Making a Game About Survival?

[jdagna]

I'm mulling over the seeds of what might be a new game, but I'm running into some mental blocks with it.  Since the game isn't even a full seed, I'm still dealing with it pretty theoretically (which is why I think this thread belongs over here in theory, but feel free to move it over to design).

The premise for the game: the character exist in a pseudo-Europe in the early iron age, where their people have been pushed off traditional farmlands into rough mountainous areas with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their herds.

So I want this game to be about survival, not just of the character, but of the tribal group (I envision extended-family units with 40-60 members of all ages and their herds).  To do that, you have to find enough food, etc. and of course the best pasture and safest weather are down on the low-lands where the raiders would happily kill the herds and the people.  

The difficulty I'm having is in coming up with mechanics and rewards that don't reduce the game to a Gamist challenge or to a Simulationist number-crunch - running the game as a series of random events and encounters seems like a recipe for failure.  It doesn't necessarily need to be Narrativist, but I'd rather have players addressing a Premise like "What am I willing to do to keep my tribe alive?" than asking "Is it statistically safer to risk starving or face the bandits?"  For that matter, the mechanics should make fending off starvation as interesting as fighting bandits.

So, are there any ideas about how a game can handle something like survival in an interesting way?

[Zak Arntson]

Script! Script! Write up a script of what the participants would be saying to each other!

Also, to make any conflict interesting, remember to keep whiffs out of the picture. "No" should always lead to "No, and" (as in further complication or benefit).  With this in mind, you'll have to find ways to make survival not a "survive or die" thing. More a "things get tougher and leaner, or they get better for a bit (before getting tougher and leaner in a different way)".

Like how you put it, do you face the bandits? Or leave for safer ground?

So how are you picturing the participation to work? Traditional, with a GM and players? More round-robin? Are players in charge of a single person? A group?

I've always liked the idea of a PC's actions having a large holistic effect on the people around them. In warfare, a PC wins the battle with the enemy general and the tide turns. With a survival game, this could be easily refleted. The PC finds food, and his tribe (or subsection) finds food.

Also, how do you see the players interacting? Do they play separate tribes? Members of the same tribe? A gestalt hivemind which controls the tribe?

[jdagna]

Script! Script! Write up a script of what the participants would be saying to each other!

So how are you picturing the participation to work? Traditional, with a GM and players? More round-robin? Are players in charge of a single person? A group?

Also, how do you see the players interacting? Do they play separate tribes? Members of the same tribe? A gestalt hivemind which controls the tribe?

At this point, I'm not even entirely sure what people would be saying.  It has to be a series of choices, but I'm still trying to figure out what the choices are and who defines and makes them.  I do see a GM involved, but I think players will need a lot more input than merely choosing options or responding to situations (otherwise, it goes back to a statistical analysis).  More on that in a sec.

Players would have their own characters in a fairly traditional sense, but the characters would represent some portion of the tribal leadership (or the whole leadership, depending on how many players there are).  I think that having the players be cousins, and therefore representing slightly different family groups would be good.  They're all related enough that they have to work together, but internal conflicts are probably going to make a lot of sense (and we all know how families can blow a little issue out of proportion).  The family will probably be some sort of resource for the characters (perhaps even like a Trollbabe relationship?)

I also tend to think that the PCs may spend a fair amount of time away from their tribe, scouting ahead, hunting, etc (though never more than a day or so away).

Also, to make any conflict interesting, remember to keep whiffs out of the picture. "No" should always lead to "No, and" (as in further complication or benefit).  With this in mind, you'll have to find ways to make survival not a "survive or die" thing. More a "things get tougher and leaner, or they get better for a bit (before getting tougher and leaner in a different way)".

Like how you put it, do you face the bandits? Or leave for safer ground?

Absolutely.  I'm strongly considering a mechanic that says "You will never fail, but you may have complications."  So a hunter who rolls (or bids/whatever) badly may find his quarry, but another tribe or predator is there eating the creature already.  A bad roll to find drinking water may find tainted water, or watre claimed by someone else.  

