D&D 5E Expedition based adventuring

[feartheminotaur]

It might be good to RP the group leaving with the laborers and all of them saying goodbye to spouses, children, etc. Maybe even have a little kid ask the adventurers to promise to keep their parent safe.

And to make sure they realize what kind of danger the laborers are in...

"Mister please make sure daddy comes home - he's only one expedition away from retiring"

"Please keep my baby boy safe. Take him with you everywhere. I've given him his favorite bright red shirt for the trip..."

 

[Saeviomagy]

My basic solution would be to change long rest to 1 week and short rest to an 8 hour rest. This means that in order to get a long rest the party would need waste a ton of time and resources that they may not have to waste especially when accounting for the workers needs.

That pretty much wrecks the balance of the game. Requiring someone to spend a whole week doing absolutely nothing to get back class abilities effectively eliminates them as a playable class in all but the most sedate campaigns.

 

[Zaruthustran]

I tell you the truth: the campaign you describe in the OP is my Dream Campaign.

I grew up in the 80s. My first D&D adventures were Keep On the Borderlands and In Search of the Unknown. Basic and Expert D&D had tables full of hirelings, and the game presumed that you had henchmen. Growing up, we regularly set out on adventures with over a dozen NPC hirelings, and straggled back to town with 2-3 survivors. Very rich survivors, since they each got a quarter share of treasure.

That's D&D, to me. Exploration and adventure. More like the Age of Discovery, with key individuals leading a long trail of porters into some godforsaken place. Rather than some costume drama where so-and-so is "the chosen one", and this guy's a reluctant hero, and that dude's dad is a major NPC, and blah blah blah.

No. The only motivation I want or need is "there's a big blank spot on this map. We don't know what's there. Go find out."

Which is why I almost misted up reading your post. Creating a budget, laying in supplies, estimating consumption (and adjusting for expected attrition), hiring and equipping henchmen, setting watch schedules and patrol patterns, formulating standard operating procedures for anticipated obstacles and crises?

Oh yeah. That's my jam. I'd play in your game in a heartbeat.

One suggestion: kill the player characters. I mean, don't be unfair. Don't be cruel. But let the dice fall where they may, even if it results in a TPK. When (not if) a PC dies, promote one of the hirelings. The new character will already be familiar to everyone at the table, and have a reason for being there.

I even encourage you to go a step further, and to consider the expedition the player, rather than the individual PCs. It's the success of the mission that matters. Level up the adventuring company. That way, when the survivors make it back, some can retire, some can go off and start rival companies, some can stay on--but the group, as a whole, has continuity. You can then have fun advancing the timeline 1, 10, 200 years into the future. That long-lost faraway ruin is now a settled trade hub. The forbidden temple where Jorich was killed by the Lich is now the Duke's palace (and the Company knows the location of the secret entrance to the high priest's tomb, now used as a treasury). And so on. Minimize attachment to individual characters, and maximize attachment to the setting and the world.

 

[Unwise]

No.

I for one appreciate the brevity. A lot of people write a lot of words to express no particular thought or opinion. This post included.

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As for expedition based adventuring, I found it handy to run it as episodic. Have you seen Clone Wars? Those episodes always start in the thick of the action, possibly miles away from where the last adventure was, with a completely different plot. I found that a very handy model for an expedition adventure, it skipped over much of the random and survival aspects. The model I used was the old TV show "Monkey" based on the book "Journey to the West".

As far as the actual outdoors stuff goes, I started each episode with a series of survival roles to see what state the PCs start the adventure in. Roll badly enough and the PCs start the adventure with levels of exhaustion and no hit dice. Roll well enough and they picked up some rare pelts or herbs on the way. It got to the stage where the PCs only wanted to travel in the forest hexes, as that was the Ranger's favoured terrain and he got huge advantages there.

 

[Zaruthustran]

Speaking of Hexcrawls: anyone know of any good Hexcrawl video games?

Back in the day we had Seven Cities of Gold, and--though there's no true exploration element--Sid Meier's PIRATES!. But I haven't seen such a game in a long, long time.

 

[FrogReaver]

That pretty much wrecks the balance of the game. Requiring someone to spend a whole week doing absolutely nothing to get back class abilities effectively eliminates them as a playable class in all but the most sedate campaigns.

Your right my numbers are off it should be 2 short rests per long rest. Short rest = 8 hours. Long rest = 2 or 3 days of rest and downtime.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Your right my numbers are off it should be 2 short rests per long rest. Short rest = 8 hours. Long rest = 2 or 3 days of rest and downtime.

That means that your typical adventuring cycle is 2 days of adventure, 2 days of staying in bed. Which is weird.

I think if you loosen up the definition of a long rest to allow most mundane activities, then it might work. I think what might be better is simply saying that every 3rd short rest is a long rest, and short rests are no more than 1 per day. That gives you reduced resource recovery without having adventurers seem like they're invalids.

 

[FrogReaver]

Good ideas

That means that your typical adventuring cycle is 2 days of adventure, 2 days of staying in bed. Which is weird.

I think if you loosen up the definition of a long rest to allow most mundane activities, then it might work. I think what might be better is simply saying that every 3rd short rest is a long rest, and short rests are no more than 1 per day. That gives you reduced resource recovery without having adventurers seem like they're invalids.

 

[collin]

I started out running a campaign like this several years ago in D&D 3.5 and using the Eberron campaign setting. It worked very well in that setting because 1) Eberron has a high-adventure/pulp feeling, and 2) all of the various House guilds readily available in the Eberron world from which to tap into for resources, plot devices, etc. As someone previously mentioned, it had a kind of Keep on the Borderlands kind of vibe to it. We liked it at the time because I would create these mini-adventures that could be completed in 1 afternoon, and since the players were older and so spread apart geographically, it made it difficult for us to get together on regular basis. This way, the adventures were not necessarily tied to each other and did not require every player to be at every session or to remember details of what had happened in the previous adventure.

I say, go for it.

 

[Bawylie]

That's a nice framework. And good for drop-ins and one shots. I would not necessarily run a campaign around it without a lot of backend things.

BI is right in that a campaign based on going to work could ultimately fail to live up to Adventure. I'll add that over-reliance on that framework could feel repetitive.

That said, I am - right now - on my second draft of a setup like this, which I'm intentionally writing as a one-shot. (Working with is3rith and highscorekid). It'll go up on the DMsGuild, and if you guys like it, there'll likely be more of it. But it's still not the kind of thing I'd base an entire campaign on. Personally, I want variety and a lot of fantasy.