This Place Is Trying To Kill You: Revisited

 

"The View Through The Gate," by Evangeline Gallagher, as printed in One Night Strahd.

INTRO

    I have a lot of complicated feelings about my time with One Night Strahd. It is the thing that got me into game design in anything even approaching a professional manner, and yet for all its relative success, very little of that had anything to do with me. We won the "Best Digital Book" silver ENNIE in 2022, but a lot of that is thanks to the absolutely stellar art by Evangeline Gallagher (who, already fantastic in their own right with their own work, has now gone on to be beloved by many horror TTRPG creators, authors, and apparently even The Cure?!), the layout & graphic identity by Angie Knowles (the Director of  Design and Production at Oni Press, already well decorated by the time she came to work with us on the project), and the battle maps from Ripley Matthews (whose work I don't see mentioned anywhere near enough considering how extremely good it is, please go commission her). While Jake and I wrote and playtested most everything together, much of the book is in Jake's voice with my editing followed by further developmental and tonal edits from M Ebel (already known for their work on Rime of the Frostmaiden at that point). We put out an extremely good product that I truly am proud of - but it's hard to feel like I contributed anything to it that still remains, y'know?

    I started thinking about it again thanks to a chat in the Prismatic Wasteland Discord the other day, mainly in the context of how much easier of a time we'd have had writing it had we been familiar with the OSR community. Jake and I actually met via the Giant In The Playground forums at the same time the G+ OSR boom was happening, so as a result while I spent a lot of that time talking about D&D 3.5 and understanding that game, there was a lot of old-school play that I was just never introduced to. It's also critical to note that despite being a forum kid, I completely missed The Forge, which meant that I also completely missed out on the games and theory that came from it - particularly anything that Vincent/Meguey Baker had to say. I tell you all of this because, working with what we had at the time - me, mostly being versed in D&D 3.5 and then 5e, Jake having played older editions of D&D and being familiar with that style while also wanting to make a game that we could run for our friends on Halloween 2019, we knew that the primary hindrance to getting the game done in a timely fashion was how 5e's combat worked. We knew we had to keep combat in the game: so much of the narrative of Ravenloft (at least in the 5e Curse of Strahd game) was expressed via its many random encounters, we wanted the game to still feel like you were playing a full campaign without it feeling like a boss rush in a videogame - but how do you keep the narrative intact to show off the setting, the combat present but not only not slow down the game with its presence but make sure that the Big Combats (TM) felt more weighty than the random encounters? My solution, which I think was my some of my best design in the book, was to honor what the setting was trying express to the players: This Place Is Trying To Kill You.

TPKU

    "This Place Is Trying To Kill You," or TPKU for short, is the first part of Act 2 in our game and is one that recurs as long as the players are in Act 2. It's the random encounter table, legally, but it's a random encounter table with a series of metacurrency procedures surrounding it. D&D's two primary metacurrencies are HP and XP, which random encounters function to reduce one to increase the other. Since One Night Strahd is intended to be done in one day (both in and out of game), things like leveling up your characters or taking long rests to heal aren't really on the table here, that means that unless we did something, all random encounters would do would tax resources and take time away from the more spectacular (in the traditional sense of that word) bits of the game. My proposal was that if we acknowledge that they just exist to tax resources, why not just be up front about that and save a whole lot of time by having players narrate the encounters instead? If a fireball would toast a group of werewolves anyway, why not just narrate the scene, have the player spend the spell slot, narrate a conclusion and move on with it?

    This evolved into a series of tables sorted by difficulty of encounter, and then assigning them a value of which the players would need to spend resources to meet. HP and XP weren't 5e's only metacurrencies - you have HD (at that time only spent for healing during rests), Inspiration, and spell slots that are all usually spent as a consequence of combat. This was just a more direct way to spend them. This also allowed for certain story beats that happened through play to allow a "discount," meaning that there was incentive to do certain things to allow easier traversal - because at the end of the day TPKU was there to symbolize the players traversing Castle Ravenloft and its surrounding grounds, so completing objectives should necessarily make things easier.

We balanced ONS for parties of 4 level 6 characters - hence the
consideration for Expected Levels/number of PCs.

An example and a half of the entries.

