Never do I ever... Roll for Random Encounters at Night

There you have it. Page 47 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, Encounters. My copy is stained with the blood of a thousand characters. But hardly any of the blood came from a nighttime encounter. And certainly not a random nighttime encounter.

Back in the day... and when I say "day", I mean from time immemorial to present day... people hunker down at night. Night is not fun unless you are up to something that can only happen at night. Typically, to have a good time at night, you need a plan, not "random". A dinner party, a star watching party, New Year's Eve and so on. Many people would be hard pressed to name a "random nighttime event" that went well for them. 

The same goes for RPG's. Don't waste time on a nighttime encounter roll. It makes the players nervous and edgy, which is sometimes fun. But not once a day, every day. Night time IS fearful, but the playing field is level when everyone fears. Not much moves at night. (Vampires are a story for another time).  

Many epic things happen in the light of the moon. You can't trust your dice to tell you what that is. You make it so. And make it good. 

One of my favorite stories about night adventures isn't even mine. It's the story of the Seventh Galbiana. This was a legion that declared for Otho against Vitellius for the Purple. Otho was coming north to head off Vitellius who was racing south for Rome. Both armies turned to meet, Vitellius' forces facing west and Otho's to the east. They met at dusk at Bedriacum and the Second Battle of Bedriacum was on. It was one of the rare cases where the Romans fought through the night. The Seventh's eagle fell to the enemy in the dead of night, but was saved by one centurion who sacrificed himself for honor. The fighting was chaotic, ferocious and exhausting. 

As the Sun rose, there was a collision of happenstance. The Seventh was on the left hand of the field, facing to the west. They were under command of Antonius, who served in the Legio III Gallica in Syria. When dawn broke, the men of the Seventh Galbiana followed Antonius' lead turned their backs to the enemy and gave a mighty cheer to something in the east. The Vitellian forces, the whole army, not just the ones facing the Seventh collapsed and retreated believing that Otho's reinforcements were taking the field. 

Nothing could be further from the true. All the Seventh was doing was emulating Antonius' Syria habit of saluting the Sun.  

Such thing are random, but not the sort of random that dice generate. If you want your players to enjoy their game, give them something to think about, not something the dice tell you.

If you like such stories, you can read more about this the book 69 A.D. by Gwyn Morgan.

Why The Tek on These Old Games?

Every month, I publish my stats on the blog and "download numbers*" from DriveThru RPG. Why?

When I started this, I did everything willy-nilly without much evaluation of what I was doing. Back in July of last year, I wondered how much money I was making. I got a number $314.

Ok.

How? No idea. It isn't terribly important how much or how without a record of how much time I put in on this. I started taking in an interest in my stats, which allowed me to appreciate how people were using my website and coming into contact with my 5 products on DriveThruRPG.

Back in August of 2018, I broke some ribs. I started selling books while all hopped up on pain pills and a lack of sleep. I got into this with zero consideration AND just in time for my main vehicle for contact with consumers to close (Rest in Peace, G+!).

Now that I doing research before taking action, I know a bit and would like to share with anyone who thinking about creating a blog or a product line.

Here is a little information about how I promote my stuff. I primarily use MeWe, and make efforts to promote on both Dice.Camp and Mastodon. I am also found on Old School RPG Planet. I have a presence on Facebook, but it is small.

Today, I had a chance to talk to Jon Salway, vb Wyrde and Wayne's Books on MeWe.com about Facebook stats. We all have Facebook pages, which don't seem to be working as we wish. (Those FB links are Wayne's Books, vb Wyrde, and These Old Games)

We were all noticing how much FB wanted us to pay money for contacts, and what contacts and interactions were small. I ran some stats and found out some data. First, FB was telling me that I had zero likes in the past 28 days, 6 pageviews, 11 people reached and 9 engagements, whatever any of those things are. Added together, it's "26 things".

My Google Analytics was telling me a different story. In the same 28 days, I had 74 sessions from Facebook. Hmm. 

