Jaquaysing Stat Blocks
Jennell Jacquays was an artist and game designer for Dungeons and Dragons. One of the biggest contributions, aside from her iconic art, was being turned into a Game Designer verb. Her dungeon designs almost always had a non-linear approach in mind. The biggest example would be making sure that a dungeon has at least two, but preferably more, entrances. I do like to joke that Dungeons and Dragons can be boiled down to “In the room there’s an Orc with pie, you want the pie” and she championed more than one way to get into the room. She added a lot of verticality with her dungeon designs, allowing for a dungeon to be solved in any order that the party wishes instead of the ‘correct’ order. Designing your dungeon with non-linearaity became a word, “Jaquaysing” your dungeon.
Beware of Becoming a Keyword
Jennell Jacquays Art
Instead of having a castle with the only access point being the gate which funnels players into the same path, she’d come up with alternatives. Yes, castles are meant to be impregnable but daring rogues have been shown time and again to be able to get into the castle to rescue the princess. With Dungeons and Dragons, players are given the opportunity to feel and be heroes. Jaquays would add an underground sewer system, a hole in the wall hidden by bushes or perhaps an ally that could fly the players over the wall. During a dungeon dive, the players have so much agency yet that seems to be stripped away when it comes to entrances.
By designing these other entrances, you’ve tacitly given your players permission to do what they want. If the players see themselves as Dudley Do-Rights, they might march to the entrance. If your players want to play as dastardly knaves, perhaps they know of a way of circumventing security with a trip through the sewers. During scouting, the observant see servants outside of the castle after curfew and they can fulfill the fantasy of being of being a genius detective by discovering the hidden entrance. Or if you got a bunch of theatre kids for players, maybe they’ll convince Gandalf to toss ‘em keys to the Eagles.
Which sounds more appropriate for a Sandbox game? One option or many?
Passed That Pop Quiz with Flying Colours
How does one “Jacquays” a stat block? Luckily, despite the trend of paring down stat blocks, there isn’t too much overhead. The first step is to make sure you have a common language between the players and NPCs. I know I previously championed the removal of Common but that’s because it is bland. As a cooperative storytelling game, players need to learn to share the spotlight and sometimes a particular player is pushed forward because they’re the only one who speaks the esoteric language. Another interesting alternative if you don’t mind party drama is having a player intentionally mistranslate, which will surely up the ante on shenanigans.
The next simple solution is to give stat blocks some Intelligence skills; such as, History, Nature or Arcana. If the party interrogates a captured Orc, perhaps to find more pie, you can see within the stat block the chance of them knowing something. Just because the Orc has the History Skill doesn’t mean that they’re a trained historian, it is to give you an appropriate Skill for a Check. The reason we write stat blocks is so that we don’t need to remember. If the Orc is cooperating but keeps failing History Checks, this is suddenly an interesting possibility. Why was the Orc on an info diet? Perhaps the Orc only recently joined and hadn’t gotten to the inner circle; with bribes, threats or the threat of friendship, your players might have acquired an inside man. What was a Random Encounter has grown legs to let your players play in the Sandbox.
Now you’re ready to use the Orc for more than fighting when it comes to guarding pie. Or in a real example, I found myself with players wanting to hire what I thought was an obvious bad guy, as I was surprised to discover, when I ran the Unholy Hall of the Huntsman King One Page Dungeon.
