Wilderness Travel Redux

I’ve been running Empire of the Ghouls for the past few months, and one thing it has a lot of is wilderness travel. Like, a lot.

“Road Trip: The Adventure.”

And this brings me back to how difficult it is to run engaging wilderness travel in Dungeons & Dragons.

This is a problem that goes back to the early days of the game. In The Isle of Dread, the characters explored a large island, filling in the contents of hexes on the blank map, until they found a point of interest. There weren’t many points of interest. To enliven everything, you’d make wandering monster checks.

Having a Tyrannosaurus try to eat the party is fun. Especially when one of the players, with a bit of quick thinking, throws his backpack into its mouth. But the problem comes when you’re repeating this for encounter after encounter after encounter. It wears down the players and DM.

So, you want more than just a monster name. Various systems have tried injecting more variety and encounter cues, to varying levels of success.

It should be noted that we’re also dealing with different types of wilderness travel! It has different story purposes, and you shouldn’t always use the same method. Sometimes you’re wanting to progress to the next town as quickly as possible so the storyline can continue; other times the characters are in exploration mode, and wilderness encounters are the entire point of the session.

Why random encounters? It’s a case of how you interact with the game. Some DMs of my acquaintance plan out everything beforehand. There’s no such thing as a random encounter – every encounter the travellers have has been determined beforehand (although the consequences have not been).

I use random encounters a lot. I tend to find a lot of inspiration at the table. I don’t need every encounter to hit. But when the players react well to an encounter, I then can expand on it.

And so, systems that help determine what happens next are very valuable at my table.

I recently had a look at the new Lord of the Rings 5E rules for travelling. As you may know, Lord of the Rings has a lot of travel in it. And so, the game needs structures to handle that travel. Unfortunately, the system that results in this version is too abstract for my taste.

It abstracts away what the challenges are, beyond very vague descriptions and who can solve them. This is not my view of Tolkien’s journeys. The journeys are made up of major set pieces. Nothing abstract about them – perhaps the most abstract is the attempt to cross Caradhras.

The idea of random encounters is mostly antithetical to the planned approach of Tolkien’s books. In a D&D game, it makes more sense – the difference between a book and a game.

What I did like about the new Lord of the Rings rules was one thing: Its method of determining he distance between encounters (events). The party leader makes a Survival check, and that indicates how many hexes the party can travel before there’s an encounter.

The base is 1 hex. 10+ on the roll means 2 hexes, 15+ is 3 hexes, and 20+ is 4 hexes. (You could potentially expand on that).

How big is a hex? The game uses 10-mile hexes. In my games, it would depend on the map. Greyhawk uses 30-mile hexes for major travel. And I use 6-mile hexes for local travel. Funnily enough, I’d keep the hexes component – and just have it apply to different scales.

As I noted above, longer travel doesn’t always mean you want more encounters!

The next thing is to determine the encounter. With Empire of the Ghouls, I want to use three sources:

Empire of the Ghouls gives a base level of encounter for the journey. For the most part, they represent the specific type of creatures or experiences you might have in that terrain. However, they don’t go into much detail.

Trials and Treasures is part of the Advanced 5th Edition from EN Publishing. While I am dubious about their character book, their monster and GM books are very good. And Trials and Treasures has some of the most varied encounters I’ve seen in a traditional book.

What makes T&T even more interesting is that it has environmental and social encounters – and ones that have mechanical weight. The one aspect of the book I am unsure about is how some of the encounters requires tracking of supplies. I will need to investigate that further and see how much I want to implement.

Uncharted Journeys has potentially the widest variety of encounters, with a lot of rather detailed descriptions of wilderness encounters. The main problem it has as a source is that the mechanical underpinnings of it all are very weak. It suggests too few encounters per journey, and they often don’t have enough weight. So, it will require more work to reframe the encounters.

My most recent session of Empire of the Ghouls took encounters mainly from Trials and Treasure in a 600 mile journey to the heart of the conquered land of Krakovar (conquered by undead!)

Well, it should have been about 600 miles – I think the party took longer by going upriver by barge – and the river winded back and forth a lot!

Using the LotR system to determine how far between encounters and (mostly) the T&T book for encounters, we had the following encounters over the course of the journey:

ENCOUNTER 1: Tornado – the party used their superior Athletics skills to ace the challenge, and then befriended a giant crocodile that had been carried by the tornado to their location. (Failure at the challenge would have inflicted damage on the party).

ENCOUNTER 2: Troll – the party were attacked by a troll coming out of the swamp. They slew it quickly, with their new crocodile friend taking it down.

ENCOUNTER 3: Cyclops – as the party set up camp on the river’s edge, they witnessed a cyclops looking for a new club (a nearby tree). As most of the party spoke Giant, they engaged in friendly conversation with the cyclops, before it moved on.

