Roleplaying as the Steam Highwayman is all about being on the road, exploring and encountering, and happening upon opportunities. One way I’ve achieved this in the first three books is by placing uni-directional journey passages between locations – they show up orange on the map above. I stole this technique from Fabled Lands, of course, where they are particularly used in Cities of Gold and Glory and Over the Blood-Dark Sea. These journeys achieve a couple of things: they can slow your passage through the world, for good or bad, and they can be an opportunity for unplanned roadside encounters. They typically look like this:
Up until now, I’ve relied upon a mechanic I inherited from Fabled Lands – the random encounter table, which usually looks a bit like type A. If each encounter is unique to the location, then after experiencing it, a fixed link can redirect the reader to the eventual destination (which in this case would be passage 233), but since Highways & Holloways I’ve used generic, repeatable encounters, such as bad weather, which can be met in different locations. These need the reader to note which passage they will eventually be spat out at when they follow the instruction ‘turn to your noted passage’.
The main benefit of the random table is that you can’t really know what is going to happen on any given journey. But I’ve come to wonder if this unpredictability is less of a benefit than I originally thought. So type B shows an alternative.
Downsides to this style include the duplication of links – 233 gets mentioned four times here, which isn’t elegant. I could replace each mention after the first with ‘noted passage’, but that’s also rather clunky and a bit of a typographic challenge. See type C below.
The mechanic used in B and C is a tick-box list. For better or worse, the reader must pass through the events on this journey in sequence: the first time they steam this way, they will meet the seven sisters. On their second journey, they will proceed directly to 233. On the third, they will encounter rain (a generic passage that has minor consequences). Only on their fifth travel along this road will they talk to the boy with the broken basket.
Upsides: no annoying dice that stubbornly refuse you to access an event you haven’t been to. Also, there is no need to use a tickbox within an encounter to make it a one-time event, which always feels like a cheat to me.
Downsides: duplication, predictability and writing in the book. A player who knows that travelling down a certain road might trigger a rainstorm might avoid it – and then again, they might forget exactly when. Also, for the sizeable minority who dislike writing in their book, this list has to be exported elsewhere, eg into a new companion. And if you re-play the entire game, it’s another set of tickboxes to erase…
After five journeys down this road, the passage becomes effectively useless – but perhaps that was the case with the random table anyway? Are my readers that keen to re-play minor encounters without a differing outcome? In a book as large as a volume of Steam Highwayman, how long is it before someone re-rides or exhausts one of these journeys anyway?
I’m really interested to see what you all think about these two (relatively minor) mechanics, and whether there are strong preferences. Perhaps you have another system entirely to suggest? I’m unlikely to entirely switch over from type A to type B, but with almost 50 unidirectional journey passages in Steam Highwayman: The Princes of the West, I want to eliminate anything that really annoys a majority of readers. I’m actually thinking increasingly hard about my gameplay design, which I know isn’t perfect, and I’ll be posting some more issues like this in the future.
And if you’re really interested in thinking about random event tables and their use in tabletop rpgs, do take a look at Duncan Thomson’s https://www.randroll.com/. They get a lot more complicated than my simple ones here, and he has a huge wealth of content. Need a table to generate a fantasy encounter for sailing the open sea? Or a list of 100 winter-themed trinkets? Off you go.
In the examples above, “sunshine….” and “an uninterrupted journey..,” are duplicative; they each basically say the same thing: “Nothing happens, move along.” So I would begin by combining those.
Also, it’s interesting that the “move along” outcomes are interspersed within the event outcomes, instead of being left at the end. In other words, you have to visit the same location five times to encounter the broken basket, with two uneventful pass throughs. As a player, I’m likely to turn around and go through the same text again just to have an encounter. From what I recall in FL, the pass throughs tend to be left for those times when a player has exhausted all other encounters.
To answer the general question, I think encounters should generally only happen once, unless they are highly generalized (get your pocket picked in a dodgy part of town, get caught in a rainstorm, etc.)
Thanks Gaetano. A couple of other readers have written something similar – you seem to be in that majority when it comes to combining null events, and there are certainly people who, like you, want to rinse a road or location before moving on.
I don’t think people are that interested in meandering through gamebooks encountering whatever shows up. Completionism is more common, and since gamebooks have no “quest log” it’s much easier to see all of what a location has to offer before crossing it off the mental checklist
So that’s another thing I’m thinking of… A quest log. Either in the book, or in a companion journal. A bit like the one I did for SH1: https://martinbarnabusnoutch.com/smog-ambuscade-achievements/
Completionism is definitely more common among historic gamebook readers, but meandering is my own style… Does it show badly? And pretty common among people for whom SH is their first (!) gamebook. Definitely a customer tension 🙂
I’m generally not a fan of random encounters. Especially when, as in Vulcanverse, they often carry a key step to progression.
I like your solution B. I think “noted passage” is just way too cumbersome.
Thanks Michael. Cumber is exactly what I want to avoid. The noted passage mechanic can be really efficient when I use it well, but it is kind of addictive and not always needed.
And you’re 100% right – random encounters that hide progression are a problem. I’ve come to realise that anything needed to complete a quest should be hidden fair and square where someone can find it if they want to and if they have the key. Randomness needs to be saved for flavour and depth.
I agree, that hiding key parts in random encounters is a no go. Initiating quests in random encounters is okay though because they keep things interesting.
I seem to be the odd reader out who is not a completionist and likes it when there comes up something new when visiting an area visited before. SHW in my gaming see me revisiting well traveled paths again and again during quests hence this suits my playstyle.
My kind of odd reader, Andreas 😉 You know the books very well, so I was surprised when you mentioned you’d never met Toothy Braddock. But to access that you need to have been arrested, fit through a narrow gap of notorious-but-not-too-notorious and then a random roll ;-/ My game design is changing – you’ll be able to pick up Toothy’s gold in SH4 even without being arrested in SH1, I think. It’ll just be a better payoff for that single reader out there who did!
It’s interesting to think about these things! I agree with other commenters that gating progress behind random encounters isn’t the most enjoyable design to play. Having said that, random encounters can always be cheated, so different options can all be explored, if players feel like doing that.
One way to design the ‘type B’ encounter could be to make them progress along a theme. E.g.
[ ] uneventful
[ ] signs of bandits
[ ] a bandit!
[ ] loads of bandits!!
[ ] mini quest to resolve the bandit issue, which could result in either rubbing out the tick marks and starting again, or skipping this paragraph in future.
Type B doesn’t need to indicate what each encounter would be, it could just be ‘[ ] turn to 901’, to add a bit of mystery for the reader.
Full disclosure – this isn’t exactly reader input, as I haven’t read any of your books yet, apologies! 🙈 But am looking forward to getting everything on your next kickstarter 🤞🤞
I recently made a load of notes for world building and encounters in an open world gamebook, to have a go at writing a series (the world needs more open world gamebooks!). But very soon realised I don’t have anywhere near enough time with the day job and young kids. Maybe one day! 😃🤞
PS – it’s super-interesting to have an insight into your design process! 🙏
Thanks Al. I like your progressive list idea: I have a few structures a bit like that where you meet the same character repeatedly, and that’s a nice examples there.
As for your own series, I say, go for it. But work in the smallest map modules that you can (eg four locations) and get them working before bolting them together. An over-large map is the single biggest obstacle to finishing an OWG. Also, you’ve got to really define your mechanics and limit yourself or feature creep will kill you (hahaha sigh). My young children and our situation are the reason I’m writing this before they get up for breakfast, after 500 words on SH4!