The Tedium of Travel Rules

 

Source: Zach Wolf's excellent Realms of Peril sandbox

Travel rules in TTRPGs have been a constant thorn in my side. In theory, there should be some interesting gameplay and decisions that result from overland travel. In reality, it’s never led an interesting gameplay decisions for my players. Mayhap I’m simply running the rules incorrectly, or incompletely, but I still want to take some time to think about it, hence, this blog.

In general, there are fundamentally three components to (theoretically) make overland travel (hypothetically) interesting. Those are resources (i.e. attrition) and time.

Resources include things like player HP, stat penalties, rations, and torches. Time usually translates to how many random encounters you must make to get anywhere.

A party of players wants to move from one side of the map to the other as quickly and safely as possible. They bring enough food and torches for the journey. They may get a random encounter or two, but ultimately will arrive at their destination without issue. This is how it has almost always gone for my players in our games. Despite the aggressive tracking of resources and time, it doesn’t tend to result in any meaningful or interesting gameplay. If anything, it just seems like a waste of time.

There are two directions we could go from here, with the simplest solutions on one side, and more crunchy solutions on the other. Starting on the simple side…

How ICRPG Handles Overland Travel

In Runehammer Games’ Index Card RPG, overland travel is extremely simple: Each hex costs each player a certain amount of gold. More difficult terrain costs more. This abstracts out the burden of tracking rations, water supplies, torches (perhaps) and anything else, reducing it to a simple number. The weakness of this system is that it just burns gold. As long as players cart around all of their worldly wealth (which players usually do) they can travel freely, practically forever. Functionally, this feels more like paying a tax than planning for an expedition. I’m not sure it’s fun, but it at least nods to the idea of overland journeys being difficult. There is no preparation from players; no shopping, no weight tracking. It’s just fuel to burn.

How ACKS handles the same issue

Autarch’s Adventurer, Conqueror, King System, Imperial Imprint (ACKS II) is the gold standard of obsessively detailed math-based simulationism. It's also my second-most played RPG system after D&D 5e. Tracking random encounters is something best automated via spreadsheet or program, as its hundreds of players and DMs can attest. Off the top of my head, the DM must track the following at any given time, particularly during travel:

• Carried weight (this determines travel speed)
• Carried rations (which must be consumed daily)
• Carried water (only in dry regions)
• Weather conditions that day (which utilize the real-world Köppen Climate Classification system, no I'm not kidding)
• The time of the year (to determine how much daylight is available)
• Random encounters (which vary depending on if the hex is one of four classifications between civilized and borderlands)
• The type of terrain the party is traveling through
• and so on, and so fourth. This is ACKS II we're talking about 

Ultimately, this stuff should be tracked by an automated program; as a human, the whole thing just bogs down. Furthermore, it typically results in a big fat “nothing happened" or more realistically "2d8 caribou are grazing 70 yards away." It’s like that meme of the person stepping on a rake and hurting himself, versus a person doing a much bigger, fancier trick on a rake, and ultimately having the same result of hurting himself.

This is the one.

 

What’s the Point?

So what then, exactly, is the point of overland travel rules? Isn’t it likely that a competent DM could reasonably tell players that it costs a certain number of rations to get somewhere, but that’s just one step away from Runehammer paying gold per hexagon traveled. Instead of gold, now we’re turning that gold into rations, and tracking rations.

In my perfect game, overland travel would lead to interesting decisions. In an open-world video game, we can simply see interesting objects in the distance, and go explore them. In a tabletop game, the players are functionally blind to the world except for whatever the DM shows them. This is why board games provide such powerful tools for communicating gameplay to players. If exploration were more like a board game, then it would become a logistical puzzle for players to solve. “If we want to get to the mountain fortress, which is X many hexes away, we need to bring X many of Y resource.” Players typically enjoy this puzzle, as it gives them agency and a feeling of control over proceedings. In this case, though, the interesting decisions happen before travel, not during.

Traveling from town to a mountain fortress might be best handled by drawing from a stack of cards labeled “dangerous events.” Players tend not to blame a deck of cards for screwing them over, though they might blame a DM for the same thing, even if the result were drawn from a table. I, the DM could easily say that a terrible storm blows in overnight, ruining one of the party’s tents, spoiling half their rations, and resulting in a non-travel day. However, that would feel unfair and arbitrary. Having the system handle this helps put the DM and players on the same side, rather than making the DM the bad guy.

 

The Land of Eem's Mucklands setting is my new gold standard for exploration

A Dark (Muppet) Horse Appears

The Land of Eem is a remarkable achievement in tabletop RPG design. It doesn’t cleanly fit into the OSR, nor the NSR. It’s not a d20 fantasy game. It’s not a survival game. It’s not Powered by the Apocalypse. It’s not a meat grinder or a super hero simulator. Its tone sits somewhere between the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, with a good measure of Adventure Time thrown in.

The game is, as best I can tell, a story generator.

With that in mind, its travel rules follow suit: Any given overland travel step is met with a dice roll that (usually) results in something happening. There’s only a 25% of “nothing happening” every travel turn. Instead, players are met with all manner of encounters, ranging from perilous dangers to helpful discoveries, along with losing supplies, getting tired, getting stuck in storms, and even interparty conflict (which is an opportunity for players to gain XP by roleplaying).

While the goal of travel is presumably about getting to where you’re going, the Land of Eem supposes that travel is just as much a part of the experience as the destination itself. Its rule set presupposes that every random encounter is primarily a social encounter. Its initiative system has four stages, and the first three are talking. Essentially, the Land of Eem flies in the face of classic (and even modern) tabletop roleplaying games, because its primary goal is not attrition, it is story generation. If a player character finds themselves without enough rations for the day, the party might find themselves searching for some (a theoretically normal D&D travel experience). In addition to finding edible plants, they might find a strip-mining operation run by unscrupulous goblins. Perhaps a group of disgruntled forest creatures are looking to put a stop to the whole thing, and recruit the party for such a task. Instead of single-mindedly bee-lining for the dungeon and handwaving travel as unimportant, the Land of Eem elevates travel as a major part of the gameplay loop, thus creating more of it.

Maybe travel isn't about attrition as much as a series of interesting decisions.