2022-07-15 The Joy of Exploration

The heat wave makes me unwilling to go outside while the nuclear death star hangs in the sky. I’ve been writing Common Lisp code all day.

I recently read @frotz’s blog post about his dissatisfaction with exploration.

@frotz

I wanted to run a fun, *interesting* exploration game that also rewarded players who wanted to send their characters out into the wilderness rather than into one of the two big dungeons that are close by. I don’t feel like I am really doing as well as I could - since XP in the rules system we’re using Halberds and Helmets is based on the amount of gold spent in the game and there aren’t piles of gold just lying around regular characters in my game lag behind those who spend time in Stonehell or Barrowmaze. – 2022-07-11 Dissatisfied

2022-07-11 Dissatisfied

(I run the Stonehell game.)

I think it’s easy to think that exploration works as game because when we go out to explore the world, it’s exciting. There’s fresh air on our skin, wind in our hair, strange people (or no people), a different landscape, mountains, lakes, rivers, deserts, we move away from home and chances are high it’s exciting. Even the most mundane things are exciting because the setting is new.

I don’t think this translates well to a role-playing game, however, and no amount of experience points for miles travelled or hexes visited is going to change that. What’s the point of wilderness travel, that is the question. I think it all comes down to excitement, to adventure, and that has a lot to do with danger, and decision making. Most importantly, it has very little to do with listening to the referee talk. Unfortunately, I like to hear myself talk. At the same time, hearing me talk makes me nervous: are people getting bored? Am I not getting to the point? Is the attention drifting? There’s anxiety in there somewhere, and that’s not something I want to recommend. But I do want to recommend thinking about the number of occasions where the player characters are in danger, or have decisions to make.

I just read a blog post by W. F. Smith on the Prismatic Wasteland blog:

The worst encounters play out like vignettes where the referee reads aloud a little scene, and the players say “uh, okay” or “huh, weird” and just press on, ignoring the encounter completely. If you’re able to answer “yes” to at least a few questions below, your encounter is more likely to be something that either cannot be ignored or (even better) something the players would never dream of ignoring. – Encounter Checklist

Encounter Checklist

W. F. Smith’s list:

• Is the encounter something that happens to the player-characters?
• Can the player-characters “play” with the encounter?
• Are there multiple possible solutions or no solution at all?
• Do the player-characters want something from the encounter?
• Does the encounter have a motive?
• Does the encounter have a means to accomplish its motive?
• Is there a consequence to ignoring the encounter?

The blog post itself refers to Arnold K’s post from 2016 on the Goblin Punch blog:

How to Use This Checklist: Read it once before you write you dungeon. Then read it again when you’re done, to make sure you got everything. – Dungeon Checklist

Dungeon Checklist

Arnold K. lists:

• Something to Steal
• Something to be Killed
• Something to Kill You
• Different Paths
• Someone to Talk To
• Something to Experiment With
• Something the Players Probably Won’t Find

In 2010 I had a similar list for dungeons:

What do I personally like about small dungeons? The kind that keep us busy for a session or two? – 2010-02-05 Quality Dungeons

2010-02-05 Quality Dungeons

I think these lists illustrate what qualifies as interesting in the eyes of players. It’s about a certain amount of meaningful interaction within the context of a game. Players taking a long time to investigate what they found and then going “uh, okay” or “huh, weird” is not much better than players skipping the investigation altogether, because for me as a player the act of investigation is not “immersion”. I know there are other play styles. *Das Schwarze Auge* is notorious in certain circles for the immersive “non-game”, the so-called “Stimmungsspiel” (mood game) where player characters sit in a corner of the local tavern and talk with the locals in-character, enjoying the “mood” of the setting, to feel like they’re living in that other world without actually doing anything over on the other side. In a way, this is a possible answer to the fact that the rules aren’t providing for a good game. One could change the rules or one could change the goal. The mood game works without the rules. But … is it still a game I want to play? Not I.

