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Author Topic: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions  (Read 2811 times)

jhkim

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Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« on: July 19, 2021, 09:45:50 PM »
Following up on a side topic that went came up in "Use of campfires attracting attention". I had said:

If I want to push more realism and have the PCs take wagon trains and caravans to supply long journeys, I try my best to make it fun for them rather than a constant drag of nitpicking them with details and vulnerabilities.

In practice, I've seen a lot of GMs push back if players try to have an expedition with lots of porters, pack animals, and other support characters for them -- because it comes across as unheroic and breaks assumptions.

There were two responses on the last point,

Those GMs are dumb. We call it an adventuring campaign for a reason. There's a reason it's 30-300 bandits - someone's got to cook the gruel, after all.

Too many gamers have never read the AD&D1e Player's Handbook back section, from p.101 onwards. "THE ADVENTURE" first paragraph tells us to gather information and hire men-at-arms, get mounts and so on if we can.


Pfft on them.  My wife and I love logistics: we're the ones who pore over gear for optimum use. We come by this honestly; we met in a combat boffer LARP with many camping events a year.  If anyone has any question on the matter, if you're going to be out all day swinging swords in 90+ degree weather, you want to have a good hot meal in your belly made from good food, you want to have slept through the cold rain last night in a dry tent, you want to have had a good night sleep in good bedding, and you want plenty of pure liquid to drink.

By contrast, people who figured they were young and tough, wrapped themselves in a cloak, dined on a half-bag of Doritos, tried to sleep on a hillside without shelter, no change of clothing ... nope.  Didn't fight so well.

So yeah: if I'm a PC, I'm going to pay attention to logistics.  If I can afford it, I'll absolutely pop for a pack mount, quality camping gear, good food.  A GM who "pushes back" on that is a campaign I'm walking away from. 

-----

Fundamentally, the clash here is between fictional narratives like The Lord of the Rings and the like - where a few adventurers go it alone - versus historical expeditions which would typically have at least a dozen people or even several dozen including servants, guides, and the like.

As I see it, the key difference in assumptions is that a large and well-equipped expedition is much slower and less stealthy than adventurers on their own. Historically, fatigue, disease and getting lost were the deadliest dangers. In RPGs, these rarely feature - and instead there are wandering monster attacks.

I did something a little like this in a previous campaign - which was a post-apocalyptic game along the lines of The Living Dead. The PCs were shepherding the last of civilization to safety underground while a dragon apocalypse ravaged the surface world. So the PCs had an entourage of non-combatants they were leading.

D&D adventures tend to assume lone adventurers - especially in having stealth or speed required. Some specific issues:

(1) In many game worlds, powerful wandering monsters make the wilderness effectively unsurvivable for an unstealthy expedition with vulnerable non-combatants. In my post-apocalyptic game, this was a feature rather than a problem -- the group faced unacceptable losses because there was no choice. In other games, it may take more explanation for why things are how they are.

(2) Some adventures have an imposed time limit, like "in X days the enemy's plans will succeed" or similar. This

(3) If there is no time limit per se, some modules turn into a longer-term war of attrition rather than the more normal room-by-room approach. For example, a module like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief could turn into something more like a siege or series of guerrilla attacks over weeks rather than going through rooms round by round. A module like Tomb of Horrors might be more like an archeological expedition taking several days per room.

Thoughts?

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #1 on: July 19, 2021, 11:18:51 PM »
Thoughts?

You raise a lot of good points, although I think your point (2) above may have gotten cut off somehow. For a literary example of the same kind of "refugee train" campaign as yours, the primary plot of the second Malazan novel Deadhouse Gates is about a similar situation, a great mass of refugees from an overrun nation trekking across hostile terrain to reach safety.

I suspect that the basic starting assumption of D&D -- i.e. that a party was never more than a few days' travel between a relatively "civilized", "safe" home base and the place of their adventuring, the location of which was also generally already known (q.v., the Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos) -- played a lot into how the game developed as well. Random wilderness encounters were intended to make a short journey interesting, not an incredibly long and difficult one even more dangerous.

I have to admit, I don't immediately have an idea for how to encourage players to buy into the logistical detail of expedition management as fun for its own sake if they're not already inclined to find such things entertaining, but maybe a minigame rules module might help?
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Prairie Dragon

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #2 on: July 20, 2021, 04:42:17 AM »
The 'here there be Dragons!' plot device is always fun to do.  I have found myself down to 2-3 players and the expedition platform has always worked for me.  Especially, when we spend entire session putting together the NPCs and resources they need. Players love to make characters and try new things, NPC's satisfying a lot of urges.  The players also get to do things that a gaming group rarely get to do: sea voyages that lead to discoveries of new lands and people and terrors!