ENCOUNTER 4: Fog – a heavy fog made navigating the river very difficult. The party could either delay their journey or use Survival to continue on with some risk – they chose to risk it and aced the Survival checks.

ENCOUNTER 5: Bunyip – this underwater monstrosity attacked as they set up camp. Not an easy fight, but the party eventually prevailed.

ENCOUNTER 6: Feature (door) – as they passed near to a cliff, they saw a door in the rockface. They really, really wanted to investigate, but chose to pass by.

ENCOUNTER 7: Faerie Ring – mischievous fey challenged the party to a riddle contest, which the party were moderately successful at, winning no prizes but being able to continue unmolested.

ENCOUNTER 8: Cursed Temple – the party came across a shrine raised by the dark forces of the land. They were unsuccessful in purifying it, and the dark forces spoiled many of the potions of healing they were carrying.

ENCOUNTER 9: Feature (vision of Sister Adelind) – the party saw a ghostly apparition – possibly the spirit of Sister Adelind, the martyr they were seeking a relic of.

ENCOUNTER 10: Necrophage Ghoul + 3 Zombies – a combat encounter as they got close to their destination. This one came from the adventure.

ENCOUNTER 11: Antelope – a flavour adventure, this one from the adventure as well.

With that, they finally arrived at their destination. Time to play in real time? About 2 hours. It had been an eventful journey!

As I keep at it, I’ll be refining the system. I hope to report back as it gets better.

7 thoughts on “Wilderness Travel Redux

  1. I wonder if it is time for us to accept as a community that wilderness travel is… just not interesting?

    Hell, travel is not interesting in the real world so there is no reason why it should be in a game. Most people who like travel don’t do it for the travel part. They like being in new and interesting places, not getting there.

    Does it need to be ‘interesting’?

    I wonder if we would find more useful solutions if we asked more specific questions, like;
    Do we need to spend any real world time on this? If so, why?
    How do we make travelling here fun?
    How do we make travelling here actually dangerous?
    How do we make this section feel like it took a long time?
    How do we use this to advance the story/Deepen the world/Explore backstory a character’s backstory etc…

    (No shade on your solution – that looks like a fun session)

  2. Great post! I came to many of the same conclusions about a5e, The One Ring, and Uncharted Journeys.
    > (Failure at the challenge would have inflicted damage on the party).

    I have to ask the classic question: what does damage do in this context, given there are probably an average of The one aspect of the book I am unsure about is how some of the encounters requires tracking of supplies.
    There’s a good post on EN World by someone who played an A5E campaign and concluded that supply was so easy to come by and so rarely depleted that it didn’t seem to add much for all the bookkeeping that it added (compared to not tracking any survival resources) and didn’t reduce the bookkeeping much from the 5e 2014 rules. It was a while ago that i read it, but i think it was this thread: https://www.enworld.org/threads/my-level-up-campaign-has-ended-level-up-feedback.699198/

    1. Keeping track of stats that only get used during journeys is always an issue and there’s a lot of balancing work that probably doesn’t get done about it! After all, journeys are so varied in nature that One System To Rule Them All is unlikely to function as you expect.

      Damage typically matters if (a) it could be lethal, (b) you can’t rest properly until the end of the journey (which is how LotR/Uncharted Journeys handles it). And I do believe I’ll investigate how to work that system in better.

  3. I think that wilderness travel is one of the most exciting things both in linear media and in actual real life. Also, if the system supports it, it could be the most engaging challenge for the players, as it utilizes both strategic thinking and freeform problem solving. I haven’t found the right system and set of procedures though, so while travel is really cool in theory (and real-world practice), I don’t know how to reliably pull it off at the table.

    I have a hypothesis that for engaging wilderness travel, two things are requried:
    1. Baseline risk and resource management layer. This is travel speed, supplies, foraging for food and water, pathfinding, weather and shelter, visibility, difficult terrain, noticing points of interest, hiding from enemies, following tracks etc. In ideal case, the game system should ensure that simply going from point A to point B would already present a compelling challenge.
    2. Unique emergent layer. It should come to life when specific elements of region’s content comes up and interacts with players and the other content. This is specific places of interest, local weather, special conditions and other phenomena, and, of course, region’s denizens. In addition to “remixing” base rules with additional variables, it’s also an important narrative tool, a great way to paint the actual world (rather than just disparate chain of set pieces such as tavern > throne room > dungeon > shop).

    In theory, these two layers should provide players with an interlocking web of incentives and risks that’s exciting to navigate.

    In practice, I find that “FTL-style” random encounters aren’t pulling that off. By FTL-style I mean players seamlessly moving through a kind of abstracted hyperspace until they are “kicked out” from the global map to some sort of combat or challenge arena that they must “solve” to engage their metaphorical FTL drive again.

