So I am running a bit more of a back-to-basics style open-world campaign, and part of that is I don't want to handwave travel to give opportunity for exploration, skill use, and resource management. However, travel is difficult to do in a purely descriptive game where you essentially ask your players where they want to go and they tell you, like no player's going to ever say "we head off in the direction of the Baron's Keep but we get lost halfway and stumble into a nest of fairies" or whatever. The alternative then would either be to have your entire sandbox mapped out mile-by-mile from the beginning, which would be maddening, OR to use a random table for travel, which I did.
So the way my table works is that for every day of travel there is essentially a skill challenge for the party to see how smoothly it goes. For each failure of one of the skills, I will roll once on a d6 table, and that will mean one of the following happens while they're traveling:
1- The players get lost and it takes 1d6 hours to find their way back to the last landmark.
2- Inclement weather (rain, snow, fog, etc) forces the party to either wait it out for 1d4 hours OR, to travel through the storm and succeed either a Con or Perception check to navigate/stay hale and hearty. DC for the check =8+ 1d12-(#of original skill successes).
3- there is a medium- difficulty random combat encounter (using either the Xanathar's guide encounter tables or Kobold Fight Club's random enemy feature).
4- the party comes across a unique feature out in the wilderness. These can take the form of natural landmarks (caves, waterfalls, etc), ancient remnants (statues, ruins, etc) or otherwise. These features aren't necessarily dangerous, some may even contain hidden benefits. (I'm in the process of writing up table 4B that details results for this roll).
5- there is a hard random combat encounter (same as before r.e tables)
6- The players come across a significant impediment (like a cliff, swamp, river, wall of old ruin, etc) and must take 1d4 hours to navigate around it OR else attempt some other way around, over, through, or otherwise (appropriate skill checks and DC's apply).
My goal with this, as I said, is not only to simulate travel time but also exploration, so that's why I made it so that not everything is dangerous or a combat encounter, but they could also find things they're not even looking for (examples from what I have from 4B so far: "they find a clear blue pool with a shimmering waterfall, its waters are particularly refreshing if you drink it or bathe in it" or "you find a circle of stones or mound of earth that feels haunted; you sleep poorly tonight").
What do you all think? Does this seem serviceable for low-mid tier travel? Any glaring omissions?
Thanks!
*Edit* this campaign has 4 players, so on a good day there might be 0-1 rolls on the table, while a hard day they might all fail and I'd make four rolls on the table (though I'm considering maybe another table for big failure and that might be something that presents a new quest our poses more immediate danger that derails the players slightly)
Good thoughts. Challenge the players and let them make a decision to use their resources or save them. A little realism in a fantasy game. But do not let it bog the game down too much.
You could design the entire travel segment in a dungeon-like fashion. This is something I have tried before with success. Use natural obstacles such as Mountains, thick forest, and bodies of water as the "walls" as the dungeon and roads, paths, and flat terrain as the halls and rooms. Now you can sprinkle in encounters and other interest points as you see fit, and when the players run into them you can zoom in the map for that encounter.
That seems cool too, I might steal that idea for if the party is ever trying to explore through like an Important area that I've saw fit to map out in advance.
The open-world dungeon idea seems pretty good, would work well for features such as mountain passes and river travel where you can put fairly linear encounters in place.
I would look to make navigation skills depend on their approach. For example, they are trying to get to Baron von Naughtymann's keep and kick his butt, and that is north. They can choose to go directly north, which leads through a forest and then through the mountains, or they can go east to the coast and follow the coast north, around the mountains, and then head inland again, or they can head West and follow the roads to a mountain pass to the northwest.
The forest and mountains will be the shortest, but be the most difficult to navigate, potentially improved by following a river upstream. The navigation checks should be high difficulty and they should stand a high risk of getting lost in the woods or mountains and finding encounters like hag's huts and goblin caves and other woodland or mountain obstacles.
The road west should be impossible to fail at navigating, but will take the most time and feature toll roads, bandit raids, highwaymen, and towns and villages which may need a heroes help.
The road east should be easy to navigate but still offer risks of getting lost. the coast may have risks of pirates and such, and there may be some cliffy coastline which makes for difficult traversing.
Try to make any random tables progress the plot, if not in the direction they want - they might find a traveler who is actually a dragon in human form, or a small village inhabited by a single family of cannibals, or be mistaken for bandits and arrested while they rest. Not so keen on "you got lost and wasted time finding your way back". It would definitely be worth the DM having a very basic map of the area they are exploring in to keep some idea of where they have ended up. You could even have their movement determined by their navigation roll - high roll is directly to where they want to go, as it drops below the required roll you as the DM can move them sideways more and more, so if they wanted to travel 20 miles north, and rolled a 13 on a D20, you could move them 7 moles east or west whilst they move 13 miles north, resulting in a more diagonal movement.
Yeah that tracks. In defense of the "you got lost and had to find your way back", the point I'm going for is treating time as a resource. I'll be tracking provisions, so if a journey ends up taking longer, depending on how much longer the provisions could run out and they may need to forage or otherwise use their skills to survive.
The purpose behind which being that needing stuff also drives the plot. Players in town A planning a long and arduous journey to town B will need to consider how many provisions to bring along, and if they decide they need more, they may have to do more favors and odd jobs (quests) in town A to be able to afford the gear.