So, my contention is: for the game to be enjoyable, immersion is not enough. I want to do and decide interesting things in the setting. Let’s go through some of the things that worked for me in the past when I was running wilderness exploration games.

The most important element is that there need to be destinations and concrete motivations to visit them. “Everything to the west is unknown territory” is not good enough. “To the west there be ogres” is still not good enough. “In the Ogre Mountains to the west stands an elf tower” is getting there. “In the Ogre Mountains to the west stands an abandoned elf tower with some griffons” is good to go. “In the Ogre Mountains to the west stands an abandoned elf tower with some griffons and the Alder King is offering you 5000 gold to go and get a live pup” is concrete: there are warnings about two or three potential enemies, there’s a clear reward, a mission. I need to add enough details until “uh, okay” or “huh, weird” is an unlikely response.

Another important element of my overland travel procedures are random encounters. In my game, there’s a one in six chance of a random encounter every day and every night unless you spend it behind walls.

When the players enter a new region, prepare a new random encounter table with eight to ten entries. … Players tell me where they want to go. Roll 1d6 for a daylight encounter and 1d6 for a nighttime encounter for every hex travelled. Combine encounters if that spices things up. – 2012-06-20 Hexcrawl Procedure

2012-06-20 Hexcrawl Procedure

So the first question is whether there are safe places on the way to the destination. In my example, there are not.

Here’s an excerpt of the map. The players are starting out in the Grove of the Alder King.

Dark River Dangerous Jungle QuietCorner Pass West Delan Grove ofthe Alder King Forest BightFortress DruidCovenant Coven of theShadowElves Boghra-Little Golden EyeKobolds Black RiverLizards Flying Monkeys StoneheartDungeon Frog Temple Lammasu Source of Evil Ogre Tribe ElephantHills Swamp Hag Red HeartFortress TerellionGriffon Guard Perkozhod Kuo-ToaVillage StandingStones Heart ofthe Forest Dark TalonLizards Grizzicckk GreenKobolds Charging River Necoare'sBone Fortress Zombie City

So now I know that the area has kuo-toa (and the party has to travel through their hex!), undead, ogres, flying monkeys, elephant men, and evil faery creatures. I’ll create a random encounter table for those creatures and all of them will have some sort of plan, something to discover about them. Not all of it will be super important setting stuff, but given that the players know nothing, simply adding more destinations to the map is important. This is how their map grows, how their options expand.

• Kuo-toa are slavers, worship a water god, their priests throw lightning, they are evil, they live here and their king has hidden away a great treasure, apparently. If you claim to worship the same water god, perhaps you could visit as pilgrims, however.
• Undead are a sign of a necromancer nearby. The Alder King can tell them that this is Necoare’s doing and that he really needs to be taken out. He’ll pay up to 1000gp if the party travels to his stronghold and reports on his activities. Further research shows that Necoarre used to be a friend of the Alder King and some of his old friends are still alive, like Lerizwan the shadow elf and Brónach the dread dwarf. Perhaps the dwarves of Red Heart Forest know where Brónach can be found?
• Ogres live in the mountains. Before you encounter them, you hear their bellowing in the upper valleys. When encountered, they’ll threating players with visitations from the mountain witch, an ogre mage or flying swordmaster or something like that. That could be a valuable teacher, but the ogres are plundering the land.
• Elephant men have recently surfaced and they say they had lived underground for a thousand years and that their master would love to hear news from the outside world. Please come visit, you’ll be rewarded! Who knows how honest he is, though…
• Evil faery creatures are rogue assassin goblins, all of them friends of the Alder King but also evil and mean, so what will the players do as they see them torching a fortified farmhouse? If they intervene, how will the Alder King react? How will the other goblins react? If they don’t intervene, will they at least help the fleeing people across the river? If so, how will they explain their part in the attack? If not, will some escapee report on their participation?

Thus, every random encounter leads to more information about local inhabitants and all of them can act as a “front” in the Dungeon World sense: for every such faction I can write down two or three escalations of the players do not want to get involved, or if they cannot. Whenever there is a lull, whenever the players ask for news and rumours, I can “advance the clock” for one of the “fronts” – i.e. report an escalation of the situation, maybe reactions of the Alder King or other factions, and so on.

