How Do *You* Handle Wilderness Exploration?

[Sparky McDibben]

Hey friendos!

Borrowing conceptually from Mr. Over_Game's thread here: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?631842-How-do-*you*-use-illusions-in-combat (excellent thread, go check it out)

I'm listening to some WebDM Patreon podcasts right now, and I want to know: how do you handle wilderness exploration and travel?

Personally, I ask myself if there are interesting decisions to be made. If not, I handwave it. But if there are interesting decisions to be made, I'll usually handle it with a Hazard Die system (see here) (https://www.necropraxis.com/2014/02/03/overloading-the-encounter-die/) with custom consequences for the environment and powerful NPCs active the area. Each level of the die usually has a d6 subtable, with situations that I present to the players.

How do you do it?

[Crucius]

I find exploration the hardest 'pillar' to engage with or to make engaging.

If I don't handwave it I do the following:

Describe an event that is unique to the current environment, then ask the players to quickly solve that particular problem by stating a general approach. I have prepared three different outcomes and I see if their approach matches one of those outcomes. If it doesn't I make something up on the fly.

This is pretty vague so here's an example:
You wander the forest when you find a shrine. Atop the shrine stands an effigy. (Religion check reveals the effigy to be dedicated to an evil spirit)
Ignore: You make haste. You have advantage on your next initiative roll.
Study: The symbols on the effigy are so profane it nearly drives you to madness. Before you know it, you start speaking an incantation in an obscure tongue. Wisdom save DC 13 or the next time you roll initiative you also roll on the madness table (homebrew madness table).
Iconoclasm: Once destroyed the materials that were used to make this idol appear quite valuable. You gain 200 GP.

For this it is important that not engaging with the random encounter has some repercussion (good or bad). While not super in-depth, I like it for its brevity and conveying the feeling that miles have been traveled because stuff was seen and things were done. As long as you keep an open mind when it comes to player creativity it can provide a nice little tool to handle 'exploration'.

(The idea was 'borrowed' from the video game Mechanicus (Warhammer 40K meets X-Com). I once sat down to conceive a bunch of these encounters, label them with environment types, and now I can grab that file whenever I think it's appropriate)

[MrStabby]

I don't.

Wilderness is honestly, kinda boring. Stories are made from relationships. Relationships need people. Wilderness tends to be the absence of people.

So sure, in the middle of the Great Desert you might, in an extraordinary crime against the laws of probability, happen to have some random encounters and meet people but I find that can be done as easily in town at the far end with less strain on belief.

Wilderness is good for encounters with no one else intervening, or encounters where casual property damage is unlikely to annoy anyone but generally have the acion in places where there are people and things of interest.

I change this somewhat if a PC wants to make a point about the wilderness - a druid founding a druid grove of whatever but I figure I get limited session time; lets spend it somehwere fun where plots are advanced, shemes are foiled and cool treasure is discovered. Some fetid marshland where no one goes because it is completely uninteresting just doesnt float my boat.

Maybe as a stretch if I have a cool idea for some kind of swamp beast to railroad the players into fighting (and if I don't think they would mind) then one a year of so there might be something happen... but generally wilderness sucks more than buildings.

Buildings are built to house interesting people and objects - now and in the past, so if you are looking for either of these go towards, not away from buildings.

[Skrum]

I generally try to plan around it. Make a reason for the players to have a good idea where they're going, that sort of thing. Whenever I imagine the players getting lost and not getting to the stuff that I actually planned for, I always decide I'd rather that not happen lol.

The one game where I did do something with exploration was a quest that involved the players looking for an orcish warcamp. They didn't have a location, just a direction. Taking inspiration from skill challenges, I decided they were going to make 3 survival checks, ~1/day. If they succeeded, they made good progress. If they failed by a little, there was an encounter ready for them. If they failed by a lot, they got an encounter and level of exhaustion. The final check was to determine how they found the camp - succeed, and they sneak up on the camp from a favorable direction. Fail by a little, and they come upon from an unfavorable direction (i.e., traps). Fail badly, and they get picked up by a patrol from the camp that warns the camp of their presence.

I thought it worked fairly well and would like to do something similar again. But if I do, "exploration" is going to be the adventure. I wouldn't tack on a chance of failure to find an adventure location if it meant potentially not having a proper gaming night, if that makes sense.

[Veldrenor]

Wilderness exploration, currently nothing; the setting we're using doesn't call for it. For travel, though, I'm using the Journeys rules from 5e Adventures in Middle Earth with the encounter tables tweaked to suit the setting. There's enough meat there that travel conveys a sense of a living world, and I can either adjudicate it quickly enough to not take up much game time, or stretch it to fill a session if the party randomly decides to head for the opposite side of the country and I need to stall.

