Exploring the Wilderness: Navigation and Player Agency
A few weeks ago, I watched an episode of Matt Colville’s Running the Game, his YouTube series of long-form D&D advice. I’m a big fan of Matt’s. I wrote an adventure for his Kickstarter. One of the things I know Matt loves is an old-school module titled Cult of the Reptile God—an adventure in which the village of Orlane is taken over by a sinister cult in the forest beyond, the characters learn of this and travel through the wilderness to reach the cult’s hideout, and then engages in a dungeon exploration to stamp out the cult.
That middle section, the wilderness exploration, is something a lot of D&D adventures of the past decade have lacked. It seems to be making a resurgence, though; Tomb of Annihilation had an excellent hex-crawl through the jungles of Chult, Princes of the Apocalypse had a dodgy but salvageable hex-crawl around the Dessarin Valley, and Storm King’s Thunder had an infamous exploration section that threw the party into a massive sandbox of the entire freakin’ North.
It’s why I was surprised to learn that in his video titled “Making Travel Interesting,” Matt outright states that he thinks “trying to make travel interesting [in D&D] is largely a red herring. It’s this thing that distracts us from what we’re trying to do” (7:53).
Wait, Seriously?
Well, sort of. My surprise at hearing that blunt statement was immense, and I’ve taken it a little out of context here so you feel the same shock I did. If you were to continue watching—like I did, after taking a few minutes to walk around and reevaluate my DMing choices—you would hear Matt go on to say, “It’s our responsibility as Dungeon Masters so unless you think that traveling through the wilderness is going to advance the plot [emphasis added], I’m giving you permission to just skip it [and] narrate it in a way that makes it sound real” (8:25).
There’s his real thesis. If an element of your game doesn’t advance the plot, skip it.
Well… hold on, I disagree with that, too. Not everything in a story is in service to the plot, let alone a game. Games of D&D are more about just the plot, they’re about character interactions, out-of-character jokes, engaging gameplay, and—this is what Matt is really challenging us to consider the value of in his video—the verisimilitude of the game world! The challenge of making wilderness travel interesting as a Dungeon Master is, in both his experience and mine, finding ways to give your players meaningful choice in how they travel.
Giving Players Choice
Games like D&D are all about giving the players the chance to chart their own destiny. It’s part of the game’s power fantasy; we often feel powerless to meaningfully change the course of our own real lives, so being afforded the chance to do so in a fantasy world is titillating and empowering. In combat, players have the choice of how to defeat an enemy, which spells to use, how to line up an attack. While exploring a dungeon, players ideally have choices to make in how they progress through the complex and how they overcome its obstacles. And roleplaying scenarios are the most freeform and choice-driven of all, where the course of entire stories can be changed based on the strength of a player’s roleplaying—and the DM’s ability to think on the fly.
But early D&D had another element of choice that the rise of roleplaying-focused games seems to have overshadowed. Navigation. When the game of Dungeons & Dragons was simply about getting from the town to the dungeon, clearing the dungeon of loot and getting back to town again, navigating and surviving the wilderness was a crucial part of the game. Because of this, players needed to make choices on how they would navigate the wilderness; which route they would take to get to the dungeon, juggling decisions like if they could afford to take the long way around to avoid monsters at the cost of their rations, or if dangerous terrain posed more of a threat than random encounters.
When D&D was young, when its core rulebooks were softcover paper pamphlets created by Gary Gygax and distributed personally at Gen Con in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, wilderness exploration required players to buy a completely different game and hack it into their D&D game. That other game was Outdoor Survival by Avalon Hill (which Wizards of the Coast owns these days, by the way), and it came ready-made with an expansive hex-map. Some gamers made their own unique hex-maps for D&D, others used the one in the Outdoor Survival box. Look at this map and choose any two points to represent the town you start in and the dungeon you travel to… and then make a return journey from, laden with burdensome treasure.
What choices would you make? Go around the mountains to save time, but risk going through the lizardman-infested swamp? Or follow the river to avoid getting lost, but risk an ambush from stone giants lurking between the mountain crags?
