Do you get bored of the wilderness treck?

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Do you guys actually roll every hour the PC's sleep at night for random encounters? I just sort of make something up a few nights out of the journey just to keep them on their toes, but I was wondering how other people handle camping at night.

Absolutely not!

I keep a "library" of NPC cards. It's pretty easy to create a bandit group and have them attack in the night. There either needs to be a warning ("there are bandits in these hills", burned out caravans, etc) or some reason (the bandits have trackers who followed the PCs). It's almost like a random encounter, as coming up with these reasons takes little time, but you're pulling out that spiked chain warrior and the druid bandit king you've been saving up for a fun occasion instead of just throwing a dozen low-level warrior bandits at them like the random encounter table would tell you to do.

Also, players kind of hate those encounters. They're really hard to actually suprise the players (okay, who's on first watch and where are you putting your camp ... oh, I'm not paying more attention than I usually do, really), they probably didn't draw their camp so you have to do it on the battlemat or ask them to do it, it takes players a round or more to wake up and get up from being prone, they have to draw weapons, they probably aren't wearing armor, all their hour-per-level buffs are gone which is a huge deal if you're a wizard, etc)...

The last time a DM did that to me, I was a mounted warrior. It took me so long to wake up, get up, pull out my sword etc that I ordered my horse (which I've never used to attack before) to fight. It kicked a fair amount of arse due to the Wild Cohort template, which is fair, I guess, because my character didn't get to do a blasted thing by the time the encounter was over. We faced a single rogue, and instead of CdGing me (he easily could have), he stole something from me. He nearly made it into the woods, too, where he would have been safe. It was a plot-based and not a random encounter, and the DM obviously did not go out of his way to kill our characters at our most vulnerable, but it was still frustrating wasting all that time just waking up, getting up, and dealing with the darkness.

I wouldn't use the Survival skill rules to avoid getting lost. That just makes the heroes feel incompetent. Distant mountains, the passage of the sun, moss on trees and the freaking road they're probably following (heroes without survival tend to do that, you know) generally prevents the heroes from getting lost. Even if they can't walk on the road because of patrols or something, they probably know which direction it's going in and can walk a mile west of it (or whatever direction).

 

[The Shaman]

I like wilderness travel, and I like random encounters - makes the world feel lived in to run into a pair of hunting displacer beasts or a band of brigands or a pilgrims' caravan while travelling.

Throw in some bad weather, a washed out bridge or high water at a ford, a snowed-in pass, a tropical storm threatenting the coast, a plague of locusts, a poisoned well in the desert - travelling by any means other than magic (and travelling by quite a few magical means as well) should be uncomfortable and a tad dangerous.

 

[Uder]

We play long sessions (6-8 hours usually), so random encounters, wilderness treks, etc. don't get in the way.

 

[Cassandra]

I stumbled on this thread, and this really caught my attention:

The default D&D wilderness trope = hundreds of miles of nothing represented by a wandering monster table, which you walk through on the way to a dungeon....that's not "untamed". That's boring.

This exactly represents the way my games used to be. "You ride two weeks through the open terrain and don't see anything." (This drove my players crazy.) Our long-term solution was a little more extreme than most people's - we formed a company and publish books to handle that problem. Tabletop Adventures has published three books in the "Bits of the Wilderness" series: Into the Wildwood, Into the Swamp, and Into the Open. They give tons of descriptions, respectively, about forests, swamps and open terrain. (You can see them on EN Game Store if you're interested.)

The point is that characters can observe or discover dozens of interesting little details without having to actually stop and fight something. The Bits add flavor without requiring all the time of a combat, and without handing out XP on the way to the next prepared location. Since the descriptions are written out, they also makes GM prep simple. They could be a good supplement to a planned encounter or two, or subsitute for them easily.

 

[frankthedm]

I like wilderness encounters. I also like traveling taking in-game time and teleporting being more risky than random encounters.

 

[frankthedm]

Do you guys actually roll every hour the PC's sleep at night for random encounters? I just sort of make something up a few nights out of the journey just to keep them on their toes, but I was wondering how other people handle camping at night.

You keep watch or risk not waking up! Natural animals avoid campfires, unnatural and smart monsters home in on them.

 

[jester47]

Control is another reason. In a dungeon, there are boundaries. If you're worried the giant might be a bit too much for the party, put an escape tunnel just big enough for them leading out of the room. Giant can't reach them. Same encounter happens while they're camping, though, and it's fight or die for them.

Well, you forgot about the cave with the entrance that is too small for the Giant to enter, and is too much work for the giant to dig out.

Along the same line, if a party gets lost in a dungeon, there are only so many options for them and they still probably hit a lot of the encoutners. They get lost in the wilderness, though, and they could accidentally bypass every location specific encounter the DM has prepared. Sure, some of those encounters can be moved to a different location, but it's really frustrating to have the party miss the Bandits of Chor that were ambushing travelers at a key bridge because they foolishly fell off a cliff into the river while traveling at night, floating downstream and coming ashore on the banks of the Lake Darnwherearewe.

Actually, along rivers and in mountains, it is very hard to get lost unless you are in fog or a blizzard. And in fog you ussually run out of space if you are headed the wrong direction. Ussually there is not really anywhere to go. The places where people get lost are in forests and hills below timberline and vast open areas. But in the vast open areas, you have the sun and moon and stars to guide your way.

Getting lost in a city or inside a large structure with lots of corridors that look alike is much much easier.

At leat this has been my personal experience. But maybe that is because I was a boy scout and did a lot of wilderness training stuff in high school so I have a few levels of ranger or somthing.

 

[amazingshafeman]

Well, you forgot about the cave with the entrance that is too small for the Giant to enter, and is too much work for the giant to dig out.

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.

 

[dougmander]

For years I have designed wilderness areas as big dungeons, with discrete zones or areas each populated by one or two planned encounters or challenges that require skill checks or some RPing with the local NPCs. I NEVER use random encounters in wilderness travel.

The idea that dungeons are meticulously crafted experiences for the players while wilderness = a pair of dice + an encounter table is a silly convention that I choose to ignore. I think it's a leftover of the old, old days when less consideration was given to the world between the tavern and the dungeon, because, well, D&D hadn't been around long enough for any aspect of it to seem conventional.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

A couple of encounters are good but it never takes 1 or 2 sessions to fight/RP 1 or 2 encounters. So I'm not sure what to vote for. Now for truly monumental journeys a thousand miles long it might take a couple of sessions.