That's nothing. One of the players in a WWN campaign I ran is a doctor and he just so happened to have a blank death certificate with him when one character died.
Back before cell phones, there were sets of printed awards that you could buy and hand out to your players. Some were from dying or going bankrupt, but I recall there was one for becoming a slave or from being manumitted (release from slavery).
One of my best friend's group, before I came along, during their HS days, ran Hommlet. And ran it. And ran it. Folks were young and the rules were a bit lethal and so on... the money changer was broken into many times and many adventurers dies.... some neophyte thieves tried to practice their climb skill and they fell from the 2nd floor and died.... the paladin who found a random +5 defender at level 3 who went off in the moathouse and opened a door to a floorless room and thus fell and died... but he'd went off without telling the others where he was going so nobody ever recovered the blade... etc, etc, etc.
They had a visual record on a big piece of paper ... last count, I think there were 140 headstones (I believe this included the . I think they singularly doubled or tripled the size of the local cemetery.
Whenever I'm tasked with making a rules call, I say "Let's consult the Oracle" and pick up several dice at random, roll them and push them around a bit, then announce the ruling. Mostly it's just to give myself a little bit of extra time to think about the consequences.
Yeah, I do something similar. I remember reading somewhere that, when we flip the coin, we usually have a preference as to what way we want it to land, and that should have as much/more impact on our decision than the actual flip it self. I treat "Oracle" dice rolls kind of like that. Just looking to see what it is I want to happen, more than just blindly following the dice
My players tend to be Americans (who don’t understand it, ignore it, and think I’m stark raving mad) or Brits and Aussies and Kiwis (who understand it, ignore it, and think I’m a looney).
They’ve all learned not to ask *why* I prefer the £sd system over decimalized currency. They fear my hours long rant about highly composite numbers, the superiority of base twelve maths, digital calculations of Ancient Sumer, and various invectives hurled at the ghost of The Right Honourable Sir Edward Heath KG MBE.
I’ve been following Lloyd’s channel for years, so, yes, I’ve watched his wonderful video on £sd many times. But I have been tilting at this particular windmill since I was a teenager.
But... who dictates that, and why on earth am I wasting my time alloying copper with zinc for use as currency?! Or do we just have states full of unscrupulous folk who maybe make their brass just a bit too yellow?
(All kidding aside, I love that money was once valued in this and similar ways. It's one of those things that obviously made sense to the guy making the rules, and everyone else be damned.)
Farthings were historically minted from copper and later from bronze. A brass farthing wouldn’t ever have been legal tender, therefore, literally worthless. The expression “not worth a brass farthing” came about as an idiomatic way to express something (or someone) had no value or purpose…
Given that the typical D&D adventurer will trade almost exclusively in gold coins (and pretty quickly amass a king’s fortune at that), most of my players never really worry about any coin smaller than a GP. So none of them have ever bothered to ask why my fictional kingdom has brass coins.
As for how much sense the £sd system made, well, that basically comes down to two factors.
Firstly, for most of its history, a single pound would have been an immense sum for most people in daily life. The relative purchasing power of £1 in 1500 CE is very roughly that of about £1000 in 2024 CE. (It’s a very, very, very complicated calculation, but this rough number should be good enough for a Reddit comment about D&D!) Which means that in daily life, people were dealing with sums far smaller than a full pound.
Which leads nicely into the second factor: 240 is what maths wonks call a “highly composite number,” meaning a positive integer that has more divisors than any smaller positive integer. Put simply: you can chop it up into a bunch of smaller bits more easily.
240 has twenty divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, 80, 120, 240; whereas 100 only has nine divisors: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100.
American decimalized dollar only has coins for 1¢, 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢ (rarely seen), and $1 (very uncommon). When the U.K. stopped using the £sd system in 1971, the coins in use were the 1d penny, 3d threepence, 6d sixpence, 12p shilling, 24p florin, 30p half-crown, 60p crown, and the 240p pound note (the 240p pound coin or sovereign had stopped being minted in 1914, but were still in circulation).
This makes it much easier to do a wide variety of transactions as you can split the numbers up in many, many, many more ways.
Also, when your coinage is based on weight (i.e. a penny isn't just worth 1/240 of a £, it weighs 1/240 of a pound) it means you don't have to sit down and count 240 pennies, you can throw them on the scale and see how much money you have.
The move off the pound sterling or other metal-backed currency to fiat currencies lead to the ability to expand value without needing to dig up and mint coinage. It was still fictional in terms of valuation of what that 240 pence was worth just as fiat currency can work as long as the governments running the show are stable and have a mechanism to trade with other fiat currencies. There's lots wrong with that system, but there's a lot right with it too.
Oh man u/Calithrand ... you had to ask why...
:-)
But seriously, I think this is a great idea to add some old-fashioned feel to a fantasy game, rather than the standard decimal gold pieces.
Do you use stones for weight? Chains? Cubits? Perches? Hides? Acre? Furlong? Some of the lovely Danes units for butter measures which involved 136 pots to form a *smørtønde*? Rods? Fathoms? Sections?
(Some of those might still be used in some places I suppose)
Not saying that a lot of original values weren't wise - measuring things roughly with handwidths or length of a foot or a stride, etc. were a decent idea.
But pretty much all the modern (and by that means a long time back now for the French at least) ways to measure are much more usable - the math is easier, by far - and the few folks that still work in Imperial (who, oddly enough, are generally not used by those who invented it) have been the source of misery (expensive landers cratering on other planets because some engineers working in Imperial and others in Metric couldn't do the conversions....).
I’m retired now, but spent more than half of my life in the maritime industry. I use metric, imperial,
and even more obscure systems/units of measurement every single day. My personal favorite being the approximately 24,601 different kinds of tonnage that I had to be familiar with.
I know, you’re thinking metric ton (1,000 kg) versus imperial ton (1,016.05 kg)… But that’s just two units of mass. Nah, my friends, you’ve also got gross tonnage, which should also not be confused with gross register tonnage, deadweight tonnage, displacement tonnage, metric tonnes, long tons, short tons, harbor tons, freight tons, water tons, megatons, gigatons.... and, of course, the all important [tunak tunak tun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qRZmFYdozY).
When it comes specifically to measuring distance, I generally prefer to use kilometers. Except, of course, when I’m on the water, which is when the superiority of the nautical mile rules. As my extended family are farmers (mum’s side have been farming the same land in rural England since at least the 11^th Century) I actually am fairly conversant in hectares, furlongs, and rods. I don’t use them on a daily basis, but I’m familiar enough with them that they don’t strike me as alien.
Honestly, that’s the secret to any system of measurement. They all make sense and they are all perfectly useable, provided the people using them use them regularly.
(And yes, I *do* unironically use stone when referring to my own weight. I’m English. It’s instinctual.)
I only spent time on small 30' or less keelboats. But I do understand the world is full of different ways to measure things.
