Unearthed Arcana Into the Wild: New Unearthed Arcana Covers Wilderness Exploration

Ohh the Nentir Vale - Moon Hills example that Mearls had showed a screenshot of before. Nice.

 

[MagicSN]

We're very different DMs. A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post on how random encounters changed the trajectory of my campaign. Just like the players, as a DM I enjoy the suspense of finding out what happens and the challenge of reacting to an unexpected obstacle.

This I would also say, that we have different mastering style. Probably due to the "bit of narrative style" our table includes into our gaming (all DMs at my group do this - to a varying extent).

The suspense for the players you can create by an unexpected move of the antagonist as well - without consulting a single random table. Yes, I admit random table are a pretty awful thing for me ;-) Don't like them.

But maybe we should leave the discussion at this - to avoid just repeating us ;-)

The advantage is exactly what I stated in the quote. Randomized encounters often result in situations that I normally wouldn't think of. They get me out of my comfort zone and keep me from falling back on my own personal tendencies and my own personal motivations.

Getting the players out of the comfort zone is a good idea. The way to go, I would say. You can do this without a single dice roll.

External stimulus is also a good idea. Here it is very nice to let players tell what they WANT. Either describe an "open" situation where the players can define some elements of the story as fitting for their characters (I use this only as session-starter) or by letting a player do a suggestion (like: "The camp in front of us - that's actually the army, I think!"). And then let him roll. If the roll is good, it is as he says, if he rolls bad - come up with complications. If it was really bad - serious complications ("Yes, it is the army - but the other one, the one that's hunting you..."). Okay, the examples are a bit lame right now.

We actually had one of our GMs experimenting with random encounters some while ago, the comment of all involved players was that it
was not good GMing to include "boring enemies with no focus on the story, and who felt like totally uninteresting - you surely can do better than this". All agreed on that.

Note the opposite of random encounters is NOT pre-planned encounters - which are as bad. It's just that you use the antagonists - and henchmen - available in the story and when the situation for an encounter arrives - use them.

 

[BookBarbarian]

Well, if they don't make the Navigation DC. Yeah, sure you can do "rince&repeat".

Why would I rinse and repeat? Nothing says to do that in the UA.

But that is boring. And it means despite failing they just can try like before without any decision needed.

Only if you as the DM decide to make it so. Again nothing in this UA says that's what happens.

A failure should always have some consequences (asides from being 2d6 miles off-track),

Agreed, thankfully this can.

lead to a hard move from the gm or lead to a situation where the gm presents a new situation which requires a hard choice (being 5 miles away from where you were before is not actually a new situation - it is the old situation repeated, slightly off-track).

Only if you as the DM choose to make it the old situation.

5 miles away could be in an ancient grove with a Dryad, a dark ruin with a Wight, or simply far enough away that that the party will have to put extra work etting to their destination before the town is attacked, possibly incurring a level of Exhaustion.

Also, why are you cutting off our names when replying to us? This makes it very difficult to follow the conversation.

 

[Ristamar]

Either describe an "open" situation where the players can define some elements of the story as fitting for their characters (I use this only as session-starter) or by letting a player do a suggestion...

As a DM, I'm not a fan of handing over narrative control as a form of encounter generation mechanics. If the player's want to exercise control, they can do that through their actions or downtime activities.

 

[Monayuris]

Things I really liked and thought were helpful:
The terrain chances for an encounter map - featureless encounters are boring, give us stuff to interact with.
Journeys are an important part of adventure stories, but there is very little support on making them interesting. Material like this is very helpful. Too often travel is on a blank gray slate no matter the world location.

Things I Thought Were Missing
Challenge Rating of the Terrain: There should be guidance on setting land areas to challenge different levels of parties. Yes, eventually the party will Air Walk or Teleport everywhere. But there's still a wide range of levels before that happens. Whether you are designing for a specific party or making a sandbox world with differing levels of difficulty (like a dungeon with multiple levels the party can use to calculate their risk), guidance for making terrain to challenge specific levels would be helpful.

Interaction between the flora, fauna and geography. Not just the random encounter tables advice in the books, but how to tailor encounters for specific features. What likes to live in the quick sand, and how do they take advantage of it. (The example does do some of this but there isn't any motivation to do so in the rules content.)