I always start out by having them make three characters:
1.  The leaders of the expedition.  Generally, higher level/power.
2.  The Scout team leaders.  Generally, mid level/power.
3.  Leaders of the men-at-arms and all the support staff.  Cooks, engineers, sailor etc. 

Usually, the leaders are the children of rich merchants or nobles etc.  Everyone picked to go along knows that they can have a share of the gold and glory.  Folks back home write off the expedition, even forget about entirely.  When it returns, the characters use it brag and even get new characters interested in joining the group.  'We couldn't bring back all the treasure, we didn't have room!  We left piles of it!"

I've done this several times and the longest running one ran a whole school year.  It was a good time.  Used D&D 2E...

Khazav

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #3 on: July 20, 2021, 04:42:59 AM »
Ignoring all the potentially boring details, it might be easiest to give a cost per day for wilderness travelling, say 50gp and assume it covers food, livestock, porters, etc. Have the party choose how many days they wish to pay for in advance and if they are in the wilderness longer than what they've paid for, then reduce ability scores some amount per day until they reach civilization and get properly fed and rested.

In a way this is kind of a gamble for the players; they can look at the map or get some info from people who know the area and estimate how many days it is on the journey and then pay the price. If they guess wrong, or bad luck happens, or monster encounters slow them down, etc then they may suffer the ill effects. Makes missions like scouting a mountain range to find a pass much more dangerous.

Khazav

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #4 on: July 20, 2021, 04:46:13 AM »
And, I forgot to add, the amount paid before the journey starts isn't refundable so if the players can't purchase, say, a hundred days of travel and then get a refund if it only ends up being a 20 day trip.

Steven Mitchell

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #5 on: July 20, 2021, 09:39:03 AM »
I look at from the tone of the campaign and the nature of the setting.  If the threat is often things like 100 to 300 orc bands and the game can make numbers overwhelming, then the small army of followers or hired mercenaries--at least in the base camp--is the way to go.  Big monsters are more a threat because of the attrition they cause and the morale they shake.  Accordingly, even within that environment, there are times to scout with a small, highly competent band.  Also times to delve with the smallest but most competent band. 

It's not just that "camp guards" won't go into the dungeon.  It's that those guys aren't experienced to work in that environment, you need a small number to sneak around, and you need your guards to be relatively whole to make it back to civilization.  When the game rules or the setting changes to mute or remove those assumptions, then logistics becomes a game chore instead of part of the game.

Players in my groups are, on average, far more accepting of managing logistics and handling large numbers of characters when in the wilderness, too.  Perhaps it is how I manage the characters differently.  It's fun to get to roll a lot of attacks because you've got 10 archers to roll for when the orc horde is charging.  It's not as fun to keep up with them when maneuvering in tight quarters and most of them can't do anything except react fearfully to the sound of one of their comrades getting eaten or falling in a pit.  I've had players in the past that enjoyed that aspect of the game, but not so much now.

Bedrockbrendan

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #6 on: July 20, 2021, 09:50:30 AM »
Following up on a side topic that went came up in "Use of campfires attracting attention". I had said:

If I want to push more realism and have the PCs take wagon trains and caravans to supply long journeys, I try my best to make it fun for them rather than a constant drag of nitpicking them with details and vulnerabilities.

In practice, I've seen a lot of GMs push back if players try to have an expedition with lots of porters, pack animals, and other support characters for them -- because it comes across as unheroic and breaks assumptions.

There were two responses on the last point,

Those GMs are dumb. We call it an adventuring campaign for a reason. There's a reason it's 30-300 bandits - someone's got to cook the gruel, after all.

Too many gamers have never read the AD&D1e Player's Handbook back section, from p.101 onwards. "THE ADVENTURE" first paragraph tells us to gather information and hire men-at-arms, get mounts and so on if we can.


Pfft on them.  My wife and I love logistics: we're the ones who pore over gear for optimum use. We come by this honestly; we met in a combat boffer LARP with many camping events a year.  If anyone has any question on the matter, if you're going to be out all day swinging swords in 90+ degree weather, you want to have a good hot meal in your belly made from good food, you want to have slept through the cold rain last night in a dry tent, you want to have had a good night sleep in good bedding, and you want plenty of pure liquid to drink.

By contrast, people who figured they were young and tough, wrapped themselves in a cloak, dined on a half-bag of Doritos, tried to sleep on a hillside without shelter, no change of clothing ... nope.  Didn't fight so well.

