Making wilderness movement interesting and dynamic

[SunKing]

I want to make wilderness (and specifically trackless boreal forest) movement and actions more interesting; I have no problems with finding/making interesting encounters, but I want choices and uses of Survival to be meaningful in between those encounters. Right now, I move them off their desired route by one increment on the hex map for each 5 that they fail a Survival roll. And specific actions, like climbing a tree to see where they can help with that. Whether they use a fire at night may make their Survival check easier, but may also increase the chance of an unwanted encounter. II want choices, actions, and rolls to matter, and the game not simply be a series of linked wilderness encounters that feel like they are just sitting their waiting for the PCs to 'bump' into them, regardless of what they do between those encounters...

Looking for advice or a product in that regard; I've looked through 'Ultimate Wilderness' and it isn't what I'm looking for...

[Andostre]

Do you use the rules for getting lost when traveling through the wilderness?

[LordKailas]

You could use the cards from the chase deck and the rules from the social combat deck

Basically you lay the cards out in a grid pattern face down based on how long you want it to take from point A to point B.

The players start in the top left corner and are trying to get to the bottom right. Each card represents an obstacle and two methods for dealing with it. The party chooses if they want to attempt just one of the checks or both. If they pick to only do one and are successful then they can flip up any card adjacent to that card, but not diagonal. If the party passes both checks then they can flip up the card that is diagonal.

Once they flip up the card in the bottom right corner they have arrived at their destination.

Each check represents hours, days or weeks as determined by you. In this case there's not any penalty for failure other then it taking longer. You could encounters to specific cards which the party may end up avoiding. You could even mix say forest and underground cards if you want to represent a mountain path for a particular leg of the journey.

I have used the chase cards before and they make things different without feeling like it's a completely different game. The only downside is that you may need to adjust the listed checks up or down based on the party level in order to keep the challenges appropriate.

[Wheldrake]

Back in the early days of D&D, we were encouraged to use the game "Wildernes Survival" to simulate adventuring through the wilderness. There are some relics from this precursor in things like the getting lost rules, using the survival skill to forage for food and so on.

Part of what makes some folks think wilderness adventures are boring is the abstract way the wilderness is represented on a campaign map, with or without "hexes". In a real wilderness, you don't necessarily have to travel five miles for the terrain to alter considerably, for there to be multiple points of interest and obstacles to overcome. Things like a sudden valley, escarpment, stream or gorge. A hidden grove that you only run across if you follow the west flank of a certain hill. A game trail that leads to a critter's lair. A ruined building that you wouldn't notice unless you blundered right across it. A herd of animals (which might or might not have special meaning for a given player). An isolated farmstead or woodsman's cottage, with folks you can chat with and wring intel from. And so on.

Another part of what sucks the interest out of wilderness adventures is the "railroad-y" nature of published adventure paths. In most cases, the wilderness only exists as a distance or lapse of time you must cross to get somewhere. Many folks don't realize that the wilderness is just another sort of dungeon; instead of walls you have distance, terrain and obstacles. And you can have a lot of varied and different things living cheek-by-jowl in a very cramped space.

A lot of the DM's job comes back to the map. You wouldn't (usually) take your group of PCs into a dungeon exploring session without a detailed map, would you? Wilderness adventures can work the same way. But just as it would be fastidious and nearly impossible to map an entire dungeon the size of Moria, you can't map out a wilderness to a scale of five or ten-foot squares.

Some people solve this abstraction conundrum by preparing a short list of specific locations that the PCs will stumble across during their exploration, without necessarily pinpointing each location on a map. You might think of this as a flowchart method, similar to using the chase deck, like LK suggests.

Others choose the narrative approach: you just describe the experience of travelling for a given number of days until characters reach the next planned step in the railroad.