[ad_hoc]

If it is part of the campaign then we use the rule: "Long rests may only occur in friendly settlements."

[Sparky McDibben]

Man, this is illuminating!


I don't.

Wilderness is honestly, kinda boring. Stories are made from relationships. Relationships need people. Wilderness tends to be the absence of people.

So sure, in the middle of the Great Desert you might, in an extraordinary crime against the laws of probability, happen to have some random encounters and meet people but I find that can be done as easily in town at the far end with less strain on belief.

That's an interesting take. I would argue that "stories rely on relationships" is a false premise - you can have a relationship with yourself, and your relationships within the party deserve just as much treatment as those without. Ever travel with family? Man, you wanna talk about seeing how stress can affect a relationship!

Also, I've lived in multiple deserts, and it's fairly common to meet people. Nobody's just wandering around in the middle of the desert - they're moving from water to water, so a good random encounter table can have a ton of variety. See Lawrence of Arabia or read Seven Pillars of Wisdom for a better discussion of that than I can provide here.


I wouldn't tack on a chance of failure to find an adventure location if it meant potentially not having a proper gaming night, if that makes sense.

I am confused about this, actually - why does the party failing to find an adventure location mean not having a proper gaming night? Is there a metagame constraint?

That's an interesting way to implement skill challenges and searching for the location! Definitely stealing that the next time I need a quick and dirty system. How did you handle higher-level abilities like find the path?


For travel, though, I'm using the Journeys rules from 5e Adventures in Middle Earth with the encounter tables tweaked to suit the setting. There's enough meat there that travel conveys a sense of a living world, and I can either adjudicate it quickly enough to not take up much game time, or stretch it to fill a session if the party randomly decides to head for the opposite side of the country and I need to stall.

Neat! Do you make your own events tables or reskin the ones from the books?

[verbatim]

Something that worked better than expected in my last campaign was to arrange a table of random encounters 0 through 30, with 0 being the hardest and 30 being the easiest, and have players rotate making an ability check to determine the encounter for the day.

The big drawback being that it takes a lot of prep work to think up 30 encounters + encounters to replace existing one's that wouldn't make sense to repeat.

[Sparky McDibben]

Something that worked better than expected in my last campaign was to arrange a table of random encounters 0 through 30, with 0 being the hardest and 30 being the easiest, and have players rotate making an ability check to determine the encounter for the day.

The big drawback being that it takes a lot of prep work to think up 30 encounters + encounters to replace existing one's that wouldn't make sense to repeat.

Yeah, that's rough! I prefer to let chaos do the work for me on those. I use a series of d4 tables covering Who, What, When, Where, Why. So the d4 table of Who might include 1 - Duke Bumtest's Men (1d6: 1 - 1d4 + 1 guards; 2 - 1d4 thugs, 3 - 1 knight leading 1d6 guards, 4 - 1d6 knights, 5 - 1 knight leading 1d6 thugs, 6 - 2d4 knights leading 2d6 guards); 2 - Bitterbrew Hag Coven (1d6: 1 - 1d6 murderous children, 2 - ...).

The d4 table for When might be 1 - Morning, 2 - Noon, 3 - Evening, 4 - Midnight.

The nice thing about these is that 5 d4 tables equates to 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 1,024 encounter combinations. And that's before we account for subtables (the d6 beneath each of the Who entries, for example).

[Veldrenor]

Neat! Do you make your own events tables or reskin the ones from the books?

I reskin the ones from the books, although that may not work for everyone. While many of the entries are setting agnostic (both flavor and mechanic-wise), several of them are tied into the Shadow system so they'd require a little bit of a rewrite if you didn't also import that. Thankfully I'm running a dark fantasy/horror campaign and the slow corruption of Shadow perfectly fits the current arc.

[Kane0]

If I know the party is going to be travelling i throw together some quick tables for encounters, events, weather, etc and grid out the area in chunks about equal to a days’ travel each (or a weeks’ if using gritty realism). I try to have an interesting feature or two for each chunk like a trading post, druid grove, roc nest, etc.

Once i have those pieces i can have something interesting happen periodically as the party travels, independant of how they approach anything thrown at them.

[Pixel_Kitsune]

I allow wilderness wandering if my players want to. I tend to run as an open sandbox where plots move with or without the PCs and adjust based on where the PCs go and what they do.

But to share the two most active games I have (One I play, one I DM). One is a Planescape game and the players got a Spelljammer almost immediately. The other one the DM had us discover these gemstones that could open portals to anywhere we could properly envision. But they were one use. We've since learned to grow them but it takes time. So we have fast travel, but have to be careful with it.

Guess neither of us really like wandering that much.

