Underground Travel

[Glorelendil]

No, I haven't. And with AiME as the model I want to start from scratch again.

[zedturtle]

I had a thought last night that lead to more thought today. I'll PM y'all when I get them in a coherent form.

[Rich H]

No, I haven't. And with AiME as the model I want to start from scratch again.

Do share. I certainly got to a place where I'm really happy with the Journey Rules I run for my game by combining the best elements from the two rule sets.

I had a thought last night that lead to more thought today. I'll PM y'all when I get them in a coherent form.

Groovy!

[Rich H]

New Year review!

Any progress on this, Glor?

[Glorelendil]

Errr...no. Just curious, or do you have a campaign headed underground?

[Rich H]

Errr...no. Just curious, or do you have a campaign headed underground?

More general curiosity than anything, but I have thought about a certain underground campaign more than once or twice...

[Glorelendil]

Ok, let's brainstorm about this.

All my previous attempts have been based on the idea that you roll-as-you-go, which makes it really hard to hit the sweet spot of the right number of events. This is more critical for underground travel than it is for normal journeys, at least if you want to incorporate the fear of getting lost and running out of supplies. And I think those two elements are essential to an 'authentic' experience. It won't feel like underground if you're not worried and scared.

The other component that was really hard to include was preparation/supplies. One of the fun things about D&D dungeons (in the old days) was stocking up on useful supplies. I wouldn't want to replicate that exactly...TOR shouldn't be about itemizing your gear and adding up its weight & cost...but I do think it's fun to make decisions about how much gear you take with you, and it should have an impact on your success. So I played with a whole bunch of different schemes for quantity and quality of gear, and its impact on your dice rolls while exploring. And one of the challenges in that was distinguishing between light sources, food & water, and 'other' supplies that might be useful (ropes, pickaxes, and the obligatory 10' pole).

Some other challenges:
- All my iterations resulted in too much dice rolling
- The best systems mechanically tended to rely too much on the 'Explore' skill
- It takes extra complexity to avoid having the hero with the highest skill constantly making required rolls (that's one of the advantages of the current Hazard system...you get to pick your role, but you can't necessarily hand off the hazard role to the guy with the highest applicable skill.)
- I'm not a fan of secret LM/DM/GM rolling, but I'd love to keep players in the dark (get it?) about just how lost they really are.
- It was tricky to balance the granularity of Encumbrance with the needs of the system. I absolutely didn't want to allow fractional Encumbrance, so you have to require everybody to increase their Encumbrance (even if only to their travel gear) by an integer amount. So then the question is, can they all pick a different amount, in which case the value is the sum, or is it a single value for the entire fellowship, in which case you can use that amount as a fixed value. Both versions have pros and cons, but one of the hard things to avoid is a system that favors party size (either large or small) but this runs into paradoxes: a larger party should need proportionally fewer torches (as several people can share the light of one torch) and ropes, pickaxes, etc., but food/water requirements should scale linearly.

Basically I think the system needs to include the possibility of getting lost or suffering other mishaps that result in unanticipated consumption of supplies, which in turn increases the possibility of running out of light sources and/or food & water, which in turn would make it even more difficult to complete the journey.

How much of that needs to be modeled in detail, versus simply narrated? I don't know.

Let's say we use something like an AiMe approach. It might look like:
- Players decide how much gear they are going to take, which has to include a trade-off.
- Some preliminary roles are made that will determine number and type of encounters, as well as modifiers for dice rolls when the occur.
- During the journey, two things need to occur:
- The pre-determined encounters
- Their current state...meaning how lost they are, and their supplies...needs to change unpredictably. That could either be from a separate set of rolls, or as possible outcomes of the encounters.
- Before arriving, a final roll is made that determines their state (which might even include emerging in the wrong place).

Thoughts?

[Rich H]

Thoughts?

This is a lot to digest, David, so will probably need repeat passed at this...

Let's say we use something like an AiMe approach. It might look like:
- Players decide how much gear they are going to take, which has to include a trade-off.
- Some preliminary roles are made that will determine number and type of encounters, as well as modifiers for dice rolls when the occur.
- During the journey, two things need to occur:
- The pre-determined encounters
- Their current state...meaning how lost they are, and their supplies...needs to change unpredictably. That could either be from a separate set of rolls, or as possible outcomes of the encounters.
- Before arriving, a final roll is made that determines their state (which might even include emerging in the wrong place).

I do think the AiMe approach is the way to go on this. I like the idea of a pre-determined number of encounters and therefore being in control of those.

Perhaps an option regarding equipment, and lack thereof, would be to apply positive and negative traits with regard to these that impact during the delve and can also have positive or negative effects on their arrival roll?

You could abstract out equipment completely though; make it part of the narrative and results applied to the preliminary roll and any outset roll (should you wish to include such a thing); that way delving equipment sets the tone of the delve, both at the start and throughout, but doesn't need to be a 'number-crunching' exercise?

The fluctuating state of equipment could be applied to fatigue gains (lack of the right equipment), endurance losses (poor food and water supplies), Shadow gains (the dark from poor lighting), etc. Perhaps based on the results of the preliminary roll and/or outset roll the number and type of encounters could be determined and the results of these lead to the above aforementioned losses?

As the encounters within a delve to feel like they use the Explore skill a lot (with some usage of Athletics, Riddle, etc for other specific Encounters) then perhaps we need some kind of group-based extended skill check where all members of the party of required to contribute in some way so can impact on the outcome of each Encounter; be it for good or ill?

That's all for now, I think.