I don't know whether the player, the GM, the group or some combination of them decide what the complications are, but like I said, it probably won't work if the GM just dictates everything.  In fact, if players have to pick the complication, they'll probably pick the kind of challenges they want to deal with - be that fighting, negotiation, etc.

However, I think the issue of surviving requires some sense of being out of control.  If players pick everything, won't that lesson the tension and conflict?  Maybe that's just Gamist thinking creeping in where it doesn't really fit...

[Tomas HVM]

I like this idea. The challenge is interesting; how do you make survival the focus of a good game? Allow me to think out loud on some of the concepts...


--->  THE TRIBE  <---
It will break up into families, and individuals. Not all families are alike, some are stronger and some are weaker. Some have a tradition for special skills. There will be inter-family groups of herders, gatherers, hunters and craftsmen, to complicate the picture.

The various groups and individuals within the tribe will have differing views about what strategy to choose, and a relative status varying with the circumstances. Some will go for confrontation, while others will prefer to search for peaceful pastures (other side of the mountains?). The hunters may love the mountains, while the gatherers like the forest and the herders need to get their herds down on the open pastures...

Relations with family and friends may form alliances, but may also be the spur of conflicts. Relations could translate into challenges like:
- Your mother asserts her authority, and forbids you to spy on the bandits.
- Your girl is proud of you, and expect you to act the heroic leader.
- The wise grandmother of your family is too frail to traverse the mountains. If the tribe choose to do this, you will have to leave her. If you leave her, you will loose the one human dearest to you, while your family and tribe will loose a source of wisdom...
- etc.


--->  THE NATURE <---
It will be full of beasts, and these people will have to deal with them as grave challenges, especially in times when resources are sparse (battling it out with hungry wolves and the likes).

To hunt will be a serious challenge, not only to keep from hunger, but to keep from being hurt while doing it. An angry moose can do considerable damage to a hunter who has to go in close to kill it. Damage may render you helpless in a time of crisis, and may change your status (from hunter to gatherer, from gatherer to herder, from herder to baby sitter, from baby sitter to beggar, from beggar to outcast). To make some research on likely damage gotten in such societies, and give GMs an idea of how to use it, may be useful. It is important for each and every individual to stay a useful member of the tribe. A character reduced to a certain level may be "eliminated", and used as a NPC (showing the players the possible downfall).

Weather should be used to complicate challenges. Sun will make the herds restless (grass drying up). Rain will hamper vision, and make the mountains more dangerous to traverse. Wind will sap the strenght out of weaker familymembers. You'll have to imagine beforehand how various weather may influence the tribe, and how to make it a substantial part of the drama (bonuses, challenges, atmosphere).


--->  FRIEND AND FOE  <---
The bandits are obvious foes in this game, but what make them such a grave challenge? Sheer numbers? Training as warriors? Better equipment? A great and brutal leader? is there any chance of the tribe winning a confrontation? Are there weaknesses to be revealed about the opposition?

Other tribes may be in the same situation, and that may be a problem (pastures in the mountains are sparse, and several tribes has been driven into the mountains). It may also be a source of help. Is there any hope of an alliance? Will an alliance help in any way, or will it only place undue restrictions on the tribe? Will a peaceful agreement on borders be threathened by bad balance: Our tribe got the better deal (huzza for you, our negotiator), so the other tribe feel tricked and threatened (bugger you, our negotiator). There may be peaceful tribes, and aggressive ones, and no sure way to meet them...

What about relations between tribes? The need to get fresh blood into the tribe may institute some kind of baby-snatching. More children means more work, possibly more enemies, but also a greater growth potential for the tribe. What about the man who meets the woman out in the woods, and the attachment they form, in spite of being from different tribes? How will their relationship complicate things, or help, when the tribes ends in conflict? What will your group of hunters or gatherers do, when you find a very rich resource, and a similar group from another tribe also want to exploit it? How do you resolve the shouting game? What will the players have to do, to initiate negotiations? What will they have to do, to scare the other group off? (no one will like to fight in an environment where any small damage may be a big threath)

--->  DRAMA  <---
How do you make scenarios for such a game, and how do you make a method which fascilitate an interesting drama. Conflict resolution, GM-techniques, character qualities.