[Tanarii]

Hexcrawl.

Really the common choices are that, or nodes of interest (aka a dungeon). And the latter abrogates a lot of what makes wilderness exploration different.

[Sparky McDibben]

If I know the party is going to be travelling i throw together some quick tables for encounters, events, weather, etc and grid out the area in chunks about equal to a days’ travel each (or a weeks’ if using gritty realism). I try to have an interesting feature or two for each chunk like a trading post, druid grove, roc nest, etc.

Once i have those pieces i can have something interesting happen periodically as the party travels, independant of how they approach anything thrown at them.

That sounds pretty similar to what I do! Do you use procedural generation to come up with features on the fly?


I allow wilderness wandering if my players want to. I tend to run as an open sandbox where plots move with or without the PCs and adjust based on where the PCs go and what they do.

Cool! What kind of content do you fill the sandbox with, and when / how do you determine what the PCs encounter?


Hexcrawl.

Really the common choices are that, or nodes of interest (aka a dungeon). And the latter abrogates a lot of what makes wilderness exploration different.

True, but aren't you exploring the wilderness looking for points of interest? I mean, for me the tension in wilderness exploration comes down to several points:

Are we gonna find the thing?

Are we gonna find it before our resources give out?

What interesting things do we find along the way?

What does the journey reveal about the characters?

About your hexcrawl, what tools do you use to keep the information intelligible? What structures do you use for moving through the wilderness? And how do you determine when the PCs encounter content? Is it automatically found? Are there hidden points that require skill checks? I've only developed one hexcrawl and it was an absolute bear to stock everything.

[Pixel_Kitsune]

Cool! What kind of content do you fill the sandbox with, and when / how do you determine what the PCs encounter?

Yes? Honestly, I wing tons of it, but as an example. The group had gotten to Automata supposedly to meet up with their Father Figure who had been missing since the first game. They showed up as the Modron March started. Long story short they decided to damage the gate from Mechanus to Automata to stop the march and succeeded. But the explosion ported the PCs and several of the NPCs with them to "random" Once the PCs got back to the ship we have the following setup and options:

Find out one NPC is in Avernus, another is in Sharn, meanwhile one PC is getting messages and visions to come to the demon web pits (Lolth is their mother), another PC has been revealed that SOMEHOW they have a very established relationship with the Noble Efreeti that pilots their spelljammer and has a kid with him back in the City of Brass. Lastly another PC has recently obtained property in a Homebrew world. (The one my wife runs).

So at this point I come up with the major point NPCs for each of those locations and what the general situation is. I then work Roleplay fluff and timing so that the game ends as they decide where to go (Or arrive).

If they go to Avernus to rescue their NPC friend, it's the whole Elturel storyline going on. Said NPC friend has actually been okay and made friends with Lulu. Follow plot of book, though I threw in some other stuff.

If they go after the NPC Sibling they lost to Sharn they'll find out he lost something important in the Mournland and needs their help there before he can come back. If they go to the Mournland they're going to find Cyre 1313 and it leads to Ravenloft.

The Demonweb pits will start one of the main plots I have going, which I lifted from Expedition back in 3.5. The PC that is "Lolth's Child" is actually the contract from that adventure and going to the DemonWeb will risk that PC's life and them being used as a cosmic key to force a lot of the other demons to work under Lolth's guidance.

The situation in Brass is that all the PCs are children of Demon Princes (I ripped Baldur's Gate). The PC tied to Brass was the child of Yeeognhu. She rigged some Time Travel via wish to go back and tweak things so she wasn't under his influence, then got stuck there. So had spent 18 years coming back to the group the long way. So that becomes a whole bunch of explaining all the extra stuff about their nature she knows and trying to sway them to take similar steps.

The Homebrew world actually leads to Court of the ShadowFey inspired stuff where the Fey Court of that world has decided that they need to murder the reigning king as part of a ritual to resurrect his sister as the "Proper" ruler of the land.

The PCs indicate where they're going and I'll take that branch and start filling it out for next game. Meanwhile I'll think about what happens in each of those other branches during the same time frame and advance the plots appropriately.

[Mjolnirbear]

As someone mentioned, the most interesting interactions involve people.

I have a rolling method to randomise encounters. It looks a lot like the Danger level that Giffyglyph uses in Darkest Dungeons, originally inspired by AngryGM. The more dangerous the area, the more encounters you have. I modified it to work with population, instead.

I also randomised the type of encounter. It's not always combat. It's also discoveries, and obstacles, and social interactions, and random treasure. I roll here twice to determine each encounter. A Social + Treasure result might be a satyr who offers a riddle contest and the prise us the treasure. A Social + Hostile might be a child running from a band of gnolls. A Discovery + Obstacles might be a sudden squall of bad weather, and when you take shelter you discover an old door nearly hidden in the overhand.

