D&D 5E What do you do when players say "we go north" but their characters don't have the "Keen Mind" Feat or Navigation Equipment?

I'm fairly laid back about this sort of thing, to the point where it seems like [MENTION=45197]pming[/MENTION] might have an embolism.

When the players/characters tell me they're "headed north" or something similar I ask myself two questions:

First, are there any extenuating circumstances that would prevent them from navigating normally? For example, perhaps they're underground, there could be poor weather, or maybe there's some magic obfuscating their ability to figure out what direction they're moving in, and so on. If there is I deal with that using ability checks of some form or another (usually survival or nature) like most people who've responded seem to do. However, if there's none of the aforementioned complications I move on to question two...

Is anything interesting actually going to happen if they get lost? If there answer is yes, then again, I'll have them make a few checks or something of the like and see what happens. If the answer to this question is no, then I'll just say "Okay, you head north." No roll required.

In essence, I need failure to provide something of interest to both the players and myself beyond the characters simply getting lost for a bit and perhaps running into a few random encounters. In my games I need trips from Point A to Point B to actually be an engaging experience to bother interrupting the flow of the game with rolls that ultimately mean nothing. If there are unknown ruins, enemy encampments, a time crunch, or if indeed the very point of moving around is to explore unknown regions of the map, then by all means I'll have the players actively engage in navigating. But if they just want to get from one known location to another by moving in a general direction they know will get them there... I'm not wasting anyone's time with die rolls that end up to amounting to, what I personally see as, essentially wasting time.

Of course... horses for courses and all that. Just because I'll the players in my games get around without rolling dice on occasion doesn't mean it's for everyone.

pming said:

Hiya!



I can see where you are coming from, but you are making a lot of assumptions. The biggest is that you are assuming that a 'game world' (say, Greyhawk) has people that do a lot of travelling. I'd hazzard a guess that for the vast majority of people in Greyhawk, for example, never go more than a dozen kilometers (call it, 8 miles) from their home/town. There is simply no need, and it is too dangerous. They would never need to know where the 'north star' is. They would be familiar with local landmarks which they would use to get around. They may know where North is because of this. But teleport that person 1000 kilometers in some random direction and they'd be totally lost in all likelyhood.

Click to expand...

My only assumption is that they have seen the stars at night. In a pre-modern world, night was dark, so, outside of the tiny pools of light made by fires or lamps, the only thing to look at would be the stars. Astronomy was a huge preoccupation of the pre-modern world, since half of the time (during night), it was the just about the only thing you could see or do. And, since everyone would have observed the stars, they would know they would rotate around a certain point, know that point is "north", and would be able to find it as second nature. Even those who never left their homes would be able to do it.

Do you use “north” in your area descriptions? If so, they’re just going with the terminology you’ve given them. If not, then I guess it’s a super easy check to determine which way is north.

pming said:

The biggest is that you are assuming that a 'game world' (say, Greyhawk) has people that do a lot of travelling. I'd hazzard a guess that for the vast majority of people in Greyhawk, for example, never go more than a dozen kilometers (call it, 8 miles) from their home/town. There is simply no need, and it is too dangerous. They would never need to know where the 'north star' is.

Click to expand...

I suspect you live in the city. In the woods you could easily get lost in a quarter mile, let alone the 8 miles you suggest.

And generations of rural farmers, who might have rarely left their farms, grow up learning how to do all kinds of useful things. Including finding north.

And if all else fails . . . they can do what I do and ask somebody.

You never need to leave near your home to have a good reason to know the directions. Even a farmer who somehow never left his farm would want to know which direction the winds were blowing from and how far north/south the sun was rising to have an idea of seasons. Most would have to travel at least a few miles to collect firewood or graze animals. Without knowing directions it would be easy to get lost doing that. Virtually any farmer should know basic things like how to find north, IMO.

Are they outside in the day time? Pretty much everybody from whatever hemisphere they're in is going to be able to point themselves more or less north. "Is the Sun coming up?" "Yeah." "Then put it on the right!" (I believe the actual movie quote is "...on the left and get us over water."