Will you place the characters on top of the "status-track", as hunters (high "dramatic" potential), and leave the other groups for the GM to use as complicating elements?

How do the GM and the other players go about sewing the various elements of the game into a focused drama with it's own special "feel"? What will make the game session something out of the ordinary?



I hope this was helpful in some way. Good luck!

[Michael S. Miller]

Ludography post: Check out and PLAY the game "Tribes" from Steve Jackson games. It's set in pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer times, but pay special attention to the rules for making rules (can't remember them off the top of my head).

[jdagna]

Thomas, some excellent ideas and suggestions in there.

Your views on the internal nature of the tribe pretty well anticipated mine.  There should be some rivalries and disputes internally, but with the committment that they're all stuck together.  Still, it would be very appropriate if the hunters went out to face bears because they seemed less fearsome than that damned mother in law back home.

As for the bandits, they're better more or less for all those reasons.  I haven't decided on a mechanic yet, but I'm stongly considering a racial set of skills based on upbringing.  Bandits are raised as warrior, while the tribesmen are farmers and herders.  This will give a bandit warrior an edge of a few points over a tribal warrior.  Part of the inisistence on early iron age tech is simple: the bandits have it and the tribesmen don't.

However, I don't see the bandits being unreasonable savages.  Trade them a couple of goats for a sword.  Or sic them on your enemies.  Or give them tribute for free passage (though the setting would rest on the assumption that the tribute for going back home is simply more than the tribesmen can pay).  And bandits can still be killed depending on force sizes and situations - it's just that battles are costly in manpower.

There are also other tribes.  In fact, I'm thinking that the player's people broke up into dozens of tribes when they were pushed into the mountains.  These tribes are basically friendly to each other, but when survival is on the line disputes are likely.  This would make negotiation important.

As for status, characters would have status both inside and outside the tribe.

I'm split on weather.  Obviously, seasons will drive certain general modifiers, but I'm not sure if I'll worry about it on a day to day basis.  In fact, I think weather might be the result of rolls, not a modifier (see mechanic ideas in a second).

Scenarios: I'm still rough on this too, but one specific idea is that the GM think of a theme for each year, which gets played out as one scenario per season.  For example: one year's theme might be meeting a girl in a forest - the rest of the year, you spend courting and getting her tribe to go alogn with the marriage.  (Inter-tribal marriages would be common, I think, if only to keep inbreeding down.  But the tribe losing the woman would want recompensation - if she's a ten-goat woman, can you afford her?)   Another year's theme might be stopping a particularly ruthless bandit leader who's decided to hunt tribesmen in the mountains because he's bored.  Or one tribe has gotten uppity in some way and is causing problems for everyone else.

The challenge in scenarios in a survival game is handling transitions.  This has always been challenge for me as a GM, particularly in fantasy-type settings.  Here, you're going to be frequently going from a week to week (or even month to month) scale of hunting and farming down to a minute to minute scale for negotiation and combat.  Handling that without psychological whiplash will be a key, I think.  This is part of why I see scenarios focusing on particular events during a year, so the rest can provide a backdrop that still lets people get into the moment (so to speak).  A scene framing structure may help too.  

Tribal rituals may also help - if there's a formalized greeting dialogue that players have to learn it might force them into character and active dialogue and out of summary/math mode.  Hmmm, that's a good idea, I think.

OK, Mechanics time.

Here's what I realize I don't want.  Most game handle this by saying "In winter, you have a 10% chance of finding food and a 30% chance of getting frostbite."  (or something that amounts to that).  In other words, players always playing the odds - it might work, it might not.  It can literally come to a point where the GM says "Well, that was a bad roll.  You all die."