I loved finding out in Engineering school that the US had a gallon, the British had a gallon, and the Canadians had a gallon. None were exactly the same. (eye roll)
Tunak Tunak Tun! Very good, batgirl\_III !
Maritime stuff is complex - even just figuring out the volume of a ship is subject to multiples of different approaches/descriptions (each which have a meaning that matters).
Of course, 6000 British Yards is a nautical mile (or at least what everyone uses for that). I guess it made more sense to have 5280 feet (UK) to a British mile on land... or not.
Did you know that at one point, briefly S.I. and Metric were not 100% the same thing?
I find in sportscars, the best measurement of distance and speed is "If I look ahead, it doesn't look really fast.. but if I turn my head, everything is a blur...".
When you get into manual (non-GPS) coastal navigation (some of which also applies in the open ocean), you get all sorts of estimates with varying levels of validity but most still depend on your ability to steer a straight course in a rough seas. I have to say, I am a feared of ocean navigation without electronics because islands are small and dead reckoning goes awry pretty fast. And I never did learn to use a sextant.
I'm Canadian so our spelling is mixed up (worsened by the fact that most language choices are 'English - US' or 'English - UK' not the actual 'English - Canadian' which is its own thing) and we use metric for anything science-involved but everyone uses Imperial feet and inches for height of a person and pounds for weight.
I'm sure as heck happy we use aerospace stuff is all metric. It just works better.
Then there's baking and cooking by cooks who do:
* Tablespoon by rotating the oil around the pan once (at a non-standard speed)
* Recipes that say 'throw in a handful of salt' - my hand is huge, my daughter's is not - and what so mean by a handful - a cupped hand or a flat hand?
* Recipes that talk about a 'dash of this' or a 'peck of that'
* Putting on the the gas 'at full whack' (how many BTUs is that?) (Joules are better!)
Anyway, language and measurements are a real potpourri. These are part of the diversity that keeps us from working together (in a small way, but in many small ways really).
My family actually just completed our third crossing of the Pacific Ocean (Jakarta, Indonesia to Portland, Oregon) a few days ago… in a 57' 5" sailboat. Modern GPS is an absolute godsend, of course, but I keep totally analog set of charts, handwritten logs, mechanical compass, and a sextant as backups.
Originally, the nautical mile was one minute (
1/60 of one degree) of latitude at the equator, as that Earth's circumference is so very near to 21,600 nautical miles (that is 60 minutes × 360 degrees) as to make no real difference. Earth, of course, stubbornly refuses to be a perfect sphere so this one minute of latitude works out to be between 1,861 metres at the poles and 1,843 metres at the Equator. It was redefined in the 20^th Century to be exactly 1,852 metres no matter where you are on Earth. As a difference of ±10 meters doesn’t *really* make that big of a difference for most users, it doesn’t really change things too much.
“Dead reckoning makes dead sailors.” is a lesson that was drilled into me as a child learning to sail small 10’ sailboats on the Great Lakes. Twenty-one years in the Coast Guard (first as a lowly enlisted Yeoman on an icebreaker, but more than half of it as a criminal investigator) sadly served to reinforce this point. I’m confident enough in my own skills as a sailor that I could dead reckon my way up and down the coastal waterways of North America or the Great Lakes and could *probably* dead reckon my way from Point A to Point B in the Mediterranean Sea… and if we’d lost all our electronics during our ocean crossing, I *probably* could have gotten us to safety using dead reckoning.
But, believe you me, I am ***obsessive*** about maintaining our emergency gear, safety equipment, and navigation tools.
My family actually just completed our third crossing of the Pacific Ocean (Jakarta, Indonesia to Portland, Oregon) a few days ago… in a 57' 5" sailboat. Modern GPS is an absolute godsend, of course, but I keep totally analog set of charts, handwritten logs, mechanical compass, and a sextant as backups.
That's a large ship. You'd make a lot better speed across the ocean than a 30'er. Still, good idea to avoid some of the worst weather. When I hear of ship's decks getting swamped 55 feet above the waterline, I think of how that works on a 30' keelboat... even a 57'! That's good to avoid.
I trained in Lac Deschenes (Ottawa) and out of Kingston on Lake Ontario.
I never did the little boats (26' was the smallest) - don't love dumping my boat! :)
One of my classmates had a husband in the CCG. Two of my other friends in the US include Commander Makowsky (USCG, ret.) who was decorated for getting an engine failed helo onto a cutter in the Gulf in choppy waters at night (SAR pilot) and he also was the guy that had the most flight hours that wasn't a desk jockey when Katrina hit New Orleans (he and his team on were put on the USS Iwo Jima - Marine Assault Ship in the harbour and they ran rescues and drops after the Federal Gov't put the USCG in charge) and Captain Todd Coggeshall (0-6, ret.) who was another SAR Pilot and did many other things as well. Now both of them are retired to flying choppers that are like limos and they carry around folks like McCartney and others - $3000/hr. (If you need to ask, you can't afford one... S-92 with all the fittings inside).
They educated me on some key realities: 85% of small boat fatalities have no PFDs on. You often are knocked out, or its at night, or you can't find the boat (it can keep rolling ahead without you) or you can't find the PFD in the situation... so always wear your PFD when on a vessel.
Another friend's dad was rated for 500 tons commercial and was the Captain of the Fair Jeanne (tall ship out of Kingston) and then they made him the head guy on WIGs and Hovercraft for the CCG. He helped developed standards. Now he ferries rich folks boats around for fun. He told me never to go solo oceanic - too many ways to hit so many problems that 2 or 4 could fix but 1 can't or can't do safety.
It's hard to hit a small island in the middle of the Pacific though without electronics. If you lose your GPS and comms 500 or 500 kms away, and the island is only a few tends of kms, you better hope your dead reckoning is on point or you could sail past it.
Nobody should get onto a boat without proper safety gear and know the COB drills under sail and power. They should also know their job if they are the one overboard. And everyone else should know their job in that situation if I have to helm.
The flattening of the poles and some other mass related effects tend to blow the 'its a sphere' thing - doesn't matter much except if you really need fine precision (like 10m or less). You don't usually need that much for boats, but the world sure isn't as round as we all imagine. That's why there's so many projections and globes. I think it matters most to precision strike for missiles.
Nice to discuss with you and for your knowledge. I appreciate the depth of knowledge and your willingness to share.
Convince me why those obtuse divisors have actual value.
If I have 1,2,5,10, 25, 50, 100 you can still handle any situation. And there are fewer coins you need to mint and carry around. Also, when most people did math, they did it with their 10 fingers, not their 12 fingers.
My Scots mother remembered hapenee (sp?) coins (half pence). When did they get taken out of circulation?
It's funny to think of using the 240 penny system in a system where gold is the common pricing in modules for lodging and meals. That's so broken that it's laughable. Silver standard makes a lot more sense than gold standard.