Are they outside at night time? Pretty much anyone from that hemisphere is going to be able to find a pole star or know a constellation or two and which direction that is at the beginning/end of the night...and/or a moon? Is there a ranger, a wizard, a barbarian, bard or druid with the party? Cleric of a sky god? Sun god? Moon god? Night god? Astrology/astronomy god?

Any wood or high elf of any class? Any forest gnome or halfling? They'll all know which way is north from the sky.

Are they underground? Is there a dwarf in the party [of any class]? They'll know which way is north...at least in my games...whether that's RAW for 5e or not, I'm not sure. May be a 1e or 2e holdover that I've just never gotten rid of. I'd extend that to rock gnomes...ya know, the real underground mountain/burrows in rocky hills living ones. Not these bastardized tinkerers/Santa's workshop ripoffs that try to pass themselves off as "rock gnomes" now.

So, really, if the party has just about any kind of character of any outdoorsy class or race is in the party...they should be fine for "finding north" without having to rely on a roll.

Assuming the players find themselves in a situation where their characters - who are experienced travelers - can't easily figure out which direction they're heading, it's going to either be an ability check or a skill check to determine their success, with advantage or disadvantage depending on how they try to determine that information.

It's probably going to be a fairly rare situation where the DC for a roll to determine direction is going to be very high, however, and there's quite possibly a chance of having multiple characters able to Assist with the role.


On a side note, a set of Navigation Tools as envisioned in 5E D&D are used for steering ships, plotting long voyages and surveying/mapmaking. It's probably not too far-fetched to say that someone with proficiency in Survival, someone with training in the art of divination, or someone with a military or maritime background might have the basic knowledge of how to make a compass or other basic navigational tool, and such things might possibly be commonplace enough to be for sale in the campaign world.
in the real world, lodestones were used for geomancy and divination in China as early as 800 B.C.E., and were in reasonably widespread use as compasses by 1100 A.D. And before that, the Norse were using bi-refractive crystals on cloudy days to determine direction. So, given the tech level of most campaign worlds, there's a pretty decent chance that a balanced and diverse party is going to have at least someone with either the equipment or knowledge to be able to determine which way to go without too much trouble.

If the characters were not following a map and could not use natural landmarks (for instance, Out of the Abyss after Chap 1: "I'm lost!") then I would ask for a navigation check. Let them volunteer which skill they want to use and why.
I would be looking to add TRAVEL TIME based on how bad the roll is.

I want the players to get to the adventure later this session, not role-play - or worse, blow-by-blow re-enactment in real time - being lost.

Demetrios1453 said:

If it's at night, and the campaign world has a reasonably bright star near the North Celestial Pole, like we do here on Earth, then a Nature check to go north when the skies are reasonably clear at night would probably only have a DC 5 or so, since everyone in a lower-technology world would be familiar with the night sky, and especially with something incredibly useful like that. In the real world, I, along with anyone else with even a rudimentary knowledge of astronomy, would, if in the Northern Hemisphere, easily be able to make a bee-line due north on a night with clear skies, even in the city (I can easily make out Polaris even from here in the middle of the Phoenix metro area; granted, the north-south running streets would make that meaningless).

Even if the campaign world doesn't have a bright pole-star, like Earth's Southern Hemisphere, knowledge of what stars are near the celestial pole would still be wide-spread. That would mean that the DC would likely be 10 - 15 to go in hoped-for direction, depending on just how barren the area around the celestial pole is. And of course, on cloudy nights, all this would be useless...

Click to expand...

You're making a ton of assumptions. Just to name a few:

1. There are stars in the campaign world
2. The campaign world is spherical
3. The campaign world rotates
4. The apparent motion of the stars depends almost exclusively on the rotation of the campaign world
5. The stars are far enough away that their relative positions don't change with lattitude and longitude

In my campaign world, for example, only #1 and #5 are true. Navigating by the stars in my world works entirely differently than it does on Earth. (Easier in some ways, much harder in others.)