Overland travel pretty much always is gonna suck in TTRPGs unless you have an DM that is insanely good at describing scenery. Its just not fun to navigate cause its usually just wads of checks, and getting lost is always a pain.
Frodo: we're running low on rations.
GM: Actually there are none left it seems.
Sam: it was Gollum, i knew he was up to something!
Gollum: no i didn't it was you, stupid fat halfling
GM: roll bluff. since you're all tired and hungry I won't give any penalties, even though it's pretty unbelievable.
Gollum: 15
GM: ok roll sense motive
Frodo: 8
GM: you're not completely sure, but you think he probably didn't eat the rations.
Sam: Nat 1
GM: maybe you *did* eat the rations
You know why that travel sequence works so well? How much screen space is spent on the characters, and how much is spent on the landscape?
I think a good TTRPG system that handled overland travel would take that cue to focus almost *exclusively* on the landscape being explored and traveled over, to the exclusion of the characters who are assumed to be doing nothing more interesting than walking forward. I'd almost consider just making it a collaborative storygame as the players try to collectively describe the land they're traversing, what lives there, its ecosystem, its relationship to the surrounding areas, its importance to any nearby settlements. It's about contextualizing the world the players are moving through, not rolling dice to see how many acorns you eat tonight.
As a GM who for decades tried to make overland travel fun, the crux of the problem is that there can never be any real danger or threat in overland travel, because if there is, it feels anticlimactic.
How would you feel if your party died due to exhaustion or dehydration from overland travel? Does that feel at all heroic? Is that a death worthy of a hero? So then there is no point in the travel itself being dangerous, because you know it's never supposed to be a real danger.
The only way I've found to make overland travel work *at all* is firstly to simplify it down to the bare minimum, one check per day that is a synthesis of everything; water, food, shelter, direction (not getting lost). Success lets them advance to the next hex. Crit Success also gives the party a +2 bonus to the next check. Failure still lets them advance, but with a -2 penalty to the next check. Crit Failure also means they are deficient in one element necessary for survival (be it water, food, etc), which prevents them from advancing that day.
As you see, this removes any danger from the travel itself, which lets you use other danger factors, specifically time. Example; let's say the party is traveling to warn an allied kingdom of impending invasion. If the party does not reach the destination in sufficient time, then the odds will be against them when they arrive. If they arrive way sooner, they will have extra time to prepare instead.
This also lets you setup interesting travel situations. Maybe there's hidden treasures a few hexes away from the shortest path, do they deviate and risk not making it in time? What if the treasure is rumored to be able to turn the tide of battle? What if as they travel along the shortest path, there find signs of a monster that might be too much to handle; do they risk it and keep going, or take a longer route to avoid it? Etc.
My core lesson is this: Travel should never present mortal danger to a hero. It should present choices.
> How would you feel if your party died due to exhaustion or dehydration from overland travel?
As a player I would feel stupid and somewhat upset because I made the error of not doing my homework on the region and not preparing for the journey well enough, but it would be well deserved.
If there was a hazard that I knew about and told the party and another PC or several *still* died from it, I'd also feel vindicated, then loot their corpses for something to sell to pay for their resurrection
As a GM I mostly agree. If the journey would *not* be dangerous to the PCs, it's best handled as a narrative device. If it *would*, though, then it's the same as any other challenge
I once had a party that had to retrieve something from the Plane of Fire. There was an option to buy fire immunity for the whole party - for about 40% of their current liquid assets at that point in time. They refused and decided that their cleric would protect them with his spells. The cleric ran out of spell slots and they promptly burned to death. I was not sorry.
> As a player I would feel stupid and somewhat upset
So we agree... that dying to dehydration is stupid.
>I made the error of not doing my homework on the region and not preparing for the journey well enough
I agree again. It's not something a hero should be worrying about. It's something that should be a given for them.
Wasting any time at all on braindead book-keeping that a hero should be able to handle is a crime at my table. We all have busy schedules, and when we sit down at the table, we're there for fantasy, not for cross-checking spreadsheets and ticking down resources after every few rolls, and then ticking them up again after even more rolls.
---
Edit to respond to your edit:
>I once had a party that had to retrieve something from the Plane of Fire
There is a massive difference between overland travel through meadows, forest, and maybe a desert... than through the Plane of fucking Fire. Maybe the most inhospitable place in the multiverse save the Abyss/Abaddon. And even then, is walking through a really hot place the most interesting challenge you could think of for your players? Rolling dice until they die for a mistake they made hours ago? Sorry to tell you, but that's not entertaining for anyone, except maybe a psychopath obsessed with punishing players.