Game board of Outdoor Survival by Avalon Hill. Image Source: KidzArea
From Point A to Point B
There are two kinds of navigation while out in the wilderness: macronavigation and micronavigation, to coin a few words. Macronavigation is the act of navigating the campaign world on a large scale; or what Matt Colville calls “getting from point A to point B,” and it’s what old-school gamers did when they hacked Outdoor Survival into their D&D games. This style of navigation is fairly well-explored in D&D, even in the modern fifth edition books. We may not have many adventures focused around hauling treasure back to town across hostile terrain anymore, but it’s still important to know how the characters get from adventure to adventure.
The tricky part of this is, as we now know, finding a way to make travel engaging. Sometimes just narrating a travel montage and skipping travel all together really is the best way to go, especially if you’re pressed for time and you just want to get to more dungeon exploring. But let’s set that aside for now. The way to make exploring the wilderness fun is the same as making any other part of D&D fun: give the players agency. That is, players have fun when they feel their choices have a meaningful impact on the world around them or the story they’re a part of.
Choose the Path
Also known as the “Outdoor Survival” method, allowing your players to choose a path lets them weigh their options and choose which route from point A to point B will work out the best for them. This method is sort of like a heist movie, because the planning is the real point of this style of exploration. The bulk of the fun is setting up the dominoes and trying to guess where everything will fall apart—and then sitting back and watching things start to fall apart as the actual exploration takes place.
Once the planning phase is done, you have a couple of choices. You could either play out the exploration, with the characters moving hex-by-hex and rolling for random encounters which you then play out tactically, or you could merge this heist-style setup with the travel montage cutscene we talked about earlier. This is a sleek combination of the two styles that highlights the strongest points of each: the best part of the choose-the-path style is the planning, and the best part of the travel montage is the DM’s tight narrative control and vivid descriptions.
The challenges you may face using this style are all related to how well-prepared you are. If you don’t have a detailed map of your campaign setting with different routes the players can choose from, then you’re sunk. Even if you do have a detailed map, you need to know enough about the setting to drop hints and rumors from NPCs as the characters search for information on the dangers of each route, or else the players can’t make informed decisions—and once again, player agency is all about making purposeful decisions based on information or character, not just choosing randomly.
Develop the Path
Jump to 9:44 in the Matt Colville video at the top of this article for his analysis of his preferred method of making travel interesting: skill challenges, a type of mechanic from fourth edition D&D that he has ported over to the modern game. I actually have played through a number of travel montage skill challenges in a campaign my partner Hannah ran during the D&D Next playtest, and they can be lots of fun!
Skill challenges come in many shapes and forms, and the ones you deploy as a Dungeon Master will be different than most. The simplest explanation of a skill challenge is: the characters want to accomplish a goal, but it requires their teamwork to achieve it. They need to use their ability scores and skill proficiencies to succeed on ability checks against a DC you set, based on how hard the challenge is. The group needs make a certain number of successful checks (let’s say 5) in total before they fail a certain number of checks (let’s say 3). Initiative is rolled like in combat, but rounds in a skill challenge could take seconds, minutes, hours, or—in the case of a navigational skill challenge—days. Each character takes their turn to make an ability check using a skill they’re proficient in. It could be as simple as that, but fun skill challenges require the players to narrate how they’re using the skill; the ranger could make a Wisdom (Animal Handling) and describe soothing the party’s horses during a thunderstorm on his turn, while the rogue could make a Charisma (Deception) check and describe throwing her voice to cause a horde of orcs to start infighting instead of hunting tasty humans.
The point of these skill challenges is to develop character traits. Even though there’s only one way to get from point A to point B—that is, to succeed on 5 checks before amassing 3 failures—the description and roleplay that this challenge requires the characters to perform helps to develops the path they followed and the journey they embarked on. This gets the players more engaged in the stories of their characters and in the process of communally creating a story, as opposed to making the DM the sole storyteller as you monologue at them about how rainy and cold the journey was, and how soaked they all were by the time they reached the dungeon.
