It really depends if you're focused on the journey or the destination.
"30 days later you arrive in Korvosa" is totally a legitimate segue into getting into the nitty gritty of what's happening in Korvosa.
Alternatively, you can plan travel encounters, especially if you want to focus on the journey and the changes to the landscape as the characters travel. 30 days on the road is a long journey. About a thousand miles, give or take. Depends if they're walking or riding horses or sitting in a carriage or wagon.
Brigands/bandits/highwaymen and wolves are appropriate encounters. Will-o-wisps can be very deadly since they have so many immunities; many parties lack the resources to deal with them when they are level-appropriate adversaries.
Encounters on the road can be fun, especially since the PCs usually only have one encounter per day, so they can use all their spells and stuff at once if they need to.
Maybe have someone or something get caught stealing something from camp and running away into the wilderness?
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As a player, I hold that to say "30 days later you arrive" is a cop out. As a GM, I would never, because it defeats the purpose of the teleportation spells at later levels, and players should feel like they earned their destination.
Some suggestions I can give:
1. Inclement Weather: Always an option. Anything from thunderstorms to just nonstop drizzle causing the party to get bogged down. wagons could literally get stuck in mud, requiring effort to remove. they could be forced to take a detour to find water due to a serious drought in the area.
2. I recommend you not let the party go by themselves. NPC's should be around for a majority of the journey, such as a caravan, ships crew, or something. This allows non-combat encounters to be more available to you, and helps add flavor to the world.
3. Let them relax: maybe the caravan is doing all the traveling for them. They could spend the time in downtime, crafting, earning a wage, or getting to know that key NPC you need them to be friends with. Or heck, even each other (but so few take this option... sigh).
4. If your campaign allows for it, make the mode of travel fantastic! AIRSHIPS! TRAINS! why simply trod through the world when you can go in style.
Thats all I can offer you in my 30 minute lunch break. gotta head back to work. XD
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The best advice I can give about portraying travel is this: Read the Wheel of Time series, then don't ever do what it does.
I'm gonna fire these off while I'm here, because I've thought of them and don't want to lose them.
Have them meet a bard going the opposite direction who regales them with tales of their destination, and the current gossip.
They could meet a patrol out looking for the very bandits they will later encounter. doubling your encounters for the price of one. possibly even tripling them as they would then have to take the bandits to the patrol, and that's a challenge in itself.
Remember that there are probably other towns between them and their destination. don't let the journey be filled with road, instead have it seem more like town hopping. Each place can present their own unique encounters and depth. who says they have to speed along to their final destination?
The best advice I can give about portraying travel is this: Read the Wheel of Time series, then don't ever do what it does.
Maybe save a few years of your life, and just listen to the wisdom of other people who HAVE read the Wheel of Time series.
;-)
The best advice I can give about portraying travel is this: Read the Wheel of Time series, then don't ever do what it does.Maybe save a few years of your life, and just listen to the wisdom of other people who HAVE read the Wheel of Time series.
;-)
True wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others. :P
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True wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others. :PThe best advice I can give about portraying travel is this: Read the Wheel of Time series, then don't ever do what it does.Maybe save a few years of your life, and just listen to the wisdom of other people who HAVE read the Wheel of Time series.
;-)
One time, in grad school, after the anthropology Xmas party, we were sitting in the office, and someone started to pass around this super salty, super liquorishy Finnish "candy" and everyone was going "Yuck!" or "Gross!" or "This is the worst thing I've ever had in my mouth!" or
"Oh, God! Oh God! I think it killed my tongue!" And when it got passed to me, I was like "No thank you." And everyone was acting shocked because I wouldn't try it. I had to explain that we were all anthropologists, and observing human behavior is our specialty, and part of that was poison avoidance by observing the reactions of conspecifics.
So I really appreciate learning from the mistakes of others.
The best advice I can give about portraying travel is this: Read the Wheel of Time series, then don't ever do what it does.
Erm... So what did it do that ought not to be done?
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Encounters on the road should reveal things about the wider campaign, hint at things to come, and even foreshadow threats and obstacles that the players are not even aware of.
Here's an example from one of my own campaigns:
The Party is entering relatively settled/civilized lands, but they are going overland, avoiding the main road. They encounter a farmstead and need a place to rest/recuperate.
Elves are rare in these lands, but the party contains two. The poor farmer and his family have only heard of one elf in the region: a local warlord with a reputation for violence. As such, they treat the PCs with extreme deference and are obviously terrified of the elves. This makes the PCs suspicious and sets off a series of social interactions/skill checks.
The PCs figure out that they've been mistaken for somebody else, and now have been set up to meet the warlord later on, who eventually became a recurring antagonist.
