Hey guys, I am a semi-new DM and I hate when my party has to travel.
In my current campaign, my players need to travel across an ocean to their next destination and I don't know how to make it interesting. My players like to roleplay, most of them anyway, but they don't do much when traveling for many days in a row, so if an encounter isn't rolled (I frequently roll too low for encounters) then nothing happens for the majority of the journey. But, they are too low level and without the connections to make fast-travel really an option.
As a DM, I have realized that I am much better at the roleplay aspects than at others things, so I've been working on making combat encounters that are more challenging for my players. And it's helped, but I haven't found anything to help me with traveling. Got any advice for me to make travel a better experience for my party?
Screw the rolling to see if they have an encounter. Instead decide (or roll to see ) how many encounters they are going to have on the trip entire trip. For example, you could roll 1d6-1. Then either pick or randomly roll for what they are from your random encounter list. Start the first with "After several days of boredom, something interesting happens." End the last with "After several weeks of total travel, you arrive at port."
Screw the rolling to see if they have an encounter. Instead decide (or roll to see ) how many encounters they are going to have on the trip entire trip. For example, you could roll 1d6-1. Then either pick or randomly roll for what they are from your random encounter list. Start the first with "After several days of boredom, something interesting happens." End the last with "After several weeks of total travel, you arrive at port."
That is a fair point. This is my first homebrew adventure, so it never occurred to me that I could just do that. Thanks!
Overland travel with the last few editions have always been a rather dull experience. They only list examples of random encounters. And lets face it. In most cases those encounters are meaningless filler. In ye olde days we used hex-grid crawl overland traveling. Instead of having random creature encounters we made random situations that would fit in that specific environment.
These situations could be another vessel at sea. It could be in trouble in some way. There could be weather elements that are unnatural. Potentially dragging the ship to the bottom of the ocean if the PC's don't react. Create a d20 table where every number is its own Day and during that Day 1 situation can happen. On a D20 they have the wind in the sails and travel farther than other days. on a 1 they run into a Sea Turtledragon. Knowing the big situation that comes up during any given day you can then break it up into 8 hour parts if you want. Giving you a possible build up towards the climax of the situation. Simply let the navigator roll on the d20 table to see what will occur during that day.
Example: you roll on the table and see "ghost ship encounter". During the early morning the group sails forth with a calm blue sky bobbing on away on the waves. Describe how in the late afternoon the air darkens, the wind picks up as if a storm is brewing. Allow the players to decide what to do after the short narration. "several hours pass and suddenly the wind dies out. yet the cold air turns even more chill. fog rises in the distance. moving towards the ship". Once again giving the players a chance on what to do. Then have the ghost ship appear out of nowhere.
However not every situation needs a per day time build up. It really depends what the event is and what would fit.
Depending on the situation you can then have each player roll a d6 when coming up on the event. If the majority rolls a 1 the group will approach in a negative way. So that the situation can ambush or catch the party off-guard. With most rolling a 6 the group will approach the situation with an advantage. Giving them time to observe and decide what to do with it. Everything else leading to a more natural engagement.
With this you can have all sorts of things on the d20 table from combat encounters, social encounters, exploration encounters...each leading to potential side stuff.
The other alternative. If you're on the way to a dungeon. And you know it, the players know it. Then just make the journey towards it with predetermined encounters. Treat the journey as part of the dungeon and just as deadly. Replace traps with environmental hazards and such.
PS for lengthier journey's you might want to homebrew some creatures. In older editions are creatures that can drain xp/levels. Homebrew those attacks to instead drain Exhaustion Points from the PC's. Giving some more threat to the traveling. Also giving more options for meaningful decisions. When to rest up or push forth etc. Turning those meaningless filler random encounters into a bit more meaningful situations since it'll add up.
Another option is to use the 4e "skill challenge" rules for travel in 5e.
The short version is: Each of the Party member, in turn, needs to pick a Skill, and describe how using that skill can aid or further the journey. The GM determines a DC on what they are trying to do, and Players which take silly or ill-chosen skills would have extremely high DCs. If someone has used a skill, another Player cannot choose the same skill, or at the DMs discretion they can, but the DC is correspondingly higher ( say, they are rolling at -2/-3 modifier for every time someone has already used that skill in the challenge ).
