Sowing Seeds: A Minigame for Planting

That's right. Sprout you little shits.

 
Read this post on my static website here!

Howdy, Farmhands!

    A bit of Gadda History before we begin: 

     As previously mentioned on this blog, 2020 was the year I finally bit the bullet and got into Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition. I had been listening to the Adventure Zone Podcast since 2018, and with all of my social events canceled due to The Pandemic, I wanted a hobby I could enjoy with my roommates and online friends. This honeymoon period lasted maybe 4 months until I actually ran Lost Mines of Phandelver, and I immediately turned into a contrarian sicko with a hate for WOTC. Thus began the era of Poasting.

    I was a piece of shit on Twitter. I had yet to learn the difference between being rewarded for my intelligent opinions and being rewarded for simply being witty enough to be picked up by the rage machine. But during this time, I spent a good portion of my clout seeking sending out game design thoughts, as if to somehow validate my existence as an angry voice on the internet. Some of those ideas are actually... not bad? Now that I'm looking at them with a significantly clearer head I can see some winners in there. One of my earliest fascinations was with the many things one could do with the humble d6. To that end, I put forward a series of Mini-game like procedures for condensing larger activities into something you do in--between sessions or perhaps as sort of a Mario Party-like grab bag of events. Finally, this bring us to the point of today's blog; I don't have anything better to post, so sure, I'll regurgitate one of those.    

SOWING SEEDS

A Minigame for Planting 

    The original Tweet Thread went as follows: 

"Planting d6 minigame where you attempt to cultivate seedlings??? Roll a d6, that's your seed. 1 being a dud and 6 being great! You can choose to roll a second d6 to nurse it to better health, but rolling under the seedlings number OR surpassing a total of 8 means you ruined it? So like, its super easy to upgrade a 1, but more risky the higher the base value it This would tie in to some kind of produce grading system where a top tier plant eventually yields good harvest. I'd probably have 1 die count as a field of ground crops but have each fruit tree get planted and rated individually. Needs some tweaking to really make it work. Maybe some sort of ritual of preparing the ground and watering it to add bonuses to the initial roll"

    This is a fine start, but lacks anything solid enough to build a procedure around. Let's start draft 2 by making this a form of Downtime Action, i.e. the time between adventures. Rolling 1d6 for your initial Seed quality is still great, as is choosing to roll a second d6 to nurture it to better health. I believe rolling Under your Seedling's current number might be too harsh; these Downtimes only come every so often. Let's keep the threshhold of failure going over 8, but introduce a degradation mechanic. For every Adventure between Downtimes, roll 1d6 and subtract that value from the Seed's quality. If a Seed remain less than 1 at the end of a downtime, the crop has failed to thrive. This gives players a chance to fix the problem before everything goes completely tits up, as well as incentivizes the initial planting being as high a value as possible before they carry on with their adventuring.

    What's the point of this, though? In the original tweet thread, I vaguely hand wave at a scoring system where this process would net you better/more crops from a single seed.

1-2: Poor Quality. You've managed to grow Crop equal to the amount of Seed you started with, but it was hardly worth the effort.

3-4: Fair Quality. You've grown double the Crop per seed, and it's good enough that you'd eat it!

5-6: Great Quality. You've tripled your investment, and 1/3rd of it came out looking better than the average Veg. 

7-8: Blue Ribbon. The same as Great Quality, however, 1 piece of Veg came out looking larger, juicier, and tastier than all the others. You might even win an award for it... if you weren't planning on selling it for four times the initial Seed's value.

    Further Thoughts:

    Time is always a factor in farming, and I want to make use of it. I have no interest in making a formal list right now (maybe later), but different crops requiring 1-3 Downtime Actions to be ready for harvest sounds about right. The 3 Action Crops would require a significant amount of reward for successfully growing them, and with 3 Degradations to contend with, would NOT be simple to produce.

    Mid-level play with Hirelings would immediately muddy the waters. This Mini-game as written assumes there's 1 plot of land for 1 player to maintain, but once the party can just Hire A Guy to do things for them, the urge to set them to work in the fields will be strong. My immediate thought is to still require the player to perform the game as written; but hirelings assigned to the fields increases the number of crops that can be planted at once, 1 per hireling, as opposed to making the NPC do all the work offscreen.  

    I've previously written this d50 table for generating fantastical produce, and included links to other great blogs on the topic of fantasy food and cooking! Give it a read!

This post and others like it are made possible by members of my Patreon, where you can see Game WIPs and Previews of future blogposts a week early! Thank you in particular to SethChris93 for your continued support!