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View Full Version : Ingredients and Methods for Great Wilderness Explorations



Yora
2017-06-18, 10:31 AM
I've spend quite some time researching the preparation and running of wilderness exploration campaigns and while there is a good amount of great advice on creating hexmaps of realistic landscapes and environments, there is relatively little about the finer art of running such games to make them the most exciting and entertaining for the players (and enjoyable for the GM). Word from GMs who have succesfully run such games with great success is often that they just went ahead without much of a plan and it turned out to be great fun, but there are also always short mentions of groups that quickly lost interest in the same situation. While there have been countless campaigns where it worked out great, there does not appear to be much common knowledge about why they worked and how they worked, while others didn't. In this thread I would like to discuss and share ideas and methods that might help to improve the chances of a wilderness exploration being fun and exciting for everyone before the campaign starts and while it's progressing.

To start this, I think to make a campaign that is all or primarily about wilderness exporation, it needs the following ingredients:

A Default Goal
I think this is the biggest hurdle at which most unsuccesful open-world campaigns fail and that I struggled with the most and the longest before starting to feel confident that I could actually pull of such a game. Beginning the campaign and instructing the players to "have fun doing anything they want" is a prime recipe to have the players floundering around with no idea what they are supposed to do. At least at the start of the campaign, players need to be pointed into a specific direction because they don't have any real knowledge of the world yet on which they could base their choices what they want to do. If you don't have information on which to base your choice then any choice becomes meaningless and as far as the players are concerned indistinguishable. This is one of the reasons why players sometimes start wrecking the starting village. Not because they want to sabotage the campaign but because it's the only thing of the world that they know and they try to get any kind of response from it. This makes the default goal vital to a successful campaign without a scripted plot. Any time the players are not sure what they should be doing next, they always should think "we can still go back to continue with x". And in the case of a wilderness exploration game, x generally is (but does not always have to be) "exploring caves and ruins in the wilderness".

An Initial Direction
Dropping the party of in a tavern or village square and telling them to go and explore ruins in the wilderness probably isn't going to work well, though. At least if the players have no idea how they would find a ruin that can be explored. If you give them a blank hex map the only thing they could do is randomly pick a hex and keep going in the hope that eventually they will run into something. Depending on how densely the wilderness is packed with sites to discover, this could actually take quite some time during which the players might feel rather lost about whether this is really how this campaign is supposed to be played. So at the start of the campaign, the players should have a map that shows them the way to at least one place they can go to to explore. The journey through the wilderness should be a lot more enjoyable when the players know they are getting closer to their current goal instead of just randomly walking in circles.
Once the campaign is running players will be knowing more about the world and find clues that allow them to search for sites they know must exist and with a general idea where to search for them. And if anything else fails, you can always have an NPC show up offering to sell the players another treasure map.

Sites of Interest
This is the real meat of the campaign. Or at least the highlights. Even when exploring the wilderness, I think that most of the fun actually comes from exploring specific siites like ruins, caves, temples, and lairs. Traveling through the wilderness is not a goal in itself. Finding sites of interest in the wilderness is the goal of exploring it.

Randomized Encounters
Random encounters have gotten somewhat of a reputation as being bland or distracting, but this is mostly a result of them being used as padding and filler to draw out an adventure that the GM believes to be "too short" otherwise. At other times they are believed to be silly and make absolutely no sense in the context of the environment in which they are happening. But the important thing to understand about random encounters is that they are not fully random creatures that appear in fully random places, but rather encounters that are partly randomized to add an element of unpredictability. They key to good random encounters is to have customized encounter tables for different areas or regions. You don't just pull a random creature out of a monster book but prepare in advance a list of creatures that the party could run into in the environment they are currently exploring. No desert land sharks unless the GM deliberately decides to populate the desert with land sharks.
The concept of random encounters in D&D also comes from editions that also have reaction rolls. Randomly encountered creatures are not automatically enemies that attack. They have equal chances of being hostile or friendly, and they might stay peaceful if left alone or be open to hear what the players say before deciding on how they react to them.
Most importantly, random encounters are adventure seeds. Randomly encountered creatures and NPCs don't need to appear out of thin air. Most of them, and especially the intelligent ones, have a lair or camp somewhere not far away that the players could attempt to find. Or if the encounter is a friendly one the NPCs might even invite them to their homes. For this reason it comes very handy to have a handful of floorplans for small camps and lairs prepared in advance. Creatures that will be encountered in the lair and the treasures they posses can be generated very quickly using random treasure tables and the Number Encountered or Organization lines in the creatures stat block in D&D monster books. Simply put the rolled creatures into random rooms and the treasure on one or two treasure chests that sit in some of the deeper rooms and you got yourself a monster lair. Alternatively, you can use the randomly encountered creatures as patrols of a group that lives in a nearby site of interest.
Because of all this, encounter tables do not have to be adjusted for the level of the PCs. Harmlessly weak creatures can still be interesting to interact with and overwhelmingly powerful creatures don't need to be faught and defeated in battle. Having one PC killed and the rest fleeing to vow revenge, or having the party badly beaten and taken to be imprisoned in a lair as slaves or sacrifices can be the start of great new adventures.