They attempt the roll, and if they succeed, they make progress on the journey, if they fail, there is a complication.
A complication can be an wandering monster encounter, a loss ( say, of equipment, or a horse ), a environmental hazard ( a member rides into quicksand, and the Party must race to pull them out, and the horse, and the gear, before they're lost - some DM care and skill on dramatic tension and pacing can make this quite exciting ), a barrier obstacle that the Party either has to figure out or bypass ( which adds time to their journey or increases the number of successes they need to end the challenge - see below ), or a change in their circumstances which makes the journey more perilous ( there's a storm, part of their supply of fresh water casks is washed overboard, now the need to make Constitution checks every day or suffer a point of Exhaustion, due to reduced water rations ).
Typically, a skill challenge requires that the Party makes X successes to come to the end of the challenge, and if they accumulate Y failures first the challenge fails. In that case of an ocean voyage, I'd be tempted to have them shipwrecked on a small island and throw in a mini island side quest as they repair the ship ( there's a malevolent entity on the island, sending waves of undead at them, and the being is - of course - tied to the ruined cursed temple deep in the jungle .... ).
If you like, you can have natural 20 rolls count as 2 successes, and critical failures count as 2 failures.
Using a skill challenge this way means the Players are always involved, as they're trying to figure out creative ways to use their high ability Skills to their advantage, they feel like their in control of their journey as they fail and succeed on their rolls and the choices of skills, and a really clever Party will start coordinating and figuring out who is best suited to roll what ( OK, Emma you can roll your Survival to navigate us better, and that means Dave can try and roll his Persuasion to inspire and lead the crew ... ).
You can make a skill challenge as long, or as short, as you feel is appropriate, or interesting. There's nothing to say that a single skill roll can't encompass several days travel.
There's a Matt Colville video on skill challenges here.
Hereis an example of a pseudo-skill-challenge being used for a journey on Critical Role ( Campaign 2, Episode 93 - Misery Loves Company ).
And there's an interesting blog post on using skill challenges in 5e, here.
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
I rarely roll for random encounters during travel. I decide if something will happen. If it does, great, otherwise, skip time. Don't waste your party's time on checks that you know won't have any consequences. Other than the perception check while keeping guard meme, I don't ever make travel have any unnecessary checks, because if they fail then things go wrong and I don't want to spend the session fixing a wagon for the tenth time because the artificer is rolling a ton of natural 1's.
If they're going to run into something along the way, I make it happen. If the party wants to, they can do checks to circumvent the encounter- survival and stealth checks to skirt through the wood unnoticed, persuasion or intimidation to convince the bandits to back off, etc. It's not always combat encounters, either. Maybe there's a traveling bard who tells a story, or a group of refugees. Anything that happens, though, should matter, and that's why I don't use random tables for traveling.
Random tables are great for inspiring you as a DM, but my rule of thumb is if I'm looking at a random table and I really want one of the outcomes, unless it's going to be bad for the party or not fun for the players, that's the one that happens. Obviously, things like wild magic don't apply here, since the randomness is part of the fun! But when building encounters, setting up scenes, and developing characters, random tables don't necessarily make things smoother, especially if you get outlier results consistently. Go for what feels right. You might need to lean on random tables, especially if you're a new DM and getting started, but once you get used to running D&D it should make more sense what feels right and once you know your group you can keep them engaged pretty easily.
Another option is to use the 4e "skill challenge" rules for travel in 5e.
The short version is: Each of the Party member, in turn, needs to pick a Skill, and describe how using that skill can aid or further the journey. The GM determines a DC on what they are trying to do, and Players which take silly or ill-chosen skills would have extremely high DCs. If someone has used a skill, another Player cannot choose the same skill, or at the DMs discretion they can, but the DC is correspondingly higher ( say, they are rolling at -2/-3 modifier for every time someone has already used that skill in the challenge ).
