To Boldly Go Where (You Have Never) Gone Before

Pic unrelated.

As discussed in the last post, exploration is something that video games do fairly, even exceedingly, well, but tabletop systems have difficulty with. Let me explain what I mean.

In the freeform collective narrative of a roleplaying game, the storytellers and the audience are one and the same--the players, including the GM. As such, this small group is the only demographic the night's game session is targeting, and because our playing time is limited by life, we want to get to the "good part" quickly, and stay there as long as we can. What the "good part" of the game is depends on the group, and usually the night. Sometimes, it's spending a session playing through a day-long shopping trip in the bazaar of a fantasy city. Other times, it's brainstorming potential solutions to problems the characters face. Still other times, we just want to kill monsters and go through their pockets for loose change.

Because of this focus, travel takes (or should take, if everyone's on the same page) exactly as much time as it remains the good part (yeah, I'm tired of the quotes) or, that failing, exactly how long it takes to get from one good part to the next. Generally, traveling is only the good part if something happens en route, or, as in our recent Vertigo game sessions, if there is planning and plotting and discussion to be done. Otherwise, a trip of anywhere from five minutes to five weeks can simply be hand-waved in order to get to the next good part and move things along. We, of course, see this aplenty in TV shows and movies, Star Trek being a fine example (so I guess the pic was related, after all).

That sort of narrative pacing works just fine for most RPGs, but I want ATOMIC to have exploration as a focus. The world is a wasteland, with nearly two centuries of industrial development interrupted, then finished off, by catastrophes that almost ended everything, followed by another century of survival and the struggle to regain any scrap of the greatness was lost. The players' characters are newcomers to this, or at least people without knowledge of the world beyond the horizon and the chatter of the local radio DJ, so a big part of the adventure, as well as a big part of the reward, is broadening those horizons, seeing what has become of the world, and finding places that are exciting, dangerous, unusual, or just damned cool.

Pic related.

In order for that to be a realistic goal, the rules of ATOMIC need a structure that encourages and rewards exploration for its own sake. Complicating this challenge is the fact that I do not want to force the GM to create maps ahead of time. I would much rather have them use an old postcard or gas station road map (I got a great one of Long Island from 1957 via eBay for my Fallout: New York* tabletop game) if anything, and those are pretty sparse with detail beyond towns and roads, most of which are extinct, defunct or otherwise misrepresented on the map now, anyway.

Here is my current thought, borrowing an idea or two from video games like Fallout and World of Warcraft. First, any campaign area (like Long Island/NYC in Fallout: New York, or maybe Denver and its environs, or the DC Crater) should include a number of readily-identifiable landmarks. These are large natural features like the Rocky Mountains or Lake Huron, artificial constructions or monuments like Crazy Horse Mountain and the Hoover Dam, ruins like the Golden Gate Bridge or St. Louis, and living settlements of decent size like Megaton near DC or the Empire State (housed in the Building, of course) in Manhattan.

There don't need to be tons of these. Several are good to begin with near the start point, to facilitate player agency in making meaningful decisions for their characters, but they are also readily suggested by the real-world features easily seen with Google Maps or Bing. These are the locations for major hubs, trade, home base, and continuing adventure.

Now the next bit requires imagining the rest of the world as resting in Schrödinger's box. I don't know of many GMs that enjoy this sort of free-wheeling, but bear with me. The idea is this. You create other interesting locations on a table, or in a list, on cards, whatever, and when you make checks for random encounters (we'll get to that eventually), these locations can come up, too. The characters are in a mucky radioactive swamp, check for an encounter, BAM! Manhole out in the middle of it. There doesn't need to be any more explanation than thermonuclear war and a century of entropy and we're playing a game here not mapping the world for a class. The manhole wasn't there until the dice were rolled and it came up, but it was there, lurking on that table, waiting to be rolled. Since no other group is playing this particular campaign, it doesn't matter where these outposts, bomb shelters, makeout points, donut shops or whatever show up--nothing has to be set in stone at all until after the metaphorical box is opened, and then, only with this particular group (for continuity's sake).

So we have a way to keep maps light (or unneeded) up front. Now, to reward players for exploring the world around them, what do we do? That will be the topic of my next post. Until next time, true believers.


* This old campaign blog is dead--I'm linking it for curiosity's sake only.