Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[Micah Sweet]

I tend to think of conquistadores in the New World as perhaps the closest to D&D style adventurers we've come to in real life. Just what little I know about Cortés, his behavior seemed like your typical PC who didn't think the normal rules of society applied to him.

In most games IME, they really don't.

Fallout looks like a great game. Picked it up not too long ago.

 

[Alas]

I tend to think of conquistadores in the New World as perhaps the closest to D&D style adventurers we've come to in real life. Just what little I know about Cortés, his behavior seemed like your typical PC who didn't think the normal rules of society applied to him.

Which presents kind of an ethical challenge, for me, as far as any proposed game's content and framing. I definitely want my explorers more from the Moana and Picard end of the spectrum than Columbus and Cortes. The Earthdawn plot of reconnecting after the Horrors would be an interesting and healthy angle.

 

[Reynard]

Which presents kind of an ethical challenge, for me, as far as any proposed game's content and framing. I definitely want my explorers more from the Moana and Picard end of the spectrum than Columbus and Cortes. The Earthdawn plot of reconnecting after the Horrors would be an interesting and healthy angle.

I think we could just avoid discussing colonialism in this thread and we would be fine.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think we could just avoid discussing colonialism in this thread and we would be fine.

Historically adventuring involved quite a lot of it, to the point that the exploitation of lands, resources, and people was the major motivation behind the Age of Exploration, so it's hard to ignore it and still have your world make sense. You have to come up with an alternative reason why and how these expeditions get authorized and funded. The Star Trek model is wonderful, but works primarily because money isn't an issue in the post-scarcity society of the Federation.

 

[Mannahnin]

The Avalon Hill board game Outdoor Survival which OD&D used for its wilderness map is entirely focused on this. Navigating overland across the board with random events/encounters with animals, the chance of getting lost, etc. I don't think disease is considered given the time scale of the game, but starvation is definitely a threat.

I am not so much interested in the combat as war aspect. I am more interested in making the threat of disease or starvation actually interesting to play out.

I think there's a fair amount which can be done with wilderness random encounters (and planned encounters) which simply aren't combat. I know I've seen extreme weather, terrain obstacles and supply mishaps come up in adventures and OSR blogs.

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.

Forbidden Lands sounds good. I think it's essential to gamify and get the players acceptance of randomly losing stuff and having it break. A lot of the time having the right tools and a little simple knowledge can nullify an obstacle, but if you lose those tools you're forced to improvise and adapt.

 

[Reynard]

Historically adventuring involved quite a lot of it, to the point that the exploitation of lands, resources, and people was the major motivation behind the Age of Exploration, so it's hard to ignore it and still have your world make sense. You have to come up with an alternative reason why and how these expeditions get authorized and funded. The Star Trek model is wonderful, but works primarily because money isn't an issue in the post-scarcity society of the Federation.

or just mapping the wild for the sake of knowledge. Or climbinga mountain, to say you did. Or discovering a more efficient passage from one side of the continent to another. or surveying a new land.

There are lots of ways to imagine this without kicking the colonial hornets nest that will inevitably derail the thread.

 

[Alas]

The Star Trek model is wonderful, but works primarily because money isn't an issue in the post-scarcity society of the Federation.

A sci-fi setting for exploration would be great because, depending on taste, the sessions could alternate between "planet of the week" and deep dives into a particular world. Trek would be the iconic example, but I wonder if the Aeon-Trinity setting would work, with its mix of developing the Solar System and hopping to alien worlds. It'd come with the mass media element already in place-- exploration as reality tri-D series. Or maybe the example sector presented in Scum & Villainy?

Personally I'd be most interested in poking around Eberron. Xen'drik is set up explicitly for that sort of campaign, but the Demon Wastes and Q'barra could easily accommodate it, too.

 

[Celebrim]

I am currently in the middle of The Lost City of Z by David Grann (Goodreads link), a nonfiction story about early 20th century exploration and it got me thinking about the pretty wide gulf between what a real world adventurer is, and what most RPG adventurers are.

I've always hated the term "adventurer" because the word actually means "tourist" and is most closely translated as "danger tourist" or "extreme tourist" today, though at the time the word was coined there wasn't a need for an adjective because all tourism was considered dangerous and extreme owing to the general difficulties and dangers associated with travel and alien cultures and near universal xenophobia.

Rarely if ever are the protagonists of an RPG actually adventurers and rarely if ever would the NPCs within the world think of the PCs as "adventurers". The more likely term to be employed is "mercenaries" and I think that better captures the sort of sentiment the NPCs probably have about typical murder hobo PCs. If the PCs acquire a very good reputation and aren't known for being primarily motivated by money, perhaps they'll be thought of as "heroes".

I do love me some long distance travel at some point in a fantasy campaign with some attention paid to the dangers of weather and climate and terrain and getting lost and the problem of logistics and all of that, but there is a fairly narrow window for that in fantasy where the PC are on the upper end of gritty and realistic (and so capable enough to handle the hardships) and the lower end of heroic (action movie hero tier) but not yet at the level of super heroic where such concerns don't really trouble them.

And additionally, the one big problem I always have with this is the getting there is always more fun than the getting back. Tolkien has that upper level gritty to low level heroic feel where the journey is so much of the hardship of the quest, but he typically ignores the getting back because it's boring. Typically, he solves the problem by having dues ex machina accompany the heroes on the way home. It's a bit less easy to justify this in a simulation. Video games always tend to have a back door to circumvent the retracing of steps. But in a TTRPG, I've never been able to easily force the players to take the easy way back.

 

[Micah Sweet]

or just mapping the wild for the sake of knowledge. Or climbinga mountain, to say you did. Or discovering a more efficient passage from one side of the continent to another. or surveying a new land.

There are lots of ways to imagine this without kicking the colonial hornets nest that will inevitably derail the thread.

That still begs the question of who is paying for it, and how. And if the PCs are in any way associated with a polity, how do they feel about it? You can ignore these questions, but IMO the setting will suffer for it.

 

[Reynard]

That still begs the question of who is paying for it, and how. And if the PCs are in any way associated with a polity, how do they feel about it? You can ignore these questions, but IMO the setting will suffer for it.

I am more interested in the mechanics of how to do such a thing well at the table so that it is engaging and dramatic and tense.