missions, but you can also explore the maps - the wilderness, the mega dungeon. You can even get rewards for clearing other city blocks if you eliminate enough random encounters.

The wilderness itself has a bonus feature. Not only do different parts have different encounter tables. There's an off chance you stumble across a monster lair (yes, it's random!) and fight your way to some interesting loot.

Dungeons and Wilderness and Scaling, oh my!

So, having said all that, lets put it all together.

First, let's talk XP. Tying XP to treasure means that the most interesting leveling in POR happens at points defined by the game designer, when making your way to hoards of money and gear. Some of them are gated behind key combats, but some are just hidden. The equivalent to this in 5e could be milestone awards, but you're probably best of giving away additional XP if you want to boost your party that way - usually to the amount of an encounter. (It's in the DMG.)

It's interesting, though, that POR in effect, but without outright stating it, did something similar to milestone leveling whereas most other games favored the grinding approach of bringing down enemies for XP. (The "Might & Magic" games stands out for being similar to POR in this, having specific treasures boost your XP dramatically.) The game keeps you motivated to find hidden treasure and accomplish missions this way and while you wade through a lot of monsters in doing so, you never have to grind. I breezed through the game in two days (knowing it quite well by now) without ever having to go "XP hunting", a testament to the balance possible.

You could reduce XP awards for combat if you want to, but then you'd better be on your toes of allowing to evade combat and dealing with it creatively. It's no fun to slog through it on tabletop and get diminished rewards for "doing it anyway."

Next is the mix of big dungeon and other gates areas, including the equivalent of a hex crawl. The balance here is notable - before you can tire of the mega dungeon, you can branch out into differently themed missions elsewhere (free a kid from being sold into slavery, battle it out with a tribe of kobolds, invade the lair of the wizard that poisons the river, etc).

Then there is the notion of sandbox dynamics. When you clear up the Stojanow River you also can traverse the river safely on the overland map. In the adventure module (but not the video game) at some point there's a counter attack on the stockade in an attempt to end the "hero threat" once and for all. Certain events in the game only take place when the respective missions have been awarded - changing parts of the locations. Contrast this with the "you always arrive at the right time" approach taken by many 5e campaign modules (described in the first article).

To top it off, the mix of scaled content vs not-scaled content is interesting. Some things get easier if you tackle them later, some stay challenging, with some content bordering on "Nintendo hard". (Kinda-sorta.) Please note that the game scales its random encounters, something you could emulate by prepping several versions of them, considering the "tiers of play" or a somewhat finer granularity. We'll talk about making things more dynamic in the next article, though.

Buy it on Good Old Games and get a whole slew of Gold Box games along with it. Or buy a scan of the original companion module. Or both.

Now that's a can of worms to open! Somehow I got thinking about the topic when I got a random email that somebody else had replied to an obscure thread from 2020 about "The Dragon of Ice Spire Peak" and its shortcomings. And that made me think of Starter Sets and Essential Kits and what not and what the problems of designing a sandbox in 5e are.

What is in this box full of sand?

Of course, one of the main problems is defining a sandbox. For some people it's like Minecraft, do what you want, nothing is given, it's random but follows patterns, and you make your own fun somehow. That version certainly isn't popular within tabletop roleplaying, but due to a misunderstanding, I actually got to play something like this. It... isn't fun exactly.

Some people would say it's simply a hex crawl. You have a map and can go anywhere, and hexes have premade stuff in it. (It could also be a point crawl, more about that later.)

In the view of the products I mentioned in the intro (Starter Sets, Essential Kit), it would be quite similar to that, but this "modern sandbox" would have a few traits to it... There would be a notion of order given by "missions" that you either find or are given to you (by NPCs or by the plot), which in turn mostly structure the sandbox and where you go. So this modern sandbox is, to some extent, a more linear adventure in disguise, or at most one with a maybe a parallel thread or two.

The other "modern sandbox" we find in 5e is "Curse of Strahd", and boy, it's great! You can go anywhere in this land of Barovia, but being too bold and going too far west will almost certainly TPK the party. But it's a sandbox, alright, and a fun one. If you go in a certain order, you will find it balanced to a good degree. Expect surprises.

