Day 6: Explore
There are a couple of different types of role-playing styles played by fans of RPGs. Power gaming, more acting than dice rolling and a few others. One of the biggest styles is Exploring. Star Trek is a classic for this style of gaming. Boldly Going Where No One Has Gone Before. Finding a strange new world and discovering new life forms. While I’ve never had the opportunity to play Traveller, I understand that Exploring is a big portion of that game as well. There have been various rules in different Science Fiction games that gave a methodology of creating new worlds (FASA had a very interesting system) and new aliens. I remember being amazed that Starships and Spacemen had a system that could randomly decide what the aliens bumpy foreheads would look like.
The Dungeons and Dragons Expert Rules introduced Dungeon Masters and Players to the hex crawl. This was the next step up from exploring underground caverns and dungeons as described in the Basic Rules. What will the players encounter when they blaze a new path (hey did I just connect to another one of the words in the challenge?). I remember reading the rules and wondered how many times the DM would actually keep track of the party getting lost? Is the adventure in the travel or is the adventure in the destination? I don’t recall which one of the retro-clones it was, but one rulebook talked about how the regular population hardly moved past the regional area that was controlled by the local baron. This made travelers from other ares carriers of news. The locals would want to know what they saw on their exploration. This could lead to some role playing opportunities when the party reaches a tavern in a new town. That is, if the citizens of the town trust outsiders (insert dramatic music here). Something for DMs to consider between dungeons and hexcrawls.
Final Thoughts:
Flavor is one of the suggestions? Really? I wonder if anyone will really post about Flavor. Path kinda works alongside Explore (which I tried above). But I couldn’t think of anything that would be interesting to post about. I’m still scratching my head about Flavor as a suggestion. Chase could have been an interesting subject. I’ve heard that the James Bond RPG had a good chase system. I’ve just never played it to try it out. Flavor? What are we going to get the homebrew stats of Flavortown King Guy Fieri?