I roll 2d100. Then apply those numbers to tables I've made to determine the type of discover or social encounter, but also use tables that already exists, such as Xanathar's random encounters based on terrain and party level or the treasure tables in the DMG. I use both d100 results on each table, and pick the best one from each table and combine them into an encounter.

It's never just a random owlbear. It's an owlbear defending her cubs, or one mauling a hobgoblin merchant, or one sleeping in her den right beside the ring radiating magic. The encounters write themselves. With so many tables and potential combinations I'll never get the same result twice. I'm extremely happy with this system. It makes encounters not just combat, but negotiations or puzzles or traps or discoveries. It's a bitch to easily run in a VTT sometimes though.

I'm less happy with the camping system. I nicked this from Giffyglyph as well, but it feels videogamey. If I Press the Cooking Button, Character A gets an extra Hit Die restored. Character B gets Inspiration from the Instrument button. The jobs don't help. You have the Scout, the Guide, and the Lookout as important jobs, but my group doesn't really track rations so the Forager is less important, and most of the rolls are done by the Lookout and Scout (who are always the same character).

I'm considering in the new game I'm running to have camping rewards that you can use your choice of activity to obtain. If you used a lot of hit dice, you could rest longer to restore an extra die, or cook a hearty meal, or brew a restorative tea. If you want inspiration, you could put out a harp or lyre, you could tell a story, you could meditate or perform katas, or cook a really inspiring meal. The idea is the player gets the reward they want as long as they can justify it. Then I can use the camp DC to see if they succeed at these activities. It rewards for immersion but doesn't require calculation to figure out who has the best roll for what activity. I haven't tested it yet, but I hope it works out.

[Tanarii]

About your hexcrawl, what tools do you use to keep the information intelligible? What structures do you use for moving through the wilderness? And how do you determine when the PCs encounter content? Is it automatically found? Are there hidden points that require skill checks? I've only developed one hexcrawl and it was an absolute bear to stock everything.
I read the Alexandrian series on hexcrawl and based it on that.

And yes, they are an absolute bear to develop, especially if you want it to contain full adventuring sites in some locations. So is a mega dungeon. But the idea is it's pretty simple to to run the hexcrawl part once set up, you use as much procedurally generated content as you can.

I would not consider developing a hexcrawl (or a mega dungeon) for a single group of players. It's not worth the time investment.

[MrStabby]

Man, this is illuminating!



That's an interesting take. I would argue that "stories rely on relationships" is a false premise - you can have a relationship with yourself, and your relationships within the party deserve just as much treatment as those without. Ever travel with family? Man, you wanna talk about seeing how stress can affect a relationship!

Also, I've lived in multiple deserts, and it's fairly common to meet people. Nobody's just wandering around in the middle of the desert - they're moving from water to water, so a good random encounter table can have a ton of variety. See Lawrence of Arabia or read Seven Pillars of Wisdom for a better discussion of that than I can provide here.



Yeah, exagerated a little with the stories rely on people, I believe it is generally true but not an absolute.

I would also say that the road between two bustling settlements isn't the wilderness either - but I guess such things are a matter of definitions.

[Kane0]

That sounds pretty similar to what I do! Do you use procedural generation to come up with features on the fly?


My favourite thing to do is flick through previous versions of D&D books for creatures that suit the environment (because the party wont be familiar and respond without meta).
For events and items of interest i try to maintain a master list that I add to as I think of or see things going about my day, selecting a subset of them that are applicable and recycling the ones that dont get used or can be reused (different group, enough time has passed, etc)

[Segev]

If you're going to do a "nodes of interest" sort of thing, you should have random, semi-random, and fixed obstacles that are on the route(s) to the points of interest. You should also note any other nodes of interest that might be within detection range of the party as they travel, and gear encounters to at least drop clues as to these other nodes' presence. A hex crawl, in theory, naturally provides some of this, because there's something interesting in every hex, and some of those "somethings" will be hazards that could impede progress. As will random encounters.

If you're not using "gritty realism" resting rules, I recommend also having your random encounters be sequences and ongoing elements that can occupy a day with multiple sub-encounters, rather than having them be simple one-off instances. When you roll to see if a random encounter occurs, it should at least have the most interesting and potentially profitable choices require engagement on a level that will require a short rest or two before it's fully resolved. Simple instances that could be safely nova'd should not require nova-ing at all, because their interest should lie somewhere other than in "roll initiative." A random cache of another explorer's stuff should at least require a little bit of decision-making to find successfully, and should probably have something more than the usual "bit of food, maybe a random tool" that is often listed by modules, unless it's genuinely going to be of use and interest to the party to have that little bit of food or whathaveyou. I suggest diaries, nor maps to points of interest, or similar.

