George Mallory, explaining the attraction of mountaineering, said: "Why do we travel to remote locations? To prove our adventurous spirit or to tell stories about incredible things? We do it to be alone amongst friends and to find ourselves in a land without man."
Most fantasy RPGs are about what Mallory puts under the umbrella of "proving [one's] adventurous spirit or telling stories about incredible things". That is what I think you would describe as the main motivation for D&D PCs (along with gaining wealth and power), for example, and the game models that well enough.
Fantasy RPGs model the pleasure of "being alone among friends in a land without man" much less successfully. The struggle of man in the wilderness and the pleasures and hardships of travel and exploration have largely escaped our focus.
This may replicate an imbalance at the heart of fantasy literature, which I think has tended to draw from the more bombastic, saving-the-world and derring-do elements of The Lord of the Rings while neglecting the (huge) parts of the story which concern travel and exploration as interesting activities in their own right. You don't get many fantasy epics which are mainly about the experience of a journey, although Vance's books can have this quality.
Eventually I will get around to buying Ryuutama, which promises to be able to produce that type of play experience. Some elements of the game (the "players and GM create the world together" and the idea of nudging PCs to help each other through the mechanics) are a turn off. But it seems worth putting up with that - by which I mean cutting out those bits - for "Hayao Miyazaki’s Oregon Trail". As long as I can transpose the contents into Lower Druk Yul or Lamarakh or whatever, we're golden.
Parts of the Fabled Lands choose your own adventure series are the closest I've felt to this, in terms of analogue games. I think it's hard to model this sort of wandering solitude because as an experience it is so far away from a table of gamers rolling dice. By comparison, social interactions, barter, combat feel much closer.
ReplyDeleteThe trick is to fill it with enough in the way of events and obstacles that it becomes a challenge, I suppose.
DeleteI'd disagree that wandering wilderness is necessarily any farther from the objective real situation of gamers at a table than combat is. Speaking from my own time in deserts, being the only living thing in sight and being there with a small group of other people are both incredibly intimate experiences, and the latter did not lack for solitude and isolation just because we were 1d4+1 instead of fully alone. If you're gaming in a quiet space removed from external distractions, your reality is probably closer to that experience that to the hot press and frantic chaos of actual mortal combat, and struggling to survive against the dreadful decline of rations and water need not be any less intense than doing the same with hit points (as long as the stakes were set clearly in advance, rather than using it as a screwjob, but that's a difference matter).
DeleteGood points. I do think setting the stakes in advance is important - I used poker chips to represent rations in one campaign, and that worked well.
DeleteLawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom has this feeling. The wild landscapes alone made it feel more otherworldly than a lot of fantasy fiction for me.
ReplyDeleteI have heard a lot about that book lately - something else I will eventually get round to reading,
DeleteHad you considered that for many people, this is an enjoyable game, and that when you speak of "eventually" you will do something, this is how we speak about a fetish?
ReplyDeleteAre you implying I have a fetish for Ryuutama? That would be weird.
DeleteIf I focus on just the first part of that last sentence ("We do it to be alone amongst friends"), I think that can be be replicated partially through putting more effort into the narration of wilderness travel than "you're in a forest/desert/mountain/etc. and *roll dice* find nothing this day". I'm exaggerating here for brevity's sake, but at least in my personal experience, travel feels the most boring when the GM seems to treat it as either filler in the way of the actual adventure or a dry experience of looking at hex maps and random encounter tables (which can be the case regardless of whether you're glossing over it with some degree of extended check or going into more mechanical details).
ReplyDeleteTake some time to describe the majesty of trees towering over the PCs like nigh-immortal sentinels, the breathtaking vista from the top of the mountain, the awesome silence of the desert expanse where nothing else is moving aside from the heat shimmer of the air, the dissociating feeling of floating through infinite nothingness while crossing a huge cavern which the PCs' lanterns all combined can only reveal a bare fraction of, and I think you start to recapture some of that. It's not a perfect solution, and I'd love to see ways of integrating that into mechanics to lighten some of the GM's burden, but when it comes to elements that rely heavily on description/narration rather than tracking finite quantities, I don't think any amount of mechanics can take it over entirely. It feels little different from making combat more fun than a rote exercise in rolling dice and accounting; you have to bring your interest and excitement to the table.
How to do narrative well is a very under-explored skill in OSR blogging,
DeleteYou just inspired about 3500 words that just starts covering that subject:
Deletehttps://www.ashadler.com/single-post/2020/03/17/Tips-about-Narrative-Presentation-for-Exploration-in-TTRPGs