Follow the Path
I hate this method… or at least, I used to. Setting up a single linear path for the players to follow and throwing a predetermined series of monster encounters at them is the textbook definition of railroading. Even if you roll randomly, random encounters while traveling are usually trivial affairs that have no bearing on the main plot and, unless your players are extroverted roleplayers, rarely reveal salacious character details. I may be changing my tune on this one, though. Done well, a chain of predetermined encounters can tell a powerful environmental story, completely separate from the plot of the adventure. We’ll come back to this next week when we look at micronavigation—the art of navigating between different regions within the same wilderness encounter area.
A Dungeon Master’s Resources
Whether you’re fully fleshing out a wide swathe of detailed terrain for your players to navigate and interrogate, or simply creating a simple map for skill challenge-based travel, you’re going to need resources. Dungeon Masters seeking official aid for running a large-scale navigation adventure like the journeys in Tomb of Annihilation and Storm King’s Thunder, should first look at the “Wilderness” section of Chapter 5: Adventure Environments in the Dungeon Master’s Guide to help generate ideas for adventures and interesting events that could occur while the characters are traveling. You should also look at the “Movement” section of Chapter 8: Adventuring in the Player’s Handbook, particularly the Travel Pace and Activity While Traveling subsections.
These selections from the core rules can help you create a campaign setting designed to facilitate exciting wilderness travel. There are lots of random tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide that can add a different flavor to an established campaign world, or help you develop your own underdeveloped setting. D&D Designer Mike Mearls has also been crafting a gazetteer of the Nentir Vale campaign setting for his own personal game, and his two-page regional spread is an excellent template for anyone planning on including overland travel in their D&D games. It’s particularly suited towards creating travel montage or stocking free-roaming hex-crawls, but its format is flexible enough to suit any gamer. I can’t recommend stealing this format highly enough. I’ve already swiped it for my next campaign!
Next week, I'll be taking the same question of player agency in navigation and zooming in to the tactical level with an examination of micronavigation. How can DMs provide interesting player choices even in linear, combat-based exploration?
Have you ever included wilderness exploration in your D&D game? What’s your favorite story of a wilderness adventure gone wrong?
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, and is also a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and Kobold Press. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah and two living skill challenges, Mei and Marzipan. You can usually find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
Good article. Currently DMing OotA and it's a challenge to make player choices matter when wandering through the Underdark from point A to point B, especially since there are no real maps; choosing tunnel A is as good as choosing tunnel B. I prepare interesting set encounters-- and thus far have been quite enjoyable (thank you Planet Earth documentaries for all the inspirations!)... But still a challenge to make choice A-- this way!-- better than choice B -- that way!... In the end, all roads lead to preplanned destinations. As DM, I *know* that they're getting this encounter rather than another one by chosing this path, but the players don't know that... so why not skip the choices altogether? (less prep!) Which brings me back to the issue of making player agency matter on the journey to their destinations.
Eberron's Xen'drik gives plenty of chance to just explore the wilderness. I bribed some of my gamemates to try a short adventure in this setting when we finished a campaign. The mission: to draw an accurate map of the surrounding areas, which, by the setting canon, is impossible (but they didn't know). They just had to reach as far as they could in two weeks and come back with a map. If a second group (also played by them after the first one) proved the map accurate they would get the reward. It was fun to witness the bonfire small talk between the characters by night and the notes they wrote in their diaries (I supplied my players with brand new notebooks for them to write as their characters).
I played this back with 4e rules, so now that this article has re-sparked the memory, I think I'll try it again with my current party.