    

    I still think a lot of the writing in these prompts is good (Jake took a lot of prompts I had written and jazzed them up very well), but you see how close we were to doing something resembling what would eventually end up in the Carved From Brindlewood games? You see how much easier our lives would have been if we just...hadn't used D&D, and instead made some kind of spooky vampire castle game in some other system? This is one of the reasons why I am so vocal about people playing games outside of the one you really like - most of the time, someone somewhere out there has had the same problem as you and has found a way to solve it. But by the same token, had we known about games outside of the D&D ecosystem, would we have even tried writing One Night Strahd? I can tell you that if we had known how other people approached things like this, at the very least we could have saved ourselves hundreds of pages creating new procedures, explaining them to the reader and doing everything we desperately could to get these 5e players to be okay with their characters dying while also trying to make sure the DMs had all the tools they needed to keep the gameplay pace moving. We could have been a lot more judicious with our use of tables, space, and explainer text to get the point across - again, we joked a lot about the fact that in order to condense a campaign into one 12-14 hour experience, we in fact had to almost triple the number of pages in the original book.

WHAT TO DO WITH TPKU TODAY

    I am still pretty proud of TPKU from a game design standpoint, but I realize that the issue I was solving in 5e is essentially just a non-issue in lots of other games. I do think that adding more narrative framework to handling random encounters is good - again, this is why I've grown fond of both the OSR "the answer is not on your character sheet" ethos to make players engage with the narrative space of the world they're in. But I also love things like the Belonging Outside Belonging games' system of earning and spending tokens through play to keep conflicts moving forward, keeping all the players engaged and giving your character rewards for engaging with their character's core concepts. I could say the same for His Majesty The Worm or Triangle Agency, each of which encourage players to pull on their character's bonds to resolve conflict in the moment, though each in vastly different ways. As I mentioned before, what I was stabbing towards also gets close to how Carved From Brindlewood games handle things by spending a metacurrency to resolve a threat accompanied by narrating something off of a prompt - though TPKU sits in a weird place between CfB's "Paint The Scene," "The Unscene," and marking a Mask to get out of a bad roll. TPKU is somehow all of these things and none of these things - and while I would have appreciated a broader understanding of game design at time of writing, I'm still glad I blindly stumbled into territory well traveled by people whose design sensibilities I now know and respect.

    Honestly, the only game I could think of trying to remake TPKU to fit with today would be maybe...Daggerheart? But hey guess what I'm not going to - not only because I don't have that kind of time, but also because good ol' Jack DNGNCLB has already done something that fills a similar void for that game. 

He posted this on Bluseky, which I linked above, but you can
buy it in his Heartbreakers Itch product which is also linked above.

OUTRO

    Despite One Night Strahd being pretty successful (at time of writing, we've sold just south of 2000 copies since it was released on 11/11/21), I'm honestly not sure if it has broken even yet. Jake funded the project entirely on his own and aside from the few promotional copies I've requisitioned over the years, all of the money has gone back to him to help pay back the costs of commissioning so much wonderful art, the layout, the project management, the six episode AP we got Jasmine Bhullar to run for us that stars some really cool folks, and the ads we commissioned from Denkles, Superdillin and Eleanor Morton. We also don't make any money from the POD copies of One Night Strahd since DTRPG charges over $80 to print the 525 page book at the high quality we wanted it at and we knew nobody was going to pay that (if you did, please come find me at a con and I'll sign it or something because YOWZA that's a lot of money for a single book), so that means all the money it made came from people buying the PDF. While it would be super neat to maybe see some money from that project, what was much more important to me was seeing what the actual design process was like, learning how to manage the feelings about other people getting to decide what happens with content that you wrote, and figuring out how to solve problems in a way that makes sense to people outside your friend group. While starting at this scale is absolutely not a thing I would recommend for anyone and has absolutely ruined my sense of scale for all other projects, it was an extremely valuable experience that I feel very thankful and privileged to have had. It has opened some doors for me, sure - case in point, if you're reading this then I'm well enough known on the Internet for anyone outside of my friend group to care about what I'm saying. But for all that, maybe the most important thing for me was realizing what parts of game design I actually excelled at, because knowing that about myself has made it easier to recognize the things I struggle with in solo projects: I'm pretty good at encounter design and understanding the procedures games want you to interact with, but if being able to describe something in way more detail than necessary was an Olympic sport I'd be bringing home the gold every year.

    I guess my closing point here, which I am saying as much for you as I am for myself, is don't downplay your contributions to a project. Be proud of what parts of you shine through, even if it's not as much as you thought would be there in the end. And most of all, remember that working with and learning from other people will always help you become better at what you do. Or to put it another way:

    Stay weird out there.