Incorporating Torchbearer Ideas in 5E

[HidesHisEyes]

I've been reading the rules to Torchbearer. As an overview in case your unfamiliar with it, it's a dungeon crawling game which puts the logistics of dungeon crawling centre stage, so the game revolves around keeping track of supplies and encumbrance, making sure you have a light source and so on - all the things that often get handwaved in D&D games. So it's really about the gritty reality of being someone who delves into dungeons for a living. If you've played it then correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the impression I get of the game.

It's not exactly rules light, and to be honest I can't see myself putting in the time to actually run it. But I'm aware that not everyone does handwave that kind of thing in D&D. I myself do, but I'd like to incorporate a bit more of the logistical stuff if I can.

To me it seems there's a larger issue which is that, as someone pointed out in a thread recently, D&D is a power fantasy. PCs don't get hungry, they don't get tired, they just kick ass with ever more powerful abilities. In a 5E game, the way I and many people play 5E, I think tracking supplies and light sources doesn't add much to the game besides extra book-keeping, and imposing exhaustion for not eating or whatever is just a random punishment.

So does anyone have tips for incorporating this kind of thing into D&D in a way that's engaging without burdening the rules too much. I'm especially interested in any mechanics that abstractify things like supplies and light sources and inventory capacity to the point where they matter but don't create much more "work" for either players or DM.

[Malifice]

My Pcs must eat, drink, use torches, spell components etc as they go.

The players deal with the logistics. The DM just tells them to cross off the item.

[JackPhoenix]

You can't really have it both way. Either you ignore tracking supplies, or you're adding more work for someone.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Turn the supplies into a critical failure mechanic - whenever someone rolls a 1 on a skill check (not combat, critical fails in combat are bad), roll another die for supplies: 1 = rations, 2 = light source, 3 = rope, 5 = ammunition, etc, etc. When that supply comes up, someone in the party has run out (roll randomly when more than one person has that stuff).
This may not be immediately apparent - you don't notice your food has got wet and mouldy until you come to eat it, you don't notice your last arrows are warped until you try to use them.

It stop you having to keep track, but adds a level of survivalism to the game.

[mephnick]

The fact that no one uses encumberence and everything that entails from it is really sad. 5e basically killed it with its ridiculous carry limits (the variant 5xSTR is much better) but I feel it adds more to the game then it costs in effort. It's the main thing that's led to a devaluing of Strength and the removal of problem solving in modern D&D. Who cares about hirelings, horses and wagons when you can carry everything you find? Who cares about planning for a dungeon when you don't have to carry food, water, torches and ammunition that will take up space for loot? Who cares about securing your stuff in a bank or a fort? Let's remove an entire layer of the game because we're too lazy to make some marks on a sheet. Then people have the gall to complain that STR has no value. It's like everyone that handwaves exploration and complains that Rangers are no good. End rant.

Try tracking all this stuff. You might actually find it adds something to your game. You can just use normal D&D rules for it, though you'll have to use 5e's variant.

[Bloodcloud]

I've been reading the rules to Torchbearer. As an overview in case your unfamiliar with it, it's a dungeon crawling game which puts the logistics of dungeon crawling centre stage, so the game revolves around keeping track of supplies and encumbrance, making sure you have a light source and so on - all the things that often get handwaved in D&D games. So it's really about the gritty reality of being someone who delves into dungeons for a living. If you've played it then correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the impression I get of the game.

It's not exactly rules light, and to be honest I can't see myself putting in the time to actually run it. But I'm aware that not everyone does handwave that kind of thing in D&D. I myself do, but I'd like to incorporate a bit more of the logistical stuff if I can.

To me it seems there's a larger issue which is that, as someone pointed out in a thread recently, D&D is a power fantasy. PCs don't get hungry, they don't get tired, they just kick ass with ever more powerful abilities. In a 5E game, the way I and many people play 5E, I think tracking supplies and light sources doesn't add much to the game besides extra book-keeping, and imposing exhaustion for not eating or whatever is just a random punishment.

So does anyone have tips for incorporating this kind of thing into D&D in a way that's engaging without burdening the rules too much. I'm especially interested in any mechanics that abstractify things like supplies and light sources and inventory capacity to the point where they matter but don't create much more "work" for either players or DM.

Before incorporating new stuff, always ask yourself why you want to introduce it, how it would play out and how it would affect the experience. Tracking encumbrance and ration and stuff would be a great idea in out of the abyss for exemple. In princes of the apocalypse? It seems superfluous.

Make it important if you have a long trek and want to incorporate rarity of supply in your game. Track it if you have a way to make it important and part of the core plot and challenge. Otherwise, I'd advise handwaving.

[JackPhoenix]

The fact that no one uses encumberence and everything that entails from it is really sad. 5e basically killed it with its ridiculous carry limits (the variant 5xSTR is much better) but I feel it adds more to the game then it costs in effort. It's the main thing that's led to a devaluing of Strength and the removal of problem solving in modern D&D. Who cares about hirelings, horses and wagons when you can carry everything you find? Who cares about planning for a dungeon when you don't have to carry food, water, torches and ammunition that will take up space for loot? Who cares about securing your stuff in a bank or a fort? Let's remove an entire layer of the game because we're too lazy to make some marks on a sheet. Then people have the gall to complain that STR has no value. It's like everyone that handwaves exploration and complains that Rangers are no good. End rant.

Try tracking all this stuff. You might actually find it adds something to your game. You can just use normal D&D rules for it, though you'll have to use 5e's variant.

Funny thing: while I don't really bother the players with it that much in my games (technically, I expect them to keep track of their ammo and rations, but don't check if they are not skipping on it, or check if their encumberance values fit), I'm really anal about that as a player, to the point of counting encumberance for single coins and keeping track of specific spell components (even if they are non-costly, and yes, I've declared that my component pouch ran out), even if the DM doesn't care about that stuff at all. Or the appearance and state (i.e. damage to) all outfits my characters own.

[Tanarii]

Encumberance is already somewhat important under two major circumstances in 5e:
1) Rations and Water matter, and it's a long journey.
2) recovering treasure matters, and there's a lot of it.

Unfortunately they built in tons of easy workarounds to #1, especially magical solutions. Those cost resources, but not significant ones by mid-level, the typical way the game is played.

They also made treasure relatively light as easy to carry. Often, one character can carry 2500 gp (50 lbs) no problem.

Which brings us to the third problem, a reasonable encumberance system is optional. The 'let's ignore encumberance, but pretend we aren't' rule is the standard.

If you want a system designed for classic D&D / AD&D 1e style dungeon delving (or torchbearer dungeon delving), you can do it. You definitely need to use the optional encumberance rule.

From experience, you'll want to take a hard look at Create Water and Goodberry spells and decide if you want to axe them. As well as consider changing coin weight to classic's 10 per lb, and reintroducing XP for GP (at a ratio). These aren't necessary components, but they're worth thinking carefully about.

[Stan]

From experience, you'll want to take a hard look at Create Water and Goodberry spells and decide if you want to axe them.

At least they're burning up spell slots which is a limited resource that players care about.


Many (most?) players don't like tracking logistics. WOTC knows this and that's why they've been increasingly toning down logistics. 50 coins/lb already greatly overestimates the weight of coins and underestimates the buying power of precious metal. 50 lb of gold should make someone wealthy for life.

Like most things that are matters of varying taste, I think it's best to ask players how they want to handle it. I used to like it in the AD&D days but it bores me now. I tell players to not even track mundane ammo - they buy a quiver of arrows at startup and it lasts for their adventuring career. They're assumed to be collecting/repairing/buying off camera.

For a long trek or siege where supplies matter, you can ask if anyone wants to plan what to have and track usage. If no one wants to do it, you can assume that the characters are more into it than the players and use skill rolls to see if they had remembered to bring a given thing. The skill would vary depending on the environment and item but you could always default to Int or Wis rolls, with the difficulty determined by item rarity, usefulness to class, and possibly even alignment. Water is a given. landshark repellent is unlikely. It rewards certain character types without adding a bunch of rules.

[Beelzebubba]

I've been reading the rules to Torchbearer. As an overview in case your unfamiliar with it, it's a dungeon crawling game which puts the logistics of dungeon crawling centre stage, so the game revolves around keeping track of supplies and encumbrance...

Torchbearer is basically 'Moldvay Basic D&D refined'. We did all that stuff in many of my AD&D games in the 80's too - close tracked time, consumables, encumbrance, light sources, hireling morale (with the effect on their pay), and random monster encounters. It all fit together to create tense, high-risk, calculated play.

It's a very different game.



To me it seems there's a larger issue which is that, as someone pointed out in a thread recently, D&D is a power fantasy. PCs don't get hungry, they don't get tired, they just kick ass with ever more powerful abilities. In a 5E game, the way I and many people play 5E, I think tracking supplies and light sources doesn't add much to the game besides extra book-keeping, and imposing exhaustion for not eating or whatever is just a random punishment.

Well, old D&D was a first-person war game. 5E is cinematic fantasy. They appeal to fundamentally different urges.



So does anyone have tips for incorporating this kind of thing into D&D in a way that's engaging without burdening the rules too much. I'm especially interested in any mechanics that abstractify things like supplies and light sources and inventory capacity to the point where they matter but don't create much more "work" for either players or DM.

5E has a bunch of optional rules that help. Much longer 'long rest' times, overnight rest recovering only half hit dice and not hit points, things like that. But, I don't think you can get the satisfaction of the groggy 'resource mastery' mini-games without the bookkeeping. The encumbrance, expense, resource consumption - and the time pressures those creates - all feed off of each other, so you can't really just pick part of it and expect it to create that old school vibe.

You also need several mechanics that are gone now to ramp up the pressure. Wizard spell re-memorization was 15 minutes per spell level - so blowing a 6th level spell meant 90 minutes to get it back. Random monsters that stumbled in during rests (or those re-memorizations) meant you couldn't stand still too long. The deadliness of the monsters being highly variable meant you always had to be ready to retreat, and generally have an extremely solid plan of where to go and how to get out before delving. Healing was much less effective, so you'd always be looking out for ways to 'win' without fighting. It generally resulted in pressing on and never really being back to full strength, ever.

I mean, an auto-calculating PDF character sheet helps the drudgery a bit, but it's more about the interplay of your supplies (the more equipment you brought, the less loot you could grab), time (move too fast and you get in over your head, move too slow and your strength gets sapped by random encounters), and resource management (leaving to re-stock gives the dungeon denizens a LOT of time and breathing room to prepare).

Hopefully that gives you an idea of the kind of factors to balance with whatever rules you think up.

[Tanarii]

At least they're burning up spell slots which is a limited resource that players care about.True. That's why I don't axe them.


Like most things that are matters of varying taste, I think it's best to ask players how they want to handle it. I used to like it in the AD&D days but it bores me now. I tell players to not even track mundane ammo - they buy a quiver of arrows at startup and it lasts for their adventuring career. They're assumed to be collecting/repairing/buying off camera.I make no value judgement about people that don't enjoy this style of play. OTOH, despite it's limitations, it's clear the 5e Devs were aware this very old-school style of play is a thing, and made it possible for 5e to be adapted to it. 5e feels like a blend of 3e innovations, then rolled back in some places towards Classic D&D where 3e took them a bit too far.


Well, old D&D was a first-person war game. 5E is cinematic fantasy. They appeal to fundamentally different urges.I agree 5e certainly isn't Classic, but I disagree that it's automatically 'cinematic fantasy'. 5e is closer to Classic D&D than, for example, 3e or 4e are. Those two editions are particularly Combat-as-Sport & 'Cinematic Fantasy'. The Devs clearly were aware of what they were doing, as indicated by strongly promoting Theatre of the Mind, and the built-in flexibility for DM adjudication of resolution.

[HidesHisEyes]

Thanks for all the insights everyone. I will go on exploiting the magic of handwavium for now and ask the players if they'd like to figure out some basic logistics rules for future games.

[Vogonjeltz]

I've been reading the rules to Torchbearer. As an overview in case your unfamiliar with it, it's a dungeon crawling game which puts the logistics of dungeon crawling centre stage, so the game revolves around keeping track of supplies and encumbrance, making sure you have a light source and so on - all the things that often get handwaved in D&D games. ...
To me it seems there's a larger issue which is that, as someone pointed out in a thread recently, D&D is a power fantasy. PCs don't get hungry, they don't get tired, they just kick ass with ever more powerful abilities. In a 5E game, the way I and many people play 5E, I think tracking supplies and light sources doesn't add much to the game besides extra book-keeping, and imposing exhaustion for not eating or whatever is just a random punishment.

So does anyone have tips for incorporating this kind of thing into D&D in a way that's engaging without burdening the rules too much. I'm especially interested in any mechanics that abstractify things like supplies and light sources and inventory capacity to the point where they matter but don't create much more "work" for either players or DM.

First of all, D&D doesn't handwave anything you said. There are rules for Supplies, Encumberance, AND Light sources.

If you don't actually use them, that's you doing the handwaving, not the system. If you want to use them, as you claim, the solution is simple, easy to implement, and obvious. Stop your handwaving!


Encumberance is already somewhat important under two major circumstances in 5e:
1) Rations and Water matter, and it's a long journey.
2) recovering treasure matters, and there's a lot of it.

Unfortunately they built in tons of easy workarounds to #1, especially magical solutions. Those cost resources, but not significant ones by mid-level, the typical way the game is played.

They also made treasure relatively light as easy to carry. Often, one character can carry 2500 gp (50 lbs) no problem.

Which brings us to the third problem, a reasonable encumberance system is optional. The 'let's ignore encumberance, but pretend we aren't' rule is the standard.

If you want a system designed for classic D&D / AD&D 1e style dungeon delving (or torchbearer dungeon delving), you can do it. You definitely need to use the optional encumberance rule.

From experience, you'll want to take a hard look at Create Water and Goodberry spells and decide if you want to axe them. As well as consider changing coin weight to classic's 10 per lb, and reintroducing XP for GP (at a ratio). These aren't necessary components, but they're worth thinking carefully about.

I think it's the seemingly prevalence of ignoring basic rules that causes devaluation of various classes (i.e. the Ranger) that actually get major benefits from reducing the impact of those same rules.

Burning spell slots to avoid dying of starvation really isn't a minor cost, that's a big deal. And if we use the basic encumberance rules, anyone who uses Strength as their dump stat (i.e. Wizards) is actually going to be capped out, or over their limit just from their starting equipment.

Forget treasure, they can barely lug the basics.


Like most things that are matters of varying taste, I think it's best to ask players how they want to handle it. I used to like it in the AD&D days but it bores me now. I tell players to not even track mundane ammo - they buy a quiver of arrows at startup and it lasts for their adventuring career. They're assumed to be collecting/repairing/buying off camera.

It depends on the type of game as to whether I prefer encumberance or not.

For example, in Fallout or Diablo, I basically hate it. When you can carry 10+ different guns including multiple heavy weapons and other parts of armor, it's gone well outside the bounds of plausibility, and those games aren't in any way balanced such that having reasonable encumberance limits (or really...any limits) make sense in-game. The real explanation is to limit the inventory interface to something managable. Once you've got a billion and one things it's going to cause computing problems.

Pen and Paper RPGs aren't like that, the real reason to limit things based on encumberance is to avoid having to endure absurd levels of suspension of disbelief. It's the same reason I don't say all Humans have darkvision.

It makes the decision to pick a particular race have a meaningful impact on the game. In the same way, the decisions about what equipment to bring has a meaningful impact on the outcome of the game. Do you carry that treasure? Or do you instead carry those rations for the journey back through the wilderness? Risk vs Reward calculations.

When you start to remove those decisions, the game starts to get less interesting than it can be.

[Thrudd]

First of all, D&D doesn't handwave anything you said. There are rules for Supplies, Encumberance, AND Light sources.

If you don't actually use them, that's you doing the handwaving, not the system. If you want to use them, as you claim, the solution is simple, easy to implement, and obvious. Stop your handwaving!



I think it's the seemingly prevalence of ignoring basic rules that causes devaluation of various classes (i.e. the Ranger) that actually get major benefits from reducing the impact of those same rules.

Burning spell slots to avoid dying of starvation really isn't a minor cost, that's a big deal. And if we use the basic encumberance rules, anyone who uses Strength as their dump stat (i.e. Wizards) is actually going to be capped out, or over their limit just from their starting equipment.

Forget treasure, they can barely lug the basics.



It depends on the type of game as to whether I prefer encumberance or not.

For example, in Fallout or Diablo, I basically hate it. When you can carry 10+ different guns including multiple heavy weapons and other parts of armor, it's gone well outside the bounds of plausibility, and those games aren't in any way balanced such that having reasonable encumberance limits (or really...any limits) make sense in-game. The real explanation is to limit the inventory interface to something managable. Once you've got a billion and one things it's going to cause computing problems.

Pen and Paper RPGs aren't like that, the real reason to limit things based on encumberance is to avoid having to endure absurd levels of suspension of disbelief. It's the same reason I don't say all Humans have darkvision.

It makes the decision to pick a particular race have a meaningful impact on the game. In the same way, the decisions about what equipment to bring has a meaningful impact on the outcome of the game. Do you carry that treasure? Or do you instead carry those rations for the journey back through the wilderness? Risk vs Reward calculations.

When you start to remove those decisions, the game starts to get less interesting than it can be.

