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Dienekes
2014-06-07, 08:59 AM
So, I've been the sole GM of my group of players for about as long as we've been playing. I've GMed a lot of games, mostly ranging between war, politics, and city investigations. So, when my players decided they wanted to play a Sci-fi game, I thought it would be fun to try something outside my usual and try an exploration game. I drew an outline of the first planet they were heading to, came up with a strange radiation signal, and sent them on their way.

The only problem was, there was just no spark to it. Without real NPCs to interact with the game just felt meandering, and I could tell my players felt it too. So, I was wondering if anyone here had experience with exploration style games and if they could give me some hints and tricks to make this style interesting to my players and myself.

Mostly, I'm looking for any advice to help build tension and suspense and challenge my players. But if you want more details about the campaign it's in the spoilers. Thanks for your help.

The players are one of several scouting squads in a galactic corporation whose goals are to chart out the unknown sections of the galaxy and retrieve anything exotic or potentially interesting.

The planet they're currently on is earthlike in temperament, and features two sentient races. Both these races are essentially acting out the Cold War. So far that has all been in the background. The planet was discovered when sensors picked up a strange power radiating off the planet. Upon finding the planet they pinpointed several spots that may be the source of the power signal. The group was sent to one of the spots to investigate, however the corporation they're working for still needs to go through several layers of bureaucracy to get permission to make first contact. Until they get it, the group has to remain secretive (though they were given holographs to integrate with the population in a pinch. The spot itself is filled with rolling hills and hyena like creatures that the group has already fought off once. There is a city around 7 miles from the power source that the players have yet to really look through.

draken50
2014-06-09, 09:48 AM
Well I haven't really run a game specifically like that, but my players seem to respond best to exploration when I can add in at least a few of the following elements.

1. The place has a history that is either known by the players, or can be discovered. Usually I like to have them know a bit and discover more as they explore.

2. It helps to have mystery of some kind. Generally they are looking for something, or someone. I tend to combine "Where is what we are looking for?" with questions either about what's going on in the present, or what occurred in the past.

3. How does it affect other parts of the game world or characters? What will exploring this place mean outside of just this session, what impact will/could this discovery have?

4. Excitement: Exploration stories, tend to be more adventurous stories. Boats going off of waterfalls, being chased through jungles by natives, finding ruined monuments or majestic canyons.

Really... when it comes to exploration... I think the most examples of the kinds of things you could do in one place would be the Duck Tales theme song.

DM Nate
2014-06-09, 09:49 AM
Really... when it comes to exploration... I think the most examples of the kinds of things you could do in one place would be the Duck Tales theme song.

Wooo ooooo.

prufock
2014-06-09, 12:24 PM
Honestly, for a sci-fi space exploration game, you don't need to look any farther than Futurama. Just excise whatever amount of humour/silliness from it you think is appropriate for your game and use the basic ideas. That's what I did for a one-shot game I ran.

The party was a ship captain, a gunner, a translator/diplomat, and a medic. Their job was to deliver parts to some natural resource mining company on an odd outpost planet that hadn't really been explored much beyond "is this safe" and "are there minerals there." They get a false beacon that finds them landing in a remote wilderness of strange plants and animals that have a form of direct genetic transfer. Rather than random mutation and inherited traits, they can adopt traits from one another... including the landing party.

Some of the beings were hostile, but others gradually began to mimic traits of the crew, until they found a tree with a copy of one of them growing in its bark (not yet alive).

NichG
2014-06-09, 01:50 PM
You need to get the characters personally invested in the results of the exploration. 'Do the bidding of our company' is at best a stop-gap, a way to get them to the location but not to keep them interested.

Personal investment means that whatever they find has to loop around and be relevant to them - bonus points for if its relevant in ways they didn't expect to be possible. An explorer on an alien world finds an ancient data storage device that has the remnants of a tune on it - something he remembers hearing during his childhood - now he's personally invested because there's an impossibility in front of him that involves his life and his history directly. An explorer on an alien world who isn't supposed to make contact with the locals is knocked out in a rockslide and comes to in the home of one of the locals, who is taking care of him - now he's personally connected to the consequences of his exposure to the planet's population. An explorer on an alien world is expecting to find stone-age artifacts and finds an alien starship far beyond his world's tech level hidden underneath a hillside, with its crew all dead or missing - he's now invested because of personal opportunity. An explorer on an alien world falls through a wormhole and is now trapped on the other side of the galaxy... okay, been done.

Basically you need to get the PCs out of equilibrium with their situation - make inaction something that is unpalatable.

Airk
2014-06-09, 02:34 PM
I read somewhere that people don't actually like to EXPLORE; People like to DISCOVER. The difference is that discovery involves finding things.

Of course, the primary issue here is along the lines of what NichG is saying - what's the driver of the exploration? Are the PCs searching out "new life and new civilizations"? (That's pretty weird and altruistic, truthfully). Are they looking for new worlds to claim in the name of the Terran Protectorate? Now you've got a little more bite. Are they looking for natural resources to ruthlessly exploit? What's the POINT of the game? NO ONE just flies around space because they're bored. (Or if they do, they STAY bored).

So put these two things together:

Find out what the players are after and then have them discover it.
THEN:
Complicate matters.

Awesome mineral deposits in that asteroid field? Uh oh. Looks like the Antorians have shown up halfway through your mining spree. Cut and run? Hide? Try to stall? Realize that holy crap, this is inside Terran space and what are they doing here with a fleet that size?

It seems to me like the root of the problem here that you've had at least one session and nothing has really been discovered yet. Great, they've found a planet with some aliens they have no reason to care about (and no permission to show themselves to) and it's got weird energy signatures on it. That's a setup, not an adventure. That should've been taken care of in the first 15 minutes. They need to find something. OH CRAP. It's a Precursor Artifact... and the indigenous races worship it in their temples/use it to power their superweapon/don't know WTF it is and have it in a museum of art. And the PCs are ordered to retrieve it. Before the rival team from Industrial Light And Fusion arrives - because THEY already have clearance to interact with the aliens.

You're not COMPLICATING stuff enough. :)