Building Blocks & Stavanger Index

The series on urban adventures and the description of Rogaland/Stavanger is getting so long that I feel I need to organize the relevant posts.  Read the posts from the beginning and bookmark this page.  Here they are (and I will expand the list as new posts are added):

Part One: Building Blocks

What Good are Town Maps? ~ Introducing why town maps don't deliver on all they promise regarding adventure support.

Putting Down Roots ~ How are towns formed; how do people and processes accumulate over time?  And what sorts of conditions create what kinds of towns?

The Steady Urban State ~ Misconceptions about how towns are laid out, discussing how money and labour divide the motivations and designs of one neighborhood from another.

Dogpiling ~ Why it is hard for players to adventure in a town, what makes a town especially dangerous and how a DM can circumvent those issues.

I'll Ask Again: What Do We Want a Town Map For? ~ What do the players want?  What informs them about how to see the environment, and what matters when it comes to adventure.  How time presents as a factor in town adventures, and how urban environments in real life defy our ability to effectively explore every nook and cranny.

How Much Can You Search? ~ What is an ideal scale for designing a map that will separate out the bits and pieces of how a player can search, given limitations on time?

Building Blocks ~ Defining a city block, both in terms of its size and why that size is the subject of study for urban planners.  What can we know about density and how can that knowledge inform our game design?

A Day at the Beach ~ An example of how a particular, obscure urban block can be expanded into a role-playing and adventure opportunity, just by knowing how the people in that environment live, and what they know.

We Know Already How This Works ~ Using city blocks as a tool, what are the four purposes that we should keep in mind when having a party hex crawl through a town, or through an game space?

One Block at a Time ~ A conclusion to the subject of building blocks, with what a designer should keep in mind.  Some examples of blocks, with the understanding that such a list could easily contain hundreds of possibilities.  My intention to keep expanding the list in the future.

Part Two: Building Rogaland

The Failed Plan ~ My original plans for explaining and expanding on my development-infrastructure worldbuilding concept, which I have tried before without success.  I had a new strategy, it got bolluxed by the death of wikispaces and now it is my intention to unveil the process piece by piece.  Includes a 6-mile hex map of Rogaland.

Haugaland ~ Introducing 5 development cultures (dev-5), starting with the NE corner of Rogaland. I discuss wilderness vs. rural lands, and how the wilderness can be subjected to a random die roll to create building blocks of adventure.  Relating the way adventures can be designed according to topography, terrain and relationships between wilderness and civilization, as opposed to whim.  Description of rural/wilderness blocks.

Making a Standard that Creates Distinctions ~ Further discussing how to breathe life into a low development culture, to make it into something that players would care about and feed adventures.  What makes this primitive rural clan hex different from a slightly less primitive rural clan hex?  How nuance is all important.

More About Rogaland's Dev-5 Culture ~ Describing the rest of dev-5 Rogaland, excepting the settlement of Stavanger.  How isolation creates separate entities that can, in turn, build conflict ... and that although different rural blocks may have similar characteristics, that does not mean that we can't invest those blocks with unique ideas.

Stavanger's Initial Growth ~ Describing a primitive settlement in a dev-5 culture, and how that settlement morphs over time to become slightly less primitive, with an influx of people and without any fundamental change in the environment, culture or technology.

Building Stavanger with Blocks ~ Once we decide to make a village map of Stavanger, how do we decide to lay out the various buildings?  This post gives a shorthand way of thinking it through.

Adding People ~ Buildings and even occupations are not enough. A settlement is made of people, who interact with each other, promoting group personalities and conflicts.

Bend Your Mind ~ Setting the mindset for building an adventure from scratch: what are we looking to achieve, how is the adventure going to make our players play, and what sort of motivations will the players uncover as they investigate the adventure?

The Village of Stavanger, 892 AD

Horik's Block ~ Introducing a short adventure surrounding the village of Stavanger as it existed in the year 892.  We meet the chieftain, Horik, and examine the benefits gained with Status.

Sand's Block ~ The players meet their family, and learn a little more about what's going on in Stavanger, and what is about to happen.

The Shaman's Block and More ~ A discourse on the wider Stavanger adventure, told from the perspective of the six principles of game feel, expanding on earlier posts discussing this idea.

The Town of Stavanger, 1237 AD

Stavanger Development 6: Introduction: An overview of what's changed in Stavanger with the introduction of certain technologies and culture, in the last 345 years.

