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Mr. Mask
2016-04-24, 05:53 AM
I was thinking it could be interesting to have a mini-game where you manage aspects of travel and camping in between reaching your destinations. While many RPGs have rules related to these, they rarely form a comprehensive mini game, either being skimmed, ignored, or becoming cumbersome.

Anyone know of systems that try to make travelling and camping mini-games of themselves?


The type of mini game would be a simple resource management game, like many out there. Your resources are Carrying Capacity, Energy, and Morale. Other factors are Terrain Difficulty, Terrain Type and Conditions, Land Speed, Food and Water Rations, Weight, and various character skills such as Woodcraft. Having low Energy and Morale would affect your ability in battle.


To give an example: You plan to travel 50 miles to a city. 5 miles is across easy inhabited terrain, due to good roads. 20 miles is through forest. You have to travel 3 miles across a mountain. Then 17 miles across a tundra. The last 5 miles are easy inhabited terrain again.

We'll say we're travelling at 10 miles a day, as base land speed, with X days worth of food and Y days worth of water water. We also recover 10 Energy points every day of rest, normally.


5 Miles, Inhabited, good roads:
First and last five miles are pretty effortless. You can find water sources effortlessly, and you can buy food to restock your food rations (roll Barter to adjust the price, if you care). Your land speed will barely be impeded by the decent roads.

So, we can clear this distance in half a day's travel. Energy is 100%.


20 Miles, Forest, Uninhabited, no roads:
This is difficult terrain. Your land speed may be halved or worse. Forests do provide the best chance of trapping, hunting and foraging though, so your food and water should last. A woodcraft check can be made to indicate how successful you are.

Due to halved landspeed, it takes 4 days to clear the forest. We decided to hunt as we traveled to maintain our supplies. That cost -12 energy a day. We're back to full rations, and lost -8 Energy with our trip through the forest.


3 Miles, Mountain, Uninhabited, no roads:
Depending on the details of the mountain and how you're scaling it... this can be some of the worst terrain of all. Your land speed will be crippled, maybe 10% of what it was. You will likely have to roll for negative events such as the weather turning harsh. Some require a check, others require roleplay. Water thankfully isn't an issue, as you can melt snow with body heat in a container and drink it.

At 10% landspeed, it would take three days to cross the mountain. We could consider hustling faster to try and get through this place quicker, but that would be very dangerous with mountains. Due to the mountain's rough nature, even with our preparations and survival checks, we lost -15 energy a day. We're down -15 Energy (total: -23), and down -3 Food. Morale would also be lowered.


17 Miles, Tundra, Uninhabited, no roads:
While not as bad as the mountain, this is still pretty bad. Land Speed is a quarter what it normally is (2.5mpd) and we still have harsh weather.

It would have taken 6.8 days to cross the Tundra, but we grow impatient, and decide to double-time through the area, so it takes 3.4 days. We lose -8 energy per day in the Tundra, and due to double-time speed we don't recover any energy. We lose -27 Energy (total: -50). That's pretty low energy... so, we decided to eat double-rations since we have quite a bit of food. (-6.8 food, total: -9.8). This gives us +5 energy per day (+17, total: -33 Energy).


5 Miles, Inhabited, good roads:
Luckily, we reach civilization before we succumb to exhaustion and hunger. It's easy going from here, just like before. We restock our food, and regain 10 energy per day.

You arrive into the city exhausted, but not hungry, and spend the next few days recovering from your journey. The inn allows you to quickly regain your Energy and Morale.


That is the general idea of how travelling might be calculated. It is rather bland summarized like this, and may be more so if travelling isn't interesting to you. Still, what I describe is five stages to an "Encounter" of travelling, a sort of skill challenge. You only roll once or twice for some of the stages, if you want to. With a bit of work, I think something to this nature could be streamlined and be an interesting mini game.

I understand if this doesn't seem as interesting as slaying orcs to you. Travel and woodcraft and resource management is interesting to me. If you do see appeal in this idea, what would you discuss about it that might need changes?


Aside from that, have you heard of RPGs that have similar systems? Have you made attempts to make travel and camp management interesting or central to a game? How would you go about it if you did decide to make travelling a big part of one of your campaigns?

Lacco
2016-04-25, 03:09 AM
I have been thinking about this a lot few months ago - one of my players really likes this aspect of game (the travelling) and would love a travelling heroes sandbox game with focus on the overland travel, adventures in different cities.

He's the type that enjoys a beautiful vistas that you don't even describe - his mind adds the rest.

