Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[The Firebird]

If I was going to try to abstract it, I would probably combine food and water for one day into a ration unit that would weigh 15 lbs (extra weight is for the containers).

Tempting. But suppose they are traveling along a river with abundant fresh water. Does it make sense to count water weight? Having a clause like "rations take up 1/5th weight when along fresh water" means division, which I think should be avoided.

 

[Celebrim]

Tempting. But suppose they are traveling along a river with abundant fresh water. Does it make sense to count water weight? Having a clause like "rations take up 1/5th weight when along fresh water" means division, which I think should be avoided.

Problems like this are one reason I don't think it's practical to abstract things to "supply". To continue the "Oregon Trail" analogy, the game doesn't attempt to bundle everything into a single resource, but has a small but reasonable number of categories of items representing the things necessary to overcome obstacles. You can easily find yourself in a situation where you are supplied with one item but not with another more immediately necessary one. That's a huge part of the gameplay. Can you get away with selling your spare wagon parts in order to get more food? It's easy to imagine mishaps or events that concretely threaten one portion of the supply. If you have a generic thing like, "Find a fresh water oasis: replenish 12 supply", it doesn't really capture the problem of, "We still have water, but wild animals or insects ate our food supplies". It also doesn't really express how important that is if you have plenty of everything else but not the 1000 pounds of water the expedition needs. It also in an RPG context doesn't deal with returning to revisit a known oasis, since unless we apply some judgement one supply source like that could represent effectively infinite supplies. It's more realistic if we separate animal fodder, water, food, light sources and what not because then having a nigh infinite water supply doesn't mean you are just set for all manner of supply. Any attempt to abstract away these problems is just going to result in artificialities and complexities that mitigate against any value in "keeping it simple".

 

[Micah Sweet]

Problems like this are one reason I don't think it's practical to abstract things to "supply". To continue the "Oregon Trail" analogy, the game doesn't attempt to bundle everything into a single resource, but has a small but reasonable number of categories of items representing the things necessary to overcome obstacles. You can easily find yourself in a situation where you are supplied with one item but not with another more immediately necessary one. That's a huge part of the gameplay. Can you get away with selling your spare wagon parts in order to get more food? It's easy to imagine mishaps or events that concretely threaten one portion of the supply. If you have a generic thing like, "Find a fresh water oasis: replenish 12 supply", it doesn't really capture the problem of, "We still have water, but wild animals or insects ate our food supplies". It also doesn't really express how important that is if you have plenty of everything else but not the 1000 pounds of water the expedition needs. It also in an RPG context doesn't deal with returning to revisit a known oasis, since unless we apply some judgement one supply source like that could represent effectively infinite supplies. It's more realistic if we separate animal fodder, water, food, light sources and what not because then having a nigh infinite water supply doesn't mean you are just set for all manner of supply. Any attempt to abstract away these problems is just going to result in artificialities and complexities that mitigate against any value in "keeping it simple".

Yeah, if I had my way I would use more detailed rules for Supply than those to which Level Up defaults, but I don't have the right players for that unfortunately.

 

[LordBP]

Tempting. But suppose they are traveling along a river with abundant fresh water. Does it make sense to count water weight? Having a clause like "rations take up 1/5th weight when along fresh water" means division, which I think should be avoided.

Well, to me, tracking them separately would make the most sense, but I don't mind tracking everything.

If I was abstracting it some, then I would split rations and water into two separate items which you could then combine or not depending on the circumstance.

As for fresh water, I would boil/purify anything I drank as you do not want to catch a bug from even a clean looking source (had it happen before and you would not want to experience it even with magical healing ).

