Thursday, December 27, 2012

Random "Dugouts"


Trying out imgur gallery embedding.

I'm a big believer in replayability, especially when it comes to sandboxes, but overcoming meta-game knowledge can be a bitch. As such, we've decided to make a table of small cave structures that can be rolled on to make what you "find beyond this cave entrance" a little more random, and perhaps a little more special.

"Important" structures, or perhaps, larger structures will remain constant from game to game (since  the story created by the players should supply sufficient diversity), but I'm hoping that adding elements of randomness to the "unimportant" structures will allow exploratory wonder to persist a bit longer. What was a bandit camp last game, may be small, watery cave, this game.

I'm also thinking that if we pair these maps with a solid set of tables to determine both contents and the location of those contents within the caves it would be a cinch to generate a very large number of possible cave combinations with minimal effort. Of course we may then run into the problem of "pointless randomness" or "forced randomness". Moving the location of the treasure between 6 pre-determined spots within a cave is even more asinine than having it always be found in the same location no matter what. Gotta find that balance.

The only question I've got now is... will these hand drawn maps work? Or do we need to add a grid to them? I suppose only time and play-testing will tell!

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