They attempt the roll, and if they succeed, they make progress on the journey, if they fail, there is a complication.
This seems like the best idea for handling travel... it's always good when players get to roll dice to effect what happens, instead of just random encounters.
As well, I'd also mention that, personally, I would treat extended travel on a reliable vessel essentially as downtime, and maybe include a few planned encounters along the way. If the characters are simply passengers on a ship with a full crew, then they could conceivably spend their time brewing potions or writing spell scrolls, maybe occasionally getting interrupted by a storm or some harpies or something.
If your party is more into roleplaying, which seems to be the case, then you honestly can just drop the random rolls for encounters. Think up a fun situation for them and put them in it. Would the party react well to a mutiny, pirates, big storms, monsters? Honestly just think about what's cool and do that, dnd is nice in that it doesn't really have rules that you "need" to follow
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
As someone else mentioned, if you want an encounter to break up travel, just have one. You’re running the game, the dice are just a tool to help you do that. But don’t be a slave to the dice.
Second, I have “fast travelled”. When my group had a long journey that didn’t pose any significant risk, I emailed out a recap of the journey through the week that they could read to get a sense of the place, the hardships, maybe an interesting NPC. Then next session, travel was done and we were ready to go. WARNING! Travel helps build a group, so don’t do this all the time. But it can be handy for extremely long journeys.
There's nothing wrong with random encounters, as long as "random" doesn't mean poorly designed. I suggest creating your own list of encounters, including combat and other challenges and planning them beforehand; roll only to decide which of your encounters occurs. These encounters should be based on what obstacles the ship might encounter in whatever waters it is traveling through.
Sea travel should be exciting and mysterious. It's worth creating some encounters that are benign or that are simply events that happen around the ship. Put your players in situations where they have to make a choice. For example, if they sight an unknown island in the distance, do they try to convince the captain to approach so they can explore it? Or do they want to avoid the risk?
Another thing you can do is to bring life to the ship's crew. Give the PCs reasons to interact with them. Interactions with the ship's NPCs is another potential gold mine for encounters. Some fun ideas I've used in the past.
A murder occurs on board; the PCs have a clear alibi, so the captain asks them to help solve it.
An NPC asks for the party's protection after discovering an enemy of theirs is also a passenger.
A mutiny is brewing (or breaks out), and the PCs help resolve it.
Signs emerge that a stowaway is on board.
The captain drops dead suddenly (of natural causes), and the crew tries to put the PCs in charge.
The crew asks the PCs to gamble with them or play a game of dice (against the captain's orders).
The crew throws a celebration at sea in honor of an event and invites the PCs to join.
Here's some other resources I've used in the past for sea encounters and events.
Hey guys, I am a semi-new DM and I hate when my party has to travel.
In my current campaign, my players need to travel across an ocean to their next destination and I don't know how to make it interesting. My players like to roleplay, most of them anyway, but they don't do much when traveling for many days in a row, so if an encounter isn't rolled (I frequently roll too low for encounters) then nothing happens for the majority of the journey. But, they are too low level and without the connections to make fast-travel really an option.
As a DM, I have realized that I am much better at the roleplay aspects than at others things, so I've been working on making combat encounters that are more challenging for my players. And it's helped, but I haven't found anything to help me with traveling. Got any advice for me to make travel a better experience for my party?
Screw the rolling to see if they have an encounter. Instead decide (or roll to see ) how many encounters they are going to have on the trip entire trip. For example, you could roll 1d6-1. Then either pick or randomly roll for what they are from your random encounter list. Start the first with "After several days of boredom, something interesting happens." End the last with "After several weeks of total travel, you arrive at port."
That is a fair point. This is my first homebrew adventure, so it never occurred to me that I could just do that. Thanks!
Overland travel with the last few editions have always been a rather dull experience. They only list examples of random encounters. And lets face it. In most cases those encounters are meaningless filler. In ye olde days we used hex-grid crawl overland traveling. Instead of having random creature encounters we made random situations that would fit in that specific environment.