 

[GrimCo]

Just to add a bit, from personal experience with mountains. When you do everything right and things out of your control don't screw you (planing, choosing time of year, having right gear, having luck with good weather, luck in that no one steps wrong and gets hurt), it can be pretty uneventful. It's demanding physically, experience in itself is awesome, but you go up, soak the view and enjoy achievement, then you go down. That's it. Other times, you do everything right, start ascent, sudden storm hits, you hunker down in shelter for day or two, eat, sleep, talk, wait. After coupe of days, if bad weather persists, you look at your supplies, calculate how many days you can hunker down and still have enough to get to top and back, if it's not enough, or if the conditions are not great, you pull the plug, descent and that's it. On smaller peaks, its even sooner, measured in hours, not days. No drama, nothing exciting, just rational decision and slow trek down, thinking about how weeks of preparation had gone to waste.

 

[LordBP]

Just to add a bit, from personal experience with mountains. When you do everything right and things out of your control don't screw you (planing, choosing time of year, having right gear, having luck with good weather, luck in that no one steps wrong and gets hurt), it can be pretty uneventful. It's demanding physically, experience in itself is awesome, but you go up, soak the view and enjoy achievement, then you go down. That's it. Other times, you do everything right, start ascent, sudden storm hits, you hunker down in shelter for day or two, eat, sleep, talk, wait. After coupe of days, if bad weather persists, you look at your supplies, calculate how many days you can hunker down and still have enough to get to top and back, if it's not enough, or if the conditions are not great, you pull the plug, descent and that's it. On smaller peaks, its even sooner, measured in hours, not days. No drama, nothing exciting, just rational decision and slow trek down, thinking about how weeks of preparation had gone to waste.

I always like the old saying of "Plan for the worse, hope for the best".

It's served me well while hiking/camping.

 

[Celebrim]

Just to add a bit, from personal experience with mountains. When you do everything right and things out of your control don't screw you (planing, choosing time of year, having right gear, having luck with good weather, luck in that no one steps wrong and gets hurt), it can be pretty uneventful. It's demanding physically, experience in itself is awesome, but you go up, soak the view and enjoy achievement, then you go down. That's it. Other times, you do everything right, start ascent, sudden storm hits, you hunker down in shelter for day or two, eat, sleep, talk, wait. After coupe of days, if bad weather persists, you look at your supplies, calculate how many days you can hunker down and still have enough to get to top and back, if it's not enough, or if the conditions are not great, you pull the plug, descent and that's it. On smaller peaks, its even sooner, measured in hours, not days. No drama, nothing exciting, just rational decision and slow trek down, thinking about how weeks of preparation had gone to waste.

I think it is important to stay grounded in the reality of the thing and this post is a really good reset to the discussion.

One of the great difficulties of TTRPGs is that many of the things that are exciting are exciting because of the aesthetic of Sensation and that's an aesthetic that is really hard to capture in a visceral way at the table. The experience of mountain climbing is exciting in large part for the sensory experience of it all - the majestic views for example or going the other way the vertigo from the unfathomable drops. It's not impossible to capture some Sensation through the imagination, but it's not the same describing riding a roller coaster and being on one (for example). The same is true of those majestic views. I'd presume from experience even a TV has a hard time capturing the sensation much less a word painter. Tolkien is often admired in some circles for capturing the aesthetics of seeing something majestic of the natural world in his words, but most of us aren't Tolkien and even then it's still not the same. Much of the admiration comes from having seen it yourself and seeing how well Tolkien puts that experience to words. If you haven't seen it, it's not the same. And that's not even getting into each of us having different powers of visual imagination.

The Challenge aesthetic is superficially the same, but there is a massive difference in what "physically demanding" is going to be experienced as on a mountain and at a table pretending to climb a mountain. In a game, "This is really hard" and "I just go on enduring" don't feel anything like they do in reality, and there isn't a lot of obvious fun in, "You rolled badly on the dice. Your character's will gives in and he gives up and can't go any further."

