Make Camp

How do you use Make Camp? When adventurers do it, do you make everyone roll, looking for "the weakest link," or do you just have one do it for the group (strongest link)?

Does everyone roll to aide everyone else (:

I suppose, if I "followed from the fiction," can someone make a camp for someone else? I suppose I wonder if the roll is just to make the camp (strongest link), or if the roll is to camp in such a way that bad things don't happen (weakest link).

Hey Quizoid, I've always had all the characters who actively 'make camp' and eat a ration make the move and on a hit they get to choose one of the options for the whole camp.

Like most moves though, its very easy to say 'we make camp' and make a roll. I really push for more detail. Invoke the setting, where are you? what routines do you do follow to prepare camp? How do you make the area 'safe'. Imbed this into the situation at hand and get lots of juicy hooks for failure from the players themselves.

On a failure, I get to make as hard a move I like, often tying it to the specific character: yes you eat a ration, yes you heal a little and here is this wonderfully evocative impending doom that awaits you. Or ask questions about a tension-ridden bond as the players natter around the campfire. 'So that time the thief stole your precious thing? How comfortable do you feel going to sleep while they are on watch?'

I love make camp, its a fantastically undervalued fictional move in my opinion :)

I have one player roll. Anyone else can aid if they want to help, or wander off into the woods and do other things if that's their bag.

We obviously need to phrase the move better. The intention is: everyone who is making camp (by settling down for a night's rest) does the move as appropriate for the environment. They they choose elements that are true for the camp as a whole.

It's like when you decide on a camp site and then one guy goes off to forage, someone else hides your tracks, another guy starts the fire, and so on.

This, by design, makes camping with fewer characters more dangerous. If you only have two even if you both roll well there's going to be something lacking in the camp. That's a reflection of not being able to share watch as easily, or scout as much of the surrounding area.

What of the non-camping characters?  Presumably some want to make camp to trade rations for health.  What are the other ones doing?  Could you pair making camp with discerning realities to represent one or more characters standing watch?  Would that be inappropriate or redundant?

I suppose you could create other reasons to make camp...
When you make camp with an ally, take +1 forward per ration spent to Parley as you break bread and share a spot by the fire.
(your hospitality is your leverage)

I like to use "...until you Make Camp" as a way of marking duration in custom moves.

Doesn't that make it too easy to camp? One person succeeds and everything is fine? How do you incorporate misses into that?

It seems like a weird (unique?) situation where everyone has to make the roll, then the GM has to look at all of the results and craft a situation that potentially combines total success with partial success and a miss or two.

Each hit adds something to the camp: safety, supplies, etc. One roll can only add one benefit. So one person does not a camp make.

That said, we're open to changing the move.

When we played, my players asked, "Why the heck do we have to be in a dangerous area to have a chance to forage and not have to consume a ration? That kind of sucks."

I read the move over again, shrugged, and told them not to worry about it - that they weren't in a dangerous area and weren't going to have to worry about rations running out.

Each hit adds something to the camp: safety, supplies, etc. One roll can only add one benefit. So one person does not a camp make.

That said, we're open to changing the move.

*Re-reads*

OooooOOOOOh!

Well, I've been playing it wrong. Has it always been like that, or was that a Beta change? It probably could stand to be clarified.

I just checked against the wording in the Red Book version and the wording is identical.

That's the only version I played, and we always did it wrong, nominating someone (usually the cleric) to make camp. The move as-is is probably fine, but I'd agree the wording could be tightened up a bit.

Undertake a perilous journey points out that each player must make the move separately, so something along those lines would probably help. Some way to make it clear that if the party is making camp in dangerous territory then each player in the camp should roll.

I've always played it as written, no confusion.  But I did find it odd that you needed to be in a dangerous area.  Although, in a Points of Light style game you could argue that any area outside a settlement is dangerous :)

Maybe you could think about it like this:

In AW I believe there's commentary on the Read a Sitch move talking about how the move requires reading a charged situation. And that just by using that move you're saying the situation is charged, even if it didn't seem like it until you  made that move.

Well, why not the same thing with making camp? You want to the chance to not use up rations? You gotta risk it and now the area is more dangerous than maybe you thought it was.

That makes sense, and I had the same thought but didn't go into that with them. 

It was just a weird case where they were making a camp next to a river about a mile outside a village in an area filled with olive groves and deer.

All seems peaceful in the grove, then you see the branch of an olive tree lash out at a nearby deer. You hear rustling from the tree near where you're laying on your bed roll. What do you do?

I've always played it as written, no confusion.  But I did find it odd that you needed to be in a dangerous area.  Although, in a Points of Light style game you could argue that any area outside a settlement is dangerous :)

And some areas within a settlement...

The other way to go with be to say that it's easy to forage in a settled area, so you don't need to spend a ration there.