D&D 5E Wilderness Travel & Encounters/Day - How do you handle it?

The easiest answer is to redefine a travel day as a period of at least one week, with each night providing the benefit of a short rest. It does benefit warlocks and monks, though to a significantly smaller extent than one-day travel days benefit wizards.

If it matters and I want the travel to be exploration and part of the game, I just plan the travel like any other dungeon. What are the things they'll encounter/explore? Some might be purely exploration and flavor/world developing, some might be combat encounters, some might be interaction, some might be weather related experiences or even tricks/traps, and some might combine elements. Encounters can still be varied as to difficulty, and sometimes it is easier for the PCs than other times. Sometimes I keep a list of possible encounters and then depending on the story, I plug some in at appropriate times. This allows me to be flexible, but still have some interesting combat or non-combat encounters that they can interact with.

If the players don't know how many encounters they'll be facing as they travel, they will be less likely to go nova. Above all, I let them know that nothing is a gimme (unless I fast-forward and do a travel montage to just get them to a desired location). I started my days with 1e so traveling in the wilderness could be much more dangerous than just hanging around civilized areas. I try to convey this type of feeling so that the players hold back in case they do find themselves overmatched.

If I don't want the travel to take up a lot of time, I will ask them to explain what they each do as they travel for X hours. Then I'll just get them to the next location quickly (sometimes describing some of the things that might have happened or what they noticed along the way).

arjomanes said:

With that in mind, how do you make wilderness encounters work and avoid the 5 Minute Workday?

1. Do you just throw a level-appropriate encounter at the party, which they nova immediately, and then get to sleep and heal back up before the chance to fight anything the next day(s)?

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Not ideally, no. You could throw a terrain appropriate encounter at them that, depending on how dangerous the neighborhood is, could be popped by a full-party nova, or eat them all ("roll new characters"), and damn the consequences, though. If you get something more towards the former end of the spectrum, just don't give exp for it - or even play through it, unless your players enjoy that sort of thing.

2. Do you roll for encounters every hour, instead of every day or two?

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In a crazy-dangerous, monster-infested region or 'behind enemy lines' or some such, perhaps.

3. Do you throw a super hard, not level-appropriate encounter at the party that just might kill them, but at least should challenge them?

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Preferably not. Especially if it's a long journey and you feel some need to do so every day. You'll just be creating an extended period in which the most Nova-capable characters dominate.

4. Do you run an encounter, and then try to lure them into the creature's lair, where more encounters may lurk?

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Not if the point really is for them to go from A to B.

5. Do you create a web of encounters linked together that trigger when you roll one?

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Maybe. Once. That would get really strange if it happened a lot.

6. Or do you do something entirely different?

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You could just narrate n days of travel, including a minor encounter or two that pain a picture of the region without playing through them.

You can also adjust when short & long rests can happen. On the rationale that medieval travel is difficult (not much of a stretch, really), you can rule that a night's sleep on the road only gives the benefits of a Short Rest, and a Long rest will only be available upon reaching their destination. That way the whole journey becomes a 'day' and can be appropriately attrition based.

If the party are just travelling to an adventure location, there's not really much need to throw encounters at them.

It's when the adventure is the journey that things get tricky. At that point, you don't really want to rely on random encounters. You need to think about what's going on. Perhaps have a couple of days where all the monsters find them...

The other thing is considering whether they're able to flee from the monsters. If this is true, throwing a very difficult encounter at them means they don't have to fight it, but it still gives them a sense of danger.

Cheers!

[MENTION=94951]arjomanes[/MENTION] Well, you've got some solid answers already, ranging from [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s astute recommendation to change the rules, to [MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION]'s suggestion to do away with random encounters entirely. So let me offer a slightly different take...

