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Open Ended Original Edition Old School Fantasy Adventure Sandbox Role Playing Games (OEOEFASRPG™) The Open-Ended Sandbox Exploration of Dungeons, Wilderness and Cities.
This question is for Jimm specifically, but I figured I'd ask it here so it's searchable.
Jimm, in your Outdoor Survival game, we were fortunate never to actually get lost. If we had, how would you have run that? We could obviously see where we were on the hex map. Would you have taken our marker off the map and kept track of where we were on your own? Or is there maybe some game/dice mechanic that you use to represent the penalty due to being lost? I'm thinking of trying to run the game you did at NTRPGCON for my regular gaming group.
I think you have a copy of my Wilderness House Rules booklet, yes? The "DIRECTION ABILITY CHART" is on page 30 of that book. The table requires a lost party to move a certain distance in a random direction, after which they can move as indicated by the table. All movement is made on the map board in full view of players & DM. So the players will know that they are lost and may attempt to correct their course, which generally takes 1 or more days during which additional food and water supplies must be used.
As I state in the intro of my wilderness booklet. I highly recommend playing through the scenarios of the actual OUTDOOR SURVIVAL board game before using it to run D&D adventures. This will give you a feel for how things like getting lost, running out of food/water, etc., are handled within the scope of the game.