Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[Reynard]

I think its triggering a knee jerk reaction to old school survival sim. Where every morsel of food and drop of water needs to be tracked. Folks found it to be exhausting and not particularly exciting. Which is why the exploration pillar is sort of in limbo currently. It's been reestablished as a pillar, but what does that mean? Social is in the same boat but its off topic for this thread.

What you need then is to examine how it plays out. Starvation/disease would be more like traps to avoid in the traditional sense. How do players navigate that in the name of exploration without it being mechanically burdensome? Furthermore, the starvation and disease obstacles are just in the way of the real prize which is exploring stuff. How do you make that piece exciting? I think thats largely going to be up to plot devices to provide a rewarding experience.

Again, my point of inspiration is how actual real world adventurers experience their adventures. It is almost never about combat; it is about hardship and overcoming hardship. What I am after is not a simulation, but a way to capture that in play.

 

[schneeland]

Are there any TTRPGs that really focus on the expedition, man versus nature, exploration and discovery, and endurance and survival? Imagine if Expedisition to the Barrier Peaks was actually a proper expedition. I think that would make for a really compelling game.

Not completely man vs. nature, but there's a fair amount of survival aspects (limited resources, degradation of gear, rules for exploration of the unknown) in Forbidden Lands. The advantage is that resource tracking is abstracted via resource dice, so you don't have to do all the bean-counting @payn mentions (which I personally also find rather tedious).

Theoretically, there's even more of a 19th century exploration theme in Coriolis: The Great Dark. However, for me personally, the rules fell flat, so I wouldn't recommend it unconditionally.

 

[payn]

Again, my point of inspiration is how actual real world adventurers experience their adventures. It is almost never about combat; it is about hardship and overcoming hardship. What I am after is not a simulation, but a way to capture that in play.

Yeap, I get that. Im trying to figure out how to make it more interesting than Oregon Trail the RPG. Maybe it doesnt need to be?

 

[Reynard]

Yeap, I get that. Im trying to figure out how to make it more interesting than Oregon Trail the RPG. Maybe it doesnt need to be?

I think maybe a core stress mechanic may be the right way to go, especially if there are interesting ways to alleviate and/or explore that stress.

 

[jian]

I think it’s an interesting take but it would be a different game, fighting natural obstacles and getting lost rather than monsters. And I agree that D&D wouldn’t be a good fit.

I’d also pedantically point out that the word adventurer was rarely applied to explorers in previous centuries. It was more likely to mean “someone who acts outside the rules of civilised society” and so tended to refer to scoundrels, divorcees, con artists, and entertainers.

 

[Reynard]

I think it’s an interesting take but it would be a different game, fighting natural obstacles and getting lost rather than monsters. And I agree that D&D wouldn’t be a good fit.

I’d also pedantically point out that the word adventurer was rarely applied to explorers in previous centuries. It was more likely to mean “someone who acts outside the rules of civilised society” and so tended to refer to scoundrels, divorcees, con artists, and entertainers.

Modern day adventurers call themselves just that, along with "explorer" etc. As I pointed out in the OP, this thread was inspired by The Lost City of Z, which follows both a turn of the 20th century adventurer as well as many who followed him, including the author of the book.

 

[Morrus]

The short version of this question—D&D lacks a full exploitation pillar; what games feature one?

I will of course (and predictably—but you did ask!) suggest our own Level Up: Advanced 5E which recognised this problem and built a fully-fledged exploration pillar into the game, baked in from class design all the way through to journey rules and exploration challenges.

 

[Alas]

I think maybe a core stress mechanic may be the right way to go, especially if there are interesting ways to alleviate and/or explore that stress.

This is the sort of game that I think Cortex would excel at. I could model multiple stress tracks: nutrition, health, injury, intra-party tension, finances. Every time the adventurers get a setback, they gain or step up a die in that stress. Max out a stress, and you get a serious crisis or fail-state. I'd put in a pool of expendable dice for supplies: food, medicine, pack animals. And I'd model the challenges like terrain, weather, disease, and relationships with locals as a pool to be whittled down.

The goal of the game should be something clear like, "Get from the Caribbean to the Pacific through the Darien Gap," or "Find the rumored ruins of Ixitxachitl, sketch them, and get out before the rainy season traps you." Play would focus on the party collaboratively filling in a map, with the GM throwing in curves and setbacks. If it's a campaign, each session could play through a particular sortie from base camp, from packing (committing expendable dice) through trekking (making the rolls) to consequences (suffering and buying off stress).

For an exploration-focused game like this, I'd want to lean heavily on player-generated input. What are the symptoms of this horrible new disease hitting the party? What do you have that the locals really want to trade for? What truths are you deducing about Ixitxachitl that the previous explorer got wrong? I'm used to providing this sort of content as a DM, but when discovery is the main reward, I've found the players' brainstorms are a big creative boost.

 

[Morrus]

Personal opinion: They aren't generally interesting to play out, in and of themselves.

Like, the things you do to prevent disease and starvation are in what most folks would call the "drudgery" bucket. They are incredibly mundane actions. There's no drama or dynamism to canning peaches for storage, or remembering to dig your latrine sufficiently far away from your water source, and washing your damn hands, and so on. The core of good logistics is bookkeeping, which, again, isn't full of rising and falling tension itself.

You want to see threat of starvation as something interesting? Go watch the TV series Yellowjackets. In it the threat of starvation is basically a setting element that puts stress on the characters. It is not the actual dealing with the details of starvation, but how it drives interpersonal dynamics, that is interesting.

I disagree. You can make it interesting.

We treat “Supply” (being food, water, firewood, medicinals, and other consumables) as basically party hit points. And exploration challenges and time passing use up that Supply. It works remarkably well. Messed up on the broken bridge challenge? You lost 2d4 Supply. Rolled a critical on the rolling boulder challenge? It uncovered a cache of Supply.

It does work. And there’s no book keeping really (no more than tracking hit points is book keeping).

 

[UngainlyTitan]

This is the sort of game that I think Cortex would excel at. I could model multiple stress tracks: nutrition, health, injury, intra-party tension, finances. Every time the adventurers get a setback, they gain or step up a die in that stress. Max out a stress, and you get a serious crisis or fail-state. I'd put in a pool of expendable dice for supplies: food, medicine, pack animals. And I'd model the challenges like terrain, weather, disease, and relationships with locals as a pool to be whittled down.

The goal of the game should be something clear like, "Get from the Caribbean to the Pacific through the Darien Gap," or "Find the rumored ruins of Ixitxachitl, sketch them, and get out before the rainy season traps you." Play would focus on the party collaboratively filling in a map, with the GM throwing in curves and setbacks. If it's a campaign, each session could play through a particular sortie from base camp, from packing (committing expendable dice) through trekking (making the rolls) to consequences (suffering and buying off stress).

For an exploration-focused game like this, I'd want to lean heavily on player-generated input. What are the symptoms of this horrible new disease hitting the party? What do you have that the locals really want to trade for? What truths are you deducing about Ixitxachitl that the previous explorer got wrong? I'm used to providing this sort of content as a DM, but when discovery is the main reward, I've found the players' brainstorms are a big creative boost.

The biggest downside to this would be that a serious fail state, historically, meant that the people on the expedition died. Not something players like to experience.