More to come ...

We Know Already How This Works

I'm a bit disappointed at my description of the careenage. I wanted to get across that it would be possible to create spaces inside an urban environment that would have a distinct personality, that could be explored and be made into source material for a bigger adventure.  I feel that I didn't give that enough time, that I threw the post together too lightly.

I believe that an urban "block" shouldn't be just fluff.  Whatever the block happens to be, it needs to address some several concrete uses for the players, beyond just knowing what sort of block it is.  We could slap together a town with twelve residence blocks, a market block, five or six workshop blocks, a castle block and a church block, and call it a day ... but that's what we've been doing for town adventures since the game started.  Creating a bunch of labels, or making a list of buildings and people, without pulling those disparate elements together into a meaningful, interesting town personality.

To my mind, the individual blocks should slowly create a mental shape; investigated, one by one, the players should get in touch with the town's character, through the characters of the inhabitants and the overall complexion of the physical town's layout and nature.  I know many people have tried to do this by building down from a grand design, like King's Landing.  But I think it is better to build up from the bottom; so that, piece by piece, inspiration by inspiration, the town will find its personality in an organic, unexpected and growing way.  The DM doesn't need to "pre-conceive" the town.  As the players explore, and as the DM responds to that exploration, the town's identity will emerge without the need for guidance.

My example with the beach was meant to provide some of the base needs that a block, not a town, ought to possess:

• The block should provide some specific purpose for the players' use.  The beach is a source for transport across the sea; it accumulates fish which can be purchased.  It is a place where boats are repaired.
• The block's residents should have a character, based on what they do and what they respect.  The people of the beach respect people who can do for themselves; who can fish or sail; who can do a hard day's work; who don't consider themselves superior because they possess wealth, status or intelligence.
• The block should be a source for adventure.  The beach offers the opportunity for smuggling.  Or to block smuggling.  It is the natural entry point for raiders who come from under the water.
• The block should provide an advantage for the player's well-being.  The beach is a good place to rest; swimming is a restorative, relaxing activity; so resting there heals hit points faster.

So long as these principles are installed in each city block that is put in place, the characters will have a reason to search; and to fight for places where their search has turned up something treasured.

Suppose that we start with a rule that dictates that if players come to town, they ought to seek the rest and solace that a tavern provides.  Whatever they eat and whatever they drink, it feels good to eat and drink at a table, where we're served, after a week of sitting on the ground drinking from pottery flasks and eating out of a cold pot.  If they don't seek a tavern, and partake at least a little, we can say they feel so down and miserable that their intelligence, wisdom and charisma will all be at -2 all the next day.

Now let's add that a typical pub will be such a let-down, after wishing for one while out in the wilderness, that what players usually get is no better that a lesser penalty: -1 instead of -2.  The ale is tainted, the food is sub-standard or almost rotten, the tables are rickety, the chairs are uncomfortable ... but it IS still better than not going out at all. So we put up with the place because at least it's not another night around a campfire, where we have to walk out into the darkness to piss.  At least, at least, the pub has an outhouse.  Or the room has a pot to piss in.

But ... the party comes to this one small town and the pub is a great little place.  There's a regular bard, the cook has some talent, the ale is made in a real brewery, and not on the premises, the tables are clean, the service is smart and friendly and the owner makes us feel welcome.  And the next day, the DM tells us we all have a +1 bonus to our intelligence, wisdom and charisma.

Examine that.  There are great bars out there.  Bars that give no bonuses, but no penalties.  Really great places like the last example.  And better places yet?  Who knows?  Why don't we look around this big city for a few days and see if there isn't a better place than this?

And then, if we find such a place, a place that gives us a terrific bonus, we will be damn sure that every time we're in Kronstadt, we're going to stop in at The Lord's Cutting Board.

That is, until the day we come to Kronstadt and find that the place has burned down.

If we want players to care about things, like beaches and pubs, we have to provide more than fluff.  We have to provide real concrete benefits to such places.  And to make the players feel the benefit more keenly, we have to squeeze the player with penalties when these places don't exist.  Otherwise, they won't have any reason to explore.

It's a bit of the stick on one end of the player and a bit of the carrot on the other end.  Once the players understand the game ~ avoid the stick, search for the carrot ~ the system begins to feed on itself.  The players WANT to search the town.  The same way that players want to search a dungeon.  It is the same principle, really.

