Navigating Complexity: Streamlining Mechanics in Falling Tides
I am running a West Marches game called Falling Tides. It's set in a 17th Century analogous world; not our world, but similar in terms of technology level, fashion, culture, etc. It's using an OSR rule set that's a combination of The Black Hack, 17th Century Minimalist, and Tiny Pirates. So far I have run 3 sessions in this setting.
I've been using overland travel procedures adapted from The Perilous Wilds, the Retired Adventurer blog, and a few other places. The party roles I've provided for my players so far include the Navigator (keeping the party moving in the right direction), the Scout (searching the area for locations), the Lookout (watching for wandering monsters), and the Forager (searching for food on the go). A lot of the systems I've looked at have more roles or slightly different ones, but this format seemed (in theory) to emphasize the type of exploration experience I was after... or so I thought.
The main issue I'm experiencing is that the mechanical procedure of traveling from one hex to another winds up consuming an inordinate amount of time, and the actual in-universe narrative experience is being shoved to the side. Maybe it's just a combination of my inexperience, the rules being designed to generate an experience I'm not aiming for, and my sessions being too short, but the balance has felt skewed too far towards mechanics and away from the narrative. The hex-by-hex procedure often manifests as a lot of rolling dice without anything interesting happening. "We spent 5 minutes rolling dice, and we wound up in an identical jungle without encountering resistance or discovering anything cool. Let's do that again four times." Bleh.
I had been making the Navigator roll for every hex previously, but for no good reason. They were following a path, and the weather was mostly good. In the future, if the Navigator is unfamiliar with either the starting or destination hex, and there is no clear path (inclement weather will negate the usefulness of a faded path), a Test is needed. Otherwise, the I can just narrate this step of the journey. The Lookout was also rolling every hex, even if I had rolled and determined there would be no random encounter. This led to pointless rolls where nothing interesting happened on either a successful or failed roll. In the future, I will just declare that nothing attacks. If I rolled that they find spoor or tracks, I will simply tell the party. No need to obscure future hooks by hiding the presence of something neat in the region. The Forager also rolled every hex. I had also been asking players to Test rations every hex. Tedious and awful. I've decided to test rations once daily (24 hours after their last meal), and will ask the forager to test at the same time. As long as they spend one four-hour block foraging, I will let them feed four people on a successful test. I'll be eliminating the Scout for my purposes. The Scout seems like it is covering similar territory as the Navigator (surveying the territory) and the Lookout (spotting threats before they spot you). It adds an extra roll to every hex that can be trimmed. If the party wants to spend time exploring a hex to find hidden locations, they may do so, but simply passing through a region won't invoke this mechanic going forward.
I also plan to pre-roll for random encounters on each hex I expect them to encounter, and pre-roll a week of weather (broken into 4-hour chunks as seen below).
Finally, I am chewing on a system for subdividing the time for the session and rolling an appropriate number of encounters. If I have three hours to game and I expect my players to visit 12 hexes, that's four hexes per hour. Of course, they are likely headed somewhere specific with the intent to do something specific, so I may want to allocate an hour for that destination. That leaves me with twelve hexes over two hours, or six hexes an hour. I know an encounter will likely take about an hour to resolve, so I need to account for six hexes' worth of danger in one encounter. This means that longer journeys will result in more intense encounters rather than simply more encounters. I will still roll to determine where these happen on the map and what they involve, but I'll modify the challenge level to suit the in-game-distance:real-world-time ratio.
I'm not confident about this last one. I feel certain it would have a positive effect on timekeeping issue, but I feel it is also the idea that's most likely to have a negative impact on the sense of a living, breathing world and DM impartiality. I'm going to put some thought into the best way to reconcile those competing goals.
I'm hoping I've identified a few ways to improve the narrative flow of the game without completely sacrificing the mechanics of overland travel for people who enjoy that kind of thing. I'll let you know how it goes.
