Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[GrimCo]

I was thinking more in terms of how to make fun game play experience in mid to long term campaign from something that can in lot of cases be pretty monotonous and uneventful. Ironically, for fun games, you want things to go sideways. That's where drama and conflict arises. Most interesting reads about expeditions are ones where everything went wrong and they still somehow managed it or fumbled catastrophically and died (but someone found journals and records).

Most times, planing and preparation part is most proactive and fun part from game play view, but how long can you stretch that part? Maybe 2-3 sessions tops ( i'm thinking about standard 3-4 hour sessions). Also, you need to make that planing and prep work detached from player skill/knowledge and base it on character skill and knowledge so Bob the accountant, who never set foot outside urban area, can participate and enjoy.

Couple of years ago, i watched yt video where one guy from my home country went by foot from capital to seaside. It's about 220km and it took him 5-6 days walking alone trough the country. Video is 23 minutes. Interesting to watch for beautiful scenery along the way, but nothing really happens, he walks, shares his thoughts and that's it. Converting something like that, which is both interesting experience to undertake and to watch, to something that's fun to play out at the table, is hard. And honestly, i don't know how to do it, except maybe trough pure shared narration.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There are a lot of good thoughts in this post. I am intrigued by the idea, if I may rephrase, that "RPGs cannot replicate experiences which are primarily about vertigo". (I like the term vertigo because it fits into Caillois' classification).

That seems right to me. There are games that combine vertigo with other aspects, like competition or strategy. Baseball or football, for example. There are ways to make baseball games. They either focus on the chance/strategy aspect (Strat O Matic) or try to give you the feeling of vertigo via a video game or something. I suppose the video games are more popular for football and the strategy more for baseball.

So, a successful game that models mountain climbing has to focus on the aspects other than vertigo...and there are not many. That argument seems right to me.

But, a successful expedition game has more to go on. There is strategy (do I press on through the storm or take shelter?), there is chance (will I discover a large waterfall here?) there can be competition (will we reach the goal before our opponents?). I think you have to emphasize those rather than experience of being a climber.


I both agree and disagree with this. I think you're right about hit points, that there are probably no fundamental improvements forthcoming there (that's what I meant earlier by saying dungeon crawling is 'solved'). But I think there is room for improvement elsewhere. The narrative movement in particular has made great advances with Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark. (Most of what I've seen since seems to be iterations on those ideas--is that right or wrong?).

Advantage/disadvantage is also pretty recent. Although maybe that is less of a fundamental shift.

Hmm. I guess I think that there could be a solution to expedition play out there. But it will represent a more significant change to the mechanics than "this is an OSR game with procedures for hexcrawling and retainers".

I would welcome disagreement. My thoughts are only half baked on these questions.

Of course, if the narrative movement isn't of interest to you, RPGs become that much more "solved".

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

As for fresh water, I would boil/purify anything I drank as you do not want to catch a bug from even a clean looking source (had it happen before and you would not want to experience it even with magical healing ).

Water is sooooo touchy, so crucial.

I know from personal experience that even when traveling in big cities in first world nations, people can have intestinal issues from drinking the tap water. The local critters in the water systems aren’t the ones your body is used to. (Which is why I always opt for bottled water when traveling, including for brushing my teeth.)

Even with the cleanest of natural sources, you may have to deal with differences in local flora & fauna, mineral runoff (like gypsum) and similar issues which may vary over the course of miles of travel. What was potable water 5 miles ago might not be anymore.

Its safety and flavor can also vary over time. There’s a town near me I visit quite frequently, and they get most of their water from a local reservoir. It’s generally safe year round, but there’s a time of year when the reservoir “turns over”- no, I don’t know precisely what they mean by this- and the water tastes like dirt. When I’m dining there at that time, I trade my usual brewed iced tea for bottled diet soft drinks.

 

[SableWyvern]

Someone may have already mentioned this, but I find the Alexandrian's hexcrawl system to be amazing for actually creating a sense of exploration and navigating (literally and figuratively) the unknown. The use of landmarks as the primary navigation tools works brilliantly. Making tracks one of the common random encounters is another small touch that makes everything feel a lot more dynamic and immersive.