I'm currently DMing a sandbox. The party (2nd level) has learned that someone or something in the forest nearby had put out a bounty on human infants (a coven of green hags). A party of scouts left their camp 2 weeks ago to look for a route to ford a river to get to the next town. This included a young family. They haven't been heard from and shoud have returned by now so the party opted for that hook. So they will travel a few days retracing the steps of the lost (and now mostly dead) scouts. To make an adventure of this I prerolled 4 days worth of random encounters...from Xanthars. I got an Eye of Gruumsh, a saber tooth tiger, a group of 5 orcs, a group of 3 scouts, 5 aarakokra, and a 8 kobold(which I replaced with goblins)...so here is the adventure.. the Eye of Gruumsh and his saber tooth tiger will be trailing the party and trying to lure them into the other hostile encounters (orcs and goblins) in hopes of weakening them. The scouts will be from the missing party and will be panicking and tryong to get home (they will report they were attacked in the night and fled, abandoning their companions). The aarakokra will offer to ally with the party and lead them to where the scouts were ambushed and will report that they have hear cries coming from there...the (apparently) lone survivor will be the infant child of the family...and will realy be an infant hag/changling). The party has a ranger and fighter, both with outlander backgrounds plus the goodberry spell...so food should not be a problem. But navigation might and evading or ambushing the Eye of Gruumsh will be fun...the ranger has orcs as his favored enemy so that will add to it.
Reward early arrival with downtime. If the players know that using their skills and abilities will be rewarded, they will engage with the problem.
Skill Challenges for 5th Edition
I played that module back in the 80s, and it was called "Against the Cult of the Reptile God". lol
I'm a new DM. Done 5 sessions. Running Lost Mine of Phandelver. I have felt that the overland travel is largely uneventful and just having a random fight or not seems a little pointless. I also feel that the two rangers aren't seeing their characters realized. The bard even asked how they really contribute outside of combat. It was a genuine question about their abilities. He wasn't being rude. And I realized that it was me who wasn't letting them be awesome. They both picked forest as their favored terrain and there's plenty of it but I didn't see their abilities come into play.
I love this article though. I'm thinking now that I will have random encounters but they won't be just automatic. I think I'll actually assign them to hexes and the players choose their route. The road is safest, but it's the long way around. The hills and woods are equally dangerous but it's a shortcut. Maybe they'll move twice as fast through woods with both rangers or the rangers can make a roll to see if they anticipate danger in the next hex. Maybe every hex, they have a 10% chance of getting lost and have to move through it again, except forest. Any other ideas to let rangers express their woodland mastery would be appreciated.
@centritan
Well for starters, the rangers’ natural explorer feat prevents them from being lost unless caused from magical means if they’ve been travelling for an hour. So right from lvl 1 they’re a boon to a party out in the wild. Without them their party could potentially lose the path or even just their own location in the environment with low survival checks.
As far as playing on their strengths to let them flex their survival methods in forested areas: they get advantage on ability checks pertaining to forest areas so tossing out ability checks to the group and letting a few people make the check, both the rangers and non-rangers, while increasing the DC for those that logically wouldn’t have a clue about the wilds compared to seasoned rangers. Example: mention that one of the rangers’ passive perception scores picks up tracks in the area they’re in, anyone is free to check, but rangers get advantage and for city slickers you could increase the DC or decrease the DC for the rangers giving the sense that if it weren’t for the two rangers, the group would be boned. This also gives a natural evolution to roles characters play and the group should then defer to the wisdom of the rangers.
Elements they would excel at, especially in their favored terrain: keeping track of where they are in relation to where they need to go with a basic idea of a time frame, using their passive perception to shove clues at just them as they would be more adept at spotting natural or unnatural signs in the forest, better knowledge of the flora and fauna, tracks and the creatures that’d make them, lay of the land and possible foresight to changes in relation to landmass changes or natural formations that could lead to food or water sources. There’s a lot more you could do, but playing up the fact that they are the pros of the wilderness compared to non-trained adventurers. Go with what feels natural for exploring and then when they get used to being gods in the forest, shove them out of their element and put them in unfamiliar territory and let them squirm when they feel like a fish out of water in the underdark haha :)
Sounds good and I'll focus on it more but I have yet to see anything that says players will get lost if they don't have a ranger or woods are difficult terrain unless it's a ranger's favored terrain, and so on. Maybe seasoned DM's are already on top of it, but newbies just have to wing it. And those are all good points. Thanks!
