D&D 5E Overland Travel Guide Help

[Brotton Goodfellow]

Hey folks! I'm hoping to start a new campaign in the near future where travel and exploration are heavily featured. Tonight, I wrote out a system for random encounters, random terrain obstacles, and a step-by-step guide for handling the travel. By no means do I believe this to be perfect. In fact the reason for my post is to solicit feedback. Tell me if you see anything that doesn't seem right, or if you have any ideas on how to expand on the stuff in the guide. I'm not big into the 6-8 encounters per day thing, as well as mathematically breaking every aspect of the game down, but if any of you brainiacs see an issue, let me know .

Steps for Travel
1. Determine player marching order and what, if any, activities they are doing while travelling
2. Determine player travelling pace
3. Roll for random weather
4. Have Navigator roll survival check
- DC set by terrain and weather (DMG 112)
- Slow pace +5 to roll
- Fast pace -5 to roll
- With a map, or if navigator can see the sun/stars, check has advantage
- If the party becomes lost, the navigator can re-roll check after spending 1d6 hours trying to get back on course
5. Once every 4 hours, roll to see if random combat/social encounter happen
- Faster travel pace increases likelihood
6. Once every 4 hours of travel, roll to see if party encounters a terrain obstacle
7. After 8 hours of travel, determine if party decides to rest, or if resting is feasible


Random Encounter Percentages
1. Determine where party is and if it's close to potential enemies/NPC's
- If so, add +10%
- If not, subtract -10%
2. Determine travel pace
- Fast: Add +5%
- Slow: Subtract -5%
- Normal: No effect
3. Starting percentage is 30%
4. If random encounter is triggered, roll on Random Encounter Table


Random Terrain Obstacle Percentages
1. Determine what type of terrain party is in
- Forests: +5%/+10% - Grasslands: +5% - Hills: +10% - Mountains: +15%
2. Starting Percentage is 25%
3. Roll on Random Terrain Obstacle Table if under percentage
4. Determine if failure to circumvent obstacle is a minor setback or has dangerous consequences
- Determined by skill check roll and DC of skill check
- DC 10: 1-5 = Dangerous consequence / 6-9 = minor setback
- DC 15: 1-9 = Dangerous consequence / 10-15 = minor setback
- DC 20: 1-10 = Dangerous consequence / 11-19 = minor setback

Cheers!

 

[transtemporal]

Cool, but... if there are any rangers in the party, most of those rolls become irrelevant since parties with rangers can't get lost and terrain doesn't affect their movement.

Just ban rangers. They suck anyway.

 

[discosoc]

My only word of advice is to prepare for stuff to get hard-countered by magic fairly quickly. Even a 1st level with the Alarm spell can encircle a camp with alarms in about an hour. Later, they'll be sleeping in an invisible hut. Provision tracking, like rations and torches, is easily negated by a single Goodberry spell or light cantrip, or a Ranger, or the Outlander background. The Wizard with an Owl from Find Familiar will make ambushes a bit less likely as it allows the Wizard to scout around from the air quite a ways out at the cost of an action. Rangers will, by default, let the group ignore difficult terrain while travelling in their favored terrain and still gather food and track at the same time. By 7th level your Wizard will be using Teleportation Circle, and by 9th level your Druid will be using Wind Walk to simply fly the group as a cloud from place to place.

That stuff is just off the top of my head. None of it is individually ground-breaking, but the sheer amount of convenience/utility options 5e gives players means running campaigns like this comes with a fairly short shelf life of about level 7. I grew up on 2nd edition, and these overland "journey" adventures are my favorite, but as a DM I've found 5e doesn't do them very well by default.

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

Thanks. None of my players are rangers, so I wasn't thinking about them. Forgot that the UA Ranger doesn't need to pick a favoured terrain also. If I had to choose to ban rangers or never let the party get lost, I'd go with the not getting lost thing. Rangers don't have much going for them, so the last thing I'd want to do is nerf one of their big abilities. In fact, I'm going to make sure my players know they can hire the services of local rangers (for a hefty price of course), to aid them in travelling.