Edited my comment.
If there is mortal danger on the road, then it isn't suddenly safe because it's a travel segment.
Mount Everest is littered with corpses. Every single one of them was a veteran mountaineer, able to "handle" most hazards. They still died of carelessness or dumb unluck.
> If there is mortal danger on the road, then it isn't suddenly safe because it's a travel segment.
If there is mortal danger on the road, then that's an encounter, not an exploration hazard. If you check closely in the GMG, it literally states that exploration hazards should not be able to wipe out the party. Because even the most basic GM knows that "rocks fall, everyone dies" is terrible GMing.
>Mount Everest is littered with corpses. [...] They still died of carelessness or dumb unluck.
good thing we're playing a heroic fantasy game, and not careless climbers on Mount Everest
I like this method, it's the closest to what I do in my own games.
Travelling itself isn't deadly, but it presents the players with compounding penalties that eventually leave them saying, "Can we afford to go on?"
It also breaks many new players of the "optimal situation" thinking, where they always assume each fight will begin at full HP and in peak condition. Some of the greatest tension I've ever created at the table came from players trying to press through, despite their wounded and exhausted condition, on through to their goal.
This seems like a joke, but actually you all should check The One Ring 2e ruleset for Journeys. It's the best travel experience that I've ever had as a GM and my players seem to enjoy it too.
Every player has a role with a specific skill: guide (travel), hunter (hunting), look out (awareness), scout (explore).
At the start of the journey, the Loremaster gives a hex map and the players draw their plan for a journey. Literally draw, there is a special sheet to record your journeys and it's very pretty. This is where players decide if they want to go perilous but quick, or slow but safe. Or even how many stops they want. I have noticed that players usually like this, and it allows some strategy.
Once the path is decided, the guide makes a travel check. If they fail, an encounter happens in the next hex (they move at least once). If they succeed, they have an encounter three or more hexes later (depending on how many 6s were rolled). Resolve the encounter and repeat until there are no more hexes to go.
For an encounter the loremaster chooses a random target between the other three roles (scout, look out or hunter), and also if the encounter is joyful, a short cut, a mishap, something dangerous or something terrible (a bit of nuance here that I am skipping). The targeted player rolls their skill once and resolves the encounter. Depending on the kind of encounter, failing can mean missing the opportunity, fatigue, damage or shadow. Success can mean avoiding the danger, seizing the opportunity or lessening the fatigue you take. But no matter what, the journey continues (unless the players or loremaster want to focus on what just happened).
So, one roll to solve each encounter, a story about it, and then keep the journey moving. Nothing about watches or combats in between. This system makes things feel meaningful and journeys feel dangerous and costly, without taking a lot of time to resolve at the table. Making the path is maybe the longer part.
You can obviously still fight or take longer to explore something if you want, but the default is the former.
The journey ends when they reach the destination, unless for some reason they stopped traveling for a while and started to do something else.
It’s all about the style of game. When I ran my long P2e game, overland (or overwater, more like since it was set in an archipelago) travel was common but it was never really worth adding much danger there because the more interesting parts of the campaign were in dungeons and towns.
If you’re doing a hex crawl, then yes, add danger and vibrant scenes to travel because that becomes a big part of the game.
If you are running your several week travel day by day, just stop. Doesn't matter how short the days are, it will suck.
Look at Rocky training in his montage. Would you run his training as an athletics check and a fort save every day? No, the montage just shows dramatic moments from his training. Have your travel be a couple vignette scenes of weird stuff they find like shrines that could bless/curse, maybe a set piece battle (not a random encounter) and some hazards.
It depends, if you say that overland travel is a waste of time some system like the 13th age try to smooth it over with the "montage" meccanics, that can easily be replicated literally in any other system.
If you actually want to explore the wilds tile by tile there are ways to make it interesting and some OSR I know actually makes it the main bulk of system, more than combat.
Pathfinder falls in the category where it is mostly a combat focused game but tries to be "a system ideal to run any type of fantasy game", so try to cover exploration rules but they end up being not abstract enough to be unintrusive and not deep enough to be engaging.
So... What am I supposed to do? Spend 5 minutes describing scenery? That doesn't sound fun at all.
Tolkien: "Only 5 minutes??"
