>I was wondering how you fellow GM's handle long experiences. For >example, my party took a sailing ship on a 3 week journey to get to >their destination. How do you guys handle that? Do you just say "ok, >the ship journey takes three weeks! You're relieved when you see land!" > >I tried doing a little bit of roleplaying, like having one of the PC's >get caught up in a drinking game with some sailors, or gambling, etc, >but that only took about 10 minutes of real time before it wore thin. I >do want the players to get a feel of the monotony and boredom involved >in traveling long distances using primitive technology, but on the other >hand, I don't want the players to actually get bored and feel the game >is becoming monotonous . . . > >Any advice?
One of my favorite campaigns involved a lot of travel. It was a mechwarrior campaign with the PCs as Federated Commonwealth/Comstar/Star League Agents. They traveled to planets with problems to investigate and solve those problems. In the battletech universe unless you have huge amounts of resources interplanetary travel takes a long time (days to months depending on the distance). What I did during that campaign to illustrate the boredom experienced by the crew was to sometimes deliberately let the game drag for a little during travel - then divert their attention to some trivial event. The players would almost always bite on any plot hook thrown their way at this point (smuggling beer into dry military posts, picking fights with blakists using the same jumpship, deliberately preforming unnecessarily high G burn in to planetside) just to spice things up. The players almost immediately realized the parallel between their tedium and the tedium the characters would be experiencing. They would look back on it later and talk about how stupid it was for their characters to do some of the things they did, but that they could totally see the characters doing them after being locked in a small ship with 3 other people for 3 weeks straight. The players eventually developed a system to pass the time productively (and we simply glossed over most the boring parts). First they used it for healing down time (Mechwarrior 3rd isn't real forgiving for its wound system - your not likely to die from anything real quick but body parts really don't like railgun and laser fire). Second several of the characters took the teaching skill and they began to cross train each other to keep themselves flexible and sharp. And Third they converted a unused Mech bay into a gym and used it to keep honed. This all fit very well with the partially burnt out former special forces background most of the party shared. I don't know if it is something you would want to try but it seemed to work for me. I tried to keep the "tedium" down to around 15 or 20 minutes at the max to prevent it from messing with the fun too much, but needed it long enough for the players to start to notice. It also helped that most of the tedious travel happened right at the beginning or end of a mission - so the exciting challenging part was unaffected by the occasional slow pacing I threw in. Clint _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
