ffilz
Legendary Pubber
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2018
- Messages
- 3,497
- Reaction score
- 6,682
One thing I need to work out is encounter tables. My original plan in trying to get Cold Iron rolling again was inspiration from Ben Robbins's West Marches with it's regional difficulty levels which would have meshed well with Cold Iron's class and level nature. Blackmarsh is a more organic setting so doing regional difficulty levels won't work as well. Certainly there can be adventure sites that offer different difficulty levels and there may be some areas that appear to be "high level".
One interesting read for encounter tables is this:
There's also this:
I'm not sure if Wizards and Dragons are the right choice for "always on the encounter table" for Cold Iron, and I'm not sure if a 2d6 encounter table has enough options on it, though with my thoughts on a limited set of creatures maybe that's OK, especially if sub-tables are used or something.
I need to work on how to determine the strength of encounters. In Cold Iron, everything has a Fighter Level and maybe a Magic Level. So is your Goblin 1st level, 3rd level, 8th level? And that really gets to the problem of difficulty level. Drop an encounter with a Goblin Wizard (8th level Magic User) and his 3 Goblin Champions (8th level fighters) on a low level party and the PCs are never going to want to venture outside the gates again. But make most of the encounters low level Goblins with an occasional mid level Troll and the high level PCs are going to tire of all these nuisance encounters (see why the West Marches difficulty level by region sounded like a good fit...).
One interesting read for encounter tables is this:
Structuring Encounter Tables, Amended & Restated – Papers & Pencils
www.paperspencils.com
There's also this:
A Procedure for Wandering Monsters
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.
retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
I'm not sure if Wizards and Dragons are the right choice for "always on the encounter table" for Cold Iron, and I'm not sure if a 2d6 encounter table has enough options on it, though with my thoughts on a limited set of creatures maybe that's OK, especially if sub-tables are used or something.
I need to work on how to determine the strength of encounters. In Cold Iron, everything has a Fighter Level and maybe a Magic Level. So is your Goblin 1st level, 3rd level, 8th level? And that really gets to the problem of difficulty level. Drop an encounter with a Goblin Wizard (8th level Magic User) and his 3 Goblin Champions (8th level fighters) on a low level party and the PCs are never going to want to venture outside the gates again. But make most of the encounters low level Goblins with an occasional mid level Troll and the high level PCs are going to tire of all these nuisance encounters (see why the West Marches difficulty level by region sounded like a good fit...).