tracking in games.

[frost890]

I am trying to find or make a list of ways to track in both fantasy and futuristic games. My gm knows a lot about wilderness survival and feeds off little details.

[Thrudd]

I am trying to find or make a list of ways to track in both fantasy and futuristic games. My gm knows a lot about wilderness survival and feeds off little details.

It depends on the game. Usually games don't model little details, they are abstract. So a tracking character has an ability or a score that represents their skill in tracking. You roll a die to see if they successfully track something.

Tracking could be represented by a more generic searching skill, instead. Then, you might say "I search for tracks or signs of passage", roll the dice and the GM tells you if you find anything. If your GM is super specific and annoying, they might make you declare a search to find every little thing, like a broken twig, each single footprint, or a spot of blood. This would generally be a bad idea, because it just slows a game down and doesn't really accomplish anything. Unless this is a game specifically measuring the players' skill in wilderness survival and tracking. Then it makes sense.

[Knaight]

I am trying to find or make a list of ways to track in both fantasy and futuristic games. My gm knows a lot about wilderness survival and feeds off little details.

For futuristic games:

• Heat signatures. For relatively recent tracking, there's potentially signs of heat from the group being tracked, particularly if they're going through a colder area which isn't particularly windy. This can mean looking at changes in surface heat, air temperature, etc.
• Doppler effects. If whatever is moving is sending off a signal (which in a futuristic game is very possible), and that can be measured very precisely (which in a futuristic game is very possible), you might be able to tell how they're moving based on doppler effects measured in different directions.
• Electronics monitoring. This is less tracking per se and more a searching technique, but if you can monitor electronics and see if the target uses them somewhere, you can potentially pick up a cold trail.
• Air quality testing. If you're tracking someone on foot, this is likely useless. If they're on a vehicle though, and you have sufficiently good sensors for the air, you might be able to pick up traces of emissions, particularly if they are upwind.

For fantasy, you've generally got real world tracking, plus whatever particulars emerge from the fantasy elements. Those vary enough that more detail would be needed to cover much of anything.