Exploring & connecting with discoveries

01 Sep, 2022

I've been super busy this week and haven't had much time at all to sit down and work on anything. Instead I've been thinking about things a lot. I haven’t been able to play RPGs much at all over the summer and I'm itching to get back to running games again, I'm thinking about what to bring to the table. There are dozens and dozens of games that I want to play but I keep thinking about Wanderhome and the sorts of experiences that it helps to evoke. In the absence of combat it helped me think about the other aspects of storytelling I've been preoccupied with. At the moment I'm working on a social game, part of the idea behind that is that the idea of running a social game terrifies me and I'm intrigued to see what I have to include to make that a comfortable experience for everyone. For the sake of this post though, I’m stepping away from that and thinking about the other big video game pillar, exploration.

When I think about exploration in video games I think about the rewards for that exploration and how it’s incentivised. I think they fall into a few categories, including;

• seeing something cool,
• getting something cool &
• map completion.

When it comes to TTRPGs I think there are difficulties in all these categories which revolve around the possibility space being infinite. To take that last point first, you can't complete the map of an imagined space with no fixed physical component, it keeps going until you run out of imagination. Getting a cool thing is tricky because TTRPGs are so often about getting a cool thing the idea of being rewarded with a cool thing for exploring isn't novel or exciting. The first and final point would be to see something cool but that's a hard thing to do as a GM, you have to write something so evocative that it's interesting in and of itself, something I don't flatter myself that I'd be able to pull off regularly. You also run into the risk of railroading players to a particular vantage point to describe the cool thing you lovingly crafted which could rob it of its joy.

The joy of exploration for me comes in two parts;

• the journey itself has to be a fun and engaging part of the experience and
• the discovery needs to be impactful.

Gamifying journeys and different traversal methods are things that there's a lot of writing on out there; be it pointcrawling, hexcrawling, depthcrawling, however you want to crawl about the place¹. I'm interested in what the something cool is. When it comes to exploring for the sake of exploring I don't feel like you can have the things you discover be materially useful all the time, but as with all things they should have Impact². From a narrative perspective it would be useful to incorporate a mix of scales into the discoveries, from small things that impact a particular character to large things which impact the direction of the game. The obvious thing to do there for me would be to tie the cool thing to the place so that as the adventure continued it would be a constant reminder of that place and time. Another option would be to make the thing and the place one and the same, like the Seat of Seeing at Amon Hen³. The Impact is key though, that's what separates the Discovery with any number of other moments in the journey which go undiscussed.

The point I want to make is that discoveries in this sense and the impact they have on players and stories alike are tied up with that old classic, apophenia⁴. In order to be delighted by the things they discover while exploring players have to be able to connect with them. I'm thinking a lot about Knowledge Management at the moment for work reasons and the idea of discoveries in a narrative sense coming from the connection of disparate thoughts reminds me of the Zettlekasten method⁵. When a GM is thinking about what to put at the end of the road, or in a hex, or deeper in into a dungeon, they can use oracles to generate the seed of the idea⁶ but it would be useful for them to consider triangulating the seed with other existing ideas. How does that discovery connect the place to two other things about the world? It could be as straight forward as a player character, an object and the place itself, the discovery doesn't need to be planned at all the crucial element is the connection; the links which are formed between those elements. In a sense it doesn't matter if the discovery itself is revelatory but that connection now exists to be leveraged or evoked down the line. I think that's the joy of exploration, you form links between the places you've been, the people you were with, and the things you found or saw along the way. In a game sense and a story sense those links can be leveraged to drive the campaign or narrative forwards and to call back to key moments, reinforcing their Impact.

#exploration #game-design #knowledge-management #low-violence #rpgs #theory