Before we get into the article, it’s ZINE MONTH! We, Storygames Chicago, got our start with publishing during zine month so it’s a special time for us. This year we are back at it with Chase Kurkowski’s instant cult classic, Diabolic Dialect. Grab your Spellbook, don your robes! Dive into a magical game of weird wizards and insane, linguistic spellcasting!
Get to Kickstarter for that, stay here to dive deeply into our love of exploration, our discontent with its execution in tabletop games, our yearning for something more, and our striving to uncover it. Will we succeed? I’m honestly not sure, but you can be the judge of that. In any case, we need to start with a question.
Searching for Exploration
What is exploration? Or maybe more importantly, how can we design satisfying exploration in a tabletop role playing game?
We, the authors, have chatted before about how neither of us has much patience for definitional discussions, but definitions are useful when used to direct creativity! You wouldn’t catch me dead debating “What is Jazz?” but seeing a band self-describe as nu jazz/prog? oh yeah cool I’ll check that out.
So what does exploring feel like, and how can we evoke that feeling in tabletop game design? Maybe it’ll help to start with our definition and see where it takes us.
Exploring is: noticing unfamiliar history while doing something demanding
Noticing your finds makes them feel real. If you couldn't have missed it, you're in a museum or a theme park, not exploring. But if you notice something in a museum or theme park that wasn’t signposted and highlighted, that might be exploring.
Unfamiliarity brings you outside the rote, creates wonder, and sparks curiosity for more noticing. If you expected what you found, you weren’t exploring, you were searching. But if you notice something unfamiliar about it, you might have started exploring.
History imparts gravitas, makes it feel important by connection to the rest of the world. If what you noticed is an opportunity, danger, or valuable, you’re scouting, not exploring. But if you notice some unfamiliar historical detail in the opportunity, danger, or valuable, you are exploring too.
Finding while doing something demanding gives each find a sense you earned it, space to breathe, and an opportunity cost. We don’t have a catchy “not exploring” example here, so instead let’s dig a bit deeper into why this friction is so important.
Examples of “something demanding” you might be doing when exploring:
Hiking or walking in a wilderness or city
Clearing out old junk from an abandoned cabin
Interviewing, or getting to know people
Scanning, skimming, or studying academic writing on a subject
Getting to know people through conversation
The space flight controls and physics in the video game Outer Wilds
The draw-3-pick-1 constraint of the video game Blue Prince
Whether it’s the physical exertion of hiking or the mental burden of poring through dense text, the demanding thing is taxing, but also rewarding in its own right! You should enjoy doing the it enough to want to keep at it, but it should be demanding enough that you “had to try” to reach your next find.
Doing the demanding thing takes time. The moments when you’re fully engaged in it give you critical space to mull over, internalize, or theorycraft on previous finds. You need this time! Reading a bulleted list of clues is no fun at all.
What do we mean by opportunity cost? Since time is limited and exploring isn’t effortless, you have to make difficult, real decisions about where to look. The daydreaming about the path not traveled, the path that could be hiding something incredible, that could be hiding anything, makes the world of your exploration immersive and expansive.
Our Discontent
So if that is what exploration feels like, how can we do it in the tabletop role playing games we’re playing or designing? This is where we’ll stop defining and start speculating and wondering. But first some complaints about unsatisfying exploration we’ve experienced.
Unsatisfying Exploration
A common model of exploration is the hex crawl, in an authored setting, with resource management, random encounters, and random loot. While this technically meets our definition of exploration, the specifics aren’t fully satisfied, and we’ve never been very happy with it. Discoveries from random encounters or loot end up feeling arbitrary and expected. Findings from prepared settings end up feeling handed out rather than noticed. It’s either obvious when the GM gives a relevant detail, or you completely miss it. We end up feeling like we’re waiting for the GM to tell us all the cool stuff they prepared rather than uncovering an undiscovered world. This is certainly not everyone’s experience with hex crawls and random encounters, and its obviously okay to like this sort of play.1 We simply don’t prefer it, and there are others like us.
So what then?
The thing we want is for a sense of history, place, culture, and verisimilitude to emerge from noticing and realizing it along the way. This isn’t something we’ve figured out yet in our own games. Either played or designed. However this process of definition and discussion gives us some ideas.
One way this feeling of exploration could emerge is from simple play patterns2. They’d just need to satisfy the definition of exploration. If details are established while doing something effortful, and we notice that they are unfamiliar and historic, it will feel like exploration because it will be exploration. We could act like little J.J. Abramses throwing in little mystery boxes along the way. The details we notice plus our natural inclination to speculate and build on what’s been established will create a world that feels surprising rather than expected. That feels consistent rather than arbitrary. That feels discovered rather than authored.
A first stab at it
An Epic Fantasy PbtA game3 might create these play patterns with the following GM principle, GM moves, and PC move.
GM Principle
Barf forth Apoca Paint your wondrous and fantastical world
Daydream about the details of your epic fantasy world. The geology, the views, the plants and animals, the cultures, the politics, the magic, the monsters. Wonder about, but don’t decide, its history.
GM Moves
Describe a detail. Often mundane. Sometimes wondrous, curious, or ominous.
Hint at a deeper and unfamiliar history.
Build on speculation. By confirming. By confounding.
Player move
When you notice a sign of unfamiliar history speculate on what it must mean then roll +sharp. On a 10+ ask one of your choice, on a 7-9 the GM gives the answer to one of their choice.
Where can I go or who can I ask to learn more?
What detail here have I missed?
What omen is there to be guided by?
On a miss prepare for the worst.
Other options?
There are a few other disconnected directions we expect to be fruitful in creating the kind of exploration we’re searching for that we haven’t fully processed yet.
Here is a handful of them.
Paint the scene as described in this article from The Gauntlet by Jason Cordova. The asking and answering of these questions could fit well as a demanding activity and a source of details to notice.
Opportunities outside of talking at the table for noticing unfamiliar history, like images or audio. 4
Hiding things around the play space before the game.
Costumes and props with details of unknown history to be discovered.
Hex-crawl where each hex is drafted when entered, as opposed to predetermined or fully random.
Did we find it?
I don’t know. We did learn a lot writing this! Hopefully we’ve given you some things to try and think about in your own search for exploration.
1 Two intriguing play styles in this old school direction I need to explore more are Blorb Principles, and Fantasy Non-Fiction. It’s possible that these would make old school style exploration satisfying for us but we simply haven’t tried it, so who knows?
2 These play patterns are NOT at odds with hex crawls or random encounters, though they might be at odds with authored settings.
3 Jesse is currently working on an Epic Fantasy PbtA game and has added moves very much like this to the play test document (Treacherous Winds).
4 Collin is a freak for meta-mechanical reveals in games and would flip his lid if he suddenly realized a sound that had been playing alongside the background music for weeks had narrative significance.