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A Pedantic NoteOn page 32 of the guide it says: The city is famous for its weekly dinosaur races through the streets. Faerun does not have weeks. It has Tendays. 1. How Cool is a Dinosaur Race?A good encounter will address two questions:
Most of the racing I've seen was in movies. I'm a movie buff, so I use movies for inspiration, but I also pull from comic books, novels, etc. Ben-Hur, Fast and the Furious, and Pixar's Cars films all have fun race scenes. Grease, Star Wars: Episode I, and Days of Thunder are fine sources too. What makes these races exciting is that they have
Dinosaur Betting - Preliminary NoteThe book gets this totally wrong. Don't follow it or you'll end up very confused. This is NOT how odds are written. Frankly, the dino betting element is boring. Focus on dino racing instead. I'll return to my betting notes at the end. 2. Why to Skip the Race as WrittenHere's how the book suggests you run it:
The whole race is abstracted, so it will really be a bunch of math problems on a sheet of paper in the end. Boring. If you want to run it as the book says, I would print handouts for the players, one for each dino. I don't like this way of running the race. It's not very fun, it's not dangerous, and it doesn't hit our secondary goal of touring the city. 3. Sean McGovern's Dinosaur RaceGo buy Sean McGovern's Tomb of Annihilation Companion (ToAC) right now. It's five bucks well-spent. You'll thank me. I will be stealing a lot of his dino race ideas for mine (I won't include the parts I steal here--so if you don't buy his supplement, you'll have to invent your own), but I won't be stealing how he runs the race itself. I don't like his actual race mechanic (sorry, Sean), so I'll come up with my own. What ToAC does well is threefold. It gives us:
Though this doesn't give the players a tour of everywhere they can go in Port Nyanzaru, it gives them exactly enough to learn the basic layout of the city and some ideas of where they can go to get started having fun. It has 8 stages, each with their learning experiences:
An example of the supplement's challenges is this at Stage 1: Pushing Riders Off the Bridge. Riders can make an opposed strength check to try to knock one another off their dinosaur. The loser of the opposed strength roll must make a DC 10 Dexterity save or fall off the bridge into the crowd below. This lets the player deal with a rival (the NPC doing the pushing or that THEY are pushing), experience some danger with HP loss or even death, and creates a set-back in the race that doesn't put them out entirely. I like all this. I recommend using all of the challenges from the race in the Tomb of Annihilation Companion. But I still don't like the racing mechanic. 4. A More Intuitive RaceThe main problem I see with the race mechanics is that they are complex, but will never be used again in the game. If I'm going to introduce a complex mechanic in a mini-game (like the raptor fight gambling I introduced), I want it to teach my players something that they'll be using later on (ie, flanking rules). The second problem is that they don't feel much like a race. They feel like a bunch of math problems: the first player to add up points to 300, wins. The third problem is that the race race mechanics aren't intuitive. I want my players to look at what we're doing and understand why a rule would be there on-sight. The better way to run the dinosaur race is as a board game. Players always love a mini-game and board games are good fun. All sorts of board games are races, from Candy Land to Life. Even children understand this sort of gameplay. Players go around the table rolling dice to move forward spaces until someone gets to the end of the board. Instead of a bunch of combat mechanics and calculating full and half movement speeds, we'll try to emulate a traditional board game. You can have all the players try to ride in the race if you want, but I would follow these guidelines:
Board Game RulesNOTE: These rules are under construction. Since receiving more feedback, I think they need to be tweaked. In particular, I think that all players need to be stopped at every challenge space, but there are other revisions as well that I think are useful. I'll update this when I can.
