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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8641749" data-attributes="member: 6670763">Even before I manged to figure out how to make exploring dungeons fun, I've been really excited about the idea of running long exploration adventures with a whole train of pack animals, servants, and mercenary guards to haul supplies and treasure.The Expert rules have some guidelines for that as well.There is a recommendation that wandering monsters in the wilderness should be checked once per day. Though in area's of high danger or great monster populations, it could be up to 3 or 4 checks per day.I think I actually really first thought about wilderness encounters when The Order of the Stick spend an entire page on the topic quite early in the series. One of the jokes was something that now that they have had one encounter, they don't need to take any more precautions for the rest of the journey, because there's always exactly one encounter, no matter how long the journey. The idea behind that being of course that wilderness encounters are a nuisance that disrupts the story and so GM's don't want to waste any more unnecessary time on that.Doing only one wandering monster check per day in either 3rd and especially 5th edition would make the whole idea of combat encounters rather pointless. If players know they will face only one encounter per day, they can use all their spells during that encounter, and the next morning everyone will have all spells back and be fully healed. Unless a wilderness encounter kills PCs, they have no consequences.But in the context of the BX rules, things really look very different. On first level, clerics have no spells at all. Wilderness adventures are recommended from 4th level on, but even then a cleric only has only two 1st level spells. Characters will only heal damage naturally if they rest for an entire day, and even then it will only be 1d3 hp. Also, the party might very well be not just 5 PCs but also 4 henchmen, half a dozen pack animals, perhaps another half dozen mounts, and a number of hirelings to tend to and guard the animals. That's quite a lot of people and animals that might get injured in a fight even when none of them get killed.Making only a single encounter check per day can still leave considerable marks on the party and seriously affect an adventure before the party even arrives at the dungeon. Or turn the return trip into quite a struggle.How likely an encounter is depends on the type of environment, but on average it comes out as 1 encounter for every 3 days in the wilderness. This means you can put a dungeon considerable distances away from the next nearby town without having the party completely exhausted by the time they arrive there. Because, again, only about half the random encounters are expected to lead to a hostile situation. 6 days to the dungeon and 6 days back is where it only starts to get really interesting. I think a well equiped party of a decent size could very well handle adventures in the wilderness that take them a month to return back to civilization even at 4th level. Though that of course depends what you populate the wandering monsters tables for the region with.</blockquote>

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