D&D General How Do You Run Travel and Exploration In Your Games?

[payn]

I've come around to abstracting all the survival sim aspects of RPGs. No more worrying about every piece of ammo, every ounce of food, every drop of water, every single torch, etc.. I will usually do a check based on some combo of situation and character skill. For example, in a hexcrawl, the PCs might spend a day travelling and such. There will be a check to see how efficient they are. If, an encounter happens, they might be well rested, or they could be tired. They might have navigated the land well and catch their foes off guard, or they could wander around aimlessly and get caught in an ambush.

For exploration elements, I usually jazz that up. There is some historical significance to a site the PCs are exploring. Finding all the clues and piecing things together is an adventure itself. Things like traps and puzzles are simply encounters, but the exploration itself has much more purpose to it. What is significant about this dungeon, terrain, place that makes actually exploring it interesting? I mean, beyond being a dungeon filled with things to kill and loot.

 

[Piperken]

A5E's Trials & Treasures has rules for traveling, called journeys, which I loved once I finally grokked them. They're pretty simple, while also using big ol' random tables (I love random tables) and giving players the option to take part in journey activities.

I home brewed some of the faction missions in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, to better tie in with the party's characters by personal backgrounds and class. I anticipate they'll undertake these soon, and when they travel, they'll be A5E journeys!

 

[Clint_L]

Depends on the game. Normally I just handwave it, but in my Tomb of Annihilation game I went all in: Resource management, chance of getting lost, random encounters etc. at one point they were lost in the jungle for a month and only one character survived.

It was great and frustrating fun for everyone

This - depends on the campaign and where it's at. At low levels it's often a big part of my games, but by high levels players usually have a lot of options. I love a good random encounter at levels 1-5, though.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Exploration is a good low level arc. It provides that sense of growth as you go from "a muddy hillside could kill us all" to "anybody want a bear skin cloak?"

I tend to keep the "points of interest" approach, at least if they make their navigation checks, but one point of interest is always "running low on food/water" because that's when they have to start foraging.

Foraging, IMO, is when random encounters get dangerous. You are spending non-trivial amounts of time in some other predators' domain. Plus if you kill a deer, the blood may draw wolves or bears who steal you kill.

Getting lost is a risk, but "how lost" depends on where they are. Is this "we can't be more than X days north of the east-west river so we can just go south" or is this "lost in the mountains where if you choose wrong you wind up in a dead-end canyon and can easily waste days/weeks/months?"

 

[Smackpixi]

I handwave mostly. The trials and treasures has some good encounter ideas but frankly, since I run a pretty narrative driven game, random encounters on travel that don’t contribute to the story are just time wasters. It already takes like a year or two to get through a short story amount of content, so forcing travel to be interesting is dumb. Travel as interesting is a thing if your game is one that develops organically where random encounters add to the plot or experience. If your game is the story that happens at the destination of the trip, and the encounters along the way aren’t connected to that, waste of everyone’s time.

 

[Smackpixi]

let me clarify, it’s the long rest that destroys the narrative. If things that happen along the way get erased by a long rest, there’s no point to them. If they have an impact of attrition to the party on the way to save the princess, they are meaningful and add to the narrative. It’s the availability of long rests that makes travel encounters dumb.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

To be honest, I'm really surprised at the number of people who just handwave it. In addition to providing opportunities to use a swath of character abilities, I think travel and exploration are a great way to feed the players potential plot hooks and side quests, information about the region, or just set tone and ambiance for the coming area they are seeking.

For example: The shadow and sound of a flapping dragon might indicate a dragon's hoard to seek out somewhere nearby. While a griffon might have nest with eggs or young for players to find and (hopefully not too forcefully) adopt. Travelers might know things about the area. Ruins can give clues to the region's past (if relevant). While enemy patrols can hint at what challenges the party is going to face when they find whatever main site they're looking for.

I guess I also feel like there's something inherently more dramatic about overcoming a monster or BBEG that lives in a demonstrably dangerous and hostile region than one whose gates you effectively just appear at.

"Through the mist, through the woods,
through the darkness and the shadows.
It's a nightmare but it's one exciting ride.
Say a prayer, then we're there,
at the drawbridge of a castle,
and there's something truly terrible inside."

No judgement, mind you, just my thoughts. I certainly understand how much work it takes to run a game at the best of times. And we each have our own priorities we want to focus on.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

let me clarify, it’s the long rest that destroys the narrative. If things that happen along the way get erased by a long rest, there’s no point to them. If they have an impact of attrition to the party on the way to save the princess, they are meaningful and add to the narrative.

Yeah, that IS an issue. I know several ways to deal with it:
* One can increase the difficulty of encounters so that they're threatening regardless of having fresh resources to expend.

* One can design encounters that serve some purpose other than draining the party's resources. A meeting with some non-hostile orcish refugees fleeing the new chieftain's draconian rule isn't likely to cost the PCs much in the way of hp or spell slots. And generally isn't intended to.

* One can play around with the requirements for long rests. Maybe long rests are only possible in sufficiently comfortable conditions, like an inn or a well-established camp (that maybe takes 8 hours to set up). Sleeping in not-so-comfortable surroundings still gets you at least a short rest and also keeps one from suffering levels of exhaustion from sleep deprivation.

Combats can also still be fun even if they don't ultimately cost the party resources for the next challenge.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I also handwave it... because almost always the players are travelling to locations that they already have plot points they are following to go to, so purposefully throwing down extra stuff to do in the interim is just slowing down their progress. Now I will of course describe a couple things they might see along the way just to make the travel have a bit of narrative as they go... but more often than not those things I describe are just off-hand comments that I probably have nothing set up for. If it turns out they players do in fact turn away from their current narrative to go check one of these things out... I will usually have to create something rather quickly. But I have a lot of side trek bits and bobs that I've collected over the years in my head and can probably improvise an encounter leading to that side trek to give me the chance to pull something out more completely for next session.

Case in point... in my last campaign set in Theros the party was marching west from Deyda Harbor to a copper mine that was having some issues that they were checking out. Along the way I mentioned them passing both a ruined shrine that they saw south of them down the hills to the seacoast, as well as seeing a griffin to their north flying haphazardly and then falling from the sky. The group just walked past the shrine uninterested, but actually decided to travel north to go find the griffin, which meant a bit of improvising by me to come up with something in the moment that carried them through the end of the session. But that wasn't a big deal, and it allowed me to make a larger encounter and location out of it for the following week.