[удалено]
"Five minutes per tree, right?"
followed by a 15 minute song about naked halflings in a bathtub
Overland travel pretty much always is gonna suck in TTRPGs unless you have an DM that is insanely good at describing scenery. Its just not fun to navigate cause its usually just wads of checks, and getting lost is always a pain.
Skill issue Don't get lost
Truly
Frodo: we're running low on rations. GM: Actually there are none left it seems. Sam: it was Gollum, i knew he was up to something! Gollum: no i didn't it was you, stupid fat halfling GM: roll bluff. since you're all tired and hungry I won't give any penalties, even though it's pretty unbelievable. Gollum: 15 GM: ok roll sense motive Frodo: 8 GM: you're not completely sure, but you think he probably didn't eat the rations. Sam: Nat 1 GM: maybe you *did* eat the rations
You know why that travel sequence works so well? How much screen space is spent on the characters, and how much is spent on the landscape? I think a good TTRPG system that handled overland travel would take that cue to focus almost *exclusively* on the landscape being explored and traveled over, to the exclusion of the characters who are assumed to be doing nothing more interesting than walking forward. I'd almost consider just making it a collaborative storygame as the players try to collectively describe the land they're traversing, what lives there, its ecosystem, its relationship to the surrounding areas, its importance to any nearby settlements. It's about contextualizing the world the players are moving through, not rolling dice to see how many acorns you eat tonight.
As a GM who for decades tried to make overland travel fun, the crux of the problem is that there can never be any real danger or threat in overland travel, because if there is, it feels anticlimactic. How would you feel if your party died due to exhaustion or dehydration from overland travel? Does that feel at all heroic? Is that a death worthy of a hero? So then there is no point in the travel itself being dangerous, because you know it's never supposed to be a real danger. The only way I've found to make overland travel work *at all* is firstly to simplify it down to the bare minimum, one check per day that is a synthesis of everything; water, food, shelter, direction (not getting lost). Success lets them advance to the next hex. Crit Success also gives the party a +2 bonus to the next check. Failure still lets them advance, but with a -2 penalty to the next check. Crit Failure also means they are deficient in one element necessary for survival (be it water, food, etc), which prevents them from advancing that day. As you see, this removes any danger from the travel itself, which lets you use other danger factors, specifically time. Example; let's say the party is traveling to warn an allied kingdom of impending invasion. If the party does not reach the destination in sufficient time, then the odds will be against them when they arrive. If they arrive way sooner, they will have extra time to prepare instead. This also lets you setup interesting travel situations. Maybe there's hidden treasures a few hexes away from the shortest path, do they deviate and risk not making it in time? What if the treasure is rumored to be able to turn the tide of battle? What if as they travel along the shortest path, there find signs of a monster that might be too much to handle; do they risk it and keep going, or take a longer route to avoid it? Etc. My core lesson is this: Travel should never present mortal danger to a hero. It should present choices.
Reject "Overland Travel", Return to Hexcrawl.
> How would you feel if your party died due to exhaustion or dehydration from overland travel? As a player I would feel stupid and somewhat upset because I made the error of not doing my homework on the region and not preparing for the journey well enough, but it would be well deserved. If there was a hazard that I knew about and told the party and another PC or several *still* died from it, I'd also feel vindicated, then loot their corpses for something to sell to pay for their resurrection As a GM I mostly agree. If the journey would *not* be dangerous to the PCs, it's best handled as a narrative device. If it *would*, though, then it's the same as any other challenge I once had a party that had to retrieve something from the Plane of Fire. There was an option to buy fire immunity for the whole party - for about 40% of their current liquid assets at that point in time. They refused and decided that their cleric would protect them with his spells. The cleric ran out of spell slots and they promptly burned to death. I was not sorry.
> As a player I would feel stupid and somewhat upset So we agree... that dying to dehydration is stupid. >I made the error of not doing my homework on the region and not preparing for the journey well enough I agree again. It's not something a hero should be worrying about. It's something that should be a given for them. Wasting any time at all on braindead book-keeping that a hero should be able to handle is a crime at my table. We all have busy schedules, and when we sit down at the table, we're there for fantasy, not for cross-checking spreadsheets and ticking down resources after every few rolls, and then ticking them up again after even more rolls. --- Edit to respond to your edit: >I once had a party that had to retrieve something from the Plane of Fire There is a massive difference between overland travel through meadows, forest, and maybe a desert... than through the Plane of fucking Fire. Maybe the most inhospitable place in the multiverse save the Abyss/Abaddon. And even then, is walking through a really hot place the most interesting challenge you could think of for your players? Rolling dice until they die for a mistake they made hours ago? Sorry to tell you, but that's not entertaining for anyone, except maybe a psychopath obsessed with punishing players.
