D&D General How to Make Travel Meaningful and Interesting

[Micah Sweet]

The scenery type stuff should mostly be in addition to the interesting encounters and not be the encounter itself. And often times you don't want that stuff to be random. If you are using say the weather to help set a specific tone then you can't use/rely on a random table to do that.

I'm not trying specifically to set the tone. I'm trying to make the world feel more real. Nothing on the table I would roll on has anything that would be out of place in the area.

 

[eMCee]

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?

IMHO, Randomness and a topic wheel is far from meaningful and exciting. Using the travel to advance your story is where DMs should be focusing. I use Backwards Design to tell the right story. Guide, template, and sample journey can be found here: https://site.dmsguild.com/product/564226/How-to-Create-Exciting-Travel

 

[Umbran]

How do you handle travel in your game?

These days, my sessions are short, and only run a couple times a month. I just don't have time for material that isn't core to whatever the players are doing. Yes, yes, "make the world feel small". Sure, whatever. If I try to add interest into yet more things, the group never gets anything done, and they feel like they are wasting their play time, which is worse.

So, if I don't start with something specific I want or need to happen in travel time, I'm just going to fast forward through it.

 

[Clint_L]

I loooove random encounter tables. I make a new one for basically every environment, city, whatever. Some of my favourite story arcs have started from a random encounter. So that's one way I keep travel interesting. Another is that I really go to town on my descriptions of the setting as they travel. I try to bring it to life, emphasizing not just what they see but all the other senses, and the overall ambience. And thirdly, travel provides essential pauses in the action where vital roleplay can happen. The two characters on guard strike up a conversation. Examining a roadside shrine leads to a character revelation. And so on.

In my home campaign, we have recently had several four hour sessions that were just travel, and they have been our favourites.

Edit: lately, I've been thinking of travel in D&D as akin to the Japanse concept of "ma." Mostly because I've been teaching that in a new unit on comics that I created over spring break, which led to me thinking about how Japanese and American styles differ. Anyway, the idea behind ma is that we need moments of quiet contemplation in order for the action, when it comes, to have more meaning and impact. Studio Gibli films really emphasize this - you might get several minutes of just exploring the surroundings, seeing what is happening in everyday life, and so on. This creates space for the audience to breathe and contemplate bigger ideas. I think travel can serve a similar function in TTRPGs. In a way, the DM is handing the reins to the players, and letting them actualize the thoughts and feelings that have been percolating behind all of the big story beats. Character growth, in particular, can be explored and expressed, and this can add another dimension to games.

Still developing my thoughts on this, but that's kind of the conceptual framework that is percolating in my own brain. Anyway, I think there's good reason why the originators of this medium placed so much value on travel, as do genre-adjacent authors like Tolkien.

Edit 2: Now I want to write an essay on this subject. "Escaping the Dungeon: Why Travel Has Always Played a Vital Role in TTRPGS."

 

[Scott Christian]

IMHO, Randomness and a topic wheel is far from meaningful and exciting. Using the travel to advance your story is where DMs should be focusing. I use Backwards Design to tell the right story.

I loooove random encounter tables. I make a new one for basically every environment, city, whatever. Some of my favourite story arcs have started from a random encounter. So that's one way I keep travel interesting. Another is that I really go to town on my descriptions of the setting as they travel. I try to bring it to life, emphasizing not just what they see but all the other senses, and the overall ambience. And thirdly, travel provides essential pauses in the action where vital roleplay can happen. The two characters on guard strike up a conversation. Examining a roadside shrine leads to a character revelation. And so on.

I really feel like both of these are the way to go depending on the time. I really enjoy pulling descriptions or imitating descriptions to make the setting feel like a secondary character. But I also like the knowledge that the encounters highlight the PCs or the setting.

Last night, I just had travel through a mountain pass ("Broken Cart Pass"), then along some small hills along a huge lakeshore, and eventually into a frozen forest ("Snapwoods"). The pass provided a way to highlight them using a road not heavily used with a scree slope, spotting a cairn, using a trapper cave for shelter, encountering local wildlife (crag cat), and finding some small loot. The lake provided a way for me to directly connect to a PC's backstory via a lake anomoly called "The Swirl." It also allowed them to find a second trapper cave, via little cave near a small stream hidden uphill off the road. And the frozen woods provided a dangerous encounter with a rhemoraz.

Now, if they failed their skill challenges to spot the trapper's cairns, then they miss out and just have to sleep in the cold rain. This could lead to some dangerous situation the frozen Snapwoods. Not sleeping in the caves would have also would have led to a possible encounter with a griffon that patrols the area at dusk. I think it highlighted the setting, which is the northeast section of the lake the campaign is taking place in.

My question for you Clint is, is having them make skill checks random enough for a table? Meaning, could you replace the random rolling by the GM, and instead have it shift to the PC's skill set to determine the encounter?

PS - Here is the map of our campaign. I should note they had an option to take a boat or travel the western road and go all the way around the lake. But some of the PCs are on a time crunch.