I'm wondering what advice/suggestions people can give for travel time in adventures? At the moment for instance, in a campaign I'm running (which is really just my husband and two support characters I'm playing) there is a month long period of travel. It seems boring to just say '30 days later you arrive in Korvosa'.
So far I've planned to have an attack by brigands/bandits/highwaymen (not actually sure what the difference is, so whatever is reasonable for three level 3 characters). Was considering a will-o-the-wisp, but it seems to be CR6 so that's probably too much. Maybe wolves. I thought maybe some minor roleplaying encounters, but can't really think of anything. :/
If you don't have a good idea for random encounters, either use a random encounter table appropriate to the environment and CR or just skip through to the good stuff. If your ideas don't excite you, then they will just bore your PCs as well.
When I run random encounters during travel, it is to reveal one of two things 1) that being low level sucks and takes a long time to get somewhere (this lets the players appreciate when they finally get to fly or telelport or use portals) or 2) to reveal something about the history or tone of the surrounding landscape.
For example, if your PCs are travelling through Varisia, it's always good to have an encounter with either goblins or Shoanti tribes so they get a feel for the indigenous peoples of the land. Alternately, if you just want them to know something big and bad is out in the wild, have them spot a red dragon sleeping and see what they do.
If you're in the Cinderlands of Varisia, Book three of Curse of the Crimson Throne has an encounter table for it.
Yeah, if you're not excited to run an encounter, your players are unlikely to get excited to encounter it.
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It's all about fun, of course, and I endorse the idea of bucking the conventional encounters trend if it's not going to be much fun for you.
To give you some food for thought, I had a GM who came up with some interesting ideas for a long travel sequence in a home brew campaign (we had previously had a fairly uninspired experience with a travel portion of one of the D&D 5E campaigns).
They're "outside the box" ideas, but were lots of fun. They also cut down on some of his workload (and mental efforts) as a DM, and gave the players a chance to do a little cooperative worldbuilding.
- Campfire Stories -
The party was fairly 'new' and didn't necessarily know one another well, so he asked us each to have a campfire story prepared that gave some insight into the character's past, or which was otherwise just a bit of fun.
We then interspersed these through the trip, which was a nice way to give each player some time to shine, and break up the usual encounter format.
- Narrative Encounters designed by PCs -
The other thing we did was have each player come up with a purely narrative, non-combat "encounter" ahead of time. Each player was then called upon (at a releveant time) to introduce the encounter, and then designate one of the other players to tell us how his or her character resolved it.
Like I said, it was all done via narrative and entirely without dice rolls, and was another good way to give a fun insight into the character's personality, skill set, etc.
For example, my 'encounter' was woods filled with willow trees. As the group went through, they noticed the smell of decay. Before we could get further, the willow branches suddenly grabbed the group and started strangling us. I designed one of the other players to respond, and his bard character managed to play a soothing tune which caused the trees to let us go, and he continued playing until we got clear. He subsequently revealed he had heard of this rare sort of tree before (tying it back to one of his Knowledges or something, as I recall).
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Let's say that the party needs to reach Korvoa ASAP. I would come up with a few encounters that would offer the possibility of speeding up their trip: A fast ship has come to port, a powerful Druid when is known to travel far distances has a grove near by, etc.
If the party needs to get to Korvosa eventually and time is not an issue, offer safer methods such as a caravan, traveling circus, or a group of pilgrams traveling in that direction.
No matter what way you choose to go, introducing small encounters or NPCs is a great way to flesh out the region, culture, etc. Not every situation the party encoutners needs to be a fight. Sometimes it can be a set of skill tests, or just plain role playing.
^^^ This
Here is my tip:
Grab a bunch of random encounter tables, and not only monster encounters, but npcs, travellers, wild animals, bad weather, etc., roll those encounters on a daily basis and write them down.
You will have 30-days worth of encounters planned ahead of them, they will just walk through them.
And you will have a lot of fun designing those encounters. Because when you roll "oh look, a bear", the bear could show on their path, they could hear screams on the forest, they could find a trail of blood, they could see a wanted poster on the road, and so on. You will have full authority when designing them.
If all you need is a few combat encounters, this generator should help you: http://donjon.bin.sh/pathfinder/encounter/
For npc encounters, try this: http://donjon.bin.sh/pathfinder/random/#type=npc
It's all about fun, of course, and I endorse the idea of bucking the conventional encounters trend if it's not going to be much fun for you.
To give you some food for thought, I had a GM who came up with some interesting ideas for a long travel sequence in a home brew campaign (we had previously had a fairly uninspired experience with a travel portion of one of the D&D 5E campaigns).
They're "outside the box" ideas, but were lots of fun. They also cut down on some of his workload (and mental efforts) as a DM, and gave the players a chance to do a little cooperative worldbuilding.
