D&D 5E How dangerous are your wildnernesses?

[Minigiant]

Me (as the DM): Suddenly you the flapping of wings. A slight feeling of fright and awe tickles your skin. And then you see it. Above you flies a huge dragon. Its green scales...
Player: Wait what? Dragon?
Me: Yeah. Dragon. Game's called Dungeons and Dragons. There are dragons out there. If you roam around aimlessly in the woods, far from known civilizations, you are going to bump into wild humanoids, some crazy fey, some hidden elves, or a green dragon. You lucked out and got an adult dragon.
Other Player: At least it's not a sharknado this time.
Me: That's coastal. There's no sharks in the...


One aspect of D&D is that as the player characters advance in level, they face more challenging foes, traps, hazards, and monsters. You go from goblins to orcs to giants to dragons to bigger giants to bigger dragons. You go from simple locks to fancy traps to complex traps made with dwarven craftdwarfship and gnomish design to epic locks made by demigods.

5th edition introduced bounded accuracy to let low level challenges still be relevant to high level PCs.

And we accept this as the default assumption. If we change the game's tone or setting, we alter the assumption. But if nothing is said to be changed, we assume that more and more challenges could be handled as you level and you'd run into them. Compared to most settings in media, D&D settings have extremely deadly wildernesses. Half the MM monsters would eat our heroes from other stories with ease.

Except for the wilderness. At some tables, the wilderness doesn't upgrade by nature nor narrative.
At some tables and in some settings, the "natural advancement" of the wilderness wont occur if the DM has no reason to add an advanced monster or hazard to the wilderness nor upgrade an area to include them. There isn't a red dragon on every unclaimed mountain range. No fey prince or princess dominating every secluded forest. No storm giant sleeping under every undisturbed sea. So the high level forest archdruid is taming bears near his home and not dealing with young green dragons. The epic loner ranger doesn't have a collection of frost giant bones that grows every year just because. And the barbarian tribe in the hills lacks a story of spontaneous demonic energy conjuring fiends if a taboo is done.

It's not a bad thing. If every time a party travels to and from the far off dungeon, there was a high chance to run into an age appropriate dragon, few would make the journey. So the many setting cap it at predatory animals and random savages.

So what is your preference? Do you like the wilderness generally a problem for only low level adventurers, equally and potentially deadly to all, only deadly for plot reasons, or skippable altogether?

 

[Lanefan]

Voted "moderately dangerous" but would have preferred to vote "highly variable" had the option been there.

Some wilderness is reasonably safe. Some wilderness is worse than the average dungeon (or in fact *is* the dungeon!). Some is in between. Some areas change greatly over time depending what's recently moved in and-or out e.g. migratory dragons or nomadic bands of giants.

Lan-"and sometimes it's at the whim of my dice"-efan

 

[miniaturehoarder]

Moderate, while most encounters will be not be of strong creatures, a few still exist. Also large numbers of schlub foes can be a beast if the party goes headfirst.

Near cities: safe with isolated threats that have a reason to be near a city
Near settlements: Easy to moderate, monsters that range this close are often picked off by troop movements & militia. Aggressive lone monsters and small band of humanoids. Bandit groups will be an exception as this is where they are the most numerous.
Away from settlements: Moderately. Even slubbish monsters don't go alone and I'm checking my 1E & 2E books for # appearing.
Giant territory: Deadly. When the locals are 20' tall, you are going to hate to see why THEY don't go out alone.
Far Realm canker: Extreme. I'm rolling the foe(s) CR on a d30.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I tend to assume that monsters, like seemingly everything else in the universe, follow a rough Pareto distribution, and the weakest 20% of species account for 80% of the population. A creature the size of an adult dragon can have a range of hundreds of square miles, so there may only be a handful of them in all the land. This is not to say that you won't get killed in the wilderness... just that you're several orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by a warband of gnolls.

And monster populations in the wilderness are independent of character level. You don't magically attract more powerful monsters, and they certainly don't magically scale with you. So whether a given location is "deadly" or "easy"... that depends on whether you're 3rd level or 12th.

 

[S'mon]

I guess moderate, but others have said, different bits of wilderness vary in danger level just as much as different dungeons do. I normally start the campaign in a relatively low threat area, with more dangerous zones further away. Mountains are often particularly dangerous, as are some swamps. Default might equate to a level 3-6 dungeon but I run Wilderlands where some areas are level 16+; the local mountain range is known for its flocks of vrock demons!

 

[Henry]

I went with "Moderate" - just recently the Monk was alone near a waterfall and got carried off by a Peryton for a mating ritual. Fortunately the party had set a rendezvous and went looking for him.

 

[Talmek]

Moderate, while most encounters will be not be of strong creatures, a few still exist. Also large numbers of schlub foes can be a beast if the party goes headfirst.

Near cities: safe with isolated threats that have a reason to be near a city
Near settlements: Easy to moderate, monsters that range this close are often picked off by troop movements & militia. Aggressive lone monsters and small band of humanoids. Bandit groups will be an exception as this is where they are the most numerous.
Away from settlements: Moderately. Even slubbish monsters don't go alone and I'm checking my 1E & 2E books for # appearing.
Giant territory: Deadly. When the locals are 20' tall, you are going to hate to see why THEY don't go out alone.
Far Realm canker: Extreme. I'm rolling the foe(s) CR on a d30.

While I voted moderate, I find that this is more accurate to how I run my wilderness encounters. The further from civilization, the more "where the wild things are" it becomes.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I too cast my vote for "moderate" when the answer is actually a lot more complex than that.

My wilderness is as one would expect the fantasy wilderness to be if basing their assumptions on real-world wilderness: Everything that lives in the whole wild world is out there somewhere, and you might just run into it if you aren't trying to avoid it. It's dangerous, but there are things which make it a bit safer, such as the patrols sent around settlements, well developed roads that kind of trim the wilderness back a bit around them so you can at least see danger from a bit greater distance, and traveling the right way for the local dangers to be less interested whether that means being a big strange noise that wild creatures don't want to mess with or being quick, quiet, and out of sight so that intelligent and hostile things don't notice you.

And despite all the myriad dangers, you still might go a week traveling without coming across anything you didn't mean to.

One thing is for certain, though, and that's that I don't use random encounter tables that are divided or weighted by CR - just those which are divided by the locale terrain, and weighted by commonality of each creature, so if you are 3rd level wandering through a forest that an ancient green dragon lives in, you might just encounter it out hunting.

 

[Arcshot]

Moderately. Generally it depends on locations. Our adventures are currently in the forested area of Eastern Karameikos of Mystara. PCs are rather safe in the woods close to the Callarii Elves but things can get nasty when they venture deeper into the Dymrak Forest to the east, with bandits, goblin clans, lycans, witches and possibly green dragon. PCs need to be on their toes but since it is a very big piece of forested land it won't be the case of meeting deadly encounters every now and then.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I too wish there was a variable option. Some areas of wilderness are far more dangerous than others. There are wilderness areas that are seldom traveled which are dangerous but passable to those who know how to navigate it.

There are also deep wilderness areas where there is no record of a civilized being ever venturing there and returning. These are the truly unexplored areas where there is but a blank space on the map. These are the areas of the great unknown, where adventurers are likely to discover ruined cities, and encounter creatures never before seen by anyone who lived to tell the tale.

These kinds of wilderness simply exist with little regard to the experience level of those exploring them. Player characters may visit areas of extreme wilderness whenever they wish. The locals who live the nearest to such areas will say their goodbyes to those who depart into these regions expecting to never see them again.