How to deal with travel

[Esprit15]

So I plan to run a campaign for some friends in a few months, and one of the biggest issues I noticed (partly with the setting I made and partly in reading the books) is there doesn't seem to be any good depiction of how to actually run natural hazards for a game when they are more than just a piece in a dungeon. While taking damage every few minutes from cold makes sense in a crawl, it is a little weirder to run traveling through a frigid wasteland other than to say "You buy these things, you walk here over the course of a few weeks." I would like to make use of the rules for extreme and unusual environments as more than just something to make a gold tax for magic devices, spells cast, and equipment bought.

Has anyone here actually used even the basic weather band rules from Frostburn, let alone the more unusual effects such as blood snow? How did you implement it?

[Crake]

This will pretty much always be the case. You have a hazard, prepared players have what they need to overcome it without issue, unprepared players die horrible deaths. Even something like a blizzard just tacks on a few extra days of travel. Obstacles and encounters are the only way to make travel interesting. Mountain climbing, coming across monsters or raiders, dot the road with towns that can have some interesting hooks for side adventures, or give the players people to interact with. Environmental hazards don't provide anything to interact with, which is why they're boring. You just shore up the things you need to survive then wait them out, or just push through without issue.

[Florian]

Traveling is like the whole deal with mazes: Faszinating thought, pretty boring as game content itself.

[DrMotives]

Holding up your players with weather effects seems like a disguise for railroading, really. I suppose you could have random charts out, and a bunch of potential side quests / areas of interest and make sure the PCs know it's not you, it's the dice, but otherwise if they stop in Tiny Hamlet because a big storm stopped the caravan, they'll assume you had a plot going on there.

[Esprit15]

Holding up your players with weather effects seems like a disguise for railroading, really. I suppose you could have random charts out, and a bunch of potential side quests / areas of interest and make sure the PCs know it's not you, it's the dice, but otherwise if they stop in Tiny Hamlet because a big storm stopped the caravan, they'll assume you had a plot going on there.

No, quite the opposite. It's an obstical that they'll have to overcome, one of the plot points being on the southermost tip of the continent, and another being located in a desert.

[Darth Ultron]

Hazards only really work in small encounters. Like having a cave or room with a hazard effect.

Weather hazards just don't work well in adventure games like D&D. There is no adventure in weather. Remember all the exciting parts of of the Lord of the Rings movies while Frodo walked to Mordor?

If your playing a standard game, hazards are best in small bits. Unless your playing a very gritty type style of the game. So if your keeping track of food and water, encumbrance, spell components, and limit magics like healings and cures....then sure, add in hazards.

[DrMotives]

If your playing a standard game, hazards are best in small bits. Unless your playing a very gritty type style of the game. So if your keeping track of food and water, encumbrance, spell components, and limit magics like healings and cures....then sure, add in hazards.

I suppose it comes down to preference of playstyle. If you & your group want to keep up with all the climate, time of year details, then go for it. If your group has no idea if it's summer or winter in-game but still know what their characters are doing, than you aren't playing with climate rules and probably shouldn't throw a storm at them.

Neither is right or wrong, they're both just different games. Since you haven't started this campaign yet, feel out your group and see what they want. How much attention to detail is as important to mood as how much humour or how much evil & horror you include. It's very much part of your game's mood, and will vary considerably table to table. I gather from here most people are not big into details, but that certainly doesn't preclude you enjoying using all those rules to their fullest if that's what your table likes.

[Curmudgeon]

If it's winter, they'll either have appropriate gear or won't, as Crake already mentioned. Weather by itself isn't usually exciting. There are a couple of exceptions:

Snow covering a large stream or small pond, with ice too thin to support the characters' weight. When somebody falls through it's a mad scramble to get them out before they die from exposure. All that heavy clothing doesn't keep the cold water out, but instead the sodden weight adds to the total which has to be shifted to rescue the victim.
An avalanche. One of only two encounter types that PCs are guaranteed to notice coming, even if they're blind and deaf. Very exciting. Don't use more than once.

[Hiro Quester]

Weather hazards can also add content if there is a deadline. You need to get to point X within Y many days, or you need to get to X asap, because each day the bad guys have the McGuffin adds bad things to your to-do list.

Then weather delays, flooded creeks to cross, can add risk and drama. Now you need to make decisions about risks: e.g. decide whether to keep trying to travel through the storm (and risk being surprised by an encounter you'd see coming in clear weather), or hunker down, but now have to rest for less time, and set less watches at night (and have more people sleeping when random night encounter happens; risk of casters on watch without spells refreshed, etc.), or deal with the rules for exhaustion while traveling more than 12 hours/day, etc.

Adding in hazards can force players to make decisions that can affect the progress of the mission. And those decisions can be made without much in the way of adding boring elements to playtime.

