I've come to accept that there are a few things in the world of online TRPG discourse that I will never understand, like why people like Drizzt Do'urden or why people think rules lawyering makes for a fun time at the table. But even then, the first time I heard this piece of advice, I was completely dumbfounded. Why, I asked myself, would anyone want to skip over overland travel? That's the best part!
Ever since I began my career as a DM, I have always played out travel in "game time." I treat it as a series of scenes, challenges, and encounters, just like I would treat any dungeon. In just about every campaign I've run, half the action, if not more, has been taken up by the party getting from one place to another. And I have never gotten bored with it, or felt like I needed to - or, indeed, that I should - gloss over it.
I think a big part of this can be attributed to the stories that shaped my perception of the fantasy genre, and that I drew upon in my DMing. In my childhood, the two stories that introduced me to fantasy were The Hobbit and The Odyssey. Both of these are, fundamentally, stories about getting from one place to another. But the majority of the story is devoted to the many incidents that happen along the way. For me, that was just how a fantasy quest worked - there was a beginning and an end, but most of the interesting points happened in between those points. I just assumed that everyone ran travel the way I did. Why wouldn't they? I mean, imagine if Tolkien applied this logic, and Bilbo went from Hobbiton to the Lonely Mountain in the span of a single chapter. That wouldn't be a very interesting story, would it?
Evidently, the world needs my wisdom. So I'm coming off my mountain hermitage to share how I handle travel in my games, and how I make it interesting.
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| All of this in one forest! |
This is probably advice you've heard before - but it bears repeating, because it's good advice. There is just as much room for interesting obstacles, challenging combat, and thought-provoking puzzles above ground as there is in a dungeon. A lot of wilderness travel can be handled in the same way one would handle a dungeon crawl, replacing rooms and corridors with landmarks and other points of interest. The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks provide plenty of good examples of how to make this work. As early as the third installment in the series, 1983's The Forest of Doom, we can see this in action - the book takes the dungeon crawl format of the previous titles, but simply rethemes it as a journey through the forest. Walls can be replaced by dense trees, and rooms by clearings, but the structure of the action remains the same: a spatially linked series of discrete zones, with encounters in each.
The Forest of Doom stands as one extreme of this philosophy. Certainly, you can run things this way, but if you don't want travel to be laborious, it may be more practical to expand the "dungeon" over a wider span of distance, with "rooms" being miles or leagues apart. This is where your pointcrawls and hexcrawls come in. As long as there's a number of points of interest in the environment, enough for players to remember and map out and want to travel back and forth between, with multiple different routes and connections between them, you're still essentially running a dungeon crawl writ large. The only thing that fundamentally changes is the scale - you can zoom in and out as needed to focus in on a smaller, encounter-dense location like a dungeon, or cast a wider lens for a wider area. All you need to do is have plenty of interesting things for your players to do.
If you're going to run a good dungeon, you want to stock it with plenty of interesting and diverse rooms, puzzles, challenges, and encounters. It can't just be a series of orcs guarding pies. Well, it can be, but it'll get dull fast if you don't put twists on the formula. If we treat overland travel like a giant dungeon, you'll need to do the same thing.
It's no coincidence that many entries in my Friday Encounter series are interesting things that can be found on the road or in the wilderness. A lot of them, after all, are encounters I've used in my campaigns. But they also show that there are all sorts of unique situations you can throw at players, and many of them can fit just as well in the wilderness or on the road as in a dungeon.
Of course, if the party is traveling from a designated Point A to a designated Point B - especially in a settled or civilized area - they'll likely want to stick to the road, which limits the amount of directions and branching paths they could travel in. That's not to say that there isn't room for choice - perhaps the road forks, or the path is blocked, forcing an alternate route around - but if the PCs are going to be sticking to a relatively straight line, it's especially important to pepper that line with interesting stops along the way to keep travel dynamic.
The sadly defunct Way of the Waysider blog goes into great detail about this, with an excellent guide to making road travel engaging - they had even begun to construct a "road sandbox" detailing a number of stops along a network of roads, and it makes me sad to this day that this was never completed. In an average pre-industrial society, a road in any settled region should have stops roughly at least a day apart from one another so that travelers would find a place to rest. These would mostly be towns, but there are other options, like castles, monasteries, inns, and homesteads. Each of these stops should have a hook or gimmick to them. It could be a feature of the settlement itself - a particular landmark, or even a dungeon that could be explored - or it could be something in the vicinity, like a noted visitor, or rumors of a monster or treasure nearby. You could even give the party a quest to take them on a brief detour from their main journey. Even something as simple as a peculiar local custom ("in this town, the locals observe a festival of rolling cheese wheels down hills, and this just so happens to be taking place when the party arrives") can make stops memorable and bring life to the setting.