A Day at the Beach

Following the last post, Building Blocks, I'd like to explain what a "building block" might be.  I don't see an urban setting being made of just one sort of block, but rather hundreds of sorts.  A block might be a skein of scattered houses, with small paths between, as Hobbittown is depicted in Lord of the Rings.  Or it might be a linear row of houses, stretched along a river; or a festival ground, with a pitch that includes a collection of homes and warehouses; or a gutted area, where a fire destroyed everything between two avenues, or where a mud slide washed a path down to the river.  There might be hundreds of people living on top of one another, in one sort of block; in another, there might be only a single monastery surrounded by an enormous yard and wall.  Given time, we might create an extensive list, featuring all sorts of small urban environments, that would then be pieced together.  A few pieces would make a village; many more pieces, a town.  Hundreds of pieces, so large that it would take a game year for the players to properly search it, might make a huge city.  This is the idea.

Much detail of one building block hidden by trees or off
shot, to the left.

With this picture on the right, I will propose a most benign example, one that might occur in any size of urban settlement, from London to the most obscure coast in Siberia ~ the image of fishing boats pulled onto the shore, for safekeeping or for repair.  I found myself wondering what this sort of beach is called ~ surely, there must be a name for it.  Turns out, a beach favored for grounding sailing vessels, to enable repairs to be made, is called a "careenage."  It is nice to have a name for things.

Let's say we've come to a village that includes a careenage ... and that as a unit on our map, it comprises one block, or 3.7 acres.  And that we, as players, are going to explore this hex, for a day.

That seems unlikely, doesn't it?  The block size I specified yesterday was a diameter of 435 feet.  We can walk from one edge of that to the other in five minutes; and we can easily see these boats as we walk by, so where's the "exploration?"

To begin with, the beach is but a mere sliver between two sides of the block: the sea, or lake, and the land above the beach, where the fishing culture or boat builders live.  To explore the sea, we must strip down and go swimming, discovering what the currents are, what sort of game exists, how warm is the water, how far we can go out before risk our lives.  The small collection of houses will be protected by a sand bar or an earthen break, if inland is but a few feet above sea level; or they may be nestled upon a slope above the beach; or they may be found atop a cliff, dozens or hundreds of feet up, necessitating a serious climb.

Even so, with twenty minutes of swimming, and twenty minutes of seeing what houses there are, likely not more than a few dozen, this will not take a whole day, will it?  That's hardly exploration.

We must ask, as players, what do we want from this beach?  If all we see is a beach, and it does not interest us, then we can mark it on our maps as "beach, careenage," and go on our way.  But does this mean we "know" this beach?  To answer that, we must ask ourselves, what might it give us?

Well, surely passageway to a nearby island or across a small expanse of water, perhaps 20 miles.  Players will often ask if they can convince a boat owner to shuttle them some distance, and DMs nearly always say yes, for a little money.

But suppose we treat these people as they actually are, rather than as a game's plot convenience.  They are most likely proud.  They are most likely distrustful.  They would not like to go out of their way for strangers, risking their boats, their livelihood, knowing that boats are preyed upon by pirates and by passengers.  Too, they've worked the long day; if they take players twenty miles, how exhausting will that be?  Shouldn't we, as players, have to make friends first?

That could take all day.  Chatting up a few of the folk, discussing their business (they would not care about our business), learning about their difficulties, their politics, their motivations ... and seeking their respect.  These people would not respect intellect; or piety (the sea is god and she is a mean bitch); or money (too proud to take it); or status.  These people respect ability.  Can you manage a boat?  Have you ever fished properly?  Do you know the sea.  For these folk, what you know about their business means as much as your charisma ever could.  Luckily, I have a series of sage abilities (sailing, fishing, oceanography, beachcombing) that would prove handy for some of our characters to break the ice.  As might a number of thieving skills related to smuggling; if the beach were being used for that purpose, it might take us more than a day to learn it.

So, suppose we talk to a few boaters; we assign some modifiers (whatever system you're playing) to our charisma, to see if we can help scour a hull free of barnacles; or wangle a trip out on the water to help pull nets; or get ourselves invited to some fisherman's house for an evening meal.  We learn a few names. We role-play.  We make a friend or two.  And on another day, some time in the future, when we need a trip across the water, we drop in on Charlie and see how he's doing.

When we want some fish, we don't go to the market; we get a good deal from Charlie, or Buck, or Mattie.  We might even make an exchange; a mend spell, or a herb, traded even.  We might strike up a bargain to make ourselves middle men ... but that really depends on how those charisma rolls go.

