A guy on a Facebook group I'm part of came up with the idea of having a list of encounters for an outdoors geographical area, keyed by location, and then letting the players move around on this grid, and then they could run into various encounters in a non-linear fashion.

The more things change, I guess.

Quote from: robiswrong;759938A guy on a Facebook group I'm part of came up with the idea of having a list of encounters for an outdoors geographical area, keyed by location, and then letting the players move around on this grid, and then they could run into various encounters in a non-linear fashion.

If this came from one of the Story-Games or Big Purple darlings, it would be treated as a major breakthrough in game design.

Nothing new under the sun.

Man, if there was only a term for that sort of adventure....



Oh yeah.  "Modules"



Right now the Castellan at the keep has no idea what an adventure like that would even look like...

What's old is new again, eventually.

Hell, someone probably did it 200 years ago, and the effort long since dropped into obscurity.

He should patent that. Seems like a cracking concept.

This will change the face of gaming as we know it!

You can't make that shit up.

Someone did do it 200 years ago. The Sisters Bronte (those Brontes) had a fictional world called Gondal with heroes who participated in political, romantic, and supernatural adventures over the course of many years.

I don't know whether they used dice or random tables, but it was definitely something akin to what we think of when we say RPG: a referee, immersive storytelling, emergent plot.

I have been reading James Maliszew's "pulp D&D" blog entries from 2007-2008. He was also re-inventing D&D piece by piece on his own at that time.

Tourists.  Whaddyagonnado.

To be fair, a number of people immediately piped up with "You mean, a hexcrawl", and after a little bit of argument he seemed to buy that it had been done, and in fact there were a ton of resources on how to do it well.

So at least he didn't insist "nuh uh!  This is totally new and nobody's never done it before!"

Quote from: Scott Anderson;760104Someone did do it 200 years ago. The Sisters Bronte (those Brontes) had a fictional world called Gondal with heroes who participated in political, romantic, and supernatural adventures over the course of many years.

I don't know whether they used dice or random tables, but it was definitely something akin to what we think of when we say RPG: a referee, immersive storytelling, emergent plot.

I wonder if you would share your source for these details--particularly the referee and immersive characteristics. While I've seen people cite the Brontës as proto-roleplayers, all the descriptions I've read have seemed far closer to fan fiction or possibly simming. That is they have the characteristics of:

Wholly-invented worlds
Shared authorship
Demarcated authority over different aspects of the sub-creation
and (almost certainly)
Open-ended interactive narrative creation (i.e. building on established narrative facts created by others)

But I'd say this gets you only as far as something "akin to" an RPG, while still having its feet firmly in the storytelling camp. I'd be interested in seeing evidence and argument to the contrary. (Hopefully not just semantic quibbles.)

All I have is semantic quibbles. Your take on it is as good as mine or better.

Thanks anyway.