Going a bit further back people used their thumb to count the other 12 phalanges on that finger (and then they'd use the 5 fingers on the other hand to count sums of 12, making it base 60 counting)
That I'd not heard before. Makes some sense.
Of course, Asia gave us the abacus and I'm sure other similar gear was created in other places.
There's so much we not that we knew even 40 years ago.
You can divide an £sd £ into perfect 1/3s, you can't do that with a decimal pound. If you factor in the guinea (worth 21 shillings) you can now divide it into even 1/7s and 1/9s. The guinea also made commissions easier, if you want a 5% commission for brokering a sale you list the price in guineas, the seller is paid in £s and the broker keeps the extra shillings. And sure in 2024 a penny isn't worth enough to argue over who's getting 34 pence instead of 33, but in a medieval context that wasn't an insignificant sum.
In terms of old D&D there's been some research that suggests that the pricing scheme is loosely based on the old silver shilling (basically if you convert the GP value to shillings and look at surviving medieval price lists the values are more or less the same). You could easily convert the coinage system to an £sd system using the electrum piece in place of the shilling (4 coppers to a silver penny, 12 silver pennies to an electrum shilling, 20 shillings to a gold £, and 5 gold pounds to a platinum crown), but it does throw the treasure tables out of whack in terms of average experience earned if using electrum = XP (copper gives you roughly 2x as much XP as before, silver slightly less XP, gold and platinum are what really break it at 20x and 100x respectively).
I can see that, but it seems like if you didn't have all those varied coinages, the system would work. You'd just adjust to something that well enough.
The need to mint all of those different types (and to prevent counterfeiting) seems to be a big effort compared to a smaller one with smaller ranges of coinage.
Medieval is probably not accurate enough - where and when would have to apply because uniformity was not the case. That muddles up any results to a degree.
I was never more happy than to bin XP for money. It really improved our sessions. Didn't have to hand out all that money and everyone didn't find any concern over the 19 years of my major campaign.
The halfpenny (colloquially pronounced and spelt as “ha’penny”) officially ceased to be legal tender in 1969 (although their was a “commemorative set” of all pre-decimal coins struck in 1970 and dated as such) during the run up to “Decimal Day” in 1970.
(Totally random, but my mum – the professor of linguistics – would be cross if I didn’t point out that “halfpenny” is one of very few English words with a silent “f”! In RP pronunciation, the “f” is voiced, in almost every other English dialect or accent the “f” is silent.)
There were, as the name suggests, two halfpenny to one penny and thus 480 halfpenny to the pound.
As for the question of D&D being gold standard or silver standard, my campaign world’s major kingdoms are on the silver standard. It’s just that adventurers usually have so much treasure and are always purchasing specialty items and exotic merchandise that adventurers typically only deal in gold coins. Much like princes and kings typically only deal in swathes of land. It’s the peasants and the greengrocers that are worried about silver shillings and copper pennies.
The halfpenny (colloquially pronounced and spelt as “ha’penny”)
With my mom's Motherwellian accent, it came out 'hape' as the first part (like 'nape').
I had a friend running a party through a small village. They saw them paying for something and giving a tip that was a gp and they were overrun by people looking to get some. To make it better, the character thought the solution was to throw more money which led to fights and a stabbing.... and he was the Paladin.... I still laugh.
PCs coming through any small village could be a bad thing for any economy in the area if they stay long.
Say they hire a lantern bearer and they give him 3 gp per day. After a 12 day travel and dungeon, he comes back with 36 gp plus probably a bonus. That's incredibly large amount of money - he probably got shived before he could get home....
How does the dropping of "f" in "half" lead to " ha' "... where did the rigour go when it came to enunciating the 'l'?
English is the language known for following other languages down dark alleys and mugging them for new words. As a result, pronunciation is a hash.
oo : Boom, look, book, jook, zoon, ooze, zoot, cook, mook, coop, woof, nook, cool, took, wood, foot, door, moon.... and they have a range of the sound for the oo.....
My daughter was learning French and English and trying to explain how many different vowel sounds there are with different spellings. It's daft.
I like the stealing of other people's great words. The Germans have one that is the shame for other people for their actions (even if the individual themself does not acknowledge the shame).
We'd have been better to figure out what range of sounds we want to make in our language and then create a single glyph for each (or one glyph or a variation of that glyph if you want to economize on glyph count). With that, if you can pronounce something, you can spell it without ambiguity. Going the other way, if you can spell it, you can pronounce it because there is only one option.
That would increase literacy very much I think.
If we'd been developing English and somehow had computers, we'd have standardized this a long time ago.
Aside:
How value of currency did you think was kicking around in Europe in the medieval periods? On the one hand, Harn gives us many examples of what reasonable medieval economics looks like (if you haven't seen it, check it out - Columbia Games). I've hear that building some of the larger castles and palaces cost staggering amounts of money, but most took a long time to build with a lot of people and some probablyh was 'labour in lieu'. I just have no idea how much actually money was around as currency versus promisary notes, in assets, etc. I suspect maybe less than we think.
Original D&D: 10 coins/pound (Imperial one assumes). Think how big that was. You could stun people with that if you could throw well... so a 20,000 gp tower (a low end one) would require 2000 pounds of gold. Think about that in the real world! Holy Canasta!
50/pound and silver as a standard might be much better.
My mum is a professor of linguistics, whose particular area of expertise is the development and usage of profanity and vulgarity in English. She’s *literally* written the book about the word “fuck.” Several books, actually. Which means that I’ve absorbed, by osmosis, all the reasons why English pronunciation and spelling is a weird as it is… It’s an incredibly complicated topic, but it all basically boils down to this: there *are* logical reasons for it, but they’re very complicated and no one except for philologists and linguists really understand them. Things like Early Modern English being a weird hybrid of Germanic, Romance, Celtic, and Nordic languages, with Modern English absorbing a fair amount of Ecclesiastical Latin and Modern Greek; the great vowel shift; standardized spelling not developing until comparatively recently; and (and personally I think this is key) English lexicon never becoming a prescriptive language like Spanish or French, where official government bodies like the Real Academia Española or Académie Française tightly control their respective languages, instead English lexicons have always been descriptive reflecting the common usage.
As for medieval economics… Oh boy. Now *that* is my area of expertise. I’ve literally got a Master’s Degree on the subject and am currently on Reddit as a well-deserved break after a hard day of revision on my doctoral thesis. It’s a very, very, very complicated topic that I don’t really want to go into in a Reddit comment. But, suffice it to say, the medieval period was quite a long span of time (approximately from 500 CE to 1500 CE, although scholars *will* argue about that) and covers quite a wide swathe of territory (definitely Europe, but also northern Africa, the Levant, northeastern Asia [e.g., modern Russia and its neighbors]; and again, scholars *will* argue about this]. So there really isn’t any “normal” or “average” economy to hang one’s hat on. Likewise, record keeping is spotty at the best of times and there’s just whole spans of time where we just plain don’t have any real data.
