Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[Dannyalcatraz]

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.

I was thinking along these lines. My (partial) solution was to use a RPG with mechanically simpler PC design. For example, if I wanted to run this kind of campaign in a traditional fantasy realm, I’d probably default to using The Fantasy Trip/In the Labyrinth, with players controlling 3-5 PCs simultaneously.

Not only does this flesh out the various roles (keeping them in players’ hands), but facilitates the “promotion” or addition of other characters if needed.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

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

I can think of:

Finding treasure
Finding mundane or arcane resources
Finding new lands to settle/leading settlers to same
Finding new trade routes
Hunting rare or exotic critters
Scouting for the military

 

[Tonguez]

I read quite a bit about Admundsen and race to South Pole. It's fascinating and interesting to read. But it would be pretty boring to play out. Make mistakes in planing stage, and you have downward spiral of despair and very little agency to improve your condition. Specially if weather conditions are rolled at random. Few lousy rolls could cost you valuable resources which proves fatal in the long run.

Yeah, but the South Pole is particularly extreme. At least mountains still give options for shelter - a flat sheet of windblasted ice gives you nothing

 

[jdrakeh]

My own game, Sword Omen, had/has* a heavy emphasis on adventurers as desperate/foolhardy explorers financed by wealthy patrons and supplied with various hirelings (cooks, guides, porters, etc). There are also pretty extensive rules for wilderness travel and survival, including such things as getting lost, starvation, etc.

*I sold the rights to the game in question and, to my knowledge, the new publisher hasn't re-released it yet. There are some self-published, signed and numbered, copies of it floating around (but, IIRC, that edition was limited to something like 10 copies).

 

[The Firebird]

I can think of:

Finding treasure
Finding mundane or arcane resources
Finding new lands to settle/leading settlers to same
Finding new trade routes
Hunting rare or exotic critters
Scouting for the military

Nice list, which has some I hadn't thought of. My work in progress below. I conceived of it as some kind of 2d4 or 2d5 table but the numbers are off so I'm rethinking that.

1 - Find a person
1: Eliminate (Apocalypse Now)
2: To ask for help (The Force Awakens)
3: To bring them home (Livingstone, Saving Private Ryan)

2 - Map a region
1: Newly acquired land (Lewis and Clark)
2: Find a way through (The Northwest Passage)
3: To understand weather patterns (Nile)

3 - Find a location
1: Acquire resources (Congo)
2: Acquire an artifact (Indiana Jones)
3: Learn secrets (The Lost City of Z)
4: To reach a destination (Everest, the Poles)

4 - Transport persons/goods
1: Military attack (Lawrence's march to Aqaba)
2: To break a siege
3: To relieve disease/famine
4: To escape (Beyond the Black River (?))
5: To return home (The Odyssey)