So yeah: if I'm a PC, I'm going to pay attention to logistics.  If I can afford it, I'll absolutely pop for a pack mount, quality camping gear, good food.  A GM who "pushes back" on that is a campaign I'm walking away from. 

-----

Fundamentally, the clash here is between fictional narratives like The Lord of the Rings and the like - where a few adventurers go it alone - versus historical expeditions which would typically have at least a dozen people or even several dozen including servants, guides, and the like.

As I see it, the key difference in assumptions is that a large and well-equipped expedition is much slower and less stealthy than adventurers on their own. Historically, fatigue, disease and getting lost were the deadliest dangers. In RPGs, these rarely feature - and instead there are wandering monster attacks.

I did something a little like this in a previous campaign - which was a post-apocalyptic game along the lines of The Living Dead. The PCs were shepherding the last of civilization to safety underground while a dragon apocalypse ravaged the surface world. So the PCs had an entourage of non-combatants they were leading.

D&D adventures tend to assume lone adventurers - especially in having stealth or speed required. Some specific issues:

(1) In many game worlds, powerful wandering monsters make the wilderness effectively unsurvivable for an unstealthy expedition with vulnerable non-combatants. In my post-apocalyptic game, this was a feature rather than a problem -- the group faced unacceptable losses because there was no choice. In other games, it may take more explanation for why things are how they are.

(2) Some adventures have an imposed time limit, like "in X days the enemy's plans will succeed" or similar. This

(3) If there is no time limit per se, some modules turn into a longer-term war of attrition rather than the more normal room-by-room approach. For example, a module like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief could turn into something more like a siege or series of guerrilla attacks over weeks rather than going through rooms round by round. A module like Tomb of Horrors might be more like an archeological expedition taking several days per room.

Thoughts?

I am a big fan of parties that organize and go the route of hiring porters, guides, etc. You do have to account for time pressure (if the place being explored is abandoned, then makes this easier, but if it is lived in, obviously you can't quite do the archaeological dig into someone's house without attracting attention pretty frequently). But this to me plays into players playing the game smart and trying to outwit the challenges they face. If putting together a caravan achieves that, I don't see any issue with it. You will need to account for things like cost. What often happens in my campaigns is players start out with less money and have to work their way up a bit before they can attempt these sorts of things.

It isn't quite the same but i had several long term campaigns where players were building organizations in the setting and those because the base of their adventures (i.e. starting sects in a wuxia setting, starting criminal empires in a fantasy or wuxia setting, etc). It does lead to different kinds of adventures. Sometimes the adventure is planning stuff at the sect headquarters, dealing with people coming to ask for favors or sending special teams to take out rivals, etc. But it is still a lot of fun and you can still have ventures into dungeons and stuff

Omega

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #7 on: July 20, 2021, 09:53:58 AM »
Those GMs are dumb. We call it an adventuring campaign for a reason. There's a reason it's 30-300 bandits - someone's got to cook the gruel, after all.

Too many gamers have never read the AD&D1e Player's Handbook back section, from p.101 onwards. "THE ADVENTURE" first paragraph tells us to gather information and hire men-at-arms, get mounts and so on if we can.

Apparently Kyle hasnt read the DMG or he'd know that the # encountered is supposed to represent the total spread out across a dungeon level or overland hex. Not all in one go. But for some reason that has been repeatedly lost and mis-read.

Bedrockbrendan

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #8 on: July 20, 2021, 09:57:16 AM »
Thoughts?

I have to admit, I don't immediately have an idea for how to encourage players to buy into the logistical detail of expedition management as fun for its own sake if they're not already inclined to find such things entertaining, but maybe a minigame rules module might help?

This is a big challenge I've encountered int these kinds of games. One reason I've run them, is I have and have had players who find this kind of logistical stuff very entertaining. I've often come up with various systems for managing the logistics. I've found very few that don't get brushed to the side by such players (for example I've tried to abstract things like costs and hiring large groups, and most of these players want things concrete, not abstract: I pay 100 gold and get x). Not saying this is the case for everyone. I've just found after trying to build my own subsystems for sect building or managing the logistics of a crime racket, that the attracting to this stuff with the players I've had, has largely been about doing something specific and getting a specific result to that, rather than it becoming a mini-game on its own. There are some exceptions. One thing that comes up a lot in these games is sending out groups of hirelings to do things (assassins, builders, diplomats, etc). What I found worked well here was assigning a score that translated into a dice pool (my game is based on dice pools) of 1d10 to 6d10 (and there is a lower rating for unranked characters where they roll 2d10 and take the single lowest result). So the players might have a right hand man who has a general rank of 4d10 for the things he is sent out to. Or they might have a hit squad with a rank of 3d10. Anytime they send those characters do do something, I will roll that pool against the target and determine the result that way. This generally has worked well.

tenbones

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #9 on: July 20, 2021, 12:15:26 PM »
This is normal stuff in my games.

