Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Ah. As usual, my concerns are much more about how to make it make logical sense within the setting. I feel "drama" should be a byproduct of good roleplay from all sides and should have minimal mechanical involvement in traditionally-styled games.

 

[Tonguez]

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.

Which is why I looked to non-western exploration models, which tended to be more diplomatic and scholarly. Al-Masudi was a Scholar who lived in the Abbasid Empire and was commissioned by a Caliph to verify the reports of nations and beast beyond their borders - it was pure scholarly curiosity, that allowed Masudi to travel from The Zanji coast of Africa to China. He also includes reports on France (and its capital Bariza) and even mentions Anglosaxon Britain. He is also notable for early documented use of the name Istan Bulin saying that only Arabs called the city Constantinople.

Ibn Battuta was an Islamic lawyer motivated by religious devotion and first travelled on his Hajj. Afterwards he determined to visit nations and islamic shrines across the world finding work as a judge, court advisor and sometimes diplomat (ie doing downtime jobs or side missions). That journey took 30 years.

Rabban bar Sauma was a Nestorian Monk from China first sent on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but diverted to Baghdad due to war. He was later sent to Rome as an envoy for the Mongols.

When I ran similar mission in game the questgiver was the Curator of the Church Archives, himself a historian and archaeologist.

 

[Enrahim]

I think I have a key insight: The trick to get the experience described here might have nothing to do with system, and all to do with content.

To back it up: As part if a long running D&D 3.5 campaign, I ran essentially a multi session fetch quest. It had highlights like a cozy slice of life evening in a mining town. An obviously doomed charge toward a peek with thousands of winged abominations swirling arround. Finding an abandoned griffin nest with some mysterious magical trinkets. Fetching the mcGuffin from a seemingly nice vampire.

During these sessions hardly a single dice was rolled. We had no shopping. But the sense of adventure was absolutely there.

 

[Mannahnin]

Oh, the other system I thought of was Torchbearer. I remember reading a play report and thinking it successfully makes simple travel dramatic and difficult.

 

[Koloth]

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.

Columbus's original plan would probably pass muster. His first voyage was an attempt to find an alternative trade route to China as a way to avoid the heavy taxation on the overland routes. In many ways, he was a 15th century venture capitalist. Had an idea and found several investors to fund the trip. It is what happened after the attempt was interrupted by inhabited islands that many current era folks have issues with.

Cortes pretty well defines the explore, exterminate and exploit type of trip.

The first Columbus trip if played from inception to conclusion would seem to fit OP's original idea. The politics and getting the finances needed to arrange such a trip could be a fairly complete 'adventure' in its own right. To avoid the colonization aspects, assume there is no intervening inhabited land. Perhaps some uninhabited islands that could be developed as ports along the way. A variation on the 'selling equipment to miners' is the best way to wealth during a gold rush. Once the trip is underway, it comes down to navigation, seamanship and survival. With maybe some leadership to keep the crew from mutinying and taking over if the trip starts going poorly.

 

[Piperken]

...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...

Years on, I still vividly remember reading when the Company attempts to cross through the mountains, with Boromir trying to plow through the snow.

 

[Piperken]

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'd echo these questions also go to what the exploration is for, and what things it could be about. There are some games I have come across with heavy exploration, and they deliberately structure their reward system (e.g. At the end of the session, ask yourself the following questions: Did you discover a new point of interest, landmark or settlement and made note of it on your map? Discover something new about a recent culture or society you encountered? Captured by hand a new beautiful scene from a vista or the like? Discover a secret and made record of it in an area of interest to you? Sampled a new dish or kind of food you haven't had before? Resolve a dilemma or hardship being had between two or more groups of peoples? etc) around specific actions or tasks it asks the characters undertake, sometimes based on their background, interests, or hobbies.

 

[The Firebird]

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'm glad you made this thread, because I've been working on a OSR system that is exactly this. It's been on my mind for a while. I don't have anything final to share but I can share some general thoughts.

I think the idea, first of all, is just killer. The literary history of adventure gaming and expedition stories or historical expeditions are intimately linked. Going back to The Odyssey, or Jason and the Argonauts, and the Polynesians or the Vikings or the search for the Source of the Nile, or Lawrence's march across the desert.

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.

Obviously managing bands of this size is challenging, so you need much simplified combat. The way I run it, basically everyone gets a d20 + X to hit and rolls d6s for damage. I mean every weapon does a d6. The game is about expeditions, not weapon choices...so we simplify there.

If it gets too large then mass combat rules may be in play. I haven't needed them yet with sizes of 15-20 retainers.

Another change is too sharply limit the advancement of the heroes. The system I run caps out at 4th. There needs to be enough variance so lv 1 heroes are worth multiple retainers, but you can keep 4th level characters and retainers on the same battlefield. That means limiting complicated spells and abilities.

 

[The Firebird]

Could do worse then read up on the US based Lewis and Clark expedition then find a game system that best models that adventure. GURPS might make a good fit.

As part of my research into the system I've been looking into Lewis & Clark. They're a recent enough expedition to have good notes and the size (~30-40 people) I'm looking for. There are also reasonable records for the time period which means there is a lot to learn about the economics. I'm interested to help guide the mechanics, like how much should players be spending on salaries vs supply (depending on how much they hunt, of course). Here's for the Lewis and Clark (if you check an encyclopedia you will get a different number based on the requisition submitted by Lewis. But there are other factors in the accounting).

It turns out it is mostly pay, either as the base pay for expedition members, bonuses paid to them after ('double pay', which doubled salaries of all but Lewis & Clark, but did not double the subsistence allowance or signing bonuses which I folded into base pay), and land which was awarded to expedition members as a bonus for successful completion.

Regarding the numbers, something like $10-30 a month was a typical working person's salary for the period.

This gives an idea of how much is reasonable as standard pay vs what you might expect to distribute as bonuses if you find the treasure (or whatever success is.)

For those interested, the right reference is Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783-1854, Ed. Donald Jackson. See especially “Final Summation of Lewis’s Account”, Document 277, p 424-430.

 

[The Firebird]

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.

This also worries me and I think it is incumbent on anyone who presents such a system to provide some good examples of other ways to frame expeditions. The easiest way is the Indiana Jones/National Treasure route...some bad people are on expedition to do a bad thing, so the PCs have to do the same expedition to stop them.

But I think you can get more creative as well. Transported to a modern context, you could be journalists heading somewhere remote to uncover an illegal mining operation. Or you could be trying to find an individual who is remote for whatever reason; that is Stanley's search for Livingston, but also The Force Awakens. The search for the source of the Nile helped reveal why there were years of famine of plenty. You can imagine casting that as a solution to ecological challenges (i.e., there is a famine because of ?). Tying that into climate makes for a very timely backdrop.