Games with exploration systems

[Jiggy]

Hey all,

I've heard that there are RPGs which contain subsystems for wilderness (or other) exploration, but aside from one that I'm about to try (Mutant: Year Zero) my exposure to such mechanics is zero. However, it's a topic I have an interest in and need to do some research into how different games have handled exploration mechanics.

Can anyone recommend some games with exploration systems for me to read up on? Bonus points if they're free/cheap or have some kind of SRD or something.

Thanks!

[Goth Guru]

Here's a few.

https://www.google.com/search?q=rpg+wilderness+generator&oq=rpg+wildern ess&aqs=chrome.2.0j69i57j0l2.15380j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

[Jiggy]

Thanks, but I didn't mean wilderness generators. I meant games where part of the system is a mechanical implementation of the act of exploring. Have anything like that?

[Steve Geddes]

There's a bit of that in kingmaker. I presume you mean more robust than that?

[Jiggy]

I actually haven't even seen Kingmaker. I'll have to see if I can find it.

[Steve Geddes]

The exploration stuff was a pretty small part of it (most of the mechanics were about developing one's settlements). It did provide a framework for exploring unknown hexes and gradually "taming" the wilderness by finding and dealing with scattered, set piece encounters whilst dealing with random, wandering monsters.

There wasn't a huge amount of crunchy stuff though (from memory, it's been a while).

[DM Livgin]

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir had a wilderness travel system where skills were mechanically important and there was an entire sub system around fleeing powerful enemies and running down week enemies. A computer game, but a sub-system like any other.

[Bluenose]

There's a Dungeon World supplement that covers that exact territory - the Deadly Wilds, possibly, though it's been a while since I read it. 7th Sea also includes some, though it's not yet got any supplements going into detail.

Traveller, if you're willing to go into SF territory, has had several versions of rules concerning exploring areas of space, planets, and zooming in to particular regions. Most of the books on 'world building' or the Scouts career have something like that. It's not uncommon in SF games, including Star Trek Adventures.

[Haladir]

Pathfinder has an Exploration System from Ultimate Campaign. (It's a modified/expanded version of the Kingmaker rules.)

Dark Dungeons RPG is an old-school rules (OSR) retro-clone of the Tom Moldvay/Dave Cook D&D Basic/Expert rules, released under the OGL. It has a fairly extensive wilderness creation and exploration system, that pretty much parallels that of the 1981 D&D Expert Rules. (These were used for the 1981 hexploration adventure X1: The Isle of Dread.) These are very simple and workable rules for hexploration.

I found some more general advice on creating and running hex-crawl adventures at this guy's blog.

[Jiggy]

Bluenose wrote:

There's a Dungeon World supplement that covers that exact territory - the Deadly Wilds, possibly, though it's been a while since I read it.

I found one called "The Perilous Wilds". Is that what you mean?

[@stroVal]

Check this out:

Forbidden Lands Rpg.

also 'Mutant Year Zero' and 'Tales from the Loop' use previous versions of the exploration system in this.

[@stroVal]

DM Livgin wrote:

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir had a wilderness travel system where skills were mechanically important and there was an entire sub system around fleeing powerful enemies and running down week enemies. A computer game, but a sub-system like any other.

That was great.A great game overall, good acting, script, quests, graphics.

Too bad NWN2 also had a game breaking bug that nobody on the dev team seemed to want to help fix. :/ I had to quit after not being able to progress (even restarted the damn thing to same results)

[Bluenose]

Jiggy wrote:

Bluenose wrote:

There's a Dungeon World supplement that covers that exact territory - the Deadly Wilds, possibly, though it's been a while since I read it.

I found one called "The Perilous Wilds". Is that what you mean?

That's the one. Sorry, I couldn't remember the title properly.

[Jiggy]

@stroVal wrote:

Check this out:

Forbidden Lands Rpg.

also 'Mutant Year Zero' and 'Tales from the Loop' use previous versions of the exploration system in this.

Yeah, I saw the Kickstarter for Forbidden Lands, and it looks really enticing. Even so, my group is likely to play MYZ soon, so as far as researching exploration systems, it might be a bit redundant. Or not? I wonder how different they are. :/

[@stroVal]

I backed 'the Forbidden Lands'.

I'll let you know...in a year unfortunately :/ haha

[@stroVal]

Theres also this system I discovered:

Worlds Apart

Never even heard of them making a fantasy version of Traveller.

But at the very least you can mine ideas and sub-systems...

[Jiggy]

Just wanted to pop back in and thank everyone for the suggestions. In the end I designed a hybrid of open-ended hexcrawling and linear module-style gameplay.

Look for updates on my project in the new year!

:D

[doc chaos]

Have you been to the Welsh Piper hexcrawling blog? It helped me a lot.

[Irontruth]

Beyond the Wall I believe has some mechanics. Not sure as I haven't read it, but a friend keeps trying to push it on our group.

The One Ring - not exploration, but travel, which is similar, but different.

Torchbearer - focuses on dungeon exploration. Time, resources, mapping are all tracked.

Ryuutama - traveling rules built around exploring. Fairly lightweight game overall. Interestingly it's highly gear focused. Characters end up carrying around an extra wardrobe for different types of terrain/weather.

Those are a couple I can think of right now. It's an interesting balance to try and strike. A lot of exploration is resource management, but it's of things like rations, water, torches, ink, and paper. How do you make that bookkeeping interesting and meaty without going overboard and making it tedious? What if tedious for one person is exciting for someone else?

I've started leaning towards abstract methods. A number of games have used a mechanic where a resource is assigned a die size (d4, d6, d8, d10, etc). When you use the resource, roll the die. If it comes up a certain number (like 1) the die size decreases. If a d4 decreases, it is exhausted. Basically, if you have Torches (d4) and roll a 1, you've just grabbed the last one. There's a lot of possible variation, and it means you don't have to track individual amounts.

[Rathendar]

Ultimate Wilderness has a varient exploration system also, which plays out different from kingmaker/ultimatecampaign's hex crawl. Just as an FYI since you were looking for variety.