Exactement. I was thinking to myself: doesn't 5e have rules for all this stuff already? Am I missing something? True, 5e is quite a bit more lenient than AD&D was, but it already has rules for how much stuff characters can carry, how much things weigh, penalties for carrying too much stuff, getting lost and finding food and water in the wilderness, what happens if you don't have food and water or go without rest, how long different light sources last and how much light they cast.
5e is not "cinematic power fantasy" by default - it definitely has enough rules to let it get close to an AD&D dungeon crawly game (which is what Torchbearer is recreating/expanding on).

As was said earlier, if you really want to go that direction, institute XP for gold (returned to civilization from the dungeon), reduce the XP awards for monsters a bit, maybe increase the XP requirements for levelling, require training time and maybe training costs for gaining levels (no levelling in the middle of an adventure while still in the dungeon).

[Tanarii]

Burning spell slots to avoid dying of starvation really isn't a minor cost, that's a big deal. And if we use the basic encumberance rules, anyone who uses Strength as their dump stat (i.e. Wizards) is actually going to be capped out, or over their limit just from their starting equipment.Burning a spell slot is only a big deal on days when you're going to be experiencing an adventuring day's worth of spell resources needed.

And the basic encumbrance rule, Str 8 is 120 lbs carried. Very few classes come close to that with their starting equipment. Clerics and other Medium Armor wearer might, or those carrying a Hunting Trap.

Variant Encumberance is another matter. Dumping Str to 8 is a choice that needs to be more seriously considered.

[mephnick]

Variant Encumberance is another matter. Dumping Str to 8 is a choice that needs to be more seriously considered.

And races with Powerful Build become very useful.

One thing I do is let characters proficient in Athletics move the encumbrance levels to x6 and x11 (instead of x5 and x10) but otherwise keep the variant as is. Not much, but a little bit of bonus.

[Zorku]

The fact that no one uses encumberence and everything that entails from it is really sad. 5e basically killed it with its ridiculous carry limits (the variant 5xSTR is much better) but I feel it adds more to the game then it costs in effort. It's the main thing that's led to a devaluing of Strength and the removal of problem solving in modern D&D. Who cares about hirelings, horses and wagons when you can carry everything you find? Who cares about planning for a dungeon when you don't have to carry food, water, torches and ammunition that will take up space for loot? Who cares about securing your stuff in a bank or a fort? Let's remove an entire layer of the game because we're too lazy to make some marks on a sheet. Then people have the gall to complain that STR has no value. It's like everyone that handwaves exploration and complains that Rangers are no good. End rant.

Try tracking all this stuff. You might actually find it adds something to your game. You can just use normal D&D rules for it, though you'll have to use 5e's variant.

Yora's worldbuilding thread/blog for (her?) campaign setting has a nice post for this
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=21957062&postcount=43

That post introduced me to how Lamentations of the Flame Princess deals with encumbrance (and I like Yora's tweaks more, so I'll gonna paraphrase that.) You can carry X "Stones" worth of items without suffering encumbrance. X is your Strength. One stone is any item that weighs more than 5 pounds, or one bundle of items (quiver w/ arrows, 1 week of rations, etc,) and it's an extra stone when you go past around 30lbs or if the item is really bulky or such. Light/Medium/Heavy armor is 2/4/6 stone. Being lightly encumbered drops your travel speed to 75%, and being heavily encumbered drops you to 50%. You can typically forage enough food to keep yourself fed, but it will mean going off of the road and traveling more slowly. If it's less than 1 stone don't bother to count it (as long as you don't intentionally try to carry an unrealistic number of these weightless items.)

She's also using gold* hauled out of dungeons as the primary source of xp, so wandering monsters offer no grist of that sort and are all around annoying to deal with, and thus to be actively minimized. If I picked up the right details from the inspirational reading, you run into a wandering monster every hour in a dungeon and most exploration tasks (that passive perception trap check we do,) eat up 10 minutes. In the wilderness roll 1d6 1-3 times per day (1 is like farmlands, 3 is like right next to an agitated orc outpost,) and there's an encounter if the party rolls a 1.

*Not so much gold coin. More like paintings and antique furniture. Have fun with that encumbrance system.


All of this polices the 5mwd... right up until one PC knows the create food and water/goodberry spell :/
Yora's setting is a pretty major revamp of (2e?) but I think I'd just homebrew that create food or water must be done at consecrated sites, creates 1d4 rations, and it takes you most of a day to consecrate a suitable structure. Not quite sure how to impose a similar limit on good berry. Hopefully nothing else screws with the rations economy too much. (Ranger or hermit background mostly remove the 5e speed penalty for foraging, but with these rules you've got hirelings/pack animals to carry your stuff, and foraging only results in so much food, so how much time do you really want to spend off of the road...)


Funny thing: while I don't really bother the players with it that much in my games (technically, I expect them to keep track of their ammo and rations, but don't check if they are not skipping on it, or check if their encumberance values fit), I'm really anal about that as a player, to the point of counting encumberance for single coins and keeping track of specific spell components (even if they are non-costly, and yes, I've declared that my component pouch ran out), even if the DM doesn't care about that stuff at all. Or the appearance and state (i.e. damage to) all outfits my characters own.

How do you judge how many components fit in the pouch? Seems like 5e just wants it to be a different flavored focus.




Burning spell slots to avoid dying of starvation really isn't a minor cost, that's a big deal.I've heard a couple of people say things like this but I'm not quite sure what they're picturing. In my head, there's a simple pattern that will emerge for travel: try to hang on to one spell slot during random encounters, then create food and water/goodberry when the party makes camp.
You're sort of down 1 spell slot in order to do this, and then you've got 15/10 people worth of food (or 5/10 horses worth,) and water that lasts for 24 hours. You eat 1 ration worth (conceptually a late lunch and supper, as spending much more than 8 hours walking tends to cause exhaustion effects, and the miles per day listed in the book line up nicely with 8 hours worth of walking speed travel,) go to bed, then rouse thyself and eat breakfast. If you've got a little leeway for carrying stuff (and you do cause you're gonna wanna haul some treasure,) then you pack up your lunch for the next day, and nobody has to be careful about saving a spell slot for this the next day. This sustains a 5 player party at level 5/1 with no need for rations, or a 4 player party with a horse/mule at a cost of a ration for the horse every other day.

If they carry any amount of actual rations on them then it seems like they don't really have to be very careful about saving that spell slot, as there would only be a few days that were likely to demand the slot's use.

Is this radically different from what you picture?


It depends on the type of game as to whether I prefer encumberance or not.
For example, in Fallout or Diablo, I basically hate it.
It seems like you could really use automated hirelings in those games. Fallout 4 had the ever so slightly elegant solution of giving you an interface that counts all of the contents of your nearby boxes, so designers could just do some more aggressive inventory merging when players want to look at all of their crap. Playing unidentified item tetris is fun for a minute, but you can mostly automate that after a certain point. Keep the runners back in the really hectic areas but have them walk behind you picking up the strangely golden and coin shaped blood that spews out of each demon that you kill, and then high tail it back to the settlement when they've filled up most of their capacity with non-junk.

Cookie clicker games know how to do the math for most of this. You mostly just need assets for the idiots adventurers pay to come along with them that aren't good for anything buy carry capacity... and incentive to deviate from the formula that tells you what features are critical for game feel, or not so many little side projects like this that you never get the game to a functional state.

[HidesHisEyes]

Yeah, I'm coming around to the idea of actually just using the variant encumbrance rules and tracking things. I always just thought it looked like a massive headache, I don't really like bookkeeping, and I thought there had to be a faster, more abstract way of making logistics matter. But the more I think about it the more it seems simplest to just use the rules as written. I'll give it a try. Thanks for the input people.

Regarding goodberry and create food/water, I have to agree with those who are pointing out that spell slots don't really matter for the majority of a long journey, since assuming you have one long rest before you get to the actual dungeon you are getting that spell slot back.

Overland travel still seems generally problematic, actually. What's the point of one random encounter a day on a five-day journey, since you're gonna have a long rest between each one? This is why I have tinkered with the idea of making rations REQUIRED to get the benefits of a rest - one for a short rest, three for a long rest (and they're fluffed as like general "travel supplies" not specifically rations). That way to save your rations on a long journey you might need to sometimes treat camping for the night as a short rest instead of a long rest, so a whole five-day journey effectively becomes an adventuring day. Not sure how that would line up with the ration economy as per the PHB.

[mephnick]

Overland travel still seems generally problematic, actually. What's the point of one random encounter a day on a five-day journey, since you're gonna have a long rest between each one? This is why I have tinkered with the idea of making rations REQUIRED to get the benefits of a rest - one for a short rest, three for a long rest (and they're fluffed as like general "travel supplies" not specifically rations). That way to save your rations on a long journey you might need to sometimes treat camping for the night as a short rest instead of a long rest, so a whole five-day journey effectively becomes an adventuring day. Not sure how that would line up with the ration economy as per the PHB.

I switched to gritty realism and just tell the players that short rests still only take an hour, but you only get 2 per long rest, choose whenever you want and deal with it.

[HidesHisEyes]

I switched to gritty realism and just tell the players that short rests still only take an hour, but you only get 2 per long rest, choose whenever you want and deal with it.

But a long rest takes a week? That sounds like it limits them a little too much for my liking. Maybe I could do that but allow them more short rests though.

[mephnick]

But a long rest takes a week?

I do a few days in a safe location. A week is quite long, yeah. I do lots of travel/exploration, so the normal rest rules are basically useless to me. I've found this to be a pretty balanced way of running that type of campaign. It also fixes some of the problems of doing dungeons in gritty realism as the players xan take the short rests on the same day if they really need to.

[HidesHisEyes]

I do a few days in a safe location. A week is quite long, yeah. I do lots of travel/exploration, so the normal rest rules are basically useless to me. I've found this to be a pretty balanced way of running that type of campaign. It also fixes some of the problems of doing dungeons in gritty realism as the players xan take the short rests on the same day if they really need to.

That's pretty cool.

I've also started wondering if gritty realism (or some version of it) could help you get more done in a session. I find at mid-higher levels combat is dragging on a bit, and I wonder if I made easier fights - specifically, enemies with fewer hit points - but made resting harder so that players had to be more careful with their resources - could I fit more fights into each adventure, and thus each session, this way? Has anyone tried this?

I ask because I just ran a session which I had intended to be an entire one-shot adventure and we had to end halfway through because it got so late IRL. It wasn't entirely because of combat taking ages, but it was largely that.

[qube]

So does anyone have tips for incorporating this kind of thing into D&D in a way that's engaging without burdening the rules too much. I'm especially interested in any mechanics that abstractify things like supplies and light sources and inventory capacity to the point where they matter but don't create much more "work" for either players or DM.I played a survival desert campaign - and I used tokens for water & food.

As for lightsources - before entering a dungeon, the DM could mark how much lightsource they have with them (ex. 10 hours worth) - and when the DM decides they reach the point of 7 hours, he informs the party their torches are running low; and at the mark of 10 hours, he informs the party they are without torches at all.

As for carrying capacity ... That's always a bummer. Best I can think of, is
each player knows his 'modified carrying capacity' (carrying capacity, with permanent gear (armor, cloths, weapons, spellbook, ...) substracted) and round down to the lowest 5 lb
create varios 5 lb tokens (maybe cut out cardboard pieces; or if you're a magic-player, perhaps a card, a card sleave & a piece of paper in front of it); each representing 5 lb. For example, 5lb worth of food, 5lb worth of water. Heavy items can have a marker they count for 2 cards or something.
you can houserule that 1 days worth of food for the party weighs 5lb, and one days worth of water is 5lb worth of water. (technically one requires 1 ration & 1 gallon of water per person per day, but meh)

[Tanarii]

you can houserule that 1 days worth of food for the party weighs 5lb, and one days worth of water is 5lb worth of water. (technically one requires 1 ration & 1 gallon of water per person per day, but meh) [/list]One day's supplies, ie One ration and One Gallon of Water (2 waterskins), weighs 12 lbs. 2 lbs for the food, and 10 for the waterskins. So 10 lbs as a 'house rule' for one day's supplies is already pretty close. Although 5lbs and 5lbs for food/water is pretty far off the mark.

IMX the most common way for players to run into trouble is only having one waterskin (1/2 a day's requirement) and no Cleric or Druid to cast Create Water.

[Cybren]

Burning a spell slot is only a big deal on days when you're going to be experiencing an adventuring day's worth of spell resources needed.

And the basic encumbrance rule, Str 8 is 120 lbs carried. Very few classes come close to that with their starting equipment. Clerics and other Medium Armor wearer might, or those carrying a Hunting Trap.

Variant Encumberance is another matter. Dumping Str to 8 is a choice that needs to be more seriously considered.

Well, pack animals are cheap enough that you can start with one if you wanted to, BUT, that's another resource management system, as now you either need to carry food for them or are limited to areas where your animal can graze. This is my kind of D&D though, so I'm all about it.

[Tanarii]

Well, pack animals are cheap enough that you can start with one if you wanted to, BUT, that's another resource management system, as now you either need to carry food for them or are limited to areas where your animal can graze. This is my kind of D&D though, so I'm all about it.
Oh yeah, I have no problem with that. It's just something players don't think about unless you point out to them that maybe they need to get some extra water for their week long trip, or figure out if they're comfortable foraging while traveling (with attending 'automatically surprised' penalty), or want to dedicate a spell slot it occasionally (if Cleric/Druid is available).

I was pointing out that it'd be closer to the PHB to count 10lbs of food and water combined, rather than 5lb of food and 5lb of water separately. If you're counting separately, you need 10 lbs of waterskins. Water is HEAVY. As it should be.

[Armored Walrus]

I was all set in my campaign to add food and water management, navigation checks to avoid getting lost, and ammunition shortages to the current adventure arc. Then a new player joined and happened to take the Outlander background, so a food and water shortage is now no longer an option. I do, however, feel sure they will run out of ammunition before they can complete their tasks, so at least I have that. (The party is in the Outlander's home terrain, so no, I won't be able to just say the land won't support it. He's a lizardfolk fighter, and they are in his swamp.)

[KorvinStarmast]

The fact that no one uses encumberence and everything that entails from it is really sad. Our group uses it all the time, since Roll20 makes for easy bookkeeping. It matters for movement in combat. (Also makes that one bag of holding insanely valuable.)


Torchbearer is basically 'Moldvay Basic D&D refined'. We did all that stuff in many of my AD&D games in the 80's too - close tracked time, consumables, encumbrance, light sources, hireling morale (with the effect on their pay), and random monster encounters. It all fit together to create tense, high-risk, calculated play.

It's a very different game. And it's not hard to do. I used to make my char sheets on green engineering graph paper, with little boxes to check off for arrows, potions, rations, In Pencil. Easy Peasy.


Well, old D&D was a first-person war game. 5E is cinematic fantasy. The latter is a good assessment, the former partially good. :smallwink: OD&D had a lot of room to move in that regard ... really depended on the table.

[Tanarii]

Then a new player joined and happened to take the Outlander background, so a food and water shortage is now no longer an option. I do, however, feel sure they will run out of ammunition before they can complete their tasks, so at least I have that. (The party is in the Outlander's home terrain, so no, I won't be able to just say the land won't support it. He's a lizardfolk fighter, and they are in his swamp.)
Wanderer is a great background, provided you don't mind being automatically surprised for foraging. And don't have to worry about mounts / pack animals.

[Cybren]

Wanderer is a great background, provided you don't mind being automatically surprised for foraging. And don't have to worry about mounts / pack animals.

Or NPC hirelings. Also, there are limits, it won't do much good within a multi-day dungeon crawl, or exploring other large regions that don't reasonably provide food, like the caldera of a volcano or something equally Metal that you might experience in D&D

[Zorku]

Yeah, I'm coming around to the idea of actually just using the variant encumbrance rules and tracking things. I always just thought it looked like a massive headache, I don't really like bookkeeping, and I thought there had to be a faster, more abstract way of making logistics matter. But the more I think about it the more it seems simplest to just use the rules as written. I'll give it a try. Thanks for the input people.

Regarding goodberry and create food/water, I have to agree with those who are pointing out that spell slots don't really matter for the majority of a long journey, since assuming you have one long rest before you get to the actual dungeon you are getting that spell slot back.

Overland travel still seems generally problematic, actually. What's the point of one random encounter a day on a five-day journey, since you're gonna have a long rest between each one? This is why I have tinkered with the idea of making rations REQUIRED to get the benefits of a rest - one for a short rest, three for a long rest (and they're fluffed as like general "travel supplies" not specifically rations). That way to save your rations on a long journey you might need to sometimes treat camping for the night as a short rest instead of a long rest, so a whole five-day journey effectively becomes an adventuring day. Not sure how that would line up with the ration economy as per the PHB.

I don't -think- I said this before, but tracking encumbrance, consumables, and time basically becomes silly if you don't do all of the above. How those play off of each other gives players a reason to invest in a stronghold where they can stash their nice stuff without always having to haul it around, limited rations keep them from wasting a ton of time, and they don't just carry an infinite number of arrows/potions/torches.

If you don't wanna use the "stones" thing I suggested, do try to kind of walk players through efficient bookkeeping. They can probably lump a lot of non-consumable gear together to know the weight of stuff they plan to always have, lump their regular consumables into a single weight and just not pay any mind to updating that lump weight unless it matters. They only really need to make sure what the total weight is when something might put them into the next category of encumbrance.

