D&D 5E Wilderness Travel & Encounters/Day - How do you handle it?

[Rhenny]

I just had a thought inspired by Barovia.

Travel and the time it takes to travel can be used as a source of tension/limit that keeps the PCs on the move. For example, if they PCs know that they need to find a safe place to rest each day, but there is no such place unless they travel at top speed for 8-10 hours, you can limit the number of rests they take naturally. The trick for them is not how many monsters they defeat, but how do they keep moving as quickly as possible and attempt to avoid those monsters so that they reach a safe place. In this scenario, save the deadly encounter until night so if they don't make it to a safe place they see how dangerous it can be.

This kind of play is like a game within the game. You can come up with encounters that delay them if they fail. They can encounter an occasional combat encounter, but again, the goal isn't to just survive it is to get from point a to point b as quickly as possible. There are a lot of options that would fit into this type of travel scenario - a lot of good choices and you can use skill checks to determine if they group can accelerate their travel. For example, they may see a wagon being attacked by Orcs. Well, do they help? They may get lost. They may encounter harsh weather that may slow them or even harm them in some other way. They may get to a ravine with no apparent way to cross. There are tons of things you can substitute for combat encounters and still have a few of those as well. Certainly, taking a 1 hour rest would be something the group would avoid if at all possible.

 

[arjomanes]

Thanks for all the replies, and really good ideas. There is a lot here to digest, and I'm going to look at testing a couple of the different ideas in the next few sessions.

I've been running a sandbox game. A lot of these issues came up when I was running through Isle of Dread (they aren't there now, but travel and exploration are still a key part of the game, just more island-hopping now).

The players would hit a random encounter, or maybe two, handily defeat it, and camp for the night. Since much of the game was reliant on travel, I didn't feel like the players were challenged until they got to an adventure site. I began adding a few extra encounters (and they ended up being scarier) as they got deeper into the jungle, but I still don't think they were the same level of challenge as dungeons.

For those who recommended changing the short rest/long rest rules for overland travel, in your experience, did it break verisimilitude or come across as unfair to players? I don't want to set expectations for the game and then change them later in a way that seems arbitrary. But maybe this shouldn't be a concern? I think Out of the Abyss experimented with altering the rest rules by imposing a check to successfully take a long rest (due to the demonic influence in the Underdark)? Has anyone had success using that mechanic?

Thanks for all the comments. Great ideas here!

 

[Tony Vargas]

For those who recommended changing the short rest/long rest rules for overland travel, in your experience, did it break verisimilitude or come across as unfair to players?

No & no. Long journeys are arduous, the campaign I used it in (which was 4e, but that also featured a short/long rest distinction), they were even sea voyages, and medieval-through-19th-century, those were notorious for privation, so the idea you only got a long rest when you put into a friendly port or lush tropical island with fresh food & water made perfect sense. Whether your players will consider not always being able to rest at the same rate for the same benefit 'unfair' I can't say. Mine didn't, but they're an easy-going lot.

 

[arjomanes]

I just had a thought inspired by Barovia.

Travel and the time it takes to travel can be used as a source of tension/limit that keeps the PCs on the move. For example, if they PCs know that they need to find a safe place to rest each day, but there is no such place unless they travel at top speed for 8-10 hours, you can limit the number of rests they take naturally. The trick for them is not how many monsters they defeat, but how do they keep moving as quickly as possible and attempt to avoid those monsters so that they reach a safe place. In this scenario, save the deadly encounter until night so if they don't make it to a safe place they see how dangerous it can be.

This kind of play is like a game within the game. You can come up with encounters that delay them if they fail. They can encounter an occasional combat encounter, but again, the goal isn't to just survive it is to get from point a to point b as quickly as possible. There are a lot of options that would fit into this type of travel scenario - a lot of good choices and you can use skill checks to determine if they group can accelerate their travel. For example, they may see a wagon being attacked by Orcs. Well, do they help? They may get lost. They may encounter harsh weather that may slow them or even harm them in some other way. They may get to a ravine with no apparent way to cross. There are tons of things you can substitute for combat encounters and still have a few of those as well. Certainly, taking a 1 hour rest would be something the group would avoid if at all possible.