We tried several things (unfortunately the rest of the group was less enthusiastic, so we tried it in 1-on-1 sessions). We tried to get as many ideas as possible. The best one was the "boardgame" approach.

And no, found no RPGs that focus on this or even have decent rules that aren't really boring/overcomplicated.

The "boardgame" approach was:
You have a board with party stats and tokens. You only write down the "final" stats after the game (the "save" position). Or you just take a photo of final status of the board.

You have an overland map. We tried both hex-based and free, didn't make a huge difference.

You have the day divided into phases for "morning", "afternoon", "evening" and "night". Morning/afternoon are considered to be each 4h long and usually mean marching (with 1h for breakfast/breaking the camp and 1h for lunch break). Evening is divided further into hours. Night phase is not divided and is considered around 8-10h long.



Let's start with Morning and Afternoon.
There are 4 possibilities for these two. March, Foced March, Exploration and Camping.
The first one gives you standard overland speed (I use RoS, it has a handy table).
Forced march gives you higher speed at cost of higher fatigue.
Exploration means you move at half speed, but you are able to find more "landmarks" as you look for them. Also, hunting/foraging is possible.
Camping means you rest and the game switches into "hourly" mode as in evening.

Evening can be done with the same selection as morning/afternoon.

Night has only forced march (slower due to low light, but especially tiring) and camping.

Each of these has its own modifiers on the corresponding tile. To track what has been done during the day, players place a token on the field they decide to use (e.g. morning - forced march; afternoon - exploration; evening - camp; night - camp).

E.g. if you march at night, you need to burn torches, your rolls are decreased, and you get tired faster.



The GM has "terrain" cards, containing basic information (terrain type, modifiers for speed, foraging/hunting, morale, special info). Every time the party enters different area, he places the token together with other tokens (e.g. weather).

Players have their own small board where they track fatigue, hunger/thirst and morale.

Food is represented by other tokens - and each party member consumes 3 pieces per day (equal to full rations). If he eats less, his hunger grows, until it's critical and he starts acquiring fatigue.

We did not consider thirst usually - if a party crosses a source of water, I assume they fill their bottles/waterskins and continue. Only if water is troublesome (deserts, wastelands) it's tracked - we did it with two jugs of water (one representing their reserves, one working as "dump") and bottle for each player (representing their thirst - in wastelands, they had to pour some water to "dump" - or drink some - each phase).

In RoS fatigue removes dice from your dice pool, so it affects your combat abilities too. Morale works as rerolls (giving you the edge), so it's especially important to keep it high.

This system works for hexcrawl/sandbox exploration/travelling.

If this is for "adventure", I'd go with overland map where the players plan their route. GM writes down the terrain cards and then it's just about how much they deviate from their route...

Ok, hopefully this is something like you expected :smallsmile:.

Mr. Mask
2016-04-25, 10:15 AM
Lacco, would you like to correspond regularly? You're a thoughtful person, and you think similarly to myself, I always enjoy the feedback you have to offer. I would in turn do my best to give you good feedback on your ideas and systems.


To this, you have quite an interesting system. The granularity of phases is interesting. As you saw, I went with straight days of travel, based off the number of miles divided by your (modified) land speed. So, if you need to travel 3,033 miles, with a landspeed of 15, that's 202 days. At a rate of -1 Energy a day, that's -202 energy. Etc..

From this, I can quickly work out the results of the party's planning quickly. Now, if the Party only had 100 energy, it's easy to adjust. They travel for 100 days, then rest for five days instead (+20 Energy per day). Or, if they want to keep at least 50 energy, they can decide to take 8 days off during their journey. Or, if you want to get really fancy, they can decide to take a day off every 27th day. In either case, it's easy to subtract the amount of food, and calculate other variables.

Of course, my system feels like a math exercise.... Having granularity and atmosphere, "It's morning, what do you do?" is good. The only issue I see, is that it could be too long for a given travel period. In a ten day journey, that is forty phases to go through. The decision density per phase seems like it will be low. I feel reducing it to a smaller number of turns would be more interesting for your players, trying to give them more and more impacting decisions each turn. Say, if you made each turn five days, you might say, "you see that you are running low on food. Should you slow down to hope to hunt down some deer on your way? Or force march your way to town? Do you want to ration your food, or will someone volunteer to not eat for this turn?"