Example + and -
Terrain: the example could have used more interactivity. Can the boulders be pushed over onto enemies? Rolled down those steep hills? Will the bandits try to use them, so they PCs would need to make different choices in combat?

Other possibilities: it isn't directly said (that I saw) is that the Moon Hills are pretty dry, since vegetation is sparse and you've got old connections to the Plane of Earth. So the gullies may be typically dry, but is there a 1% chance of a flash flood in a gulley during a long rest? THAT would add excitement to an evening encounter (if not just be a hazard onto itself.)

I really enjoyed the Planar Confluence.

Other than the Planar Confluence, there was little in the example to provide guidance on hazards.

In general, the connection between the narrative descriptions and the mechanics (natural and supernatural) was strong. Nice.

Yeah, I definitely think this can be expanded upon, but it represents a pretty solid framework.

The Moon Hills description in the UA article seems to be inspired by a Dungeon World supplement called Perilous Wilds; wherein the book suggests creating a Region Almanac that has details and rules bits for a region.

Personally, I've played Dungeon World and its not for me, but the Perilous Wilds supplement does have some very good organizational tools for wilderness play.

I think everything you're suggesting can go into this one page almanac, like the Moon Hills I could see a template:

Bullet point region description and theme
Terrain DCs: It may require ability checks to travel safely through the region (The Death Crags require Strength (Athletics) checks to climb its ravines.)
Forage DCs
Adventure Sites and their Navigation DCs
Random table of hazards (avalanches, razor vine, quicksand: with specific rules for each)
Random table of points of interest (ruins, magic pools)
Random table for wandering monsters. I've been experimenting with this framework: https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-procedure-for-wandering-monsters.html
Tactical Terrain (when a random encounter occurs) I LOVE this. You can very quickly create an tactically interesting encounter that is thematic to the area that is more than just 4 monsters in an open area.

Keep a One Note or binder full of these for regions in your world and you can easily facilitate any wilderness travel of the cuff.

The way I would try to design this is to make sure that the rules added can be handled both abstractly and in detail, as needed.

As an example:

Ancient Stone Bridge: These massive works of ancient construction can be found in the Death Crag. If the party travels over these expanses at a SLOW pace, they automatically succeed their Strength (Athletics) check to travel safely. The stone work is worn and cracked with age, any creature that choose to move at full speed while on the bridge must succeed at a DC 10 Dexterity saving throw to do so, otherwise they may only move at half speed.

 

[Geeknamese]

The suspense for the players you can create by an unexpected move of the antagonist as well - without consulting a single random table. Yes, I admit random table are a pretty awful thing for me ;-) Don't like them.

As a DM, I’m all for combat, encounters, events being relevant and moving the narrative. But if everything that happens in the game is somehow connected to the narrative, it feels a bit contrived and not realistic. There is the narrative and story but when you hit the exploration stage of the game when you are in the open world and your goal is to not railroad your players, there should be randomness in the game. While you’re exploring in the deep jungles or wilds and you get lost, it’s extremely unrealistic to have an encounter or event just happen to be connected to the ongoing narrative or that the antagonist just happens to be tracking you in the middle of nowhere. Random tables for encounters help create that feel of anything can happen and encounters can be super easy or downright deadly and instead of a combat encounter, it may be a “crap, we need to avoid this and stay alive” encounter.
One thing I try to stress in my campaigns is that there is a living, breathing open world that isn’t scaled to your characters or levels and once you step foot into exploration into the open world, all bets are off. Its random encounters of all difficulty levels and I don’t pull any punches if you make the unfortunate decision of not avoiding an encounter that is completely out of you’re league.



Sent from my iPhone using EN World mobile app

 

[guachi]

Is it too early to start speculating that 2019's splat book will be Drizzt's Guide to Dangerous Destinations?

Not enough alliteration. More like Drizzt's Diary to Dangerous Destinations

 

[Hussar]

Just a thought about Rangers and not getting lost.

