Thinking about Map Scale

Thinking about Map Scale

I've recently gotten back into working on my fantasy game, and took the time to do a bit of solo play using the system - the first time it's been tested! I was in something of a swampy mood, I think, so I set three adventurers trudging through an area of the world map rife with marshes and illness.

I found that they were able to get through the entirety of it quite quickly, and without much adversity. They had one battle against a handful of trolls, but that was the only hostile encounter they interacted with. Now, after resting at a fishing village, they are equipped enough to continue outwards into another region entirely.

The swamp area is among the biggest regions in the map, in terms of sheer grid spaces, and I was using a procedural system that generated encounters and interests on a grid-by-grid basis. It's a system I initially developed for use in Best Left Buried solo play, when I'd be exploring dungeons that didn't have maps and needed a method to generate and populate them on-the-fly. I had success using it in this method.

I do like this system, though found that in the setting of a wilderness exploration, the random method of generating interests, which sometimes made it so that a grid space had no encounter to speak of, created an experience in which a halfway-decent party was able to entirely traverse a relatively large area of map.

I considered making the map bigger and slower to traverse, but this thought has given me pause. I wonder if this is something that I only think I want, and am uncertain whether or not it will improve the travel experience. I think this for two reasons:

-The map itself is both small and big; it simply depends on how far you zoom in when looking at it. Every time adventurers enter a grid space, I could re-roll the encounter they find, which they would come across alongside anything else they'd discovered previously. Going through a grid space once doesn't mean you've seen the whole thing: even if a region of the map is only a handful of spaces, there is still opportunity for a multitude of discoveries to be made.

-Randomness in interest generation means that what is discovered can very actively influence the travel experience. In my testing, the adventurers fought a small band of Trolls, and came out of it relatively unscathed. If, after that, they encountered more Trolls, they would have no doubt been in a considerably worse state, as would they have been if they'd encountered any adversary on their way to the next area. There was definitely a tension in their travel. As such I don't necessarily consider encounter rolls turning up nothing as being a negative of the system: sometimes nothing being encountered is a good thing, after all. Even a small map region could provide adversity, if the balance between map size and encounter difficulty is tweaked.

This all is to say, I think that the size of the map will remain being relatively small and traversable - traversable enough that one of the largest biomes can be moved across in only a single session of relatively brisk exploration. 

I often come back to Dark Souls when developing this project (original, I know), as the game is undoubtedly the largest source of inspiration to this world's visual and gameplay intentionality. I find that the regions in Dark Souls are quite small, really. They feel a lot bigger than they are because you're always running around them and still learning about the game and the enemies around you whilst you're exploring. Once you've gotten good enough, you can charge right through it (perhaps with some difficulty remaining). I think that I will want a similar sort of feeling to the wilderness exploration in my project; that the wilderness may always challenge explorers, but that with planning, preparation and some luck, the wilderness can be tamed.

Ideas for development:

-A method of ensuring that no encounters are found in travel, such as a meta-resource that could be spent, use of a local navigator or specific travel medium (such as using a boat in the swamp).

-Changing the 'Omen' encounter type to simply 'Encounters', making random encounters more common ('Omen' required being rolled twice for an Encounter to activate, whilst a simple 'Encounter' roll would only require one).

-Alternatively, using Omen rolls alongside typical Encounter rolls could result in greater complexity to the inhabitants of a region. Perhaps the two could interlink: a distant encounter seen only through Omens, reacting to and interacting with the actions of those in the foreground.

-Some more rugged method of previously discovered Encounters interacting with newly-discovered ones?