It's not obvious from your post or to me in general that the core loop of man against nature is in the simple case all that fun or can be made fun easily at the table. I think it's always the case that you can only capture part of that loop and you have to find the fun you can't capture in something else. One of the problems is that its hard to put enough concrete reified details into it that lends itself to the imagination. So many of the tasks are mundane and slow that they just lend themselves to a test of fortune and few details. Another problem is the tasks are so repetitive that it's only interesting to describe them at most once. Were this a movie we could have long montages that depend on cinematography and visuals to impart the Sensation we need to make the trek interesting. But that's just hard to do at a table and almost nobody plays an RPG purely to listen to the storyteller narrate for 20 minutes. Even if it is fun to listen to a good storyteller or an audio book, that's just not why people came to the table.

But I'm also not saying that you shouldn't try to do it. By all means have expeditions that cross rugged and difficult and unknown country and track the food and water and whatever else seems to be critical to the situation. Just don't expect that to produce anything other than what you GrimCo has said: "No drama, nothing exciting, just rational decision and slow trek". The fun then comes from how that part of the game interacts with drama. Your narrative is about getting up a mountain because it would be fun and a personal challenge. The narrative gets very different when you have to get up the mountain in three days or the world (or your part of it) ends. The Fellowship have to attempt the Redhorn Gate or the world ends, bad weather or not. Rational calculus changes compared to doing this for adventure (in the traditional sense of the word).

My general impression of RPGs is that if something was possible, it would have been done by now. I think we often overlook just how sophisticated the games coming out the 70s and early 80s actually were. Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon and AD&D invented so much fundamental technology that all games depend on today, and we didn't drop that technology and use something else primarily because it's really hard to invent better approaches given the limitations of a TTRPG experience. I don't think we are stuck on the hit point because it was invented first and people lack the imagination to get away from it. I think we are stuck on the hit point because there just isn't anything better. I don't think there are magical mechanics that have been largely undiscovered that satisfy most people's aesthetic needs. I don't think that at this point we are likely to invent processes of play fundamentally all that more interesting than a well-run "Isle of Dread" or "Descent into the Depths of the Earth". We might create settings or scenarios as or more compelling, but we aren't going to reinvent the wheel at this point. Everything is a tradeoff. Can you create a more interesting experience at a TTRPG for a gritty expedition than "Oregon Trail"? Maybe not.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it is important to stay grounded in the reality of the thing and this post is a really good reset to the discussion.

One of the great difficulties of TTRPGs is that many of the things that are exciting are exciting because of the aesthetic of Sensation and that's an aesthetic that is really hard to capture in a visceral way at the table. The experience of mountain climbing is exciting in large part for the sensory experience of it all - the majestic views for example or going the other way the vertigo from the unfathomable drops. It's not impossible to capture some Sensation through the imagination, but it's not the same describing riding a roller coaster and being on one (for example). The same is true of those majestic views. I'd presume from experience even a TV has a hard time capturing the sensation much less a word painter. Tolkien is often admired in some circles for capturing the aesthetics of seeing something majestic of the natural world in his words, but most of us aren't Tolkien and even then it's still not the same. Much of the admiration comes from having seen it yourself and seeing how well Tolkien puts that experience to words. If you haven't seen it, it's not the same. And that's not even getting into each of us having different powers of visual imagination.

The Challenge aesthetic is superficially the same, but there is a massive difference in what "physically demanding" is going to be experienced as on a mountain and at a table pretending to climb a mountain. In a game, "This is really hard" and "I just go on enduring" don't feel anything like they do in reality, and there isn't a lot of obvious fun in, "You rolled badly on the dice. Your character's will gives in and he gives up and can't go any further."

It's not obvious from your post or to me in general that the core loop of man against nature is in the simple case all that fun or can be made fun easily at the table. I think it's always the case that you can only capture part of that loop and you have to find the fun you can't capture in something else. One of the problems is that its hard to put enough concrete reified details into it that lends itself to the imagination. So many of the tasks are mundane and slow that they just lend themselves to a test of fortune and few details. Another problem is the tasks are so repetitive that it's only interesting to describe them at most once. Were this a movie we could have long montages that depend on cinematography and visuals to impart the Sensation we need to make the trek interesting. But that's just hard to do at a table and almost nobody plays an RPG purely to listen to the storyteller narrate for 20 minutes. Even if it is fun to listen to a good storyteller or an audio book, that's just not why people came to the table.

