Wilderness Encounters as Attrition 2

I received a comment on a recent post inquiring if I had fiddled with my rules for "wilderness attrition" at all, and whether I had anything further to write about them. The short answer heretofore was "no" because I have been using the rules as I wrote them for the last few sessions (and they've been pretty simple and effective so far, and people are starting to carry back-up items, which is one thing I envisioned for these rules ... thus necessitating a mule and porters ... mwahaha!)

The longer answer is, I do actually have an idea for making "wilderness attrition" a little better, I hope--"concreteness".

As written so far, and as used so far, I roll the encounter chance, elucidate the results and the number of damage dice for the party, and then come up with a lame reason for it afterward (especially when prompted by the player of Rendorsheeg the Elf). This is abstract; abstraction, of course, was the main purpose for creating these rules; yet nevertheless, D&D is so often about concreteness that it pains me to just kind of handwave why a week of rations, 12 arrows, a spear, and a shield were all lost. Generally I've been calling it skirmishes with goblins or orcs ... but what if I had said it was wolves, and a druid, say, replied by saying, "I want to cast speak with animals and talk them out of attacking us"?

Moreover, of the three dice I roll for every encounter/wandering monster check, on of them is not pulling much weight in these "attrition" rules, and I think "concreteness" could be a better use of its pips on the table.

Therefore:

When I roll for encounters, I roll 3d6, one black, one white, one red:
black -- encounter chance
white -- party surprise chance
red -- monster surprise chance

I ignore the red and white dice if black comes up nothing.

For attrition in the wilderness, rather than rolling up a full encounter on a positive result from the black die, I look to the other dice:
The white die determines "attrition dice" inversely to the number rolled on the die, e.g. 1 is 6d6, 2 is 5d6, 3 is 4d6, 4 is 3d6, etc.
Instead of an extra chance to "ignore" the encounter as I originally wrote, the red die can be used to determine "concretely" just what happened, thus:

1 - animal encounter -- a bear, a pack of wolves, a rutting moose, a baboon troupe, etc.

2 - men encounter -- a group of hunters, some brigands, some local ruffians

3 - humanoid encounter -- a skirmish with orcs, goblins, ogres, etc. per what I've generally said

4 - fey/unusual encounter -- undead perhaps, or faerie trees/briars that grasp at characters, etc.

5-6 - non-creature encounter -- a freak storm, a patch of poison ivy, a nest of young ticks, etc.

These are vague, and I think necessarily. As I said above, abstractness is the reason for these rules of attrition--what I get out of them is focusing on the dungeon while retaining some of the danger of the wilderness and travel through it. Attrition is a quick way to move through the consequences of the wilderness than having to describe an entire encounter with a band of orcs transporting prisoners, etc.

And yet, having a sense of what concretely the characters have encountered allows the players to respond to it with their skills, spells, etc in somewhat of the way that they would if presented with a full encounter. The best example I have is that if the referee rolls an "animal" encounter of six attrition dice, and the party includes a druid who responds by casting the spell speak with animals, the referee could allow the druid to just talk to the animals and avoid the encounter altogether, OR allow that spellcasting to replace one (or so) of the "usual" means of eliminating attrition dice (including the otherwise invulnerable sixth die, perhaps!).

Perhaps the party encounters "animals"--the referee declares them spiders
... and the halfling of the party uses his halfling abilities to sneak around
distracting the spiders with anti-arachnid slurs like, "Hey, atter-cop!"

Maybe an "unusual encounter" is undead, and the cleric can turn undead to eliminate an attrition die; or perhaps a group of men can be charmed or slept by a magic user to eliminate dice ... etc.

And of course, if the players just blithely accept the dice that you put forth, break their items, and move on, it's no skin off the referee's back. I just felt a strong need to have a way to clearly allow more player agency in response to the "attrition".