Having a hex grid and cards is a good idea. I'm not much of an artist, so I tend to think, "maps? I'll just use numbers." But, as you point out, it makes it far easier for the players to work out the best route to their destination. If you play with a map editor for a while, add some fortresses which may or may not be friendly, areas known to have bandits, and some obstacles in the path, and planning your route could be way more interesting then I made it seem.


Thanks for sharing. If you found this feedback helpful, I would be interested to say more about the rest of your system. I'm curious how you handle various aspects, as well.

Thanks again, Lacco.

Lacco
2016-04-26, 07:30 AM
I don't have anything against regular correspondence. And you usually give good first ideas, so it's easy to work from there.

If you ever decide to GM a PbP travelling campaign, I'll be happy to join :smallbiggrin:.

I must say that I don't really enjoy the "math exercise" approach, mostly because I have enough maths at work :smallsmile:. So while that is a good way how to model the long journeys, it wouldn't work for me because it doesn't take individual party members into account, and I am also sceptic about 100 days travel, 5 days rest part - while it is quite good for modeling of the end result, it's of no use if there is no "time limit" or "resource limit" which will pressure them to make some decisions.

Because, really - it's not about the GM preparing a good system, which will tell them how much food will they eat or fatigue will it require, it's about going through the mountains, slowly progressing through shorter but more dangerous part, which may save them some time but at the same time risking snowstorms, or going around them for faster travel, but risking starvation in the wastelands.

The system I proposed would be used as general guideline - the players set the "programming" for each stage (e.g. the forest = we hunt every evening) and they change it only if they see some trouble ahead. And yes, "per week" rounds would be also good, especially for long journeys.

One thing I foresee is that you shouldn't roll much - if a game has mechanic for "take 10" or "take 20", it should be used here to a great extent. They should decide whether they want to lose whole evening for hunting or whole day - if whole evening, the result will be worse than if they hunt for whole day.

I'm also not an artist, so I usually just keep a map in my head and sometimes scribble in a notebook. If you want to completely lose the hexes, it would be easy to just produce a small map with only the largest landmarks (e.g. the Farleaf Forest, the Misty Mountains, the Lost Marches) - the players should have an idea which way they want to go (e.g. "We'll go through the forest, then through the marches - I don't want to cross the mountains"). And then you give them a card like this:



Farleaf Forest
http://digital-art-gallery.com/oid/2/640x449_1382_Forest_of_Ghost_2d_fantasy_forest_env ironment_picture_image_digital_art.jpg

Length
Speed
Fatigue
(per phase of march)
Orienteering


85 miles
Halved
1
Difficult (-3 to rolls)


Hunting/foraging
Water
Herbalism
Morale modifiers


Good conditions (large game)
Abundant; no rolls
1 check per day/+1 per hour spent
Dark, bad visibility, foggy


Then you write down list of possible "small" encounters - a meadow with deer herd, a cart with broken wheel, dead body, bandits, etc.
Then you write down list of possible "landmarks" - such as the fortresses, areas known to be infested, the one huge tree, etc. The characters can navigate thanks to these.

And you check their orienteering - if they fail, they just choose a wrong way and maybe they bump into one of the landmarks.

As for the system, I'm not using it - the guy who helped me with it had to stop due to RL (girlfriend who doesn't like RPGs) issues. But I'll try to find some of the old scribblings I did for the system.

JAL_1138
2016-04-26, 07:41 AM
There was the old "Outdoor Survival" from Avalon Hill (that TSR suggested be used with White Box in some form or fashion).

Mr. Mask
2016-04-26, 11:27 AM
JAL: Interesting, I'll have to look into that. Thanks, JAL.


Lacco: OK, I'll send you a message. I'll definitely let you know if I can get campaign together based off this idea.

With individual party members, I do have some ideas for that, but I'll go into it a bit later. I agree that my example was pretty absurd, it was largely just to demonstrate the flexibility of the system. And yeah, I can see your point about the math exercise. It has a weird appeal to me. I guess one problem is, say I was playing your system, I would end up doing what I described for my system. I would count the amount of food, how much each person eats, estimate how much forage can be gained in the forest and how many days the journey should take, then follow a schedule, and I'd mostly want to skip to parts where the schedule goes wrong so I can immediately correct it. Of course, there is a factor I have neglected.

In reality, travel is fairly random. You can get lost, you can go off course, you can get sidetracked evading enemies or following side-quests, you can stop for injuries or the like. The amount of time it takes to cover a distance should probably be more random, and you need to break up travel with these sorts of events. One thing I can say in favour for static travel speed modifiers, is that it can even out statistically. If you lag behind one day, and surge forward the next, over enough days it'll even out. It's arguable how much different there'll be in travel time based off luck, with reasonable travelers. Hmm... not sure.