Let's get into those, because they matter.  I'll describe my party.  As Ikhnaton, a mage, I'm not much of a physical guy and I'm not great in the charisma department either.  My friend Jenkar, however, is a pretty damn strong fighter; but he knows nothing about the sea.  Kendra had a sailor for a father; she's pleasant and talkative, with a 14 charisma.  She's the best we can offer.  Finally, Lanna, our thief, is taciturn, with a 9 charisma.  She's our liability.

But the thief is willing to go out fishing, and she's sharp with a line and a rod, and she does pretty well with her dexterity; so we give a +1 bonus for impressing with ability.  She also knows quite a lot about the smuggling that goes on up and down this coast, and the fellows wonder just what she knows; if they're actual smugglers, this might be bad, but they're not.  They like learning what to watch out for, so we give Lanna another +1.

Kendra gets +2 for sailing and +1 for knowing some sea chanty's taught to her by her father; songs from another country, because we're strangers here.  A new song is a great thing.  Jenkar, meanwhile, uses his energy in the evening to pull boats in from the water, and helps roll two of them over for repairs.  He's not bright, but he's welcome.  And I hear about a boy who has injured himself and is now suffering from a fever.  I have a very expensive healing salve in my pocket, but I'm willing to sacrifice it to buy some good will.

At the end of our day, we roll charisma checks, using our bonuses.  I fail; Lanna fails. But Jenkar and Kendra succeed.

When we want to make use of these people someday, to help us out, we know who to send.  Lanna and I will wait at the end of the beach as a boat is sorted out ... and we'll get picked up there.  On another day, perhaps, we might take our chances again, to get over our bad first impression and make friends.

Dull?  Perhaps.  But all this could be played out in half an hour; and it really depends on how important this beach might be to us someday.  It might be the start of a smuggling operation, particularly if Lanna eventually makes friends here.  Or it might be a merchandising base.  Or we might like the people so much, we build ourselves a cabana on the beach.

We might even find that the water is so clear here, that our wounds heal faster on this beach.  That could be a random roll the DM makes.  We might find it restores our fears and gives us a +1 on some saves. Remember the scene where Frodo and Sam remember the strawberries back home?  We might have that scene, but about this beach.  This beach might give one of our party the strength to carry another when the time comes.  Who knows?  It really depends on how we see it as players, and how the DM lets us see it.

Building Blocks

This is Le Pre-Saint-Gervais, 4.6 kilometers from Paris, which has the distinction of being the 8th densest city in the world, despite having a population of only 18,121.  Unfortunately it is not a medieval city; Paris annexed the commune in 1860, whereupon it was completely transformed from a farmland and royal resort into the densely populated suburb it is today.  So it cannot be representative of any sort of medieval city.

What it can tell us is something about population density.  Unlike the sort of slum that is the substance of Manila, Mumbai or Dhaka, Le Pre, along with other French communes like Levallois-Perret, Vincennes and Saint-Mande, is a structured, architectured environment.  In that way, we can compare it to the densely made cities of the Middle Ages, as a limit on what might be termed as maximum population density might be.  Le Pre has a density of 259 persons per hectare.  In old English units, what my world is based on, that's 109 persons per acre; or rather, per 43,560 square feet; and, just for shits and giggles, 109 persons per 2,007 combat hexes (that are 5 ft. in diameter, 21.7 square feet in size).

That will seem empty for most people, and it will surely occur to many a reader that population densities in history MUST be more dense than that.  Truth be told, we can argue whatever we want.  There are no sources; no final documents; no definitive arguments at all, for what population densities might have been at any time of history except in our own time.  And the reader will take note on how much green space and open road, without visible cars, occurs on the map above.  Too, the densest city in the world, Manila, is only fifty percent denser than this. Picture the above with only one third of the greenery removed.

Google Earth's 3D Rendering of Le Pre-St.-Gervais

Le Pre has the distinction of being made entirely of apartments; most of which would be slightly higher than the Medieval equivalent, but not much; a heavily urbanized Medieval equivalent might be a bit lower to the ground, it might then have less green space ... but it wouldn't have a denser population.  Clearly, above 100 people per acre, movement and living gets impractical.

Where it comes to exploring an urban environment, we might think in acres ... or, more appropriately, "blocks."  A block is the standard description of the city environment; it comprises both the street and the buildings, it suggests a certain character and, best of all, it isn't used for any other term to be found in Dungeons & Dragons (or any other RPG that I can think of).