I think players need to choose the bad outcomes.  Your roll will only tell you the quality of what happened, not the specifics.  So if you're going hunting, you make a roll.  I'm thinking you'll add a skill (I think I'll do away with attributes) to a die roll and compare it to ao target number.  The difference between TN and roll is the quality of your result, which translates directly into things like how much food you get.

So if you need 3 food for the week/month and get 3 or higher as a success, you found enough and everyone's happy.

If the hunter needs 3 food, and succeeds by only 1, he has a choice.  He can either come back without enough food and face those consequences.  Or he can take a -2 result in order to boost his success up to 3.  The -2 result might affect him personally... he could deduct it from the quality of equipment or from his wounds or attributes.  (obviously, still rough here).  He could also parlay it into some other effect - finding the food, but it's already claimed by another tribe or animal.
 
If the hunter needs 3 food and gets a -5 result, he's in trouble.  To get a +3 out of it, he'd have to make it into a -8.  Let's say a -8 would be sufficient to kill him.  He could choose that - staggering back into town as he dies of frostbite or injuries.  He could choose to bring home the food, but put the -8 into making it diseased - the tribe eats, but gets sick.  He could bring it home, having stolen it from another tribe, and the -8 now figures into the future relations of the tribes.  Or he could come home without food, putting the -5 into personal injuries (or anything else).
 
This also gives you a sort of dynamic resource management system (ew... DRM... better find a differe name  ).  In other words, instead of having pools or stats for food, health, morale, etc... everything is covered by modifiers.  Players make rolls to meet the needs of the tribe, and the result of those rolls gets turned into modifiers that the tribes "keeps" as a resource.  So plentiful summer hunting doesn't just mean extra food.  You can put those successes into health, happiness, tribal relations - whatever.  In winter, that gives you options.  You can bring back diseased meat if you have a bonus of health already.  You can piss off your neighbors if you've established strong ties.  Etc.  Oh, and the PC's status within the tribe (as well as his immediate family's) will undoubtedly be one of the resources he can modify with success and failure.
 
How does this sound?

[JamesSterrett]

Another ludography post:

Grab a copy of "King of Dragon Pass" (computer game for Mac or PC); the focus of the game is on providing the "guiding spirit" of a Bronze Age clan (set in Glorantha).  It does a superb job of educating and encouraging the player to think in an Orlanthi mindset in order to survive and prosper.

King of Dragon Pass Website


A restrained assessment:  I think it's *really good*.  :)

[timfire]

I see alot of potential for this idea in a very Nar sort of way. But interesting, it doesn't involve any of the hunting-gathering issues that have been discussed so far. I see great potential to explore the themes of responsibility, community/ family, and tradition vs individual interest.

For me, I'm interested in the social interaction between members if the tribe. I mean, there's more to survival than just finding food. In a community where everyone has to rely on each other, cohesion is a major issue. If the tribe splinters, everyone's well-being might be put at risk.

This brings up tradition. In situations like that, social rules sometimes are enacted not because the individuals agree with them, but because they feel its vital to the cohesion of the group. Breaking tradition means threatening the cohesion of the group, which means threatening the survival of the group.

I, personally, would use the hunting-gathering aspects as background to heighten or influence the social conflicts of the group.

[M. J. Young]

(Inter-tribal marriages would be common, I think, if only to keep inbreeding down.  But the tribe losing the woman would want recompensation - if she's a ten-goat woman, can you afford her?)

In Africa a young man saves enough to buy his bride; in India, her father will pay you to take one of them away.

I think you may have to consider what the value of wives is in this society; that in turn seems to depend on the value of children. If children are an asset, such that they increase the food supply (as they are in agrarian societies, to a lesser degree among nomadic herdsmen), then the more wives you have the greater your wealth. If children are a burden (as they are in overpopulated or overfarmed lands, to a lesser degree in systems more founded on artificial production), then girls are part of that burden, and the value of wives goes down.

Don't assume that the woman has to be purchased unless you can see how children are an asset in the current situation. It appears rather that at the moment it is better to limit tribal growth until the more pressing problems are resolved; and if as Tomas suggests there are several tribes in this situation, we're probably looking at a dowry situation, not a wife purchase situation.