When I ran ToA's hex crawl portion, I would look at the party's most likely route to where they'd decided to go, and roll up days' worth of encounters ahead of time, and then I would re-arrange them into something cohesive that clumped several of them together over a 1-2 day period, followed by potentially days of nothing interesting. Random encounters with wildlife weren't worth rolling out unless they somehow contributed to the decision-making of the PCs or led to depletion of resources when it was actually critical.

I think I could have done it better; this wasn't a perfect solution.

I think maybe tying encounters to foraging or hunting might be interesting, though I don't have the precise mechanism down to do so. In service to this, though, reworking the rules on wilderness travel such that hunting and foraging are "turn choices" you can take in place of moving on, with rangers getting some sort of bonus benefit that might let them do both, would be a good idea. But simply letting them do both still leaves us with "ranger solves problem by existing" rather than a new and interesting tool the Ranger can use to play the game more competently. So that still needs work.

[Skrum]

I am confused about this, actually - why does the party failing to find an adventure location mean not having a proper gaming night? Is there a metagame constraint?

It's partially game restraint, yes. I'm in a West Marches style game with a bunch of players and several DM's. Each session should be ~3.5 hours, and end with the players returning to a central location. And in terms of stuff that I've prepped for the night, I'd much rather fill up the 3.5 hours with my planned stuff than just winging it because they failed a survival check.



That's an interesting way to implement skill challenges and searching for the location! Definitely stealing that the next time I need a quick and dirty system. How did you handle higher-level abilities like find the path?



The party in this was quite low level. At higher levels I would probably move away from exploration encounters entirely. Partially this is because they do have access to Find the Path or the like, meaning it makes to no sense for them to be getting lost anyway (most of the time), and partially because high level character really have better things to do than get lost in the woods.

[Sparky McDibben]

Yes? Honestly, I wing tons of it

Big DM mood there, bud. :)


It's never just a random owlbear. It's an owlbear defending her cubs, or one mauling a hobgoblin merchant, or one sleeping in her den right beside the ring radiating magic.

YES. I feel this so much. So often I see people kvetching because "random encounters break immersion!" Well, yeah, if you run them as the equivalent of a freaking Street Fighter battle! You have to contextualize that crap.


I'm less happy with the camping system. I nicked this from Giffyglyph as well, but it feels videogamey. If I Press the Cooking Button, Character A gets an extra Hit Die restored. Character B gets Inspiration from the Instrument button. The jobs don't help. You have the Scout, the Guide, and the Lookout as important jobs, but my group doesn't really track rations so the Forager is less important, and most of the rolls are done by the Lookout and Scout (who are always the same character).

I've never heard of Giffyglyph, but I might have to check them out, now! Vis-a-vis the Forager, I've found that the herbs sub-system in Adventures in Middle Earth is pretty handy at giving players something to look for. Some of them remove a level of exhaustion, or cheer everybody up, or hell, if you just lean back and have a good smoke for an hour, will allow you to retry an Intelligence check.


I read the Alexandrian series on hexcrawl and based it on that.

And yes, they are an absolute bear to develop, especially if you want it to contain full adventuring sites in some locations. So is a mega dungeon. But the idea is it's pretty simple to to run the hexcrawl part once set up, you use as much procedurally generated content as you can.

I would not consider developing a hexcrawl (or a mega dungeon) for a single group of players. It's not worth the time investment.

Oh man! Funny story about that. I approached my wife about running a Western-themed campaign. So I built out an entire hexcrawl - an 8 x 14 grid, four items of interest per hex, custom random encounter tables, custom game structures, etc. Damn thing took four months of work. And at the end of it, my wife goes, "Yeah, I'm just having a really hard time coming up with a character concept. I'm not sure about running that campaign."

I fully took a month off of DMing as a result.


My favourite thing to do is flick through previous versions of D&D books for creatures that suit the environment (because the party wont be familiar and respond without meta).
For events and items of interest i try to maintain a master list that I add to as I think of or see things going about my day, selecting a subset of them that are applicable and recycling the ones that dont get used or can be reused (different group, enough time has passed, etc)

Oh my God, would you be willing to post that?


When I ran ToA's hex crawl portion, I would look at the party's most likely route to where they'd decided to go, and roll up days' worth of encounters ahead of time, and then I would re-arrange them into something cohesive that clumped several of them together over a 1-2 day period, followed by potentially days of nothing interesting. Random encounters with wildlife weren't worth rolling out unless they somehow contributed to the decision-making of the PCs or led to depletion of resources when it was actually critical.

I think I could have done it better; this wasn't a perfect solution.