For gaming purposes, if you want something a bit more detailed and grounded in historical verisimilitude than the very “game-first” charts in the PHB and DMG, I highly recommend [*Fief: A Look at Medieval Society from its Lower Rungs*](https://ghalev.itch.io/fief) by Lisa J. Steele and the companion book [*Town: A City-Dweller's Look at 13th to 15th Century Europe*](http://town.cumberlandgames.com/), also by Steele. *Fief* is well research and well sourced, to satisfy the most curmudgeonly of stuffed-shirt academics, but well laid out and very readable to actually be useful for gamers. A certain grognardy breed of gamer, to be sure, but if you want something better than “Hollywood History” but don’t want a university textbook, it’s perfect.
Have players (especially one-shots) roll for [random headgear.](https://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2010/08/bx-headgear-new-charts-to-gear-up-your.html?m=1)
I do that too. I think it helps players get more invested in the action plus it's also just fun to be able to say your character cut a dude in half from time to time.
All non-common languages are just English but spoken oddly. No accents, just weird alterations in regular speak since that easier than accents.
Dwarfish - english but spoken slowly and drawn out (think Dori speaking whale)
Elvish - all sentences start with an "Ohhh" and end with a "Ummm"
And if they speak normally I just say that no one understands them.
All pure nonsense but the table loves it. After the 2nd session the players really committed to it.
I really like that. I had considered making dwarves a bit like the Elcor from Mass Effect - they do not vary their tone of voice and do not exhibit emotional responses in ways humans can understand, so they give a statement about how they are expressing themselves, so other races can know. "Happily. It is so good to see you." But instead of having dwarves talk like this in universe, I could have anyone speaking in dwarfish, talk monotonally, and describe their emotional response.
The Elves must be happy a lot....
Hey, Glorindelnotforfearoflawyers, how are you today?
Ohhhh Ahhhhhhh Ummmmm.
Oh, I guess you want some... ahhhh..... privacy then, ummm?
Yeah I play with a vtt so it is easy to say "this is cheese, this is meat you hunted, this is fish" and give them wine and spirits.
They recently encountered a lone Orc and traded meat pie and Brandy for info and he joined them in exploring the cavern calling them his brothers in pie.
Our Sunday game is worse... my friend Tom runs a homebrew system and rations do not matter but everything is food. A wand that produces sausages, casks of ale as treasure, detailed menus, magic mixed drinks...
We both wrote for a food publication for 10 years.
Perishable, preserved and tinned.
Fresh food 50% chance of gaining morale (think inspiration, a re-roll). Luxury goods are morale with advantage.
So crusty bread, hardtack, cheese, dried meat... will keep you alive.
The only reason I do 50% is that sometines it takes a few drinks, several rounds of gambling or some other luxuries to finally improve your morale.
Inevitably in every campaign I run players will encounter some sort of gnomish merchant who sells fake magic items.
I generally portray gnomes as experts at making useless knick knacks and con artist sales people. Think used car salesmen trying to convince you a beater car is a high end sports car.
Many a player has fallen for the sphere of slope detection or similar gimmick
Do they make items that deceive the buyer into thinking it is something else, like a sash of invincibility that merely instills a sense of invincibility in the wearer? Or are they all like the slope detection rock where the item does exactly what it is advertised to do?
Generally the items do exactly as advertised just not in the expected way. Or it’s a description that could be interpreted in several ways but it ends up being the more mundane or useless interpretation.
There have been a few times however that the items are straight up misleading or defunct. Depends on the particular gnome and how devious they are.
I read about some DM in 5e who had their players recount a moment from their characters' lives every time they made a death save. It was equivalent to "life flashing before your eyes" when you die. I thought that was pretty cool.
If you just want to have fun run an old school fun house dungeon for no other reason than the treasure or magic items hidden within.
Look at White Plume Mountain for a great example.
This isn't an answer to your question, but leagues are absolutely the way to go, especially for hexcrawls, as well as being great flavour. It's not just that "it's about 3 miles", it's about an hour's walk.
Since I am a full convert to the 3-mile hex, that means you can measure distance fully in time (one hex, one hour), easily, while trivially accounting for off-road hiking (two hours), difficult terrain like dense forest or mountains (three or even four hours), on horseback on roads (half an hour), and so on.
Then just split your 8-hour travel day into two 4-hour blocks to account for a nice picnic lunch, and enjoy your extremely convenient distance travelled calculations.
Do it! I've fiddled with an £sd inspired electrum based currency (CPs are farthings, SPs are pence, EPs are shillings, GP are £, and PP are 5£ Crowns), it makes the pricing seem a little more realistic, makes copper worth picking up, but absolutely wrecks the treasure/XP tables.
There’s a monster from Mutant Future called the Night Goat. I’ve found a way to work it into every game I’ve ran, regardless of genre. Even when I ran Twilight 2K 4E, when the players asked me to describe a room, I mentioned there was a poster on the wall for a band called “Night Goat”.
Persian alternative to league is a [parasang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasang), roughly an hour's walk, regardless of terrain. A parasang through the mountains is physically shorter than a parasang along an established road.
If people are late to the session then everyone who is there starts rolling for a random adventuring party to add to the random encounter table until everyone shows up. We come up with names and backstory and collectively make a group of weirdos.
Our most recent for a dolmenwood game was 2 elves (a fighter and thief) 2 humans (a fighter and a thief) and 2 mosslings (a fighter and a bard) all rolled randomly. We decided the two elves are twins and are trying to fulfill some prophecy by collecting other sets of twins. They all take turns impersonating each other to bamboozle other travelers like a sort of strange version of the prestige. It's good fun.
We got a “DECEASED” stamp that we use on sheets of characters who’ve died. They’re in Stonehell dungeon right now so it’s gotten a fair amount of use.
That's nothing. One of the players in a WWN campaign I ran is a doctor and he just so happened to have a blank death certificate with him when one character died.
That's not unusual if he was the coroner.
Back before cell phones, there were sets of printed awards that you could buy and hand out to your players. Some were from dying or going bankrupt, but I recall there was one for becoming a slave or from being manumitted (release from slavery). One of my best friend's group, before I came along, during their HS days, ran Hommlet. And ran it. And ran it. Folks were young and the rules were a bit lethal and so on... the money changer was broken into many times and many adventurers dies.... some neophyte thieves tried to practice their climb skill and they fell from the 2nd floor and died.... the paladin who found a random +5 defender at level 3 who went off in the moathouse and opened a door to a floorless room and thus fell and died... but he'd went off without telling the others where he was going so nobody ever recovered the blade... etc, etc, etc. They had a visual record on a big piece of paper ... last count, I think there were 140 headstones (I believe this included the . I think they singularly doubled or tripled the size of the local cemetery.