While your points are valid... They fail to take into accounts how random those wilderness sections becomes and how far off the road your players can get. Even if i didnt hate random encounters... The simple fact that your story can become a hot mess of randomness because of players changing routes constantly. Is enough to agree with matt and not you. The reality is... Why do your dm story a thing if your players can just ignore it and do the world in 80 days instead ? While the thing is a good concept... It is also counter productive because your dm will never be able to come up with a story just because your players will change said directions every single games.
Exemple... At which point do you force that one player to go where your story is instead of simply always ignoring your questes.
The reality is... We all had those 4-5 hours long games that led us to go from point a to point a1 which means we didnt even leave the tavern yet. We started there and left the session in it still. Why ? Because of player interactions. You do not need wilderness to get those. And saying we need them is wrong. We really dont !
All that said i like wilderness adventures and totally gonna create ruins in those forest.
James, excellent article as I've come to expect of you....except " We’ll come back to this next week when we look at micronavigation...."
You are a big tease!
Taking Matt's advice about skill checks proved to be a good decision a couple of weeks ago; the party were travelling from Nightstone to Waterdeep, which is basically a case of follow the road....except they saw a column of smoke rising over the nearby forest. Now they have to (if they want to investigate) find a way through 'difficult terrain' to discover the source. They failed 3 checks (which were amusing events in their own rights) and ended up stumbling into a clearing and upsetting an awakened tree. Charisma checks were failed, things were said...in short it got nasty. They eventually found the source of the smoke and some (hopefully) tantalising hints about events in the world. Regardless of skill checks, the party were always going to find the origin of the smoke, once they had made the decision to search for it. Choices they made cost them resources, and all added to the fun.
Even the fight revealed something about a couple of the characters, which elevated it above my usual style of Hackmastertm.
It also gave me time to catch my breath, as I had not expected them to head for Waterdeep at that time!
Sometimes wilderness travel (and 'random' encounters) is a DM's best friend!
Apart from the long running PoTA campaign that I DM, I also GM for Adventures in Middle-Earth by Cubicle 7. One of the nicest parts of the altered 5E system, is the inclusion of Journeys.
Journeys is a mechanical system that weaves skill challenges and story narration together and is a wonderful tool that can easily be brought to any D&D campaign.
I found this very useful when working in the wilderness. (Fulvanos guide to the wilds)
https://reddit.app.link/jbiBPCTwuO
I mainly agree with Matt Colville here. I watched this video when it came out and immediately started using his method. This easily cut 20 minutes off of travel, and by making everyone do a skill check every day of travel and making an encounter happen for every 2 fails (regardless of how long they travel) makes the travel seem very real. My players immediately jumped on board, they seem to prefer it a lot actually (plus I have a hand drawn map, so I can't do a hexcrawl).
Maybe it's just me, but I don't have any problem with my players deciding they want to do something other than what could be argued is the main story beat. I have a world map for my campaign. I know what the continents are, where they're located in relation to each other, and how long travel between them takes. I have spots noted on each one where it would make sense to have a city. I do not have all of those cities named or built, nor do I have a name for every forest, body of water, or mountain range. But I will not stop my party from trying to go to any of them. If they decide to do something other than the quest they'd been tasked to do, that's completely cool with me. I will build the world around them as necessary, and in some cases (like when I had a guildhall offer them contracts to kill 3 different creatures) will even present other opportunities for them outside the "main" questline. The entire world is theirs to explore. As a DM I will never take that away from them.
As it pertains to travel, I'm not a big fan of running random encounters, because to me they kind of feel artificial; like I'm having an encounter for the sake of it. I am all for streamlining that, but I've noticed that my players don't necessarily like to fast-forward things. I recently gave them the option to jump ahead a week instead of just hanging out in a town waiting for the ship that would take them to their next story destination, but we ended up playing out every single day. I think I need to maybe double-down here, because the group is about to spend 2+ weeks at sea, and I'm definitely not RP'ing every single day of that voyage.
My group tends to enjoy wilderness adventures as much, if not more, than dungeon crawls. I always insert a lot of travel into my campaigns and let the party navigate known areas in whichever fashion they feel like doing so. When they get into unknown areas, I pass out found and/or purchased maps that help them navigate by landmarks. Indeed sometimes they do get lost, but if they can find a landmark that's on their maps, they feel a sense of accomplishment "getting back on track".