Yeah, ToA's main problem, I think, was that there wasn't enough to interact with. And by interact, I mean "do something other than combat." Honestly, I would have prevented long rests and implemented reaction rolls during the hexcrawl and required the PCs to do some freaking diplomacy to get into safe places (like the aaracokra's stronghold).


It's partially game restraint, yes. I'm in a West Marches style game with a bunch of players and several DM's. Each session should be ~3.5 hours, and end with the players returning to a central location. And in terms of stuff that I've prepped for the night, I'd much rather fill up the 3.5 hours with my planned stuff than just winging it because they failed a survival check.

Ah, the metagame constraint makes sense, but I'm going to disagree with you on the "wasted prep" piece. I personally love it when the game goes outside what I prepped. I like to have a bunch of things that will point the players in the direction of their adventure, but at a price. Dragons, hags, lost travelers they need to help, anybody or everybody who might a) know where the adventure location is, and b) needs something from the players. So for the dragon cave, I'd put an adult dragon in the way, and if the PCs go wandering in, have the dragon block the entrance (while also dropping hints that this guy is really powerful, like the mossy bones of a paladin clutching a half-melted holy avenger) and demand to know what the PCs are doing. Depending on how they roleplay it, the dragon might want:

a) Half their stuff
b) The party to do him a favor
c) An item recovered from the adventure site
d) For the PCs to start bringing him tribute from their adventures

Whatever happens, you've introduced a new complication, a new adventure site, and a new antagonist - all from a failed die roll! That's a play priority of mine I don't necessarily expect you to share, but I have way more fun from failure than success.


high level character really have better things to do than get lost in the woods.

I mean, they do have better things to do...but don't they also have better things to do than lose a fight? And if we're using that rationale for the one, why are we not using it for the other? That's where I get confused with skipping wilderness exploration.

[Segev]

Yeah, ToA's main problem, I think, was that there wasn't enough to interact with. And by interact, I mean "do something other than combat." Honestly, I would have prevented long rests and implemented reaction rolls during the hexcrawl and required the PCs to do some freaking diplomacy to get into safe places (like the aaracokra's stronghold).

Oh, there's a lot that's not necessarily a combat when you encounter it. It's just that it's also barely interesting to mention by itself. "Oh, look, stegosaurs!" Cool and all, but unless the party wants to fight them, there's not much to DO with them. Caches of explorers' stuff are nice flavor, but after finding one, there's just not much value to talking about finding more (barring the party being in dire need of very random, low-quality supplies).

Denying long rests due to the jungle's harsh environment, or something, might've been a good move. "You can't camp just anywhere; it's just not feasible. And the good camp sites are either claimed, or are empty for a reason." Makes finding a baitiri or grung village that you can make nice with (or win a fight against and leave enough alive to extort help from) of value, because they're settled and you can actually get a long rest.

Maybe Camp Vengeance is actually in such dire straits in no small part because you have only a 50% chance of getting a successful long rest in it. Or simply can't. It's just not well-built enough for resting in this environment.

"But what if our expert guide / ranger whose favored terrain is "Jungle" builds our camp site?" the players might ask. This could be answered with the requirements for a good camp site being rare enough that it can't always be found, and / or building a camp site that is solid enough for a long rest taking a full day of work, possibly with a large number of bulky supplies (or even more work to harvest and process them from the jungle).

[Kane0]

Oh my God, would you be willing to post that?


The majority of it is poorly scribbled across loose paper sheets but I can point you towards a few places I've stolen ideas from:
Urban (https://nerdsonearth.com/2019/09/100-dd-city-encounter-ideas/)
Forest/Jungle
(https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/759juz/d100_jungle_encounters_xpost_from_rd100/)Underground (https://www.reddit.com/r/d100/comments/98uy48/lets_build_interesting_dungeon_encounters/)
On the road (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MBJ72TrRDMJ4SrJTVgSXSEoJeECiSNZl/view)
A bit of googling will usually give you far more than you will actually ever use and you can pick and choose your favourites to steal.

I also nab ideas straight out of adventures (there's plenty of them even if your players are familiar with the 5e adventures, just look at previous editions or other RPG systems), build on the 'something happens' table on the DM screens, and a personal favourite of mine: intersperse stuff that has happened from previous games you've been in (can be a neat cameo or just an example of the world not revolving around the PCs), which can include table in-jokes.

[Dragonsonthemap]

I've given up on it. While I and a couple other people in each play group I'm in like wilderness stuff, in no group are we the majority, and in fact we're almost always outnumbered by people who not only aren't interested in it, but are so disinterested that doing anything more than handwaving it significantly detracts from their enjoyment of the game.

