Ok it was extremely hard not to use a Tolkien quote from one of his books as the title of this post. So I took the easy route and went ahead and used one.
It introduces the subject of this post really nicely. Getting from A to B in D&D. You know that bit that takes our party of adventurers from that nice “safe” town or city to that extremely dangerous dungeon/liar full of who knows what monsters, traps and treasures.
As a disclaimer for the post, I’m not going to go into detail on each of the methods for handling travel (can you imagine the length of this post, or number of posts I’d have to bore you with?). I’m going to briefly describe them, hopefully enough to pique your interest, and where possible provide links to the source material. Also bare in mind this post is acting as my notes and thoughts on the subject, and is something for me to refer back to at a later date. But I also hope you dear reader find it interesting and of use.
In the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) we as DM’s are given two suggestions for how to handle this wilderness travel between locations, A) the travel montage, and B) hour by hour.
“Just as movies use travel montages to convey long and arduous journeys in a matter of seconds, you can use a few sentences of descriptive text to paint a picture of a wilderness trek in your players’ minds before moving on.”
We are advised to use the travel montage if the destination is more important than the journey.
The alternative given by the DMG is the hour by hour approach. Which it suggests should be used when “…wilderness travel feature prominently in your adventure and isn’t something you want to gloss over…”
The hour by hour approach uses a combination of planned and random encounters, and possibly a travel montage if there are long periods without anything happening.
You can find the specifics in chapter 5 of the DMG for these two suggestions.
I think in my short time as a DM now, I’ve used both methods. So take that into account for this next bit, and bare in mind my experience is extremely limited.
Personally as a DM I’m have not found the travel montage very satisfying. I feel I’m short changing the players. Maybe it’s due to me not feeling too confident in my descriptions of the journey. I certainly know descriptions are an area I need to work on.
The hour by hour approach I did was more a travel montage with a planned encounter. This I knew I wasn’t happy with. Both parts just didn’t work for me, or I wasn’t happy with. Obviously the travel montage bit for the reasons just given. The planned encounter was a skill challenge. Which I feel in hindsight could have gone better. And it was down to how I ran it. It was the first one I’d ever ran. I’m not giving up on skill challenges yet.
Naturally there are going to be more wilderness journeys in my campaign. We have one in our next session (it’s not a spoiler, they know they are doing it).
So I went looking for advice on how to improve things, make travel more exciting and immersive for the players, for those occasions that the journey does matter. Which technically I think is when the players first visit a new location. Once they have been to a place and got back safely, I think it’s ok to skip to the montage to speed things up. Otherwise you are kind of sign posting something is going to happen when you don’t use a montage.
“Short cuts make long delays.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Third Party Advice and Alternatives
This wouldn’t be a D&D post without me squeezing in a quote or talking about Matt Colville and what he has to say about this subject. And yes he has done a video on this very topic. It’s called Making Travel Interesting, Running the Game #58 funnily enough.
Matt argues for the montage, and only use another way when or if the travelling through the wilderness will advance the plot. But if you want to add tension to travel to think about using skill challenges. And then goes on to discuss how he would use skill challenges to get from point A to point B.
Which brings me nicely onto the D&D Beyond Encounter of the Week from the Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus series of encounters they ran. You can read the actual post here. The linked to encounter uses a skill challenge to navigate through a wilderness. And from my reading of it is being used to a similar way described by Matt Colville in his video.
I think I’ve already in a previous post said I like the looks of using a skill challenge for navigation, and have/had an adventure hook planned that would/will use it. The only draw back at the moment is that less than positive experience with my first attempt at a skill challenge.
In Tomb of Annihilation chapter 2, WotC present another way to get from A to B. If I’m summarising this correctly, is hex based using a map. In the book I think each hex is 10 miles on the map they are using. So each day of travel (basically a hex) if not lost get shown their position on the map. The party then chose a navigator that rolls to see if they get lost or not, after choosing a direction and travel speed. After the check, the DM rolls for encounters during the day, and finally at the end of the day checks for dehydration.
