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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 8874080" data-attributes="member: 6796661">There is now RAW spell for finding secret doors in 5e, but there is the Wand of Secrets. Like many things in 5e, it is a very different game at different levels. You don't have to bother wasting spell slots and magic-item charges once you have characters with exceptionally high passive perception. Sure, you can always ratchet up the DC levels of the secret doors. But I think that should be done very selectively. Players should be rewarded for getting there characters to the level where old challenges are now easily overcome. When you have secret doors that are insanely well hidden, there should be a reason for this. Also, I think it is better that they somehow obtain knowledge that such secret place exist, especially if important to them meeting their objectives. In my current campaign, they party received some intel, backed up by downtime divination, of a secret area located within a massive cavern. They were at a high level, so they had access to ethereal travel. They had to carefully go through the cavern examining all the rock faces and rock formations. Various encounters happened along the way. Eventually, they found a large rock formation where ethereal travel was blocked. Then they had to investigate and try to find a way to get in.  That said, sometimes it is fun to keep some high-level but random secret doors and compartments. Also, to keep some value to actively role playing searching, my players and I agreed to a home brew rule where I roll secretly against the passive perception of the party member focusing on looking for traps and secret doors as they travel. Basically for every DC past 10, the secret gets a +1 to the role. So a DC 15 would have a +5 on a d20 against the character's passive perception. Because the chances of most secret doors, traps, and compartments beating a passive perception of 26 is low, I'll usually handwave the rolls. But for well hidden doors or compartments, I'll still roll. And I'm okay with the party never finding or knowing about missed secrets. This keeps them motivated to actively and carefully search in many promising areas.This is where I like to use 4e-style group skill challenges. I don't know how closely the rules I use hew to 4e as I never played it. I got the idea from a Matt Coleville video and he claims they are based on 4e. Basically, I have set a DC. Each player describes how their character is contributing to the group's success and makes an appropriate skill check. Rather than a simple pass fail, I have a sliding scale of complications. Roll really high, you avoid any complications or make better than normal progress. The lower the role, the more or greater the complications will be. Complications can be getting lost, failing to avoid enemies, falling, getting sick, etc. Depending on the nature of the challenge. What I like about this is that it can be zoomed out for a week long travel montage or in to an escape the collapsing dungeon montage. Also, getting lost in real life is not always boring. It can be stressful and scary. It all depends on the stakes and dangers involved. Even when the stakes and dangers are very low, getting lost can be fun. One of life's pleasures is wandering around in a new city on a day that you have nothing scheduled, and purposefully getting lost and seeing where you end up.The answer to that is "sometimes."  I like to mix all of the approaches you allude to. Sometimes I just hand wave travel. "After 5 days of travel you arrive at..."  Other times I have a fully fleshed out sandbox for the travel. Other times, it is skill checks and random encounters. All can be fun, especially if you mix things up. For me, it has never been wilderness travel that has been the issue, it is mazes.  Mazes are one of those tropes that my players and I find to be just tedious in actual play. I rarely run complex and large mazes straight. I have a variety of mini-games I'll use to run mazes. Sometimes just using the group skill check described above. I also have a virtual card deck that I use in my VTT. I also have a VTT map which has a progress bar (e.g. from -10 to +10).  I line up all the tokens at zero, in the middle. Then based on group skill checks they can increase their groups progress or decrease it. Various flavorful encounters and traps can be encountered along the way. This last example is particularly useful for mazes that have high stakes like poison air or danger of being too late to stop something from happening.Heck, even video games that have navigation mini-maps, etc. I find I get lost.  I feel that I must just have very poor perception when playing video games, I can't tell you the number of times I keep missing some obvious passage that I know must be there because I just don't see it. Regarding your sneaky teleporting, I do this in Foundry. You can set it up where when a token is moved into a certain area it is auto moved to another area. While the players will generally know that they have been teleported, they don't necessarily know if it was just to bring them to the next area of the map or not. It depends on how the map is laid out and how the DM describes what the players see. Works very well with a serious of small maps.</blockquote>

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