D&D General How to Make Travel Meaningful and Interesting

[Scott Christian]

I generally start with narrative: I personally just go through notes of hikes I have personally done or read about. Abbey for harsh inspired desert-style travel, Bryson for humorous Appalachian style-travel, Muir for awestruck Cascade style-travel, Theroux for mosquito swamp inspired travel , Melville for ocean inspired waxings, etc. Whatever fits. I take a line or two that is really appealing and sometimes try to build around that.

I add a "scene." A lost satchel of letters sitting on the trail or road, catching a couple laughing in a field of wildflowers, seeing a bear and realizing it's a momma with cubs, hearing a songbird follow you and sing a unique song that is entrancing, eyeing a group of caribou way off in the distance, having an interesting NPC, like a landscape painter or naturalist philosopher, join them on the road to add to the setting, etc. Basically, something grounded in reality that promotes worldbuilding.

This is a great time for characters to interact with each other and provide little clues or pathways to something that the characters might follow in the future. For example, the adventurers stop for the night at a winery and see the same laughing couple show up. Their interactions (or lack of interactions) with them might lead them to understand that the woman is royalty and having an affair with her bodyguard in private.

I have found things like this to be more memorable than running across a random monster.

If I do have an encounter, it is generally only there to promote the storyline the adventurers are following, or to show that the path or road they are taking is extremely dangerous. (For the record, I have always had trouble with a well-trodden road between two populous areas always being under attack by rogue monsters. If it had a problem, there would probably be a group hired to take care of such things. )

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

I use the A5e journey rules, for regions, exploration challenges, journey activities, random encounters, and scenery. My current game has been making extensive use of them as the party travels through an apocalypse-scarred American Southwest.

I would probably love this setting. My cursed antagonist NPC barbarian in my setting finally donned a Clint Eastwood style poncho and said happy trails to the party after a long-standing rivalry

 

[el-remmen]

A mix of random encounters (made from curated tables based on the region and terrain type) and “scripted” encounters, the proportion of which is determined by what is going on in the campaign.

I also have a rolling mechanism for encounter determination that can call for rolling twice on the table and then I create an encounter based upon mixing the two results.

So for example, this happened during a recent wilderness journey along a lesser known mostly overgrown road while the party was camped out of sight of the road*. The results were ogres and zombies. I then improvised a result that makes sense for what is going on. In this case, the PC on watch heard the noise on the road and crept forward stealthily to see a pair of ogres fleeing a bunch of zombies dressed like living cultists the party had encountered on a recent adventure.

It was then up to the PCs to decide if they should intervene, follow, ignore, speculate on what’s going on etc.

* while traveling through wilderness I require survival checks for finding a good camp spot, which (based on the results) can influence how a potential random encounter while camped plays out.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

I generally start with narrative: I personally just go through notes of hikes I have personally done or read about. Abbey for harsh inspired desert-style travel, Bryson for humorous Appalachian style-travel, Muir for awestruck Cascade style-travel, Theroux for mosquito swamp inspired travel , Melville for ocean inspired waxings, etc. Whatever fits. I take a line or two that is really appealing and sometimes try to build around that.

I add a "scene." A lost satchel of letters sitting on the trail or road, catching a couple laughing in a field of wildflowers, seeing a bear and realizing it's a momma with cubs, hearing a songbird follow you and sing a unique song that is entrancing, eyeing a group of caribou way off in the distance, having an interesting NPC, like a landscape painter or naturalist philosopher, join them on the road to add to the setting, etc. Basically, something grounded in reality that promotes worldbuilding.

This is a great time for characters to interact with each other and provide little clues or pathways to something that the characters might follow in the future. For example, the adventurers stop for the night at a winery and see the same laughing couple show up. Their interactions (or lack of interactions) with them might lead them to understand that the woman is royalty and having an affair with her bodyguard in private.

I have found things like this to be more memorable than running across a random monster.

If I do have an encounter, it is generally only there to promote the storyline the adventurers are following, or to show that the path or road they are taking is extremely dangerous. (For the record, I have always had trouble with a well-trodden road between two populous areas always being under attack by rogue monsters. If it had a problem, there would probably be a group hired to take care of such things. )

Gorgeous I will use some more poetic guided imagery, very solid ideas.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

The party had to travel from Iskandar to Deepwater last night, which is about fifty miles on a well established road. Making these sorts of journeys feel interesting and meaningful has been a long running challenge for me, and I know lots of you have mentioned similar. I really dislike just handwaving this sort of travel ("Ok, you leave Waterdeep. 10 days later, you are at Neverwinter"). It makes your world feel small, and leads to nonsensical behaviour ("I left my signet ring behind? I really wanted that for next months ball. I'll just walk back to Waterdeep and get it. Yeah, 20 days round trip.")