Also, I think Tim is right about the real issues.

--M. J. Young

[jdagna]

I see alot of potential for this idea in a very Nar sort of way. But interesting, it doesn't involve any of the hunting-gathering issues that have been discussed so far. I see great potential to explore the themes of responsibility, community/ family, and tradition vs individual interest.

I think you're right, though the way I'm envisioning things, the hunter/gatherer backdrop is going to drive the social conflict.  (that may have been exactly the way you were seeing it, too)

What hasn't been discussed yet is that starvation doesn't only weaken the tribe in a vague general sense... specifically, some individual person is going to die first.  In a situation and a community like this, it ultimately comes down to choosing who dies.  If you split rations equally, you know that the young, old and sick die first.  If you give more to the people who need it, you have to intentionally deprive someone else.  And, since giving some people more than others generally follows lines of rank, it's a good bet that the people who need it most are getting it least.  Prosperity will bring conflicts of its own, but the really hard decisions come when things are scarce, which is the subtext to the mechanic even though I haven't spent a lot of time dwelling on that.

Here's a problem I'm having with social conflict, though.  How do you avoid making it look like a bad disaster movie?  You know, the ones where all the people cuasing conflict come off as selfish whiners who deserve their ultimately painful demises?  Is it sufficient to have PCs represent different groups in the community so that players can do the whining on behalf of the group? (presumably with some mechanics reason to help encourage them to really tangle with each other over it).  I certainly want to avoid vague morale ratings like you see in most computer games.


MJ, I think in a culture like this, women and children would be valued, hence the reason I suggested buying the girl.  There are two reasons I think that.  First, they came from an agrarian background, which means the old traditions, where labor is useful, might hang on for a while.  Second, there are lots of labor-intensive things that need to be done to survive.  Some can be done at camp (smithing, sewing, healing), while others will require people to be out and about (hunting, herding, fishing).  Children can help with many of these tasks (especially herding and fishing) even from a relatively young age.  If the young teens can tend to the herds while the manly men go hunt, it would mean more food.  Also, infants are going to see the highest mortality rate, since they have the lowest tolerance for food shortages and cold weather.  I think they'd want to have many children to ensure that a few get old enough to survive on their own.

Still, it's probably too early in development to make a firm decision on that.

[Tomas HVM]

Great thread this is! The reason being partly that I'm involved in a game project with my friends, a kind of "roleplaying tribal-evolution game". It's not one of my professional projects, but it's still the result of a lot of work. In it's current setting it is right in the middle of this topic. We call it CREATIA (yes, I know; bad name).

I'm about to play it today, and need to make some preparations for the session. Let me try to make a scenario for it here, openly, in the hope that it will help me make a great session, and maybe give you some ideas.

Here we go...

--->  Hunting with Nestor  <---

Summary: this scenario is meant to show some more of the personality of the great father Nestor, both his great enthusiasm and his intense grumpyness. He will fall down and break his leg out in the wild, leaving the characters to get him home, while enduring his nagging. At the same time they will be involved in a quest to find a lost hunter, and have to deal with his madness when they find him.

Starting place: around the fire in the longhouse of Nestor and Aura (great father and mother of the tribe)

Opening: old Nestor is in great mode (made love last night?). He states that he wants to go hunting with his sons (the characters). It's been a great while since he did so last time. Aura tells him to leave it be, but he don't listen (a stubborn old man, he is, and very prone to act contrary to Auras advice). We'll make a great hunt, he says, hunting lynx in the Northvalley! I will bring you back a beautiful lynx fur, my love, like in younger days!