Wilderness Encounters as Attrition

Earlier this month, as I was contemplating running a public game focused on the dungeon, I was wondering how best to deal with the wilderness. For myself, though I'm glad to play in them, I have a tough time wanting to run a game in which the dungeon is right there in town (like Jeff Rients' Vyzor; or my own local friend's dungeon, the entrance to which is in the inn's basement). I have my own idiom, into which I've fallen every time I've started a new group--a long north-south corridor, bounded to west and east by mountains, with wilderness over the eastern mountains, and civilization back over the western mountains. The dungeon is near--not more than a week away--but still must lie somewhere in the eastern mountains, on the border between civilization's final frontier, and the beginning of the true wilderlands.

(and the drive in Idaho, between the poles of Boise and Moscow, definitely exerts a kind of of influence over this vision)

It's surprisingly hard to find Google images of the mountains rising on
either side, which is much of what one sees on the north-south drive
through Idaho; my D&D games have wider valleys, but a similar bifurcation

I use this both as a means of separation (the characters still must travel away from civilization to find adventure), and as a means to make sure time passes in-game (the local game run by my friend has maybe progressed a couple weeks, and we've been playing for months; for me, if I were refereeing, that would feel stultifying, in that I like a session to be a week at minimum, but his game is his game).

But if the game is dungeon-focused, wilderness encounters will draw attention away from that dungeon. Case-in-point, during the last session of the Greyhame Mountain Dungeon that I ran, perhaps a quarter of the session was spent just dealing with an orc warband encountered on the way to the dungeon. It wasn't a bad encounter (actually, the players took it quite in stride and shone in it); nevertheless, it took a lot of time that might have been differently spent inside the dungeon.

(and just for the record, that encounter occurred because I couldn't remember these very "attrition" rules I'd tried to formulate, and it was easier to just do a monster encounter; and yet for the dungeon-game, it could have been quicker into the dungeon if I'd had my "attrition" notes before me).


So:
When I roll for encounters, I roll 3d6, one black, one white, one red:
black -- encounter chance
white -- party surprise chance
red -- monster surprise chance

I ignore the red and white dice if black comes up nothing.

For attrition in the wilderness, rather than rolling up a full encounter on a positive result from the black die, I look to the other dice:
If the red die comes up 1 or 2, there is still no encounter/attrition, because the "monster/encounter" was "surprised" by the party, and they can avoid it.
But the white die determines "attrition dice" inversely to the number rolled on the die, e.g. 1 is 6d6, 2 is 5d6, 3 is 4d6, 4 is 3d6, etc.

An "attrition die" is 1d6 of damage allocated to one party member, by lot or by choice. In any singular "encounter", an "attrition die" may be negated by breaking 1 shield, 1 suit of armor, 1 weapon, by losing 1 week of rations, or by expending 1 dozen ammunition (arrows, bolts, bullets, etc. via the commensurate missile weapon, e.g. bow, crossbow, sling), but no negation may be duplicated (i.e. once a shield is broken, no other shields may be used to negate "attrition dice" in a given "encounter").

You may note that a roll of 1 on the white die (6d6 "attrition") creates an absolute necessity of 1d6 damage somewhere in the party, volunteered or by lot (because a maximum of 5d6 "attrition" can be negated in any one "encounter"). I could further add that this damage may not be cured by clerics during the course of an adventure, representing instead of wounds, fatigue, starvation, mild disease, or what have you--or perhaps not, if I don't feel inclined.

I envision this option as a means to resolve wilderness encounters quickly, yet without simply bypassing the fact that the D&D wilderness can be dangerous. Stakes remain, even up to damage to characters or the possible destruction of equipment. And yet, the game will be allowed to move quickly to the dungeon that is its real focus without dwelling overlong on the wilderness chance encounter.

Given the abstraction, I wouldn't use rules like this at a "regular" game, where I would much rather just run a wilderness encounter as-is, and let the consequences be what they may. But games like that imply a continuity that extends beyond the dungeon; whereas if your pick-up game relies on getting to the dungeon--but wants to touch on the danger of the wilderness--"attrition" could be a fast way to convey that.

All said, you could just start the game "at the dungeon". I just ... still want the travel time, and the possibility of some minor disaster. And this is my rough draft for an "in-between" version.