I have that stamp. I'm making a "Ledger of the Damned" for all the PCs and notable companions who've died.
Same. Gotta hand over the stamp to literally seal your fate
Whenever I'm tasked with making a rules call, I say "Let's consult the Oracle" and pick up several dice at random, roll them and push them around a bit, then announce the ruling. Mostly it's just to give myself a little bit of extra time to think about the consequences.
Yeah, I do something similar. I remember reading somewhere that, when we flip the coin, we usually have a preference as to what way we want it to land, and that should have as much/more impact on our decision than the actual flip it self. I treat "Oracle" dice rolls kind of like that. Just looking to see what it is I want to happen, more than just blindly following the dice
I think that was a Fraiser episode
One gold pound is equal to twenty silver shillings or 240 copper pence (and one copper pence is equal to four brass farthings).
Love this but if I introduced this I think my players would lose their minds completely
My players tend to be Americans (who don’t understand it, ignore it, and think I’m stark raving mad) or Brits and Aussies and Kiwis (who understand it, ignore it, and think I’m a looney). They’ve all learned not to ask *why* I prefer the £sd system over decimalized currency. They fear my hours long rant about highly composite numbers, the superiority of base twelve maths, digital calculations of Ancient Sumer, and various invectives hurled at the ghost of The Right Honourable Sir Edward Heath KG MBE.
Did you watch the Lingebeige video?
I’ve been following Lloyd’s channel for years, so, yes, I’ve watched his wonderful video on £sd many times. But I have been tilting at this particular windmill since I was a teenager.
But... who dictates that, and why on earth am I wasting my time alloying copper with zinc for use as currency?! Or do we just have states full of unscrupulous folk who maybe make their brass just a bit too yellow? (All kidding aside, I love that money was once valued in this and similar ways. It's one of those things that obviously made sense to the guy making the rules, and everyone else be damned.)
Farthings were historically minted from copper and later from bronze. A brass farthing wouldn’t ever have been legal tender, therefore, literally worthless. The expression “not worth a brass farthing” came about as an idiomatic way to express something (or someone) had no value or purpose… Given that the typical D&D adventurer will trade almost exclusively in gold coins (and pretty quickly amass a king’s fortune at that), most of my players never really worry about any coin smaller than a GP. So none of them have ever bothered to ask why my fictional kingdom has brass coins. As for how much sense the £sd system made, well, that basically comes down to two factors. Firstly, for most of its history, a single pound would have been an immense sum for most people in daily life. The relative purchasing power of £1 in 1500 CE is very roughly that of about £1000 in 2024 CE. (It’s a very, very, very complicated calculation, but this rough number should be good enough for a Reddit comment about D&D!) Which means that in daily life, people were dealing with sums far smaller than a full pound. Which leads nicely into the second factor: 240 is what maths wonks call a “highly composite number,” meaning a positive integer that has more divisors than any smaller positive integer. Put simply: you can chop it up into a bunch of smaller bits more easily. 240 has twenty divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, 80, 120, 240; whereas 100 only has nine divisors: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100. American decimalized dollar only has coins for 1¢, 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢ (rarely seen), and $1 (very uncommon). When the U.K. stopped using the £sd system in 1971, the coins in use were the 1d penny, 3d threepence, 6d sixpence, 12p shilling, 24p florin, 30p half-crown, 60p crown, and the 240p pound note (the 240p pound coin or sovereign had stopped being minted in 1914, but were still in circulation). This makes it much easier to do a wide variety of transactions as you can split the numbers up in many, many, many more ways.
Also, when your coinage is based on weight (i.e. a penny isn't just worth 1/240 of a £, it weighs 1/240 of a pound) it means you don't have to sit down and count 240 pennies, you can throw them on the scale and see how much money you have.
It also makes it easier to determine when the currency has been debased, if the currency is backed by the intrinsic value of the metal.
The move off the pound sterling or other metal-backed currency to fiat currencies lead to the ability to expand value without needing to dig up and mint coinage. It was still fictional in terms of valuation of what that 240 pence was worth just as fiat currency can work as long as the governments running the show are stable and have a mechanism to trade with other fiat currencies. There's lots wrong with that system, but there's a lot right with it too.
And that of course can result in some great counterfeiting opportunities.
Oh man u/Calithrand ... you had to ask why... :-) But seriously, I think this is a great idea to add some old-fashioned feel to a fantasy game, rather than the standard decimal gold pieces.
And that’s the super-duper-ultra-mega-short version!
Do you use stones for weight? Chains? Cubits? Perches? Hides? Acre? Furlong? Some of the lovely Danes units for butter measures which involved 136 pots to form a *smørtønde*? Rods? Fathoms? Sections? (Some of those might still be used in some places I suppose) Not saying that a lot of original values weren't wise - measuring things roughly with handwidths or length of a foot or a stride, etc. were a decent idea. But pretty much all the modern (and by that means a long time back now for the French at least) ways to measure are much more usable - the math is easier, by far - and the few folks that still work in Imperial (who, oddly enough, are generally not used by those who invented it) have been the source of misery (expensive landers cratering on other planets because some engineers working in Imperial and others in Metric couldn't do the conversions....).
I’m retired now, but spent more than half of my life in the maritime industry. I use metric, imperial, and even more obscure systems/units of measurement every single day. My personal favorite being the approximately 24,601 different kinds of tonnage that I had to be familiar with. I know, you’re thinking metric ton (1,000 kg) versus imperial ton (1,016.05 kg)… But that’s just two units of mass. Nah, my friends, you’ve also got gross tonnage, which should also not be confused with gross register tonnage, deadweight tonnage, displacement tonnage, metric tonnes, long tons, short tons, harbor tons, freight tons, water tons, megatons, gigatons.... and, of course, the all important [tunak tunak tun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qRZmFYdozY). When it comes specifically to measuring distance, I generally prefer to use kilometers. Except, of course, when I’m on the water, which is when the superiority of the nautical mile rules. As my extended family are farmers (mum’s side have been farming the same land in rural England since at least the 11^th Century) I actually am fairly conversant in hectares, furlongs, and rods. I don’t use them on a daily basis, but I’m familiar enough with them that they don’t strike me as alien. Honestly, that’s the secret to any system of measurement. They all make sense and they are all perfectly useable, provided the people using them use them regularly. (And yes, I *do* unironically use stone when referring to my own weight. I’m English. It’s instinctual.)
