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Each seems to get better at more explicit language, but I know recently there was some confusion with regards to the effect of losing conscripts and militia, and I read that section several times, but it wasn’t until someone was trying to actually utilize it that I realized there was ambiguity. I have to imagine detecting something like that is even harder for the person who wrote it.
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the best example I can think of off the top of my head is going on a wilderness adventure:
*ok, let’s figure out our overland movement rate (pg 93)
*wait… how slow is everyone? we need to check encumbrance of everyone (pg 48)
*hmmmm, we have an exploration of 60’ so we can only move 12 miles a day. what if we put some people on horses? we’ve got 5 slow plate wearers, can we buy 5 horses? let’s see how much a horse costs (pg 42).
*ok, the cheapest horse is medium riding at 40gp, how many of those are there in a class IV market? (pg40).
*hmmm, only 1, but we could also commission another 5 which would cover us. how long does it take to comission a horse? (commisioning rules, not on a table, but at least on the same page!)
*ok, so 40 days later we’re ready to roll… how fast do we go now? it doesn’t say on the table with it’s cost… oh but it’s here in the entry for Horse, Medium (pg 45). also there’s a table for all the speeds of the mounts farther down (pg 49)
*solid! so a medium horse is 180/90 for loads of 30/60 stone… well I can’t carry 30 stone of gear so it must be the higher value… unless it counts my weight in stone… I said I was a fat dwarf of 250lbs so… 25 stone? how would any dwarf ever ride a donkey or mule?
*whatever, we’ll just assume 90. so now we go… 18 miles a day. alright let’s do this! ok judge, roll some random encounters.
*ok, the entry under wandering monsters in the wilderness says i roll once per day if you’re stationary, otherwise once every time you enter a new hex. your city is built around a watefall, so it must be in the hills which means an encounter on 5+ of 1d6 (both 244)
*let’s see… on the second hex, 12 miles from the safety of town, i rolled an encounter. Let’s roll on “Mountains, hills”, I got humanoid… subtable is on the next page… I got hill giant.
*ok, the wandering monster flow says i roll to see if it’s in lair, which is in it’s monster entry. (p 170)
*now, this IS a hill giant lair. “seriously?” asks the players "We’re 12 miles from town. anyway, treasure type N is inside, that’s on pg 206, but I have a utility to do it and they might not go in so i’ll just wait to roll that.
*ok, so there’s giants… how far away are we from it? pg 97 has encounter distance… there’s no hills. whatever, the encounter table said hills, mountains so let’s use mountains. 4d6x10’ so we’re maybe 140’ away… but we actually see him at 280’ because the giant is probably twice as tall as us.
*alright, right next to encounter distance is surprise! As long as he keeps rolling 2- we can close with the ones at the entrance. Ok, it worked once, we move our… per-round movement so 30’ closing to 240’, let’s try that again… ok he spotted us this time. now what?
*well right after surprise is reactions (Alright! this is working out!) let’s see, our face has +0 charisma but has mystic aura (assuming the judge allows it)… we got a 3… he’s going to smoosh us, let’s run!
*ah, here’s evasion next… for dungeons… oh next page is wilderness evasion. (pg 100).
*darn, we got 11 and needed 14+, oh but one of our henchmen is an explorer! he adds 5 to that roll (pg 30)
*alright, you got away… back to the rolling… next hex… dragon. what?
*oh, hang on, look in the campaign chapter, under populating a dungeon: roll once a month in civilized hexes, week in borderlands, day in wilderness domains (141)
*oh… so are we civilized or borderlands? well according to pg. 129, hexes that get populous enough will grow from wilderness to borderlands and then into civilized…
*“so do all domains start out as wilderness?” not quite, according to page 125, a city or larger makes 8 hexes around them civilized, and 5 hexes beyond those civilized hexes are borderlands.
*so when I converted my setting, I figured out the start town was class IV which makes it… either a large town or a small city (pg 134).
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That was me sort of taking you through my own process. as you saw, some parts worked out quite well (The combat sections flowed nicely into one another), but other parts require knowledge that other sections exist. Some of it can’t be helped: a lot of the equipment sections are going to be separate from the adventuring sections and should probably stay that way, but there’s a lot of cross referencing until you basically memorize which tables you need to look at (assuming you have a collection of tables) or else you memorize the tables.
alright, my fingers are cramping up, i hope this helps. and certainly i don’t mean this as criticism, I think the extent to which I backed D@W shows that I’m a big fan of the ACKs system.