I bought some little recycled paper notepads that I regularly use for tracking consumables or hp totals


I switched to gritty realism and just tell the players that short rests still only take an hour, but you only get 2 per long rest, choose whenever you want and deal with it.

Other than somebody MCing warlock/cleric and burning short rest spell slots on healing, do things really break down without a limit on short rests? A couple of classes go into fights in pretty good condition, but hit dice should run low and hp should dwindle after they've gone through a few short rests. It's not like the short rest classes can nova all that hard.


I do a few days in a safe location. A week is quite long, yeah. I do lots of travel/exploration, so the normal rest rules are basically useless to me. I've found this to be a pretty balanced way of running that type of campaign. It also fixes some of the problems of doing dungeons in gritty realism as the players xan take the short rests on the same day if they really need to.

I figured you had to kind of establish safe places in dungeons if you want to allow the party to rest in it. Secret passages in ruins are great for just that occasion.


I was all set in my campaign to add food and water management, navigation checks to avoid getting lost, and ammunition shortages to the current adventure arc. Then a new player joined and happened to take the Outlander background, so a food and water shortage is now no longer an option. I do, however, feel sure they will run out of ammunition before they can complete their tasks, so at least I have that. (The party is in the Outlander's home terrain, so no, I won't be able to just say the land won't support it. He's a lizardfolk fighter, and they are in his swamp.)
Well there is still one notable thing with that. It should be faster to travel on a road than off of it. Road aint a terrain where stuff grows so they've gotta go into the terrain to scrounge for food. I don't know how many roads you find through swamps, but when roads are an option you'd basically be choosing between bringing your own stuff or not.

There's also flavor. You could have to party roll percentile dice to determine how edible they consider swamp-fare (or come up with some chart based on their native diets.) You probably don't even need mechanics if you tell somebody that their character can technically keep this stuff down if they work to, but that it's miserable for them. Having two pukey characters isn't going to push the encumbrance stuff as hard as having the whole party try to subsist on rations, but it could keep the idea present.

[Armored Walrus]

Well there is still one notable thing with that. It should be faster to travel on a road than off of it. Road aint a terrain where stuff grows so they've gotta go into the terrain to scrounge for food. I don't know how many roads you find through swamps, but when roads are an option you'd basically be choosing between bringing your own stuff or not.

There's also flavor. You could have to party roll percentile dice to determine how edible they consider swamp-fare (or come up with some chart based on their native diets.) You probably don't even need mechanics if you tell somebody that their character can technically keep this stuff down if they work to, but that it's miserable for them. Having two pukey characters isn't going to push the encumbrance stuff as hard as having the whole party try to subsist on rations, but it could keep the idea present.

Yeah there happens to be an enchanted causeway through the swamp, and stepping into the swamp itself is dangerous. However, the PC did state straight out in character that he was going to butcher the giant constrictor snake the party fought last session, so a) I'm going to let him get a few days rations out of that and b) the flavor thing already came up. I'm sure if I harp on it some of them will use rations rather than eat his snake and grub and earthworm meals, but it does take some of the immediacy out of it. I don't really want to add a roll to that feature, since if we're rolling to find food and water then anyone with survival proficiency can do that, so the feature isn't really that special. I have some other ideas to impose a shortage on them and make them face the choice of continuing on or heading back to town to resupply, but I have a few other complications that they will run into first. I will keep what you say in mind, though, especially the bit about roads. (although, take a quick ride down the highway to see how good game is at avoiding roads :P )

[mephnick]

Other than somebody MCing warlock/cleric and burning short rest spell slots on healing, do things really break down without a limit on short rests? A couple of classes go into fights in pretty good condition, but hit dice should run low and hp should dwindle after they've gone through a few short rests. It's not like the short rest classes can nova all that hard.

I mean a BM throwing down all his maneuvers, or a monk burning all his ki in every combat is a bit strong. Warlocks are very popular with a couple of my players so that was the main consideration, especially with some of the hexblade stuff. Yoo many short rests/combat isn't nearly as bad as too many long rests/per combat but it's still not great for balance.

[Estrillian]

My game has a lot of lengthy overland travel in it (I'm running a long variant based on PoA before they produced the errata that changed the map scale, and we have stuck with everywhere in the Dessarin valley being about 100-150 miles apart), and rationing of food has come up a lot, ammunition sometimes, encumbrance rarely, and lighting never.

I am using the following Gritty Realism rests :


Short rests are any time of 10 mins or greater, including overnight. You can have any number a day, but the time required gets longer the more you have, so 2-4 is a good average.
Long rests require at least a full day's stay in somewhere safe and secure. You can't get one in hostile territory (if you are setting watches etc. it isn't a long rest). You can get one on the road by searching out a secure camp with fresh water and shelter (so that normally takes 2 days). Long rests still don't restore hitpoints.


Under those rules using spell-slots to feed people is a last resort. My party has done it more than once, but it has always been a desperate move. They have had both a wanderer and a ranger in the party and still worried about food, either because they can't take the time to forage, or because they have really large groups (they keep rescuing people, and then having to take 20+ people cross-country while being pursued).

So I'm happy with food. Lighting is different. Half the party have darkvision, the rest have light cantrips, or glowing weapons, or something similar. They are so casual about lighting that sometimes they want to set something alight with lamp oil, only to realise they *have no lamps*. In general I just try to remind them that Darkvision is a poor substitute for real light. Everything is gritty, grainy, and in black and white.

[Zorku]

(although, take a quick ride down the highway to see how good game is at avoiding roads :P )
Take a look while you're driving down the road at 20-30 times foot speed for how much game actually steps onto the road in front of you.

It's not that nothing touches the road, but when it doesn't get bludgeoned to death by metal boulders that move faster than it can, you don't see so many critters stationary on the margins. Now, human(oid)s have also not totally chased off all other large predators, so the deer type fauna won't all be expertly adapted to specifically avoiding the seasonal surge of hunting that ever takes them out of the population, and thus might not be quite so effective at avoiding the outlander/ranger, but I don't think there's ever been the notion that you could road-hunt for guaranteed food in most places.


I mean a BM throwing down all his maneuvers, or a monk burning all his ki in every combat is a bit strong. Warlocks are very popular with a couple of my players so that was the main consideration, especially with some of the hexblade stuff. Yoo many short rests/combat isn't nearly as bad as too many long rests/per combat but it's still not great for balance.

Well the gritty short rest is a day, but you're reduced that to an hour, so presumably they run into 3 or more combats in a day... but why? If you keep the short rest to a day and just don't throw more than 2 combats at them in a day then there's still some resource management going on there.

What drove you to mix and match the rest styles?

[mephnick]

Well the gritty short rest is a day, but you're reduced that to an hour, so presumably they run into 3 or more combats in a day... but why? If you keep the short rest to a day and just don't throw more than 2 combats at them in a day then there's still some resource management going on there.

What drove you to mix and match the rest styles?

It's just more flexibe because I don't decide when the encounters come, the dice do. I use hexcrawls and tables. If they travel 6 days there might be one fight the first day, two the second day, two the third day one the fourth and two the fifth day. This gives them the option to use their rest between any of the fights regardless of day, but restricts them to two short rests instead of the four they would have gotten if I kept the gritty realism rules. It also gives them flexibility to use their rests in dungeons instead of doing 7 encounters without a short rest which is the major weakness of the gritty realism variant, since no party should get 8 hours of free rest in a dangerous location. Suddenly everyone is getting the rests they need to balance the game but the decision of when to best use the rests still falls to the players.

[Vogonjeltz]

Burning a spell slot is only a big deal on days when you're going to be experiencing an adventuring day's worth of spell resources needed.

And the basic encumbrance rule, Str 8 is 120 lbs carried. Very few classes come close to that with their starting equipment. Clerics and other Medium Armor wearer might, or those carrying a Hunting Trap.

Variant Encumberance is another matter. Dumping Str to 8 is a choice that needs to be more seriously considered.

I guess I'm not seeing the first point, every day not in town is an adventuring day.

For the latter, you're correct, I'm thinking of the variant rule as being more problematic. (A Wizard with an Explorer's pack is looking at about 68lb of gear)


I've heard a couple of people say things like this but I'm not quite sure what they're picturing. In my head, there's a simple pattern that will emerge for travel: try to hang on to one spell slot during random encounters, then create food and water/goodberry when the party makes camp.
You're sort of down 1 spell slot in order to do this, and then you've got 15/10 people worth of food (or 5/10 horses worth,) and water that lasts for 24 hours. You eat 1 ration worth (conceptually a late lunch and supper, as spending much more than 8 hours walking tends to cause exhaustion effects, and the miles per day listed in the book line up nicely with 8 hours worth of walking speed travel,) go to bed, then rouse thyself and eat breakfast. If you've got a little leeway for carrying stuff (and you do cause you're gonna wanna haul some treasure,) then you pack up your lunch for the next day, and nobody has to be careful about saving a spell slot for this the next day. This sustains a 5 player party at level 5/1 with no need for rations, or a 4 player party with a horse/mule at a cost of a ration for the horse every other day.

If they carry any amount of actual rations on them then it seems like they don't really have to be very careful about saving that spell slot, as there would only be a few days that were likely to demand the slot's use.

Is this radically different from what you picture?

I would disentagle a few things.

1) Option availability isn't fungible. Goodberry (lvl 1) is available to Druid and Ranger, Create Food and Water (lvl 3) is available to Cleric and Paladin. At level 5 that basically limits us to Druid and Cleric (Ranger if they spent a slot on Goodberry. I am not sure a Ranger would given their superior foraging ability, but I suppose it could).

2) Goodberry only alleviates food concerns. So we still need to forage for water routinely.

3) Create Food and Water requires containers for the water. That 30 gallons of water means you need 60 waterskins (4 pints each, 8 pints to a gallon) (or some other, preferably larger, container) to actually capture the water and not have it be wasted/never exist at all. Without the appropriate infrastructure in place (a wagon with a few barrels on it?) we're looking a great deal of wasted utility there.

60 full waterskins is a combined 300lbs. That's going to put a damper in your carrying capacity without the aforementioned cart/mules. And it's not like you can parcel it out, creating it only as you need it, it's all or nothing for that 3rd level spell slot. Do you really want to burn one of only two 3rd level spell slots of your Cleric at level 5? It sounds like a very high price to pay. Remember, that same slot could be used for something critical, like Revivify, Dispel Magic, etcetera. And there are going to be 6-8 encounters every adventuring day (that's about 1 encounter for every hour of travel time).

It might just come down to opinion, but I find the value of the 3rd level spell slot to be way too high to commit to burning it on something like create food and water except in the most dire of circumstances (you're in the desert, you've run out of food and water completely and have no choice but to do that or die of starvation/thirst).


Overland travel still seems generally problematic, actually. What's the point of one random encounter a day on a five-day journey, since you're gonna have a long rest between each one? This is why I have tinkered with the idea of making rations REQUIRED to get the benefits of a rest - one for a short rest, three for a long rest (and they're fluffed as like general "travel supplies" not specifically rations). That way to save your rations on a long journey you might need to sometimes treat camping for the night as a short rest instead of a long rest, so a whole five-day journey effectively becomes an adventuring day. Not sure how that would line up with the ration economy as per the PHB.

I think the modules that feature overland travel segments typically have a larger number of encounters than that, enough to make each day an adventuring day.

[mephnick]

I think the modules that feature overland travel segments typically have a larger number of encounters than that, enough to make each day an adventuring day.

Not SKT. They should have called it "Nova Every Encounter: The Campaign". Other than a couple dungeons 90% of the campaign is 0-1 fights per long rest if you follow the regular rest system. They "fix" this by making most of the random encounters super Deadly and it devolves into rocket tag. I don't know if most people that write D&D articles just don't understand the system, but I was shocked not one of the dozen reviews I read mentioned it.

[Cybren]

Not SKT. They should have called it "Nova Every Encounter: The Campaign". Other than a couple dungeons 90% of the campaign is 0-1 fights per long rest if you follow the regular rest system. They "fix" this by making most of the random encounters super Deadly and it devolves into rocket tag. I don't know if most people that write D&D articles just don't understand the system, but I was shocked not one of the dozen reviews I read mentioned it.

Well, if you're playing it without having already read the module, you don't actually know that you're going to only face one encounter a rest, which for the first few iterations might have people playing really conservatively. the problem comes when they figure it out

[Estrillian]

I think the modules that feature overland travel segments typically have a larger number of encounters than that, enough to make each day an adventuring day.

PoA has 4 rolls per day for encounters (Morning, Day, Evening, Night) with an encounter on an 18+ (unless I've gone mad and taken that from somewhere else). That means it cannot produce a full adventuring day (almost all the encounters are medium), and most of the time will produce only a single encounter - so it is also Nova every encounter, if you don't use some sort of gritty rest.

[Estrillian]

Well the gritty short rest is a day, but you're reduced that to an hour, so presumably they run into 3 or more combats in a day... but why? If you keep the short rest to a day and just don't throw more than 2 combats at them in a day then there's still some resource management going on there.

What drove you to mix and match the rest styles?

(Question wasn't directed at me, but I do the same, so I'll answer).

Flexibility. The gritty short rest encourages a 5-minute day again. By removing all recovery in a dungeon setting you force parties to repeatedly withdraw, or get ground down. Finding a small rest area, or shaking your pursuit for 10-minutes, doesn't actually help you. I considered having different rules for rest times in and out of dungeons, but it stuck in my craw, so I went for this system instead.

This way people can get some precious rest quite often, whether its a night's sleep, or a desperate recovery in the middle of hostile territory, but real recovery (long rests) requires much more. It lets both me and them be flexible about rest.

It does add more power to short-rest classes, but given the general wearing down of Hit Dice, Hit Points and most of all spell slots for Healing, the short-rest classes are more shoring up the rest than overshadowing them so far.

[Tanarii]

I guess I'm not seeing the first point, every day not in town is an adventuring day.Says you. I say adventuring days are things with encounters in them. Mainly because that's what the book uses it to mean, and also because that's when resource expenditure of spell slots becomes relevant.

That said, obviously players won't always know if a day is going to be an 'adventuring day', so I'll grant that means they have to plan as if it may be. It's certainly a choice to prepare Create/Destroy Water over something else, even if the spell slot to cast it only gets cast at the end of a day of non-adventuring. And as you point out, they still need sufficient containers and strength to carry the water for the days when they don't cast it.


For the latter, you're correct, I'm thinking of the variant rule as being more problematic. (A Wizard with an Explorer's pack is looking at about 68lb of gear)Yes, but that's the second heaviest pack weighing in a 59lbs. Only a Dungeoneer's Pack weighs more at 61-1/2 lbs. With a Scholars pack (11 lbs) the total weight should come in at 20 lbs (using your +9 lbs of other gear). That gives the Str 8 Wizard a leeway of 30 lbs.

IMX players of non-Str Clerics by far run into the most problems with variant encumbrance, trying to wear medium armor.

[Zorku]

It's just more flexibe because I don't decide when the encounters come, the dice do. I use hexcrawls and tables. If they travel 6 days there might be one fight the first day, two the second day, two the third day one the fourth and two the fifth day. This gives them the option to use their rest between any of the fights regardless of day, but restricts them to two short rests instead of the four they would have gotten if I kept the gritty realism rules. It also gives them flexibility to use their rests in dungeons instead of doing 7 encounters without a short rest which is the major weakness of the gritty realism variant, since no party should get 8 hours of free rest in a dangerous location. Suddenly everyone is getting the rests they need to balance the game but the decision of when to best use the rests still falls to the players.

If it's a dungeon then it has been there for quite awhile and a bunch of different (lets say 7 leaders,) people have installed traps and generally mucked around with it. This matters because the current inhabitants don't necessarily know about all the secret passages. Party has a decent shot at resting there, though everyone in the dungeon will certainly know that a bunch of the guards up front have died after that long.


But alright, I see that you want a mix of dungeon crawling and you don't want wilderness encounters just just be full nova every time. Quick question: Do you have any familiarity with designing fights that the party is meant to run away from? Like, if most of the wilderness encounters are just too nasty of a creature to actually defeat? 5e doesn't write a whole lot to teach you how you might do things like that, but it seems to me that a bunch of worn out travelers ought to just try to run from a decent portion of the wilderness encounters that could pop up. This was a strong enough element of TTRPGs that it made its way into video games, and it seems very much like the thing that should happen when a party hasn't been able to rest, but for some reason it wasn't the option you went for (and generally isn't the option any of us go for.) Any thoughts on why?


I guess I'm not seeing the first point, every day not in town is an adventuring day.

For the latter, you're correct, I'm thinking of the variant rule as being more problematic. (A Wizard with an Explorer's pack is looking at about 68lb of gear)In the variant, where your movespeed drops for carrying too much crap, it seems like you would probably drop the pack on the ground for combat, and quickly have the others carry your crap while you travel. If you're aware of combat movespeed not having a linear relationship with over land travel speed, then any adventurer wizard concerned with encumbrance, but lacking a proper pack animal/hireling, will offload 9lbs of gear onto their unseen servant, or 19 lbs if the party in general is already traveling slow due to light encumbrance*.

