Getting into the Points of Light mindset

[Gradine]

There are things in the wilderness that are dangerous that are not monsters.

There's a great scene in The Stand (in the miniseries, anyway) where four characters walking down an abandoned highway come across a long, deep crevasse and have to figure out how to get down one end and up the other. It's a major source of tension. You don't necessarily have to use giant crevasses all the time, but there are plenty of topographical (and mystical, and fantastical, etc.) obstacles to throw at your players. If nothing else it makes the players stop and have to make a choice, and it's good to let your players have choices.

These kinds of obstacles should be a hallmark of a PoL campaign. The geography should be just as much of a reason for the sparseness of lack of connectivity of civilization than spooky monsters. Heck, probably an even bigger reason. Treacherous terrain I'll buy, but these people couldn't honestly be bothered to hire caravan guards? Please.

Of course, in order for any kind of long-distance traveling to really register as an important part of the game for the players there needs to be a sense of urgency about it. Without urgency there is really nothing in the wilderness that can nor should make your players feel threatened because they can just stop and rest at any time. If you're going to throw wandering wilderness monsters at them (or really any kind of obstacle, skill challenge, etc.) the players have to believe that they will not able to take an extended rest when they get to where they're going. This can be difficult to pull off on a consistent basis unless, of course, the source of the urgency is the central thrust of the entire campaign, which is also really really difficult to pull off.

Without urgency, a non-sandbox campaign has really only two uses for wilderness encounters:
A: Interesting if ultimately unimportant set-pieces (to give a unique feel and depth to the world you're creating)
B: Foreshadowing
Both of which should be used relatively sparingly.

 

[Prestidigitalis]

Without urgency, a non-sandbox campaign has really only two uses for wilderness encounters:
A: Interesting if ultimately unimportant set-pieces (to give a unique feel and depth to the world you're creating)
B: Foreshadowing
Both of which should be used relatively sparingly.

C: A sense of depth and texture. Without wilderness encounters, the wilderness feels like a sterile waste. I have played in campaigns like this -- where a thousand miles is crossed with no encounters -- and it leaves me feeling empty, like the world isn't real.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I have played in campaigns like this -- where a thousand miles is crossed with no encounters -- and it leaves me feeling empty, like the world isn't real.

This is a lot of what I'm feeling as I've looked back at the campaign to this point. I need to work better at not making the journey seem so devoid of... anything.

 

[shadzar]

The problem I ran into was that the modules I was using (starting with KotS and Thunderspire and then a bunch of others) were relatively self-contained. Thus there wasn't many times where I saw a chance of foreshadowing on the way to whatever location was the hub of the next module.

Then go for the outer ring. There had to be something in it that starts the adventure. Have some left over component from the last adventure chase down the PCs, or somehow be ahead of them waiting in ambush.

There has to be something where they have leftovers or some sort of thing in the enxt adventure that will tie them together on the road to help slow the party down at least even if not the next adventure central plot.

 

[Klaus]

Y'see, not every on-the-road encounter needs to be an actual battle.

So the PCs are travelling from Fallcrest to Winterhaven by horse. On the road they see:

- Abandoned farmhouses that show marks of goblin attack.
- A caravan of merchants with heavily armed guards going the opposite direction. They tell of the griffons that ate at least three of their pack mules.
- Sideroad graves... some even disturbed *from the inside*.
- Rumbles under them, and a bulette bursts out, tries to grab one of them and then dives back into the earth. (this might actually be handled as a two-round fight, before the bulette moves on).

 

[DracoSuave]

C: A sense of depth and texture. Without wilderness encounters, the wilderness feels like a sterile waste. I have played in campaigns like this -- where a thousand miles is crossed with no encounters -- and it leaves me feeling empty, like the world isn't real.

Random encounters don't make a wilderness feel teeming with life tho. They just make the wilderness feel like a chore to be endured... it's a grind. Worse, the players are simply at the whim of random dice rolls. They are not agents of their own fates... and that's a BIG no no. The best games are those that emphasize player agency, and the consequences there of. You step up an obstacle, and the players choose how they will attempt to overcome it.

So how do you solve the problems of wildernesses needing to show their danger, and players needing to feel their agency?

Skill Challenges.

You simply present to them that they KNOW wildernesses are dangerous. Seriously, if the campaign world is designed around very small pockets of civilization with everything else being dangerous and trying to kill you... then that's going to be a part of common knowledge. Farmers teach their children not to go into the Skull Woods. Scholars cloister themselves in their universities because outside is The Mountain of Hatred and there are -things- there.

Then, you allow them to figure out HOW they traverse that wilderness. What preparations do they make? Do they travel the main road, because it is more likely to be patrolled, or do they travel off the beaten path, because it is less likely to be predated on by bandits? Do they manage to notice the obvious signs of natural predators?

Random encounters are not solvable problems, other than 'OMG A LION KILL'. Instead, present the wilderness ITSELF as the encounter... where success leads to a minor encounter with bandits (which you don't mind because the next village has a bandit problem) and failure leads to being harrassed by encounters with snarling wolves for a couple days before meeting with the above bandits.

That is using the danger of the wilderness to build a narrative... and way more fun than simply watching the DM roll dice behind a DM shield for a few minutes.

 

[Ryujin]

Attendant to Dracosuave's post, let's make the assumption that the wilderness IS dangerous, and that the players are aware of this. Rather than having them deal with the danger, performing skill challenges in order to traverse the wilderness while avoiding that danger, you could have them do so in order to find a way around being faced with that danger. Could they manage to tag along with a huge and well defended merchant train? Book passage on a military vessel? Negotiate the opportunity to use the town's teleport circle?

In this way you can present the wilderness as being deadly dangerous, without ever really having to deal with it.

 

[DracoSuave]

Attendant to Dracosuave's post, let's make the assumption that the wilderness IS dangerous, and that the players are aware of this. Rather than having them deal with the danger, performing skill challenges in order to traverse the wilderness while avoiding that danger, you could have them do so in order to find a way around being faced with that danger. Could they manage to tag along with a huge and well defended merchant train? Book passage on a military vessel? Negotiate the opportunity to use the town's teleport circle?

In this way you can present the wilderness as being deadly dangerous, withough ever really having to deal with it.

This is also a possibility. The key is 'player agency.' If they're tagging along with a merchant caravan... it's -their- idea. If they're going through the wilderness skulking around in the midst of the muck, it's -their- idea.

That way they're playing the game they want, facing the challenges they want, and they feel like the authors of their own destiny. All you need to do is change up some skills in the skill challenge behind the scenes, and make it work. Replace wolves with street toughs, and you pretty much are doing the same thing, mechanically.

They don't need to ever know that tho.

 

[Prestidigitalis]

Random encounters don't make a wilderness feel teeming with life tho.

I didn't say "random", and I don't remember the discussion being specifically about random encounters. But even random encounters, carefully chosen (i.e. no polar bears in the desert), would be better than nothing in many cases.

 

[OnlineDM]

Even if an encounter is carefully crafted rather than random (i.e., choosing interesting foes and terrain instead of rolling on a table to see if there's a fight and rolling on another table to see what the fight is with), I feel that it's a mistake to include it if it does nothing for the plot. If it doesn't contribute to the overall campaign goals or an interesting side quest, I say leave it out. Combat in 4e takes too long to be used just to build atmosphere. Build the atmosphere with good narration and description and skill challenges.

Ignore all of this if your players just want to beat stuff up, of course!