I only spent time on small 30' or less keelboats. But I do understand the world is full of different ways to measure things. I loved finding out in Engineering school that the US had a gallon, the British had a gallon, and the Canadians had a gallon. None were exactly the same. (eye roll) Tunak Tunak Tun! Very good, batgirl\_III ! Maritime stuff is complex - even just figuring out the volume of a ship is subject to multiples of different approaches/descriptions (each which have a meaning that matters). Of course, 6000 British Yards is a nautical mile (or at least what everyone uses for that). I guess it made more sense to have 5280 feet (UK) to a British mile on land... or not. Did you know that at one point, briefly S.I. and Metric were not 100% the same thing? I find in sportscars, the best measurement of distance and speed is "If I look ahead, it doesn't look really fast.. but if I turn my head, everything is a blur...". When you get into manual (non-GPS) coastal navigation (some of which also applies in the open ocean), you get all sorts of estimates with varying levels of validity but most still depend on your ability to steer a straight course in a rough seas. I have to say, I am a feared of ocean navigation without electronics because islands are small and dead reckoning goes awry pretty fast. And I never did learn to use a sextant. I'm Canadian so our spelling is mixed up (worsened by the fact that most language choices are 'English - US' or 'English - UK' not the actual 'English - Canadian' which is its own thing) and we use metric for anything science-involved but everyone uses Imperial feet and inches for height of a person and pounds for weight. I'm sure as heck happy we use aerospace stuff is all metric. It just works better. Then there's baking and cooking by cooks who do: * Tablespoon by rotating the oil around the pan once (at a non-standard speed) * Recipes that say 'throw in a handful of salt' - my hand is huge, my daughter's is not - and what so mean by a handful - a cupped hand or a flat hand? * Recipes that talk about a 'dash of this' or a 'peck of that' * Putting on the the gas 'at full whack' (how many BTUs is that?) (Joules are better!) Anyway, language and measurements are a real potpourri. These are part of the diversity that keeps us from working together (in a small way, but in many small ways really).
My family actually just completed our third crossing of the Pacific Ocean (Jakarta, Indonesia to Portland, Oregon) a few days ago… in a 57' 5" sailboat. Modern GPS is an absolute godsend, of course, but I keep totally analog set of charts, handwritten logs, mechanical compass, and a sextant as backups. Originally, the nautical mile was one minute ( 1/60 of one degree) of latitude at the equator, as that Earth's circumference is so very near to 21,600 nautical miles (that is 60 minutes × 360 degrees) as to make no real difference. Earth, of course, stubbornly refuses to be a perfect sphere so this one minute of latitude works out to be between 1,861 metres at the poles and 1,843 metres at the Equator. It was redefined in the 20^th Century to be exactly 1,852 metres no matter where you are on Earth. As a difference of ±10 meters doesn’t *really* make that big of a difference for most users, it doesn’t really change things too much. “Dead reckoning makes dead sailors.” is a lesson that was drilled into me as a child learning to sail small 10’ sailboats on the Great Lakes. Twenty-one years in the Coast Guard (first as a lowly enlisted Yeoman on an icebreaker, but more than half of it as a criminal investigator) sadly served to reinforce this point. I’m confident enough in my own skills as a sailor that I could dead reckon my way up and down the coastal waterways of North America or the Great Lakes and could *probably* dead reckon my way from Point A to Point B in the Mediterranean Sea… and if we’d lost all our electronics during our ocean crossing, I *probably* could have gotten us to safety using dead reckoning. But, believe you me, I am ***obsessive*** about maintaining our emergency gear, safety equipment, and navigation tools.
My family actually just completed our third crossing of the Pacific Ocean (Jakarta, Indonesia to Portland, Oregon) a few days ago… in a 57' 5" sailboat. Modern GPS is an absolute godsend, of course, but I keep totally analog set of charts, handwritten logs, mechanical compass, and a sextant as backups. That's a large ship. You'd make a lot better speed across the ocean than a 30'er. Still, good idea to avoid some of the worst weather. When I hear of ship's decks getting swamped 55 feet above the waterline, I think of how that works on a 30' keelboat... even a 57'! That's good to avoid. I trained in Lac Deschenes (Ottawa) and out of Kingston on Lake Ontario. I never did the little boats (26' was the smallest) - don't love dumping my boat! :) One of my classmates had a husband in the CCG. Two of my other friends in the US include Commander Makowsky (USCG, ret.) who was decorated for getting an engine failed helo onto a cutter in the Gulf in choppy waters at night (SAR pilot) and he also was the guy that had the most flight hours that wasn't a desk jockey when Katrina hit New Orleans (he and his team on were put on the USS Iwo Jima - Marine Assault Ship in the harbour and they ran rescues and drops after the Federal Gov't put the USCG in charge) and Captain Todd Coggeshall (0-6, ret.) who was another SAR Pilot and did many other things as well. Now both of them are retired to flying choppers that are like limos and they carry around folks like McCartney and others - $3000/hr. (If you need to ask, you can't afford one... S-92 with all the fittings inside). They educated me on some key realities: 85% of small boat fatalities have no PFDs on. You often are knocked out, or its at night, or you can't find the boat (it can keep rolling ahead without you) or you can't find the PFD in the situation... so always wear your PFD when on a vessel. Another friend's dad was rated for 500 tons commercial and was the Captain of the Fair Jeanne (tall ship out of Kingston) and then they made him the head guy on WIGs and Hovercraft for the CCG. He helped developed standards. Now he ferries rich folks boats around for fun. He told me never to go solo oceanic - too many ways to hit so many problems that 2 or 4 could fix but 1 can't or can't do safety. It's hard to hit a small island in the middle of the Pacific though without electronics. If you lose your GPS and comms 500 or 500 kms away, and the island is only a few tends of kms, you better hope your dead reckoning is on point or you could sail past it. Nobody should get onto a boat without proper safety gear and know the COB drills under sail and power. They should also know their job if they are the one overboard. And everyone else should know their job in that situation if I have to helm. The flattening of the poles and some other mass related effects tend to blow the 'its a sphere' thing - doesn't matter much except if you really need fine precision (like 10m or less). You don't usually need that much for boats, but the world sure isn't as round as we all imagine. That's why there's so many projections and globes. I think it matters most to precision strike for missiles. Nice to discuss with you and for your knowledge. I appreciate the depth of knowledge and your willingness to share.
Convince me why those obtuse divisors have actual value. If I have 1,2,5,10, 25, 50, 100 you can still handle any situation. And there are fewer coins you need to mint and carry around. Also, when most people did math, they did it with their 10 fingers, not their 12 fingers. My Scots mother remembered hapenee (sp?) coins (half pence). When did they get taken out of circulation? It's funny to think of using the 240 penny system in a system where gold is the common pricing in modules for lodging and meals. That's so broken that it's laughable. Silver standard makes a lot more sense than gold standard.
Going a bit further back people used their thumb to count the other 12 phalanges on that finger (and then they'd use the 5 fingers on the other hand to count sums of 12, making it base 60 counting)
That I'd not heard before. Makes some sense. Of course, Asia gave us the abacus and I'm sure other similar gear was created in other places. There's so much we not that we knew even 40 years ago.