But I'm also not saying that you shouldn't try to do it. By all means have expeditions that cross rugged and difficult and unknown country and track the food and water and whatever else seems to be critical to the situation. Just don't expect that to produce anything other than what you GrimCo has said: "No drama, nothing exciting, just rational decision and slow trek". The fun then comes from how that part of the game interacts with drama. Your narrative is about getting up a mountain because it would be fun and a personal challenge. The narrative gets very different when you have to get up the mountain in three days or the world (or your part of it) ends. The Fellowship have to attempt the Redhorn Gate or the world ends, bad weather or not. Rational calculus changes compared to doing this for adventure (in the traditional sense of the word).

My general impression of RPGs is that if something was possible, it would have been done by now. I think we often overlook just how sophisticated the games coming out the 70s and early 80s actually were. Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon and AD&D invented so much fundamental technology that all games depend on today, and we didn't drop that technology and use something else primarily because it's really hard to invent better approaches given the limitations of a TTRPG experience. I don't think we are stuck on the hit point because it was invented first and people lack the imagination to get away from it. I think we are stuck on the hit point because there just isn't anything better. I don't think there are magical mechanics that have been largely undiscovered that satisfy most people's aesthetic needs. I don't think that at this point we are likely to invent processes of play fundamentally all that more interesting than a well-run "Isle of Dread" or "Descent into the Depths of the Earth". We might create settings or scenarios as or more compelling, but we aren't going to reinvent the wheel at this point. Everything is a tradeoff. Can you create a more interesting experience at a TTRPG for a gritty expedition than "Oregon Trail"? Maybe not.

As I said above, good thing I love Oregon Trail. I do agree though that RPG-style adventure goes well with the traditional kind, and can enhance the experience without abstracting the exploration part of the game away.

 

[The Firebird]

--good post--

There are a lot of good thoughts in this post. I am intrigued by the idea, if I may rephrase, that "RPGs cannot replicate experiences which are primarily about vertigo". (I like the term vertigo because it fits into Caillois' classification).

That seems right to me. There are games that combine vertigo with other aspects, like competition or strategy. Baseball or football, for example. There are ways to make baseball games. They either focus on the chance/strategy aspect (Strat O Matic) or try to give you the feeling of vertigo via a video game or something. I suppose the video games are more popular for football and the strategy more for baseball.

So, a successful game that models mountain climbing has to focus on the aspects other than vertigo...and there are not many. That argument seems right to me.

But, a successful expedition game has more to go on. There is strategy (do I press on through the storm or take shelter?), there is chance (will I discover a large waterfall here?) there can be competition (will we reach the goal before our opponents?). I think you have to emphasize those rather than experience of being a climber.

My general impression of RPGs is that if something was possible, it would have been done by now. I think we often overlook just how sophisticated the games coming out the 70s and early 80s actually were. Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon and AD&D invented so much fundamental technology that all games depend on today, and we didn't drop that technology and use something else primarily because it's really hard to invent better approaches given the limitations of a TTRPG experience.

I both agree and disagree with this. I think you're right about hit points, that there are probably no fundamental improvements forthcoming there (that's what I meant earlier by saying dungeon crawling is 'solved'). But I think there is room for improvement elsewhere. The narrative movement in particular has made great advances with Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark. (Most of what I've seen since seems to be iterations on those ideas--is that right or wrong?).

Advantage/disadvantage is also pretty recent. Although maybe that is less of a fundamental shift.

Hmm. I guess I think that there could be a solution to expedition play out there. But it will represent a more significant change to the mechanics than "this is an OSR game with procedures for hexcrawling and retainers".

I would welcome disagreement. My thoughts are only half baked on these questions.

 

[Celebrim]

There are a lot of good thoughts in this post. I am intrigued by the idea, if I may rephrase, that "RPGs cannot replicate experiences which are primarily about vertigo". (I like the term vertigo because it fits into Caillois' classification).