When the PC's invariably reach a certain experience point in the game they're inevitably going to have to plan expeditions to <X>.

Depending on the size of the expedition - it almost always creates more content in just in trying to put the expedition together. Whether it means using contacts to cut corners, or make the trip easier (provisioning is always an issue). Plus if it requires travel along known traderoutes before going offroading - some player almost always wants to make some extra coin with hauling tradegoods to points of interest.

All of which requires:

 - Porters, Wagons, Packanimals, handlers
 - Provisioning for all the PCs/NPCs
 - Security
 - Scouting and general camp-coordinating

This all leads to tons of adventuring possibilities.

 - Attacks and recovery on your expedition
 - Re-provisioning when inevitable stuff gets lost
 - Search and rescue for NPC's that get shafted (you really didn't think all those NPC's were totally safe did you?)
 - Puh-LENTY of RP opportunities between PC's and NPC's that you can use for side-quests. Especially if your expedition hits trade-hubs
 - Every single night: Watch rotation. What could possibly happen? You know what happens at night. GET THEM!
 - Scouting opportunities are adventure opportunities. Sure you're going to your destination... but that doesn't mean your trailbreakers can't find something interesting for now or later.


Pat
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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #10 on: July 20, 2021, 01:14:15 PM »
Those GMs are dumb. We call it an adventuring campaign for a reason. There's a reason it's 30-300 bandits - someone's got to cook the gruel, after all.

Too many gamers have never read the AD&D1e Player's Handbook back section, from p.101 onwards. "THE ADVENTURE" first paragraph tells us to gather information and hire men-at-arms, get mounts and so on if we can.

Apparently Kyle hasnt read the DMG or he'd know that the # encountered is supposed to represent the total spread out across a dungeon level or overland hex. Not all in one go. But for some reason that has been repeatedly lost and mis-read.
Where does the DMG say that?

hedgehobbit

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #11 on: July 21, 2021, 09:37:52 AM »
Fundamentally, the clash here is between fictional narratives like The Lord of the Rings and the like - where a few adventurers go it alone - versus historical expeditions which would typically have at least a dozen people or even several dozen including servants, guides, and the like.

I'm older than most here, so to me the "fictional narratives" include movies like Jason and the Argonauts and Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.  Thus large expeditions is totally something that as a DM I encourage. I've even tweaked my OD&D combat system (using rules from EPT) to make it so battles of 30 on 30 are totally playable so the hired help isn't limited to just guarding the baggage.
« Last Edit: July 21, 2021, 10:02:01 AM by hedgehobbit »

Ghostmaker

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #12 on: July 21, 2021, 09:48:17 AM »
Pathfinder had an adventure path that involved this. Jade Regent, to be specific.

It was interesting, but kind of annoying as well.

tenbones

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #13 on: July 21, 2021, 09:56:32 AM »
I used to run campaigns that were basically Marco Polo (Volo) in the Realms that would take young low level adventurers working for Aurora's (Of the Whole Realms Catalog fame) on a trading expedition all the way across the Realms, through the Hordelands, to Shou Lung.

It was fun as the PC's rose in prominence eventually they were making the decisions on the route taken, from city to city. Tons of political intrigue, making allies/enemies etc. all on top of the whole expedition list of needs and concerns. It's always a winner.


thedungeondelver

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Re: Fantasy adventures as large expeditions
« Reply #14 on: July 21, 2021, 10:39:31 AM »
I don't know entirely about the thesis but I will point out that in my "How to play 1e AD&D" video series I'm doing on my youtube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/c/thedungeondelver ), I strongly emphasize hirelings.  A party of 5 may have anywhere from 25-40 hirelings: bearers, linkboys, men-at-arms, animal handlers for horses, the list goes on and on.  As a party advances in levels they will find these troops used less and less as in-dungeon front line combat troops and more as support personnel.  You take down a mated pair of huge ancient red dragons, you're going to need guards for the Silver Train back to the City of Greyhawk!

My group of 12 players on Monday night has a somewhat smaller retinue; 28 hirelings: 11 light foot, 9 cavalry, 3 heavy foot, and a pair of animal handlers/teamsters for their wagon.  So that works out to just over 2 per character (they were all mostly hired by a single character, but imagine if each player had picked up 5-6 each, that'd be 60-80 men under arms).
« Last Edit: July 21, 2021, 10:41:08 AM by thedungeondelver »
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