Time Marches On... So Should Your World

Ye olde TL;DR - Have mechanisms for resolving quests and world events without the players. Here are some ideas.

One of the things that makes a world feel engaging is the perception that it has its own life beyond the player characters. Or, to think about it the other way, nothing feels more flat than a world that doesn’t go anywhere unless the players actively take it there. Once the players discover they’re the only entities in the world that matter, it shatters the immersion.

Sadly, D&D out of the box doesn’t give the referee many pointers on how add dynamism to the game world. To rectify this, I consulted experienced referees and experimented with my own mechanics.

Since I doubt I’m the only one who has craved substance to fill this void in the D&D rules, I wanted to share my discoveries. What follows are some of methods I’ve adopted for making the world organically evolve.

Quests Actually Do Complete Themselves

In an open world game, it’s common to have multiple quests available. However, when the characters takes one of them, the other ones shouldn’t necessarily all still be there when they’re ready for a new adventure. This could be because a party of NPCs got to it, or it stopped being an issue on its own.

Here is one process for checking if a quest stops being available.

1. Decide on the difficulty scale you want for quests in your game. As you can probably intuit, we’ll assume that the harder quest, the less likely it is to be completed. Start by deciding on the number of difficulty levels you want. No matter how many you pick, the easiest quest will have a 50% chance of completion. Next, divide that 50% by the number of difficulty levels to yield (a) the completion chance for the most difficult quest and (b) the difficulty increment (“(a)” and “(b)” being the same value). So the hardest quest has a completion chance of the result of the previous division, a quest one level easier will have double the completion chance, the next level will be triple the hardest quest’s completion chance, etc...

E.g. If you want 5 levels of difficulty, the hardest quest will have a 10% chance (50% / 5), the next-hardest will have a 20% chance, and so on.

To simplify this, I like to think of quest difficulty in “tiers”, with tier 1 being the hardest. This way, I can multiply the tier by the difficulty increment to easily derive its completion chance.

2. Now that you have a scale, choose a difficulty level for the quest under consideration.
3. Every in-game week, roll the completion chance of the quest based on its difficulty level.
4. If you roll within the chance (e.g. for a 20% chance, roll in the 20% probability range of a single die, such as 1-4 on 1d20), the quest becomes unavailable. Choose a sense-making reason why that happened.

Execute steps 2-4 for every quest that the players know about or is currently active in the game world.

...And Grow On Trees

In addition to resolving over time, quests emerge over time. When you begin the campaign, you start off with multiple activities for players to choose from. But if you don’t add new employment opportunities, once the starting jobs wrap up, your players will be twiddling their thumbs. There are a couple of ways you can make this process play out.

• If you don’t care about distinguishing the types of jobs that open up, every in-game week, roll 1d6. On a 1, a new job becomes available.
• If you want to assign different chances to different job types, you couldroll a different die type for every desired job type, with a 1 still yielding a new job in all cases.E.g. You could make lair hunts 1 on 1d4, small dungeon clearing quests 1 on 1d6, and large dungeon clearing quests 1 on 1d8.

I was about to dig into how to decide other parameters of your shiny new quest, but I’ll save that for another post.

You Can't Spell "Faction" Without "Action"

If your game has different factions vying for competing objectives, those objectives will naturally progress over time.

I came up with this mechanic for checking faction advancement. The only caveat is that it only works dynamics with two opposing factions (you can have more than two factions, but they must compete in pairs).

1. Assign one faction “3” and the other faction “18” (these numbers will make sense momentarily).
2. Roll 3d6 to set the initial state of the factional conflict (i.e. which side starts off ahead). Record this number as the current state.
3. Define a period of in-game time for checking faction state (i.e. weekly, monthly, etc...).
4. Every period, roll 3d6. If the result is less than the current state, increase the current state by 1. If the result is greater than the current state, decrease the current state by 1. If the result is equal to the current state, leave the current state unchanged.

The reason it works this way is so that the greater an advantage one side has, the easier it is for it to close in on its objective.

5. Repeat step 4 until the current state reaches either 3 or 18, at which point the corresponding faction prevails.

Make Things Happen!

Ideally, the aforementioned mechanics will inspire you to create your own that are tailored to your game. The best way to make your game world grow is for you to grow into an approach that works best for you.