Oh this whole post is worth it just for the Caillois' classification terminology, which I've somehow managed to avoid in all my study of games and sent me down a rabbit hole.

I disagree with Caillois fundamentally on certain points, but it's still worthwhile reading. Notably, I'd think if he'd realized the falsehood of "Games are not ruled and make-believe. Rather, they are ruled or make-believe." he would have been able to invent the modern RPG, but I think at the time he made his observation it was largely true that games fit into his either/or classification so I can see why he would have thought it.

So, a successful game that models mountain climbing has to focus on the aspects other than vertigo...and there are not many. That argument seems right to me.

My terminology (which I outline here: Towards a Functional Taxonomy of Role-Playing Gamers) would map Cailois' Vertigo/Ilinx to a subset of Sensation. And yes, I think the part of Sensation that Caillois homes in on with Vertigo is very hard to do in an RPG, although I have achieved it a few times with children whose imaginations work more powerfully on them than adults who self-regulate against the sort of distortions of perception that would count as Ilinx.

However, it's worth noting that I think rather little of his other divisions, and in particular his mimicry concept is too vague, covering things that I can consider Sensation (the pleasure of imaging a sensation), Fantasy, Narrative, Expression, and Discovery.

I wonder how Callois would classify making a sand castle. Is it not play? Does he toss it into mimicry and just have done?

But, a successful expedition game has more to go on. There is strategy (do I press on through the storm or take shelter?), there is chance (will I discover a large waterfall here?) there can be competition (will we reach the goal before our opponents?). I think you have to emphasize those rather than experience of being a climber.

The above is a big part of my point. I don't particularly care for Callois distinctions, and I note that Richard Garfield's essay on chance (that I admire greatly) would contradict Callois' instincts here to say Chess has an element of chance in that in practice people play semi-randomly and so stumble into lines of play and in theory by doing so even an amateur might defeat a Grandmaster by pure luck. I don't count "chance" as element of why we play so much as I count as necessary for something I do agree with Callois on - that the outcome of play is not fixed. As Captain Sisko says, we love baseball because it is linear and we don't know what is going to happen.

But I do agree that we can focus on what we can bring to the table to make an expedition fun whether Challenge, Discovery, Narrative, or what have you. Imagine an adventure based on John Wayne's "The Cowboys" with the PC's in the roles of the inexperienced cow pokes learning the trail. This is straight forward traditional RPG play with some of the logistics abstracted out (because it's in the hands of an NPC and thus the GMs problem) and look at all the aesthetics we can meet.

The early part of "Skull & Shackles" has a great little minigame of sailing the ship as crew where a lot of the minigame is not letting the sailing grind you down, and it is pretty wonderful for making life about the ship feel unpleasant and dangerous. Something like that can be easily adapted to something like riding with the herd on the trail with an early "Can you keep the cows alive?" focus. Depending on the system (BRP) you could even finish each day with a skill test to determine whether you learned something on the day and did a mini "level up".

Advantage/disadvantage is also pretty recent. Although maybe that is less of a fundamental shift.

Bloodbowl (1987) has a mechanic where if you are at advantage you take the best of two dice, but if you are disadvantage your opponent chooses the result of two dice (whatever they think is your worst result presumably). Over the Edge (1992) used a very similar mechanic of granting advantage by adding an extra dice to 2D6 and taking the best two of three or granting disadvantage by adding an extra dice and taking the worst two of three. It starts showing up in 3e D&D as rerolls where you can take the better of two results and gradually becomes more pervasive. For example, prior to the publication of 4E I already had in 3e a Skill Mastery feat, that when making a skill check you did so by rolling two dice and taking the best result. Later editions just make it generic, for better or worse (I'm mostly inclined to think for worse).

I would welcome disagreement. My thoughts are only half baked on these questions.

Baking my own thoughts are what a lot of my long posts are about. So I very much welcome the disagreement, feedback, and discussion.