These situations could be another vessel at sea. It could be in trouble in some way. There could be weather elements that are unnatural. Potentially dragging the ship to the bottom of the ocean if the PC's don't react. Create a d20 table where every number is its own Day and during that Day 1 situation can happen. On a D20 they have the wind in the sails and travel farther than other days. on a 1 they run into a Sea Turtledragon. Knowing the big situation that comes up during any given day you can then break it up into 8 hour parts if you want. Giving you a possible build up towards the climax of the situation. Simply let the navigator roll on the d20 table to see what will occur during that day.
Example: you roll on the table and see "ghost ship encounter". During the early morning the group sails forth with a calm blue sky bobbing on away on the waves. Describe how in the late afternoon the air darkens, the wind picks up as if a storm is brewing. Allow the players to decide what to do after the short narration. "several hours pass and suddenly the wind dies out. yet the cold air turns even more chill. fog rises in the distance. moving towards the ship". Once again giving the players a chance on what to do. Then have the ghost ship appear out of nowhere.
However not every situation needs a per day time build up. It really depends what the event is and what would fit.
Depending on the situation you can then have each player roll a d6 when coming up on the event. If the majority rolls a 1 the group will approach in a negative way. So that the situation can ambush or catch the party off-guard. With most rolling a 6 the group will approach the situation with an advantage. Giving them time to observe and decide what to do with it. Everything else leading to a more natural engagement.
With this you can have all sorts of things on the d20 table from combat encounters, social encounters, exploration encounters...each leading to potential side stuff.
The other alternative. If you're on the way to a dungeon. And you know it, the players know it. Then just make the journey towards it with predetermined encounters. Treat the journey as part of the dungeon and just as deadly. Replace traps with environmental hazards and such.
PS for lengthier journey's you might want to homebrew some creatures. In older editions are creatures that can drain xp/levels. Homebrew those attacks to instead drain Exhaustion Points from the PC's. Giving some more threat to the traveling. Also giving more options for meaningful decisions. When to rest up or push forth etc. Turning those meaningless filler random encounters into a bit more meaningful situations since it'll add up.
Another option is to use the 4e "skill challenge" rules for travel in 5e.
The short version is: Each of the Party member, in turn, needs to pick a Skill, and describe how using that skill can aid or further the journey. The GM determines a DC on what they are trying to do, and Players which take silly or ill-chosen skills would have extremely high DCs. If someone has used a skill, another Player cannot choose the same skill, or at the DMs discretion they can, but the DC is correspondingly higher ( say, they are rolling at -2/-3 modifier for every time someone has already used that skill in the challenge ).
They attempt the roll, and if they succeed, they make progress on the journey, if they fail, there is a complication.
A complication can be an wandering monster encounter, a loss ( say, of equipment, or a horse ), a environmental hazard ( a member rides into quicksand, and the Party must race to pull them out, and the horse, and the gear, before they're lost - some DM care and skill on dramatic tension and pacing can make this quite exciting ), a barrier obstacle that the Party either has to figure out or bypass ( which adds time to their journey or increases the number of successes they need to end the challenge - see below ), or a change in their circumstances which makes the journey more perilous ( there's a storm, part of their supply of fresh water casks is washed overboard, now the need to make Constitution checks every day or suffer a point of Exhaustion, due to reduced water rations ).
Typically, a skill challenge requires that the Party makes X successes to come to the end of the challenge, and if they accumulate Y failures first the challenge fails. In that case of an ocean voyage, I'd be tempted to have them shipwrecked on a small island and throw in a mini island side quest as they repair the ship ( there's a malevolent entity on the island, sending waves of undead at them, and the being is - of course - tied to the ruined cursed temple deep in the jungle .... ).
If you like, you can have natural 20 rolls count as 2 successes, and critical failures count as 2 failures.
Using a skill challenge this way means the Players are always involved, as they're trying to figure out creative ways to use their high ability Skills to their advantage, they feel like their in control of their journey as they fail and succeed on their rolls and the choices of skills, and a really clever Party will start coordinating and figuring out who is best suited to roll what ( OK, Emma you can roll your Survival to navigate us better, and that means Dave can try and roll his Persuasion to inspire and lead the crew ... ).