Others construct massive random tables of what you can find, admitting their lack of interest in mapping out minute details, like this guy:
https://fr.scribd.com/document/255999057/Random-Wilderness-Events-D-D-5th-E d

Others will take a published map and fill it in with details, like I did during my recent RotRL campaign, with help from work done by other forumites like PH Dungeon:
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2upvf?the-Forest-of-Random-Encounters#3

There are many ways of spicing up winderness adventures, and making it not just another way to get from page 36 to page 37 of an adventure path book. Here's another guy with lots of ideas:
https://theangrygm.com/getting-there-is-half-the-fun/

And another: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/108257/how-to-make-forest-traveling -interesting

[SunKing]

Excellent and useful advice, all. As I mentioned, I’ve got no shortage of interesting wilderness encounters. What I’m struggling with is avoiding the phenomenon where PCs merely ‘wander’ into a series of wilderness encounters that sit there waiting for them. I want the journey to be interesting and compelling, where player choice and action matter. Thanks all.

[Mark Hoover 330]

One way to make the "trackless" wilderness more about player choice is to offer them choices. Look over your players' character sheets, hunting down any skills beyond Survival that relate to the wilderness. Climb; Handle Animal; Knowledge: Geography, History, Local, Nature; Profession: Cook, Driver, Farmer, Fisherman, Gardener, Herbalist, Miner, Sailor, Shepherd, Tanner, Trapper, Woodcutter; Ride; Swim all leap to mind.

If your PCs have these skills, have them roll them and prepare, ahead of time, information they'd know of their immediate or regional surroundings based on those rolls. If for example you've got a Human Fighter with Profession: Woodcutter, a Grippili Ranger with Profession: Fisherman, a Halfling Hunter with Knowledge: Geography and a Half-Elf Wizard with Knowledge: Nature, a boreal forest could easily be a happy playground for them.

The Grippili, using his Climb speed, races up a tree and sees a nearby glade with a small, marshy lake. Rolling his Profession check he might realize that the thing might be a great place to fish for mud-dwellers; he might also know that the terrain suggests that there might be a cave entrance under water.

Meanwhile the Wizard and Hunter confer. The natural features in the area appear to be tainted by fey powers; weird mushrooms growing in rings, a rare kind of winter berry in patches, mud that giggles when you squish it. Tall tales are told of a "laughing man," a korred that could reside on a pine ridge nearby. The Hunter can confirm that, if that's north over there then Laughing Man Ridge should be in that direction; the marsh lake the Ranger spied is known as Kidney Marsh so the ridge is likely about 15 miles away.

Finally, while all of this is going on, the Fighter rolls on his own Profession: Woodcutter. Based on local flora and trees in the area, and distribution patterns of Darkwood from other parts of the forest, it's likely that in the opposite direction from Laughing Man Ridge is a stand of the hearty trees known as Duskhart. Woodsmen in nearby towns tell legends about a fell beast that keeps them from hewing the trees.

Now all of a sudden you've got choices. The party can venture to Laughing Man Ridge and see if there's a Korred there; they can plumb the depths of Kidney Marsh and see if they can find the underwater cave network or just other resources; lastly they can move toward the marsh then turn west and make for Duskhart to find what guards the trees there.

Sunny K, you've said you know how to build interesting encounters in the wilderness. I'm guessing you also know how to use terrain, hazards and such as part of those interesting encounters. One way to engage your players then is to preface those encounters using the skills and knowledge they have, the abilities they're using. If you want the players to make interesting choices you have to give them choices to make.

The next time your players get lost or otherwise wander out of the main campaign area, think about the encounters and hazards you have planned for them and contrive a way to tell your players about them.

Another way to do this, if PCs DON'T have skills or the players don't roll high enough with them, is to take a page out of your local dungeon. In a classic dungeon you have a room, with exits leading out, hallways leading away beyond those exits and still more doors and archways piercing those hallways. A boreal woodland might be the same:

You've come to the end of the game trail you've been following, arriving in a narrow clearing formed some time ago when a tree collapsed to the forest floor. the old, dead trunk long ago began to return to the earth as it is partially submerged in a hillock of moss and peat to your immediate left. The opening in the undergrowth is roughly twice the radius of the four of you standing together (about 30' around). Just beyond the downed tree is a shallow streambed, its waters nearly completely dammed up by the rotting wood and mossy earth; this is one means of leaving the clearing without blazing a new path. Ahead and to your right you think you spy another game trail cutting through the undergrowth.