*The travel pace rules don't mention the encumbrance variant rule at all (which makes sense given the way the book is put together,) but of course being encumbered is going to alter your travel speed. Based on the combat movespeed penalties and perusing past editions, you would expect to lose 1/3rd of your travel speed for light encumbrance and 2/3rds of it for heavy encumbrance.

e: Or Tenser's Floating disk, the ritual spell that is actually meant to help wizards carry crap.


I would disentagle a few things.
...
And there are going to be 6-8 encounters every adventuring day (that's about 1 encounter for every hour of travel time).
I feel a need to disentangle this as well. Wilderness travel days probably are not the same thing as adventuring days. I'm not sure where exactly this convention came from (so it's probably right in the PHB for 2e,) but basically every table I've seen do wilderness encounters just rolls 2 times per day 'till you get to an actual destination.

I'm happy with pretty much all of the food and water stuff I cut out of the quote though.


the problem comes when they figure it out
When you're talking design theory on forums you basically just assume everyone has already figured it out.


PoA has 4 rolls per day for encounters (Morning, Day, Evening, Night) with an encounter on an 18+ (unless I've gone mad and taken that from somewhere else).
The DM I saw run it didn't seem to have any idea that was a thing. He did seem a little overwhelmed with this trying to keep track of a module business though, as he typically homebrewed.


(Question wasn't directed at me, but I do the same, so I'll answer).

Flexibility. The gritty short rest encourages a 5-minute day again. Huh? Gritty short rest is 8 hours, and that seems to explicitly discourage a 5 minute work day. The epic heroism variant makes the short rest 5 minutes long, and a long rest into 1 hour. Is that what you're thinking of here?



That said, obviously players won't always know if a day is going to be an 'adventuring day', so I'll grant that means they have to plan as if it may be.
It seems to me that when you head out to some dungeon site you know that it's about 3 days trek in whatever direction (somebody at least rattled off some landmarks for you to look for, right?) Most of the rationing of your food is going to be travel days, and if you up and start having adventuring days before you reach your destination then you'll have to turn back and resupply anyway, as you don't actually have enough supplies for the round trip anymore (depending on how much leeway you give yourself and how much treasure you expect to haul out of the place.)

Is that not the primary circumstance where you would cast create food and water?

[mephnick]

But alright, I see that you want a mix of dungeon crawling and you don't want wilderness encounters just just be full nova every time. Quick question: Do you have any familiarity with designing fights that the party is meant to run away from? Like, if most of the wilderness encounters are just too nasty of a creature to actually defeat? 5e doesn't write a whole lot to teach you how you might do things like that, but it seems to me that a bunch of worn out travelers ought to just try to run from a decent portion of the wilderness encounters that could pop up. This was a strong enough element of TTRPGs that it made its way into video games, and it seems very much like the thing that should happen when a party hasn't been able to rest, but for some reason it wasn't the option you went for (and generally isn't the option any of us go for.) Any thoughts on why?

I don't design encounters for the party, I design regions and then the party goes through them if they want to, or are forced to by the adventures they embark on. My setting is basically a bunch of zones and each zone has it's own encounter table. But each table has a couple encounters on it that are much harder than the rest, like an iconic creature. So I'll have, say, a large marshland fairly close to a city, so it's only "Level 3-5" and I'll fill the encounter table with stuff that makes sense. Lizardfolk, Giant Snakes, Trolls etc. But I'll also have a Hydra on there as an apex predator. Then there will be a few caves the PC's can delve into that are level appropriate for the region, but there will probably also be a more dangerous location that they definitely shouldn't go into at level 4. The townsfolk will likely know about it and if they PC's do some research before setting out they'll be told to steer clear of the Rippling Caves because there's crazy stuff in there.

So, I want the players to trudge through the wilderness for a week and get a decent adventuring day out of it without having 40 encounters (hence Gritty Realism) but I also want them to be able to tackle dungeons once in a while without having to clear the whole thing + 3 wilderness encounters without taking a rest. That's where the flexible short rests come in. To me, travel is part of the adventure and it should be dangerous and eventful, but it should not feel like a punishment, nor should it cause an imbalance in the game because it favours one type of rest over the other. The default rules make travel a joke in 5e and I'm not surprised most people hand-wave it. It's just a shame because I feel travel and exploration are a key part of D&D and Fantasy as a whole.

[Zorku]

I don't design encounters for the party, I design regions and then the party goes through them if they want to, or are forced to by the adventures they embark on. My setting is basically a bunch of zones and each zone has it's own encounter table. But each table has a couple encounters on it that are much harder than the rest, like an iconic creature. So I'll have, say, a large marshland fairly close to a city, so it's only "Level 3-5" and I'll fill the encounter table with stuff that makes sense. Lizardfolk, Giant Snakes, Trolls etc. But I'll also have a Hydra on there as an apex predator. Then there will be a few caves the PC's can delve into that are level appropriate for the region, but there will probably also be a more dangerous location that they definitely shouldn't go into at level 4. The townsfolk will likely know about it and if they PC's do some research before setting out they'll be told to steer clear of the Rippling Caves because there's crazy stuff in there.

So, I want the players to trudge through the wilderness for a week and get a decent adventuring day out of it without having 40 encounters (hence Gritty Realism) but I also want them to be able to tackle dungeons once in a while without having to clear the whole thing + 3 wilderness encounters without taking a rest. That's where the flexible short rests come in. To me, travel is part of the adventure and it should be dangerous and eventful, but it should not feel like a punishment, nor should it cause an imbalance in the game because it favours one type of rest over the other. The default rules make travel a joke in 5e and I'm not surprised most people hand-wave it. It's just a shame because I feel travel and exploration are a key part of D&D and Fantasy as a whole.

But what I'm getting at, is that the party doesn't really need to clear wilderness encounters. If those the area is more like "Level 5-6" and the wilderness encounters don't give the party anything they want so much as just take resources from them, then they might actually take steps to try and avoid them.

I mean, in 5e we all kind of have the experience that parties won't make any attempt to avoid these things, but why is that the case? It seemed to work this way for people that were playing a few decades ago. What did they do to make it work that way?

[Tanarii]

I mean, in 5e we all kind of have the experience that parties won't make any attempt to avoid these things, but why is that the case? It seemed to work this way for people that were playing a few decades ago. What did they do to make it work that way?You no longer get XP from GP recovered, but instead get the majority of it from encounters that require resources to overcome.

[mephnick]

But what I'm getting at, is that the party doesn't really need to clear wilderness encounters. If those the area is more like "Level 5-6" and the wilderness encounters don't give the party anything they want so much as just take resources from them, then they might actually take steps to try and avoid them.

Sure they can avoid them. Maybe. It's pretty hard to avoid things that are faster and more perceptive than an adventuring party. I definitely don't force them into combat if they can figure out a way around an encounter. At the same time, the party doesn't need to do anything, but playing the game is supposed to be fun. If you don't like combat, D&D has been the wrong system to use for two decades.

[imanidiot]

50 coins/lb already greatly overestimates the weight of coins and underestimates the buying power of precious metal. 50 lb of gold should make someone wealthy for life.



With the current gold prices a pound of gold would be $20, 464 or about a year's wages for an unskilled laborer. In 5eD&D that would be 73 gold or 1.46 pounds of gold. 50 pounds of gold wouldn't make you wealthy for life in either world but it would be a good start.

In order to be "Wealthy" you need 29.2 pounds of gold per year.

[Armored Walrus]

With the current gold prices a pound of gold would be $20, 464 or about a year's wages for an unskilled laborer. In 5eD&D that would be 73 gold or 1.46 pounds of gold. 50 pounds of gold wouldn't make you wealthy for life in either world but it would be a good start.

In order to be "Wealthy" you need 29.2 pounds of gold per year.

I agree, $1M of gold bricks in your basement won't make you wealthy for life unless you're already in your 60s. Especially since that gold's not going to have any investment earnings. (although the value of it does tend to come close to keeping up with inflation over time) It's also worth noting that if you happen to have a wife, and maybe an elderly parent or a useless 5th son to take care of, that $20,464 per year is technically considered "poverty level" this year in the USA. So if you're 30 years old, have a family, go adventuring and find 50 pounds of gold, then retire and live off your "riches"; congratulations, you can now live at poverty level by spending one pound of gold per year until you are 80 years old. Or, congratulations, you now have a nest egg for your old age, but you need to go back to picking weeds in the lord's fields if you want to feed your family in the meantime. If you want to be wealthy for life, you need to find more gold than that, maybe enough to buy a mill, or enough to buy a lordship, so you can own some land and charge those peasants rent to work it for you. You don't carry that much gold. You put it in a chest, chained to a cart, and hire guards to accompany you while you transport it to the bank.

[Zorku]

Sure they can avoid them. Maybe. It's pretty hard to avoid things that are faster and more perceptive than an adventuring party. I definitely don't force them into combat if they can figure out a way around an encounter. At the same time, the party doesn't need to do anything, but playing the game is supposed to be fun. If you don't like combat, D&D has been the wrong system to use for two decades.

But stuff that attacks you in the wild usually wants something. A few large carnivores might intend to kill and eat you (in whatever order,) but there are lots of other reasons for being attacked. Maybe some adult female monster-thing is trying to rear their young and simply wants the party to keep a wider berth. Maybe a predator much prefers the taste of deer but the party has been killing a few of those while they forage (and leaving a lot of the potential meat to spoil because they can't carry an entire deer while they travel.) Maybe this creature would have really rather avoided the party but some fairies are screwing with everyone for fun.

I'm not advocating for avoiding all of the combat, just combat where the only thing you gain is xp.


You no longer get XP from GP recovered, but instead get the majority of it from encounters that require resources to overcome.

Did we change that to try and streamline the system, or were people really fed up with not trying to kill every damn thing they came across besides unarmed citizens? Was there some other sort of reason?

[Beelzebubba]

Did we change that to try and streamline the system, or were people really fed up with not trying to kill every damn thing they came across besides unarmed citizens? Was there some other sort of reason?

I think monsters without treasure, or found outside of their layer without treasure, got too annoying.

Also, the idea of always starting at 1st level, and parties throwing all their GP at that new character to power-level them to match everyone, was an artifact of a very idiosyncratic gaming group (i.e. Gary and Dave's groups) and didn't really ever take off when the game went bigger. So that 'perk' of XP being GP was ignored, and the idea that 'you got XP by what you did, as in actual experience, was more important than the loot'.

[imanidiot]

Yes, but that's the second heaviest pack weighing in a 59lbs. Only a Dungeoneer's Pack weighs more at 61-1/2 lbs. With a Scholars pack (11 lbs) the total weight should come in at 20 lbs (using your +9 lbs of other gear). That gives the Str 8 Wizard a leeway of 30 lbs.



With only 30 pounds of carrying capacity how much treasure are you going to be able to carry out? 1500 coins, assuming they're all gold that still isn't very much.

[Cybren]

With only 30 pounds of carrying capacity how much treasure are you going to be able to carry out? 1500 coins, assuming they're all gold that still isn't very much.

This is what Floating Disc, hirelings, pack animals, bags of holding, and return trips are for.



When you're talking design theory on forums you basically just assume everyone has already figured it out.

That's clearly not an actual response to the comment I made, because it is nonsensical within context if it is.

[Tanarii]

With only 30 pounds of carrying capacity how much treasure are you going to be able to carry out? 1500 coins, assuming they're all gold that still isn't very much.
I agree. My comment was the end of an exchange regarding specifically that even with variant rule encumberence, a Wizard (specifically) shouldn't generally run into problems dumping Str with just their starting gear. But as I said, the variant rule requires more careful consideration. I was just nitpicking at the specific example given.

With the basic rule for encumberence, a Str 8 Wizard with an explorers pack (total 68 lbs per Vogonjeltz's example) can tote out 52*50 = 2600 coins, or with the scholars 100*50 = 5000 coins. Assuming containers and ignoring bulk. The latter is enough capacity to handle Tier 2 Hoard's coins with just the one character. So the variant rule makes quite a big difference to what happens in play.

[Zorku]

I think monsters without treasure, or found outside of their layer without treasure, got too annoying.

Also, the idea of always starting at 1st level, and parties throwing all their GP at that new character to power-level them to match everyone, was an artifact of a very idiosyncratic gaming group (i.e. Gary and Dave's groups) and didn't really ever take off when the game went bigger. So that 'perk' of XP being GP was ignored, and the idea that 'you got XP by what you did, as in actual experience, was more important than the loot'.
But you can tell if you're running into a monster away from the lair and thus loot, and resolving any of these combats by means other than "inserting pointy metal sticks into soft flesh" is still "a thing that you did."

But you're saying that folks pretty much moved away from recovered gold = xp before they started to consider having new characters start at the same level as the party proper?





the problem comes when they figure it outWhen you're talking design theory on forums you basically just assume everyone has already figured it out.
That's clearly not an actual response to the comment I made, because it is nonsensical within context if it is.
Some the context is "you don't actually know that you're going to only face one encounter a rest, which for the first few iterations might have people playing really conservatively"? People on forums aren't asking "how can I keep my party from figuring this trick out for as long as possible?" Design theory is about sculpting the play space so that the optimal move, the smart move, is something that makes sense.

Or are you saying that the context was in "Well, if you're playing it without having already read the module"? That's a dumb context in which to expect follow up responses. Don't know what to tell you man.

Also, could you edit your post to properly attribute the quote to me? For a second I wondered if both remarks were mine and you had decided to make a very passive insult.

[Beelzebubba]

But you can tell if you're running into a monster away from the lair and thus loot, and resolving any of these combats by means other than "inserting pointy metal sticks into soft flesh" is still "a thing that you did."

Yeah, which was pressure towards 'well, I used my sword, shouldn't that improve my ability to use my sword via the experience I gained in combat?'

So, there was an incentive to hide or run away, because there was nothing to be gained if the monster had no loot, and that's not as fun.



But you're saying that folks pretty much moved away from recovered gold = xp before they started to consider having new characters start at the same level as the party proper?

I mean it sort of went hand in hand.

I mean, I was young back then, and I only had a few gaming groups to draw upon and maybe one convention once a year (not like today with Google search and discussion boards), so I'm not sure how much my take matters. It's an educated guess based on our table's tendencies.

AD&D gave XP mostly for loot, and some for combat. One group changed the XP to give more for monsters and less for treasure. Other tables only gave XP for magic items you sold, since keeping it improved you already. It was all over the place.

But, at that time, I know it was a point of contention because entire competing gaming systems were springing up to 'fix' D&D's flaws, and one of them was the Treasure for XP. Chaosium, for example, had a % based system where all your skills were expressed as percentages. (25% with Sword means roll 25 or lower on % dice and you hit.) If you used a skill or weapon, at the end of the session or adventure, you rolled % dice, and if you rolled higher than your skill, then you gained 1-4% improvement. So, it created an S-curve shaped advancement pace, and only on the stuff you *used*.

If that system wasn't a direct shot at D&D's way of doing things I don't know what is.

[Zorku]

Well, right now we don't seem to find wilderness encounters fun (can't speak for everyone, but the most satisfied people I've seen throw hydras at parties that have no hopes of defeating one,) and we seem to dislike how the game plays without them. It sounds like combat that you avoid/run from has a solution to this baked in, and I don't hear many well developed ideas from folks proposing other kinds of solutions.

Am I discounting something I should have paid more attention to?

[Thrudd]

Well, right now we don't seem to find wilderness encounters fun (can't speak for everyone, but the most satisfied people I've seen throw hydras at parties that have no hopes of defeating one,) and we seem to dislike how the game plays without them. It sounds like combat that you avoid/run from has a solution to this baked in, and I don't hear many well developed ideas from folks proposing other kinds of solutions.

Am I discounting something I should have paid more attention to?

What isn't fun about the encounters? How are they different than other encounters? You see some monsters somewhere, or you get surprised by a monster, and you fight just like you fight any other time, or you run away.

They aren't always too hard to beat, and they aren't always without reward for winning. They should be random with creatures that make sense for the area.

[Armored Walrus]

But what I'm getting at, is that the party doesn't really need to clear wilderness encounters. If those the area is more like "Level 5-6" and the wilderness encounters don't give the party anything they want so much as just take resources from them, then they might actually take steps to try and avoid them.

I mean, in 5e we all kind of have the experience that parties won't make any attempt to avoid these things, but why is that the case? It seemed to work this way for people that were playing a few decades ago. What did they do to make it work that way?

This isn't my experience with my live group. They absolutely will avoid a fight if they don't think fighting will get them closer to their goals. They constantly find ways to bypass combat. Which is as it should be. As far as the point of multiple encounters being to sap resources - there's no reason that avoiding combat can't sap resources. They'll burn slots on Pass Without Trace, or Speak with Animals, rather than on Moonbeam or Heat Metal.

[Zorku]

What isn't fun about the encounters? How are they different than other encounters? You see some monsters somewhere, or you get surprised by a monster, and you fight just like you fight any other time, or you run away.

They aren't always too hard to beat, and they aren't always without reward for winning. They should be random with creatures that make sense for the area.
It's a speed bump. You had a long rest before this fight and you're getting a long rest after, so if I make it actually dangerous enough to eat through the party resources for an entire day half of the time the dice swing hard one way and it flops or the party gets a face full of TPK. If I don't make it that dangerous then the party goes full nova and then tops off during the next long rest and there was literally no point in fighting that besides arguing over who would get the killing blow.

