Exploration: Roaming-FLUX
Last week I wrote about travel as rooms.
RECAP
To travel: to go from point A to point B.
To roam: to search an area, looking for discoveries.
If there's no challenge to the journey, just skip/narrate it.
To add opportunities to sidetrack or overcome challenges, include short
interactable elements:navigational dilemmas or hazards, alluring locales with rewards at a cost, social or hostile encounters, etc.- Make costs affect gameplay. For example, in Cairn, taxing HP is pointless, since it can be recovered very quickly. Focus on taxing resources that are relevant for the dungeon.
Use the
present perfecttense to signal these obstacles are found throughout the journey , rather than pinpointing them to exact days.
0.
Roaming (wilderness exploration, outdoor survival, crawling) is something I keep coming back to.
It would seem like a solved problem. Hexcrawls are the traditional go-to. Point-crawls are a bit prep-lighter. Narrative games such as Dungeon World seem to rely on "moves", but I'm not an expert.
I'm never fully satisfied with any of them.
- Hexmaps can feel empty unless near-every hex is keyed. That's why many games focus on regional 19-hex maps.
- Maps in general lead me down a rabbit hole. You start making sure that rivers don't split and end up trying to simulate tectonic drift1.
- Pointcralws suit me well, as they focus more on landmarks and paths, which is the way the ancients must have done it.
And the procedures... In general, they impose/assume a given scale: 24-hour, 12-hour, 6-hour, 4-hour watches. They make you add, subtract, multiply and divide watches, costs and speed based on terrain, weather, or the condition of the path.
The reward for this seems simulationist verisimilitude, which I'm not a big fan of.
1.
So far, my approach to facilitating roaming has been through pointcrawls and the ever present hazard system. You can set a global scale, such as "one roll on the hazard die per 3 locations", or/and assign a number of rolls to a path.
This concern with scale led me to reconsider flux space as a container. Fortunately, I'm not the first to think of this: Troy R has recently posted some Universal Flux Rules on the Cairn server. They have taken Nick's second article on flux space and cleared it of Errant jargon.
2.
I really like this idea, although it keeps forcing a time-scale (and an implicit size-scale).
The whole procedure is so easy to grasp and explain: Declare Action → Resolve Event → Discover Location.
Players have 4 basic actions they can declare: chart the land and discover a location at random, seek a rumoured location, make camp to rest, or peregrinate to a previously discovered location.
Then they roll on the hazard event die. And here Troy has made a sneaky, brilliant contribution: he's forgone the exhaustion result from the original hazard die, which makes sense in the dungeon but has always felt out of place in the wilderness at this zoomed-out scale.
Instead, the die can result in the focus of the particular flux, reinforcing its theme. A hazardous flux will focus on its hazard table, while a peaceful flux will have more quiet results. Even an ominous flux would likely focus on the omens sub-table -- because things are always about to happen.
Finally, the players discover a location, either rolling one of the shallow locations or being presented with a deep location. Deep locations are encountered in order, so it allows some narrative control and progression.
3.
Troy is actively working on this project and he's got big plans for it. I am starting a campaign this week, so I can't wait to use this.
I wish I were exaggerating.↩