Now that I have framed the campaign (and the setting) sufficiently to begin player character creation, there is one thing left that I need to do. Determine a “Baseline Time” for the campaign. The setting, properly examined, will tell us this.
GURPS is a toolset. It is agnostic as to how time will (or must) pass in any given setting. Its combat system moves at one second per round. Its Chase Rules (and alternate combat system) move at roughly one minute per round. This is not what I mean when I say Baseline Time. Baseline Time is the usual maximum amount of time things can progress quickly in a campaign. How quickly you can “fast forward” as a general rule when the party is doing nothing, engaged in light downtime or travelling. Its different than pacing but can certainly impact pacing. GURPS doesn’t tell you this. And there are a myriad of things that the GM must decide upon depending on the Baseline Time: Frequency Rolls for certain Traits (Advantages and Disadvantages); how experience awarded in character points can be spent and on what; the use of certain Traits. The list is long, and I will dive into detail with all this later. But this decision is important and will drive a lot of decisions through the lifetime of the campaign.
Baseline Time
For this setting and campaign, “fast travel” will be extremely rare. It will likely only happen on a long sea journey. Travel and resources matter. So the Baseline Time for the setting and campaign will be keyed to encounter frequency. A sandbox will have random encounter tables. I’ll get into the details of that later as well. But for now I need the Baseline Time question answered. GDW’s ruleset called for an encounter roll once every four hours while traveling and once per day while stationary. Free League essentially calls for an encounter draw (using a deck of cards tied to specific encounters – that you’ll run out of, so back our next Kickstarter!) every eight hours. There are various exceptions, enhancers and symbols tied to hex type on the map. Much more appropriate to a boardgame or crpg. Not a sandbox TTRPG. So I will opt for the GDW method. It also has the benefit of 40 years of accumulated playtesting conceptually. However, feeling saucy, I opt to go with two encounter chances per 24 hours using day and night to alter the chances in the encounter table set I will eventually build. Cool. So we have our Baseline Time. 4-12 Hours; keyed to an encounter chance every 4 hours while travelling and once every 12 hours while stationary. This is how time in-campaign will be tracked and accounted for.
Implied Tasks
So the implied tasks, tasks that derive from this decision, mean that I am gonna have to make an Encounter Table. And probably update it significantly for each broad geographic region the players decide to go to; either defined by the GDW adventure sourcebooks or created wholly by me if they go “outside the Ines.” Cool. That’s a long way off. We’ll just start with the Kalisz area in Poland because that is where the campaign is starting.
Glancing at the types of encounters I will need to make, some are “settlements.” Essentially not large cities, small cities or towns. Everything from a collective farm to a village or hamlet. That will suffice probably for the whole globe. But it dictates that google maps and earth won’t be welcome at this table. It doesn’t mean that if a settlement is rolled I can’t consult it for a smaller place name. But to effectively run a sandbox a more general map will need to be used. Since I am not using hexes, I will use the 1st Edition map (example portion below).
I won’t need hexes, as Foundry VTT will allow scaling of the map to km. It also means that anything not on the map can be edited in, either simply settlements or errata. There is a small city called Bełchatów that was just a small church village when GDW was researching the original game, but a large power plant was under construction and almost overnight it became a small city by their game’s definition (and a nuclear target). This choice does mean that if the players go “outside the lines” I’ll need a similarly “simple” map, but they are out there.
Anyway, a quick post today. That’s all I have. I should have a new Session Recap next week and hope to start discussing player character creation.