If I add on a reward for killing random encounters then the party doesn't even have a reason to go into the dungeon because wealth and xp comes to them.


This isn't my experience with my live group. They absolutely will avoid a fight if they don't think fighting will get them closer to their goals. They constantly find ways to bypass combat. Which is as it should be. As far as the point of multiple encounters being to sap resources - there's no reason that avoiding combat can't sap resources. They'll burn slots on Pass Without Trace, or Speak with Animals, rather than on Moonbeam or Heat Metal.
Are you saying they wear themselves down exactly the same amount either way? If so, then why are they going to the trouble of avoiding the combat when they could just kill it and tally up xp?

[Armored Walrus]

Are you saying they wear themselves down exactly the same amount either way? If so, then why are they going to the trouble of avoiding the combat when they could just kill it and tally up xp?

Not exactly the same amount. But some.

Although frankly I dispense with random encounters for wilderness travel (I use the default rest rules, not a variant). Instead I plan every encounter they'll meet while traveling, and try to make sure they serve some purpose, whether that be to help flesh out the world, convey a sense of tone for the region they are now in, give the druids a chance to encounter a new beast that they'll now be able to wild shape into, give the assassin a poisonous creature or two to attempt to harvest poison from, etc. I don't worry too much about their ability to nova these encounters if they choose to do so, or to avoid them. Frankly, my group hasn't figured out yet that they can nova these encounters. They conserve resources just like they would in a dungeon, but part of that may be because sometime when they travel they'll go a few days with no encounters, or only narrative encounters (I call them "sightings") and then have two or three hard fights in one day, so they never really know what they're going to face.

[Finieous]

Not SKT. They should have called it "Nova Every Encounter: The Campaign". Other than a couple dungeons 90% of the campaign is 0-1 fights per long rest if you follow the regular rest system. They "fix" this by making most of the random encounters super Deadly and it devolves into rocket tag. I don't know if most people that write D&D articles just don't understand the system, but I was shocked not one of the dozen reviews I read mentioned it.

I'm running the adventure on Roll20 so the book might be different, but it simply reiterates that the DM can roll for random encounters as often as he likes and references the rules in Chapter Three of the DMG. There, it says the DM can roll every hour, every four or eight hours, once per day and once per long rest, etc.

I'm rolling every hour of travel when they're in dangerous areas. (Technically, I'm /gmroll-ing 24d20 on Roll20 for each day of travel. Then I instantly know how many encounters there will be that day, and when they'll occur). There's only a 15% chance per hour of an encounter, but that's still an average of 3.6 random encounters per 24 hours. Even at that rate, IME, the characters are trying conserve resources; it only takes one five- or six-encounter day to make them fairly desperate to do so. Especially since they know the encounters are random and the next one that comes up may be really tough.

This also means a 15% chance of an encounter potentially interrupting every short rest, and a 73% chance of a random encounter during every long rest.

[Thrudd]

It's a speed bump. You had a long rest before this fight and you're getting a long rest after, so if I make it actually dangerous enough to eat through the party resources for an entire day half of the time the dice swing hard one way and it flops or the party gets a face full of TPK. If I don't make it that dangerous then the party goes full nova and then tops off during the next long rest and there was literally no point in fighting that besides arguing over who would get the killing blow.

If I add on a reward for killing random encounters then the party doesn't even have a reason to go into the dungeon because wealth and xp comes to them.


I still don't see the problem or why these encounters would not be as fun as any encounter where you get to fight stuff. So what if they nova some encounters? You don't really want them to be long and complex anyway, right? Some of the encounters might be hard enough to require a nova just to survive. Maybe others should be so hard that even a nova isn't enough. Some can be cakewalks that are just a flavorful diversion. The main point is to make the world seem like a place that is alive, that traveling in some places is dangerous, to show what sort of things are out there. It should still make them consider their resources and want to get to where they're going, but that isn't what I consider the primary reason.

Even if something seems like an easy fight, the dice can always go against you. And rolling for encounters at intervals means there's no guarantee they will always get a rest before the next fight. The more dangerous the place, the more often the rolls. If it's not a dangerous place, then there shouldn't be a lot of dangerous encounters, right? So if they only run into one easy fight in three days of travel, that is what you'd expect. If it's the haunted forest of evil, then maybe you'd be rolling for encounters three of four times every day of travel, and some of the things in there will be really nasty. Now they'll be worried about resources and hustling through to their objective.

There should still be a motivation for them to go to the dungeon besides "getting XP". Aren't they trying to save the princess, or find the magic artifact, or defeat the dragon, or find the portal to the netherworld, or loot the ruins so they can build a castle and become kings by their own hands? I mean, happening upon the lair of an ogre with a sack full of coins and a couple cow carcasses is a nice bonus along the way, but it isn't going to replace the magic sword of awesomeness and the spell scrolls they're going to find in the dungeon.

It does help when retrieving treasure from the dungeon, or even more generic "completing the quest", is the major source of XP with killing monsters contributing a smaller amount.

[Zorku]

Not exactly the same amount. But some.

Although frankly I dispense with random encounters for wilderness travel (I use the default rest rules, not a variant). Instead I plan every encounter they'll meet while traveling, and try to make sure they serve some purpose, whether that be to help flesh out the world, convey a sense of tone for the region they are now in, give the druids a chance to encounter a new beast that they'll now be able to wild shape into, give the assassin a poisonous creature or two to attempt to harvest poison from, etc. I don't worry too much about their ability to nova these encounters if they choose to do so, or to avoid them. Frankly, my group hasn't figured out yet that they can nova these encounters. They conserve resources just like they would in a dungeon, but part of that may be because sometime when they travel they'll go a few days with no encounters, or only narrative encounters (I call them "sightings") and then have two or three hard fights in one day, so they never really know what they're going to face.
I'm playing in a campaign right now that doesn't police the 5mwd at all, so our level 9 sorcerer has just been casting twin blight on big things every time they can get close enough to do so, and then whining about being burnt out after one fight with a creature that had a lot of hp but wasn't dealing much damage to us, or even when creatures like that weren't attacking any of us directly. It made the 5 floor dungeon crawl with about 6 long rests worth of stuff in it into a 3 week affair.

I was tempted to make rest lengths variable the next time I was gonna DM those players (with default rest rules applying in civilization, but gritty variant applying when out in the wilderness,) but you can probably tell from my posts here that I now think encumbrance and ration tracking will set them on a better trajectory.


I still don't see the problem or why these encounters would not be as fun as any encounter where you get to fight stuff. So what if they nova some encounters?Aside from how this behavior bleeds over and they start to nova all encounters, going full nova on an encounter has two big strikes against it:
The standard forum parrot answer is, short rest gated characters feel underpowered, because long rest gated characters have basically 3x the resources to dump into the nuclear option whenever they run into an owlbear.
The broader game design answer... there's no decision making here. It's weird if you don't know what special moves you have that you can only do so many times a day and how to use them to deal a lot of damage or otherwise trivialize a single day encounter.


You don't really want them to be long and complex anyway, right?That's exactly how I want combat to be, regardless of where it happens.


Some of the encounters might be hard enough to require a nova just to survive.I already brought that up. Any combat that requires you to nova your entire day's worth of resources is a poorly designed encounter, and has a much higher chance of a TPK. I just got done saying that every table is different, but you shouldn't have to experience too many different tables before you've seen a few that throw 3x the xp budget for a deadly encounter at their party over and over, because they want players to feel like they are just scraping by, and then without much warning oops everyone died. Yeah, turns out throwing an entire adventuring dayTM of xp at a party all at once gets really swingy.

You can fudge dice rolls to compensate for that, but in the middle of combat I'm really really bad at judging when somebody did a dumb thing and got their character killed vs when I did a dumb dm thing and I'm gonna kill everyone. Maybe the rat bastard in me will get a little more conniving about this kind of thing over time, but right now I have to work really hard to not just let everyone live every time... or let all the dice fall as they may.

Now, this isn't a problem for me in a dungeon. I can throw a long series of medium difficulty encounters at them because I know that the fireball they use to kill 6 critters without so much as getting scuffed shoes is gonna be one fireball less that they can lob at the big threatening monster, or maybe all of the fights are just 6 critters but eventually the party is out of fireballs and the fighter and rogue start to get some cuts and bruises from fighting so many of these things.
...unless the party can just walk outside and take a long rest at any time and know that I'm not going to interrupt them with any anything besides a speed bump that they can spend all remaining spell slots to not get hurt and then finish their long rest cuz wilderness encounters are "fun" instead of "dangerous and unwanted."


Maybe others should be so hard that even a nova isn't enough.You seem to be pitching my own idea at me as if it's something you just thought of. If a party goes full nova and can't kill something then it's a TPK or they run away from it, right?


Some can be cakewalks that are just a flavorful diversion. The main point is to make the world seem like a place that is alive, that traveling in some places is dangerous, to show what sort of things are out there. It should still make them consider their resources and want to get to where they're going, but that isn't what I consider the primary reason.There's no consideration of resources when a combat is only a speed bump. There's no sense of danger, and the world doesn't seem especially alive. It's a diversion only in that players look away from their smart phone for a moment to make sure they can still do the thing that deals the most damage, and then they space out because they know it doesn't really matter.

I do a couple of things at my table to dissuade that kind of attitude, but they mainly revolve around not letting these combats be speed bumps.


Even if something seems like an easy fight, the dice can always go against you. And rolling for encounters at intervals means there's no guarantee they will always get a rest before the next fight. The more dangerous the place, the more often the rolls. If it's not a dangerous place, then there shouldn't be a lot of dangerous encounters, right? So if they only run into one easy fight in three days of travel, that is what you'd expect. If it's the haunted forest of evil, then maybe you'd be rolling for encounters three of four times every day of travel, and some of the things in there will be really nasty. Now they'll be worried about resources and hustling through to their objective.It's gotta be all deadly encounters or worse before 3 wilderness encounters in a day is going to represent much risk, but sure. If you roll for encounters 4 times in a day how often is that actually going to result in combat during the day? What's your dice chart look like for that?


There should still be a motivation for them to go to the dungeon besides "getting XP". Aren't they trying to save the princess, or find the magic artifact, or defeat the dragon, or find the portal to the netherworld, or loot the ruins so they can build a castle and become kings by their own hands? I mean, happening upon the lair of an ogre with a sack full of coins and a couple cow carcasses is a nice bonus along the way, but it isn't going to replace the magic sword of awesomeness and the spell scrolls they're going to find in the dungeon.Hey, I was arguing to not have loot on the wilderness encounters. If you're also saying that there's not sweet loot on wilderness encounters then that seems to be another case of proposing my own position to me like it's your own novel idea. If that's what's happened, I'd rather you acknowledge things I've said and state agreement. Feels kind of like stealing credit otherwise (not all that much of what I've said is original either, but I'm not saying it to the person I heard it from.)


It does help when retrieving treasure from the dungeon, or even more generic "completing the quest", is the major source of XP with killing monsters contributing a smaller amount.Yup. I'm eager to find ways to make the party more interested in 'completing the quest' than killing 9000 boars in the swamp. They're already a little bit more interested in completing the question just because it is the quest, but I want them to say "it would be best if we avoided fighting any of the swamp boars," or possibly "this dungeon would have been easier if we didn't fight so many boars in the swamp." If I get to watch them go through a plan for how to not fight boars in the swamp, even just some of the time, and I like how that goes, then I've figured out how to deal with a whole host of weird little factors that eat away at verisimilitude.

As long as the game is still fun in that state I'll probably keep doing it.

[Armored Walrus]

I'm playing in a campaign right now that doesn't police the 5mwd at all, so our level 9 sorcerer has just been casting twin blight on big things every time they can get close enough to do so, and then whining about being burnt out after one fight with a creature that had a lot of hp but wasn't dealing much damage to us, or even when creatures like that weren't attacking any of us directly. It made the 5 floor dungeon crawl with about 6 long rests worth of stuff in it into a 3 week affair.

Yeah, this seems clearly on the DM, not the rules. If the group is able to comfortably long rest between every encounter then the DM isn't giving any thought as to what happens out in that dungeon while the group is back in town, resting. I get that the rest rules can be problematic and there's no RAW way to deal with players who want to abuse the mechanic, but DM creativity has to come into play at some point. You can't rely on the system itself to solve every problem. If you could, you'd be able to play without a DM.


I was tempted to make rest lengths variable the next time I was gonna DM those players (with default rest rules applying in civilization, but gritty variant applying when out in the wilderness,) but you can probably tell from my posts here that I now think encumbrance and ration tracking will set them on a better trajectory.

Encumbrance and ration tracking will at least allow you to apply some resource attrition outside of combat, so it will be a way to exert some pressure without having to throw 6 to 8 wilderness encounters at them for every day of travel. However, also give some thought to the other tools you have in your tool box. If the party walks in the entrance of the dungeon, dumps all their spell slots on the 4 goblins guarding the entrance, and then heads back to town to rest for the day, you don't need to dump wilderness encounters on them to discourage that tactic. (you could, but you don't have to). They could simply come back the next day and find that their actions of the day before have had consequences. Either the entrance is now barricaded and 10 goblins armed with bows sit behind the barricade, with caltrops strewn in the approach to the barricade. (which is close to your idea of throwing encounters at them that are too hard for them, but not via a random encounter table as you suggest) Or, the goblins discovered their 4 slain comrades, cleaned all their treasure and belongings out of the dungeon and abandoned it, leaving the party with an empty cave to explore. Or, give their quest a time limit. Or enforce daily expenses (every day out of the dungeon is going to drain their resources, forcing them back into it to find loot). Or have a rival adventuring party clean out the caves and get the quest reward while the party is resting. Or...

I have the opposite problem with my group for the most part. I had them going through Sunless Citadel; about 8 encounters in, they short rested, solely for the purpose of recovering hitpoints because they had taken enough damage to need to do it. But at that point the druids still hadn't used a wild shape (2 druids, one land, one moon) and the monk had only used one of his three ki points. But both druids had used their 2nd level spell slots and only had a few 1st level slots left. This was about 8 sessions ago, they are now finding their stride and committing a bit more short rest resources to each fight, and doing a better job of holding on to their long rest resources. Maybe your group will similarly learn and improve over time ;)

[HidesHisEyes]

I don't design encounters for the party, I design regions and then the party goes through them if they want to, or are forced to by the adventures they embark on. My setting is basically a bunch of zones and each zone has it's own encounter table. But each table has a couple encounters on it that are much harder than the rest, like an iconic creature. So I'll have, say, a large marshland fairly close to a city, so it's only "Level 3-5" and I'll fill the encounter table with stuff that makes sense. Lizardfolk, Giant Snakes, Trolls etc. But I'll also have a Hydra on there as an apex predator. Then there will be a few caves the PC's can delve into that are level appropriate for the region, but there will probably also be a more dangerous location that they definitely shouldn't go into at level 4. The townsfolk will likely know about it and if they PC's do some research before setting out they'll be told to steer clear of the Rippling Caves because there's crazy stuff in there.

So, I want the players to trudge through the wilderness for a week and get a decent adventuring day out of it without having 40 encounters (hence Gritty Realism) but I also want them to be able to tackle dungeons once in a while without having to clear the whole thing + 3 wilderness encounters without taking a rest. That's where the flexible short rests come in. To me, travel is part of the adventure and it should be dangerous and eventful, but it should not feel like a punishment, nor should it cause an imbalance in the game because it favours one type of rest over the other. The default rules make travel a joke in 5e and I'm not surprised most people hand-wave it. It's just a shame because I feel travel and exploration are a key part of D&D and Fantasy as a whole.

After 2+ years of DMing I'm just now getting around to trying to run a proper sandbox game, taking the same approach as you. Can you point me at a good guide to this style of DMing, any articles or YouTube videos or anything?

[Thrudd]

Aside from how this behavior bleeds over and they start to nova all encounters, going full nova on an encounter has two big strikes against it:
The standard forum parrot answer is, short rest gated characters feel underpowered, because long rest gated characters have basically 3x the resources to dump into the nuclear option whenever they run into an owlbear.
The broader game design answer... there's no decision making here. It's weird if you don't know what special moves you have that you can only do so many times a day and how to use them to deal a lot of damage or otherwise trivialize a single day encounter.

I already brought that up. Any combat that requires you to nova your entire day's worth of resources is a poorly designed encounter, and has a much higher chance of a TPK. I just got done saying that every table is different, but you shouldn't have to experience too many different tables before you've seen a few that throw 3x the xp budget for a deadly encounter at their party over and over, because they want players to feel like they are just scraping by, and then without much warning oops everyone died. Yeah, turns out throwing an entire adventuring dayTM of xp at a party all at once gets really swingy.

You can fudge dice rolls to compensate for that, but in the middle of combat I'm really really bad at judging when somebody did a dumb thing and got their character killed vs when I did a dumb dm thing and I'm gonna kill everyone. Maybe the rat bastard in me will get a little more conniving about this kind of thing over time, but right now I have to work really hard to not just let everyone live every time... or let all the dice fall as they may.

