Friday 25 April 2014

Times, distances etc. in my games

I want to keep things simple. That's why I rarely keep track on times or distances. Here's what and how I do it.

For ranged weapons I don't bother to think about how many feet away the target is. It's either in near, medium or far range. There are the ranges listed in weapon descriptions but I just decide how far away the target is without actually trying to figure out the real distance. I don't use minis so keeping track of how far away from each other everyone is could be hard. I do draw some rough combat situations for locations and surroundings but that's it. And it can depend on a weapon too. For a sling long range could be medium for a bow etc.

Also travel distances are how far away they are to reach. Half a day? Two days? If you leave at noon when you arrive to the destination? In my new hex map hexes are just travel times. One day for hard and rough, two for "normal" and three hexes for main roads. There's naturally some tweaking but that's how I do it roughly. Horses, boats and other vehicles might get you faster from place to place. For example a good road with a good horse might double the travel distance when in rough terrain horse might even slow you down.

In dungeons caves are small, medium or big. If more detail on the size and dimension is needed I figure it out. Random encounters (1 in 6) I roll every time a corridor or empty room is entered. When a room is cleared and revisited a random encounter is called again.

One big problem is a torch. With my abstract and rough time tracking how long does a torch burn? Same with spells, what's the actual spell duration? For torches it could be 20 rooms and corridors. -1 if more time is spent in a room like the party is spending a lot of time figuring out in a room or resting in it. Spell durations need more careful calculation in my opinion, but it could be as torches. Haven't figured that out yet. Suggestions?

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