How granular do you usually make a Perilous Journey?
I like the revised PJ-rules in Perilous Wilds, but something about the way it’s worded makes me unsure how to resolve it, and how often moves get triggered.
When PJ gets triggered, how often do they make camp? Do they scout ahead and navigate each day? If a journey takes several days, do you sum it up/abstract it in one make camp-move?
I guess it depends on the fiction, how dangerous the route is and how interesting the journey is vs how interesting the end of the journey is, but some examples would be nice.
Crap, I just typed out a long post and lost it. Sorry, Asbjørn H Flø!
Here’s the short version: We don’t trigger moves for stuff that happens “off camera”, and we don’t follow the characters to the bathroom or play out every second of their lives.
Perilous Journeys can often be treated like the time that passes for characters between sessions: the GM might narrate some stuff they saw or stuff that happened, and ask some questions about it, but we pick up in-character play only at some interesting juncture.
One more idea from my lost comment: We usually trigger Make Camp when a player says “we need to rest”. Maybe they found a place to settle in, or they seek one out right away so they can trigger the move.
Or the GM might ask “do you guys want to rest?” after showing them an opportunity to make camp through the fiction. If the players say yes and settle in, we trigger the move.
Either way, the issue is in focus right now in the conversation at the table, not something that might have happened or probably did happen during a span of time we glossed over. If they say they want to rest, there is a reason we are giving attention to that in the fiction right now, and so the move triggers.
Does that help?
It does, and that’s how I would use it. It’s not so much the level of detail or choosing how to frame the scenes as the intended mechanical resolution that trips me up I think.
The original Perilous Journey move is very clear about this: “A perilous journey is the whole way between two locations. You don’t roll for one day’s journey and then make camp only to roll for the next day’s journey, too. Make one roll for the entire trip.”
But reading the Perilous Wilds-version, I was unsure whether to roll for Make Camp and Manage provisions before figuring out how Scout Ahead and Navigate worked out. And that seemed weird to me.
But I believe you could also play a more West Marches style game, where you made the journeys more granular, and actually rolled for each day. Then you would probably make a lot of discoveries and encounter a lot of dangers. If you look at it, the Hobbit is basically a perilous journey where they keep encountering Discoveries and Dangers that keep them from reaching their goal.