Now, this isn't a problem for me in a dungeon. I can throw a long series of medium difficulty encounters at them because I know that the fireball they use to kill 6 critters without so much as getting scuffed shoes is gonna be one fireball less that they can lob at the big threatening monster, or maybe all of the fights are just 6 critters but eventually the party is out of fireballs and the fighter and rogue start to get some cuts and bruises from fighting so many of these things.
...unless the party can just walk outside and take a long rest at any time and know that I'm not going to interrupt them with any anything besides a speed bump that they can spend all remaining spell slots to not get hurt and then finish their long rest cuz wilderness encounters are "fun" instead of "dangerous and unwanted."

You seem to be pitching my own idea at me as if it's something you just thought of. If a party goes full nova and can't kill something then it's a TPK or they run away from it, right?

There's no consideration of resources when a combat is only a speed bump. There's no sense of danger, and the world doesn't seem especially alive. It's a diversion only in that players look away from their smart phone for a moment to make sure they can still do the thing that deals the most damage, and then they space out because they know it doesn't really matter.

I do a couple of things at my table to dissuade that kind of attitude, but they mainly revolve around not letting these combats be speed bumps.

It's gotta be all deadly encounters or worse before 3 wilderness encounters in a day is going to represent much risk, but sure. If you roll for encounters 4 times in a day how often is that actually going to result in combat during the day? What's your dice chart look like for that?

Hey, I was arguing to not have loot on the wilderness encounters. If you're also saying that there's not sweet loot on wilderness encounters then that seems to be another case of proposing my own position to me like it's your own novel idea. If that's what's happened, I'd rather you acknowledge things I've said and state agreement. Feels kind of like stealing credit otherwise (not all that much of what I've said is original either, but I'm not saying it to the person I heard it from.)

Yup. I'm eager to find ways to make the party more interested in 'completing the quest' than killing 9000 boars in the swamp. They're already a little bit more interested in completing the question just because it is the quest, but I want them to say "it would be best if we avoided fighting any of the swamp boars," or possibly "this dungeon would have been easier if we didn't fight so many boars in the swamp." If I get to watch them go through a plan for how to not fight boars in the swamp, even just some of the time, and I like how that goes, then I've figured out how to deal with a whole host of weird little factors that eat away at verisimilitude.

As long as the game is still fun in that state I'll probably keep doing it.

I'm didn't mean to imply you didn't have those ideas already, I'm just rambling about wilderness encounters.

I probably have some different design assumptions than you overall, because I generally want my combats to be fast and furious. Obviously more combatants will make it longer and more complex, but I don't plan out encounters in much more detail than what enemies are present (and what their motives are in general) and what the terrain is like. I put that stuff on the table and see how it goes. The only difference between my planned and random encounters is that I improvise a random encounter's terrain according to wherever the characters happen to be, rather than having it in a specific place.

I never intend to TPK, and I don't purposefully do things that are likely to cause that, but I won't stop it from happening if the dice go that way or they fail to retreat in face of being outclassed. I am 100% a "dice fall where they may" DM. The party dying in the wilderness because they didn't get to the dungeon fast enough, or just because of bad luck, is a valid possibility. That might be what it takes for the players to learn that efficient travel is important and maybe their next set of characters will treat it more seriously and take better precautions.

I also think some of this sounds like a player problem rather than a design or methodology problem, with people not paying attention when it isn't their turn and not recognizing the difference between situations where they can expect to rest after an encounter(on long journeys) and when they can't (in the dungeon)- those things should come with just being generally aware of the fictional environment of the characters. I find that making sure players have clear goals for their characters helps them in this regard - knowing that their characters in general have some specific purpose that is directly connected to the thing for which the game rewards XP, and also that they individually have goals which involve the specific things that will gain them XP.

I do think 5e's rest mechanics aren't great, and could use some house ruling even beyond the "gritty" healing variant - unless the intent is to play in more of a 4e manner where you plan out the course of events, with a number of set-piece encounters and defined times when rests occur. The players have no choice to turn back or delay the adventure - they get their 6 encounters per long rest with opportunity to take two short rests at any time in between them (or whatever the book recommends), and narrated events with maybe some non-combat skills and role play happening in between set pieces. So partly these problems are a result of 5e's design/usage disconnect.

Dice charts for me vary. I check between three and twelve times for each day, and have between 10 and 25% chance of encounter, all depending on the details of the region. I agree that tracking rations is essential as well, and strict time keeping goes without saying. Possibility of getting lost in areas with no roads or easily followed features must also be tracked. Additionally, in the wilderness, a successful long rest isn't assured (although it is much more likely than the chance of resting in or near a dungeon)- I roll for encounters between one and four times during the 8 hour period usually reserved for resting/sleeping. If an encounter occurs that results in any activity besides walking and talking, then no long rest happens.

I'm not saying there can't ever be random loot in the wilderness, even of a decent amount sometimes. But it's always random. If the roll says an ogre shows up, and ogres have treasure type whatever (in its lair), then they'll get some treasure if they find the lair. Will that divert them from going to the dungeon, to wander around the woods looking for more monster lairs? Maybe - they'll probably get tired of that when they aren't reliably finding tons of monster lairs. At some point I'll decide that a region's monster population is basically tapped-out and stop having anything happen. But if they want to scour the countryside for monsters to kill instead of going to the ruins to find treasure as they had planned, that's their choice, it probably means they're having fun fighting the random encounters so that's fine with me. The dungeon is still there whenever they want to go (though I might change some things if there's a time sensitive element).

I'm also looking at wilderness travel from the perspective of the entire journey, rather than what happens in any given day. If the journey includes the possibility of an encounter that could kill characters, then it doesn't matter that for five out of those days they had no encounters and for three days they had one or two easy encounters and got to rest in between. That last one with the three trolls should tell them that they shouldn't dawdle around out there - there's a possibility at any given time they could run into something like that, and maybe next time they will be less lucky and get surprised instead of seeing the monsters in time and being able to get away with only one character bleeding out and sacrificing two backpacks full of rations and a sack of gold.

I don't need every trip to always test their resource management of rest-recharged abilities. That's going to happen in the dungeon, for sure. The wilderness is a hit-or-miss place. Sure, you might get a bunch of easy encounters where you get to use all your spells and can rest right afterwards or even make it to the dungeon uneventfully- but it only takes one to go bad - where you get woken up in the middle of your sleep by a manticore, nobody has any recharge abilities, nobody has healed yet, and you all get eaten.

For XP, I think reinstituting XP for gold is the simplest way. Also, make clear that it is gold returned to whatever home base/settlement/city from the dungeon or adventure that earns them the XP, not just the possession of treasure itself. No XP for picking pockets, or opening up a tavern, or finding a gold mine. Divide the amount of XP rewarded for monster kills by ten or so. Give one XP per gold piece value recovered. No reward for magic items and scrolls that are kept and used by the party - the utility is the reward. Alternatively or additionally, reward a set XP amount that you determine based on the difficulty of the dungeon for all who successfully return from the adventure. Extra XP if there was a specific objective/quest that was accomplished (still reducing monster XP). Or if it's easier, keep monster XP the same, but make the gold/quest reward worth about ten times what monsters alone are worth, and increase the amount of XP required to level by a factor of ten. This should make it clear that the most efficient way to gain levels is through completing adventures, not finding easy things to kill.

[mephnick]

After 2+ years of DMing I'm just now getting around to trying to run a proper sandbox game, taking the same approach as you. Can you point me at a good guide to this style of DMing, any articles or YouTube videos or anything?

Oh man, I've consumed so much stuff that's formed my DM style over the years, but let's see. Some random stuff I can recall for now:

For sandbox/hexcrawl stuff specifically, I'd say look at the Alexandrian article on building a hexcrawl. Whether or not you want to do a true hexcrawl, it has a lot of good ideas about travel, navigation and exploration:
http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl

There's also the stuff by Ben Robbins, who created the West Marches style of gameplay. I don't run mass "West Marches" games, but the design intent is focused on exploration, danger and keeping adventurers out of the boring cities and in the wilds.
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/94/west-marches-running-your-own/

Then there's two little youtube podcast series by Stephen Lumpkin and Adam Koebel (co-creator of Dungeon World) called Being Everything Else and Hack Attack. Being Everything Else is their general view on DMing and gaming in general. Part of it everyone should view is their Hate the Game section that explains how different systems encourage different playstyles and you shouldn't use a system that doesn't suit your goal. (I'm looking at you D&D GMs who try and force D&D into genres it's not meant to handle. I complain about this a lot on this forum). There's a lot of idle podcast chatter, but the ideas are quite good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw17SbxcXrE&list=PLuGFF6RJgaMrlxVxEB7XsBerrIFgnqZIa&index=1

Hack Attack is their attempt to use 5e to run Stephen's West Marches campaign. It discusses house rules etc, but mainly discusses some design goals about character driven exploration, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW9mSaRCnLA

And obviously I've taken a lot of advice from AngryDM over the last couple of years. I don't have time to find the individual articles, but he talks about exploration, sandboxes etc in quite a few of them.

[Zorku]

Yeah, this seems clearly on the DM, not the rules. If the group is able to comfortably long rest between every encounter then the DM isn't giving any thought as to what happens out in that dungeon while the group is back in town, resting. I get that the rest rules can be problematic and there's no RAW way to deal with players who want to abuse the mechanic, but DM creativity has to come into play at some point. You can't rely on the system itself to solve every problem. If you could, you'd be able to play without a DM.I havn't really done an accumulated forum knowledge rant at the guy because he hasn't asked about those rules or even suggested that this is a problem. I can see him designing tripple deadly encounters in order to actually deplete some resources (which would seem to be easier than usual considering that all of the party healing comes in the form of lay on hands and a recharging magic item that works like a heal pot,) and I might be catching onto the tricks he's using to dial it back when it looks like somebody is gonna die in the first encounter of the day, but the group seems content with how it's working for now... except for the aforementioned tension with that sorc always wanting to rest when the rest of the group is happy to continue.

He also went from no rolls for wandering monsters to the possibility of having rests interrupted, so he's tweaking stuff in his own way and it's not really my business to tell him how he should run his game unprompted.


Encumbrance and ration tracking will at least allow you to apply some resource attrition outside of combat, so it will be a way to exert some pressure without having to throw 6 to 8 wilderness encounters at them for every day of travel. However, also give some thought to the other tools you have in your tool box.
-passage of time stuff-Yeah, I'm familiar with what forums have to say there, and I've developed some strong opinions about how alert a compound becomes after an hour or three, or how much of a massacre it takes before the residents just grab what they can carry and slink away into the night. I'm trying to get myself thinking about more creative time limits for dungeons, like if it's all the insides of some antediluvian worm creature that everyone thought had died, but somehow the thing's metabolism is restarting and the place is just gonna fill up with acid and whatever else goes on within a leviathan like that.

[Tanarii]

Yeah, I'm familiar with what forums have to say there, and I've developed some strong opinions about how alert a compound becomes after an hour or three, or how much of a massacre it takes before the residents just grab what they can carry and slink away into the night. IMo the biggest check on players taking Long Rests at or near an adventuring site isn't worrying tabout "the entire place assaults you in the night" (even though many of my players have experienced that), but rather finding out "everyone grabbed their valuable loot and left". And it's their choice to Long Rest that let the loo... enemy get away.

[Armored Walrus]

I havn't really done an accumulated forum knowledge rant at the guy ..
... he's tweaking stuff in his own way and it's not really my business to tell him how he should run his game unprompted.

Yeah, me saying it's on him probably sounded like I was advocating calling him out on it. I'm certainly not if the table is working. Just was clarifying that I don't view that as a problem with the system, but rather with the way it's being applied.




I'm trying to get myself thinking about more creative time limits for dungeons, like if it's all the insides of some antediluvian worm creature that everyone thought had died, but somehow the thing's metabolism is restarting and the place is just gonna fill up with acid and whatever else goes on within a leviathan like that.

I like that one.

Temuachan or whatever it's called, has the gas filling the lower levels. Angry DM, in the first day of his megadungeon, uses the idea that the party needs to take some medicine they looted from some goblins back to the village before a kid there dies as a way to get them out of the dungeon the first day, but also as a way to make sure they delve deep enough into the first day without stopping for a long rest. Wandering monsters' job is sort of to accomplish the same thing. Letting the party know you will randomly roll for an encounter every time they rest will make them think about whether or not they actually need to. There's no reason the mechanic for random encounters has to be invisible to the players. Unstable tunnels, with random tremors that threaten to collapse the dungeon might work, too.

[Zorku]

I'm didn't mean to imply you didn't have those ideas already, I'm just rambling about wilderness encounters.

I probably have some different design assumptions than you overall, because I generally want my combats to be fast and furious. Obviously more combatants will make it longer and more complex, but I don't plan out encounters in much more detail than what enemies are present (and what their motives are in general) and what the terrain is like. I put that stuff on the table and see how it goes. The only difference between my planned and random encounters is that I improvise a random encounter's terrain according to wherever the characters happen to be, rather than having it in a specific place.

I never intend to TPK, and I don't purposefully do things that are likely to cause that, but I won't stop it from happening if the dice go that way or they fail to retreat in face of being outclassed. I am 100% a "dice fall where they may" DM. The party dying in the wilderness because they didn't get to the dungeon fast enough, or just because of bad luck, is a valid possibility. That might be what it takes for the players to learn that efficient travel is important and maybe their next set of characters will treat it more seriously and take better precautions.Sounds similar enough so far, if we ignore the fact that I keep pulling my punches.


I also think some of this sounds like a player problem rather than a design or methodology problem, with people not paying attention when it isn't their turn and not recognizing the difference between situations where they can expect to rest after an encounter(on long journeys) and when they can't (in the dungeon)- those things should come with just being generally aware of the fictional environment of the characters. I find that making sure players have clear goals for their characters helps them in this regard - knowing that their characters in general have some specific purpose that is directly connected to the thing for which the game rewards XP, and also that they individually have goals which involve the specific things that will gain them XP.I don't want to entirely excuse the behavior of particular players, but these habits do seem to generally be responses to a lenient environment and an absence of costs associated with behaviors. Those things fall right in the DM wheelhouse, so it seems easy enough to adjust rules and in so doing, down regulate bad habits.

I've got a ton of psychology and sociology baggage I'm bringing to the table though. I wouldn't think someone was all that foolish if they told me that I don't think people have any power over their behaviors...


I do think 5e's rest mechanics aren't great, and could use some house ruling even beyond the "gritty" healing variant - unless the intent is to play in more of a 4e manner where you plan out the course of events, with a number of set-piece encounters and defined times when rests occur. The players have no choice to turn back or delay the adventure - they get their 6 encounters per long rest with opportunity to take two short rests at any time in between them (or whatever the book recommends), and narrated events with maybe some non-combat skills and role play happening in between set pieces. So partly these problems are a result of 5e's design/usage disconnect.I basically agree, but this was a bit of a problem in 3.5 as well, wasn't it?

I think that the default rest rules with some encumbrance and ration tracking will create the kind of pressure that I want, but the system isn't flexible enough that I can just bend it a bit and then have appropriate rules for, say, sea travel and naval combat.


Dice charts for me vary. I check between three and twelve times for each day, and have between 10 and 25% chance of encounter, all depending on the details of the region. I agree that tracking rations is essential as well, and strict time keeping goes without saying. Possibility of getting lost in areas with no roads or easily followed features must also be tracked. Additionally, in the wilderness, a successful long rest isn't assured (although it is much more likely than the chance of resting in or near a dungeon)- I roll for encounters between one and four times during the 8 hour period usually reserved for resting/sleeping. If an encounter occurs that results in any activity besides walking and talking, then no long rest happens. [quote]I presume that 12 wandering monster checks in a day is not so much wilderness as it is the immediate vicinity of a dungeon?

If treasure is xp and wilderness encounters are chipping away at that (damage, theft, scattered goods,) during the return trip, then 1 or 2 in a day is plenty.

[quote]I'm not saying there can't ever be random loot in the wilderness, even of a decent amount sometimes. But it's always random. If the roll says an ogre shows up, and ogres have treasure type whatever (in its lair), then they'll get some treasure if they find the lair. Will that divert them from going to the dungeon, to wander around the woods looking for more monster lairs? Maybe - they'll probably get tired of that when they aren't reliably finding tons of monster lairs. At some point I'll decide that a region's monster population is basically tapped-out and stop having anything happen. But if they want to scour the countryside for monsters to kill instead of going to the ruins to find treasure as they had planned, that's their choice, it probably means they're having fun fighting the random encounters so that's fine with me. The dungeon is still there whenever they want to go (though I might change some things if there's a time sensitive element).You made that much more reasonable than what I've seen. 5e doesn't do a whole lot to establish what's in an ogre's lair, so picture a new DM that decides that the ogre is just carrying 800 gold in a large coinpurse, and has some cool jewelry in a fannypack, and the lair never existed so this is just everything you could possibly get from killing an ogre.

Hopefully I made that sound like a money pinata, but take that a step further now, and completely sever wealth from power. Money doesn't buy anything a hero has any reason to care about, but instead they get paid in xp. Killing 8 ogres in the wilderness is just as good as killing 8 ogres in a dungeon now, except that the back of the 8-ogres dungeon maybe has a ring that allows you to cast a cantrip. Maybe one of the PCs has a reason for going into that dungeon, but the others basically get the same benefits either way.