However, a lot of attempts to gamify journeys through random encounters quickly become grindy in my experience. It's like I want people to feel the danger and tedium of a long journey - but without it being tedious! What is the solution?

I've concluded that "variety is the spice of life" in this regard. There is no one method that I can just use each time or it becomes dull. Instead, I have 4 or 5 little travel techniques in my bag, and I mix them up for each leg of the journey. The Iskandar journey above, I split into three legs:

1. For the first leg of the journey, I just rolled a random encounter table. They encountered a group of dust mephits causing trouble and had a short fight.
2. For the second leg of the journey, I asked one player to propose an obstacle, and another player to propose how the party overcame it. In this instance, the issue was a corpse on the side of the road.
3. While they were resting during the third leg, I used D'Amato's "Ultimate RPG Campfire Deck" and asked them to discuss a topic (their favourite meal), with the most popular reminiscence getting inspiration.

We spent a bit over and hour on the journey and the players seemed engaged. It made the journey feel "substantial" but it was also fun, so I was well satisfied with the outcome.

How do you handle travel in your game?

I agree, the handwave can be problematic for world-builders. Like when you read something that was obviously rushed - the writer describes "the vastness" of a place.. but suddenly the characters complete a chase scene through it completely !

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

One thing I've done is enriched regional cultures. This can guide encounter types. Currently the region my PC's are in; NPC's incapacitated a few party members instead of killing (keeping the meat fresh). In a roundabout way, the party has found out that this region is chalk-full of cannibalistic cultures ranging from honor-based flesh eaters all the way up to the abominable Wendigo-cursed. In this case the regional cultures kind of write the adventure for me.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

I generally start with narrative: I personally just go through notes of hikes I have personally done or read about. Abbey for harsh inspired desert-style travel, Bryson for humorous Appalachian style-travel, Muir for awestruck Cascade style-travel, Theroux for mosquito swamp inspired travel , Melville for ocean inspired waxings, etc. Whatever fits. I take a line or two that is really appealing and sometimes try to build around that.

I add a "scene." A lost satchel of letters sitting on the trail or road, catching a couple laughing in a field of wildflowers, seeing a bear and realizing it's a momma with cubs, hearing a songbird follow you and sing a unique song that is entrancing, eyeing a group of caribou way off in the distance, having an interesting NPC, like a landscape painter or naturalist philosopher, join them on the road to add to the setting, etc. Basically, something grounded in reality that promotes worldbuilding.

This is a great time for characters to interact with each other and provide little clues or pathways to something that the characters might follow in the future. For example, the adventurers stop for the night at a winery and see the same laughing couple show up. Their interactions (or lack of interactions) with them might lead them to understand that the woman is royalty and having an affair with her bodyguard in private.

I have found things like this to be more memorable than running across a random monster.

If I do have an encounter, it is generally only there to promote the storyline the adventurers are following, or to show that the path or road they are taking is extremely dangerous. (For the record, I have always had trouble with a well-trodden road between two populous areas always being under attack by rogue monsters. If it had a problem, there would probably be a group hired to take care of such things. )

Sometimes I will use that add-on "naturalist" NPC to push non-combat interaction. The whisper feature on VTT has been a godsend for saying "here is your knowledge of ___ now frame your own response"

 

[THEMNGMNT]

As a DM, you need to decide how significant travel and exploration are in your campaign. Is it a scene in the adventure, the adventure itself, or even the campaign itself?

Not a scene = The DM narrates the trip from Waterdeep to Daggerford.

A scene = Bandits ambush the characters on the trip from Waterdeep to Daggerford and the DM asks the players to roll for initiative.

An adventure = The Bandit King's forces harass the caravan the characters have been hired to protect between Waterdeep and Daggerford. After uncovering the spy at the caravansary, the other spy in the caravan itself, surviving the ambush at the river ford, and rescuing the survivors of another caravan, the players must discover the location of the Bandit King's hidden fortress to end the threat once and for all.

A campaign = Hexcrawl across the North.

Some of these frames are mutually exclusive, but most aren't. Sometimes the trek from Waterdeep to Daggerford is the whole point. Other times you just handwave it.

These conversations should start with "Well, it depends what you want to do." And 5E should give DM's more resources (well, any resources) to build travel and exploration encounters and adventures.

 

[Scott Christian]

Gorgeous I will use some more poetic guided imagery, very solid ideas.

Thanks. I really feel a great line or two, and then building around that, sets a mood-engineered "imagery hook." I know through outside conversations with my players that they remember those just as much as how a monster is described.

 

[Scott Christian]

Sometimes I will use that add-on "naturalist" NPC to push non-combat interaction. The whisper feature on VTT has been a godsend for saying "here is your knowledge of ___ now frame your own response"

I only play in person, so I do not know that feature. But that sounds like a cool feature.