In my last campaign, they had to track drow through the Great Forest (a truly immense forest the size of Texas), re-appropriate an orb that powered the defenses of a dwarven holdfast, and bring it back. All told, the adventure, in games terms, took them close to two months (and nearly 10 sessions). They gained the admiration of the dwarves and the enmity of the drow (and an clan of forest elves).
One of the great benefits of a wilderness adventure is the ability to divulge a lot of information about your world to your players. The above adventure gave them an insight to the workings of the invading lizardfolk armies, the loose cooperative alliance between drow and lizardfolk, a cult of Sobek that refused to be cowed into cooperation with the drow, kobolds attacking a saurial community that allied with the party, wild elves that wanted no part in either side of the fight, a clan of forest elves that were trying to hold onto their dying homestead and the ultimate reason the drow stole the orb: to power a warforged creation forge.
This was all 3.5E.
I didn't care for 4th edition for many reasons, but I decided I wanted to steal the "skill challenge" concept from therein and use it as yet another opportunity to test the mettle of my players. There were varying degrees of challenges, but at one point as they are trying to navigate up a river, they failed a skill challenge for poling their keelboat up the river. I set DCs for getting out of the boat and pulling/pushing the boat through reeds. In the challenge, they also had a low chance of getting infected with the equivalent of filth fever, for the area of the reeds were infested with the rotting remains of creatures killed further up river. One character failed, contracted the disease, and because this party had no cleric, they ended up entering into a negotiation with the cult of Sobek to cure the sick party member. The cult sent them to a ruin to retrieve a ceremonial dagger stolen by a band of orcs. Having accomplished the mission, the lawful evil cultists healed the party member and sent them on their way. A whole session because of a failed skill challenge.
So, add those wilderness adventures. They are fantastic for a number of reasons.
@Benz74M,
I am currently also running OotA... We are only on game session three of the campaign, so my players are now getting IN to the caves/caverns after just having escaped Velkynvelve... Never-the-less, I've already spent numerous hours trying to PLAN how to handle this part of the adventure. (I came upon Matt's video last week.... I understand HIS point and I was, at first, as disheartened as James seems to be about the central advice of "I'm giving you permission to skip it"). I had to re-watch part of that video.... and decided to make it work for my game.... I LIKE MATT'S IDEA OF USING CHARACTER SKILL CHECKS somehow and to incorporate it into the storytelling narrative of the travel.
OotA is unique because, as you have said, there are NO MAPS or created terrain... and in the Underdark it wouldn't matter anyhow because, supposedly, its a great big, winding mess down there. (There is basically "The Darklake" and "everything else" with some, usually random, patches of Faerzress). Besides, the party is either going to basically be stumbling around in a random way towards there general objective OR a somewhat knowledgeable NPC will be leading them (doing the navigating). On the other hand, THE TRAVEL IS THE THING, at least in the first part of the adventure when the party doesn't even have basic gear, water, or rations.... and they are just trying to survive.... So you can't "skip" the travel... I would day it IS part of the plot in OotA... At least for the first dozen game sessions...
Here are some things I am planning on trying:
(a) First: I have created (spoiler alert for this link) some maps to use for random encounters. At the least, if/when an encounter happens I can treat it as a mini-dungeon room. (I even plan on pulling up some of these maps during encounters where basically NOTHING happens... just to have the party deal with a map popping up for no real reason... so they are not always "put on guard" whenever they see a map...) Also: note the big, winding map... I plan on using that one with Roll20's VTT lighting effects.
Even though the party can't do the "typical" planning for navigation, they CAN explain the details of HOW they will travel. Um.... I have a whole, somewhat mess of ideas in mind that I won't fully explain here..... But here are some random snapshots....
