Just as with the other areas we develop information on, we are drawing in part on real world information and in part creating from scratch information. So, in general, your path to determining what sports and recreation look like in your world should involve consideration of what could realistically occur in the world and what people take an interest in. It's entirely feasible to write that all of the world's modern sports are pretty faithfully recreated in your world--global football/American soccer is an easy enough game to make, especially when you consider the many ways people make makeshift fields and goals around the world, as one for instance. Most other sports could be ported into the game with one small technological development each--rubber for a basketball, a safe puck for hockey (a stone could kill), and so on.
But my profile includes no modern professional sports. I've opted to create one of my own and rely on other forms of recreation. As I have often said, my goal in tabletop gaming is to lead collaborative storytelling, so I'm primarily concerned with recreation that allows or ideally aids storytelling. While a sports match can be narratively compelling in different ways, I prefer allowing players to create their own dramas with as few rules in place as possible. (Most of the time, at least. There 's a time and place for that challenge, too.) Read on for the full guide to sports and games in my homebrew setting.
In Evanoch, the homebrew setting I have described in quite a few ways now--check out guides to its architecture, its common sayings, its naming conventions, its superstitions, its literature, its mythology, its music, or its politics--the world is generally pretty civilized. Every major government has agreed to waive old territorial rights in order to avoid warfare, generally with success. But some traditions have died harder than others. Although regard by some as barbaric, one of the most common forms of recreation is arena fighting.
While arena fighting was a legal form of punishment for various crimes reaching back into the earliest years of recorded history, the slow weakening of kingdom governments and the rise of smaller governments has seen a widespread change of making arena fighting by force illegal or at least unheard of. However, it is hard to deny that arena fighting draws a crowd, and entrepreneurs were quick to propose voluntary arena fighters, who would fight for prizes rather than life. Many of the type who choose adventuring as a living find themselves choosing to fight in arenas.
As I said, I'm looking for the kind of thing which can open up story possibilities. Adding an arena allows us to create those stories. Perhaps a player character wants to try their hand in the arena on an easy challenge to try it out; make their foe seem weak, and then surprise the player when the arena foe is actually a serious challenge. Or the arena owner notes that a player character drew an especially impressive crowd, offering them more and more for future shows--the kinds of trouble this arena owner could end up being down the line could be seriously fun.
Another barbaric kind of bloodsport which people might pay to see or wager on is animal fighting. People in the real world force dogs and roosters to fight one another; as horrendous as it is, you can use this as a narrative tool to characterize especially evil characters. There's also the capacity to include magical creatures in the animal fighting. It may be more palatable for everyone if a skeleton is fighting a gelatinous cube--the more fantastical side of things can lighten up the dark topic.
When it comes to involving animal fighting into your campaigns, I recommend being careful. For better or for worse, people tend to react more strongly to the idea of animals being hurt or mistreated than to the idea of the same happening to human. If you have any inclination that one of your players is going to be bothered, skip it. Don't interpret that as a challenge to come up with a way that they'll actually like it. Accept that it's off limits, be kind to your players, and find another way to move forward. Fictional animal fighting isn't worth upsetting people.
If you do feel that everyone would be up for some mythical creatures battling it out, remember what the narrative purpose is. If I were doing a scene with animal fighting, it would be to show how awful the characters in charge of the event are. I'd have them pitting adorable creatures against terrifying creatures to make this point. I would describe probably 2, maybe 3, total matches for the whole scene. And between matches, the characters would be advancing some storyline. It wouldn't just be for color the way I can drop my other worldbuilding in.
A less difficult topic to cover is the sport I invented for Evanoch: candleball, a pastime which both rich and poor enjoy. Candleball is played by two opposing teams of four each. Each team has one defender and three attackers. The attacker's job is to take the rubber ball on which the game centers (3 inches in diameter and solid) and throw, kick, or in any other manner propel the ball through a circular hole six inches in diameter. The defender's job is to prevent this ball from entering the hole. Neither attacker nor defender may be within five feet of the surface in which the hole is made. The hole most commonly exists in a wooden board. Each successful attempt to propel the ball through the hole results in the rewarding of fifteen points, and each failed attempt results in the loss of one point. Points cannot be negative.
