Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[Brendan Byrd]

Ooh. I love this. Make reporting/publishing fundamental to success. Sure, you found the mythic Well of Life, but if you don't get a massive out, it means nothing.

Puts a new twist on "publish or perish".

 

[Enrahim]

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.

I actually had almost the same idea, and made a playable draft. However a solo test run hit a major issue: When the group got their hands on a major treasure, the nature of the game semingly couldn't be maintained. Cost of supplies became trivial, and it was hard to justify controlling a single group, or not hireing an army.

I think one way these problems can be to some extent solved by introducing scarcity beyond funds. Like there being a limited pool of willing retainers. But once you hit that scarcity level, the entire money mini game go away. And then design questions like if it is needed in the first place shows up, and before we know it we have gotten rid of the entire logistics subsystem, modern narrative game style..

 

[The Firebird]

Puts a new twist on "publish or perish".

Source of the Nile (1978, Ross Maker & David Wesley) is a board game where you play explorers on Africa. Much of the game is about revealing new territory, and you score points for discoveries...but only if you return to port and publish first. If someone makes the same discovery and gets back before you, you get nothing.

I actually had almost the same idea, and made a playable draft. However a solo test run hit a major issue: When the group got their hands on a major treasure, the nature of the game semingly couldn't be maintained. Cost of supplies became trivial, and it was hard to justify controlling a single group, or not hireing an army.

I think one way these problems can be to some extent solved by introducing scarcity beyond funds. Like there being a limited pool of willing retainers. But once you hit that scarcity level, the entire money mini game go away. And then design questions like if it is needed in the first place shows up, and before we know it we have gotten rid of the entire logistics subsystem, modern narrative game style..

The same goes in the stories. In Conan, or Indiana Jones, or The Mummy, the bulk of the treasure is lost, and the heroes get away with maybe a handful. National treasure I suppose is an exception. Hmm.

Maybe if the goal is treasure and the heroes win the treasure then they should retire into the sunset? That seems like a victory. Why go back if more treasure is the goal?

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

 

[Enrahim]

The same goes in the stories. In Conan, or Indiana Jones, or The Mummy, the bulk of the treasure is lost, and the heroes get away with maybe a handful. National treasure I suppose is an exception. Hmm.

Maybe if the goal is treasure and the heroes win the treasure then they should retire into the sunset? That seems like a victory. Why go back if more treasure is the goal?

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

One approach is of course to have the players not playing self funding entrepreneurs, but rather get a mission and a budget from someone else. That clashes maybe a bit with the OSR-vibe, but could be a quite realistic solution to the conundrum.

If trying to maintain the self funding entrepeneur vibe, keeping the economy in the balance between broke (too much play time go to begging for money in the town) and overflowing (cost is no longer an interesting decission factor) appear quite the challenge :/ Over-emphasis on non-treasure goals I fear can quickly put you in the broke category.

 

[The Firebird]

One approach is of course to have the players not playing self funding entrepreneurs, but rather get a mission and a budget from someone else. That clashes maybe a bit with the OSR-vibe, but could be a quite realistic solution to the conundrum.

If trying to maintain the self funding entrepeneur vibe, keeping the economy in the balance between broke (too much play time go to begging for money in the town) and overflowing (cost is no longer an interesting decission factor) appear quite the challenge :/ Over-emphasis on non-treasure goals I fear can quickly put you in the broke category.

I'm increasingly drawn to that idea. It matches much of the history. The New World explorers were bankrolled by governments. There's Nero's expedition up the Nile. In a more modern context, many shipwrecks were found with funding from Paul Allen. There's room for a d12 table of patrons. The zaniest, to my eyes, is Stanley's expedition to find Livingstone, which The New York Herald thought would sell papers.

And as this discussion shows, it's not like the expedition idea hasn't been tried, including in OSR games. It hasn't taken, outside of a small audience. Maybe only a small audience will ever care. But I think it is also possible that we're missing a trick with the mechanics. It may be worth rethinking some of the core gameplay assumptions. The 'patrons/publication' idea has some merit.

 

[Autumnal]

Fate makes a handy framework for this. The survival horror chapter of the Fate Horror Toolkit also works for survival nom-horror, with some really ingenious sub-systems:

Chapter 6: The High Cost of Living • Fate Horror Toolkit

fate-srd.com

The same mechanics would slide well into any game where player-defined qualities loom large, like QuestWorlds.