This is an interesting idea, and something that I think would have worked really well in 4e. Basically, it works like a Point of Light setting where the distance between civilizations is like enemy-occupied territory, and horrific at night. Each day, you basically need to succeed on a skill challenge to make it to shelter or you're stranded in the open at night.

To convert into 5e, you could make the skill checks more narrative, and hide the number of successes needed, but still keep the same concept. If you succeed you make it to safety before nightfall; if you fail, you're out in the open at night, and you may take some additional penalties along the way. In addition, you have to spend a bunch of resources just to survive the gauntlet of encounters during the night. And you don't get your long rest, and could move down the exhaustion track.

 

[arjomanes]

No & no. Long journeys are arduous, the campaign I used it in (which was 4e, but that also featured a short/long rest distinction), they were even sea voyages, and medieval-through-19th-century, those were notorious for privation, so the idea you only got a long rest when you put into a friendly port or lush tropical island with fresh food & water made perfect sense. Whether your players will consider not always being able to rest at the same rate for the same benefit 'unfair' I can't say. Mine didn't, but they're an easy-going lot.

Good to hear. This may not be a change I can incorporate out of the blue in the current campaign, but it's certainly worth bringing up. I could create a new narrative reason for incorporating the rule, and talk over the mechanical implications with my group. A magical Red Tide, the onset of stormy season, etc may be good enough to start with.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

For those who recommended changing the short rest/long rest rules for overland travel, in your experience, did it break verisimilitude or come across as unfair to players?

I recommended changing the rest times, but I wouldn't actually do that because it seems unfair to anyone playing a Wizard or Cleric instead of a Monk or Warlock. If I wanted to run a wilderness exploration campaign, I would probably do it in Pathfinder, since converting 5E would be too much work.

Knowing that this would be an issue, I designed my most recent campaign to take place in three distinct stages: 1) The first part of the game involved travel through mostly safe and civilized areas; 2) In the second part of the game, the party had access to an airship, allowing them to bypass anything in the wilderness; 3) In the third phase, they rely heavily on teleportation.

 

[I'm A Banana]

DM Basic rules p.57 The Adventuring Day says "Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer."

With that in mind, how do you make wilderness encounters work and avoid the 5 Minute Workday?

I'm dissatisfied with how I've been running wilderness encounters. My group, when traveling, hits one encounter every couple days that they can nuke with high-level spells, and then can rest afterwards. If the goal is for 6-8 encounters to challenge a party each day, am I running the wilderness encounter rules wrong?

1. Do you just throw a level-appropriate encounter at the party, which they nova immediately, and then get to sleep and heal back up before the chance to fight anything the next day(s)?

Or do you use one of the following options?

2. Do you roll for encounters every hour, instead of every day or two?

3. Do you throw a super hard, not level-appropriate encounter at the party that just might kill them, but at least should challenge them? This would be like some old-school encounters where you could run into a party of 40 hobgoblins, even at low levels.

4. Do you run an encounter, and then try to lure them into the creature's lair, where more encounters may lurk?

5. Do you create a web of encounters linked together that trigger when you roll one? ie: if you stumble upon Cultists in the Woods; you also will eventually have to deal with Summoned Demons, Desperate Escaping Victims, Enraged Animals freaked out by the supernatural stuff, More Cultists late to the party, Witch Hunters scouring the woods to find the cultists (and anyone else who is suspicious), Creepy Trees that will try to eat you, etc.

6. Or do you do something entirely different?

Let me know what I'm missing, and what you do to make wilderness travel as challenging as dungeon crawling.

So, the Default Way is to use the hell out of random encounters, and make sure not all encounters are level-appropriate.

In Curse of Strahd, the encounter rate is about 10%, rolled every half hour. A short rest is two rolls. A long rest is sixteen. This means that interrupting a long rest is actually very likely. The encounters in Barovia don't care about what level you are - encounter four berserkers at level 1, you figure out what you do.

I find a lot of folks skip this because random encounters seem so dang Old School that people assume they're not really necessary, but I think the default 5e pacing assumes that they're there, and if you don't use 'em, rests are too safe.

That's the easy way. A BIG YES on Q2 and Q3. "Here be dragons" means you might encounter a dragon, and you're probably going to meet something interesting on the regular.