So, what the whole sandbox topic comes down to is less one of organization, but a few other things. I mean, there will be a map to uncover, there will be "adventure locations" to find and deal with, and there will be combat, the main point of 5e.

But 5e also has some other considerations that we should look at, mainly at how it deals with adventure sites and why this might be a bad fit to sandbox play. And by that I mean published material and what it tries to teach us about making our own play material that's supposed to be engaging. So we'll look at that as well.

Trapped in the story

One of the biggest flaws of 5e sandboxes from published material is that its set piece adventures are little clockwork pieces that get triggered when you enter and then you're in for it. They're effectively designed as traps, of the story kind.

That is because individual locations have been designed with the 5e adventure formula in mind, so very often you arrive at the site "just in time" to prevent something, like a raid by monsters or a dark ritual.

So why is that bad...?

If your party is the right level and if your party just happens to be rested and well equipped then this is a great way to have a fun, engaging romp. There's something going on and we're part of it, yay! But...

What if... your party is too low a level to actually make a difference? What about then? Well, then the "Now better time than now!" for designing adventures means that the party either suffers a TPK (and hence a campaign fail) or that they disengage and the GM should assign consequences... the dark ritual happens, the site is overrun by monsters, certain NPCs are slain, captured, abducted...

You see, this design approach forces your hand. If you trigger the clockwork mechanism, it will run. There must be consequences. There are ongoing events! And frankly, it also will make it seem that wherever players go, they always arrive at a dramatic time... so it's best used sparingly. So these kind of sites are risky. There's several of them in "Curse of Strahd" and they're a definite weak point.

One choice you would make is to have two versions of the site. The "nothing has happened yet" version that presents itself to players when first arriving there, and the "action version" for when players revisit later. This presents us with other problems, but it can work. Let's discuss this in a slightly different context further down.

Leveling the playfield

Now, should you adjust the challenge of combat encounters for the adventure sites as players progress? There's no ready-made answer for this (unless you have some very firmly entrenched beliefs about what a sandbox should be), but maybe we can compare a few approaches.

First of all, leveling everything into... "Oblivion". I'm specifically referring to the "Elder Scrolls" computer game that levels pretty much everything in the game, leading to such absurdities as encountering "elite bandits" with high level gear. Not many people like this approach, let me tell you. (And that is in spite of the game being rather popular.) "Skyrim" certainly didn't repeat it.

It obviously breaks world immersion. Why would anybody with high level gear resort to banditry? Do they like... cheap thrills?

Plus all the damn high level wolves should have eaten all commoners long ago. Leveling up and new gear certainly seem kind of pointless.

Now, having the extreme example out of the way, you can of course scale combats to some degree. Just know that 5e isn't actually supporting you very well. There's no immediate scaling mechanic, you're basically doing the challenge math all over again (if you're using the DMG version). Also, the challenge math is... a bit broken... when it comes to higher numbers of enemies. (AD&D 1e seemed to be oddly unconcerned with this. I just read an adventure description with "300 kobolds" here and "30 orcs" there... What happened?)

The very least you should do if you scale encounters (especially "boss fights") is to sum up how much damage your encounter can do in the first three rounds - which is impacted a lot by spell powers and ranged attacks (= what the monsters can actually bring to bear on the party within the obvious space limitations). Look that up in the CR table (for designing monsters in the DMG) and then counter-check the Solo Monster table from "Xanathar's Guide" to get a feel what ballpark your fight is in. Obviously not all attacks will hit and some saving throws will succeed, so you will need to multiply a bit. Fun...?

Encounter building in 5e is a bit of a mess in terms of predictability, but these tools can help give you an idea where you'd end up. (Also, online tools do exist.) If you scale up, make sure you limit the number of spellcasters and enemies with ranged weapons as they will be able to mercilessly pelt the players, especially if they have other battlefield advantages (and allies to hide behind).

The other thing to consider for scaling up is the power level of your characters in another regard - only after level 5 big area spells unlock, like the infamous Fireball. Suddenly being outnumbered isn't as bad once you're past level 4. (You won't be outgunned at this point, typically.) A general guideline to power milestones are the "tiers of play" which start at levels 5, 11, and 17. But frankly, it should probably be 3, 5, 11, and 17.

