Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[Dannyalcatraz]

The main shift to make Expedition D&D (my term) work, imo, is to change the party size. If you have 4-6 heroes then dying of disease or starvation is not fun. It is too brittle: if it happens you lose based on something that is essentially tangential to the main game (dungeon crawling etc.) That means tracking supplies is not fun, nor gameable, because there are no real stakes.

I think you need to embrace having a larger party--say 10-50 people. A few of these are hero characters, some are retainers, some are porters. Overland you have big combats including the retainers. When you get to the dungeon you switch to playing just the heroes. If the heroes die you have retainers you can promote so players get to keep playing.

I was thinking along these lines. My (partial) solution was to use a RPG with mechanically simpler PC design. For example, if I wanted to run this kind of campaign in a traditional fantasy realm, I’d probably default to using The Fantasy Trip/In the Labyrinth, with players controlling 3-5 PCs simultaneously.

Not only does this flesh out the various roles (keeping them in players’ hands), but facilitates the “promotion” or addition of other characters if needed.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think it will help to have many expedition goals beyond treasure.

I can think of:

Finding treasure
Finding mundane or arcane resources
Finding new lands to settle/leading settlers to same
Finding new trade routes
Hunting rare or exotic critters
Scouting for the military

 

[Tonguez]

I read quite a bit about Admundsen and race to South Pole. It's fascinating and interesting to read. But it would be pretty boring to play out. Make mistakes in planing stage, and you have downward spiral of despair and very little agency to improve your condition. Specially if weather conditions are rolled at random. Few lousy rolls could cost you valuable resources which proves fatal in the long run.

Yeah, but the South Pole is particularly extreme. At least mountains still give options for shelter - a flat sheet of windblasted ice gives you nothing

 

[jdrakeh]

My own game, Sword Omen, had/has* a heavy emphasis on adventurers as desperate/foolhardy explorers financed by wealthy patrons and supplied with various hirelings (cooks, guides, porters, etc). There are also pretty extensive rules for wilderness travel and survival, including such things as getting lost, starvation, etc.

*I sold the rights to the game in question and, to my knowledge, the new publisher hasn't re-released it yet. There are some self-published, signed and numbered, copies of it floating around (but, IIRC, that edition was limited to something like 10 copies).

 

[The Firebird]

I can think of:

Finding treasure
Finding mundane or arcane resources
Finding new lands to settle/leading settlers to same
Finding new trade routes
Hunting rare or exotic critters
Scouting for the military

Nice list, which has some I hadn't thought of. My work in progress below. I conceived of it as some kind of 2d4 or 2d5 table but the numbers are off so I'm rethinking that.

1 - Find a person
1: Eliminate (Apocalypse Now)
2: To ask for help (The Force Awakens)
3: To bring them home (Livingstone, Saving Private Ryan)

2 - Map a region
1: Newly acquired land (Lewis and Clark)
2: Find a way through (The Northwest Passage)
3: To understand weather patterns (Nile)

3 - Find a location
1: Acquire resources (Congo)
2: Acquire an artifact (Indiana Jones)
3: Learn secrets (The Lost City of Z)
4: To reach a destination (Everest, the Poles)

4 - Transport persons/goods
1: Military attack (Lawrence's march to Aqaba)
2: To break a siege
3: To relieve disease/famine
4: To escape (Beyond the Black River (?))
5: To return home (The Odyssey)

 

[GrimCo]

Which is why planning your route and supplies is so important, to make up for the stuff you can plan for, like blizzards and ice devils.

Sure, and planing is 90% of job. But it's rather boring as game play loop. Once you start your journey, you might as well play Oregon Trail. You make skill roll, dm makes roll on weather/mishap table. Time passes, you check supplies, rinse, repeat.

Yeah, but the South Pole is particularly extreme. At least mountains still give options for shelter - a flat sheet of windblasted ice gives you nothing

Agree, it's extreme. Just first thing that popped in my mind when thinking about exploration. Mountains can also be miserable once you go above snow line (3000+ meters), it's mostly barren wasteland of snow, ice (glaciers), rocks and thinning atmosphere, But sure, caves can be found (and glacier caves have their own dangers). It's similar to Pole, just with added layer of altitude sickness due to lack of oxygen. Spent some times in Swiss/Italian alps in my 20s, even tried once climbing Mattehorn ( never did due to injury on the climb, but Mont Blanc and Mattehorn are still on bucketlist), but high altitude mountains aren't joke.

 

[Reynard]

Sure, and planing is 90% of job. But it's rather boring as game play loop. Once you start your journey, you might as well play Oregon Trail. You make skill roll, dm makes roll on weather/mishap table. Time passes, you check supplies, rinse, repeat.

This is the whole point. Stories of survival against insurmountable odds are inherently dramatic. Except in TTRPGs, it seems.

 

[Celebrim]

Sure, and planing is 90% of job. But it's rather boring as game play loop. Once you start your journey, you might as well play Oregon Trail. You make skill roll, dm makes roll on weather/mishap table. Time passes, you check supplies, rinse, repeat.

"Oregon Trail" definitely needs to be only part of the gameplay loop. Oregon trail makes things interesting by having river crossings, resupply opportunities, and other fixed events along the way. When doing long overland travel I like to break it up with fixed encounters ("lairs") as well as random encounters, weather, and mishaps. It's also important to give changing color to give a sense of space and motion and two or three sentences to give the players a sense of where they are. Terrain can be at least as fantastic as any real-world terrain. I try to imagine the players crossing the scenic equivalent multiple national parks, splitting up descriptions across multiple events - establishing shots, random encounters, lairs, etc. Each with two or three sentences and most with some encounter opportunity or signpost.

I still don't have exposure damage rules I'm fully satisfied with. Long term exposure to cold and heat should be draining or debilitating, but you both want to minimize rolls and also be able to deal with things like the difference between 4 hours of exposure and 12 hours of exposure and 24 hours of exposure (in arctic or volcanic caves, for example). Tables in my experience work best but its really hard to come up with something that scales damage to the level of the character without being unrealistically lethal to low level characters or a trivial time waster to high level characters. Realistically damage ought to scale per HD but then this gets to be extremely complex in a hurry. I used rules of a mid to high level party traversing a steaming jungle where PCs typically lost 10-20 hit points from heat exhaustion over the course of the day (but could recover them by taking a short rest out of the heat), but it always bothered me that the rules weren't truly applicable to 1st level characters or say a rodent.

 

[LordBP]

These are some interesting books to read if you want to find out how bad things can go in the mountains.

https://www.amazon.com/Accidents-North-American-Climbing-2025/dp/B0DYSDQBR4

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure, and planing is 90% of job. But it's rather boring as game play loop. Once you start your journey, you might as well play Oregon Trail. You make skill roll, dm makes roll on weather/mishap table. Time passes, you check supplies, rinse, repeat.

I loved Oregon Trail, so comparing RPG play to it doesn't dissuade me. And boring is of course relative. Lots of folks enjoy a planning session in live play, and once you're on the expedition it's just a matter of using exploration rules that work for you. I'm fond of those in Level Up, The One Ring, and the Without Number games myself.

What you're really saying as far as I can tell is that you find that sort of play boring. That's fine, but it's not something you can claim objectively.