A possible set of revised Expedition Moves for #Stonetop. Feedback welcome and appreciated! (Edit: updates made based on comments.)
Previously, we’ve been using the expedition moves from the Perilous Wilds. Those work really well, but travel ends up being like a hex crawl rather than a point crawl. And while Hexcrawls are fun, they’re best for games that are about exploration, where the PCs are a bunch of wanderers out to see what they find.
That’s not what Stonetop is about. The PCs in Stonetop are local heroes, and when they leave town, they leave with a purpose. In general, you can boil down the types of travel they’ll do to 3 types:
1) Travelling the roads (which are supernaturally safe)
2) Going to a known place through dangerous terrain
3) Searching high and low for a place that you know is out there
Type 1 is easy: the GM says how long it takes, provides some color, and the players Manage Provisions to add some randomness and texture.
Type 2 is a revision of the original Undertake a Perilous Journey. The intent is allow the journey to be handled at a zoomed out level (think montage travel scenes in Fellowship of the Ring), but have the potential for meaningful interruptions–without falling into the “there’s always just 1 random encounter” paradigm. (relevant: https://goo.gl/5TSe3W)
Type 3 ends up being very similar to the Labyrinth move that Jason Cordova and David LaFreniere presented on the Discern Realities podcast. I’d actually had the framework of this move worked out a long while ago, but shelved it when Perilous Wilds came around. I think it’s interesting how designs evolve in parallel.
I like it! its a bit more crunchy than standard rules, but adds some nice layers of story telling in. I have a few questions about the Wander move. How does one lose progress? I could see it happening as a GM hard move, or as a strictly fictional basis to justify the mechanical taking away of progress points, but it wasn’t clear to me from the text. My second question is do you intend for all the rolls to be done by the same person? The text seems to say that you do when it says “whoever leads the way rolls.” If it is not your intention that a single player make all the rolls, I would recommend rephrasing that a little, or otherwise indicating that more than one person can do this. I would recommend that more than one person make the roll throughout the wandering, just from my experience with the labyrinth move. When I’ve used the labyrinth move, varying who made the roll kept the players involved and kept me as the gm asking questions about how their plan was changing or what new tactic they tried next.
Wander is perfect. I’ve been struggling with a good way to do a random pointcrawl that doesn’t need travel distances and the like. With a move like this (hold and pay, like the classic labyrinth move), I can easily have them draw lines of travel to make it to new points.
I really like Wander.
While I feel those moves are well done, and reasoned, still I think that almost all the moves should address to a Characteristic. I try to avoid the roll+nothing ones… Maybe you could incorporate the characteristics, probably raising the modifiers numbers.
My only beef is moves with rolls that make you makeba move with more rolls. “Make camp” -> “stay sharp”
Other than that, nice work! And i too love wander
Robert Doe Like, you don’t like that it’s explicitly called out? Or that Stay Sharp is a separate move?
I’m pretty confident that it belongs as a separate move. The moves that directly suggest it (UPJ and Make Camp) are both fictional modifiers that set up a situation. Trying to cram “surprise” into those moves as well is tough, and it works well as an individual skill (+WIS) instead of situational modifiers.
I guess I could see just dropping it entirely, and handling it GM moves and monster tags. Like, a stealthy creature is going sneak up on the party and the PC on watch/point will maybe get a GM’s soft move as warning. A huge forceful creature is probably gonna wake everyone up well before it gets to camp. Hmm. That’s worth pondering.
Andrea Parducci I don’t think I’m following you. Are you saying that you think all moves should be “roll+STAT”? And that the ones with situational modifiers should be +STAT and +situational modifiers?
Either way, I don’t think I agree. But I considering turning Forage back into a roll+WIS move (and making the bounty fictionally driven).
Jeremy Strandberg I personally love leaving it open to the player to justify the stat they will use to modify the roll. Having a player describe in the fiction then deciding which stat the fiction is determining the roll take is my favorite because of all the fun ways players may try to “game” the system or, alternatively, realize they are more interested in the fictional positioning and take the low stat roll. When they take the second of those two, I feel like a story teller is truly acknowledged.
Echoing the love for Wander 🙂
Should the sentence in that last paragraph say “If a roll takes a day or more, MAKE CAMP each night.”?
(Also, Forage: “+1Â if you know the land and its creatures”)
David LaFreniere… (Edit: cross-posted)
How does one lose Progress?
As part of a GM move (use up their resources, tell the consequences and ask, turn their move back on them), as appropriate for the fiction. Most obvious would be a miss on a Wander roll. “_After a hard day of travelling through the badlands, you find yourself thinking that this particular vista looks oddly familiar. It is! You’ve looped back in a circle! Lose 1 Progress, and the porters are starting to grumble about your incompetence._” But it could also happen as a result of putzing around a Discovery, or having to flee a Danger, etc.
Do you intend all the rolls to be done by the same person?
As it’s written now, that’s what I’d expect. I think you call out a potential issue, though, and that’s worth thinking about.
It’d add even more text to the move, but it might be worthwhile to make it a roll+STAT move like Defy Danger. That could also address a niggling issue I’v had… that the time scale is pretty rigid. Maybe something like this would be better:
When you set out to find your goal, tell the GM how you go about it. They will tell you how long your efforts will take (minutes, hours, a day, more). Whoever made the plan rolls, and if your approach relies on:
* Blazing a trail through harsh terrain, roll +STR
* Stealth or secrecy, roll +DEX
* Thorough, painstaking exploration, roll +CON
* Memory, lore, math, or deduction, roll +INT
* Your sense of direction and ability to read the land, roll +WIS
* Inquiring with the locals, roll +CHA
This adds quite a bit of text to the move, but it does a few things I like:
1) generates more interesting fiction than “we keep looking”
2) encourages multiple PCs to get involved
3) allows for different checks to take different amounts of time
I’m not a fan of how much text it adds to the move, but I think I can handle that with some formatting.
Jeremy Strandberg that sounds like a solid way of varying the roll and pushing players to better fictional positioning (which I love for my players to describe).
Revisions made.
* Reworked Forage to be +WIS instead of situational; moved the situational modifiers to the bounty instead.
* Renamed UPJ >> Venture Forth (borrowing from Jason Lutes here)
* Modified Wander as described above.
Just to clarify my earlier post.
Make Camp, UPJ and Wander all require a roll. Then, require an additional roll (sometimes 3 in a row, Wander>Make Camp>Stay Sharp). Its logical, and fits the moves well, a credit to your work. I just prefer to have a move that requires a roll, to resolve then and there. Thats just a personal preference.