For a resource and time limit, I feel like travel itself can supply those, if you're going anywhere less than commonly traveled (or even commonly traveled). If you plan the trip wrong, you might starve, or you might be too tried to fight off bandits that occur, or you dawdle so long that the trip is either too late or scarcely worth it.

Those are some good cards.


Now, on the mention of programming and the earlier mention of individual party members, I had an idea for camp actions. These would be the programming of your travel. Do you want to light a fire each time you stop for the night? That will give you more warmth and allow you to cook food, increasing morale and Energy, and protecting you against cold weather. It will also make your camp more obvious to enemies, but it will allow you to fight in a lit area around your campfire if they attack you. You can decide which of you will light the fire, or it can be on rotated duty.

Similarly, you can decide how many people you want to keep watch each night, how many to send out scouting, or whether to only send certain party members scouting, who cooks, who hunts, whether you build a shelter out of sticks, etc..

You would add up the numbers from these duties, and calculate the total per day Energy and Morale effects. You can make some adjustments midway on the trip, simply by adjusting the total by any removed or added activities' values. If you have someone who is great at scouting and hunting, and someone with cooking skills, I think assigning people can make for a more immersive trip. Choosing a setup suitable for your travel plans would be mechanically interesting, I think.

If someone gets sick, and you try to go a few days without a fire because you're almost there and the bandits are following you, but they take a turn for the worse and might die, you decide to light a fire and risk it. But, you add extra night watches and pick a defensive location for your camp, putting up stakes and obstacles. Some of you even sleep in your armour. If the bandits attack, you will be ready for them this night.

mujadaddy
2016-04-26, 01:04 PM
I lifted this from someone's blog, but didn't capture the person's name or site. Presented as is, with credit to them.

TRAVELING AS A PARTY
My assumptions in the design of this procedure:
1) PCs are moving overland under their own initiative.
2) PCs are in at best semi-civilised lands where resupply is uncommon.
3) There are subprocedures for certain steps not outlined in detail here (for example, wandering monsters, determining what you can see when you look around, searching and surveying, handing the PCs shady and contradictory agendas before their adventure).
4) You are using a hexmap.
5) The PCs move on average 2 hexes (20km) per day, one in the morning and one in the evening.
6) I interpret 3-in-6 to mean "On a result of 1-3 on a d6", 4-in-6 to mean "On a roll of 1-4", etc.
7) Each PC is executing their role in parallel rather than sequentially.
This procedure is executed each day the PCs travel, once per day.

1. Preparation for departure (2 hrs.)
a) Spellcasters determine memorised spells.
b) Any healing from resting overnight or for the previous day is recorded by each PC.
c) Any relevant landmarks within sight of the party are noted.
d) Roll 1d6. The corresponding hex face has the path of easiest travel.
e) The direction, pace and marching order are determined by the caller.
f) The timekeeper determines any expendable resources that have been activated by the PCs (rations, water, protection items, etc.).
g) Any relevant spells may be cast.

2. Morning travel (4 hrs.)
a) If the PCs are not on the path of easiest travel then the DM rolls to determine if the PCs veer off-course. (3-in-6 chance; +1 on the roll per landmark kept in sight for the entire morning)
b) The mapper is informed of what terrain the PCs are moving into and marks this on map in pencil. (Either procedurally generate or DM informs them based on prepared map). They also mark the existence of any paths the PCs have been following.
c) Any extended in-character socialising during the morning is performed.
d) The guard, or one PC not otherwise occupied, rolls for any morning random encounters and fills in the random encounter tracking sheet appropriately.
e) Resolve any morning encounters.
f) Timekeeper and quartermaster update their records.

3. Noon stop (1 hr.)
a) PC may attempt to determine if they are lost. (1-in-6 chance to determine correctly; +1 per landmark they can sight themselves on).
b) Any relevant landmarks within sight of the party are noted.
c) Roll 1d6. The corresponding hex face has the path of easiest travel.
d) The direction, pace and marching order are determined by the caller.
e) The timekeeper determines any expendable resources that have been activated by the PCs (rations, water, protection items, etc.).
f) Any relevant spells may be cast.