You've got a high-level party right? You mention them wiping encounters with high-level spells, so that's what I'm assuming. Generally, in D&D exploring the wilderness is a challenge for low-to-mid-level characters. "Dangerous" wilderness exploration isn't something typically associated with high-level D&D... I could definitely see it if there were a war, a supernatural event, or the players were in a hostile plane, or something like that. From the encounter examples you gave, a theme of your setting seems to be demon cultists corrupting the land, pursued by witch hunters. So I'm going to assume that the point of your random encounters in this adventure is to reinforce that theme.

All of your example solutions assume that the main purpose of an encounter is to threaten the PCs' lives.

I'd challenge that assumption.

Especially for random encounters, and especially for high-level characters facing random encounters, the primary purpose of the encounter shouldn't be for the monsters to kill the PCs, and the PCs to kill the monsters. That either feeds the whole 5 MWD issue or necessitates changing the rules. "Threaten the Quest, not the PCs", is a saying I've used before

Let's take your example of cultists in the woods...

The cultists live in a woodland hamlet of poachers and others living outside of the king's law. They're decent enough folk, however, and it makes a good resting/trading spot, as well as a place to do business with a fence known only as The Knave, who is the hamlet's unofficial leader. However, the hamlet folk are dissatisfied with The Knave's leadership — many were hoping to reclaim family lands but The Knave hasn't come to terms with the king due to an old grievance The Knave arrogantly wants the king to apologize for first. Gradually, the hamlet folk are falling under the sway of a charismatic man known as The Traveler. The Traveler offers to violently force the occupying soldiers from their lands and give the disenfranchised folk power they never knew before. All it requires is a little blood ritual in a dark hut in the woods. Most of the hamlet folk have no idea they're actually worshipping a demon, even though they're shifting toward Chaotic Evil alignment and there are signs all around the hamlet and surrounding woods.

This random wilderness encounter can threaten several things (instead of the PCs):

• It can threaten the relationship between the king and other squatters/bandits/poachers.
• It can threaten The Knave who has information the PCs need.
• It can threaten the nearby land-owners if the demon cult reaches critical mass.
• It can threaten the hamlet as a safe resting/trading place in the future.
• It can threaten the PCs' morality...can we justify killing misguided "cultists"? Is that a good or evil act?

Probably the most important thing about this encounter is that it does not begin with "Roll initiative." Time again, I've seen those words lock players (across editions) into combat-mode.

When I run random encounters, I prefer to present a challenge which can be solved through multiple avenues, and if combat is the PCs' preferred approach, I set up combats where there is something else at stake besides whose side hits 0 hit points first.

arjomanes said:

DM Basic rules p.57 The Adventuring Day says "Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer."

With that in mind, how do you make wilderness encounters work and avoid the 5 Minute Workday?

I'm dissatisfied with how I've been running wilderness encounters. My group, when traveling, hits one encounter every couple days that they can nuke with high-level spells, and then can rest afterwards. If the goal is for 6-8 encounters to challenge a party each day, am I running the wilderness encounter rules wrong?

1. Do you just throw a level-appropriate encounter at the party, which they nova immediately, and then get to sleep and heal back up before the chance to fight anything the next day(s)?

Or do you use one of the following options?

2. Do you roll for encounters every hour, instead of every day or two?

3. Do you throw a super hard, not level-appropriate encounter at the party that just might kill them, but at least should challenge them? This would be like some old-school encounters where you could run into a party of 40 hobgoblins, even at low levels.

4. Do you run an encounter, and then try to lure them into the creature's lair, where more encounters may lurk?

5. Do you create a web of encounters linked together that trigger when you roll one? ie: if you stumble upon Cultists in the Woods; you also will eventually have to deal with Summoned Demons, Desperate Escaping Victims, Enraged Animals freaked out by the supernatural stuff, More Cultists late to the party, Witch Hunters scouring the woods to find the cultists (and anyone else who is suspicious), Creepy Trees that will try to eat you, etc.

6. Or do you do something entirely different?

Let me know what I'm missing, and what you do to make wilderness travel as challenging as dungeon crawling.

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Yeah man - I'm a big advocate of the 6-8 encounter adventuring day.