Until level 3, player characters are super squishy. (We'll discuss this tier more below.) Starting level 5, the party should be able to deal with lower level enemies more efficiently through area attacks. Level 11 is another jump in power.

So, if you do want to scale for level, reaching level 5 and 11 could be good points (in terms of party level) to up some of your adventure sites (not yet visited).

It would be good, though, if there was some in-game justification, especially one that the players know of (tavern rumors, etc) or one they can find out about (the letter that the boss left in his tent, for example). The orcs have called in allies or more have come to the area. Generally, calling in allies, or a higher level threat moving in can be good. Higher level threats either control the lower level threat from before (a dragon that lets itself be worshipped by the local kobold tribe), or displace them (a necromancer driving out a tribe of orcs or partially converting them to, well, undead).

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with leaving some sites around that do not scale up. This might result in players just having a leisurely walk in the park in comparison, making them feel powerful. This is especially valid if you had high level sites the players could not approach for some reasons (more below). In fact, this being a tabletop RPG, there's no reason why a sufficiently powerful party couldn't intimidate their way through such a site, turning a combat encounter site into more of a social encounter. (While it resorts to a lot of roll-playing, "Monsters & Magic" by Sarah Newton is very interesting in this regard. It certainly is a game that has a lot of thought put in regarding scale.)

That being said, level-scaling is a bit counter to having a sandbox. It's also, to some degree, unfair. Let's say you have adventure sites too dangerous to approach for players just yet. Why would the other sites then keep up with them?

As some final words to level-scaling, let's consider how another family of games handle them. In some of the Fallout games, entering an area fixes its level, but it might scale otherwise. Still, it has a max level, and most areas also have min levels. This way areas can feel differently hard, areas encountered early do not suddenly repopulate differently, and after a certain point, some areas become easy and negligible. This is a mix of challenge and feeling powerful.

The case of the intro adventure

As mentioned above, levels 1 and 2 are especially... "squishy." 5e decided to tackle this age-old D&D problem by... rushing through them (and by skewing the hit point math for level 1). You're really meant to reach level 3 very soon. Ironically, I myself find level 1-3 to be some of the most entertaining as both player (the thrill!) and as GM (it's probably the last time you see players think instead of charging in...).

It's also for this reason that you find many 5e adventure books published by WotC to treat these levels as special. The original "Starter Set" has an intro dungeon you encounter before going to Phandalin and being "released" into the wider world. (Though you could ignore it after the first encounter...) "Curse of Strahd" has an unapologetic intro adventure if players insist starting below the recommended level 3. (Which still means you'll probably die, that sandbox has some killer stuff in it.)

This tutorializes the game, given that most class powers unlock at level 2 and 3, giving players a chance to get familiar with their chosen class and character and developing a play style ... or rather some sort of preferred combat tactics. It's also a good time to build team work (or begin the suffering for the lack thereof).

For this reason you'd probably be best off by pushing an intro adventure on your players before you release them into the sandbox proper. At the very least get them to level 2 and halfway to level 3.

Missions or Adventure Sites?

Short answer: both.

Missions (or quests) have typically somebody issuing them and a reward (or sometimes you're made to do them). They're a great way to point adventurers to level-appropriate content, also to content that they might miss out on (challenge-wise or timing-wise or for lack of noticing). Assigning missions is prodding the players.

Now, you can have a central quest-giving authority (adventurer's guild, the mayor) or even a quest board, but that's very... game-y. It's done to death and reminds us of video games. As the party grows in reputation (or notoriety), it's certainly appropriate that people try to enlist them to solve their problems. A merchant caravan needs protection to move sensitive goods through Full-of-Monsters Forest, for example. And of course the party ideally seeks out rumors and jobs themselves.

But the true of the joy of a sandbox is, well, romping around in it. Hiking, roaming, that kind of shit. Following a rumor to a remote area to see if it's true or what's behind it. Sandboxes are meant to hit that exploration itch some people feel, so it can't all be missions. Or rumors.