Which is right? Google doesn't have a horse in the game when it comes to Facebook as a traffic source. If they did, they'd under report. So, "26 Things" happened on Facebook, but I got 74 people coming to my page from FB. That works out to 2.84 visits per "26 Things" on Facebook. I can also see that these "things from Facebook" were rather active. Most them dropped out, but many of them when on to click other stuff on my site. That's engagement. And it's engagement from people that Facebook told me didn't engage.

I suspect that someone finds my page on FB, clicks a link to my website, but after reading they don't go back to Facebook and comment or click like. That sounds about right.

So, it probably isn't in my best interest to ever pay to boost a post.

Another point about Facebook. You have three ways of having a presence. I have a page which people can follow. It holds content that is not shared with my friends and family. It isn't very effective. Second, you can create an account which is only about your business, you effectively don't have a personal account for friends and family. Everything you do is for business not for friends and family. This is effective, and at a guess I think Dyson Logos uses this method. I could be wrong, I am guessing based his activity and comments. Devon Rue took a different path. She has an account which seems to mix all of her business contacts with friends and family. Dyson and Devon's methods are super effective where as my is horrible.

Dyson recently posted that he discovered that if made a post with a link, FB depreciated it. That's annoying, they want him to pay for interaction. He discovered that if he made a post without a link and added the link to the comments of that post, more people saw it. Interesting and annoying.

Anyway, this is getting long and I am almost out of knowledge to drop. I hope this helps.

*"Download numbers" are not sales. My sales are poor. 14 times as many people download for free vs. pay for a product at any price, including a penny.

The Tek - April 2020

There are a couple of months that are really bad for me. Usually they are May and November. This is owing to my finals at school. Typically, finals are pushed in to mid-May and pull back to late November. The administration is dancing the issues of Easter and Christmas, without actually using those names.


April 2020 Downloads via DriveThruRPG:
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 3
Compass Rose Inn Minisetting - 1
Kobold Folly Minisetting - 3
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 7
Swashbucklers Character Class - 2

I want to share my all time download stats as of May, because I did this last month.
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 96
Compass Rose Inn Minisetting - 138
Kobold Folly Minisetting - 128
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 255
Swashbucklers Character Class - 93

I'm really happy with those numbers. I am less happy with my April webstats as I pretty much stopped publishing content for half a month.

Google Analytics Pageviews - 957
Google Analytics Sessions - 669
Pageviews per Session - 1.43

Additionally, I started publishing a podcast called: "That's Not New". I probably shouldn't have made my first post on April Fool's Day, but that's what happened. I am still searching for my voice and my place, so these are pretty rough episodes. I intend for these to be biweekly podcast with a duration of 7-15 minutes. We shall see how that goes. I could really use some feedback.

Pre-Generated Characters - 2nd Level Monks 002

This is my second group of monks. Decima, Seneca the Swift and Segria are fairly typical monks for my campaign. They have temporal tasks, which takes them away from their homes in the monastery. They have a lot of money for monks, which probably indicates they are either transferring funds from one location to another or have taken in a donation Segria has small diamonds flecks, which are important to her order.

Each of these characters has probably been on an adventure or three. I like to give my pregenerated characters some flavor with their equipment. Each character has something either secular like an instrument or spiritual like intense or a book. One of them has a wooden sword, which could be an interesting reveal, sort of like Book's ability to use a shotgun on Firefly. 

If there is a call for it in the comments, I will make DOCX and Google Doc file available as I have the PDFs. The reason I have not done this from the get go is that I created every character of a class in one document and print each page as a PDF.

Pre-Generated Characters - 1st Level Assassins 002

This is my last batch of Assassin for a while. I meant to generate level 2 Assassins, but somehow reverted back to level 1. Oops. Anyway, Elvina, Arrius and Linus are more in line with classic AD&D assassins than the assassins in my campaign.

Each of these characters has probably been on an adventure or three. I like to give my pregenerated characters some flavor with their equipment. One of these assassins has a lute and two of them have books which touch on ethics which is an interesting spin on assassins.

If there is a call for it in the comments, I will make DOCX and Google Doc file available as I have the PDFs. The reason I have not done this from the get go is that I created every character of a class in one document and print each page as a PDF.