 

[The Firebird]

I disagree with Caillois fundamentally on certain points, but it's still worthwhile reading. Notably, I'd think if he'd realized the falsehood of "Games are not ruled and make-believe. Rather, they are ruled or make-believe." he would have been able to invent the modern RPG, but I think at the time he made his observation it was largely true that games fit into his either/or classification so I can see why he would have thought it.

Definitely, RPGs are a weak point of his system.

The above is a big part of my point. I don't particularly care for Callois distinctions, and I note that Richard Garfield's essay on chance (that I admire greatly) would contradict Callois' instincts here to say Chess has an element of chance in that in practice people play semi-randomly and so stumble into lines of play and in theory by doing so even an amateur might defeat a Grandmaster by pure luck.

Do you mean "Getting Lucky" from Game Developer, November 2006? I wasn't familiar with it. I've read that and your essay, but want to take another look at Caillois and reflect a bit further before I respond.

 

[The Firebird]

Someone may have already mentioned this, but I find the Alexandrian's hexcrawl system to be amazing for actually creating a sense of exploration and navigating (literally and figuratively) the unknown. The use of landmarks as the primary navigation tools works brilliantly. Making tracks one of the common random encounters is another small touch that makes everything feel a lot more dynamic and immersive.

Thanks for this recommendation. I've looked at it several times but never actually run it as written. That sounds like a worthwhile exercise.

 

[Celebrim]

Do you mean "Getting Lucky" from Game Developer, November 2006? I wasn't familiar with it. I've read that and your essay, but want to take another look at Caillois and reflect a bit further before I respond.

The essay I remember would have been something like Scry magazine in the late 1990s. I'll see if I can find it, but I don't know if I kept the magazines from that era and I doubt there is a lot of online discussion about them.

The essay in Game Developer seems to be an enlargement on his thinking at the time, and is longer, but isn't the same pithy essay I remember.

 

[The Firebird]

I disagree with Caillois fundamentally on certain points, but it's still worthwhile reading. Notably, I'd think if he'd realized the falsehood of "Games are not ruled and make-believe. Rather, they are ruled or make-believe." he would have been able to invent the modern RPG, but I think at the time he made his observation it was largely true that games fit into his either/or classification so I can see why he would have thought it.

Yes, I think that is a missing piece in his work.

However, it's worth noting that I think rather little of his other divisions, and in particular his mimicry concept is too vague, covering things that I can consider Sensation (the pleasure of imaging a sensation), Fantasy, Narrative, Expression, and Discovery.

I wonder how Callois would classify making a sand castle. Is it not play? Does he toss it into mimicry and just have done?

I'd guess he would place making a sand castle as mimicry if there is an aspect of fantasy ("I am a king and I'm designing my castle"). It could include Ilinx if the sensation is enjoyable or agon as there is an element of skill and mastery.

The above is a big part of my point. I don't particularly care for Callois distinctions, and I note that Richard Garfield's essay on chance (that I admire greatly) would contradict Callois' instincts here to say Chess has an element of chance in that in practice people play semi-randomly and so stumble into lines of play and in theory by doing so even an amateur might defeat a Grandmaster by pure luck.

I only read the 2006 version. It's a provocative thesis. I think most of the points are well-argued but I'm not sure that 'luck' is the right term for what is really variance. What he's arguing for in that essay is mechanics that make the outcomes of games, especially competitive games, to have a high degree of variance. This can be done by injecting variance into the games (e.g., power ups) but it can also be done more deterministically (e.g., a handicap, like a chess player forfeiting a queen prior to the match). I feel this is a useful distinction. At least it seems wrong to me to say that a chess player accepting a handicap was "unlucky" in the same sense that someone losing roulette was.

Likewise, the factors creating what Garfield calls luck in baseball are both random variance and factors like "did this guy sleep well last night" or "does he choke under pressure". The origin of these seems more indeterminate to me.

Regarding chess, I don't think an amateur beating a grandmaster is feasible. For a difference of 1600 ELO points, a calculator I found gives the weaker player a winning probability of 0.000000002. I'll be it is high.

