The other day Kasper Brohus posted a move for navigating a labyrinth. I really liked the concept, but came at it in a slightly different way. Any thoughts on how this might work?
When you explore the labyrinth, choose one party member one as the trap expert, one as the rear guard and one as the cartographer (a character can only have one job). If you don’t have enough party members or choose not to assign a job, treat that job as if it had rolled a 6 . The trap expert roll+DEX, the rear guard roll+WIS and the cartographer roll+INT. On a 10+ all three. On a 7-9 choose one.
Cartographer
You clearly mark the correct path so you could get through the maze again easily.
It doesn’t cost each character 1 use of rations.
It doesn’t cost you 1 use of adventuring gear.
Trap Master
You don’t miss finding any of the traps.
You disable all of the traps you find before they can effect anyone in the party.
It doesn’t cost you 1 use of adventuring gear.
Rearguard
You aren’t surprised by any of the patrols you encounter.
You manage to avoid most of the patrols.
You get the drop on one of the patrols you do encounter.
Choose all/choose 1 feels a bit weird to me, but I like the move overall
Interesting. /sub
/not time enough to comment so sub
While in the spirit of undertake a perilous journey it’s a lot more fussy.
The Trap Master Cleric stomps all over the thief’s niche with a better move of the same name. Perhaps that part could be more like “if the trailblazer has/is a Trap Master then [] otherwise []
I do like the concept. I’m being super-critical to hone your Ars Magica move writing skills.
You’ve got a very good point, Adrian Brooks. I don’t think this move is appropriate for common use. It’s a fine custom move for my group because we have a thief, who would definitely be chosen for that role, but it could easily be seen as giving his ability to anyone – which is not good.
What appealed to me about Kasper’s original concept was taking the perilous journey and bringing it down to a suitably small scale. I feel like I might be going in the right direction, but it does need some refinement.
Jared Hunt In response to your comment above.
I’ve actually thought about using the Undertake a Perilous Journey framework for creating moves for more navigating more exotic kinds of environments.
Essentially, you could write one for every type of environment, only using Undertake a Perilous Journey for those without a specialized move.
I wouldn’t do that though, I’d only make them for environments that didn’t really fit with UaPJ but still feel like they needed a move. Just like I did with labyrinths 🙂
Now for some feedback.
I think this is a little too fiddly. I used the UaPJ framework to make a very simple move that made the party members rely on each other and still skip the “yet another long corridor with three arbitrary doorways” part of navigating mazes.
I like the idea of the “choose X out of Y” moves, because it lets the players choose the bad / good stuff their characters are exposed to, but I think it kind of gets in the way.
As Adrian Brooks said, it also lets some classes step on other classes’ niches. My move has the same problem with the trap expert. I’m thinking about renaming it to spotter and making the +10 a “you find a way to get around every trap on your way” and the 7-9 to “you don’t blunder into any traps but you still have to deal with them”.
You could do something similar? The “disarm traps” is the thing that makes it step on the Thief’s niche in my opinion.
Thanks, Kasper Brohus.
I also just read Johnstone Metzger’s post about negative choices and will now take the rest of the afternoon to reevaluate everything I thought I knew about this game 😉