Free information:
- Nestor is an old master of the hunt, but his bones are frail and his eyesight is failing
- Four days trek to Northvalley
- Northvalley is a dry and broken country, bushes, crags, clefts, cold winds
- The valley is a great and challenging hunting ground for deer and roe
- The first son of Nestor; Rune, lives on the way, with his wife Angla and their family group
- Lake Moon lies at the entrance to the valley, with the great settlement of Moonhome

Residents of Moonhome:
- Jabok the hunter (info)
- Mummel the wise (advice, info, quest)
- Runga the beautiful (flirt)
- Moro the curious child (sweet, full of questions)
- Modrebe the aunt (taking care of Dululi's children, warning about Lok, quest)
- Dululi the abandoned wife (desperate, lonely, quest)
- Lok the abandoned son (intense, hates his father, stonesling, stalking the characters)

Secret info: the lynx is a great hunter, and Northvalley is the lynx-area. Let the characters be stalked by great cats. Anything short of a unique result on hunting will leave them with the feeling that the grerat cats are hunting them...

A normal result on hunting will reveal Lok to be stalking them. They may trap him very easy as sonn as he is discovered. His goal is to find his father, confront him with the agony of Dululi, and kill him.

There lives a man amongst these creatures, totally absorbed by their beauty, to the point that he has forgotten about his wife and children in Moonhome. His name is Nemerav, and he is trying to protect the great cats. He is the husbond of 'Dululi and father of her five children (Lok being the eldest son, 14 years). He is quite mad, feeling to be more of a kin with the cats than with men. His recovery is possible though, and will start with his return to Dululi and their children (his "cubs").

Jabok can give info about Nemerav never coming home, but being sighted with on trek with a great lynx several times. Mummel, Modrebe and Dululi may also ask the characters to track down Nemerav and bring him home (each in their special way, of course). Nestor will of course love a "manhunt", as being more challenging (Nemerav is the son of Mummel, and great grandchild of Nestor).

Friends:
--->  Hunter Lym met the wild Nemerav yesterday, alone, in the great hills east of his camp
--->  Ravens circle the corpse of a impressingly great lynx (fur badly spoiled). Nemerav keep close to his dead "fur-brother" (tracks all over the place).

Foes:
--->  The Great Stag is present. He keeps his minions out of the way of the characters, but will frighten or attack them himself, due to the presense of Nestor (it may be the stag that makes Nestor trip and fall). Introduce him several times, and make the effect as shocking as possible, but save the real shock for the most critical situation (when they are finding Nemerav?).
--->  Huntress Gwy is in love with Nemerav, and wishes to keep him in the wilderness, so she will try to cast the characters of their track. She will produce fake tracks to the west, and direct the characters towards them, and tell them that Nemerav is both clever and shy. The fake tracks she has laid may be spotted as false with a good result on hunting, and reveal her to be a foe of the quest.

Walk on's:
- Hunters and gathereres in the country (full of respect for Nestor)
- Great cats in the valley (shodowy precense)
- Roe (fleeing)
- Deer (conspiciously distant all the time)
- Hunters and herb-gatherers in the valley (few, not much for conversation)

Hometrek: the hometrek will probable involve a nagging Nestor, a mad Nemerav, and possibly a hateful Lok. These NPCs should be played out to test the fortitude of the characters (and players :-). Nemerav will try to bolt at first oportunity, so if the characters are too slack  in guarding him, they should be punished by him escaping (something Nestor will nag about). To catch him again should not be too hard, but it should be a nuisance. Lok will look for a oportunity to kill his father, if not convinced to choose a more wise course by the characters (if so, he will be sorrowful and desperate, observing the madness of his father).

The end:
---> if they bring back Nemerav, the people of Moonhome will be very grateful, and make a celebration with song and dance (and flirting). They will also help bring Nestor home.

---> The homecoming of Nestor, with a broken bone, will of course lead to a confrontation with Aura (in public). Nestor will dread this scene, and talk about it as they draw close to home. The confrontation may be influenced by the presence of furs (maybe hunted by the characters, but presented as Nestor's catch).

---> All is well, that ends well...

[timfire]

I think you're right, though the way I'm envisioning things, the hunter/gatherer backdrop is going to drive the social conflict.  (that may have been exactly the way you were seeing it, too).

I think we're on the same page here, I guess I just didn't give you time to elaborate on the social side of things.