But how large is a block?  Well, I have a document for that too, that the reader can use to while away some time at work while looking like doing real research.  It talks about "block density":

"All streets at some point form blocks (a block being defined as a street that closes in on itself, or an area of private property surrounded on all sides by public rights-of-way). Blocks can be relatively small. In the Fairlie-Poplar district of downtown Atlanta blocks are 200-feet by 200-feet. But blocks can also be relatively long, like some of those in Manhattan with a 900-foot length. In either of those cases, you have a different kind of block density, and certainly a different kind of block density than what you typically find in a place like Alpharetta, Georgia, in the Windward area, where the blocks take on an entirely different magnitude of size and amorphous configurations.

"Blocks can be difficult to measure because they are not all rectangles. Some are trapezoids, or circles, or amoeba-shaped. Many residential areas here in Atlanta have these sort of amoeba-shaped blocks. So you have to start teasing out some of the geometric properties of these things such as block length and depth and total perimeter in order to compare them.

"A number of years ago I became interested in this type of analysis and this question of block density. I began a little study which is only semi-scientific. I say semi- because at the moment it only includes a sample size of 200: ten cities, 20 blocks per city. I have compared the sizes of blocks built before 1928 to those built after 1928. Why 1928? Because that is the year that the Standard City Planning Enabling Statute was passed out of Congress, and that is when we have subdivision regulations being adopted in a formal way for the first time in almost every city and county, every municipal jurisdiction in the nation."

Now, this talks about Georgia in America, but let me stress again that there are NO source documents from any time that are earlier than the 19th century, so it doesn't matter if this is factually true for the time in which a D&D game might take place.  We can, in the end, just make shit up; in the meantime, however, let's just go with what documentation we have.

I think the stress that we can get from Douglas Allen's research is that blocks change from place to place, and from time to time.  Our conception of blocks is based on regulation and municipal law, that was once not a part of the community's mindset.  As shown on Allen's table to the right, block size has increased since 1928.  Allen's argument is that the growth can be ascribed to the presence of automobiles ... and to traffic signals, which were designed to compensate for a speed of 40 miles per hour.  It's an interesting passage, but I won't go into it here.

For myself, I quite like this.  The actual dimension of an actual city block is not important, from a game design perspective ... but identifying a hex as "the amount that can be explored in a day" with "one block" is appealing.  But of course, how big of a block are we talking about?  One that fits with a city like New York?  Or something more akin to Omaha?

The answer is bound to be arbitrary, no matter what we base the decision upon.  None of us can possibly know if it is possible to explore 1.9 acres in a day or 4.4 acres in a day, given what a medieval town might look like.  It might take us ten minutes to cross a particular thoroughfare because of traffic, the amount of gong on the street, our willingness to get ourselves caked with said gong or how wide the street is.  There are a hundred possible drains on the clock that we can't conceive of or guess at, but can reasonably be taken for granted as we have made our environment as convenient as possible, for everyone (by including street lights, for example).  Getting around in a Medieval city might have been a real headache.

Still, we have to base these things on something, right?

Some will remember that I map my world in 20-mile diameter hexes, and that I have occasionally spoken about breaking up these hexes into smaller units.

If I continue to zoom in, to produce progressively smaller hexes along this process, always dividing one hex into seven smaller hexes, I get the following chart:

Which, I'm sorry, fascinates me endlessly.  In the middle of the chart, we find the sweet spot: 3.76 acres, with 225 people if we establish a dense population as 60 persons per acre.  Some block-sized hexes could be relatively empty; so that there's no absolute size for how many hexes a given village, town or city covers.  A village made of only scattered houses may cover a dozen block-sized hexes.  A densely packed town on an island may cover only five or six blocks.  This makes for plenty of creativity.

Nor does a town have to be in one part.  Three blocks along a river might be separated by empty hexes (fields, rough ground, cliff faces) from two dense blocks surrounding a castle.  We don't have to be regular in our design, such as we've seen from pre-made generators.

I also love the fact that the chart goes right down to the combat hex, 5 feet across.  If any readers have ever used a typical rubber mat for game play, those are usually 48 hexes by 32; the town block as depicted is 87 combat hexes across.  That would be four battle maps. Well within the realm of grasping size and scale here.

Fascinating, nyet?

How Much Can You Search?