And yes, of course traditional elements of exploration can be involved. Elven runes in Terellion might tell people where the elves went, and so the exploration leads to more places on the map. If the players care about finding more elves, they can. The water temple network of the kuo-toa is probably fascinating, and their water management system intricate, and their water property system unfair, they slave holding is politically unstable, their theocracy abhorrent ­ in other words, it’s an unstable situation and players can learn about it, and then they can do something about it.

In a way, what we consider to be history, archaeology, ethnology, botany, zoology, all of that is not enough to make an adventure. The reason we watch Indiana Jones is not because we want to know more about the archaeology papers he’s been writing, the controversies of academic life, or the culture of the ancient civilisations he’s been vandalising, the coloniser mindset that drives him, or any of that. The adventure is about cults, traps, fights, daring escapes, and so on. At least that’s where I’m coming from. That’s why I think it’s an entertaining adventure movie (and an extremely bad archaeology movie! 😆). And that’s why I’m all in favour of adding cults, traps, fights, and daring escapes to my adventure game.

To summarize my style:

• Start with known interesting locations on the map. Each has known dangers and rewards for going there.
• Have other interesting locations on the map, usually small dungeons, lairs, or settlements.
• Have random encounter tables based on the local inhabitants.
• Each encounter is also an opportunity to add more interesting locations on the map, or learn more about dangers and rewards regarding the various locations.
• Focus on the adventure, not on the immersion: cults, traps, fights, and daring escapes trump ethnography, history, riddles, and landscapes.

Maybe I should add something like this blog post to my Halberds and Helmets Ref Guide…

​#RPG ​#Halberds and Helmets

Comments

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Now @frotz is making wonder about alternatives to the above. What are our options if we don’t want an adventure game?

@frotz

There’s The Daughters of Verona on my shelf, for example. It’d definitely be a different kind of game.

The Daughters of Verona is a genuinely funny card driven story game where the players play actors forced to improvise a play. No previous experience of Shakespeare is necessary, the game gently guides you into the tropes of the genre. – The Daughters of Verona on DriveThru RPG

The Daughters of Verona on DriveThru RPG

Another consideration would be reconsidering the “reward” aspect. We could delve in dungeons for monsters and loot, we could spend time in the starting village to build our community, settling non-player characters, spending gold to build stuff, a bit like playing The Sims, Civilization, or Sim City…, and we could explore the wilderness on the lookout for new sources of spells, non-player characters to befriend, and to find new dungeons (different monsters and more gold) and settlements (a different Sim Settlement game). It’d be a bit like finding the Downloadable Content or the Expansion Set for our game.

And then of course there’s always the option to have wilderness exploration be the setup for mass combat. Bring out Chainmail and all the others! 😁

– Alex 2022-07-18 17:07 UTC

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Structuring Encounter Tables, Amended & Restated by Nick LS Whelan remains a great idea. Roll 2d6 for random encounters. 2 is always a dragon, 12 is always a wizard. But that’s not all. The blog post really is great. Wrinkle 1 is: what are they doing? A list of 30 entries: roll 1d12 if the monster is not intelligent, roll 1d30 if the monster is intelligent. Wrinkle 2: something that demands the party’s attention:

Structuring Encounter Tables, Amended & Restated

At this point an encounter often doesn’t need further tweaking. However, I’ve noticed a bad tendency in myself towards encounters that don’t demand the party’s attention. I construct something that I’d be interested in engaging with for its own sake, but when I describe it to my players they just say “Alright, we keep going.” And that’s…fine. Ignoring an encounter ought to be possible sometimes, but it shouldn’t be quite so simple. Encounters ought to intrude on the players attentions more than that. Ignoring them is possible, but doing so ought to be an interesting choice with interesting consequences.

Yeah!

– Alex 2022-07-23 11:48 UTC