Houserules: In-person Only Edition

Lots of gaming takes place online, and there are lots of tools suitable for facilitating this play.

Still, in-person games provide the opportunity for manipulatives to be used at the table.

In my case, I am thinking of mechanics lifted from other sources, using items many gamers' homes already contain.

Dread is a horror role-playing game that makes use of a Jenga tower.  The mechanic of pulling and stacking bricks to build tension works in more traditional RPGs.  But when the tower inevitably collapses, it isn't automatic death of the PC, merely something BAD happening to the party as a whole.

Another idea is one I learned of yesterday.  At the blog Daddy Rolled a One, he discusses using cards to mimic wandering through dark twisty caves.  He cites the source of the idea as the YouTube Dungeoncraft Channel, so between the two, you'll get a solid idea of what I am going for.*  

While this trick could be mimicked online using a dice roller or other random generator, there is something more visceral with pulling a card from a spread and revealing it.

The last tangible I want to write about are Scrabble tiles.  I can't lie, Scrabble is one of my favorite board games, but is hell to play against people who cannot spell, have limited vocabularies, or both.

Anyhow, Gnomish Puzzle Locks appear in my megadungeon, and amount to a grid with a bowl of letter tiles underneath them.  Clues exist, but rarely in the same room.  

Players fit the Scrabble tiles to the grid.  Letters glow faintly (sometimes) when in the correct location.  When the final gridspace is filled, either the lock opens with a click-hiss OR the PC manipulating the letters gets an electric shock (meaner versions are actually Chain Lightning).

I wouldn't be much of a DM if there weren't enough spare letters in the bowl to spell out several different words, though.  Maybe wrong words trigger different results.

As I type this, the old computer game Betrayal at Krondor comes to mind, with its Moredhel Wordlock Chests. These chests were kind enough to have the riddle-clues written on them, so maybe I could take that route: riddle-clues in obscure languages in the room (or near it) of the Gnomish Puzzle Lock. Statues and giant brazen faces intoning riddles works as well.

Are any of these silly? Maybe.

Are any of these fun? Yes.  Yes, they are.

*Since I learned of it from a blog, you can guess my preferred method of information gathering.  Still, the Dungeoncraft Channel gets high marks from several sources, so if you like videos and D&D or other rpgs, check it out.