Bloodbowl (1987) has a mechanic where if you are at advantage you take the best of two dice, but if you are disadvantage your opponent chooses the result of two dice (whatever they think is your worst result presumably). Over the Edge (1992) used a very similar mechanic of granting advantage by adding an extra dice to 2D6 and taking the best two of three or granting disadvantage by adding an extra dice and taking the worst two of three.

This is cool. Given how influential it has become, I figured it would have been adopted more widely if it was introduced sooner.

The early part of "Skull & Shackles" has a great little minigame of sailing the ship as crew where a lot of the minigame is not letting the sailing grind you down, and it is pretty wonderful for making life about the ship feel unpleasant and dangerous. Something like that can be easily adapted to something like riding with the herd on the trail with an early "Can you keep the cows alive?" focus. Depending on the system (BRP) you could even finish each day with a skill test to determine whether you learned something on the day and did a mini "level up".

I'll have to check this one out too. I don't think it is quite what I want, because I'm interested in managing the logistics. But I wonder how much could be adapted to larger group play.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd guess he would place making a sand castle as mimicry if there is an aspect of fantasy ("I am a king and I'm designing my castle"). It could include Ilinx if the sensation is enjoyable or agon as there is an element of skill and mastery.

So there is a lot to unpack here. First, I don't think people usually do a lot of roleplay when making a sand castle. The thing I think drives kids to make sandcastles is mostly the aesthetic of Expression - the pleasure of making or shaping something to your own design. "Look what I made." A kid who makes a sand castle doesn't run to his mom or dad to tell the story of his sand castle. He runs to get them to see the thing he has made. But it is I would argue empathically "play", and every kid loves it with or without attaching a narrative to it.

Secondly, while Caillois observation about Ilinx is really interesting, I think it is also so narrow that it is falsifiable and it misses out on a lot of activities. The mountain climber that does so for no reason is playing both for Challenge (which he understands) but also for the beauty of the summit and the discovery of what is at the top. At a smaller level, kids climb up boulders and trees for the exact same reasons, not just the Challenge of doing so but the joys of having done so. And climbing trees is emphatically play. They aren't doing it to get dizzy or "drunk", albeit I agree with him that it's a type of play to do so. And as delicately as I can put this, the "sex hobbyists" with their play are seeking sensation but not primarily dizziness, and yet that too is also play.

(Whether any play whether spinning in circles to fall down, drinking beer to get drunk, climbing high mountains or having a sexy hobby is healthy I'm not passing judgment on but they all fit in my opinion in Caillois definition of what constitutes play.)

At least it seems wrong to me to say that a chess player accepting a handicap was "unlucky" in the same sense that someone losing roulette was.

I don't think Garfield was saying that. Rather he would say that humans operate something like an AI that analyzes moves in chess and assigns a confidence to them and then often as not picks one according to the weighted value they perceive to the move. What move they end up picking isn't itself deterministic. In this situation the same player might play this move 72% of the time, some other move 24% of the time and some third move 4% of the time. In the critical portions of the game most moves aren't "forced" and while skilled players will generally analyze the forced moves correctly (and less skilled ones miss them) the really interesting thing is the randomness with which players will choose the unforced moves - say an opening. A handicap isn't unlucky, but it greatly increases this "random" aspect of how a skilled player will play, since it moves them out of their comfort zone and they must speculate more on the unforced parts of play.

[quoe]Likewise, the factors creating what Garfield calls luck in baseball are both random variance and factors like "did this guy sleep well last night" or "does he choke under pressure". The origin of these seems more indeterminate to me.[/quote]

Yes, but undetermined thing Garfield is saying is the same as luck. In RPG terms, those moments and things are the things we dice for.

Regarding chess, I don't think an amateur beating a grandmaster is feasible. For a difference of 1600 ELO points, a calculator I found gives the weaker player a winning probability of 0.000000002.

It is of course extraordinarily unlikely. But the point is that it's not impossible. Skill dominates over luck in Chess, which is obvious to everyone including Garfield, but Garfield is the first person I know of who said, "Yes, but skill isn't everything in Chess. There is still luck." It's a counter-intuitive yet I think profoundly true observation. And in some sense, the Chess world had already recognized this. It's why they don't decide a championship with just one game.