I'm also looking at wilderness travel from the perspective of the entire journey, rather than what happens in any given day. If the journey includes the possibility of an encounter that could kill characters, then it doesn't matter that for five out of those days they had no encounters and for three days they had one or two easy encounters and got to rest in between. That last one with the three trolls should tell them that they shouldn't dawdle around out there - there's a possibility at any given time they could run into something like that, and maybe next time they will be less lucky and get surprised instead of seeing the monsters in time and being able to get away with only one character bleeding out and sacrificing two backpacks full of rations and a sack of gold.I prefer the full journey thing, but ditching a backpack full of rations doesn't mean anything if you weren't tracking rations, and having a party member bleeding out doesn't mean very much if you ran off, woke up with full hp the next day, and then didn't run into anything for 4 days.

If there's some kind of resource attrition going on then it's all automatically meaningful, because there's always some risk of hitting 0 of some resource and being screwed for it. If it's not the kind of thing that will blindside them, and they can easily count about how many days they can easily last, then there's a clear turn around point and they either turn around to head home or they push on against better judgement and probably have a rough time and less to show for their efforts at the end even though they killed lots of things.


I don't need every trip to always test their resource management of rest-recharged abilities. That's going to happen in the dungeon, for sure. The wilderness is a hit-or-miss place. Sure, you might get a bunch of easy encounters where you get to use all your spells and can rest right afterwards or even make it to the dungeon uneventfully- but it only takes one to go bad - where you get woken up in the middle of your sleep by a manticore, nobody has any recharge abilities, nobody has healed yet, and you all get eaten.Nobody has any recharge abilities? That took more than 1 bad encounter. You either had that kind of metered out adventuring day and threw the manticore on top of it, or they already fought an encounter full of giant stuff they should have run away from.

Still, where you roll as many as 12 times in a day, that's creating this kind of dynamic. Before you brought that up I presumed no more than 2 rolls per day of travel, since that seems to be the most standard way people do this.


XP ramblingsWell yeah, of course you choose something like that. In a hex crawl with lots of dungeons you're probably fine with pure gold to xp and restricted monster slaying xp. If you want to play a little more modern with lots of high fantasy adventures that take place inside of civilization, then you need some kind of flat reward for accomplishing tasks. Other tweaks are possible, but the KISS principle is probably best.

[Thrudd]

I presume that 12 wandering monster checks in a day is not so much wilderness as it is the immediate vicinity of a dungeon?

If treasure is xp and wilderness encounters are chipping away at that (damage, theft, scattered goods,) during the return trip, then 1 or 2 in a day is plenty.

....

Nobody has any recharge abilities? That took more than 1 bad encounter. You either had that kind of metered out adventuring day and threw the manticore on top of it, or they already fought an encounter full of giant stuff they should have run away from.

Still, where you roll as many as 12 times in a day, that's creating this kind of dynamic. Before you brought that up I presumed no more than 2 rolls per day of travel, since that seems to be the most standard way people do this.

...


Yeah, 12 checks a day would be extremely bad places - near the dwelling of lots of monsters, an active war zone, a cursed city where the entire population is undead, etc. Within a couple days of civilization would be 3 times a day, with some of the possible encounters being not necessarily hostile people or animals.

The example of no recharge abilities may have been extreme, but you never know. I mean, if the players are the sort you mention, who think they can nova every encounter because they'll just long rest afterward, that's when you might see that, even if they only had one easy encounter earlier that day.

Yes, all of this relies completely on tracking resources and having consequences for running out of resources in order to be meaningful. Any time DMs stopped doing that, in any edition, the system starts to break down.

For the choices of the players regarding their travels to be consequential requires all these elements working in concert - wandering monsters of sufficient danger and frequency, rations and abilities that require some effort to replenish (like 15 min per spell per spell level to memorize), mapping and getting lost, xp for gold/goals rather than River City Ransom style, effects of fatigue and hunger as consequences of travel speed and food rationing, morale and reaction rolls (in whatever form that takes given the edition) and fleeing/pursuit rules (besides just "if you have more movement then you get away, otherwise you don't").

[Tanarii]

I presume that 12 wandering monster checks in a day is not so much wilderness as it is the immediate vicinity of a dungeon?If your wilderness isn't dangerous enough to warrant 24 checks per day, one per hour, don't run adventures in it. Just hand wave the journey, have exactly zero encounters, and teleport them to the dungeon. Or use alternate rules (slower rests) / switch to a game system that's designed to support your extremely safe wilderness.

[Vogonjeltz]

Not SKT. They should have called it "Nova Every Encounter: The Campaign". Other than a couple dungeons 90% of the campaign is 0-1 fights per long rest if you follow the regular rest system. They "fix" this by making most of the random encounters super Deadly and it devolves into rocket tag. I don't know if most people that write D&D articles just don't understand the system, but I was shocked not one of the dozen reviews I read mentioned it.


PoA has 4 rolls per day for encounters (Morning, Day, Evening, Night) with an encounter on an 18+ (unless I've gone mad and taken that from somewhere else). That means it cannot produce a full adventuring day (almost all the encounters are medium), and most of the time will produce only a single encounter - so it is also Nova every encounter, if you don't use some sort of gritty rest.

Hmm, I'll have to recheck those.


Says you. I say adventuring days are things with encounters in them. Mainly because that's what the book uses it to mean, and also because that's when resource expenditure of spell slots becomes relevant.

That said, obviously players won't always know if a day is going to be an 'adventuring day', so I'll grant that means they have to plan as if it may be. It's certainly a choice to prepare Create/Destroy Water over something else, even if the spell slot to cast it only gets cast at the end of a day of non-adventuring. And as you point out, they still need sufficient containers and strength to carry the water for the days when they don't cast it.

I mean, yes, mucking about in the wild outside of civilization is something I'd definitely classify as adventure.


In the variant, where your movespeed drops for carrying too much crap, it seems like you would probably drop the pack on the ground for combat, and quickly have the others carry your crap while you travel. If you're aware of combat movespeed not having a linear relationship with over land travel speed, then any adventurer wizard concerned with encumbrance, but lacking a proper pack animal/hireling, will offload 9lbs of gear onto their unseen servant, or 19 lbs if the party in general is already traveling slow due to light encumbrance*.

*The travel pace rules don't mention the encumbrance variant rule at all (which makes sense given the way the book is put together,) but of course being encumbered is going to alter your travel speed. Based on the combat movespeed penalties and perusing past editions, you would expect to lose 1/3rd of your travel speed for light encumbrance and 2/3rds of it for heavy encumbrance.

e: Or Tenser's Floating disk, the ritual spell that is actually meant to help wizards carry crap.

The problems with both Unseen Servant (which only has a strength of 2, so it's unclear that it can move at anything above 5 feet per 30 seconds overloaded like that) and Tenser's Floating Disk is that both only last an hour and are much slower than normal travel speed. You'd be increasing your overland travel time by 30% when using Tenser's and by 50% using an unseen servant. That's excluding the additional 10 minutes of casting time to use the ritual version (assuming we aren't burning actual spell slots on this).

I agree, the disk is intended to carry stuff...but not quickly or as well as a Pack mule. It's better suited to carrying loot out of a dungeon that a mule might not be able to get into.


What isn't fun about the encounters? How are they different than other encounters? You see some monsters somewhere, or you get surprised by a monster, and you fight just like you fight any other time, or you run away.

They aren't always too hard to beat, and they aren't always without reward for winning. They should be random with creatures that make sense for the area.

Agreed, I use random encounters to provide flavor to the story, ways of having the players know they're operating in a lived in world. Maybe the characters ignore the encounter (if it's not necessarily hostile, or they notice and hide from it) or maybe they get some fun interactions on the way.

[Zorku]

Yeah, 12 checks a day would be extremely bad places - near the dwelling of lots of monsters, an active war zone, a cursed city where the entire population is undead, etc. Within a couple days of civilization would be 3 times a day, with some of the possible encounters being not necessarily hostile people or animals.So... the immediate vicinity of a dungeon.


and fleeing/pursuit rules (besides just "if you have more movement then you get away, otherwise you don't").Yeah. Given that 30ft per rounds is 3.4mph, combat is done pretty much at walking speed, and the sharp weapons are enough of a threat that you just can't actually sprint. An actual chase is gonna happen at closer to 8 times your movespeed, and stubby legs might not translate into run speed (though I would expect it to translate into how long a fit individual can sprint...)

I would like some better gamified maths for fleeing from a combat, but the general narrative "what are you going to do to discourage them from chasing you?" plus skill checks 'thing' seems ok.


If your wilderness isn't dangerous enough to warrant 24 checks per day, one per hour, don't run adventures in it. Just hand wave the journey, have exactly zero encounters, and teleport them to the dungeon. Or use alternate rules (slower rests) / switch to a game system that's designed to support your extremely safe wilderness.
Typical day of walking through irl wilderness that I'm used to tends to involve seeing one pack of grazing animals (cows, goats, etc,) may or may not see one bear, and sight 3-5 places that might house a wildcat, but you don't run into those unless you're stupid enough to crawl into those spaces. I'd usually only do half a day's worth of travel, so we can easily double that. North America doesn't really have the wolf packs it had way back when, but it seems hard to believe that I'd have six different wolf packs decide whether or not I was ideal prey during that time period.

I've got no sense of what dice you roll though, so I can't tell what you think the actual frequency is supposed to be. If the average is supposed to be 3 combat encounters per day then that seems to keep the party from ever journeying more than 1 day into the wilds, whereas I expect like 3 days of travel to get to a lot of primary sites for adventuring do. Also, if you expect around 3 combat encounters per day in untamed wilderness, from 24 dice rolls, then I'm just going to boil that down to fewer dice rolls that accomplish the same thing.

So, what do your charts look like?



The problems with ... Tenser's Floating Disk is that (it) only last(s) an hour and (is) much slower than normal travel speed.5e does not mention a move speed for this spell (though movespeed is a bad metric for out of combat movement for the reason I listed above, and 5e's section on travel doesn't say that the 25ft movespeed races are actually hindered during their journey at all. The entry for the disk even suggests that the only normal way you're going to get more than 100ft away from it would be to leave it stranded on the wrong side of a pit while you keep walking, so I see zero justification for not allowing it to keep up with you. I'd let it follow you on a horse that was dashing at full speed, as there's no reason to continue the weird granularity of movement that comes from combat initiative order.

I tend not to be upset about players recasting spells in order to maintain an effect, but even if you absolutely think that the disk wears off and then the wizard has to start their ritual for a new one, then pile their (~17 sacks) of crap back onto the disk, that's not going to screw with travel pace very much. You're only spending about 8 hours walking on any given day, and although large pack animals can run much faster than humans, any one mount can't cover much more ground in a day than a human can walk in about 8 hours. You're looking at more of a forced march if you travel faster than that (and D&D doesn't even touch on levels of exhaustion if you decide to hustle for an extra 6 miles in a day, though you make a lot of noise and don't easily notice ambushes at that pace.)
A ~10 minute break after every hour of walking easily fits into a day's worth of travel, and if you've got pack animals they need to stop and drink or graze every so often anyway. Aint nobody walking from Sun up to Sun down, uninterrupted. You set up camp, you take down camp, you take breaks in the middle, and no matter who you've got carrying your crap they need a good deal of down time during the day hours to prevent exhaustion.

Checking older editions, AD&D gave it a "move rate of 6"," 3e has the disk explicitly follow you "at your own walking speed," and 4e has it "move with your base speed." So the spell always moved as fast as a normal human could walk, and 5e doesn't even limit it to that. I presume you read the 20ft distance it keeps from you and thought that was a movement rate?

[Tanarii]

Typical day of walking through irl wilderness that I'm used to tends to involve seeing one pack of grazing animals (cows, goats, etc,) may or may not see one bear, and sight 3-5 places that might house a wildcat, but you don't run into those unless you're stupid enough to crawl into those spaces. I'd usually only do half a day's worth of travel, so we can easily double that. North America doesn't really have the wolf packs it had way back when, but it seems hard to believe that I'd have six different wolf packs decide whether or not I was ideal prey during that time period.Modern day North American 'wilderness' is anything but. Also, the fact that you're talking about 'wolf packs' makes me think you're assuming that wilderness encounters are supposed to be animals. This is D&D we're talking about. Wolf Packs are the least of your worries. :smallwink:


I've got no sense of what dice you roll though, so I can't tell what you think the actual frequency is supposed to be. If the average is supposed to be 3 combat encounters per day then that seems to keep the party from ever journeying more than 1 day into the wilds, whereas I expect like 3 days of travel to get to a lot of primary sites for adventuring do. Also, if you expect around 3 combat encounters per day in untamed wilderness, from 24 dice rolls, then I'm just going to boil that down to fewer dice rolls that accomplish the same thing.

So, what do your charts look like?if you run 1d8 per hour, 1 is a random encounter, breaks down as:
14% - 1 encounter
23% - 2 encounters
24% - 3 encounters
18% - 4 encounters
10% - 5 encounters
4.5% - 6 encounters
Or around or about 2-3 encounters per day. That's low, but the Players don't know when they will occur. More importantly, they can't safely assume they will be able to Long Rest without issue. Odds of one encounter in any 8 hour period is ~40%. Players have to plan for (potentially) multiple day's worth of encounters per Long Rest, even without Gritty Realism rules in play.

[Finieous]

I've got no sense of what dice you roll though, so I can't tell what you think the actual frequency is supposed to be. If the average is supposed to be 3 combat encounters per day then that seems to keep the party from ever journeying more than 1 day into the wilds, whereas I expect like 3 days of travel to get to a lot of primary sites for adventuring do. Also, if you expect around 3 combat encounters per day in untamed wilderness, from 24 dice rolls, then I'm just going to boil that down to fewer dice rolls that accomplish the same thing.


The published rule in the DMG is 18+ on a d20.

[Stump]

I'm curious how you guys implement these random encounters. If my players are on a 3 day journey and I roll an average of ~3 encounters per day, that's NINE encounters back-to-back until they get where they want to be. And that's for a pretty short journey. I love the *idea* of making travel feel real and potentially dangerous, but that just seems so linear and boring. That's probably two full play sessions just to play out the travel to the next city over. What am I missing?

[Tanarii]

I love the *idea* of making travel feel real and potentially dangerous, but that just seems so linear and boring. That's probably two full play sessions just to play out the travel to the next city over. What am I missing?The next city over isn't a trip through dangerous wilderness. It's a trip through civilization. No encounter tables are needed.

Some frontier areas are something in between, it's entirely possible to adjust the chance of encounter and frequency of check as needed.

But my philosophy with 5e in particular is if your adventuring is less dangerous than 3 encounters / adventuring day, including wilderness adventuring, then it's time to bust out the Gritty Realism rest rules anyway.

[Zorku]

Modern day North American 'wilderness' is anything but. Also, the fact that you're talking about 'wolf packs' makes me think you're assuming that wilderness encounters are supposed to be animals. This is D&D we're talking about. Wolf Packs are the least of your worries. :smallwink:

if you run 1d8 per hour, 1 is a random encounter, breaks down as:
14% - 1 encounter
23% - 2 encounters
24% - 3 encounters
18% - 4 encounters
10% - 5 encounters
4.5% - 6 encounters
Or around or about 2-3 encounters per day. That's low, but the Players don't know when they will occur. More importantly, they can't safely assume they will be able to Long Rest without issue. Odds of one encounter in any 8 hour period is ~40%. Players have to plan for (potentially) multiple day's worth of encounters per Long Rest, even without Gritty Realism rules in play.
No, I mention wolves because you need a certain number of prey animals for large predators to eat, and anything that's physically bigger than a couple of wolves glued to each other isn't going to need to eat much less than those wolves to survive. In warmer climates your dinosaurs or similar body plan monstrosities would have somewhat lower metabolic demands, but if you don't also have some big ****ing grazers for them to eat then they're going to waste a lot more energy looking for food and generally have to eat a similar enough volume of food that it shouldn't radically skew the encounter rate.

Of course, humans can get chased up a tree by a moose just as easily as by a pack of wolves, but the MM is a bit scarce on dangerous herbivores.

So what's the population density like in a properly wild area? More predators for sure, and more monstrosities than you'd expect, but double or triple the number of mundane predators the land could support? Seems far fetched to me.

-

The 1 in 8 thing makes more sense for why there are so many checks, but having the DM roll the dice that much seems a bit masturbatory to me. If you went with the bounded accuracy notion of rolling when odds are closer to 0.5, then 6 rolls per day could give you the same expected 0-6 encounters per day, and you'd just be nudging the target number up or down to decide if there should be more or less. You couldn't get more than 2 encounters (or 3 if you decide that these happen exactly at the start middle and end, or decide that the intervals are uneven, but those seem like dickish dm behavior, for encounters that haven't been tracking the party,) in a long rest, but having more monstrosities wander into camp than that seems difficult to explain anyway.

-

So, this hasn't really answered my questions about range limits. Because you can't rest without getting hit in the night, there's no traveling much further than 2 days away from a settlement... or do your players somehow manage to trek 7 days into the wilderness and somehow not die on the way back?


The published rule in the DMG is 18+ on a d20.
Yeah, but it suggests that based on how active an area is. Rolling once per hour is the maximum setting for that, whereas Tanarii had just suggested that 'if you don't roll at least once per hour you should just fast forward and say they got to the destination uneventfully.'

It's done in fairly fuzzy language, but the impression I get from that passage is that in plains or forest about a day out from the town you roll twice per day, every 4 or 8 hours is more like when you're in the forest that people never go into, and hourly is the fire swamps where the ROUS are a well known terror.