 

[Jéan Bourgeois]

Rangers, Druids, Wizards, and Spells you say? Perhaps this little venture of yours could be short lived, mon ami! >;-P

- Jéan Bourgeois (*tips hat, takes a bow*), Dashing Rogue (with a false French persona), player in Goodfellow's game

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=6812740]Brotton Goodfellow[/MENTION] You have a mechanical framework that's basically ok. Three thoughts...

(1) Why does a faster travel pace increase the likelihood of a random encounter? Shouldn't it just make it more likely you get surprised? For example, imagine 2 horseback riders coming down a trail. One is sauntering along at an normal pace, and seems very approachable by other travelers and perhaps potential target by bandits. The other is galloping along at a fast pace, and others travelers might be inclined to get out of their way while bandits have to assess whether it's worth it to go after someone who's already in "fight or flight" mode. IOW, logic suggests the % chance of a random encounter is the roughly the same regardless of your travel pace.

(2) Also, step #1 under random encounter percentages...that doesn't map to my experience of how random encounters work at the table. As DM I don't go "ok, let me confer the map, realize there are enemies in hex 7B, and now adjust the % change of an encounter based on that." Too many steps! When I use random encounters, it usually needs to flow quickly, so I want to roll that dice and implement the results ASAP so as not to keep the players waiting.

(3) A 30% base chance of an encounter is equivalent to 15+ on a d20. Whereas the 5th edition DMG suggests a encounter check of 18+ on a d20 as a baseline (15%). Your assumption suggests a wilderness twice as populated as the default assumption of 5th edition. Nothing wrong with this, but it is something to be aware of...especially if you have a party traversing long distances & making checks every 4 hours!

 

[machineelf]

So travel rules can become "accounting-oriented" and annoying very quickly. When I say "accounting-oriented," I mean those times when keeping track of minutiae becomes too big of a focus and takes away from the actual fun of playing the game.

I've found that this is particularly true in wide open blank spaces in large worlds. This is why travel rules of 5th edition tend to suck in The Forgotten Realms, because there are often hundreds of miles of nothingness between cities. Well, there's not actually true because there are things in those blank spaces, like small villages, or old structures, or whatnot, but they aren't really placed on any map or in any campaign book, so you as the DM are left to fill those details in yourself.

The real problem is the enormous distance from one city or village on the map to the next. Your PCs end up having to travel for a week or more just to get to the next interesting spot if they are traveling. That means a lot of, "OK roll for navigation. Anyone searching for food or water along the way? OK roll for that. Anyone sneaking? Great, roll for that. OK you travel for the day, not much happens. You sleep and wake up. OK, let's start it all over again." Rinse, wash, repeat for 7 days, with the occasional encounter thrown in here or there. That gets old, fast.

I think that the travel rules need some fixing, and fast. But one way to make them work better is to play in a smaller world, with shorter distances between interesting locations. They work fairly well when you're playing in a smaller, well-defined area where you can actually come across something new every hour or so of traveling.

Think of the region of Skyrim, and how in just about any direction, after traveling for a bit, you come across something interesting. It would only take maybe an hour of in-game time of travel before you come across the ruins of an old, crumbled tower half-buried in the snow. You see some smoke rising from the center of the debris. If you go to check it out, you find a saber-toothed tiger feasting on the body of an elf who seems to have been hunting in this area. A campfire with a pot of food mounted above it is still lit. Look around for a bit and you find a chest hidden behind some rocks with some valuables in it.

That small-ish area, filled with interesting finds around every corner, and where it only takes a day of travel to make it to the next city, would work much better with the current travel rules. They still wouldn't be perfect, but they would be better. But in The Forgotten Realms, forget-about it. It's too large of a place, and so I think that if you do a day-by-day "accounting" of travel rules, you will bore your players out of their minds.

You could put a ton of small points of interest all over the map in the Forgotten Realms, or design your own random roll chart for interesting encounters, but it still doesn't solve the problem of huge stinkin' distances between one city to the next. Again, I think a smaller world that takes a day or two travel from one city of note to the next works much better.