[Fizban]

If weather hazards are meant to be an obstacle and are completely negated by simply preparing the right equipment, you'll need to make getting that equipment the obstacle. Not using magic item marts, enforcing a time limit so they can't wait around for crafting, starting out in a place where the equipment simply isn't available (we're teleporting from the tropics to the edge of the tundra, where do we buy winter clothes?), or simply springing the conditions unexpectedly (we tried to teleport to the tropics and ended up in the tundra, we don't have winter clothes!). Even then it only takes a 2nd or 3rd level cleric to Endure Elements it all away. I ran a no-escape dungeon with freezing conditions in the first area which players/characters didn't expect: they piled all the clothes on the squishies and tanked the fort saves/damage until the next morning easy (as I expected or I wouldn't have made it freezing in the first place). Unless you take the cold down to supernatural levels where Endure Elements isn't enough, at which point you just put on a jacket too.

Other fancy hazards like Blood Snow would just go on the random encounter table or map, same as anything else.

[Crake]

If weather hazards are meant to be an obstacle and are completely negated by simply preparing the right equipment, you'll need to make getting that equipment the obstacle. Not using magic item marts, enforcing a time limit so they can't wait around for crafting, starting out in a place where the equipment simply isn't available (we're teleporting from the tropics to the edge of the tundra, where do we buy winter clothes?), or simply springing the conditions unexpectedly (we tried to teleport to the tropics and ended up in the tundra, we don't have winter clothes!). Even then it only takes a 2nd or 3rd level cleric to Endure Elements it all away. I ran a no-escape dungeon with freezing conditions in the first area which players/characters didn't expect: they piled all the clothes on the squishies and tanked the fort saves/damage until the next morning easy (as I expected or I wouldn't have made it freezing in the first place). Unless you take the cold down to supernatural levels where Endure Elements isn't enough, at which point you just put on a jacket too.

Other fancy hazards like Blood Snow would just go on the random encounter table or map, same as anything else.

most of the equipment you need for hazards is entirely mundane and would be expected to be found on the area. Cold weather gear + furs for example, to have an incredibly high cold protection rating, or climbing gear to go climbing safely, or, for the more magical means, just having the right spells prepared (water walking for crossing water, spider climb for climbing, endure elements for extreme temperatures).

And blood snow, you mean like the 1 round/level spell? That would have to be a monster encounter for them to actually come across something like that, otherwise it would just expire long before the players get to it.

[zergling.exe]

most of the equipment you need for hazards is entirely mundane and would be expected to be found on the area. Cold weather gear + furs for example, to have an incredibly high cold protection rating, or climbing gear to go climbing safely, or, for the more magical means, just having the right spells prepared (water walking for crossing water, spider climb for climbing, endure elements for extreme temperatures).

And blood snow, you mean like the 1 round/level spell? That would have to be a monster encounter for them to actually come across something like that, otherwise it would just expire long before the players get to it.


Fortunately, a poisonous blood snow blizzard only manifests as a brief fl urry during the course of otherwise normal snowfalls, lasting for 2d8 rounds before ending.
So if there is a blizzard, you roll on an encounter table and you get a blood snow blizzard for a few rounds.

[Crake]

So if there is a blizzard, you roll on an encounter table and you get a blood snow blizzard for a few rounds.

Ah right, i see what you're talking about. That doesn't look like a very entertaining encounter though :smallfrown:

[Jeff the Green]

If it's winter, they'll either have appropriate gear or won't, as Crake already mentioned. Weather by itself isn't usually exciting. There are a couple of exceptions:

Snow covering a large stream or small pond, with ice too thin to support the characters' weight. When somebody falls through it's a mad scramble to get them out before they die from exposure. All that heavy clothing doesn't keep the cold water out, but instead the sodden weight adds to the total which has to be shifted to rescue the victim.
An avalanche. One of only two encounter types that PCs are guaranteed to notice coming, even if they're blind and deaf. Very exciting. Don't use more than once.


I can also see flash-floods or a storm at sea. The key factor is that the disaster has to give choices with real consequences; otherwise you run into Crake's issue of a binary of prepared parties surviving and unprepared parties dying.

[atemu1234]

I can also see flash-floods or a storm at sea. The key factor is that the disaster has to give choices with real consequences; otherwise you run into Crake's issue of a binary of prepared parties surviving and unprepared parties dying.

Yeah, always have unexpected problems with unexpected solutions, and try not to kill anyone.

Basically the game.

[Telonius]

Hazards can also be part of something time-sensitive. For example, you're chasing after the villain who has the prince knocked out and tied up on his horse. As he passes through the valley, he makes enough noise that an avalanche starts. "Red-line travel" can also be affected. Depending on how well you prepare, you can either get there a week before the hobgoblins are scheduled to invade, just before, or too late.