You can make a skill challenge as long, or as short, as you feel is appropriate, or interesting. There's nothing to say that a single skill roll can't encompass several days travel.
There's a Matt Colville video on skill challenges here.
Here is an example of a pseudo-skill-challenge being used for a journey on Critical Role ( Campaign 2, Episode 93 - Misery Loves Company ).
And there's an interesting blog post on using skill challenges in 5e, here.
Best of luck! :)
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
I rarely roll for random encounters during travel. I decide if something will happen. If it does, great, otherwise, skip time. Don't waste your party's time on checks that you know won't have any consequences. Other than the perception check while keeping guard meme, I don't ever make travel have any unnecessary checks, because if they fail then things go wrong and I don't want to spend the session fixing a wagon for the tenth time because the artificer is rolling a ton of natural 1's.
If they're going to run into something along the way, I make it happen. If the party wants to, they can do checks to circumvent the encounter- survival and stealth checks to skirt through the wood unnoticed, persuasion or intimidation to convince the bandits to back off, etc. It's not always combat encounters, either. Maybe there's a traveling bard who tells a story, or a group of refugees. Anything that happens, though, should matter, and that's why I don't use random tables for traveling.
Random tables are great for inspiring you as a DM, but my rule of thumb is if I'm looking at a random table and I really want one of the outcomes, unless it's going to be bad for the party or not fun for the players, that's the one that happens. Obviously, things like wild magic don't apply here, since the randomness is part of the fun! But when building encounters, setting up scenes, and developing characters, random tables don't necessarily make things smoother, especially if you get outlier results consistently. Go for what feels right. You might need to lean on random tables, especially if you're a new DM and getting started, but once you get used to running D&D it should make more sense what feels right and once you know your group you can keep them engaged pretty easily.
You might find some useful advice here:
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
This seems like the best idea for handling travel... it's always good when players get to roll dice to effect what happens, instead of just random encounters.
As well, I'd also mention that, personally, I would treat extended travel on a reliable vessel essentially as downtime, and maybe include a few planned encounters along the way. If the characters are simply passengers on a ship with a full crew, then they could conceivably spend their time brewing potions or writing spell scrolls, maybe occasionally getting interrupted by a storm or some harpies or something.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
If your party is more into roleplaying, which seems to be the case, then you honestly can just drop the random rolls for encounters. Think up a fun situation for them and put them in it. Would the party react well to a mutiny, pirates, big storms, monsters? Honestly just think about what's cool and do that, dnd is nice in that it doesn't really have rules that you "need" to follow
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
I did the 4e skill challenge last week. I think it worked OK. Players seemed to like it.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
As someone else mentioned, if you want an encounter to break up travel, just have one. You’re running the game, the dice are just a tool to help you do that. But don’t be a slave to the dice.
Second, I have “fast travelled”. When my group had a long journey that didn’t pose any significant risk, I emailed out a recap of the journey through the week that they could read to get a sense of the place, the hardships, maybe an interesting NPC. Then next session, travel was done and we were ready to go. WARNING! Travel helps build a group, so don’t do this all the time. But it can be handy for extremely long journeys.
There's nothing wrong with random encounters, as long as "random" doesn't mean poorly designed. I suggest creating your own list of encounters, including combat and other challenges and planning them beforehand; roll only to decide which of your encounters occurs. These encounters should be based on what obstacles the ship might encounter in whatever waters it is traveling through.
Sea travel should be exciting and mysterious. It's worth creating some encounters that are benign or that are simply events that happen around the ship. Put your players in situations where they have to make a choice. For example, if they sight an unknown island in the distance, do they try to convince the captain to approach so they can explore it? Or do they want to avoid the risk?
Another thing you can do is to bring life to the ship's crew. Give the PCs reasons to interact with them. Interactions with the ship's NPCs is another potential gold mine for encounters. Some fun ideas I've used in the past.
Here's some other resources I've used in the past for sea encounters and events.
1d20 Encounters at Sea
100 Sea Travel Events