- Campfire Stories -
The party was fairly 'new' and didn't necessarily know one another well, so he asked us each to have a campfire story prepared that gave some insight into the character's past, or which was otherwise just a bit of fun.
We then interspersed these through the trip, which was a nice way to give each player some time to shine, and break up the usual encounter format.
- Narrative Encounters designed by PCs -
The other thing we did was have each player come up with a purely narrative, non-combat "encounter" ahead of time. Each player was then called upon (at a releveant time) to introduce the encounter, and then designate one of the other players to tell us how his or her character resolved it.
Like I said, it was all done via narrative and entirely without dice rolls, and was another good way to give a fun insight into the character's personality, skill set, etc.
For example, my 'encounter' was woods filled with willow trees. As the group went through, they noticed the smell of decay. Before we could get further, the willow branches suddenly grabbed the group and started strangling us. I designed one of the other players to respond, and his bard character managed to play a soothing tune which caused the trees to let us go, and he continued playing until we got clear. He subsequently revealed he had heard of this rare sort of tree before (tying it back to one of his Knowledges or...
I'm making campfire stories for all of my PCs from now on, in case it comes up.
We roleplay every day of travel for my group. I have thirty different random encounter tables I use to determine if anything interesting happens while they travel. Not every group may like random encounters, my my group enjoys them.
The best advice I can give about portraying travel is this: Read the Wheel of Time series, then don't ever do what it does.
Any advice that doesn't require reading 11,000 pages of text?
Before you head for the random encounter tables or weather charts. Ask yourself, what am I trying to accomplish here? Is it simply you don't want to screen wipe from one location to the other? Then I would ask why? Its entirely reasonable if the story is not served by in transit encounters to ignore it. Maybe have a few minutes of roleplaying/describing the trip. Then move on.
If there is something you want to accomplish, then you should plan it. If you want the journey to be arduous, a chance for failure or diversion, or to advance the introduction of the 'bad guys' of the campaign, set something up that ties into your goal.
In my opinion if a game is not an 'open world sandbox' like kingmaker, NEVER use random encounter tables. NEVER. Actually plan your encounters. And make them meaningful and have a purpose for your story. Perhaps you want to represent the transition from one area to the other, so have the encounters representative of the threats native to the regions the party is traveling through, (I presume traveling for 30 days they are going fairly far).
Before you head for the random encounter tables or weather charts. Ask yourself, what am I trying to accomplish here? Is it simply you don't want to screen wipe from one location to the other? Then I would ask why? Its entirely reasonable if the story is not served by in transit encounters to ignore it. Maybe have a few minutes of roleplaying/describing the trip. Then move on.
If there is something you want to accomplish, then you should plan it. If you want the journey to be arduous, a chance for failure or diversion, or to advance the introduction of the 'bad guys' of the campaign, set something up that ties into your goal.
In my opinion if a game is not an 'open world sandbox' like kingmaker, NEVER use random encounter tables. NEVER. Actually plan your encounters. And make them meaningful and have a purpose for your story. Perhaps you want to represent the transition from one area to the other, so have the encounters representative of the threats native to the regions the party is traveling through, (I presume traveling for 30 days they are going fairly far).
This is good advice, with one caveat on my part, as I'm home-brewing.
I use the random tables to generate encounters in advance, and then I contemplate how I could build from that into either a possible story hook, or a quick side-quest. By doing this, I've found over time that I get some additional inspiration and ideas that can take the game in a direction that I would never have thought of just planning everything off the top of my head.
Just try it. Roll on a table, or even generate a random page-number from the bestiary and see what is there. Then think about where the group is at this point in your game, the story arc, other hooks they've been exposed to but didn't follow. If after a minute or so you're still drawing a blank, then toss it and don't use it. However, over time those random monsters will generate ideas for your game.
I don't have a problem with using a bit of randomness to LOOK for ideas. What I don't like is creating a random encounter table and that being the end point. If you for instance made a list of the kinds of things one might encounter in the wilderness between sandpoint and korvosa, and then picked from that list and CRAFTED an encounter out of that, I don't particularly care whether you just pick or roll to pick.
However you inspire yourself to get ideas to make your encounters is fine by me. What I despise is the random encounter tables that are just used directly. 1. Nothing happens, 2. Encounter 1d4 goblins, 3. encounter 3 bandits, 4. bad weather, make a dc x survival check 5. Encounter a traveling merchant ... 20 encounter a chimera. Then the dm happens to roll 4 20s in 6 rolls in a row and for no particular reason it appears varisia has been invaded by an army of chimeras.
I don't have a problem with you using a table to create your plan. What I think a dm should never do is leave the end point of the plan to chance.
In my opinion if a game is not an 'open world sandbox' like kingmaker, NEVER use random encounter tables. NEVER. Actually plan your encounters. And make them meaningful and have a purpose for your story. Perhaps you want to represent the transition from one area to the other, so have the encounters representative of the threats native to the regions the party is traveling through, (I presume traveling for 30 days they are going fairly far).
