I’ve been kicking around a design rule recently I’m calling “1, 10, or 1000000.” The idea is that when you’re determining how prevalent something should be in your game there should either be one of them, 10 of them, or a million.
Maybe not exactly those numbers. More accurately, if you’re thinking about how prevalent something should be in the campaign, any given thing should either be unique, part of a small coherent grouping, or common if not ubiquitous. What this means specifically varies from thing to thing so here are some examples:
Dragons
There is one dragon. Maybe not the only dragon in the entire game world, but for the purposes of the campaign there is only the one. This will likely be the most dragon-y dragon a DM could muster. The players might encounter it in passing or hear about it from time to time as they progress but they wouldn’t hope to have any chance of slaying it (or convincing it to be their ally, subduing it, etc.) until late in the game. The dragon is probably tied to the history of the setting or has some significant influence on the current circumstances. There’s only one dragon, so it has to count.
There are 10 dragons. They all know each other, and people know about them—if not all then enough to know that there are several dragons in the area. Each dragon has their own domain, goals, tastes, and their own of opinions of one another. Each dragon probably has a couple unique features in addition to the normal dragon stuff that make them distinct both from the other dragons and the stereotypical “fantasy dragon” that exists in the mind of the players. Some of the dragons are mean, some are nice, all are menacing yet for different reasons.
There are 1000000 dragons. They’re everywhere, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the sea. In every cave there dwells a dragon, in every forest they stalk and prey. Some rule city states, others hide in abandoned cellars. They come in all shapes, sizes, and temperaments. This is probably the baseline monster the PCs will be dealing with throughout the campaign.
Sages
There is one sage. She lives somewhere rather inconvenient to get to and it takes at least a session worth of adventuring to find her for the first time. Being the only sage, she’s knowledgeable on just about everything worth asking about, though she exacts a steep price for her services. She's probably an important figure in the setting despite being a recluse. A possible quest for the PCs would be if a powerful political leader tasks them to bribe her so that she gives false info to his adversaries.
There are 10 sages. They are the current members of a secret order that’s been around for centuries. They’re scattered all over the map, some in settlements, some in the wilderness, some traveling from place to place. In addition to their respective areas of knowledge each one’s got a “schtick:” one’s the mad scientist who wants to do experiments on the PCs, one’s the fogey hermit who might or might not be a badass kung fu master, one’s the eccentric inventor that always has stuff blowing up in his face, and maybe one is like a talking cat or a sentient ooze or something. They definitely have a bunch of secret signs and rites. If the player need information on a given subject and none of the sages they are buddies with know about it, they would tell them who the right sage is to look for and it would be a whole thing like “go to this distant barbarian village and show the chief this special sign and he will lead you to a clearing where in the light of the moon Umru the Clever will appear on the back of a three-horned rhino. At first he will refuse to help you but ask him three times and he will tell you what you seek to know.”
There are 1000000 sages. You can find one in just about every town, next to the blacksmith’s or the local tavern. They’re on the wilderness encounter table and maybe the dungeon one too, at least for the earlier levels. On the spectrum of background character to fully fleshed out NPC, sages lean toward the former, along with shopkeepers and city guards. Using a sage would be a pretty streamlined process—you pay them some money and they have a percentile chance of answering your question. High level PCs can hire out sages just like any other kind of specialist to have on staff in their stronghold.
Races
There is one race: the human ra- For the purposes of this kind of campaign there are humans and then everything else. If there are elves and dwarves and halflings they’d be so minor they aren’t relevant to the campaign setting (so you won’t be hanging out in the elf kingdom or helping the dwarves in their war effort against the goblins). Humanoids like orcs and gnolls are soulless monsters in the same category as chimeras and vampires and other things that want you dead.
There are 10 races. Humans might be the one the campaign is centered around, but demihumans, monstrous humanoids, and a handful of other sapient creatures have a significant presence in the campaign setting. Some are playable, definitely more than one, but probably not all. Within each population is probably a decent amount of variation—there’s more than one type of elf, dwarf, and so on. Each race has at least vaguely defined customs and characteristics that distinguish them mechanically as well as narratively. For instance, if orcs of different tribes encounter each other they may need to save or immediately turn hostile. There may be another, separate intelligent species in a specific adventure location or two, but the point is if you have the four basic races and lizardmen, bird people, and hobgoblins, then the players aren’t going to be regularly running into bugbears, kobolds, and gnomes on their adventures.
There are 1000000 races. Everything and the kitchen sink. There’s probably a nice meaty d20 list of races to roll on for character creation and implied even more in the game world. One session the players might be fighting the axolotl-men, the next they might be trying to impress the king of the coatimundi-men, the next they’re stealing treasure from the red-lipped-batfish-men. Here, races are treated less as distinct species and more as distinct people-groups. There’s almost certainly going to be that ren-faire quality some settings have where when you go to the city you’re greeted by a minotaur guard as a family of myconids walk by.
Magic items.
There is (around) one magic item (per player). In this kind of game finding a magic item is a huge, campaign-defining moment. Any magic item that shows up would be an incredible differentiator for the party and also potentially the mcguffin around which an entire adventure is centered.
