Do you get bored of the wilderness treck?

[loki44]

If your DM sees the wilderness as it should be, as one big outdoors dungeon, then the wilderness exploration may well be the point. An extended Judges Guild approach, with every hex detailed, can turn the wilderness into the adventuring environment which it should represent. Instead, the nonsensical tradition is to have a fantasy world's wilderness represented by a wandering encounter table!

Exactly! The "Wilderlands Approach" is very much to my liking too. It makes the world more believable to me. But I also enjoy the thrill of encountering the results of a random table. A healthy mix makes sense to me and I rarely just want to hop from point A to B with nothing in between

 

[Quasqueton]

Skipping over the travel time and encounters makes baby Farlanghn cry.

In my campaign, most of the campaign area (a newly discovered continent) is wild, untamed, and dangerous. Traveling through the wilderness is an adventure in itself. I use a random wilderness encounter chart, and I at least mention each day of the journey. We can cover two weeks of wilderness travel in one 4-hour game session. I think that gives the feeling of having actually traveled.

Several years ago, I ran an adventure for a group who had to travel a week to get to the dungeon. We just skipped playing the travel time. I said they traveled the distance, but we just skipped playing through it. The adventurers invaded the dungeon, and one PC died in the second room (about 10 minutes into the adventure). The group left the dungeon and went back to town and picked up another [replacement] comrade, and then went back to the dungeon.

Three weeks of travel time hand waved away. That just felt so wrong that I vowed to never skip over travel time again. And now wilderness travel is at least a third of the adventure in my campaign.

For one adventure in one of my campaigns, the PCs hired a guide to take them to the dungeon – a week’s travel away from town. They made the journey without a single encounter. This concerned them and made them wonder what was going on. That feeling is great.

Quasqueton

 

[rounser]

Control is another reason. In a dungeon, there are boundaries.

Exactly...the wilderness lacks walls.

Walls let the DM channel the PCs to discrete encounters. As suggested earlier, PCs can completely bypass a wilderness area because they passed two miles to the east of it, and never saw the ankheg lair.

The wilderness also lacks the "dungeon level" concept, whereby dungeon "levels" can be discretely designated to challenge a given level of PC. We could designate the Bone Hills as fit to challenge PCs of levels 5-7, but that doesn't stop them wandering off from the Bone Hills into Dagger Canyon and meeting those CR 21 encounters that were supposed to be saved until much later in the campaign. <- that's an extreme example, but illustrates the point.

Without a hex map, the wilderness also lacks discrete areas which a DM can assign an encounter area number to. And it's also generally far too big to populate entirely, because worldbuilders love to pack on the hundreds or thousands of miles.

Add all this together and you can see why wildernesses are traditionally very much secondary to the dungeon environment. The shortcomings of the wilderness also throw into sharp relief what could be considered one of the secret weapons of D&D that has kept it out in front for all these years; the dungeon provides a very good "game board" for an RPG, because it guarantees a certain amount of transparent railroading that seems justified rather than forced: "You can't go there; there's a wall in the way." Even GMs of games like Shadowrun and Vampire: The Masquerade borrow this dungeon model of play occasionally because it's so useful in controlling the game.

To date, I don't think "the collective D&D conciousness" has come up with solutions to these problems...it even struggles with the existence of high level good NPCs overshadowing the PCs, and basically glosses over the notion of PCs running into a status quo encounter which the PCs have found which is far beyond their ability to deal with. (MMORPGs only seem to handle it by some sort of indicator of how tough the creature is relative to the PC.)

Eberron's "mostly no high level NPCs" policy indicates that designers have paid at least a little thought to such things, but there appears to be a lot further to go. I don't know solutions to them apart from: use a hex map, keep the wilderness small with boundaries around the edges (e.g. put it on an island, in a rift canyon etc.) and arrange the wilderness areas such that higher CR challenge areas are progressively further away.

 

[jester47]

Exactly...the wilderness lacks walls.

Walls let the DM channel the PCs to discrete encounters. As suggested earlier, PCs can completely bypass a wilderness area because they passed two miles to the east of it, and never saw the ankheg lair.

...

Eberron's "mostly no high level NPCs" policy indicates that designers have paid at least a little thought to such things, but there appears to be a lot further to go. I don't know solutions to them apart from: use a hex map, keep the wilderness small with boundaries around the edges (e.g. put it on an island, in a rift canyon etc.) and arrange the wilderness areas such that higher CR challenge areas are progressively further away.

Wilderness does not have walls, but it does have boundries. Setting up those boundries (geographical, geological, and artificial (i.e. hexes or squares)) helps you direct movment and such.
My point is the Wilderlands of High Fantasy campaign setting is the only one that I have seen that works and does what you say.

When I learned how WL worked I was running a FR campaign at the time. Prior to that, I would really gloss over the wilderness stuff, and only have them encounter planned encounters. Then I implemented 5mi hexes around Everlund and stocked them with lairs, dungeons, interesting landforms and ruins. I was amazed at how much cooler my FR Game got.

The only thing I would disagree with is the idea of higher CR areas being further and further away. They just need to be clearly demarked. Like having the "dark forest of certain doom" being an obvious place where the CRs are a little higher.

 

[jester47]

No, I didn't forget about that entrance. That just doesn't necessarily have to be the only entrance to the caverns. PCs go in one way, giant(s) go in another. They bump into each other somewhere in the middle. You can replace 'giant' with any Large creature or Huge creature that's long, but not tall, if you don't want giants in natural caves. Troll, purple worm, ogre magi, etc. Likewise, look at some of the salt mine photos in this thread. There's a man made mine that could easily have just a man-sized entrance, but farther down a big burrowing creature has stumbled onto a new Old Miner Buffet.

I was saying that if they are running from a Giant in the wilderness, you provide them with a way out of the situation. Like a cave that the Giant can't enter. Or a deep crevasse spanned by an old rope bridge that colapses when the giant tries to cross it too and is too far for him to jump. Simply put, if the players need a way to run away, give it to them.

 

[genshou]

I love the trek between distant places. There are a lot of opportunities for players to even spend a session or two just having their characters interact with each other. It's easier to build character development when they actually play out the times people normally get to know each other.