Better Opposition - d4 Effective Organisation Types

tl;dr: some templates for organisations let you know quick strengths and weaknesses for effective groups.

Inspired by the freely-available thinking of a well known real world organisation that identifies the 'key ingredient' practices that make up various recipes for success. We can grab these archetypes for effective organisations and use them for villains or heroes depending on your needs. It gives us some ready-to-go bones that we can throw a skin over as appropriate for the organisation.

The four key archetypes are:
1. Leadership driven
2. Goal focused
3. Masters of their Craft
4. Team of Heroes

Shiny TTRPG links collection #34

Previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

Lizardman Diaries, one of my favourite random table creators, talks about their methods for creating random tables/generators.

Random encounters, wandering monsters and intentions on Donnut Valley I would definitely agree that part of the point of having a DM at the table is to shape the outputs from a random encounter list into the thing that makes sense in the context as opposed to 'suddenly, aboleth' just because it was on the table.

Collaborative world building for your table: Factions and the follow up how-to workflow on Hopeful Wierd Wonder blog - the workflow is a go-to for how to 'ride the avalanche' of managing player input into your world-building.

Why So Brutal? on jdmcdonnell.com talks about the different weight of character death in early D&D and how it mattered less in the style of game they played. A useful perspective.

Blood, Death, Satan & Metal talks about Quick Combat: Redshirts and the Save Versus Death - some nice crunching to get a rapid 'save on a d6' for massed combat. I like it.

A genius idea on Reddit from the DM for the Gutless Unkempt - they call them level up speeches, I used to do something similar in background vignettes - but I love the way they are used here as markers for leveling up.

This is a great post on radical transparency at the table - the list of things delegated from DM to players is gold for 'non-critical tasks' - I would say it goes a level beyond what I would consider but in my sliding of items (narration) back from the delegation pile, I am positively acknowledging that is part of my playstyle. I might set a different threshold for when when to risk breaking world immersion to say you fumbled something but I acknowledge the continuum.

Two interesting posts on Weaver.skepti.ch this week - first a translation of Comment devenir un Mentat (originally published 2013-05-06) by retired Colonel Michel Goya with a fascinating view on how military expertise is built - great for saying where your battle-winning NPC's are coming from. Second is a piece on the different reactions to (mock) combat setbacks by LARPers and reenactors.

Locations and terrain as puzzles

tl;dr: On places as puzzles and setting your players on problems where you don't know the answer

This talks through how I cobble together and then use locations using an recent session example. I have less 'big set piece combats' and more 'forces loose in a place' model.

The location.

I needed something cool for the end of a hunt. I knew it was a dwarven location, high in the mountains, where a physically large artefact could have gotten lost. I had been thinking it was a shattered dwarven ruin until I got Sly Flourish's Fantastic Adventures in a sale. It had the Dam of the Beselmir Kings in it. This also featured in an article on his blog that I loved about adapting Storm Kings Thunder. I loved the aesthetic of the dwarven heads pouring water out as beards, so I wanted to try and use that.

For the set up I mashed together the sub-locations from "The Dam of the Besilmer Kings" for Storm Kings Thunder with the "Queen of Red Water" in Fantastic Adventures. That gave me a dam, with lots of internal locations and gubbins, under assault by giants. I set out the locations within and around the dam in a point-crawl format so I knew how they related to each other and that was it for prep. The main modification I made was to have three water-spouting heads on the dam instead of four.

Not just simply evil

To frame this all up - here is my 'philosophy of D&D alignment'. The internet being what it is, let me first state that what you read below is my view. You run your table in a way that works for your table. What I am talking to here is what I have come up with from my time running tables, in particular Planescape games, to make things make sense.

I come to this from reading the online discussions that build off the premise of some sentient races being essentially evil. I find myself looking through a window into a variant of the game that I do not recognise at all. The idea that you just plough into other sentients without accounting for why they are doing what they are doing makes no sense to me and never did. I could happily play Heroquest (kick in the door, kill 'em all) but as soon as I had a copy of the old black box, I was trying to figure out the why's of the dungeons. Someone had to be eating something, the water had to come from somewhere. Things had to make sense. Similarly, if there were things living down here, unless they were oozes or the undead or some sort of magical construct, there had to be some sort of sense to their actions.

For as long as I have been running games I thought it was unfair to the players to have the opposition, who ever it was, just be randomly doing things. Without a driving motivation the players could figure out there was no way for them to outsmart the foe. If the goblins are scouting for food, bribe them to your side with rations. Maybe something is so aggressive they will be unflinchingly hostile - the ogre is going to attack immediately if you trespass in his territory - then you can work around that by avoiding the ogres patch. You could also kite the ogre out of position if you *know* it will attack whomever it sees. The idea that sentient monsters are up to what they are up to because they are simply evil just seems a massive wasted opportunity.

Shiny TTRPG links collection #33

Previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.

Sentimental thoughts about the OSR on Zedeck Siews Writing Hours.

The Ten-Year Clips Show - a retrospective on False Machine.

Asking "What Then?", or, What Makes a Good Setting Good? on Monsters and Manuals.

Maximalist Weird Fiction City-State and Cultural Creation Tables on Grand Commodore.

Breaking trail on the Great Ring - which planes need more adventures?

tl;dr: are people going to the same cardinal iconic planes because the adventures exist or because they prefer to go there?

As part of thinking about a potential new Planar campaign I had a notion about visiting the lesser known planes. I wanted to test whether the planes we hear less about are unpopular or just have less adventures available for them. To get an idea I looked at the Elderbrain survey and compared that to the numbers of adventures available for each of the planes on DrivethruRPG and DMsGuild.

First thought was - do people have a specific preference for where to go on their planar adventures? According to Elderbrain just over half do have a specific preference and of the rest ~1/10 don't like planar nonsense at all, ~1/3 are happy to walk the Great Ring to anywhere.

Surveys check: are a majority of players new?

tl:dr; Asked 'whether a majority of D&D players are new?' - it appears not, but depending where you ask the question it might look like it.

I looked at a block of surveys going back to 2016 that asked how long people had been playing. We know that a lot of new people have joined the hobby with 5e and the question is whether so many people have joined that they now outnumber those still playing from all the previous years and editions. If this was true, then for all these surveys, we should see a majority of people who have joined since 2015 responding.

What we see is that for some groups there is indeed a majority of recently joined folk - the discord server for the DM Academy Reddit page which opened in 2020 was mostly populated by people new to the hobby, same with a 2020 Reddit survey - but both of those are rooted in Reddit. We do not see a similar effect on Facebook or Twitter-sourced polls. I would tentatively conclude this says the hobby is not yet a majority of recent joiners and still has a way to go to get there.