Roll Your Own

I like when the players make the rolls. Knave, the rules-light system by Ben Milton, gives PCs an "armor bonus" so that they can roll armor against a monster's static value. It's quick to grok but doesn't sacrifice anything from a "normal" attack roll.

What if players rolled their own checks for random encounters, particularly during wilderness travel? It would help them to conceptualize the passage of time during wilderness turns and it would also directly reveal the consequences of spending more time: risking more checks.

The referee does give up the power to discretely adjust the encounter chance on the fly, but in my games it would not be a problem to tell the players that their normal 1-in-6 chance is a 2-in-6 because of the amount of noise they've been making. In fact, it's not even a negative. Again, it provides the players with more information on which to base their decisions.

Adventurers encounter a wandering furry (art by David Trampier)

My current travel rules include an encounter check on every wilderness turn made by the players, who take turns around the table. They roll a d20, and lower results equate to worse outcomes.

1-3 wandering monster

4-12 travel challenge

13-16 descriptive encounter

17-18 evidence of monster

19-20 discovery

I'm toying with the idea of having them add their WIS bonus as long as they're not traveling in darkness or at a fast pace. It might mean that certain characters would very rarely roll wandering monsters, but since they must alternate, in the long run it should balance out with characters who have lower WIS scores.

Unless they're all clerics, I guess. Guided by the holy light?

Travel Challenges

For some reason, I like skill challenges.

I think it's the idea of a player stepping into their character and thinking about how the character would solve a problem given their unique talents.

But, every time I've tried to use player-driven skill challenges to depict wilderness travel, it's fallen flat.

Boring travel (painting by Stefano di Giovanni)

The fault lies with me, as the referee. Even if I set basic parameters, my players lack enough detail about the environment and the consequences to devise their own interesting obstacles. Sure, they can come up with something ("I jump over the chasm with Athletics"), but do those really add to the experience?

But, as soon as I start giving them more detail to set the scene, I ask myself "if I'm doing all of this work anyway, why not just run a hex crawl?"

In the future, I plan to take my favorite part of my travel challenges - the failure conditions and ramifications - and meld them into more traditional wilderness travel.

Getting Lost

• Whenever players take a wilderness turn to travel, roll an encounter die. The most common result is a travel challenge or obstacle rolled on a region-specific table (1-in-2 chance).
• Players propose a solution to the obstacle. If there is risk involved, call for a saving throw.
• A failure results in immediate repercussions and a failure added to the journey's tally. Then, they roll up another challenge: players cannot advance to the next hex until they overcome one.
• If the players accumulate 3 failures, they've wandered off course. Roll to find out what they've wandered into (typically a wandering monster).

I like the idea that getting lost isn't a binary failure but a series of blunders that leads to travel's fail state.

A more improvisational referee could do without the region-specific obstacle table and come up with challenges on the fly, but if I tried that they'd probably end up pretty boring.