Every time the PCs stop somewhere, there should be something that gives them reason to investigate things further, or something they can use. It doesn't have to be big, but it should at least be memorable enough to distinguish one stop apart from others, to keep them from blurring together.
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| Trivia: the one time this part made it to the screen, Stadtler and Waldorf were involved. Look it up! |
Not all challenges in the wilderness have to come from civilization, or monsters, or other external forces. The natural world itself can be just as much of a threat to an adventurer, especially an ill-prepared one. I've always held that non-combat encounters can be more interesting than combat ones. Combat encounters have an easy and obvious solution to them - "we need to bash this thing's head in before it bashes our heads in!" But what if you have a problem you can't solve by hitting it with a sword? That encourages players to think and apply problem-solving skills. Sometimes, they can come up with solutions that even you won't anticipate. I love when that happens.
Recently, I began reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - I'm of course familiar with the classic movie, and I read several of the later books in the series in my youth, but I wanted to start at the beginning to see how it compares to the more famous film. What struck me was how similar the action in that story was to the way I like to run travel in my games. The movie adapts the important parts - Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion, and they fall into an enchanted field of poppies on the way to the Emerald City. But it also cut out a lot of chapters in between that detail the everyday challenges they face along the way, like having to cut their way through thick foliage or needing to cross a chasm where the bridge is out. These are exactly the sorts of encounters I like to throw at my players.
If you're in need of encounters for overland travel, don't forget things like bad weather, rough ground, poor visibility, and of course, getting lost. They provide fun challenges that demand creative thought, and they don't stretch suspension of disbelief quite as much as throwing constant life-or-death struggles at the party does. As other luminaries have pointed out, the concept of the "adventuring day," in which an average 5e party is meant to face 6-8 peril-fraught battles per day, is completely ridiculous. 5e is unbalanced precisely because no one ever actually runs the game the way it's balanced around, because that only makes sense if you adjust every mention of "day" in the rules given with "week." As Ross Scott succinctly put it, "how many people have you fought or shot today?" Pit your PCs against the uncaring wilds, however, and you can create challenges that are refreshing and believable.
Also worth noting, natural phenomena doesn't have to be a source of adversity. Something like an advantageous lookout that allows the party to survey the path ahead can be just as interesting, and impact the tactics they employ.
If the journey is far enough, and far enough afield from civilization, the party can't expect to rely on the hospitality of others. If you're going to make travel an engaging challenge, it helps to model the difficulties inherent in faring for oneself in the wild. Constructing shelter, navigating trails, and foraging for food can all present interesting opportunities for PCs to put their skills to the test. You should be tracking rations, and PCs should be sure to equip themselves with proper gear for the environment ahead of them - they won't do well in the cold mountains without warm clothes, for instance.
Regrettably, not a lot of systems represent this well. Which is frustrating, because the extensive literary canon of boys-own-adventure serials should well be enough to establish the precedent that this can make for good storytelling. Contrary to popular belief, Gygax and Arneson did not argue that players should break out a copy of Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival board game and just play that when their characters were traversing the wilderness; they just recommended the board as a useful game map. Regardless, I do think that there's room for house rules to fill the gaps here. My ideal system would have rules for following trails, foraging for food, scouting ahead, and making camp that would hopefully make these things more granular and in-depth than rolling a single Survival check and being done with it.
The best system I've seen handle this has been the fan-made expansion The Perilous Wilds for Dungeon World, which lists several new moves for exactly the sort of thing I just listed, complete with advice for the DM on how to apply them and how complications of those rolls could drive the action forward. I would never think of running the system without it. Dungeon World is, of course, a 2d6-based system with a standardized mechanic for rolling and three levels of outcomes for any given roll, which doesn't exactly work the same way as 5e. Maybe some day I'll adapt these rules to 5e myself, or perhaps someone out there has already done something that fills the void - I'd love to hear about it, if so!
This goes with everything regarding TRPG advice, but it bears repeating here. Most DMs don't do things this way, and not all players will be used to handling travel in such a detailed and granular fashion. It's entirely possible that they'll find it boring if they take so long to get to the endpoint of their quest, and that they'll find whole sessions of amusing incidents along the way to be a bore. Sure, I love that stuff, but you can't guarantee everyone will.
This goes especially so if you're using house rules - if there are rules in use at your table that aren't in the core books, your players may not know them as well, and may not be used to thinking in terms of how they can apply and interact with them. If your players aren't used to packing rations for the travel ahead, rather than writing them down as part of their starting equipment and then forgetting about them, it isn't fair to punish them for failing to do so. If you want to run a campaign that makes travel a priority, it's good to make sure your players know this going in, and that they're prepared to approach the challenges of such a campaign appropriately. Ideally, they'll find the prospect just as enjoyable as you do!
If you have any additional thoughts on making travel fun, please leave them in the comments below!
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