So I am running a bit more of a back-to-basics style open-world campaign, and part of that is I don't want to handwave travel to give opportunity for exploration, skill use, and resource management. However, travel is difficult to do in a purely descriptive game where you essentially ask your players where they want to go and they tell you, like no player's going to ever say "we head off in the direction of the Baron's Keep but we get lost halfway and stumble into a nest of fairies" or whatever. The alternative then would either be to have your entire sandbox mapped out mile-by-mile from the beginning, which would be maddening, OR to use a random table for travel, which I did.
So the way my table works is that for every day of travel there is essentially a skill challenge for the party to see how smoothly it goes. For each failure of one of the skills, I will roll once on a d6 table, and that will mean one of the following happens while they're traveling:
1- The players get lost and it takes 1d6 hours to find their way back to the last landmark.
2- Inclement weather (rain, snow, fog, etc) forces the party to either wait it out for 1d4 hours OR, to travel through the storm and succeed either a Con or Perception check to navigate/stay hale and hearty. DC for the check =8+ 1d12-(#of original skill successes).
3- there is a medium- difficulty random combat encounter (using either the Xanathar's guide encounter tables or Kobold Fight Club's random enemy feature).
4- the party comes across a unique feature out in the wilderness. These can take the form of natural landmarks (caves, waterfalls, etc), ancient remnants (statues, ruins, etc) or otherwise. These features aren't necessarily dangerous, some may even contain hidden benefits. (I'm in the process of writing up table 4B that details results for this roll).
5- there is a hard random combat encounter (same as before r.e tables)
6- The players come across a significant impediment (like a cliff, swamp, river, wall of old ruin, etc) and must take 1d4 hours to navigate around it OR else attempt some other way around, over, through, or otherwise (appropriate skill checks and DC's apply).
My goal with this, as I said, is not only to simulate travel time but also exploration, so that's why I made it so that not everything is dangerous or a combat encounter, but they could also find things they're not even looking for (examples from what I have from 4B so far: "they find a clear blue pool with a shimmering waterfall, its waters are particularly refreshing if you drink it or bathe in it" or "you find a circle of stones or mound of earth that feels haunted; you sleep poorly tonight").
What do you all think? Does this seem serviceable for low-mid tier travel? Any glaring omissions?
Thanks!
*Edit* this campaign has 4 players, so on a good day there might be 0-1 rolls on the table, while a hard day they might all fail and I'd make four rolls on the table (though I'm considering maybe another table for big failure and that might be something that presents a new quest our poses more immediate danger that derails the players slightly)
Good thoughts. Challenge the players and let them make a decision to use their resources or save them. A little realism in a fantasy game. But do not let it bog the game down too much.
You could design the entire travel segment in a dungeon-like fashion. This is something I have tried before with success. Use natural obstacles such as Mountains, thick forest, and bodies of water as the "walls" as the dungeon and roads, paths, and flat terrain as the halls and rooms. Now you can sprinkle in encounters and other interest points as you see fit, and when the players run into them you can zoom in the map for that encounter.
That seems cool too, I might steal that idea for if the party is ever trying to explore through like an Important area that I've saw fit to map out in advance.
The open-world dungeon idea seems pretty good, would work well for features such as mountain passes and river travel where you can put fairly linear encounters in place.
I would look to make navigation skills depend on their approach. For example, they are trying to get to Baron von Naughtymann's keep and kick his butt, and that is north. They can choose to go directly north, which leads through a forest and then through the mountains, or they can go east to the coast and follow the coast north, around the mountains, and then head inland again, or they can head West and follow the roads to a mountain pass to the northwest.
The forest and mountains will be the shortest, but be the most difficult to navigate, potentially improved by following a river upstream. The navigation checks should be high difficulty and they should stand a high risk of getting lost in the woods or mountains and finding encounters like hag's huts and goblin caves and other woodland or mountain obstacles.
The road west should be impossible to fail at navigating, but will take the most time and feature toll roads, bandit raids, highwaymen, and towns and villages which may need a heroes help.
The road east should be easy to navigate but still offer risks of getting lost. the coast may have risks of pirates and such, and there may be some cliffy coastline which makes for difficult traversing.
Try to make any random tables progress the plot, if not in the direction they want - they might find a traveler who is actually a dragon in human form, or a small village inhabited by a single family of cannibals, or be mistaken for bandits and arrested while they rest. Not so keen on "you got lost and wasted time finding your way back". It would definitely be worth the DM having a very basic map of the area they are exploring in to keep some idea of where they have ended up. You could even have their movement determined by their navigation roll - high roll is directly to where they want to go, as it drops below the required roll you as the DM can move them sideways more and more, so if they wanted to travel 20 miles north, and rolled a 13 on a D20, you could move them 7 moles east or west whilst they move 13 miles north, resulting in a more diagonal movement.
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Yeah that tracks. In defense of the "you got lost and had to find your way back", the point I'm going for is treating time as a resource. I'll be tracking provisions, so if a journey ends up taking longer, depending on how much longer the provisions could run out and they may need to forage or otherwise use their skills to survive.
The purpose behind which being that needing stuff also drives the plot. Players in town A planning a long and arduous journey to town B will need to consider how many provisions to bring along, and if they decide they need more, they may have to do more favors and odd jobs (quests) in town A to be able to afford the gear.