(b) The players might choose to "stretch out" the party, with one smaller, satellite group that travels away 100's of feet down side passages to forage and/or hunt. They can choose to keep one party member "in the middle" of this stretched out party to help the satellite group from getting lost. They will have to determine who is best suited to lead the MAIN party (for navigation and perception.) and who makes up the "satellite" group that is foraging/hunting. Who is the loan, middle character (if any) that keeps an eye out for the satellite group? And how far will that middle character hang back from the main group? The players will have to take into account "stealth" abilities and the fact that one of my PCs needs LIGHT to see.... All of this effects the chances of the whole party getting "lost", the satellite party getting lost... and what happens when a random event does occur.
(c) Foraging: The players are keeping a (spoiler alert for this link) "Field Guide to Fungi" that I will be updating as they "discover" new types of fungi. Also: the first time they find a new type of fungi, I am planning on role-playing the discovery (they will need to figure out what the fungus is). Once they do that, it goes into this field guide and then that specific fungi becomes easier to locate later in the game when they forage... Also: the satellite group in (b) has a better chance of finding fungi than the main group, since the satellite group is actively going out to find the stuff.
(d) Hunting: I think at first I am going to do hunting as a full encounter. Using some maps (shown in link above) and let the satellite group decide what to do when they randomly come upon some tracks..... "you find some feces from giant fire beetles... it looks as if there are only a couple of them and their tracks lead to a small cave on the left.... do you wish to pursue them alone? Do you wish to ignore them? Do you want to go back to the main party to have them STOP and bring a larger force to hunt the beetles?" The choices effect overall travel speed, and might effect the outcome of the fire beetle encounter.... It is possible that they track down something that is a bit too difficult to handle on their own and might have to make a tactical retreat...
(e) Of course, the party might decide to NOT have a satellite group at all... Which would allow them to travel more safely, however they won't discover flora and fauna much, and would run a higher risk of starving or running out of water because they are not effectively foraging/hunting by sticking together in a tightly defended adventure party.
(f) All of these decisions have implications WHEN they actually have some sort of random encounter.... And also effects what happens if/when the Drow hunting party might actually catch up to the party...
Again, this is only for the first dozen game sessions when the party just needs to figure out how to survive in the Underdark.... After they more fully fill out the fungi field guide, after they start getting more use to hunting in the Underdark, and after they start actively mapping the area.... everyone becomes more familiar with traveling the hazards of caverns... travel becomes less important and I plan on moving more towards "skipping the details of travel" that is recommended in the first part of Matt's video. I don't know for sure... Just my ideas for now.
@JavaPhysics. You came up with several good ideas. Thanks. I have re-read parts of 1st ed AD&D Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, which gave me a few ideas as well. Also found a few 4th ed skill challenges for underground travel online. With James' tips and other suggestions in this comment thread, I look forward to the game next Friday :)
ps there's also a facebook group for OotA Dms with members that offer a lot of suggestions.
“trying to make travel interesting [in D&D] is largely a red herring. It’s this thing that distracts us from what we’re trying to do” (7:53).@“
thank you James for also point out the problems with this statement.
D&D is suppedly built on 3 pillars. Combat, role playing, and exploration. Not taking to time and effort to make the journey interesting, and allow for getting lost, side tracked, or killed on the way just shuts down that 3rd pillar.
The other issue I have is that this technique assumes that the DM prescribed plot line is really what the characters are interested in. It kills player agency to pretend there is nothing of interest between here and there. How do you know the players aren’t interested? How do you know they won’t find something they care more about? Maybe further along in a campaign after you’ve dropped enough hooks in front of them to know what their motivations are can you start in with a little ‘fast travel’ but levels 1-5 especially, when the party is getting their footing and travel is actually a challenge, not doing something interesting with it is a problem
Here's a travel scenario my players really enjoyed, please feel free to steal it! I'm a huge fan of Matt Colville and his skill challenge and random encounter videos inspired this.
The 3rd level heroes were trying to find the drow in the center of the Spiderhaunt Thicket (from the Nentir Vale setting). The woods were very difficult to traverse, choked with huge brambles and webs, creating a maze around the periphery. Based on his backstory, one of the heroes knew it would take about 3 hours to navigate the brambles and get to the inner thicket where the drow were. Each hour, the party picked one hero to make a DC 14 Survival check (a second hero could give the first hero advantage on that Survival check by making a DC 10 skill check with another one of their related skills (e.g. Nature, Perception) or using a relevant spell or class ability). If they made the Survival check, they rolled a d8 on a table of random encounters (table posted below). If they failed the Survival check, they still had to roll on the encounter table but also had to add another hour onto their travel because they got lost.