But, ultimately, you need to find out what your goal is for the journey. Do you care about challenging the party? Is the wilderness supposed to be a deadly place that few return from? Do you just want to showcase what lives there? Do you want the journey itself to be a challenge? Step 1 is to define your goal. Generally, I see wilderness travel falling into three camps:

1. You want the party to meet new creatures in this new environment. Challenge isn't as important as just showing what the new area is like.
2. You want the party to risk death from the encounters they face. The wilderness is packed full of monsters and they will kill things.
3. You want the journey itself to be difficult. Starvation, exhaustion, and dying from broken limbs or whatever is a real threat. The wilderness is dangerous.

After you know what you want out of the wilderness, you can start doing things to get that out of it. 5e does 1 and 2 pretty well. 3 might want for some house rules if you don't want to pixel bitch about pounds of rations.

 

[Polisurgist]

For those who recommended changing the short rest/long rest rules for overland travel, in your experience, did it break verisimilitude or come across as unfair to players? I don't want to set expectations for the game and then change them later in a way that seems arbitrary. But maybe this shouldn't be a concern? I think Out of the Abyss experimented with altering the rest rules by imposing a check to successfully take a long rest (due to the demonic influence in the Underdark)? Has anyone had success using that mechanic?

In my case it didn't because the campaign started with this idea and I'm designing adventures to take it into account, trying to keep the number of stand-up fights to the death the characters face down to the level you'd find in a book or a movie. You'd probably have a hard time running a lot of published adventures with the same rules, and changing them after a campaign starts is going to present complications.

The important thing is that I generally still have the same number of combats per session, that I would normally, it just gives me the freedom to plan adventures that take place over a longer span of time.

But my rules don't include different rest times for travel and otherwise; I feel like that's a little arbitrary, though since the lifestyle level plays into it, it's presumably a little easier to get in a shorter rest when you're in civilization.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

DM Basic rules p.57 The Adventuring Day says "Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer."

With that in mind, how do you make wilderness encounters work and avoid the 5 Minute Workday?
...

6. Or do you do something entirely different?

I do something completely different: generate random encounters which are interesting to the players, which may or may not be randomly super-deadly encounters (even though I do advocate going way above Deadly relatively frequently, for reasons unrelated to your post). It doesn't even have to result in a fight. The goal is to create an interesting experience ("encounter") for the players. A midget pushing a wheelbarrow can be interesting. So can two hobgoblins on horses. So can dragon-tracks, and so can an Aurumvorax's lair, and so can a weird-looking tree. Maybe the weird-looking tree is a Treant, or a Blight, or just a tree, or maybe it's weird-looking because it grew up around a magic sword which was thrust into the tree when it was just a sapling. Don't be afraid to let your players miss 70% of the treasure.

Ideally there should be multiple ways to engage with a random encounter with intelligent opponents. Six hobgoblins may not be much of a fight for high-level adventurers, but they aren't just targets for murder--they are potential information sources, potential hirelings, perhaps skilled metalworkers, a possible "in" to the hobgoblin organization, maybe even potential future PCs. A random encounter constitutes a choice to spend table time doing something interesting during travel. That doesn't always have to mean someone is going to die.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Not ideally, no. You could throw a terrain appropriate encounter at them

Well-said, Tony! Have XP.

The rest of your post was good too, and I found this one interesting:

You can also adjust when short & long rests can happen. On the rationale that medieval travel is difficult (not much of a stretch, really), you can rule that a night's sleep on the road only gives the benefits of a Short Rest, and a Long rest will only be available upon reaching their destination. That way the whole journey becomes a 'day' and can be appropriately attrition based.

Normally I don't like the idea of messing with the rest rules, but I like this one because it gives an in-character explanation and a potential way for the characters to get around it: stay in an inn, cast Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, spend time contructing a "base", etc. I can definitely imagine revamping my rest rules to "bivouacked for one or more hours = short rest" and "day of bed rest and relaxation = long rest". In some ways it seems more aesthetic than the 5E PHB rules.

Edit: I see one of the other posters (poltersomething?) is using this variant successfully already. I will definitely keep this in my back pocket.