D&D General Travel In Medieval Europe

[doctorbadwolf]

Rubber hammers….are a thing…though?

 

[Ixal]

And thus the tautology. The world works because it works and wouldn't work if it didn't work.

Forgotten Realms is a theme park. It works because the setting runs on Narrativium and Plotsium-290. There's nothing wrong with that of course. It's how most fantasy worlds work. Which is fine. But, it doesn't change the fact that it makes about as much sense as a rubber hammer. Roads are perfectly safe to travel and monsters are almost never met, until we have a Player Character halo hover over the party and suddenly all the rules of the setting go out the window and we have dangerous monsters so often that people talk about how the Five Minute Workday doesn't work because there are so many monsters and dangerous beasts out there that taking a couple of extra days to finish an adventure means that the party will be overwhelmed.

Look at it this way. In the real world, long distance travel was dangerous, right? People died and died pretty regularly on these pilgrimages and various other trips. And that's in a world that is FAR safer than a D&D world. Our world doesn't have any really dangerous creatures in it in any large numbers. Certainly not ones that specifically hunt down and eat people.

But, apparently, adding in lots and lots of very dangerous beasts into the world, complete with the notion that these are naturally occurring creatures with life cycles and whatnot, in no way actually changes how dangerous long distance travel would be.

I'm just really not buying it.

One one hand we have a working world with lots of travellers, on the other we have your insistence that like pokemon dangerous monsters jump out of the grass every time someone leaves a village with no explanation besides you screaming "they exist so it must happen!"

 

[Hussar]

One one hand we have a working world with lots of travellers, on the other we have your insistence that like pokemon dangerous monsters jump out of the grass every time someone leaves a village with no explanation besides you screaming "they exist so it must happen!"

Yes. This. This is the argument I'm making.

Again, we're just talking past each other now and you seem to be far more interested in winning than having a conversation, so, sure, you're 100% right. Absolutely right. Well done you.

 

[MGibster]

Normally I might ask if your players have goals of their own, things they are looking for, personal motivations? However, you said straight up that you threw in something of relevance to them and they ignored it anyhow! Maybe they thought the knowledge they'd gained was sufficient to pursue later, or when it became an issue? What was at stake, during the journey, in them finding out their rival factions were working together, and did it present any issues that needed to be dealt with right away?

It's been more than five years since we played that game, I don't remember what their "real" mission was, but they pretty much accomplished it early in the session. Early as in we still had 2+ hours of gaming time left. Their line of reasoning was twofold: We're not getting paid to look into that and it's dangerous. But they did learn something of value, their hometown's two main enemies were working together somehow.

For example, did the reveal of that fact also present an opportunity to sabotage that relationship (something they might very much want), but it had to be acted on right then and there? The more immediate and transient the motivation/pressure/opportunity, the better.

They didn't investigate at all. From a distance, they observed a group of prisoners being held by faction A given to faction B. They observed this and the group consensus was "Not our circus, not our monkeys." There was one person in the group that wanted to check it out more closely but he was overruled.

For exaple, if your party is on their way to the Big Bad Fortress, but on their way come upon a scene of obvious recent violence and abduction of innocents, how are they going to handle that?

My players are likely to ignore it. Whatever distraction that is, it's not the mission.

 

[niklinna]

One one hand we have a working world with lots of travellers, on the other we have your insistence that like pokemon dangerous monsters jump out of the grass every time someone leaves a village with no explanation besides you screaming "they exist so it must happen!"

There can be no "working world" if that world is imaginary. Literally nothing happens—or even exists—in an imagined world without a real-life person deciding it is so. No screaming necessary. You two clearly each have your own imaginary worlds, in which you are deciding different things happen.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, that would imply that I actually care that much.

This entire thread would indicate otherwise.

 

[Faolyn]

I would greatly appreciate some ideas for how to make travel more fun.

Have you checked out the journey rules for Level Up yet?

 

[Hussar]

This entire thread would indicate otherwise.

Oh, don't get me wrong. It's interesting to discuss from an academic standpoint. Would I actually bother rewriting Forgotten Realms to try to make it make sense? Not a chance. Just no.

OTOH, my home-brew world that I'm currently building is at least trying to make sense of the initial set-up that I've created. Lots of "If this is true, what does that mean" sort of discussions with my group - we're working on it (very slowly and in fits and starts) collaboratively since they're very likely to see things that I miss.

But, please stop making personal assumptions here. I'm not "screaming" nor am I even being particularly unreasonable. I disagree, of course, but, the endless snark and ad hominems get rather tiresome after a while and aren't in any way actually needed.

I look at something like the Sword Coast, described as one of the most dangerous areas in all of Faerun, and then think, hmmm, no overland travel in somewhere like that would be more difficult than in the real world. Obviously, you disagree and think that it should be about the same as the real world. Fair enough. I don't really see how, but, hey, you're more than welcome to your interpretation and, clearly, your interpretation is the one that the source books largely follow, as @Ixal points out.

