Making TTRPG procedures

Better Sailing. Sailing... We are Sailing....

Astronomy: sailing under the midnight sun. Engraving, 1825. Wellcome Collection.

Procedures

In this post I wanted to outline how I go about starting to think about new procedures for a game. I’ve been wanting to make a sailing game, so I thought I’d try to think through how sailing could work as a central part of that, creating the feeling of travel by water.

Why sailing?

As a method of travel, sailing is both romantic, with images of sailing into the sunset and the vast distances covered by the Polynesians and Vikings, and deeply rooted in natural processes, harnessing the wind and the currents to move. In a post-oil world (ineveitable with Oil being a finite resource) it’s likely sail will return as a common form of transportation.

But primarily, I want to create a feeling of freedom in this game, a satisfying sensation of getting the calculations just right to speed from one location to another. To create that feeling however, you have to bake in the opposite, the difficult slog through adverse conditions, the bad luck of the wind changing at just the wrong time.

I want the sea itself to be a character in the game, not just a flat expanse to be crossed. I want speed to feel fast and cool, and crazy crossings in little coracles possible but full of drama.

So, I’m approaching sea travel like wilderness travel in traditional dungeon games, with encounter rolls at every Watch. I’m using ECO MOFOS!! rules on Watches, with 6 segments to a day:

1. Dawn

2. Morning

3. Afternoon

4. Twilight

5. Night

6. Dead of night

ECO MOFOS!! specifies rolling for Encounters at every point on a pointcrawl, but I feel like sea travel should be more organic than that, so my instinct is that we should be rolling for Encounters once every Watch. 4 hours between possible Encounters feels about right in the expanse of the ocean.

As the length of time at sea determines the number of times an Encounter is rolled for- being out at sea becomes dangerous. As each Watch you also check to see if the weather has shifted, it means that the more time you’re out at sea the more likely the wind will change. This should make travel dramatic and unpredictable.

Image of circular currents in the Pacific Ocean

I like point crawls in TTRPGs. They make navigation straightforward, are simple to set up and improvise for the GM (I’ll go more into this in another post). But pointcrawls across the Sea feels a bit strange. You don;t really sail in straight lines. And looking at the diagram above of all the circular currents, it made me think, maybe we could have circular routes that the players can hop on and off of, like the London Underground (ridiculous, I know, but I grew up in London and the tube map is seared in my brain).

Image of a Circle Crawl/Knot Crawl Map of a watery environment

So how about something more like this. As a GM, youd draw a number of islands (maybe from a dice drop [something for anothe post]) and then draw circles connecting them, and around the outside of all of the islands. This gives dlexibility and choice. Let’s say you can hop between the circles at their closest point, like changeing lines on the underground.

But what are the dots, I hear you ask? The dots are Knots, a real measurement of speed in nautical terms, but here abstracted into a marker.

So, some rules:

Sailing the seas

Sailing the seas is a balance between currents and the wind. The currents set the sea lanes, and the wind will help or hinder on that journey.

Your speed at sea is measured in Knots per Watch. There are 6 watches in 24 hours, 3 during the day, 3 at night. If at sea at the start of a watch, roll the encounter die. Setting off to sea counts as being at sea.

For your ship’s speed, add up the variables at your current position. If the direction of travel and wind direction is uncertain, the GM makes a ruling, perhaps adjusting the d3 wind speed roll.

Variables

• +1 if the current is with you

• +2 if sailing

• +d3 if the wind is with you

• +1 if someone is rowing (add a Burden/Fatigue for each watch of rowing. Max rowing bonus +1)

• -d3 if the wind is against you.

Examples

• Sailing, Wind and current with you, rowing +5

• Rowing, against the current, against the wind 0

• Sailing, with the wind, against the current +2

• Rowing with the current +2

• Drifting with the current +1

• Sailing against the wind, against the current +1

Next steps

So that’s my first stab at this. I’m not expecting it to be finished, or even something that works at all at this stage. This is a sketch to test, to get the ball rolling on the process. So. Now I test. If you have a moment you could test it too if you like, and let me know how it feels.