I kinda like the looks of this, and for me sounds a good fit for travelling over a large distance on a map.
Dael Kingsmill has a fantastic video entitled “Overland Travel in D&D || Dael Kingsmill” on the subject. Dael’s homebrew stuff is really cool. There is a really nice example of a variation of the montage that involves the players. I’d seen it elsewhere described. But this saves space and time just telling you to watch this if that interests you (here is the link to the article she mentions about it). Dael also makes a point her suggestion does involve a bit more prep work.
Dael’s system is a modified/extended version of the one we will look at next from The Angry GM. She has the party select three roles, navigator, provisioner and scout (watch the video for more on them, ok just watch the video). Dael uses a stack of cards for different events that can happen, and these are broken up into the six chucks of the day that the Angry DM uses. Plus some cards (to my knowledge the content of these cards has never been released) that are specific to the type of terrain being travelled on. One of these cards is selected at random and it describes what happens during the day, with various choices and encounters for the players.
Another system I like the sound of. But requires a lot more work up front. But once done.
The Angry GM. Apparently like marmite you either hate him or love him. But his post Getting There is Half the Fun is really good. Although if you are not interested in his look at the current state of travelling before getting onto his solution, it is a long read (much longer than this) before you hit the part you are interested in. So you can either skip a lot of the post or pop on over to another blog for a post titled “Travel Rules (from an Angry Man)“. Which is a really nice summary, and has the all important discovery table missing from the source.
The Angry DM method sounds complicated. And I’m not even going to try explaining it. It really is easier and quicker to read the posts above for the details. Instead I’ll point out bits I like. I like that at the start you have the players decide on a route from a couple or more options presented to them, based on danger level, number of days and whatever other information you give them about each route. The players set a marching order each day, and decide the pace they will travel that day. Plus the players can vary that pace through out the day. The difficulty level of the route is really how many encounters potentially can happen each day. There is the possibility for the party to make discoveries such as an abandoned shrine or derelict tower along the way. I like how it assumes every member of the party will be on watch, unless an individual expressly says they will not do it. So if an encounter happens at night a die is rolled to see which party members were on watch.
As I said when you read it, it sounds complicated. But I went through the process of planning a couple of routes and they take seconds. Very quick to plan.
Journeys are an important part of The One Ring. There is a lot of travelling in Middle Earth. And more than one commentator online suggested looking at how The One Ring handled things. Naturally The One Ring is a different system to that of D&D, so if it looked good would need converting somehow. Luckily for me and everyone else the publisher of The One Ring has done the hard work for us by publishing the Adventures in Middle Earth RPG (the d20 OGL version of The One Ring).
In away when you look at the actual details of journeys in this system, they have some things in common with The Angry GM and Dael’s suggestions, such as assigning roles. I like that events from one stage can have a knock on effect in the next. Naturally this too will involve some work before hand. But once set up…
The basic rules for Journeys are in the Players Guide Chapter 8, and the underlying mechanics are in Journeys Extended Chapter 4 of the Adventures in Middle Earth Lore Master book. Journeys in (and I keep wanting to call this MERP) Adventures in Middle Earth are split into three parts, with each part feeding into the next in some way. The three parts are embarkation, travel and arrival. Each part has it’s own table that you roll against. And for our needs the raw tables will enable us to create custom ones suitable for D&D and the campaign you are running. They may need a slight tweak here and there when they mention a class or skill into the D&D equivalent.
The thing is I think all the ones I briefly describe above (with links mostly) have their own merits and drawbacks. I don’t mind my players knowing this next bit, it’s not a spoiler really. But we will be experimenting with most, if not all of the above alternatives at some point. Then based on feedback we may just stick to one or two. Or I may just pick the one that fits the best with what I want that travel to achieve at the time.
Well I hope folks found this post useful and got you thinking.