Me, I just find it jarring to see something like maps of Phandelin, a northern town surrounded by very, very dangerous monsters, and has zero actual defenses. No walls, no moat, no siege weaponry, nothing. To me, a town in the Sword Coast should look a lot more like Roman hill forts than 15th century English towns. Granted, that's just one example, there are -others, but, yeah, I don't think that Forgotten Realms, as written, is anything more than a theme park setting. It's certainly not anything remotely close to an attempt at anything functional. It works great for setting adventures there. Which, given that it's an adventure setting, is fantastic. But, I'm not going to pretend that it's more than that.

 

[Manbearcat]

D&D has done Travel/Trekking/Journeys 3 ways. If you want to do either of the first two in 5e you're going to need to do some heavy-lifting of hacking it in yourself and then stress-testing to make sure its tightly integrated or find a product on the DMs Guild or whatever that has already attempted to do so (successfully or not you'll have to put the work in to figure out!).


* B/X RC hexcrawls w/ high resolution map and integrated rules/procedures. Procedurally, its just like dungeon crawls except mapped with fully prepped and high resolution hex-map (each hex themed and stocked w/ topography/hazards/denizens) + encounter tables + exploration turns/rest per 4 turns + wandering monster clock + monster reaction + encumbrance and loadout enforcement + gold/xp. This struggles when magic starts becoming ubiquitous (particularly powerful, terrain and light obviating magic.

* 4e map + conflict resolution (Skill Challenges) with intent/goal and stakes and Fail Forward. You can do this with each individual Skill Challenge being a leg (therefore likely Complexity 1) or the whole thing (therefore Complexity 3 to 5). Regardless, you've got a constantly changing situation with new topographical/locale-inspired dangers/obstacles to overcome (each with their own inferable consequence-space) > resolution > new obstacle/danger or escalated existing one > Win/Fail-state. Success means you complete the charted course (leg or the whole deal) w/ failure meaning some interesting twist happens that complicates or subverts your intent/goal and now you have to deal with that before you move onto your next leg (if going the leg route) or your next site of conflict if you're doing the entirety of the macro Journey as a singular conflict/Skill Challenge.

* Various other D&D where you're basically just simulating the experiential aspect of journeying/trekking with maps and rules and procedures and loadout and player decisions being faithfully observed or abridged/elided/ignored with the toggle being the GM's discretion at what best promotes the experiential quality of journeying/trekking at the moment. All that stuff is more "GM prompt" than actual consistent ruleset/journey engine with gears and teeth. So you'll go between vignettes with a lot of purple prose/flourishey-discriptions of vistas > maybe onto some moments of meaningful gamestate movers that involve system/player input/map reference > maybe some handouts or cool tokens to amplify "the feel" > maybe pretending that you're spending time on meaningful gamestate-moving decisions but its partly or mostly or wholly just performative theatrics + Force to engender the mood/experiential quality. Some formulation of all of that stuff.

 

[clearstream]

@doctorbadwolf @Hussar I've run many healthy journey-rich campaigns over the years. In common to them is a framework that I adopted consistent with my preference for open play (following the player-characters' interests.) It was part intuition, and part Griffin Mountain (RQ) that led to it.

It may be diagrammed like this

PAR > JA* > PAR

P is for populated place of any type - town, citadel, manor, witch's hut - anywhere there are many NPCs with means and motivations that PCs may become involved with. (I often lean into "points of light" settings.)

A and A* are differentiated arenas of proof, where skill is tested. Travel leans into navigation, resource management, tracking, skirmishes and pursuits. Places lean into negotiation, reputation management, investigation, confrontations and assassinations. There are overlaps, but these are well differentiated by context.

J is for journey.

R is for resolution(s), which can happen anywhere, but more often in populated places.

Occasionally journey is to, or broken by - dA? - which is a small dungeon. A ruin, a well, a cave high on a mountain - part of the world, not a world unto itself.

I'm still figuring out this framework (I only recently articulated it). My theory is that it works by differentiating on what is in play in each phase. A decision is made that Journey will not compete with Place. In a sense, it makes the whole surface world the "dungeon", if you think of places as rooms and journeys as corridors. Differentiation means that place challenges are not impinged by journey attrition. Journey in a sense is a cost paid to reach each place (and perhaps you see how that does work with the location of resolution.)

One "problem" in higher tiers is character power to compress it into

PAR > PAR

I don't personally find that problematic, following the philosophy evidenced so clearly in FFVII that relieving players of the journey phase reifies their watershed in power. R is (typically) in place, so in the end everyone is where they most want to be. However, I also use something like Gritty Realism and moderately slow advancement, so it comes late and can be taxed.

This all highlights for me that 5e leans hard on DMs to figure this stuff out and make decisions for their campaigns. (5e has the mechanics needed to give Jouney consistency and teeth. Wielding those is another matter!)