    Rather than using a single encounter that randomly pops up in player’s faces and interrupts fast travel, I see potential in layering multiple slow-burn encounters that give players a lot of space and time to react, and recontextualize each other as the time passes. This should probably happen all the while general travel procedures keep spinning.

    For example:
    – players are going along the river for several days. They might want to get to the other side. They know a village up the river has a bridge, it’s 6 days of travel. Players can try to ford the river anywhere. The higher they go, the narrower the river becomes. They might find a good place for fording, but it’s not guaranteed (and the stream is getting faster up the river).
    – on the second night, they hear howling in the forest. That’s it, nobody attacks, no fights. Now the players are aware that there are wolves nearby, can factor them in their plans and prepare accordingly.
    – on the second day, they notice a big structure, which is two or three days away, in their general direction, but deeper in the forest.
    – on the third day it becomes clear that it’s a castle, likely ruined. In the evening, storm clouds appear on the horizon.
    – Should they ford the river now, before the storm begins? It’s much harder since its getting darker, but still easier than trying that in the storm.
    – Should they keep following the river to the village? The banks will turn into slippery mud, and the forest will be much harder to navigate due to the blowdown.
    – Should they head to the castle ruins and take cover there, waiting for the storm to end? Should they head out right now and navigate forest in the night, tired from the day of walking, or should they make camp and hope they will be able to do that tomorrow in the morning? And if they decide to go into the forest, what if they see telltale goblin tribe signs on the trees? Will they change their plans?
    – Let’s imagine players hear multiple dogs barking far behind. What does that mean? A farm? They haven’t seen any farms on their way. A hunt? No nobles live nearby, and no horns are sounding. There’s another explanation: somebody is pursuing the party! Now that they know they are (potentially, maybe) pursued by a group with hounds, how will their plans change? Is there another explanation? Would they risk ignoring it? Should they just turn back and check the source of barking?

    This challenge, although incredibly generic and vanilla, still looks pretty interesting to me, as there are multiple variables to factor in. There’s a lot of drastically different outcomes, all of which heavily depend on players’ long-term planning and actions, which elevates player agency. It took me very little effort to come up with this example “manually”, but I’ve yet to see a set of rules and procedures that allows to reliably automate this.

    1. You’ve got your own miniscenario there with a surprising number of moving parts – which is probably why most systems can’t handle it. It’s a lot of specific design!

      You need resources that the players care about so you can deplete them, and that’s hard – because if they only matter in wilderness play, it’s not enough. Which is why Uncharted Journeys restricts resting, so HP and spell depletion come into play. (Food sounds like a great thing to deplete, but it doesn’t matter much in normal play).

  4. While I’m basically running 5e, I’m a big fan of the A5E’s exploration material in T&T! Here are a few thoughts:
    * I like the idea of “supply” but I generally use specific consumables like rations rather than the abstract concept. The other advantage of being specific is that I can target (or award) things like torches, oil flasks, or water skins for variety or because it makes sense to the story.
    * To make the use of supply/consumables meaningful, I found I needed to beef up encumbrance while also simplifying the book keeping. The beautiful thing is that the players are now making other meaningful choices related to the gear. (ex dropping their backpacks prior to encounters … like the Outward video game.). That’s a much longer story though!
    * I’ve not implemented damage to equipment as a possible outcome of exploration encounters due to the fact that my campaign is currently on the ragged edge of civilization and the party wouldn’t have access to a good means to repair things.
    * When possible, I roll the encounters in advance. This lets the idea steep in my head for a while so I can better weave whatever it is into the narrative (ex foreshadowing the encounter and tying the encounter to the larger story in some fashion.)

  5. I’ve been running a lot of travel/exploration in my current campaign. A few of my thoughts:
    – I make use of random encounter tables for inspiration, but generally roll them ahead of time so I can spend a bit of time making them more interesting than just “you encounter a monster in the forest.”
    – Even though my encounters are mostly prepared in advance, the “when” isn’t always. I have my players take turns rolling for a chance of encounter, helps keep them engaged. Of course if the dice are too favourable an encounter may happen anyways after a while, and similarly if they are rolling too many encounters some of them become simple non-combat encounters (e.g. a natural wonder).
    – I like the Uncharted Journeys book for non-combat encounter inspiration in particular. I’ve never really gone all-in on the mechanics of the book, and I was already implementing a system where the party doesn’t get long rests easily during wilderness travel, but there’s a lot of great material in there.
    – I pepper my world with teleportation circles. That way once the party reaches a destination we don’t have to keep re-hashing the same journey after they’ve returned to their home town.
    – While I have points of interest on my map I don’t hesitate to move them if I want the party to come across them as an “encounter.”
    – I don’t think my players have much interest in detailed accounting of supplies but I do expect them to have a plan for how they are going to carry or get enough food and water.
    – I think it is important to keep encounters interesting, varied and relevant. No reason why a random encounter can’t be tied to broader campaign story either.

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