In order to run the race as a board game, you'll need to make the board. I like crafting terrain with foam, so that's how I'd build one. If that's not your thing, a board game for the race can be laid out using markers and 3"x5" index cards or just a sheet of paper. Here's a layout of what it might look like. If you'd like something a little nicer, go to your local print-shop (I use Costco Photo Center for this) and print out this 30"x20" game board I put together for you. (Note: this was the official point I decided to set up a Ko-fi account for tips. This gameboard was NOT in my documents folder, I built it for this blog because I have lost my mind now. Thanks. You made me lose my mind. See what you did??) Once you have your game board, you'll need descriptions and rules for the challenges. Again, I would go buy Sean McGovern's Tomb of Annihilation Companion and use his. With only tiny modifications (losing the half-speeds punishments, ditching the mount-swapping and the monkey, altering the flying lizards punishment to a skip-next-turn, cleaning up challenge 6's pit escape, and changing the canoe mechanic to a back-one-space), the race will be pretty fun. Some of the punishments from the challenges can be deadly too, which provides our game with danger. BONUS ADVICE Don't let your players die in this mini-game. If they reach 0 hit points, have rodeo clowns in the crowds rush to their aid and feed them one of Wakanga's healing potions. Rivals & DinosYou're going to need some toy dinosaurs. You could use any tokens you wanted--from another board game, player minis, dice, etc. But just go to the local dollar store and buy some tiny dinosaurs for this. These will represent the rivals and mounts for the players. Leading up to the race, be sure to have at least one of the NPC riders harass your players in some way. I recommend having Ekene-Afa's son, Tyrik, do so. Likewise, it's not a bad idea to have one be helpful. I would recommend having Faroul & Gondolo provide them with tack and harnesses or something so they can meet these feckless guides. Print out offer the following dinosaur cards to your players. If they are racing, they will use their own character sheet stats for Animal Handling, strength checks, etc. If they are running an NPC rider, they will use the card's stats. Zongo and/or Nasty Boy should be run by the DM, not a player. Don't forget that the Rider Stats get replaced by the player character's stats if they are in the race. When running the race, make sure to emphasize the antagonism of the rival (Tyrik). Given any opportunity, he'll try to throw a player character off the track and talk trash. He loves to brag that his mom is heroic Ekene-Afa. Also, don't forget that Zongo farts constantly. Make it stinky. Faroul and Gondolo are idiots, but you may want to conceal this so your party chooses them as their guides. This depends on how bad you want their jungle experience to be. Winning & LootIf your players don't win the race, they won't get prizes. What a bummer. You can move on from there if you like, your party a bunch of losers. Or, you can run the race two more times, doing the three races for the day (ignore the 2-legged vs 4-legged vs unchained. This is goofy and requires more dinosaur leg-knowledge than most of us have). This gives them two more chances to win the following (swiped from Sean McGovern's Tomb of Annihilation Companion).
5. Dinosaur GamblingI would skip betting on the race. However, players may be hungry for money and want to get in on it. If so, ignore the gambling rules in the book. They're gibberish. Instead, let the players bet on who wins the board game. Keep it simple. If they bet 100gp, they can win 100gp. Don't worry about odds and payouts. It's too much math to be fun. It will be interesting to see if any of them try to throw the race over a bet. If so, would Kamari the Fat come after them for taking a fall without his knowledge? Could be cool role-playing. Next Up: Guides!
14 Comments
Laura Stevens
2/27/2022 07:35:45 pm
So glad you lost your mind lol! I love this!
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Micah
3/2/2022 05:10:51 pm
Ha! I guess it went to a good cause! Let me know if any of the other posts end up being useful as well!
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Jacob Ehmann
8/3/2022 01:07:53 pm
On the game board - the numbers 2 3 and 4 seem to be repeated in lieu of 6, 7 and 8...is this intentional?
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Jacob Ehmann
8/3/2022 01:08:23 pm
Thank you for the work btw...great stuff.
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Micah
8/3/2022 04:04:30 pm
DANGIT!
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Micah
8/3/2022 04:20:15 pm
Okay, check it now. Should be corrected.
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Jacob Ehmann
8/3/2022 05:24:48 pm
Thats awesome, thanks again. I can't wait to run this. I'm doing a 1on1 pbp and they are getting a walking tour of the sights of the city now as they head towards Kaya's respite...they so far have certainly been intrigued by the dino's.
Maarten van D
11/23/2022 02:59:48 am
None of my players have Animal Handling, I would still let them race using different skills. What would you suggest in that case?
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Micah
1/10/2023 12:28:35 pm
I would probably just use the Animal Handling scores for the NPC riders on the cards, but you could use their raw Wisdom score as well.
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Maarten van D
12/15/2022 04:57:56 am
"If a racer lands a challenge space, they deal with the challenge associated with the challenge number. Then their turn is over."
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Jacob Ehmann
12/15/2022 08:34:03 am
That is how I understood it and how I am running it now (PbP)...though I could see the value in forcing the encounters by basically having a STOP sign in place (like in the game of LIFE) to make it so they have to deal with the encounters before proceeding...I kind of wish that is how I decided to run it...I have an NPC rider that is zooming past things right now
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Jacob Ehmann
12/15/2022 08:34:54 am
adding comment because I accidentally unsubscribed from receiving new comments.
Micah
12/16/2022 11:28:14 am
Yes, I've run it both ways and I think making them stop at the challenges is the better way.
Elson
4/9/2023 06:42:29 pm
I really like the racing-as-a-boargame rules but there's something off for me about how the race is ran here vs vanilla. As written in the book, a t-rex, for example, has a high animal handling DC, but also has a higher speed to make it worth it. In this ruleset, in which the speed is defined by the check, the same t-rex having a higher DC makes it the worst option for the race, especially considering his standard rider only has a +2. Was this intentional? If not, how would you fix it? Would just flipping the DCs be enough?
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AuthorMicah Faulkner first started playing D&D back in 1985. He took many years off after high school, but came back in 2016 to find everything new and changed. Now he plays with his wife, son, and sisters every couple weeks. Archives
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