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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9797209" data-attributes="member: 4937">"Oregon Trail" definitely needs to be only part of the gameplay loop.  Oregon trail makes things interesting by having river crossings, resupply opportunities, and other fixed events along the way.  When doing long overland travel I like to break it up with fixed encounters ("lairs") as well as random encounters, weather, and mishaps.  It's also important to give changing color to give a sense of space and motion and two or three sentences to give the players a sense of where they are.  Terrain can be at least as fantastic as any real-world terrain.  I try to imagine the players crossing the scenic equivalent multiple national parks, splitting up descriptions across multiple events - establishing shots, random encounters, lairs, etc.  Each with two or three sentences and most with some encounter opportunity or signpost.  I still don't have exposure damage rules I'm fully satisfied with.  Long term exposure to cold and heat should be draining or debilitating, but you both want to minimize rolls and also be able to deal with things like the difference between 4 hours of exposure and 12 hours of exposure and 24 hours of exposure (in arctic or volcanic caves, for example).  Tables in my experience work best but its really hard to come up with something that scales damage to the level of the character without being unrealistically lethal to low level characters or a trivial time waster to high level characters.  Realistically damage ought to scale per HD but then this gets to be extremely complex in a hurry.  I used rules of a mid to high level party traversing a steaming jungle where PCs typically lost 10-20 hit points from heat exhaustion over the course of the day (but could recover them by taking a short rest out of the heat), but it always bothered me that the rules weren't truly applicable to 1st level characters or say a rodent.</blockquote>

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