I have deliberately not included a scale on the map shown.  Because of this, it might be a village, a town or a city.  It really depends on how big the roads are, or the river is, in the readers' imagination.

Let me explain.  Last post, I ended by explaining that for a party to truly understand the ins and outs of an urban space, they should have to search that space diligently.  The question emerges, then: how much space can a party search properly in the space of a day?

A square mile?  A hectare?  A neighborhood?  I'm asking because I want the reader to answer it for themselves ... remembering what I said in the last post.  That there are no street signs and virtually no advertising.  And being medieval in form, likely as not the streets aren't gridded.  There are back lanes and alleys, which might also have doors in them that lead to a strange shop or some unexpected, but important "find" that might make the players very happy.

Ask yourself: how many hours do you need to sit in a pub to know what sort of pub it is?  Or if you like it?  How well do you need to know the servers; or what does it take to know if the menu is good?  And once you're fed, how many hours can you spend poking around in shops, seeing what's there?  How many hours can you waste chatting up the patron about things you're looking for?

And once you have that in mind, how many hours can you walk around, opening and closing doors, stooping to look at things, moving from walking on stones to sprung wood, bending down to rest your pack, picking it up again ... and how long can you stare at hundreds of things before you get sick of it?  How does that cut your search time short?

Once you've searched, how well can you remember what you've seen?  Have you ever changed your mind about buying something, but then you can't remember what store you saw it in?  Are you really sure you can remember every detail of dozens of stores that you searched yesterday?  Or a week from now?

How long does it take to really get to know a specified area in a urban area?  You tell me.

Dogpiling

Continuing upon the theme of the last post, the Steady Urban State, let's talk about players interacting with the town culture as described.

Within the coded storybook framework, where the DM creates the narrative in advance and then moves the players through that narrative, the town serves as a supply depot, for both equipment and easy exposition, or elaboration of the party's goals.  The party is organized to speak to specific persons in the town, who have specific information to give, before being shuttled out of town into an environment where the players are able to act upon their knowledge.

For this, the town needs to be nothing more than a series of stalls where the players stop temporarily to get their assignments.  They don't have to interact with a living, breathing town ... and this works for most games.  With the introduction of a sandbox game, however, we have problems: suddenly the occupants of the town have their own agendas.  They don't exist to assign anything to the players.  They exist because they exist ... and the players are forced into a minefield where anything they might do has the potential to conflict with that existence, which is bound to end very badly.

I've watched this play out many times.  Players don't know what to SAY to ordinary townspeople.  They don't know what to talk about, or even how to start conversations.  They don't understand what townspeople want, or how to make townspeople interested in the player's wishes or interests.

Just like in real life.

Put a typical D&D player into a town setting, where the town is not an engineered-knowledge dispenser for adventure giving, and the players will find themselves in a situation very like their own personal experience as a social leper.  For most D&D players, if they had a sense of how to interact with real people, who have real goals, they wouldn't be D&D players.  Making them play in a world where they need to produce full sentences that sound like they have a purpose is like rubbing a player's nose in their own inadequacy.

This is part of the reason why so many players deal with town and/or social situations by drawing a weapon and killing the nearest person.  It's a tactic that works great in a dungeon, but not very well in a town.  A dungeon is a compartmentalized environment.  If we kill these orcs in this room, there's a very good chance that the orcs in another room, fifty feet and a stairwell away, won't know what we've done, unless one of these about-to-be-dead orcs gets out yon door and manages to set off an alarm.

It is impossible, however, to start a fight in a town without someone knowing about it.  The walls are too thin, the lines of sight on even a back alley are too numerous, there's far too much motivation for even a common individual to rush down and inform the guards (it might be worth a coin or two) and, on the whole, no one in a town likes it when fighting happens.

Too, in a dungeon, there might be ten or twenty orcs in this room.  Or maybe a few hundred, if it is a big lair ... but the shape of the dungeon allows a certain queuing in a line, before the hall can clear enough for the back ranks to get at the party.  But a town has thousands of people ... any of whom might be willing to throw a roof tile down on a running party, even if they don't have the nerve to fight face to face.  The Greek general Pyrrhus died that way.  Stunned by a roof tile, he fell in the street and two common people dragged him into a doorway and cut his throat. Even for great generals, towns are dangerous.