DMG also suggests that there's roughly one monster lair per 420 square miles (6 in a 50x50 mile area.) If these things stay out of each other's territory then you'd only cross one of those per day (and end in the periphery of another. It's 20.5 miles if you go right down the middle.) You could hit more than that at an oblique angle, but that would be comparably safer as the monsters spend exponentially more time closer to their lair.

[Tanarii]

No, I mention wolves because you need a certain number of prey animals for large predators to eatYou're still focusing on animals by the sounds of it. Or animal-like monsters.


The 1 in 8 thing makes more sense for why there are so many checks, but having the DM roll the dice that much seems a bit masturbatory to me. If you went with the bounded accuracy notion of rolling when odds are closer to 0.5, then 6 rolls per day could give you the same expected 0-6 encounters per day, and you'd just be nudging the target number up or down to decide if there should be more or less. You couldn't get more than 2 encounters (or 3 if you decide that these happen exactly at the start middle and end, or decide that the intervals are uneven, but those seem like dickish dm behavior, for encounters that haven't been tracking the party,) in a long rest, but having more monstrosities wander into camp than that seems difficult to explain anyway.eh, West Marches did 8 checks per day, with a random determination of what hour within a 4 hour window an encounter occurred. If that works better for you, use that. But you're going to want to up the encounter rate a LOT to make it match the 3 (probably Deadly) encounters per adventuring day needed.


So, this hasn't really answered my questions about range limits. Because you can't rest without getting hit in the night, there's no traveling much further than 2 days away from a settlement... or do your players somehow manage to trek 7 days into the wilderness and somehow not die on the way back?Yes. Of course. Adventuring in dangerous wilderness is dangerous, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.



Yeah, but it suggests that based on how active an area is. Rolling once per hour is the maximum setting for that, whereas Tanarii had just suggested that 'if you don't roll at least once per hour you should just fast forward and say they got to the destination uneventfully.'One thing I should probably note: I'm talking about a AD&D/Classic, West Marches, or Torchbearer-like campaign setting here. Given the topic of the thread. If you're not, then we're just posting at cross purposes.


DMG also suggests that there's roughly one monster lair per 420 square miles (6 in a 50x50 mile area.) If these things stay out of each other's territory then you'd only cross one of those per day (and end in the periphery of another. It's 20.5 miles if you go right down the middle.) You could hit more than that at an oblique angle, but that would be comparably safer as the monsters spend exponentially more time closer to their lair.You're clearly thinking of a monster lair as something other than a full adventuring day. 5-6 encounters, if the party is of appropriate level. (No guarantee on the latter of course.)

[Finieous]

Yeah, but it suggests that based on how active an area is. Rolling once per hour is the maximum setting for that, whereas Tanarii had just suggested that 'if you don't roll at least once per hour you should just fast forward and say they got to the destination uneventfully.'


Not sure what you mean. It says the DM can decide how often to roll and encounter occurs on 18+. Obviously, how often the DM rolls will usually depend on how dangerous he wants to make the area.

It might not be the most helpful thing to say, but it really seems to me like you're overthinking this. I really dig wilderness adventuring and exploration, so I run in point-of-light mode and have been since 1980. Read that intro to Keep on the Borderlands again. The OGB Forgotten Realms (IMO) worked well with this, and I feel like Wizards has tried to get back to it in 5e -- returning to "The Savage Frontier." In this mode, you're traveling through howling wilderness that's already been overrun by Chaos monsters and now it's coming for your huddled, little settlements, too. In SKT, Nightstone, which gets hit by cloud giants, goblins (edit: bandits -- I forgot the Seven Snakes!) and orcs all in Chapter 1 fits right in. :smallbiggrin:

If that's not your bag, do it differently. If you want your wilderness to be about as safe as the U.S. National Park system, that's cool. Adjust accordingly. The game won't work (or play) quite the same way, but that's obvious.

[Armored Walrus]

No, I mention wolves because you need a certain number of prey animals for large predators to eat, and anything that's physically bigger than a couple of wolves glued to each other isn't going to need to eat much less than those wolves to survive. In warmer climates your dinosaurs or similar body plan monstrosities would have somewhat lower metabolic demands, but if you don't also have some big ****ing grazers for them to eat then they're going to waste a lot more energy looking for food and generally have to eat a similar enough volume of food that it shouldn't radically skew the encounter rate.

Of course, humans can get chased up a tree by a moose just as easily as by a pack of wolves, but the MM is a bit scarce on dangerous herbivores.

So what's the population density like in a properly wild area? More predators for sure, and more monstrosities than you'd expect, but double or triple the number of mundane predators the land could support? Seems far fetched to me.


You're ignoring things like sentient trees, elementals, fey creatures who drink moonlight (or however they get their sustenance), fellow travelers, things that can burrow up from deep below the surface, undead (who need no prey to sustain them), nomadic species...

Not every random encounter has to be with a predator, not every random encounter needs to be with a creature - it could be a weather-related incident, or an obstacle to be overcome, it could occur in a pocket dimension that the party unknowingly wandered into, or your players could have a higher level of suspension of disbelief than your average GitP forum-dweller and just accept that the wilderness is as dangerous as you say it is, and not worry about how much sense that makes based on real-world ecology. If your wilderness is equivalent to a trek through the Fire Swamp in Princess Bride, then it is, regardless of how unlikely that seems to all of us sitting in our comfy chairs, looking at our computer screens.

Edit: Funny that I replied to just this part of your post without reading the rest of it, then went back and caught up, and saw your reference to the Fire Swamp :P

[Zorku]

You're still focusing on animals by the sounds of it. Or animal-like monsters.If you've got something better to use as a basis then let's hear it.

Considering that you dismissed modern wilderness as basically being fake-wilderness it seemed like you did have some notion of how wild the lands were in ye olden times, so this criticism hardly looks genuine.


eh, West Marches did 8 checks per day, with a random determination of what hour within a 4 hour window an encounter occurred. If that works better for you, use that. But you're going to want to up the encounter rate a LOT to make it match the 3 (probably Deadly) encounters per adventuring day needed.This whole thread is about incorporating torchbearer ideas so if you do any of that you don't necessarily need wilderness travel to be proper "Adventuring Days" for it to still cause some kind of attrition. Considering that it only takes a couple of months of proper adventuring days to go from 1-20 I actually wouldn't want the typical day spend on travel to contain that much xp. It's not a problem if some do, but the actual dungeon should be more rewarding (and perhaps more risky,) than the trip to and back from the dungeon, right?


Yes. Of course. Adventuring in dangerous wilderness is dangerous, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.That's a nice claim. Can you actually explain how a party would be able to trek into the wild for a week where it's not totally uncommon to have 5 encounters in a day, most of which are deadly due to your expectation that the dice will usually spit out 3 encounters per day? Leading with deadly and then dialing it back if the 3 encounter comes really early into the day doesn't seem genuine, so I presume you have some solution that doesn't baby the party like that?


One thing I should probably note: I'm talking about a AD&D/Classic, West Marches, or Torchbearer-like campaign setting here. Given the topic of the thread. If you're not, then we're just posting at cross purposes.The thread is specifically a kind of "let's steal the most useful bits for D&D" venture, but if you want to just talk about playing Torchbearer then I can do that too.


You're clearly thinking of a monster lair as something other than a full adventuring day. 5-6 encounters, if the party is of appropriate level. (No guarantee on the latter of course.)Inside the lair? Sure. You can have 3-6 encounters worth of trolls living in some cave. Less lazy, about half as many trolls are in the lair and you've got a few monsters that go along well with trolls, either joining them in the combat or acting as elusive pests that the trolls can't get at (even through they're happy to look at the party as a quick meal.) If you're encountering these things while traveling over land then the trolls that inhabit that lair naturally have to spread out. With 2500miles2 even a lair that houses 100 trolls is only going to have 1 troll per 25miles2. 4-5 CR 5 creatures makes an ok adventuring day for 4 level 4 PCs, but by the time the party is level 7 how are they running into that many young dragons or hydras or fomorians? You don't just cram a hundred of those huge things into the one lair, and having their range be a lot larger than halfway to the next closest monster lair doesn't change the overall density.

It ends up being like the old 2d console RPGs where everybody has menial problems for the heroes to solves and none of that **** moves in any way until the heroes get close. Your formorian ends up always magically being in the right strip of territory to jump out at the party. At least dragons fly fast enough that they can cover a lot of ground in a day, but how the hell does a hydra know that somebody is trying to travel a fairly straight line through the wilds?

Now, I know that you generally get better and more interesting fights when there are multiple opponents, but only the intelligent creatures are going to have some kind of scout network where they can actively direct a little warband to intercept the party. Some types of monsters would just actively sense where the party is, but a lot of them don't have anything like that. You can get away with a lot of these monsters being directed at the party by some green hag or whatnot, but then the party's going to have much quieter travel if they go kill that crone, and... why is it like this everywhere?
*I know, not in civilized lands.


Not sure what you mean. It says the DM can decide how often to roll and encounter occurs on 18+. Obviously, how often the DM rolls will usually depend on how dangerous he wants to make the area.
Try to remember the flow of the conversation a bit. Tanarii said that you should just fast forward through travel if you don't roll for encounters at least once an hour or more. I said that seems like a hell of a lot of rolls, but remarked that I don't know exactly what dice formula he's using. You chimed in with the 18,19,20=encounter thing from the DMG, which isn't what he rolls, and doesn't come with the same recommendation of how often to roll*.
*Tanarii's roll rates and the DMG roll rates both list once per hour as an option, but he lists it as the minimum setting while the DMG lists it as the max.

Is that easy enough to follow?


It might not be the most helpful thing to say, but it really seems to me like you're overthinking this.I just don't copy other people without understanding what they're saying. If I wanna do points of light I have a good idea how to run points of light. If I wanna run torchbearer then I have some ideas about fatigue and tight rationing and how exploring long forgotten dungeons wears you down, and how you have to actually manage problems in order to get anywhere other than your own grave.

A very slim shot at 24 deadly encounters in a day... I don't really know how to make that work in D&D. Obviously a party won't be able to kill that many things (even that many 'easy' encounters without a chance to rest would probably nickle and dime your hp away halfway into the day,) but do I understand the basic ideas of how to handle edge cases, and do I even understand what the edge cases here are supposed to be?

...I spent a lot of my youth with this kind of "if I haven't tried the advice yet then I guess I don't have any idea if it will work" default state, but after surviving a couple of abusive advice givers I realized that I've already got a really good idea of how I'm probably going to screw this up if I just try to do it the way I understand it right now. When it comes time to try and execute a plan then overthinking things is gonna be a burden and I need to stop myself from doing that, but when somebody else is offering up advice I've got all the time in the world to dissect it and figure out that they actually know what they're talking about. In this particular case, Tanarii's 1 check per hour means rolling 1d8 and there's an encounter on a 1. 13% chance of an encounter per hour. 18+ on 1d20 is a 15% chance, so that's pretty close to the same thing. If I hadn't thought about this at all I would have assumed 1d6 with 1 being an encounter, just because I've learned the rules for other games and the kinds of systems that people use, and a 17% chance per hour isn't so terribly far off, but I'm not really satisfied with doing any of these on the hour, in bog standard wilderness. If you piss off an orc encampment and then try to slink around in the nearby woods then maybe that's a good encounter rate, but by poking and prodding instead of just going with what I feel it good, I've figured out that Tanarii just has every single day outside of civilization be a full adventuring day.


If you want your wilderness to be about as safe as the U.S. National Park system, that's cool.For clarity, that was never why I brought that up. I think that the number of predators in an area has some relation to the population of prey animals. The National Park system doesn't have an unusually sparse goat population, and even if you wind the clock back to when we had huge herds of bison the point of being in a herd is so that predators can't so easily eat them. There are limits to that, so the old infirm ones get eaten eventually, but very rarely the young adults that are trying to make babies. The total amount of food available isn't much higher like that, but there's a little less work involved for those who will wait for their meal.

It's like... estimating how many grand piano repairmen there are in the US. You probably know about how many millions of people live there, and can reasonably guess about how often a house has a grand piano in it, and then based on that you can guess about how many pianos someone could service in a day, and at the end of that you've probably got a decent estimate for how many of these people there are. It's not going to be the actual number, but it's not going to be a totally unreasonable number either. If we simplify all of the large, non-intelligent predators down to "owlbears" then I don't have to work very hard to judge about how many owlbears there probably are in any given forest, and I know what that number looks like even if I don't sit hear and list out all the steps to get there. There are probably not three owlbears for every plot of land the size of my neighborhood. There are probably way more than 5 owlbears in the distance I have to drive to get to my sister's house. You have to transpose all of these measurements out of civilization and into the wild, of course, but I know these kinds of things automatically when I start looking at a hex grid and I start drawing coast lines and plotting out a mountain range. I can narrow the numbers down a lot if I actually do it, and describing any of that to other people usually necessitates that I actually do that sort of thing, but what really matters is the number I had before I bothered to "overthink it" and that's where there seems to be a problem.

I can say that these things all survive at a way higher density than what I know is likely, by saying that most of the time they suck up mana from the air and eat that, but that's kind of a garbage explanation, and I want to know if YOU actually have an explanation or it you're just leaving it up to other people to come up with something better than the garbage explanation because you somehow think that it's reasonable to have an owlbear in every garage.


You're ignoring things like sentient trees, elementals, fey creatures who drink moonlight (or however they get their sustenance), fellow travelers, things that can burrow up from deep below the surface, undead (who need no prey to sustain them), nomadic species...Aww geez, I wrote that mana thing before reading this post and now it looks like an attack -_-;

5e doesn't really give me elementals bigger than a mephit but smaller than a water elemental, and even if I steal from our temple of elemental evil remake I don't really get proper elementals bigger than a water elemental. I can still get a lot of leverage out of that if I work for it, but I wouldn't really have that off to another DM and say it was a good option for populating their wilderness. The sentient plants are a little bit better than that, but for whatever reason I have the feeling that they're quite a bit less prevalent than, say, giants. Giants are beholden to how much food is available, so sentient plants don't fill out the remaining space. Fey creatures are a little more prevalent than that, but they mostly hide from you. Undead are a much more versatile option that actually covers almost any character level with a reasonable number of monsters in the combat... but if every untamed forest is crawling with zombies that says some weird stuff about the setting. I like to actually have undead stuff foreshadow that there's a necromancer or some dark locus of power nearby. There can be a few wandering dead, but the encounter chart isn't going to feature too terribly many of them when folks aren't in the Murkwood.

Other travelers are a great option, but not for untamed wilderness. You run into these people when you're on the road, but out in the wild you probably just meet the one ranger or similar group of beings that kindly ask you not to disrespect the land. If you're getting attacked by such groups it seems like a plot point.

Underdark stuff is basically always on the table, and the ecology doesn't have to make any sense because of the Faerzress that riddles the place, but it's gotta be more prevalent in the underdark than out of it (and if I have any intent of sending the party down there then I can't go using everything that lives down there.)

Nomads do not alter overall population density.

Add everything together and you get a good range of options, but not really ones that I can use the first time a level 2 party needs to hike out 5 days into the overgrown region that housed a long abandoned keep (place was more like 2 days travel back when the road was maintained, but you can't even tell where the road used to be much of the time now, and there's some swamp in the way too.) Tanarii only wants like 3 encounters per day though, which is exactly in line with about how many wolves (and a bear or a couple of cougars,) would be interested in attacking you in about a day of walking, as per the ballpark measurement I laid out in the first place.


Not every random encounter has to be... -snip-
it could be a weather... or an obstacle...Tanarii is specifically talking about "The Adventuring Day" so you're going to need to offer up social and environmental encounters that deplete similar resources to an equal difficulty combat. I've still never seen anybody that could really convey how to create an obstacle/social/weather encounter that eats up similar resources to a deadly difficulty combat.

Personally I like just finding weird little pagan shrines as part of my encounter tables, but I've gone and overthought where all the settlements are and used to be for the last so many years, so any time I want to drop one of those into the world more than a day away from where civilization ever used to be I'm almost forced to involve a hag. I can do other kinds of things, but it's more than a little bit taxing to, on the fly, come up with reasons for the party to interact with these things in a way that consumes resources. Some little shack in the woods with a crossbow trap hooked up to the door is alright for containing a little bit of loot, but not every worn out shack should be trapped like that, and if there is that kind of danger in checking out these places then there's got the also be some explanation of why someone trapped the door (usually.) Actual dungeons have the benefit of being made of stone by the expert architects of old, but cabins and pagan shrines tend to lack that kind of wealth behind their construction.

So what kinds of things do you use?



Funny -snip- Fire Swamp :P :D

[Finieous]

I see I'm quoted, but I assume if you can write that much on the subject you've got it worked out. Good gaming!

[mephnick]

I see I'm quoted, but I assume if you can write that much on the subject you've got it worked out. Good gaming!

That was a very gracious way of telling someone to go kick rocks. I will remember it for the future. :smalltongue:

[Zorku]

That was a very gracious way of telling someone to go kick rocks. I will remember it for the future. :smalltongue:
If you hadn't chimed in with that I'd have gone off on a long rant about not just wanting to work out how I can do a thing, but also how other people have done that thing, so don't consider it too effective.

You probably can't get me to take something as "go kick rocks" unless you say it in a direct manner.