Exploration Lessons

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I mentioned earlier I was using Gus L. and I’s dungeon from Fantastic Medieval Campaigns so I could be lazy and not have to prep much for my home campaign’s alien arc—isn’t that the point of a prewritten module, come to think of it? It turned out okay, but I didn’t write a session report because I felt dissatisfied. Everyone had fun, we had good moments, but from my perspective there was friction between the experience we were having and the thing we kind of passively accepted that we were playing. The skeleton of the dungeon is already not the ‘right vibe’ for the campaign but, where at first I was able to make it work because of characters’ own motivations, I struggled because the new characters lacked a reason to be there at all except that the ‘crew’ as an abstract unit had been heading there. The advice sometimes is like, players should invent their own characters’ motivations for being at a place or doing a thing, but I don’t subscribe to a framework of play centered on the setting or the game-master. I’m not their master. I’m their mother, and I am interested above all else in seeing players “play out” their characters. We’re nurturing them. They’re our little babies. So I’m thinking about, first of all, recalibrating shit so I can better curate interesting and specific situations for our characters.

But I also want to reevaluate how I plan, prepare, and play. I feel like I’m throwing shit at the wall and so on. Sometimes I make something that fucking slaps because it resonates between multiple characters, poses difficult questions, and develops themes on personal and social levels (which is what I developed my setting to help me do). And this time, ugh. None of those things. We had fun. We had good bits. I made good dinner. And that was it. What did I do so well the first time besides just putting characters and themes first? And are there any other take-aways?

First, I think the Zombie Affair worked because the literal setting was not the interesting part of the adventure site. I totally expected when I began my campaign that plantations would be very common types of sites, and for a plantation to just be a plantation is kind of drab and depressing. The social intrigue into which the characters were plunged upon arrival was the interesting part. I vaguely remembered a post about designing adventures around questions—surely enough, written by Ty Mindstorm!—but for me it’s not just that the questions guide the adventure’s development on the macro scale, but that each room (of importance!) in the site encodes a specific question and provides answers to another. The cycle of play bounced between “What the fuck?” and “Oh, shit!”, and meanwhile the characters are not bystanders or intruders, but they relate in some way to the drama and are motivated to resolve it because of empathy, lofty ideals, or selfishness.1

  • Crop Fields: Why are the slaves zombified?
  • Big House: Who’s really in charge here?
  • Driver’s House: What’s in it for Bokor?
  • Chapel: Why does Tiffany hide Melanie from the sun?

Constant juice. Nonstop juice. I often don’t fuck with prewritten modules (etc.) because I can’t be bothered to care that much. They have to either come up with artificial hooks to justify the characters being there, or they insist on their own pseudo-literary significance (this is a fucking D&D by the way) because it’s not their job to worry about why the party should care about where they are or what they’re doing. "They’re adventurers, goddamnit!" No. I want the kind of tea which makes a motherfucker nosy, which makes someone let their curiosity get the better of them, which confronts the onlooker with their own tragic flaws and petty bullshit.

I also need to shed off at least a little of what procedural bullshit had been drilled into my brain over the last many years of being in these circles. Something crazy happened in the session whose report I didn’t write. The dwarf and the hoblin woke up an alien sleeping in its coffin-like capsule, and the kitty-angel decided to fuck off into another room (because it wasn’t her problem).2 I was like, oh no, combat’s different from exploration, but then the thinking part of my head was like “We used to do it like this before sweaty freaks yelled at us about doing it wrong.” I imagined a video game in my mind—not that I play many, but it helped me ground what I was about to do—where someone walks down a highway and is suddenly jumped by an alien or whatever. The game in my mind doesn’t switch from time passing in tens of minutes to passing in sixes of seconds. Time passes the same. I realized that also, in my imagination, however much time we spend doing bullshit in a D&D passes probably the same as what time had passed at the table. Except for when we explicitly fast-forward through the things that take longer to occur than they take to talk about, it seems to all come out in the wash. Two hours of playing D&D feels like two hours of my character doing D&D bullshit minus the montages. Plus, I never did care much for random encounters during down-and-dirty exploration, and I don’t track any cyclical resources (in Cinco! resources just take up inventory space and are spent as players do specific actions). Why am I doing any of the bullshit which exists only to provide a procedural framework for those things? Maybe Phandelver had a point. Oopsie, there it all goes.

That’s where I’m at, or at least the rationale. I’ll try to come up with a better framework for myself so I can reinforce these practices in my own game.

  1. The last one might sound like typical D&D bullshit, but it’s different (I promise!) when the greed is objectified and reified through the rules versus when the characters are, as subjectivities, selfish shits. The latter is more interesting and can be challenged as part of play. Then we get, woah, character development. ↩︎

  2. Shout-out to Kaponkie who reproduced my rules for light in the comments of my post about stationery and maps! I’m waiting for them to post about it on their blog, but this moment in play is one where light actually mattered. My first question after getting over the procedural bullshit was, “Do you have a light?” And then the player told me her character had a dark-vision feat and I was like, well, shit, yeah, there’s no reason why you can’t fuck off. The kitty-angel had a misadventure while the other characters managed their own mistake. Very fun! No regrets. ↩︎

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