Exploration Rules?

[ImaTarget]

Hello all,

I am looking for MRQII compatible exploration rules/suggestions. What I want to archive is the feeling of discovering an unknown world where the players are stranded with no way home. It might be a Hexcrawl but I am not sure on that yet. Survival, community building and exploration should all be main themes. Are there any products, be it adventures, backgrounds or rule sets that are compatible with MRQII (Or easily adaptable) out there that contain useful material on this theme?

 

[Loz]

You might find RQ Empires to be of help in establishing nations, tribes, settlements and so on for the world. But, at the character level, I'd think there are scores if supplements out there that will furnish you with ideas.

I always found the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide a really useful resource for trekking through the outback. You'll need to do some conversion work, but it has some interesting material in there.

One thing that's always struck me about exploration/investigation is how disaster can hinge on a failed skill roll. For the exploration phases of your game, why not try this:

Preselect up to 6 crucial skills needed for exploration for each character: suggestions are:

Perception
Resilience
Track
Brawn
Survival

Take the critical range of each (ie, value divided by 10 and round up). This gives each character a number of automatic success available to them when exploring and using those skills. Each success spent is removed and when they fall to zero then the skill is rolled as normal. You could be less generous and divide skills by 20. You decide when this Success Pool is refreshed - perhaps after a period when the characters have rested for a significant period of time in one safe place before they go exploring again.

This allows characters some measure of survival and means that missing things crucial to survival or driving the plot forward won't impinge so much on player morale or derail the plot. You can, of course, insist that a roll HAS to be made rather than spending an auto success on it. It also saves Hero Points for more detailed affairs such as combat.

I've thieved this idea from Gumshoe and is something I intend ti make use of whenever I run investigative games when clue finding is essential to the story - but it should well for exploratory games too.

 

[ImaTarget]

Oh , I like that Skill-check Idea! Good call, and really usable for detective scenarios too. Nicked for the future!

Empires is on my shopping list for the next month already. I do not have access to AD+D Wilderness guide however and it seems it is not available as a PDF. Is there anything a bit more recent anyone can suggest? Preferably available as PDF also as the shops here usually stink.

 

[DamonJynx]

D&D 4E has a kinda-sorta-similar mechanic called a Skill Challenge. It's a little bit different though:

Instead of Auto-success' the PC's roll each time (depending on the situation it's either a group roll vs. the lowest skilled participant, or individual tests) with overall success dependant on achieving X number of success' before Y number of failures. The X & Y values depend on the level of the PC's and complexity of the challenge. Success' generally give important info or a bonus to the next skill check according to what's appropriate; with failures doing the opposite, not getting info or imposing some sort of penalty suited to the task.

It wouldn't be difficult to adapt that mechanic to RQ either due to the focus on skills.

I actually liked those mechanics over most of D&D4E, probably because I'm more story, role-playing oriented than combat, hack-and-slash focused. Which is why I'm enjoying RQ so much I think.

Now if only I could find a GM in Sydney...so I can play as well as GM.