It occurs to me that you could play a bit of silly buggers with the definition of "lost". Yes, a Ranger never gets lost, but, that doesn't necessarily mean that the Ranger knows the best path from A to B. IOW, you know where you are, you just aren't sure how to get to where you want to go. So, under the "Becoming Lost" section, you could ignore the second effect of wandering in circles. However, a failed navigation check could be due to unforeseen terrain that pushes you off course.

So, you make your navigation check, fail, and wind up 2d6 miles from your destination, not because you are lost necessarily, but, because you find your path blocked by something - flooding, ravine, swamp, whatever and that detour results in your being off target.

Heck, thinking about it, you could actually wind up with the second result. You try one way, it's blocked, you try another path, it's blocked and, at the end of the day of travel, you are 1d6 miles from your starting point. Yes, you know where you are, but, that doesn't really help you if you don't know how to get to your destination.

 

[machineelf]

In my view, they still didn't get it right with this.

The problem I've had early on with my games is that tracking hour by hour, or even day by day, becomes too monotonous and becomes too much accounting. It just seems like work without much fun in return.

I really like the approach Cubicle 7 did with the One Ring and Adventures in Middle Earth, and I think there's a three-step method to port some of that over to a standard 5th edition game with high magic, but you'd have to 1. make exhaustion levels more meaningful (receiving a con check for them when the navigator fails a navigation check, or when the forager fails a foraging check, etc. This is an abstraction of getting lost for a time, or not doing a good job finding enough food or water, etc.), 2. make a special "long rest in a sanctuary" that is the only way to remove exhaustion levels, and 3. abstract travel over the entire journey (whether it's 3 days, or 5 days, or 10 days) instead of trying to track day by day or hour by hour.

 

[MagicSN]

The advantage is exactly what I stated in the quote. Randomized encounters often result in situations that I normally wouldn't think of. They get me out of my comfort zone and keep me from falling back on my own personal tendencies and my own personal motivations.

I think the same or even better can be achieved without random tables (if needed take a 5 minute break). Then present a cool, detailed, complex new situation. This will be much better than the result of a dice roll. This would be at least my advice.

Arguments for "new situations" are not arguments for random number tables. They are arguments for "new situations" ;-)

But I think it makes not much sense to continue this discussion. The fronts are - too hard. For me Random Tables is just something we did when we were still teens and which have no role in current RPGing anymore. Others seem to think otherwise.

5 miles away could be in an ancient grove with a Dryad, a dark ruin with a Wight, or simply far enough away that that the party will have to put extra work etting to their destination before the town is attacked, possibly incurring a level of Exhaustion.

Then why you don't just let the party arrive at that grove, without the dice-roll about 5 miles randomness? If it is a cool situation, by all means - bring it.

As a DM, I'm not a fan of handing over narrative control as a form of encounter generation mechanics. If the player's want to exercise control, they can do that through their actions or downtime activities.

Yes, not all GMs are friend of it. Here in my area all groups (not only my own) are doing it (to some extent at least). People in both way seem to have strong opinions of it.

Myselves I think about random tables as you think about narrative gaming, appearently ;-) But well, I guess, in RPGing there is not "the one way to do it". And especially what your players want plays a big role.

As a DM, I’m all for combat, encounters, events being relevant and moving the narrative.

You usually have quite some "stories" to choose from. The current antagonist, the characters backstories...

It is of course also a thing of player expectation. If I would include some purely random event, in my group all people would seek the "connection to the story" - even if it didn't exist.

Personally I would say "If it does not bring the story forward - cut it out" (the story can be a complex beast here)

 

[dave2008]

Personally I am not a fan of using random tables in a game (though I do find them interesting to review before games). However, I do have to ask: did you intentionally ignore the statements you quoted or were you blind to it? The passages you quoted twice commented how the DM like random tables because the provide a random/unknown/unexpected quality for him/her the DM. And twice you turned it back to comments about the, here:

...The suspense for the players you can create by an unexpected move of the antagonist as well - without consulting a single random table....

Where the poster was talking about suspense for the DM, and here:

...Getting the players out of the comfort zone is a good idea. The way to go, I would say. You can do this without a single dice roll....

Where the poster was talking about get him/her the DM out of his/her comfort zone.

So what gives? Intentional misdirection, internal player bias, something else?