Minor Fixes

It was pointed out to me that the “Choose an Extra” roll table in Character Creation wasn’t numbered. It is now.

It was also pointed out that the Word Lists for generating rituals had disappeared from the site. They’re now in situ again.

Treasure Tables

Last year I did a lot of work on Treasure Tables for A Dungeon Game, but I got sidetracked by more important things (i.e. work that actually paid my bills) and never finished them. This morning I was working on some updates on the site, replacing sections that had somehow been deleted in past updates and clarifying some tables, and I decided that I wanted to finish off the treasure tables.

What I came back to was a half-written document and a very big, very complete spreadsheet with no explanatory notes. Thankfully I blogged through the process of working out all the maths etc., and so I was able to pick up almost where I left off with a little bit of reading.

The spreadsheet I’ve come back to looks like this:

(If you want to dig through everything with no explanation, you can look at the actual sheet here. It will look different by the time you read this because it’s a working document and I’m working on it again.)

My first step was to figure out why the average hoard value differs from the table in the blog post I linked above, which looks like this:

I think that I didn’t like the fact that the average hoard values for levels 1 and 2 would be the same, and so I reduced the number of hoards needed to make that level jump from 4 to 3. That gives the average hoard value of ~6667 that we see on my actual spreadsheet, which makes sense. I also noticed that I had some simple formulae in the top left of my spreadsheet to work out average values based on how many hoards are needed to go up a level, so I spent some time fiddling with that.

Part of me doesn’t really like that a Large dungeon of a given level could give as much treasure as a Small or even Medium dungeon of a level higher, and I spent a lot of time trying to smooth that out. But the numbers were getting silly and I sort of realised that it doesn’t really matter? At a certain point you have to let the arbitrary numbers be arbitrary, commit to them, and write the damn thing. I largely like the numbers up to level 5, and after that point I’m less pleased with them, but I think that’s fine.

The other part that’s entirely arbitrary is the “Magic Items” column. Scrolls, potions, and weapons don’t have a monetary value, and so I’m just sort of going by feel on these and trying to figure out how rare (or otherwise) I want them to be.

Magic items are an interesting one, and this is part of the reason why these tables have taken so long to put together. My intention is that the only magic items in A Dungeon Game will be magic weapons. They’re rare, and they’re sentient, and they should have the potential to completely change the direction of a campaign. I want them to start showing up at around 3rd level, and you’ll notice that the frequency of magic items in a level 3 dungeon is much higher than at other levels for exactly this reason.

Because of this, I need to write generation tables for magic weapons. I also want to write a couple of pre-generated ones that can function as examples of how to make them work. (Thankfully one already exists in The Moss Mother’s Maze). Similarly I also need to write potions for the game. This means that the tables haven’t yet been published to the website or included in the downloadable version of the game, because they’re useless without this extra stuff, but as of today the tables themselves are complete. Here’s how they currently look:

I’ve gone back and forth a lot about how to handle individual treasure. AD&D 2e - which, if we remember, is what all of this is based on - gives bestiary entries a treasure code which corresponds to a line on the treasure tables. Part of my aim is to simplify these things, so I think I’m going to do away with individual treasure tables. Instead, each creature in the bestiary will have a % chance of carrying individual treasure, and the GM can assign them pocket finds from the treasure budget generated when they roll up the hoard for the entire dungeon using these tables.

There’s still work to be done here before I can publish these properly, and I won’t know whether these distributions of coinage/art objects/etc - and especially the distribution of potions, scrolls, and magic weapons - actually works until I get them to the table over the course of a longer campaign, but at least I have a base to build from now.

Let me know what you think.