[Segev]

I've given up on it. While I and a couple other people in each play group I'm in like wilderness stuff, in no group are we the majority, and in fact we're almost always outnumbered by people who not only aren't interested in it, but are so disinterested that doing anything more than handwaving it significantly detracts from their enjoyment of the game.

What does "wilderness stuff" look like when you're enjoying it during actual play? What are you doing at the table, and what is the gameplay like? If you've not been able to get actual experience, what would it look like, do you imagine, if only you and the "couple other people" were playing in the game, so everyone was okay with running it?

I ask because "wilderness stuff" is so vague in terms of what the gameplay looks like that what one person imagines might not be what another imagines, and I'm trying to, via these questions, get to the core of what makes it fun for at least some people.

[Dragonsonthemap]

What does "wilderness stuff" look like when you're enjoying it during actual play? What are you doing at the table, and what is the gameplay like? If you've not been able to get actual experience, what would it look like, do you imagine, if only you and the "couple other people" were playing in the game, so everyone was okay with running it?

I ask because "wilderness stuff" is so vague in terms of what the gameplay looks like that what one person imagines might not be what another imagines, and I'm trying to, via these questions, get to the core of what makes it fun for at least some people.

It's any time you're traveling between towns or dungeons or other notable locales or encounters and you're away from things like roads and the travel amenities that accompany them. While what I really like is actually most flavor, I've had other people ask for little challenges (how to cross a river without a bridge or ford has become the notorious example, but isn't really a great one), random encounters that don't necessarily mean combat, a need to manage food or water sometimes, or navigation being difficult or unreliable, affecting travel time and forcing players to make difficult decisions. Any of these are fine by me, but a lot of the people I've played with find these so irritating they will openly complain or even walk away for a bit until the segment's done. It's been far worse, and more common, than the more stereotypical "the slayer/power-gamer falls asleep during talking scenes" issue, in my (at this point somewhat substantial) experience.

[Sorinth]

Generally it depends on whether the players want to engage in wilderness exploration or not. I'm perfectly fine with hand waving the travel depending on the campaign. When we do want to engage I have several house rules

First there's a quality of rest, basically the weather and whatever shelter they find/make (Survival check) determines which/how many resources they get back. In the best case it's like a normal rest except they don't recover to full HP automatically and instead have to use hit dice/spells. In the worst case then a long rest is little more then a short rest.

Second, player actions modify the odds of a "random" encounter. So rather then only having an encounter on an 18-20, if players don't travel steathily or if they use loud spells that number gets lower and so they are more likely to get an encounter. I usually make this number visible to the player so they see how their actions are influencing the odds of encountering something. Also it's not usually a random encounter but something based off the local groups. So travelling through orc territory and making noise, leaving tracks, etc... will result in meeting with an orc patrol.

[rlc]

I basically skip it and say that they traveled through the wilderness and did and saw some stuff. I’ve made chase rules part of travel once or twice.

[Ettina]

If it is part of the campaign then we use the rule: "Long rests may only occur in friendly settlements."

I really don't like that rule. To me, long rests as written work best in dangerous settings where you can actually reasonably expect to have 6-8 encounters before your next opportunity to rest, and unbalance things the most in settings where a safe place to rest is easy to come by. So your houserule is basically the exact opposite of what's needed, imo.

However, I've found that throwing Deadly+ (up to recommended daily xp) encounters at PCs who are only having 1-2 encounters per rest is a pretty good approach.

[Sorinth]

I really don't like that rule. To me, long rests as written work best in dangerous settings where you can actually reasonably expect to have 6-8 encounters before your next opportunity to rest, and unbalance things the most in settings where a safe place to rest is easy to come by. So your houserule is basically the exact opposite of what's needed, imo.

However, I've found that throwing Deadly+ (up to recommended daily xp) encounters at PCs who are only having 1-2 encounters per rest is a pretty good approach.

If the PCs have to travel 5 days into the jungle to get to the ruins they want to loot are you really having 6-8 encounters for those 5 days?

[Catullus64]

Designing wilderness travel, for me, is not very different from designing a dungeon, only the corridors and rooms become abstracted into impassable terrain, hazardous weather, and populations of hostile creatures. In my experience, a lot of DMs fall into the trap of thinking that wilderness exploration needs to be more procedural, more freeform, than the structured gameplay of a dungeon.

Design your map so that there are essentially a series of discrete routes from A to B. Use natural features to focus the expanse of the land into specific funnels: mountain passes, river crossings, Underdark pathways, straits, harbors. If you're feeling fancy and have the time and patience, make numerous choice points along each branching path: after you've chosen to go by the northern mountain pass, which of two nearby river crossings do you make for?

