Blackjack Excavation

I'm running a small sandbox game and the map has several old battlefields as points of interest. I wanted discovering a battlefield to be an opportunity to explore and find interesting and valuable things, but it wasn't really a dungeon and I didn't want to leave it to a series of random die rolls. I wanted it to be interactive and quick and standardizable so I used blackjack as the resolution mechanic. 

The Process

• Cards are dealt face up by the DM to all players involved, the DM only deals themself one card initially. 

• The DM goes around resolving players hands one at a time before dealing themself their second card and resolving their own hand

• The DM plays to 17

• The results of the excavation depend on the results of the hand and the hands value

• The players can excavate their own site or team up to excavate sites together, allowing each group to use their best hand when determining the results of the dig

• Each dig requires 4 people and takes 2 watches (8 hours), if excavating with fewer than 4 people add a watch for each person missing

• If the dealer draws a 10, a face card, or an Ace as their first card, the group can back off, losing half the time that the dig would have taken

• The groups can decide to dig quickly, halving the time required to excavate but doing so risks breaking fragile objects (more on those later) and doubles the chance of surprise. Digging quickly also means the group cannot back out if the dealer draws a 10 or Ace, and should always make bad results more dire and demanding of attention.

The game gives the DM six possible outcomes (win, lose, bust, push, player blackjack, and dealer blackjack) to use as modifiers for the consequences of the dig, using rules that the players probably already know and which are easy to teach. Many of the results are gradients of other results, allowing for granularity when deciding which results to include unique outcomes for (i.e. lose, bust, push, and dealer blackjack can all be collapsed into just lose) and all can be modified by the total of the hand. Deciding which outcomes to use can also help to differentiate different dig sites, making some easier or harder to excavate.

The Risks

Besides the basic risks involved with being out in the wilderness for extended periods of time, there is also potential for the dig to go bad. Whether that be simply wasting time, unearthing dangerous objects of a bygone age, or unleashing some buried horror, digging deeply, and greedily will always be risky. Below are the possible lose conditions and some potential consequences.

Lose:

Losing a hand will still reap some kind of reward, but at significantly diminished returns.  Losing also guarantees an unearthed object will be fragile (detailed below). 

Push: 

A dealer push requires some resource to tip the players hand over the edge, this could be time, physical harm, or resources. Failure to pay the cost means treating a push as a loss.

Bust:

A player bust means unearthing some hazard that will need to be dealt with before excavations can continue. These should be environmental hazards like rotting miasma or an ancient Ghost Bomb 

DM Blackjack:  

Site specific encounters. Something thematic and dangerous, which now haunts the site and may be encountered as a wandering monster if not dealt with. 

The Rewards

The above table shows the basic form of the rewards table that I used for the excavations. In practice, each of the cells of the tables would be unique, mundane objects related to the site being excavated. The Blackjack table would have magic items or magic adjacent items and a potential curse or drawback on the object if the dealer pushes.

XD6: where X is the number rolled on the D6 table (i.e. rolling a 6 on the 20 win table would get a Fragile 3 object worth 6d6*10gp) 

Fragile X: Xin6 chance of object being broken or in extremely bad shape when excavated, Fragile tags only apply when a group decides to dig quickly. Failing a fragile role means the value of the object is halved.

A Maximalist Approach 

The example above is probably too much for a single site, but could be used as a master table for all dig sites. 

When Does It End?

Total Finds

Keep a running tally of the number of items found at a dig site and roll 1d20 at the start of each dig, if the result is less than or equal to the number of items discovered the dig site is tapped. 

Usage Die

Roll a die after each dig, the dig site is tapped if the dice rolls a 1 or 2. The size of the die is determined by the size of the dig site, D20 for the largest down to a D4 for small or if the site is particularly well known and has been picked over by many people.

Exhaust Table

The dig site lasts as long as there are entries on the table, rolling the same entry multiple times could yield the next highest result and takes an extra watch.  

Conclusion

I think blackjack as a resolution mechanic is interesting, and comes with some unique opportunities for granularity but there are some drawbacks that I think should be addressed. The first is the fact that it requires playing a completely different game inside of your D&D game, which some players may not be into. 

Blackjack as a resolution mechanic is also entirely player dependent, which may be unsatisfying for some, and may make the resolution mechanic feel completely separate from what is happening in the game. This also makes excavation more of a mini game or side activity than an actual adventure. I think some of this can be mitigated if it is incorporated into a larger system for wilderness exploration, which would provide context for player decisions based on time and encounter risk, and turns it into another option when hex crawling.

  

In my experience with the system, my players were initially really interested in seeing what they found at the dig sites, and did not seem bothered by the use of blackjack, though it is worth noting that they decided to go do other things after an encounter with a buried basilisk (in the form of an Iron Demon Statue) and never haven't gone back since. So if you'd like to try this out, it's probably a good idea to start small and build up from there when you get a sense of how your players feel about the system, because there is certainly a risk of doing too much work for very little pay off.