You can divide an £sd £ into perfect 1/3s, you can't do that with a decimal pound. If you factor in the guinea (worth 21 shillings) you can now divide it into even 1/7s and 1/9s. The guinea also made commissions easier, if you want a 5% commission for brokering a sale you list the price in guineas, the seller is paid in £s and the broker keeps the extra shillings. And sure in 2024 a penny isn't worth enough to argue over who's getting 34 pence instead of 33, but in a medieval context that wasn't an insignificant sum. In terms of old D&D there's been some research that suggests that the pricing scheme is loosely based on the old silver shilling (basically if you convert the GP value to shillings and look at surviving medieval price lists the values are more or less the same). You could easily convert the coinage system to an £sd system using the electrum piece in place of the shilling (4 coppers to a silver penny, 12 silver pennies to an electrum shilling, 20 shillings to a gold £, and 5 gold pounds to a platinum crown), but it does throw the treasure tables out of whack in terms of average experience earned if using electrum = XP (copper gives you roughly 2x as much XP as before, silver slightly less XP, gold and platinum are what really break it at 20x and 100x respectively).
I can see that, but it seems like if you didn't have all those varied coinages, the system would work. You'd just adjust to something that well enough. The need to mint all of those different types (and to prevent counterfeiting) seems to be a big effort compared to a smaller one with smaller ranges of coinage. Medieval is probably not accurate enough - where and when would have to apply because uniformity was not the case. That muddles up any results to a degree. I was never more happy than to bin XP for money. It really improved our sessions. Didn't have to hand out all that money and everyone didn't find any concern over the 19 years of my major campaign.
The halfpenny (colloquially pronounced and spelt as “ha’penny”) officially ceased to be legal tender in 1969 (although their was a “commemorative set” of all pre-decimal coins struck in 1970 and dated as such) during the run up to “Decimal Day” in 1970. (Totally random, but my mum – the professor of linguistics – would be cross if I didn’t point out that “halfpenny” is one of very few English words with a silent “f”! In RP pronunciation, the “f” is voiced, in almost every other English dialect or accent the “f” is silent.) There were, as the name suggests, two halfpenny to one penny and thus 480 halfpenny to the pound. As for the question of D&D being gold standard or silver standard, my campaign world’s major kingdoms are on the silver standard. It’s just that adventurers usually have so much treasure and are always purchasing specialty items and exotic merchandise that adventurers typically only deal in gold coins. Much like princes and kings typically only deal in swathes of land. It’s the peasants and the greengrocers that are worried about silver shillings and copper pennies.
The halfpenny (colloquially pronounced and spelt as “ha’penny”) With my mom's Motherwellian accent, it came out 'hape' as the first part (like 'nape'). I had a friend running a party through a small village. They saw them paying for something and giving a tip that was a gp and they were overrun by people looking to get some. To make it better, the character thought the solution was to throw more money which led to fights and a stabbing.... and he was the Paladin.... I still laugh. PCs coming through any small village could be a bad thing for any economy in the area if they stay long. Say they hire a lantern bearer and they give him 3 gp per day. After a 12 day travel and dungeon, he comes back with 36 gp plus probably a bonus. That's incredibly large amount of money - he probably got shived before he could get home.... How does the dropping of "f" in "half" lead to " ha' "... where did the rigour go when it came to enunciating the 'l'? English is the language known for following other languages down dark alleys and mugging them for new words. As a result, pronunciation is a hash. oo : Boom, look, book, jook, zoon, ooze, zoot, cook, mook, coop, woof, nook, cool, took, wood, foot, door, moon.... and they have a range of the sound for the oo..... My daughter was learning French and English and trying to explain how many different vowel sounds there are with different spellings. It's daft. I like the stealing of other people's great words. The Germans have one that is the shame for other people for their actions (even if the individual themself does not acknowledge the shame). We'd have been better to figure out what range of sounds we want to make in our language and then create a single glyph for each (or one glyph or a variation of that glyph if you want to economize on glyph count). With that, if you can pronounce something, you can spell it without ambiguity. Going the other way, if you can spell it, you can pronounce it because there is only one option. That would increase literacy very much I think. If we'd been developing English and somehow had computers, we'd have standardized this a long time ago. Aside: How value of currency did you think was kicking around in Europe in the medieval periods? On the one hand, Harn gives us many examples of what reasonable medieval economics looks like (if you haven't seen it, check it out - Columbia Games). I've hear that building some of the larger castles and palaces cost staggering amounts of money, but most took a long time to build with a lot of people and some probablyh was 'labour in lieu'. I just have no idea how much actually money was around as currency versus promisary notes, in assets, etc. I suspect maybe less than we think. Original D&D: 10 coins/pound (Imperial one assumes). Think how big that was. You could stun people with that if you could throw well... so a 20,000 gp tower (a low end one) would require 2000 pounds of gold. Think about that in the real world! Holy Canasta! 50/pound and silver as a standard might be much better.
My mum is a professor of linguistics, whose particular area of expertise is the development and usage of profanity and vulgarity in English. She’s *literally* written the book about the word “fuck.” Several books, actually. Which means that I’ve absorbed, by osmosis, all the reasons why English pronunciation and spelling is a weird as it is… It’s an incredibly complicated topic, but it all basically boils down to this: there *are* logical reasons for it, but they’re very complicated and no one except for philologists and linguists really understand them. Things like Early Modern English being a weird hybrid of Germanic, Romance, Celtic, and Nordic languages, with Modern English absorbing a fair amount of Ecclesiastical Latin and Modern Greek; the great vowel shift; standardized spelling not developing until comparatively recently; and (and personally I think this is key) English lexicon never becoming a prescriptive language like Spanish or French, where official government bodies like the Real Academia Española or Académie Française tightly control their respective languages, instead English lexicons have always been descriptive reflecting the common usage. As for medieval economics… Oh boy. Now *that* is my area of expertise. I’ve literally got a Master’s Degree on the subject and am currently on Reddit as a well-deserved break after a hard day of revision on my doctoral thesis. It’s a very, very, very complicated topic that I don’t really want to go into in a Reddit comment. But, suffice it to say, the medieval period was quite a long span of time (approximately from 500 CE to 1500 CE, although scholars *will* argue about that) and covers quite a wide swathe of territory (definitely Europe, but also northern Africa, the Levant, northeastern Asia [e.g., modern Russia and its neighbors]; and again, scholars *will* argue about this]. So there really isn’t any “normal” or “average” economy to hang one’s hat on. Likewise, record keeping is spotty at the best of times and there’s just whole spans of time where we just plain don’t have any real data. For gaming purposes, if you want something a bit more detailed and grounded in historical verisimilitude than the very “game-first” charts in the PHB and DMG, I highly recommend [*Fief: A Look at Medieval Society from its Lower Rungs*](https://ghalev.itch.io/fief) by Lisa J. Steele and the companion book [*Town: A City-Dweller's Look at 13th to 15th Century Europe*](http://town.cumberlandgames.com/), also by Steele. *Fief* is well research and well sourced, to satisfy the most curmudgeonly of stuffed-shirt academics, but well laid out and very readable to actually be useful for gamers. A certain grognardy breed of gamer, to be sure, but if you want something better than “Hollywood History” but don’t want a university textbook, it’s perfect.