Once your journey can be understood in terms of distinct, modular routes, it's time to start assigning risks vs. benefits to each route. Mentally rank the routes from slowest to fastest, based on simple measurement of distance adjusted for how much of a given route is via difficult terrain.

For each span of travel between choice points, then, design specific encounters that the players will have if they go that way. If a route is quicker and easier based on your earlier measurements, you want to make the encounters there more dangerous relative to the longer routes. The more risk players take, the better time they can make on their journey. Make time an important element: either with an explicit time factor in their objective, or by making the cost of traveling supplies significant (by default, it mostly isn't).

By encounters, I do of course mean more than just combats; I mean skill challenges and social encounters as well. The distinct biomes of your map (even if they stretch realism in smaller scales) should help give distinct flavor to the encounters. Also note that the choice points themselves can be encounters: crossing an avalanche-prone mountain pass, fording a rushing river, etc. On top of non-combat challenges, sometimes you should add little mysteries or events that don't have any real stakes, but build atmosphere and milieu.

You'll also want to seed information about these challenges, so the players' don't feel like their route decisions are just coin flips. Tell your players up front that by engaging in social roleplay in settlements and examining the environments you describe, they can get vital clues about what challenges lie ahead on a given path.

Above all, once you've set the encounters, don't feel pressured to add additional random encounters on top of them. By all means, vary up when and how your scripted encounters take place: have some monsters that attack on the road, some that attack at night, some that don't attack at all but give clues that are spotted on the road. But have the confidence that the way you've structured choice points and placed encounters alongside them will work, and that your presentation of these encounters can create the impression of sudden and unexpected dangers without having to have them be randomly generated.

A side note regarding the pacing of encounters per day: since wilderness travel is usually the connective tissue between adventure goals rather than the setting of adventure goals themselves, I usually don't mind if the encounters of wilderness travel are a little more low-stakes than those in a dungeon or city; therefore 1-2 moderate encounters in a day can still work, and sets a more relaxed feel to the journey. Peaks and valleys of tension, that kind of thing.

[Ettina]

If the PCs have to travel 5 days into the jungle to get to the ruins they want to loot are you really having 6-8 encounters for those 5 days?

Are you willing to have every single wilderness encounter cut into how many encounters they can have in the ruins?

Most of the time, my games have 1 encounter every few days during travel, and many more encounters once you start delving the ruins you want to loot. I'd rather not have them constantly having to trek 5 days back and forth just to get a decent rest so they can continue looting the ruins. And that's assuming they even can - if I decide to actually have wilderness encounters matter, they'll probably just die if they can't long rest outside of towns.

It's far more interesting to have players go "we really need the wizard's spells, so let's hole up in this corner of the dungeon, riddle it with traps, and try to hold out for 8 hours while he sleeps" than to have them just leave the dungeon altogether as soon as the wizard runs out of spell slots.

[Sorinth]

Are you willing to have every single wilderness encounter cut into how many encounters they can have in the ruins?

Most of the time, my games have 1 encounter every few days during travel, and many more encounters once you start delving the ruins you want to loot. I'd rather not have them constantly having to trek 5 days back and forth just to get a decent rest so they can continue looting the ruins. And that's assuming they even can - if I decide to actually have wilderness encounters matter, they'll probably just die if they can't long rest outside of towns.

It's far more interesting to have players go "we really need the wizard's spells, so let's hole up in this corner of the dungeon, riddle it with traps, and try to hold out for 8 hours while he sleeps" than to have them just leave the dungeon altogether as soon as the wizard runs out of spell slots.

Yes, that's what makes the decisions they take during travel actually matter. If they can just regain their resources then there's no cost to spend resources and little incentive to avoid a combat.

If resources don't come back automatically then spending them matters more. This makes an Easy/Moderate random encounter while travelling the wilderness actually be more interesting then a Deadly one. It means they'll want to avoid combats that they can, and not waste resources bypassing what would otherwise be skill challenges. It also helps remove the whole treadmill situation where you are always scaling up power level of the "random" encounters.

It also can bring interesting dynamics. If the PCs have to return to town to properly rest and bring with them lots if gold and magic items that's going to make NPCs take notice. Other adventuring groups might start looking for the ruins in order to get rich like their NPCs and so now there are time constraints that the PCs have to take into account when they go back to finish looting. Some NPCs might try to find out how the PCs know the ruins location and do things like steal the map they originally used, or follow the PCs. There are lots of possibilities that open up by them being forced to return early.

It can even encourage players to put together a more realistic expedition where they recruit/hire a bunch of people when they first go. When finally arriving the hirelings will build a semi-permanent base camp, and within a few days you will have a place good enough to LR without spending 5 days going back to town. Doing this again opens up a lot of RP possibilities.