Rumor Tables
Rumor tables are something that appears to have be almost completely vanished from published adventures decades ago. But for wilderness explorations they are pure gold. Whenever the players are asking around in a village or talking to friendly NPCs they encounter in the wilderness or in dungeons, they might learn one item from a long list of rumors. These can be specific rumors about what kind of dangers to be found in a dungeon close by, but you can also always add rumors about the locations of dungeons that have not yet been discovered by the players, the existance of hidden rooms in places they have alredy been to, aor, which I like the most, sightings of enemy NPCs that manged to escape the last time the players were fighting them.
Rumors not only help the players prepare for dealing with the challenges they will encounter in a site of interest, they can also help the players to find new sites of interest instead of blindly walking around and waiting for something to show up.

Resource Management
I think this might actually be optional and you could run a game with all the things I mentioned above while skipping this one. But when you run a campaign that is about braving the dangers and obstacles of the wilderness, then I think managing your limited resources really adds a lot to the experience.
Resources here refers specifically to items that have to be carried around, like torches and lamps, food, ammunition, and tools. (Limited spells are also a resource to manage, but those generally come back each day and have no weight.) But it also includes the treasures that players find during their exploration and any money they don't want to leave behind in the last place they stayed at. When random encounters have a questionable reputation then encumbrance is outright loathed by most people. The problem is that the regular system of writing down and adding up all the weights of every item is just way too much trouble and not fun so that most people just don't want to bother with it at all. But there is an alternative system that is slightly less "realistic" (try not to laugh) but actually much much easier to handle in actual play. Encumbrance by inventory slots (http://www.paperspencils.com/2012/03/18/making-encumbrance-work/). There are many variations of this idea, but this particular example is the one I like the most. All you need to do is to number all the lines on your inventory sheet and you instantly see how much stuff you are carrying, no calculations and recalculations required.
Resource management and encumbrance matters because players have to chose what they want to bring with them on an expedition and what to leave behind. Tracking food and torches might be boring when you can simply buy new ones at the end of the day for a fraction of a gold coin, but when you're away from the next store for days or weeks, you can actually run out of this stuff. When this happens the players are forced to adapt and improvise by either making do without them or looking for a new source right where they are out in the wilderness or the dungeon. Trying to find new light sources deep underground while on your last torch is exciting. At the same time, gathering new food takes time. Time during which the party might be discovered by other creatures leading to random encounters. Also, treasures can take up quite some amount of inventory space. Do you accept being slowed down by your burden or do you throw away stuff you don't need? Do you really need three torches or could you make some room for two more golden cups? If everything goes well, you should make it back to the surface with just a single torch. If everything goes well...

Except for the fact that an exploration campaign needs ruins and caves you can discover and explore, these are all things that I did not know when I first got intrigued about the idea of running or playing a wilderness campaign. It's something that rulebooks just don't teach and that generally does not get mentioned in guides to the making of hexmaps. So I assume that this is far from common knowlege.
And I am also sure that this is by no means the full extend of useful knowledge for creating a great wilderness campaign. So what do you think what else could improve such a campaign or how these items could be explained in a better way?

Tanarii
2017-06-18, 11:02 AM
Most of these come instinctively, if desired in a campaign, to anyone that has played old versions of D&D. And done it without the house rules that got rid of most of that stuff and eventually became modern editions of D&D.

Personally I think it's best to start each beginner adventuring party at the entrance to the adventuring site (aka dungeon), even if the players already know the sandbox. I don't like the 'meet in a tavern now figure out what to do' trope. It sucks in a sandbox. You also need a re-populating (and changing) adventuring site so that you can use it for multiple different parties, if you're running an actual sandbox campaign, and not a 'one-party-adventuring-together-adventure-arc misnamed a campaign'.

It's also worth noting the older editions generally assumed dungeon first, wilderness hex-crawl second. Part of the reason was wilderness was far more dangerous. And did not have level specific zones (also aka dungeons), for the players to select the level of danger they want to face.

On wandering monsters: Generally speaking, they suck in 3e or later by the default rules, because you can't get away with low incident wandering wilderness encounters. Those are dangerous because:
A) no garunteed level appropriate encounters
B) super slow healing before 3e

The latter can be house ruled (or optional/variant ruled in 5e).