Ideally you make the players aware, through some form of play aid, that there's a map to be explored and things to be uncovered. Whether this is a hex crawl grid, or you drawing them a point crawl and putting points of interest in it... doesn't really matter. But given how things are these days with players there needs to be some form of communication that you can basically delve around the setting like it was some sort of open-world game.

I'm serious about this. Some groups will visit every tavern and talk to every local official for quests or missions instead of simply packing a backpack and venturing forth out of sheer habit, so the intro to the setting and interactions with people should often hint at "lands of opportunity" or "many hidden ruins" or whatever makes your sandbox exciting.

Here's where having missions comes in handy: On the way to your mission you can stumble over hints regarding other places in the sandbox (or the locations themselves). While some players might treat such occurrences as side quests and take or leave them, this gives you as the GM an in-game opportunity to tickle their sense of exploration.

To make that happen, make sure that the mission is not ultra-urgent or even timed. Else the players will rush past it and you can't fault them for it.

Also, some straightforward GM-to-player communication when setting up the campaign wouldn't be amiss here.

Gatekeeping

How do video games manage the fact that players are not ready for certain challenges?

Some games show you the level of challenges and let you run away - something which 5e is anyway especially bad at. A more common way is to make areas unreachable until certain conditions are met.

This is typically called gating.

To cut it short, there are some thoughts the Angry GM shared on this topic that you should definitely read.

What he recommends is typically meant for (mega) dungeon design, but there's no reason why an adventure site - or a region - can't be cut off by such an obstacle.

While of course the typical "missing bridge over ravine" might be overcome by some player ingenuity, what happens if it's a ravine with monsters with ranged attacks on the other side? (Ones that don't come after you.) This gates it behind the players' abilities in more than one regard. (It might also become a memorable encounter.)

Since 5e is so bad at conveying when to flee an encounter and has little to say on the topic of fleeing, you might design encounters easy to flee from - but we're getting side-tracked.

Point is - you can lock away part of your sandbox behind flight or and underwater tunnel and gate it therefore until a later stage, effectively splitting the sandbox into multiple parts with early and end game areas.

Games like Ultima 4, 5, and 6 where particularly good at a mix of soft and hard gating. Some areas could only be tackled with certain tools (mountain gear, skiff, ship, flying carpet, balloon, etc), some areas were challenging and frankly exhausting without the right tools (swamp boots, flying carpet, etc). Like they would bestow you the poison effect over and over. You needed to build your set of tools, your resources (food, torches, spell components, potions, gems), as well as your levels and general equipment.

You could take even take a page out of gaming history and make up a reason why airship travel was disrupted but now is available ("Final Fantasy") or similar events unlocking game areas like the receding of the dangerous fog in "Forbidden Lands".

While a lot of resource tracking is ignored in average play, hex crawls make it easier to track time and distance, and in fact point crawls can even contain connections between locations signifying longer trips with a fixed resource expenditure, or making the availability of certain things the prerequisite of making the trip. (Like getting small boats to journey down a river running in a canyon.)

Presenting: The Gating Encounter

I haven't exactly established this well, but running away is not really a well-supported option in 5e (and probably not in 3e or 4e, either). The flip side of having challenge math baked into the system and GMs being advised to scale encounters towards their parties is that it conditions players to expect this.

Running away might be better supported in video games where you can probably see the health bar of your opponent barely shrinking while you yourself take substantial (but not deadly) hits over time. Your brain quickly does the math and decides to skip out of the encounter.

In 5e, not so easy.

Yes, you can tell them "Oh, it barely took a scratch" or "Its attacks seem overpowering" and telegraph all you want, but there's a significant portion of the player base that would charge in shouting some silly name and dying on that hill.

So, instead of hoping they'll run, do a "gating encounter."

The DMG splits encounter difficulty into easy, medium, hard, and deadly. This pertains mostly to resource use (of powers, spells, one-use items, hit dice for healing, etc), but deadly means that there's a good chance that a PC might die.