If they beat the encounter, they were one hour closer to being done. If they fled (and they did flee once from the black pudding after it dropped the dwarven fighter and partially corroded his axe and armor), they had to back track and add two hours onto their travels.
The players had fun with (and agonized over) the decision of whether to overcome the current encounter and press on, or retreat at the expense of tacking on two more encounters.
There was also a consequence for taking a long rest (but none for a short rest). The heroes were warned not stay put for too long in the Thicket. If the heroes did take a long rest, a drow patrol would find them and ambush them, possibly taking them prisoner or at least giving the drow a heads up that the heroes were coming.
I could also see adapting this scenario to traveling through a maze or large cavern system. My one change would be to grow the encounter table to 10 or 12 encounters as I almost ran out of encounters!
1. Ghostly visions : PCs see the ghost of an eladrin woman running, then a globe of darkness descends on her, and then a ghostly drow drops down from the trees above into the globe. The eladrin's scream turns to a gurgle and then is silent, and the drow walks out calmly, wiping his blade clean. Then the vision disappears. It will recur at this location every 30-60 minutes.
5. Black Pudding (1,100 XP) (use black Play-Doh): PCs have to walk through a small cave tunnel. The bones of several humanoids litter the ground. A BP lurks on the ceiling and drops into the middle of the group halfway through.
2. Web chasm (300 XP): The PCs come to a 30 ft wide chasm. The chasm is filled with web 10 ft down and there is a felled tree lying across the chasm. DC 11 Dex (Acrobatics) check to cross. If a PC falls, DC 15 Dex (Acrobatics) to grab the tree before falling.
PC that falls lands on the web and cracks open spider eggs underneath and is restrained in the web. Can escape with help from others or DC 12 Str (Athletics) check.
2 rounds after falling, tiny spiders start crawling up and under the PCs armor. If they stay on the PCs person for a whole round, they bite the PC. Take 1 pierce damage each round and make a DC 8 Con save. On fail, PC take 1d6 poison damage and has the poisoned condition until he takes a short or long rest and spends a hit die to remove the poison (no HP gain).
Below the webs is a 10 ft drop to jagged rocks (2d6 bludgeon damage)
6.Phase Spider (700 XP): The PCs come to a narrow path with a cliff (50 ft drop). A phase spider lurks near. Roll Stealth for the phase spider (+6) and compare to PC passive perception. If the spider succeeds:
Turn 1: jaunt to EP and follow PCs
Turn 2: jaunt to MP and bites the PC in the back row.
Turn 3: grapple the closest creature, jump off the cliff w/ the grappled creature and jaunt to EP for safety (no gravity in ethereal plane). PC continues falling (splat!)
Turn 4: jaunt to MP and attack soon-to-be-lunch PC with bite. Repeat.
Fall damage is 1d6 per 10 ft drop
3. Wight Knight (850 XP): PCs have to walk through a small cave. A drow wight and his 4 zombie servants dwells within. The wight can also cast darkness once per day.
Treasure: It’s adamantine longsword and leather armor
7. Possession (300 XP): A small mote of light (a spirit) approaches the PCs and attempts to possess one of them. The targeted PC makes a DC 10 Charisma save. On fail, it becomes possessed by the spirit and makes a melee attack against a random ally. Save again each turn until possession ends.
4. They Didn't Make It: You find three human sized, webbed bodies hanging from trees. Inside are the dead bodies of three adventurers, one of which is an Arborman. Their armor is ripped apart and the bodies devoured from the inside, but weapons are in fine shape
Treasure: a greatsword, a battle axe, 2 daggers and a longbow. A green Arborman cloak (cloak of elven kind) with tell-tale green tree clasp. And a total of 70 gp,120 sp, and 480 cp.
8. Nothing