I hold my hands up. Since I started gaming over 20 years ago I only ever used random encounter charts for the first three years of GMing. Of all the game mechanics that seem to crop up in almost every system this has to be the one that has got me most annoyed.

Vegas Decker@Flickr

It’s not even the kind of annoyance where I would be angry at something or someone. It’s that kind of annoyance where you’ve just spent days building a bookshelf for your bedroom only to that it doesn’t quite fit all your books. It’s minor in the grand scheme of things but it’s going to be there for a long long time.

I have always enjoyed the fact that both as a player and a GM I’ve never had to suffer the “oh it’s been 10 minutes of game time I must roll some dice to work out what’s going to happen next” moments. Don’t get me wrong the occasional secret skill check by the DM works great but the structured approach to random encounters that most systems encourage is beyond me.

Taking them out completely isn’t an option for me either. I actually like the supposed randomness the idea can give to gaming sessions if you’ll believe that or not. It’s the ‘regular’ rolling of dice I despise as it turns the game into a series of turns. That’s fine when it comes to combat but for general play it’s to much of a hindrance for me at times.

So how did I every get around this part of the mechanics? For a couple of years I had a small computer program that produced a page full of random numbers from whatever dice you chose to roll. I coupled this with maps that had specific points where an encounter ‘roll’ would take place rather than at set times during the game. It did mean that if a group stayed at one point they shouldn’t come across any enemy until they moved off if they had already encountered something whilst there but these were flaws I was willing to live with.

Having the number sheet meant I could keep the game flowing without stopping for dice rolls every time I needed to check something. If they group needed a check traps roll then I marked off the next number on the percentile page and any time I needed to roll for awareness or a similar skill the players need never know that they failed. I did love the effect of randomly rolling a dice during dungeon crawls and watching the players panic though.

These days I’m not as much of a fan of this method but I’m struggling to find a happy medium that stops never ending dice rolling outside of combat and keeps the secret rolls from the players. Any ideas people?

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Back in the days of AD&D 2e they dealt with cantrips in a completely different way from all of the other editions. I loved it but it took a long while to work out just how powerful a spell it was.

photo by jenasa@flickr

The spell Cantrip was a 1st level spell that allowed you to do almost anything as long as it was small and didn’t cause any damage to anything and anything created only lasted something like an hour. On the face of it you might think it was useless for anything other than a full on roleplay session. You couldn’t be further from the truth however.

Before we realised just how useful this spell was our mages tooled up with blatant offensive or defensive spells and that was it. Occasionally they would get their books out when they had to research some magic items for the group but usually it was ‘how many fireballs and hastes are we going to need today?’

Then one day one of our clerics died and the player decided completely against character to bring in a mage. His daily allowance of 1st level spells were always completely taken up by cantrips. It took us around an hour to work out what he was up to.

In our first encounter upon entering a hamlet was a crowd of young kids. We had asked for directions from everyone passing by but as we were armed to the back teeth and strangers to boot noone would talk to us. Our new mage wandered over to the gang of street kids and got talking to them. He ended up casting cantrips to allow him to perform a brilliant card trick and then finished it off with some mini-fireworks from his wand. The kids loved it and after a few moments we were on our way armed with the information we needed.

Now you might think that is exactly what cantrip was for but it gets better.

We arrived at the tavern we were looking for in order to track down a certain rogue that could help us fence some stolen art work. He didn’t want to deal with us and decided to hit our remaining cleric out of the way and make a run for it. One cantrip later and just as the NPC goes to barge through the cleric the holy symbol around his neck shines like it had caught the sun at high noon. Blinded by this the NPC stumbled and was easily caught by the hands of the warriors.

From that moment on I loved that spell. From pretending to burn treasure maps to get other interested parties off of our tails to magically tying the shoelaces of the guards together to aid in our escape. Every single thing the spell done was minor but it had a huge impact on the game and on our party.

I really wish they had kept the spell like that rather than find ways to limit it. I understand why they did that but it’s nowhere near as much fun now.

This months Blog Carnival is hosted by 6d6 Fireball on the topic of D&D. He has picked out 4 specific topics to write about so head on over and see what he has to say.

You can check the archives here

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And so Jonathan over at The Core Mechanic has hung up his blogging boots today to make time for Nevermet Press. Best of luck with that one and I’m sure I’ll be talking more about it over the coming months!

photo by heath_bar@flickr

As a final farewell Jonathan decided last week to end on a high and end with a project based on ‘This I Believe’. You can hear the final product here.

I had five attempts at recording my own addition to the project but with 4 kids in the background and various chickens insisting that was the time to lay an egg and tell everyone about it it didn’t really get very far. For those that don’t know my contribution is the cheesy one right at the end.

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