Are We There Yet?
Posted by: Chief -- August 06, 2024
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As I was recently working on some ideas for a new campaign, I started doing some thinking about how to conduct travel. Roleplaying by post (PbP) definitely has its own challenges, but for me, travel has been one of the biggest challenges no matter what game I play in. How do you make travel fun and interesting so players stay engaged and aren’t just going through the motions? With PbP it is even more important I feel to keep players engaged because good writing is hard work. Some players are fine with writing simple posts, but others enjoy the creativity this medium allows and choose to make more lengthy and oftentimes more involved posts. If you don’t give them the material to work with that keeps them interested, you run the risk of them having to work harder and possibly watching them burn themselves out when the “hard work” isn’t giving them the joy they are seeking. There are several ways to run travel. Random encounter tables have been around since the earliest days of role playing and they are certainly one option. I’d personally argue that these are great if you are playing a purely tactical game. Even then, this is only if you really challenged your players and made death a real possibility. These kinds of games are more “roll” playing than “role” playing from my perspective. This personally isn’t the type of game I am generally interested in but that’s just my opinion. I find that strict adherence to the random encounter rules can really just bog down a game if you really are in it for the adventure aspect of roleplaying a fantasy hero and developing his/her as a person. Some DM’s make specific encounters that they chose to use instead. They take the time to make thoughtful encounters to face creatures that you usually don’t get to face. Oftentimes there are elements of surprise, or skill checks involved to find clues leading up to said encounters. These are great, but not without flaws as well. After all, how many of these do you run from start to finish of the travel period? Is it based on distance or do you just run a set amount for each travel period no matter what the distance is? This option is great, but can be a little predictable. Changing up the type of encounters so that they aren’t all necessarily combat encounters helps, but too many non-combat encounters can start to feel like too much filler. Personally, I think you need to use a good mix of everything I have mentioned so far while also realizing that sometimes it is alright to go from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ without anything in between at all. The last thing I would say to consider that will keep things interesting is travel options. Providing players options on how to get from one place to another will help you understand what they are looking for during that particular part of the campaign. If they choose the longer road with a traveling caravan, over the more dangerous but shorter path overland through the swamp then they probably are trying to focus more on what happens at their destination rather than looking for the lair of a black dragon. Always consider there are other options like watercraft or flight that can be possibilities as well. Then there is always magical means of teleportation that can always result in the unexpected as well if something goes awry. As you can see, the means of travel can be an adventure in and of itself. So what are your thoughts? I’d love to see some other ideas I might not have considered in the comments! |