Here's a problem I'm having with social conflict, though.  How do you avoid making it look like a bad disaster movie?  You know, the ones where all the people cuasing conflict come off as selfish whiners who deserve their ultimately painful demises?  Is it sufficient to have PCs represent different groups in the community so that players can do the whining on behalf of the group? (presumably with some mechanics reason to help encourage them to really tangle with each other over it).  I certainly want to avoid vague morale ratings like you see in most computer games.

Good question. I think the reason the characters in the movies appear selfish is because they ARE selfish. Certain characters are obviously trying to help others out and others are obviously willing/trying to screw everyone else over. To put it another way, some characters are obviously right and some are obviously wrong.

I think the trick with the game would be to create situations where everyone is right and/or wrong to certain degrees.

For example... Let's say that tribe tradition says the tribe cannot pick fruit from the Valley of the Spring. This is because the valley vegetation feeds many of the animals the tribes hunts. But now a drought has come, many of the animals have migrated, and many of the tribes people are starving. Seemingly, the only place to still find food is in the Valley.

What should the tribe do? The tradition obviously has a reason for being there, and gathering fruit from there may further endanger what few animals are still around. But the tribe is hungry and starving. Neither side is right or wrong.

[jdagna]

I had a couple of interesting thoughts on the social side of things this weekend.

The first of the things stemmed from church.  We're in the process of hiring a new pastor, who spoke for the first time on Sunday and was available to meet on Friday.  Everyone is really excited about the fact that he's a big supporter of small group Bible study and music programs - areas the church is currently weak in.  

Leaders often work that way - their skills and interests wind up dramatically affecting an organization, often in subtle ways that aren't clear.  In game terms, I was thinking that perhaps the leaders of a tribe could have a similar effect, perhaps giving bonuses to tests or something like that based on their leadership.  (or perhaps even in a Trollbabe sense, where the person can be called on as a resource, though in absentia, I would think).

This could make for some interesting conflicts with lots of grey.  One potential leader is good at hunting and well-liked, but the tribe really needs stronger abilities in leatherworking and might take a fellow who's less-liked.  Or, the might just have to accept whatever leader fits the social norms for the position - the eldest or strongest or kin of someone, or whatever.  This gives room for role-playing as players decide whether to support the leader (and how) or whether to oppose him (and how).

The second thought came out of how the herds might survive winter.  I obviously need to do some research, but if going down out of the mountains isn't a safe option, then perhaps the tribes use a number of protected valleys that stay reasonably warm.  In this case, they might even come together for the winter season and thus this season could focus on relationship-building.  In winter, you build alliances with other tribes, find a mate, catch up with family who may be in another tribe, and so on.

Perhaps there's one tribe each year permitted to stay behind and farm the valley, and they're decided by some rotation, election or competition (or perhaps one tribe controls the valley and permits the others to stay in winter in exchange for something).   This might make winters extremely interesting in a social sense and easier to survie at the same time.

[anonymouse]

Re: winter strategies:

A more "traditional" setup would likely be cave complexes in the mountains. The catch, of course, is that over the year, monsters populate the tunnels and caverns. The harvest time becomes not just bringing in the foodstuffs, but culling the monsters that have taken residence in the winter homes. So you've got your reflex-standard dungeon crawl (even if it's dealt with via abstract turns of hunters-clearing-caves or such) for those what want it.

This could still mesh fine with the valley, if the valley only supported so many families and everyone else needed to brave the caves.

No idea if that's something you'd really want to do, but it popped into my head immediately.

[timfire]

I was also thinking, as someone else has mentioned, if you want to create a communal focus, I think having the players control multiple characters might work well. If you don't like that, maybe just have the players create the NPC's? I think that would help establish a vested interest in players in the characters/NPC's beyond them just being a 'resource' or whatever.

If you're looking for ideas, I thought it might be cool if the players created an entire family. You could easily have 10-12 person families (2 grandparents, 4 parents/ adults, and 4-6 children). Multiple that by 4-6 players and you got that 40-60 member tribal group you mentioned in the beginning of the thread.