This is a response to:
- Brian Ashford‘s post about wilderness travel by points
- Aaron Griffin’s post about point-crawling
I’ve been planning a game in the Symbaroum setting. I have been waffling about how to run the forest. I had thought about trying to break it into hexes, but the forest is very large and that seems tedious. The system seems to assume I will be playing it very “trad” and planning each session out ahead of time, but that is not how I prep my games.
I really like running point-crawl one-shots, but I have not thought through about how you might slowly evolve a point-crawl over the length of a campaign. I think that I will have a point crawl map with two main elements, nodes and paths. Both nodes and paths will have a variety of tags, that will have mechanical implications. I want to flesh out some of those implications over a series of blog posts.
To start, paths might simply have the following tags:
- Rumored Path – Traverse in 1d4x the standard time. 2x Random Encounter chance.
- Rough Path – Traverse in standard length. 1x Random Encounter chance.
- Trodden Path – Traverse in half time. 1x Random Encounter chance.
Rumored Paths might be overheard in a tavern, hinted at in a notebook, or sketched on a rough map. Rough Paths would be described by an experienced adventurer, depicted on a detailed map, or shown to the party by a tracker. A trodden path is a commonly known and traveled upon.
Likewise, nodes might have a variety of tags to describe the likelihood of treasure, danger, competition, and corruption. I am still thinking about what number of tags is useful versus just being overkill crunch for something I would be better off not having written down.
Shoalmont Games 
I’m unfamiliar with Symbaroum, but is there an underlying costs to slower paths or is this dependent on the situations in play? Meaning – does the system have time pressure besides what the GM invents?
I’m totally down on the idea of nodes and paths and using a tagging system.
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I’m using 5e as the core system, and hacking the setting out of Symbaroum. I think your question has a lot of merit even still, as adding more time to travel doesn’t have a clear penalty in 5e. Lots of GM’s hand-waive the book-keeping elements of food, encumbrance, and travel time. At the very least, I would have one unit of travel time require a ration to be expended by each character, and a random encounter to be rolled.
Where my brain went with your question though, is whether that is something I want to be spending table time doing. In my mind, the core concept of this game revolves around the immense work of uncovering rare artifacts from a hostile forest. As such, I think that travel time and resource management need to be somewhat core elements to communicate that risk. I fear that the systems will take time away from character narrative and might feel too much like a mini-game sub-system.
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I think travel systems and exploration based games go hand in hand. My brain goes toward a version of what UVG does:
– Say travel time is in number of days and each day is 1 ration and 1 “hazard roll” (more later)
– Stopping for a short time to forage, repair, investigate, heal or similar costs EITHER 1 ration or 1 hazard roll
– Stopping or diverting for a full day just takes a day as normal.
On the hazard roll, the Hazard System on necropraxis.com comes to mind immediately, but I was also thinking something closer to the Perilous Wilds roll – a roll that always presents SOMETHING and it can be good.
Hazard Roll (d6): 1=encounter a danger, 2=signs of a danger, 3=obstacle, 4=fatigue, 5=signs of a discovery, 6=encounter a discovery
Just spitballing…
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