House Lack of Rule

[the_gneech]

For my Fortress of Tears game, I envisioned it being very much a LotR-clone, right down to the long marches overland. The characters are HERE, the monsters have the travelers checks HERE, kind of thing. To that end, I came up with a very detailed set of travel rules, with hex-by-hex turns that had Survival checks by the designated Guide to avoid becoming Lost, Perception checks by the Scout to avoid unwanted encounters, Perform checks by the Marshal to keep up morale and help avoid Fatigue, modifiers for terrain, weather, etc.

Then, looking at the (mostly) finished project, I just sorta blinked a few times and said, “What were you THINKING???”

It was a very playable system, and did a good job of simulating fantasy-overland-travel of the type likely to happen in a “war against the dark lord” sort of campaign, but when I was suddenly confronted with the question of “How does this actually make the game any more fun?” I couldn’t find a good answer.

Thing is, I can imagine once upon a time looking over a system like this and going “Cooooool.” Because why wouldn’t you have a detailed system for this? That’s what games have, is systems. That’s how your world and the characters’ world interact. You can’t just decide what happens, that’s cheating! But if I’m honest with myself, I can then just as easily imagine myself using the system for all of three “turns” and deciding it’s way too much work, throwing out any result that doesn’t interest me.

At the end of the day, I ended up with a slightly-modified version of the standard Pathfinder rules, which do little more than give you rough MPH measurements with some modifications for terrain and guidelines for fatigue if you push it. It’s not particularly nifty or cool in any way, but it does provide a reasonably fast framework for figuring out how long it takes to get from !The Shire to !Mordor by way of !Rivendell. Since any encounters that happen are only going to be ones that I think are “interesting” anyway, I might as well just spend my time coming up with those instead of wasting my time trying to simulate the boring bits on the off-chance that characters might come to an encounter lost or fatigued.

I don’t know what it is about the gamer mindset, that occasionally gets fixated on the rules as an end to themselves. Maybe it’s just a geek thing. But to paraphrase uber-geek E.G. Gygax, “A good GM often only rolls the dice to hear the noise they make.” A well-run game is all about the players and the story, not the mathematical construct that it rides on.

-The Gneech

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[jamesbarrett.livejournal.com]

For distances in my game, I just made a quick, arbitrary decision about how far something was from the main city and kinda stuck with it. So, when you headed toward Near, to deal with the bandits, I made that be a two day journey and placed the bandits halfway between them. The Appledore farm became more like a day away, but I placed an Inn between them too. Thus, to get to Riven, up in the mountains, it's going to be a 4 day journey., 1 day to the Inn Far Away From Near, 1 day to Near, 1 day to The Last Inn, and 1 day to Riven. Quite the journey that one is gonna be. Now, what to have happen along the way?

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

I've seen dungeon models that were done by flowchart instead of by map, and I can see that being a viable method. Look at Moria: they tromped across that for four days, but the story only stopped to talk about the interesting bits.

-TG

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

The best pacing is the one that's right for the story you want to tell.

That said, the variables of the route, distance, speed, etc. are all known, you could plug that into an excel table, and randomly generate a honkload of random rolls, see what kind of encounter frequency you might expect, and then decide if you do or don't want that to inform you.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

I could, or in my case I'd be more likely to write up a CFScript or javascript web app for it; but the same thing applies: it's a lot of work for what you get out of it. :)

I have a feeling it would end up feeling like playing Dark Tower rather than a roleplaying session. "Move. Encounter. Move. Nothing. Move. Encounter." And while DT can be fun in an 80s-tastic way... nah. ;)

-TG

[rowyn]

I don't think there's any innate reason why the mechanics for rolling dice to determine the outcome of your character's journey have to be less interesting than rolling dice to determine the outcome of your character's fight. :) Although the most people do seem to think of the narrative of combat as inherently more interesting? And that's why they're happier about one than the other? I'm not sure.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

There's more inherently at stake in a fight than there is in wandering from "this patch of land" to "that patch of land," so players tend to want to have more say in how it goes. Detailed fights give the players a sense of control over the outcome.

Compare this to how fights are usually depicted in fantasy lit (at least, well-written fantasy lit)... fights are often summarized or even happen entirely off-screen. We didn't actually see the swarm of orc archers pincushioning Boromir for instance. As readers, we came upon the aftermath with Aragorn. But you can bet, if FotR was a RPG campaign, they would have played out that fight to the last hit point.

-TG