But the second one is fixed by not using level appropriate encounters in the wilderness. That's problematic because players raised in more modern Combat-as-Sport gaming won't be mentally prepared for it. Even if you tell them in advance. They almost always won't mentally adjust until after they lose a few characters.

Edit: I absolutely agree not all random wilderness encounters need to be automatic combat encounters. (Nor all 'dungeon' encounters, for that matter.) my comments are specifically in relation to the subset of wandering encounters that are or become combat encounters.

Psikerlord
2017-06-18, 08:17 PM
I agree with most of the OP.

I think you can substitute a formal Party Retreat rule of some kind (with a cost) rather than having to rely on Reaction rolls to do away with "balanced" encounters, or indeed have both. I'm not sure, as a player, I would like my PC's fate to hang on a reaction roll only.

As for starting out in a sandox, I like to throw 3 rumours at the party, and let them decide which rumour they want to pursue. Or they can go do their own thing entirely. But if you have a group that isnt sure what to do at first, the 3 rumour option gives them some guided choice.

Yora
2017-06-19, 12:27 AM
I'd say the reaction roll mostly determines how the creatures react to the party at first. What they do next depends on what the players are doing. Using the B/X reaction rolls, immediate attack is extremely unlikely to happen. And then you also get surprise on top of that. My interpretation of surprise is that the group that has surprise not only gets a free round of action but actually remains undetecte until it reveals itself.

What kind of retreat rule do you suppose?

Tanarri reminded me of another important point.

Everything the GM puts into the world is destructable
Any town can be destroyed, any NPC be killed. The open nature of the campaign means that it can always continue forward no matter what happens or changes. If the players actions and choices lead to something being destroyed, the GM should let it happen. If it's in the game then it exists for the players to play with. If you like something so much that you really don't want it to be destroyed, it should not be in the game. It's the story of the players, not the story of the NPCs or countries. If things happen to be destroyed even though you thought they would still play a much bigger role, let it happen and roll with it.

Tanarii
2017-06-19, 10:11 AM
Similarly, don't assume it's the story of individual PCs, as in their story will continue, that they are the ongoing protagonist. The PC's story might be that of a redshirt, short and brutal and then mostly forgotten. Or it might be long and full of interesting things. But don't assume it must be the latter.

They can die. They can fail. They might even die and fail. There might even be more than one group of PCs, or even more than one group of players, and they might be working at odds to each other. No one specific PC story, or in multi-party campaigns no one party story, should be assumed to be paramount or to continue indefinitely.

(Note I'm using PCs and players very specifically here.)

Psikerlord
2017-06-19, 07:32 PM
I'd say the reaction roll mostly determines how the creatures react to the party at first. What they do next depends on what the players are doing. Using the B/X reaction rolls, immediate attack is extremely unlikely to happen. And then you also get surprise on top of that. My interpretation of surprise is that the group that has surprise not only gets a free round of action but actually remains undetecte until it reveals itself.

What kind of retreat rule do you suppose?

Tanarri reminded me of another important point.

Everything the GM puts into the world is destructable
Any town can be destroyed, any NPC be killed. The open nature of the campaign means that it can always continue forward no matter what happens or changes. If the players actions and choices lead to something being destroyed, the GM should let it happen. If it's in the game then it exists for the players to play with. If you like something so much that you really don't want it to be destroyed, it should not be in the game. It's the story of the players, not the story of the NPCs or countries. If things happen to be destroyed even though you thought they would still play a much bigger role, let it happen and roll with it.
100% agree with the "Everything is destructible" approach.

Retreat rule wise, something like: http://dndhackersguild.weebly.com/blog/party-retreat-rule

D&D Cyclopedia has a retreat rule too. It disappeared about 3e I think.

Yora
2017-06-21, 12:48 PM
I only recently heard of the idea of 5 Room Dungeons. Doesn't have to be exactly 5 rooms, but a small dungeon that has 1) an obstacle blocking entry, 2) a puzzle challenge that requires clever thinking, 3) a room in which things are not as they seem, 4) a big exciting action challenge, and 5) the discovery of a reward or information. Can be a few more rooms than that and they don't have to be in that order, but the idea is that you can have the whole dungeon exploration experience in a package small enough to complete in one session. While 5 rooms for a full sessions seems a bit small to me, combining it with traveling throught the wilderness should make for a fun game session.

This seems like a good approach for "minor sites" to generously scattered throughout the wilderness. Bandit camps, witches' lairs, ancient crypts, ruined shrines, stuff like that. Some could even consist of only four or three of these rooms. It's still going to be a lot more exciting to explore than caves consisting only of empty rooms and monster encounters.