So, if the party wins a round or two against the arriving guard, it just happens that more guards arrive and the dogpile begins.  I know that many DMs will engineer the situation so that a fleeing party will miraculously flee a town, or find an ally standing in a doorway calling out, "Hide in here!" ... but these are DM-interventions, designed to preserve the party from their own folly, or from having to face the real consequences of what a town is designed to do: destroy threats.

When the party pulls a weapon in a town, or tries to steal something, the party is the threat.

A lot of DMs recognize this; and they HATE the intervention tactic, as they feel it's not their job to wrest the party out of their own stupidity.  So the rule comes down: NO town adventures.  Ever.  Problem solved.

I've never made that rule, but at the same time I don't press the town adventure idea, either.  Unless the players are strong enough to take on the entire town, towns are just too dangerous ~ and players get that.  Getting the sense from me that I won't help them, that I'll just let the dogpile take them down, they will typically behave themselves ... excessively.  They'll buy some equipment.  They might get some advice from a particular shop owner; get something made; or something checked; but they won't start something.

Which is fair.  Players, being presented with the clear fact that the town won't hesitate to crush them underfoot if they don't toe the line, have no interest in testing that line by taking a step over it.  The consequences are too severe and the evident gain apparently out of reach.

Still, much of this is due to players not knowing enough about a town, or town life, or how things work, to circumnavigate the dogpile, as people obviously do in towns, even the most dangerous towns in the world.  And this is because we as game designers haven't fashioned towns and other urban spaces clearly enough to make such navigation possible.  That is what this series of posts is struggling to achieve: the reformulation of the town, both in our imaginations and in concrete, definable ways, so that adventure in towns is not only possible, but legitimately desirable.

Let's have another look at that Cracow video I linked yesterday:

It is so clean.  And while the historians who put this video together are well-aware that the streets would be much less pristine than presented, they are concerned with something other than verisimilitude.  But our imaginations are weakened by this sort of presentation.  Let me take a game example: the village of Hommlet:

Again, clean.  Yes, there's a lot of apparent detail, but remove the trees and shrubs and it can be seen that the depiction of Cracow and that of Hommlet are virtually the same.  As anyone who has ever wandered around in a small town knows, the maintenance of any like space is never this neat and tidy.  Vegetation is not neatly trimmed, as shown.  The building walls are never this straight and grid-aligned.  Shit piles up.  Houses are abandoned.  People never have such clear titles as "farmer" or "teamster."  Distractions happen.  People don't live together in peace, but ambivalence, tolerance and outright hostility.  There are people in a town who could be killed in the middle of the street and no one would care.

Hommlet's secret is that something evil is going on behind the veneer of the village ... but an adventure here need not be so overtly dramatic.  Clutter and hard feelings go a long way towards isolating one part of an urban place from another.  We've all run games where we've let the players climb into a sewer so they can have a fight in town ... but why not a simple basement?  Or in a slum court, too poor for the guards to bother about?  The guards exist to protect all that potential money from being plundered ... but they don't care what the lower classes do among themselves.  This is why crime thrives, and why it is particularly hard on other criminals ... because other criminals don't enjoy the protection that the rich do.

To circumvent the dogpile, the players need approach the problem of town adventures with two things in mind: a) how to isolate the fight away from the attention of people who care to stop it, or in a way that it won't be heard or noticed, or in a way that the participants themselves will all want it kept quiet; and b) the party needs to fight things that the authorities want fought and killed.  That's the idea of Hommlet.  No significant authority outside of Hommlet will mind if most of the people in Hommlet are killed, once the evil is brought to light.  No one would mind if the players found and killed a dire wolf being hidden by an owner feeding it the occasional drunk.  It's okay to clean out a nest of vampires.  People will reward you for doing it.

It is the responsibility of the DM to create the urban environment that makes this possible.  An environment with hidden holes and isolated stone houses; with gutted places destroyed by fire, where undead might be lingering; with natural insulation, making the sound of a quick sword duel practical; with clear rules that tell the players, and non-players, that if you break off the fight within four rounds, it doesn't matter who hears and sees, the participants will all be gone before the guards arrive.  The fight can then be continued again on another day, right?  Everyone knows this.  NO ONE fights for five rounds.  That would be stupid.

If we can make the environment clearer to the players; if the DM can make the environment conducive to play; if the players can then trust the DM; and if we can designate the spaces in the town in some way that the players can SEE what's going on, so that it isn't just a mass of meaningless houses and castles, as we usually see in a game map, there's room for real adventure.

Not just walking around talking to people about things.