Whichever team has more points at the end of the game, marked by the duration of a candle's burning, wins. No one may interfere with the candle or otherwise tamper with it. If a person or wind blows out the candle, play stops until it is re-lit. Some regulation sets of the game have been created, which feature a platform marking the boundaries of each hole and a telescoping pole which extends from the surface to a harness that the defender wears in order to maintain the minimum distance. One extreme variation of the game involves spikes being placed on the ground for five feet around the hole, increasing the penalty for entering that zone. No professional leagues exist for sports, though there has been recent effort to create an Evanine Candleball League, mostly among dwarves, halflings, and Daltoners.
I will admit that I have never run a game of candleball in the game. Doing so would require a mixture of Athletics and Acrobatics checks for maneuvering with perhaps Dexterity checks for attempts to throw the ball or block it. But I'm interested more in the narrative potential here. There are two key narrative elements to the game: (1) failing an attempt to score means losing a point, making every roll important, and (2) the candle decides when the game is over, creating automatic drama. It is functionally no different from a time clock, but when players ask how tall the candle is and hear that it's lower than the last time they asked (an obvious statement), it's still a stressful thing to hear. Both of the defining features of the game make it more dramatic, in turn making the game more exciting.
There are of course non-athletic games and recreation, as well. Just as most people play more restful games in our world, most Evanines are interested in relaxing when they play games. I drew the major games of the world from three different sources: our world, the official D&D information, and my own invention.
From our world, there are many games which work well in a D&D setting. There is most every card game, for instance, from poker to gin rummy to go fish. Playing cards are not necessarily obscure ideas, though we came to them in the real world via copying tarot cards rather than conceiving of playing cards for the purpose of playing a game. It's reasonable enough to think that numbered, suited cards could exist, and all the associated games with it. One benefit here is that you can actually pull out a deck of cards and really play the game as you and your players roleplay the game. You may be surprised by how much the narrative of the card game affects the roleplaying.
Another game it's hard to imagine not having in the gameworld is chess. There's no reason that chess has to be exactly the way it is in ours; the rules could be different, or at least the names of the pieces. But certainly chess, or a game like it, is likely to exist in your gameworld. I would add that if chess in your setting is chess as we know it, you can have yourself as an NPC play a real game against a player character just as I described card games above.
Then there's the official D&D entry: Three Dragon Ante, a betting game that flows quite naturally from the carefully designed cards. It's a card game that Wizards of the Coast produced, and my first DM bought it and played it with us in-game. I had a great time. I bought myself my own pack almost right away. It's a fun game, and it makes roleplaying especially fun. There's just something more immersive about saying, "I play the 4 White Dragon" than saying, "I play the 4 of Clubs." When it came time to design the recreation in this setting, I felt I just had to include this game as the dominant card game, something that every kid grew up knowing how to play.
Finally, I created some of my own games. There's "Roll the Bones," a game that requires players to roll two polyhedral dice from a set as many times as they can without rolling the same number on both dice. Each successful roll, the player must trade their die with the most faces for a die with less faces, making doubles more likely, until only rolling a d4 and a d6. It's played both as a betting game and as a young children's game, and it has popularized polyhedral dice across the land. You probably know what I'm going to say next: you can actually have your players play this one since it only needs the dice they already have.
And I must mention a moment brought to us care of my players from the Eastweald and mystery campaigns--they stopped in the biggest city in the Eastweald and looked absently for a game store. I asked them out of game, "What are you looking for?" They weren't sure--they just wanted to see what was there. I remember writing out a short list--maybe 12 game names, things like "Elves and Orcs," "Knight Race," or "Dragon Chess," whatever that was. But it struck me that in our world, there were a couple of guys who sat around and came up with D&D, and we're all still playing it now. Somewhere in my gameworld, why shouldn't there be a creative little game designer? I know for certain that the next time I have players who walk into a game store and ask what they have, I am going to see whether or not my players' characters will roll characters in a tabletop game inside my D&D setting.
That's a guide to sports and recreation in my homebrew world. I'm surprised to find that it's taken more the form of a walkthrough for handling sports in your own games rather than a detail-rich look at mine, like I normally do, but I hope that this approach has helped you see some of the method to my madness--it's all meant to drive the players to more and more storytelling.
That's all for now. Coming soon: a list of ideas for character backstories, a guide to the world of nature in my homebrew setting, and how to use divination in your game. Until next time, happy gaming!
Back to the homepage (where you can find everything!)
No comments:
Post a Comment