I don't remember any mechanics from pandemic! so I can't compare directly but I know there was a
Pathfinder 1e Curse of the Crimson Throne module that came up with urban plague outbreak rules.
Yeah, I'm not really talking about using it to simulate the spread of diseases in-game, but rather as a way to model how the various factions in a game behave in a semi-organic way. I do need to track down Curse of the Crimson Throne for another reason, though, so I'll be sure to check out those mechanics! Thanks!
I love Pandemic and I love fusing different games together, but it never occurred to me to try to combine some of its mechanics with D&D. I am excited and will give it some thought. But this is your idea - play around with it and tell us what you figure out.
Well, invitation accepted!
I guess what I find interesting about Pandemic is that it models pretty interestingly geometric-ish progressions without the "aaand you're dead" feeling that actual geometric progression brings. In Pandemic, you play as a group of epidemiologists trying to stop four diseases from spreading and wiping out the globe. On every players turn, more cities (determined by random card draw) get infected. Players move around the board and try to research cures, contain outbreaks, and generally juggle grenades. In addition, when a city hits a certain infection threshold, it triggers an outbreak that infects all nearby cities (potentially triggering cascading outbreaks). There are multiple ways to beat the diseases, and multiple ways to lose.
For me, I'd probably set it up so that I have three to four big threats in a sandbox, each of which have certain goals. So let's take the Sparky Boyz! They're a group of orcs who've decided to steal the secrets of inventing from Garl Glittergold. So their goals look like this:
Stage 1:
1) Capture the gnomish inventor Fuddlestucks Twinkletoes
2) Develop Sparky-tek, weapons and armor that give the Sparky Boyz a significant advantage over their foes
3) Learn from Fuddlestucks about Garl Glittergold's Beamy Deffgun, the only weapon that can kill Garl Glittergold
Stage 2:
1) Scout the nearest gnomish community (Chunggus)
2) Raid Chunggus and sack the temple of Glittergold
3) Find the
Big Book of Bits 'N' Bobbins in the temple
Stage 3:
1) Discern the location of the Vault of Garl
2) Find out how to bypass the Vault's defenders
Stage 4:
1) Acquire interplanar travel method
2) Break into the Vault of Garl
3) Steal Garl Glittergold's Beamy Deffgun
Stage 5:
1) Kill Garl Glittergold with his own Beamy Deffgun
I'll have to play around with the actual mechanics, but basically, between each PC adventure, you draw 2 - 4 cards. Each suite of cards corresponds to a threat (the Sparky Boyz are diamonds). When you get a card for a given faction / threat, you add ticks to a clock on one of the goals (starting with the Stage 1 goals and proceeding down). So let's say that each goal requires 4 ticks on a clock before it's complete. Once a goal is complete, it adds 1d6 ticks for the DM to spread around to every incomplete goal near it (again, pardon the incomplete mechanics), and triggers a rumor to the PCs that a threat is accelerating their plans. If the PCs intervene (depending on how successful they were at disrupting the threat), they can "rewind the clock," removing ticks from incomplete goals.
All this would ideally plug into a faction's responses (see the Vampyramid from
Night's Black Agents) that informs how they react to the PCs. Stop their forward progress enough and maybe you can trigger a showdown with the faction, potentially removing them for good after several adventures.
It needs work, but that's the core concept.
If I was going to try using pandemic as a means of describing a pandemic or zombie apocalypse or even an orcish horde moving across the land, I'd probably not even show it to the players, rather it would be backdrop and depending on what the players do, they might interact with it, halt its progress, fail to halt its progress, etc. In between sessions I'd make checks to see what happens, draw some cards to see if another clan of orcs pops up in a different part of the kingdom. It might actually be quite a good system to use for the background of the campaign.
That is a really good idea! Borrowing!
Beyond the Wall and Other Advantures, in one of its either expansions or threat packs, has what it calls Blight zones. These are hexes in the game world where some event has happened, and the land is blighted, and anyone traveling in the areas must save or lose HP each day. It is also. Impossible to forage or find food and water in the wild.
The mechanics also have rules for periodically checking if the Blight expands into neighboring hexes, and in what (or what random direction). There are then rules for how to defeat the source, depending on the source.
I’m sure that kind of mechanic has appeared in other products, but it is presented clearly and simply in BtWaOA, and I think would make a good model to base a pandemic like outbreak around.
That's a good way to think about it! I'll have to check that out!