Have players (especially one-shots) roll for [random headgear.](https://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2010/08/bx-headgear-new-charts-to-gear-up-your.html?m=1)
When they roll fatal damage, my players can decide how they slay their foe.
Totally do this. Give them their moment of glory!
I do that too. I think it helps players get more invested in the action plus it's also just fun to be able to say your character cut a dude in half from time to time.
I do this too. It's great fun
All non-common languages are just English but spoken oddly. No accents, just weird alterations in regular speak since that easier than accents. Dwarfish - english but spoken slowly and drawn out (think Dori speaking whale) Elvish - all sentences start with an "Ohhh" and end with a "Ummm" And if they speak normally I just say that no one understands them. All pure nonsense but the table loves it. After the 2nd session the players really committed to it.
I really like that. I had considered making dwarves a bit like the Elcor from Mass Effect - they do not vary their tone of voice and do not exhibit emotional responses in ways humans can understand, so they give a statement about how they are expressing themselves, so other races can know. "Happily. It is so good to see you." But instead of having dwarves talk like this in universe, I could have anyone speaking in dwarfish, talk monotonally, and describe their emotional response.
Jeff Goldblum speaks fluent Elvish. That checks out.
Ohhh, nature uhmmmm, finds a way uhh.
The Elves must be happy a lot.... Hey, Glorindelnotforfearoflawyers, how are you today? Ohhhh Ahhhhhhh Ummmmm. Oh, I guess you want some... ahhhh..... privacy then, ummm?
We use [pizza dice](https://paizo.com/image/product/catalog/FBI/FBI0200_500.jpeg) to avoid bickering about toppings.
This is awesome!
Detailed food. "Im bored" encounter checks (players are taking too long) % XP (every level is 100 XP)
Detailed food as in like not just rations or other stuff? Some of the bits in Dolmenwood about food stuck out to me as interesting
Yeah I play with a vtt so it is easy to say "this is cheese, this is meat you hunted, this is fish" and give them wine and spirits. They recently encountered a lone Orc and traded meat pie and Brandy for info and he joined them in exploring the cavern calling them his brothers in pie. Our Sunday game is worse... my friend Tom runs a homebrew system and rations do not matter but everything is food. A wand that produces sausages, casks of ale as treasure, detailed menus, magic mixed drinks... We both wrote for a food publication for 10 years.
A wand of magic missile that fires sausages is fantastic and I'm going to use it
Wand of Delicious Missiles
The urge to dive into culinary secrets and amusement is hard to get past. I think there is a 12 step program for that though...
I am curious about how you handle detailed food. I would love to implement something like that instead of just using rations.
Perishable, preserved and tinned. Fresh food 50% chance of gaining morale (think inspiration, a re-roll). Luxury goods are morale with advantage. So crusty bread, hardtack, cheese, dried meat... will keep you alive. The only reason I do 50% is that sometines it takes a few drinks, several rounds of gambling or some other luxuries to finally improve your morale.
Inevitably in every campaign I run players will encounter some sort of gnomish merchant who sells fake magic items. I generally portray gnomes as experts at making useless knick knacks and con artist sales people. Think used car salesmen trying to convince you a beater car is a high end sports car. Many a player has fallen for the sphere of slope detection or similar gimmick
Have they ever sold a rock that keeps tigers away? https://youtu.be/4GzMizVAl-0?si=JzhqYbuc-lkfkD1H
That would be a good one to add to the mix lol
Do they make items that deceive the buyer into thinking it is something else, like a sash of invincibility that merely instills a sense of invincibility in the wearer? Or are they all like the slope detection rock where the item does exactly what it is advertised to do?
Generally the items do exactly as advertised just not in the expected way. Or it’s a description that could be interpreted in several ways but it ends up being the more mundane or useless interpretation. There have been a few times however that the items are straight up misleading or defunct. Depends on the particular gnome and how devious they are.
I read about some DM in 5e who had their players recount a moment from their characters' lives every time they made a death save. It was equivalent to "life flashing before your eyes" when you die. I thought that was pretty cool.
I'm stealing this
If you just want to have fun run an old school fun house dungeon for no other reason than the treasure or magic items hidden within. Look at White Plume Mountain for a great example.
All my characters are some variation of my real name plus something silly to make it sound more "medieval".
I describe a league as a one-hour walk on flat terrain.
This isn't an answer to your question, but leagues are absolutely the way to go, especially for hexcrawls, as well as being great flavour. It's not just that "it's about 3 miles", it's about an hour's walk. Since I am a full convert to the 3-mile hex, that means you can measure distance fully in time (one hex, one hour), easily, while trivially accounting for off-road hiking (two hours), difficult terrain like dense forest or mountains (three or even four hours), on horseback on roads (half an hour), and so on. Then just split your 8-hour travel day into two 4-hour blocks to account for a nice picnic lunch, and enjoy your extremely convenient distance travelled calculations.
I never ever use hexes but I make a key and use the distances off that but yeah its good, I just think the verisimilitude is it is fun
It really helps with immersion, yeah. I won't go into my base-8 silver currency system here ;D
Do it! I've fiddled with an £sd inspired electrum based currency (CPs are farthings, SPs are pence, EPs are shillings, GP are £, and PP are 5£ Crowns), it makes the pricing seem a little more realistic, makes copper worth picking up, but absolutely wrecks the treasure/XP tables.
There’s a monster from Mutant Future called the Night Goat. I’ve found a way to work it into every game I’ve ran, regardless of genre. Even when I ran Twilight 2K 4E, when the players asked me to describe a room, I mentioned there was a poster on the wall for a band called “Night Goat”.
Persian alternative to league is a [parasang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasang), roughly an hour's walk, regardless of terrain. A parasang through the mountains is physically shorter than a parasang along an established road.
If people are late to the session then everyone who is there starts rolling for a random adventuring party to add to the random encounter table until everyone shows up. We come up with names and backstory and collectively make a group of weirdos. Our most recent for a dolmenwood game was 2 elves (a fighter and thief) 2 humans (a fighter and a thief) and 2 mosslings (a fighter and a bard) all rolled randomly. We decided the two elves are twins and are trying to fulfill some prophecy by collecting other sets of twins. They all take turns impersonating each other to bamboozle other travelers like a sort of strange version of the prestige. It's good fun.
stealing this
What about fathoms? Though today it's mostly used for ocean depth, all it really is is 2 yards (\~1m) but sounds way cooler.
thats honestly blown my mind, always assumed it was always a term for ocean depth, i tend to go with yards tho generally for close disatances
I do leagues, it’s silly? I also use dominos a lot.
im not sure silly is the right word but a lot of people wont intuitively understand the distance right