Into The Wild - I: Party Dispersion on Wilderness Encounters

Introduction

Interluding our regularly scheduled transmission of reinterpretations on common adventuring feats and rules comes this post. I couldn’t quite shoehorn it as belonging to that former category, thus a new sequence of posts begins, one that is oriented to hexcrawl play.

Tying so many disparate actions under the sway of the d20 while preserving a sense of task-identity and immersion is a challenge; one that I relish, but a challenge nonetheless. Many are the times I either see or sense the yawning great vaccuum of design space waiting to be filled by breaking free of dogma and resorting to other mechanic underpinnings; examples abound and some are downright impressive.

And here’s the thing: though I’m loathe to mess about much with the player-facing part of the equation, the referee’s pastures are a complete free-range for me, and I intend to run with that for all that it is worth.

With player-hidden, or at least non-actionable systems, I’m absolutely willing to make do with some alternative rolling mechanics (as already happened with Weather). World running, after all, need pay no heed to Difficulty Classes, as things are not trying to succeed at much of anything, they are simply happening.

'Blazers and Stragglers

This particular entry comes as a reaction to this classic Tao of DnD post. I still get a chuckle out of it: the image choice is spot-on, the argument being made is sound and there’s some gold in the comments, too. Here is my take on this thinking as I’ve chosen for my running, including the part left unanswered, of whom is caught where at which point when an overland encounter commences.

A basic understanding is that I don’t intend to mess with close formations while the party is delving in the underworld, as these are a player choice and the minute-by-minute time frame certainly supports them being strictly kept.

However, over the dreary, capricious miles of unending and unchanging wilderness scenery and at a time scale of many, many a long day, things take on a different tack, as individuals will drift into all sorts of relative positions as dictated by a miriad of factors, social, biological and terrain-driven.

The Crunchy Bits

The following methods should be workable for both linear encounters (danger coming from a defined direction) as well as for irradiating ones (something happens to or in the vicinity of one of the characters, and it becomes important to define where is everyone else). I’m taking it as a given that each player is provided with a personal and identifiable polyhedral randomizer.

The more direct (but less predictable) method:

- Employ a drop-surface, such as the lid of a cardboard box for reams of letter-sized paper and lay a square or hex grid atop it, wherever the dice land is where each character is at the time of the encounter.

- Designate how many straightened handspans of height to drop the dice from, with a greater or lower height being selected for as befits the situation/terrain type (standard being two spans).

Like this, but several of them.

- Die-drop to victory (following the same guidelines as below).

The more convoluted (but stabler) method:

- Have each player die-drop a d6 for the character he controls in the party (animals and possibly hirelings may or may not warrant a distinct roll), each pip being worth 5 feet.

- If the party did not previously indicate someone as navigator or pointsman, the die that ends up closest to the upper edge of the drop surface is the one closest to the threat and is considered the party’s vanguard, its result rendered moot. If a pointsman was designated, then that character’s position is not rolled for and is instead automatically considered the closest one to the threat (as dictated by encounter distance).

- If dealing with an irradiating event or encounter, either randomize from which character it irradiates (here providing a chance for each character in the party to test his fortune) or otherwise mark its spot as the middle of the drop box and begin biasing the rest of the party’s positioning rolls from there.

- Each of the dice represents a character, with the result shown on the dice signalling these many 5-foot increments of distance to the character represented by the next closest die, forming a result chain of sorts, following the die drop’s positioning. Should two dice be roughly aligned, they can be said to be parallel on a given axis.

- Rugged terrain can physically delay and separate the party members against their will and better judgment, with larger dice sizes being used to account for this.

- Open ground, on the other hand, will lend itself naturally to more spreading about as characters keep themselves within sight, hearing and bowshot distance, this can be represented as above but also with the die’s result being worth a greater number of feet.

- A Ranger character may edit his positioning by a number of squares equal to a roll of his proficiency die. If specialized on the terrain type count the roll as being multiplied by ten feet increments.

A more graphic example:

1.       Character A’s result is discarded on account of him being the pointsman.

2.       Character C’s result of “2” indicates he is 10 feet behind A as well as 10 feet to his left.

3.       Character D is 15 feet to C’s right as well as 15 feet to his back.

4.       Character F is 20 feet to the back of D as well as 20 feet to his left.

5.       Character E is 25 feet to the left of F and another 25 feet to his front.

6.       Character B’s result points him as being 5 feet to the front and left of E. 

Note that a drop of d6 never resolves into too great a spread: no matter where the dice ends up, its maximum dispersion will never amount to more than 30 feet from the closest character.

So Strung Out

For a party making overland progress slowly and cautiously (therefore at half rate), this will ensure that a relatively tight formation between characters is retained at all times (one-two handspans/d4-d6 squares), as it will imply everyone stopping whenever someone does.

If the party is spread out while foraging, canvassing the terrain on a search pattern or is deliberately ambushed instead of just happening across something as a cohese marching group, the lay of the land can certainly factor into things, as the characters will be a greater distance apart (three-four handspans/d8, d10, d12 squares).

If the party is somehow routed and running for their lives or for some other reason separated from all group cohesion – lost from each other, assailed by the weather, out hunting game, individually shopping about in a crowded market square – everyone should make a grab for the d20 or be prepared to drop their die from the table onto the floor.

Closing Thoughts – Turn-About is Fair Play

With this procedure in place, it is easy to see where feats, classes and whatnot magical reasons may enable fruitful modifications to a character’s benefit. I don’t know that any of the processes will prove agile enough to be recurringly applied, but then, no plan survives contact with the table.

Notice that the dispersion method works just as well as applied to a group of enemies being ambushed, championing the underlying philosophy that, whenever character placement matters and the abstraction cannot carry the answer, a good chuck of the diviners can always be relied upon to inject some surprise into a running. This makes no bones about the fact that sometimes life deals a raw hand (by our character getting caught in a dangerously isolated position) but preserving the essential agency of allowing the player to react, overcome odds and make something of it that will yet quake a bard’s larynx. Or die an abject death, it cuts both ways, I suppose.