There are 10 magic items. Maybe in this circumstance there are 10 of a certain major kind (10 swords, 10 pieces of enchanted jewelry) that have similar provenance and make up the main focus as far as magical treasure is concerned, with other magic items being largely auxiliary. Each item would have one or several open-ended qualities that make them broadly useful while also having some definite drawbacks to limit their utility. Perhaps the drawbacks of one can be mitigated by another, creating a sense of momentum as the players acquire them. The ten magic items could make up the premise of the campaign—"gather each segment of the rod of seven parts"—or they could just be more incidental marks of distinction—"be wary, for the warlord you oppose is said to wield one of the 12 legendary demon blades." The ten magic items don’t also have to have the same origin or be the same kind of object, but they ought to be at least distinguishable as in the same class as one another. Patrick Stuart’s proposed World of 100 Wonders is an example of this kind of setup.
There are 1000000 magic items. Most are minor, with specific and limited functions that make them handy to have around but not totally gamebreaking. As the PCs explore and find more items it would be like they’re filling out their utility belts, getting more tools to handle incrementally greater challenges and to facilitate new approaches. A lot of these items would probably be consumable like potions or can only be used a set number of times like wands. I’ve never played Numenera but I think it does something like this with cyphers.
Dungeons
There is one dungeon. The mega one. This is a classic-style dungeon big enough to accommodate an entire campaign. This is where the DM crams every one of their dungeony ideas. There are levels, sublevels, secret levels, and enough interconnectivity between them to make the dungeon less a thing to get to the end of and more an open environment to explore and manipulate.
There are 10 dungeons. This is like Legend of Zelda, where each dungeon has some motifs that show up in the puzzles and traps and monsters. Despite the preponderance of dungeons in D&D games I feel this is a rather underutilized concept: a set number of dungeons from the outset, each distinctly themed, where in one you’d find an item or a clue that would help you circumvent an obstacle in another. This kind of game might also represent an inversion of the BX game play progression that starts into players in the dungeon until they get strong enough to explore the wilderness—here players may begin the game with wilderness exploration, with the goal of making it to a dungeon, and then progress as far as they can until they get bored or hit roadblock, and then explore the overworld again until they find another dungeon.
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Further elaboration
- Truth be told, in most circumstances I can think of 10 is probably too many of a thing to accommodate in one campaign. Five (+ or - 2 of course) is a much more workable number. But I went with 10 to keep it a consistent powers of 10 thing.
- If it’s not already clear, the number does not always need to refer to the literal number of people or things—giving knights a 1 could mean there is 1 knight in your campaign or 1 knightly order. 10 could also refer to a knightly order of 10 knights—the difference is that a “1” knightly order would have a strong theme that carries over to every member, but one knight might not be that different than the other. On the other hand in a “10” knightly order each knight is their own character with their own traits and personalities. There might be overlap between the knights to reflect the theme of the knightly order, but each member would reflect the theme in their own way (so if it was an order of space knights, one might have a laser sword and a suit of robot armor, one might be like an astrologer-mystic, one might be a void guy who wears black and doesn’t speak, and so on).
- I use the term “campaign setting” here a lot, which I mean to refer to the specific locale that the campaign occupies—it could be the entire planet, or it could just be a specific region. If all or most of your campaign takes place within the confines of a 12x12 hex map, that’s the campaign setting regardless of what exists elsewhere in that fantasy world. A thing that you assign a 1 to for your campaign could be much more common elsewhere in the game world, but for the sake of your campaign specifically there is only one.
What this solves
Every now and then when I’m coming up with stuff for the campaign I struggle to establish how much weight a concept ought to have. Usually I sort of get attached to one approach but then don’t want to close the possibility of a different approach and then I end up with a noncommittal in between that lacks any kind of satisfaction, so I scrap it all and start over.
The 1, 10, or 1000000 rule is a nice little creative constraint to bounce off of. It provides a concrete metric of prevalence so there's no more having to sort through competing visions for an ambiguous desired outcome, that being the sort of attention I want something to have in the campaign.
If I, say, want a lot of different kinds of mercenaries in my game but I’m also mostly just excited about one specific idea I have for a mercenary band, I would have once had that mercenary band be the most fully fleshed out and only vaguely gesture at the existence of other mercenary armies through random encounters and rumors the players may not even pay attention to. The 1, 10, or 1000000 rule resolves this by dictating that mercenary bands should either be ubiquitous enough that any distinction is no more than window dressing, there should be a defined amount of different mercenary bands in the area, or there should just be the one band that about every mercenary in the campaign belongs to. Each is a valid course, and more importantly they do away with the ambiguity that exists between my concept for the mercenary band and how mercenaries actually show up in the campaign.
Ultimately, the rule is for clarity and decisiveness. Using it lets each choice feel intentional.
It might go without saying but this rule isn't applicable to every circumstance. Sometimes it's fine to have a group of things somewhere in the middle of 1 and 10 or 10 and 1000000. Traps in a dungeon, for instance—the should be prevalent but not everywhere, they don't need to be put into a categorizable, and there shouldn't just be one trap or kind of trap unless your dungeons really small.
So like most rules of thumb, it's best to use when you get stuck or want to try a new approach.
