User talk:IGTN/Feral Libram/The Wilderness Exploration Minigame

Hex spacing and turn length

I finished the updates we talked about in chat and wanted to get a second opinion on them wrt this minigame. Finding food is here and the overland stuff is here. And after writing all of it out, I'm thinking that moving to turns as 1 hour blocks instead of 2 hour blocks might fit better. - Tarkisflux 20:40, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Sure, one hour blocks work for me. Actually, that makes the six-mile hexes work better with different speeds, since they just take two hours at 30' and three hours at 20'; 40' still makes me start using half-blocks, though. --IGTN 08:21, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Speeds over 30 are going to be problematic in general on an hour time scale with 6 mile hexes (excluding any (2^n)*30 speeds, which map nicely). We could probably be lazy about it and just place people in whatever hex their movement ends them in, and then if they stop for the night we don't bother tracking how far along it they were and make them pay full rate to move on to the next one in the morning, losing any excess move they might have otherwise had. Written out that looks like a 40' could move 1 space per 2 hours, or 2 spaces per 3 hours. 50' could move 1 space per 2 hours, or 2 spaces per 3 hours, or 3 spaces per 4 hours, of 4 spaces per 5 hours, or 5 spaces per 6 hours. Speeds between 60 and 120 would see similar weirdness where you got to move 1 space per hour for a while before getting 2 spaces per hour near the end.

The alternative might be to just dump the idea of overland turns and more accurately map location. Instead of saying something is "in hex 5", it would have actual real coordinates. Hexes would be used to indicate terrain type, but you'd know how many miles you needed to go to get to a particular. I don't particularly like this solution. - Tarkisflux 18:49, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I'd probably just alternate. Something like a speed of 40 takes two hours to clear the first hex, then one to clear the second, then two, then one, and so on; 50 does 1 2 1 1 2 1, 70 rounds down to 60 with a bonus hex every six hours or something, and go from there. Or, failing that, bearing and distance to center in each hex, but that would be really inconvenient.

Yeah, that's the non-additive version of the 1st thing I wrote. So I concur. - Tarkisflux 23:23, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Things to do in a hex

Aside from "move through" and "find food", it looks like the actions available to players at this scale are going to be "search for quest stuff / general recon in hex" (which may also include "see big stuff/terrain in neighboring hexes" and "find stuff to fight"), "avoid stuff that found you", and "deal with random natural event/hazard (includes poisonous food supplies and disease exposure)". Am I missing anything?

Those actions will probably allow a reasonably solid exploration setup, at least as solid as the old move and search and fight wandering monsters dungeon crawl setup, but it relies a lot on the MC to pre-sketch/develop stuff and leave it in various places so people can find it. Which is fine for games where searching for something within a time frame is the objective, but I think we can expand the usefulness of the game by adding some extra stuff.. Assuming random encounters are in, it makes sense to do a similar random location hook table that can be dropped into places when players go searching in a random direction. I'm inclined to even add abilities to classes/skills that let them randomly drop certain types of points of interest on the map because they know where to look for them or heard about them once upon a time in a tavern somewhere. - Tarkisflux 23:23, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

That makes sense. Move, Explore, Scavenge as actions. Random encounters are certainly in; this minigame wouldn't run without some way of doing random encounters, although having a list of "random" encounters for each area and checking them off as you go through them works too. Random locations should work, but I'm not entirely sure how they're different from random encounters.

Integrating this more fully with character classes would be a good idea. I'll definitely stick some abilities for it on the classes in this book, and maybe mention some stuff in for earlier tome classes and classes that get revised later. --IGTN 02:50, 22 December 2010 (UTC)