Allan wrote:
Anyone familiar with the Travel Montage system from 13th Age?
Nope, but that doesn’t stop me from commenting, see below.
Anarak wrote:
I’m actually struggling with overland travel in my games as it sometimes feel like a chore or, at least to me, feels like i’m wafflin. As a flick buff i’ve naturally moved to jumpcuts of fragments of scenes backed by an adventurous song, but that’s just through my narrative.
Jumpcutting to fragments is in the Blade mindset. Like we state in the book, we don’t care for travel downtime. Your Arabian Nights rogues are travelling from Baghdad to Cairo? Fine, bang, they’re there — if the journey itself isn’t the story. And if it is the story will be clear from asking yourself whether events on the quite possibly dangerous trip would merely delay the resolution of the story, like a random encounter, or if the trip is actually part of the story arc. Tolkien glances over the companions’ — quite possibly not at all leisurely — trip from Rivendell to Caradhras, but he devotes many pages to the much, much shorter journey of Frodo and Sam from the Falls of Rauros to the Black Gate. Let’s take a clue from him (and all writers) and just glance over travel time that would be no more than an episode.
If somebody is very uncomfortable with that insert a cut scene, like
13th Age seems to suggest. A very brief encounter, designed to be dealt with in no more than
20 minutes of game time and addressing one
PA of one
PC would fit the bill. On the way from Baghdad to Cairo cut right to a sandstorm in the desert, or to some fellow traveller trying to steal something from a
PC, or to an encounter with beduins that might turn into hostilities if handled poorly, etc. Especially with trips that take my players from one cultural or climatic region to another I like to use this technique myself, as it imparts some impression of the surroundings changing.
For a really long trip you can either string up a succession of such small scenes along the way, or actually insert a half-way adventure taking up an entire session along the way. With the PA-guided play-style of Blade I am however wary of such adventures and prefer a string of cut-scenes, as such an adventure needs to be very carefully tailored to not actually detract from and merely delay the group’s interest but instead have meaning in regards to their PAs, something that I have found frequently to be beyond my capabilities.
But, returning to
13th Age: I quite like the technique, but even among my crowd I would not trust of all of them to be able to handle it correctly — even more so as with Blade, the player making up a probem for another to solve should absolutely be required to address one of this player’s PAs with that problem. And, the way Blade treats travel, I would say that for most trips one such problem should be enough, not a string of them.