You can take all this advice and still use a random encounter table. You just use the provided encounter as a starting point and then proceed to do exactly what you suggested, as suggested upthread.
You're in Varisia, add in Varisians. A wandering gypsy caravan can offer shelter, trade, news, entertainment, and maybe even some danger for the foolish and gullible.
Also when trqveling throw in the occasional roadside distraction: broken bits of old Thassilion ruin, Desnan shrines, majestic sunsets/rises, or grave markers.
As for monsters, never make the encounter fell like "and then there were trolls" instead, go with something like: "As the grey stormclouds fall upon the trail like a terrible army of lightning and wind, the vangard of the storm comes as a gentle drizzle. Suddenly you hear a howl upon the wind of fiendish glee and savage bloodlust." And then see if your players decide to hide or face it in the open. A journey upon the road should have as many interesting features and deadly encounters as a jaunt through a dungeon.
First tip: Avoid more than one "random attack" encounter. Nothing drags the speed down or makes a journey seem longer than fights. Even if you want to do more than one, make them possible to avoid through diplomacy/intimidate. MAJOR POINTS if you can fill the journey with events that DON'T require combat. Players fight all the time, so filling the journey other things makes it feel special.
Second tip: Vary things up a bit, there are a hundred different events you could throw into the game to make it interesting. Just a few suggestions below...
*One of the merchants/passengers has had something stolen and it's possible for your party to investigate and find the culprit/item.
*A penniless bard wishes to travel with the group but has nothing to offer. He doesn't actually offer any thing if you pay for his ticket/allow him to join but does write a song about the group.
*A large storm has come and winds buffet the group. Continuing through causes the players to come down with cold and risk losing items to wind. It's especially interesting if they're travelling with a caravan and can offer assistance to protect their belongings
*A farmer is standing underneath a tree and is confused by his poor donkey who is stuck in the crook of the tree 5 feet above ground.
*A mother's child has fallen ill and is in need of medical assistance
*A travelling merchant selling (unusually) cheap goods, apparently he's trying to sell them cheap to avoid taxes but they're actually fake/stolen.
*A travelling caravan selling exotic food/wares.
*A stubborn group of cows blocks the path and refuses to move
*A bridge is broken and is in need of repairs to pass
I personally would aim for around 4 maybe 5 encounters, ideally the most of them aren't too involved as your group's ultimate purpose is to reach a destination and continue their quest, not get sidetracked on other story lines. I am personally of the mindset, that time invested into side stories, detracts from main story line too much.
Sorry for referring to my own post (Disappointed for no one else doing it), but check out this thread from a few years back. It was design for this purpose specifically.
First tip: Avoid more than one "random attack" encounter. Nothing drags the speed down or makes a journey seem longer than fights. Even if you want to do more than one, make them possible to avoid through diplomacy/intimidate. MAJOR POINTS if you can fill the journey with events that DON'T require combat. Players fight all the time, so filling the journey other things makes it feel special.
First tip: Avoid more than one "random attack" encounter. Nothing drags the speed down or makes a journey seem longer than fights. Even if you want to do more than one, make them possible to avoid through diplomacy/intimidate. MAJOR POINTS if you can fill the journey with events that DON'T require combat. Players fight all the time, so filling the journey other things makes it feel special.Relevant comic is relevant
This comic is relevant depending on the game you intend to play. This is the most important point here - if you are playing a 'the world is vast and mysterious' sandbox type of game - you should make travel take time - allow one 50 mile hex of travel per day and have the map fleshed out with interesting locations and such for your players to find and interact with - have your table for survival dc's to avoid being lost if they venture into the woods - have planned and random encounters and hooks that may derail the original reason they set out to travel in the first place - etc. In this type of game - travel and random encounters are important.
If the type of game you are playing is about a big story that involves set pieces and don't want your party to be sidetracked - and the only encounters they have on the road are all random and irrelevant - honestly skip it. As someone stated earlier if you aren't interested in your encounters your players won't be either - this is so true more than anything - the tone of the two types of games are very different here and if the players are more interested in the plot it's more than fine to 'gloss over' boring parts to move on with the interesting stuff.
Not every game plays the same way - the only thing that really derails a game is if you try to switch game styles on your players without warning or reason, set expectations and (assuming everyone is enjoying the game) have fun.
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I love running sandbox adventures.
In a previous campaign of mine, the PCs found a treasure map leading to dungeon. Getting to the dungeon took a large number of sessions, and over a year of in-game time. On the way, the party got involved in a minor political struggle, visited a number of haunted ruins, led a small army to take down a Frost Giant King, and re-established a fallen nation. And gained five levels.