4. Afternoon travel (4 hrs.)
a) If the PCs are not on the path of easiest travel then the DM rolls to determine if the PCs veer off-course. (3-in-6 chance; +1 on the roll per landmark kept in sight for the entire morning)
b) The mapper is informed of what terrain the PCs are moving into and marks this on map in pencil. (Either procedurally generate or DM informs them based on prepared map). They also mark the existence of any paths the PCs have been following.
c) Any extended in-character socialising during the afternoon is performed.
d) The guard, or one PC not otherwise occupied, rolls for any afternoon random encounters and fills in the random encounter tracking sheet appropriately.
e) Resolve any afternoon encounters.
f) Timekeeper and quartermaster update their records.

5. Evening (4 hrs.)
a) PC may attempt to determine if they are lost. (1-in-6 chance to determine correctly; +1 per landmark they can sight themselves on).
b) The quartermaster, or one PC not otherwise occupied, draws the camp layout on a scrap of paper.
c) Any research, preparation for the following day, etc. may be done.
d) The caller determines the watch schedule.
e) Any extended in-character socialising during the evening is performed.
f) The guard, or one PC not otherwise occupied, rolls for any evening random encounters and fills in the random encounter tracking sheet appropriately.
g) Resolve any evening encounters.
h) Timekeeper and quartermaster update their records.

6. Night (9 hrs.)
a) The referee rolls for any night time random encounters and determines which PC is on watch if/when they occur. The PC on watch fills in the random encounter tracking sheet appropriately.
b) Resolve any night encounters.
c) Timekeeper and quartermaster update their records.

Mr. Mask
2016-04-27, 12:36 PM
Thanks Muj! This is a really interesting ruleset. Landmarks are a good point, and this demonstrates an interesting system for causing the party to naturally veer in odd directions. This is a pretty clever, simple way of doing it.

This system has raised several thoughts. The characters do not seem involved in success and failure, and the choices seem minimal. If the random roll puts the path in a good direction, then generally you will follow it. If it puts the course in a sub-optimal direction, you generally will follow it to avoid the risk of getting lost. If it is in a useless direction, you have to chance a better path. Besides this, there's only he roleplay based decision of which direction the land slopes so that you can keep an eye on landmarks, trying to keep as many in view as possible. Without a height map, it is hard to represent enough depth with that aspect. There could, admittedly, also be the possibility of making your path towards known landmarks and use them as waypoints to guide your path, which is probably where this system really shines.

Hmm... this system presents a good point, in that way. Having to decide the path you take not just with obstacles, but landmarks could be interesting, and hoping you see the landmark soon and worrying it won't show up on schedule. The question is the best way to do this.... You're essentially gambling, the further you decide to go without a landmark. Personal skill in travelling may help you to reduce the need for them. In reality, there is also possibilities like backtracking and finding your trail, or getting somewhere high up if there is any notable terrain at all to look at.

In my system, I could just randomize the amount of days a trip takes. Or I could have a Get Lost event, where you need to solve the problem and get back on track somehow, where the players choose or decide on a solution. Priests could pray, wizards could try spells, rangers could do their best to work out where they got lost, the party could backtrack, or press on, risking going (even further) off course before finding their way again.

If you were going to randomize travel distances based off this, you probably would want to adjust land speed so that getting lost and going off course weren't factored into this.

mujadaddy
2016-04-27, 01:47 PM
Yeah, I think it's specialized for blazing your own trails.

Player input: I think that the system-equivalent for Area Knowledge would give bonuses like Landmarks, and of course the best thing to do would be to hire local guides with these Landmark bonuses. (ie, being familiar with the area makes useful Landmarks more frequent)

Travel distances: Amount of linear distance traveled should ALWAYS depend on the terrain. Whether that distance was covered in the correct direction is what the Landmarks etc. are for.

I also found this note, which I wrote, for my 30-mile hex map:

"March" = 4mph = 32mpd = 1 Hex (also Horse's Walk)
"Forced March" = 6mph = 48mpd
"Trot" = 8mph = 64mpd = 2 Hexes
"Canter" = 16mph = 128mpd = 4 hexes
"Gallop" = 32mph = 256mpd = 8 hexesOf course, some of these modes of travel shorten the amount of time available for foraging, setting up camp, and sleep.

Mr. Mask
2016-04-27, 02:46 PM
Using skills to create more landmarks is a good point. That does create some complications, though. A lot of landmarks are fairly obvious to a skilled traveler. A mountain, a hill, distinct patches of trees, lakes and marshes and rivers, etc.. Realizing where you are based off a landmark requires knowledge of the area, but navigating based off a landmark is fairly simple.

I'll have to think of this more. Including landmarks would be nice, but it seems an amount of specificity and work for arguable gains mechanically.