This is, however, not the whole truth, but relative. 5e is a resource-management game where you can decide to burn through a lot of resources fast ("going nova") and then have nothing for future encounters, or trying to optimize your burn rate such that you can beat the current adventure/mission/quest/dungeon.

This means, the party can beat a significantly stronger opponent (or group thereof) when they're still fresh but then they're likely to retreat to rest and regroup.

(I wrote another article quite a while ago discussing why players assessing threats never really works well unless your game is super-formulaic and your players keep tabs.)

5e's challenge math and advice is your friend here. You can place an encounter near the entrance to an adventure site when the players are still "probing" and checking it out. You know, guards and such.

If you're not going with level-scaling, your site likely has a level associated with it that it's designed for. The encounters are neatly made for allowing a party of that level to have reasonable challenge while beating it.

The core of the 5e encounter design are not challenge ratings but encounter XP. As fallible as this measure may be, it provides you with a number which you can take and use with the table in the DMG on page 82, "XP Thresholds by Character Level".

Assuming your party has all the same level, you can simply divide the encounter XP (adjusted according to the rest of that chapter) by number of PCs and use it with that table.

Let's say you're planning for five PCs, and your total encounter XP happen to be 5,000. So, we divide by 5 and we see:

This encounter is Deadly for level 4 or below.

It's Hard for levels 5-6.

It's Medium for levels 7-8.

It's Easy for levels 9-12.

It's even below Easy threshold for 13+.

If you include the possibility to flee, it might be suitable for levels 4+ and pose as a game challenge from 4-12. That's quite the range!

Now, let's say this area was designed with level 10 in mind. You put an easy encounter as gate at the beginning. But as you can see, the encounter would be doable as low as level 7 without being unduly difficult. Parties below that will break a sweat and reevaluate their options, probably. Especially since the next encounter might easily be a 7,500 XP Medium encounter (which would be Deadly for levels 5-6 as well).

Without ever telling the players that they might be out of their depth you can probably establish this within 1 or 2 encounters before they truly have to commit to the adventure. Or one encounter with plenty of foreshadowing how challenge will rise once they proceed (like seeing the hill giant camp proper from a higher vantage after struggling to beat some guard mooks posted as outer sentries).

Of course you can vary this - sometimes having Medium encounters, meaning the area "behind the gate" might be about as challenging as the first encounter, on average.

The opposite is also true: Try to avoid misleading encounters that will make players gauge difficulty wrong. If the encounter has a story reason, make the story reason clear. If goblin scouts are surprised while spying on an ogre camp, make sure the players realize that the goblins are not a gauge of how difficult the combat encounters in this area will be.

Other Obstacles

The most obvious one would be distance, which would be a gate to your real world activities most certainly. How far do you go to just visit a friend? How many hours of travel? How many expenses are you willing to shoulder?

Which is, of course, where 5e lets us down. Expenses are insignificant, distance isn't felt. Unless you make it felt.

The age old answer to that question are random encounters, but they don't fit well with 5e for many reasons. As is so often joked, for example in the Order of the Stick, you either have one per day or one per the whole journey, making it meaningless. Resources renew daily in 5e, and making the encounter border-line Deadly is not the answer, either.

Before you even consider whether you will do better random encounters, you could consider what they are meant to do in your game.

If your random encounters are meant to convey the danger of an area, it's fine to have few. They're just appetizers and tell-tale signs of what's to come in the area. Just design your encounter table for the level you had in mind and put some Easy and Medium encounters, maybe a rare Hard one, too. (For Hard ones, consider monsters that cannot outrun the players.)

When your random encounters go from a handful of orcs to a hill giant to a hydra, the rise in challenge tells its own story about the dangers. Split the map into several zones and assign them difficulties / levels and their own tables, typically more dangerous farther from civilization, and your random encounters will tell players what to roughly expect in general as they venture further out. Combine it with environmental clues to top it off, like a deep magical forest or some barren desolation as opposed to the lush grasslands or light forests found closer to your home base. In fact, it might be good design for such cues to go hand in hand with the difficulty of encounter zones, establishing a relationship between environment and monster.

Of course, instead of pure random encounters you could design mini-adventures or multi-challenges the party runs in at certain points on the map. At the very least this might mean the party has to return to base and try again. These could be semi-randomly placed within an area or fixed to specific hexes.

