On Overland Travel, Part 1: Can We Prove Vaarsuvius Wrong?

Rich Burlew’s Order of the
Stick #145 rather accurately expresses
the nature of the problem with Random Encounters when travelling overland. Go
read the strip before continuing; it only takes a second and it’s worth it. You
don’t have to know anything else about the series to understand the point made
in this particular page.

In the strip, Vaarsuvius rather
convincingly demonstrates (far better than I ever could) exactly why Random Encounters
are a waste of time—but do they have
to be that way? If they were such a waste of time, why are they then such a
staple of the genre? Perhaps, like Wandering Monsters and traps, the mechanic
can be salvaged once we dive in and understand why it’s there in the first
place.

My approach to Wandering Monsters in
dungeons—which you can read here—won’t
work for Random Encounters travelling overland because of the nature of resting
and healing in D&D. Wandering Monsters represent battles of attrition that
wear down spellcasters faster than fighters, and also provide a simple way to
simulate an entire ecosystem without using a single iota of the GM’s
brainpower. However, if the party has the opportunity to rest between every
single Random Encounter, they quickly become a waste of time for the reasons
mentioned above—the party will blow all of their powerful, limited-use
abilities, then simply heal to full before the next battle. Victory is both
free and assured, so the GM might as well save everyone some time and roll on a
random-XP table every day of travel.

But before we decide to ‘fix’ Random
Encounters, we have to know why they
exist in the first place.

Note: For the purposes of article, “Random
Encounters” refers to monsters, NPCs, and other stuff stumbled into in an overland
journey measured in days, while “Wandering Monsters” refers to
monsters, NPCs, and other stuff stumbled into in a dungeon crawl, typically
measured in minutes or hours. I believe this is the terminology used in D&D
itself, though the phrases have always been used interchangeably in my gaming
group, and maybe in yours too.

Why Bother?

I believe that every game mechanic was
created for a reason. Not all of them were necessarily well thought out, or
solve the problem they were intended to elegantly. For some, like Wandering
Monsters, the reason is long forgotten, but the mechanic lingers, leaving
people scratching their heads and simply houseruling it out.

Random Encounters are one of a slew of mechanics,
such as Wandering Monsters, Treasure Tables, and Rumour Tables, that involve
the GM secretly rolling on a secret table to determine a result that they could
just make up by themselves and no-one would know—a practice which, I believe,
has become increasingly popular. GMs will build bespoke treasure hoards and
encountered tailored to the party, rather than relying on a random generator.
There’s nothing wrong with doing this, and if it works for you, go for it, but there’s
a reason all those tables and random generators exist in the first place.

The first, and most obvious, is that procedurally generating content makes the
GM’s job easier. It’s much easier to roll some dice and be given an answer
than to come up with one yourself. This makes GMing, which is already an
intimidating role, much more accessible.

The second, and most controversial, is that
procedurally generating content makes
the GM into a player. Neither the GM nor the players know what will happen
when the dice hit the table, so both are holding their breaths in suspense. The
GM, now, is on the side of the players—worrying that a powerful monster will be
generated, hoping for good treasure, and so on. This can reduce the sometimes adversarial
nature of the relationship between GM and player, because both players and GM
know that the GM isn’t punishing the players by having them stumble into a dragon’s
cave—the game did that to them.

The third, and most subtle, is that it means the PCs aren’t the centre of the
universe. When every encounter isn’t custom-tailored to the party’s exact
level and makeup, the entire nature of the universe changes. This gamey-seeming
mechanic can actually make enhance
verisimilitude by realistically populating the world with “too hard”
and “too easy” encounters. Much like with Wandering Monsters, a
cleverly built Random Encounter table can simulate a thriving ecosystem without
diverting any of the GM’s precious attention.

There are a few other benefits to Random
Encounter specifically, as well. They can make long journeys actually feel
longer than short ones, and give an incentive to find faster methods of travel.
I’ve seen many players scoff at buying horses or hiring ships to travel, because
it doesn’t actually matter how long it takes to get from point A to point B
in-game. Regular Random Encounter checks makes travelling on horseback a
substantially safer proposition. Additionally, character classes that are
experts at wilderness survival, such as rangers and druids, might be given more
opportunities to shine. Rangers in particular need every advantage they can
get.

So What Do We Do About It?

The problem lies not within Random
Encounters themselves, nor in resting per
se, but in the interaction between them. This leaves us three options: give
up, change the encounters, or change resting.

Give Up

If we just get rid of overland encounters
altogether, the problem is solved. This is a perfectly acceptable solution—it’s
the one espoused by Vaarsuvius earlier—and it’s basically what I’ve been doing
for years as GM, just like I gave up on traps and Wandering Monsters.

Of course, it comes with a heavy set of
downsides. Wandering Monsters, as I mentioned in my On Wandering Monsters
series, have a slew of mechanical and narrative benefits. Abandoning traps
means unfairly shafting the Rogue and de-clawing the dungeon. Abandoning Random
Encounters can make overland travel, a staple of the genre, bland and
uninteresting—and can shaft the Ranger and Druid, both of whom are supposed to
be “good at” travel in the way that Rogues are “good at”
dungeons. A good Random Encounter system, similarly, should be able to spice up
overland travel, if we can just get it right this time.

Change the Encounters

Given that they are only encountered every
few days, the party will be going into each battle fully-charged and rearing to
go. This means that the only way to give the battle any stakes is to massively ratchet up the difficulty of
the monster, such that it accounts for the party’s entire daily complement of abilities.
We could also greatly increase the rate of wandering monsters such that there
are six or seven every day, rather than one or two, but the thought of how many
real-world hours would be spent fighting monsters to simulate even a week’s
travel makes me ill. Either of these approaches make every Random Encounters
into a life-or-death battle to the bitter end, which isn’t what I’m looking for
as a general solution, though it might work in some cases.

Change Resting

Generally speaking, taking long rests in
dungeons should be discouraged, if not prevented outright. A single 'delve’
into a dungeon is a resource-management game of judiciously expending spells
and hit points in order to overcome obstacles. Overland journeys have no such
restrictions, allowing healing between every encounter, thus eliminating much
of the “resource management” aspect of the game.

The short rest/long rest dynamic in 5th
edition D&D is a good one, and one baked into every level of the rules, so
changes made to it should be with a light touch. When tweaking things for
overland travel, we don’t want to 'break’ other aspects of the game, like
dungeon crawls or murder mysteries.

If we think of the journey between town and
the dungeon as one “day,” from a resting standpoint, then we can
replicate the “whittling down of spells and hit points” effect that
makes dungeon crawls work. We can keep Random Encounters short and sweet,
because there is no longer any pressure on each individual one to challenge the
party, but rather, to whittle away some of their precious resources. There’s a
lot of specifics to work out, but I think this is the approach that will work
best for a typical D&D campaign.

Next
up: On Overland Travel, Part II: Long Rests and
Short Rests.