That said, during long wilderness treks, I rarely use more than one or two encounters per day (and most days are spent with zero).

You dont have to constantly spam 6-8/ 2 short rests on the party. Its a common mistake that is championed by the 'I dont like 6-8 encoutners per day' crowd. No-oone (certainly not the rules) suggests you do it, and it would rapidly break any immersion if it happened. Some days have less encounters than 6-8 (probably around 50 percent in my games), some rare days even have more. Mix it up. Be unpredictable. Keep your players guessing (and thus avoiding nova strikes and playing the resource management game, which is what the 6-8/2 SR paradigm is there to do).

When the party reaches wherever theyre headed (Ze Dojonn of Despicable Doom) then you 'zoom into' your 6-8 encounters meta. Heck - the first encounter of the AD can be on the way to the dungeon (followed by a side quest into the cave nearby where the 'random' monster laired for encoutner 2). PCs then have a quick short rest after clearing out the lair (and dealing with those two encounters) and then push on the central adventure locale, and get 4-6 more encounters in before long resting.

Its OK to have single encounter/ shorter AD's from time to time. Just like its OK to occasionally throw longer ones at the party (or ones that feature more short rests, or less).

If your campaign regularly features long over land travel as a staple with only the occasional dungeon/ encounter heavy 'zoomed in and tightly packed' encounter location, then the longer rest variant is what you should be using.

My grappling with this eventually led to a house rule that required (usually*) a full 24 hours of sleep and light activity for a long rest, while keeping short rests at an hour. I ran one campaign where I tried just amping up the difficulty on wilderness encounters, but that tended to fall one way or the other too easily, as well as making random encounters more difficult and kind of more the "star" of the adventure over the more planned, "balanced" ones.

The interesting thing I found is that while I thought this would make it more difficult to design dungeons and other circumstances where you do expect rapid-fire encounters, the opposite has tended to be true. I can still have the 6-8 encounter "adventuring day" take place in a single day as long as the characters have an opportunity to recuperate before going in, and my adventures have ended up paced a lot more like an Indiana Jones movie, with fewer combats that have more on the line.

*I killed two birds with one stone here really and tried to give a good reason to spend some coin on higher lifestyle, even if temporary, by letting nicer circumstances lead to faster long rests: (link to my campaign site redacted because I'm new)

I run wilderness travel and encounters where each of the following things are true:
1) There are multiple chances throughout the day to encounter, or be encountered by, something or someone.
2) Encounters will make sense for where you are and the current circumstances in that area (i.e. you might see a green dragon in a forest, or an army camped in the plains if there is a war on)
3) Encounters will not in any way be tailored to the party's level, beyond that intelligent creatures encountered might regard you as not even worth the effort to destroy, and may decide to chat with you a bit instead of there is something they think you might know that they'd like to, or will ignore you as long as you don't give them motivation not to.

I don't try to shape what the encounters will lead to, leaving that up to the players to decide if they want to find a creature's lair or other such side-treks. I also don't have a set number of times per day/night I check for encounters - that entirely depends on circumstances during the campaign (i.e. I will check less often in a desolate wasteland with very few inhabiting creatures than I would in the same wasteland while it is being crossed by pilgrims of some religion and also scoured for ancient relics by an evil empire and also happens to be the seasonal migratory period of the local lizardfolk).

My results have been that my players don't over-spend resources in the encounters they do have unless they are intentionally punching above their weight-class because they don't know that they won't have more encounters before they are able to refresh their resources.

I am running a hex crawl with 1 mile hexes. I roll for encounters every hour; some are monsters, some wilderness hazards and some "specials" (often a social encounter). 8 hours in the wild is a short rest, a long rest is only possible in certain locations on the map: towns, forts, religious monasteries, monster lairs and the upper works of haunted dungeons. Some monster lairs are essentially single use long rests, because they're impossible to find again after clearing them out. After you clear the lair that monster no longer appears in random encounters though, so travel through that area is safer. If a PC is knocked out, they lose any XP they had accrued since the last long rest.