Another thing to consider is that random encounters might not only target you, but also your valuables, your means of transportation, or even just cost you valuable time. A monster trying to poach your tasty tasty horse (mmm!) while you're camping, or bandits trying to lure you away from camp to score some of your valuables. Not every encounter is done with the intent to kill. Well, at least not you.

And finally, as the party rises in level, random encounters (at least with animal intelligence or above) might have the good sense to leave the party alone, which in turn shrinks distance in the minds of players. Psychological distance, I mean. The area becomes largely transparent for traversing and the group will become more likely or willing to venture further out in turn.

In other words, the adventuring area under consideration by your players shrinks with perceived danger and expands as dangers are mitigated or their characters rise in power. This allows you to structure onion layers of challenge around civilized lands with the odd exception to mix it up.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was to send my players to the other end of my campaign map early on. Let them unlock the world like waves washing back and forth over a shore when the tide rises.

I was born under a wandering star

Another consideration is distance from home bases. Safely resting might be easy to address even in the wilderness (unless your random encounter system is merciless), but what about the treasure the party wants to take home? Make some of it valuable but bulky once in a while, and vary it. Watch them agonize whether to take home a valuable stack of silver wolf pelts to sell them or having to abandon them. For the true pack rats and looters that's painful as can be. So, home bases are for storing and converting loot, for safely resting, replacing one-time equipment, etc. And if there are few and far between, this creates a sense of distance - the effort to overcome to actually get there and bring back stuff.

If you're willing to track resources, means of transportation matter as well, as more resources weigh more. But again, 5e makes it so easy to replenish resources (or conjure them out of thin air), it's hard for this to have much of an impact for very long. If the party resolves to live on conjured food and water for a week (the D&D equivalent of instant ramen), you can't stop them.

Even then, consider for each adventure site where players could withdraw to from it. D&D is a game of short and long rests, and sometimes players must retreat. Barricading yourself somewhere in a part of the dungeon might occasionally be an option, but in general resting means leaving an adventure site and its sphere of influence (like the area patrolled by dungeon inhabitants), and hence another journey with expenditure of time and the risk of random encounters.

This is in fact where the possibility of random encounters matters most - when resources are to be conserved for the adventure day ahead or low after battling it out in a dungeon on the way out. In the latter case, watch out for TPKs. Unless you don't care and leave it to players to mind that risk.

The need for a safe camp site some distance from their goal might actually be revealed to the players through a roll on their survival skills, this way you can effortlessly insert the necessity for planning in a base camp if needed.

Hold the Line

Now, as I mentioned before, some adventure sites might just not be interesting before something else happens. The players might find hints that a big nasty orgy might go down on Dark Druid Hill, but right now our unfriendly goths are busy laundering their black robes and washing their beards and can't be bothered to show up for your low level party, natch.

This prevents the effect so overworked in the otherwise excellent "Curse of Strahd": That it seems like everybody just waited for you to drop by.

Now, if you set up sites to be important later, you probably should avoid one thing at all costs: Do not set a specific time for things to happen. Time is cheap in tabletop RPGs, any amount of time can be waited out with just a little resource expenditure and if players say so. (Like returning to town and spending a week in an inn.) If your intent is to make a particular site available around the time you think the players can beat it, this won't do. (Also, a ticking clock always has side effects on players' attitudes in general and is anathema to open exploration.)

So, you need to gate the unlocking behind an event (e.g., the death of the orc chief that ruled over the forest), ideally. You could just require a minimum level for your own bookkeeping, but some chain of causality should exist for the sake of the overall narrative experience. So you still need to know what your trigger event is in the narrative, even if it conveniently happens when they are level X.

But that alone is not enough. Because how will the players know when to come back? Again, environmental clues could come to the rescue. The dragon that moved into the abandoned goblin cave could start threatening livestock somewhere. The dark ritual casts an eerie glow into the night sky for miles as preparatory rites are completed. Rumors, if you must.

If something is unlocked, in some way or form it should be known or else your players are unlikely to interact with it.