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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6870033" data-attributes="member: 2067">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:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> You want the party to risk death from the encounters they face. The wilderness is packed full of monsters and they will kill things.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> 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. </li> </ol>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.</blockquote>

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