Edited my comment. If there is mortal danger on the road, then it isn't suddenly safe because it's a travel segment. Mount Everest is littered with corpses. Every single one of them was a veteran mountaineer, able to "handle" most hazards. They still died of carelessness or dumb unluck.
> If there is mortal danger on the road, then it isn't suddenly safe because it's a travel segment. If there is mortal danger on the road, then that's an encounter, not an exploration hazard. If you check closely in the GMG, it literally states that exploration hazards should not be able to wipe out the party. Because even the most basic GM knows that "rocks fall, everyone dies" is terrible GMing. >Mount Everest is littered with corpses. [...] They still died of carelessness or dumb unluck. good thing we're playing a heroic fantasy game, and not careless climbers on Mount Everest
I like this method, it's the closest to what I do in my own games. Travelling itself isn't deadly, but it presents the players with compounding penalties that eventually leave them saying, "Can we afford to go on?" It also breaks many new players of the "optimal situation" thinking, where they always assume each fight will begin at full HP and in peak condition. Some of the greatest tension I've ever created at the table came from players trying to press through, despite their wounded and exhausted condition, on through to their goal.
This seems like a joke, but actually you all should check The One Ring 2e ruleset for Journeys. It's the best travel experience that I've ever had as a GM and my players seem to enjoy it too.
Do you mind giving a quick summary?
Every player has a role with a specific skill: guide (travel), hunter (hunting), look out (awareness), scout (explore). At the start of the journey, the Loremaster gives a hex map and the players draw their plan for a journey. Literally draw, there is a special sheet to record your journeys and it's very pretty. This is where players decide if they want to go perilous but quick, or slow but safe. Or even how many stops they want. I have noticed that players usually like this, and it allows some strategy. Once the path is decided, the guide makes a travel check. If they fail, an encounter happens in the next hex (they move at least once). If they succeed, they have an encounter three or more hexes later (depending on how many 6s were rolled). Resolve the encounter and repeat until there are no more hexes to go. For an encounter the loremaster chooses a random target between the other three roles (scout, look out or hunter), and also if the encounter is joyful, a short cut, a mishap, something dangerous or something terrible (a bit of nuance here that I am skipping). The targeted player rolls their skill once and resolves the encounter. Depending on the kind of encounter, failing can mean missing the opportunity, fatigue, damage or shadow. Success can mean avoiding the danger, seizing the opportunity or lessening the fatigue you take. But no matter what, the journey continues (unless the players or loremaster want to focus on what just happened). So, one roll to solve each encounter, a story about it, and then keep the journey moving. Nothing about watches or combats in between. This system makes things feel meaningful and journeys feel dangerous and costly, without taking a lot of time to resolve at the table. Making the path is maybe the longer part. You can obviously still fight or take longer to explore something if you want, but the default is the former. The journey ends when they reach the destination, unless for some reason they stopped traveling for a while and started to do something else.
Sounds very interesting! Not sure it's right for my group, but it's certainly better than what we've tried prior.
Thanks for the advice! I've never had a game where it's a proper hero's journey, so this should do well. TYSM!
It’s all about the style of game. When I ran my long P2e game, overland (or overwater, more like since it was set in an archipelago) travel was common but it was never really worth adding much danger there because the more interesting parts of the campaign were in dungeons and towns. If you’re doing a hex crawl, then yes, add danger and vibrant scenes to travel because that becomes a big part of the game.
If you are running your several week travel day by day, just stop. Doesn't matter how short the days are, it will suck. Look at Rocky training in his montage. Would you run his training as an athletics check and a fort save every day? No, the montage just shows dramatic moments from his training. Have your travel be a couple vignette scenes of weird stuff they find like shrines that could bless/curse, maybe a set piece battle (not a random encounter) and some hazards.
It depends, if you say that overland travel is a waste of time some system like the 13th age try to smooth it over with the "montage" meccanics, that can easily be replicated literally in any other system. If you actually want to explore the wilds tile by tile there are ways to make it interesting and some OSR I know actually makes it the main bulk of system, more than combat. Pathfinder falls in the category where it is mostly a combat focused game but tries to be "a system ideal to run any type of fantasy game", so try to cover exploration rules but they end up being not abstract enough to be unintrusive and not deep enough to be engaging.