Point A to Point B

A peculiar problem is coming up with my D&D game tomorrow, so now is a good time to talk about it, as it directly affects the player. That problem is travel.

As some might remember from this recap last week, the players are tentatively accepting a "request" (not a "quest") to journey down to a certain border between Croatia and the Ottoman territory of Slavonia, a distance of about 140 miles. Not really that far, of course, but still, enough to raise question, how to get the player from point A to point B. Sooner or later, every dungeon master runs into this.

There are three fundamental strategies in accomplishing the displacement. The first method is "poof!" you're there. This might be accompanied by arbitrary costs of travel, the number of rations you have to scratch from your character, even possibly a roll for things that have broken or been spoiled along the way. Oh, and of course, the days of the journey are counted against the calendar. The main logic is that "travel is boring," and therefore, why not just do the Hollywood film cut betweeen the characters turning off the light and leaving their apartment and then getting off the plane, er, the wagon, finding themselves conveniently in Croatia.

Method 2 is the way all my DMs did it when I was starting out, that I myself followed for a long time: count the number of days, roll a random encounter chance for each day, fight out the random encounters (yes, one by one), then count the journey as "earned" as the players reach their destination, tired from having to fight random nobodies. This at least has the sense of the players feeling the journey's weight, if not the actual distance. It's also a good way to discourage long trips.

Method 3 is the video game solution: side quests. Let the players get there, but keep inventing problems along the way that need to be solved by insisting that the party enter this dungeon to get this gem or pour this vial of water into this lost stone bowl in the forest, yada yada yada. Thus, we turn the journey into its own "adventure," yay, so that we have to solve the adventure to have the adventure.

These methods are to get around the problem of having to verbally describe the journey taking place, as the trees and hills and streams and other travellers and houses and toll gates and fences and farms and rocks and flowers and the sun too passing overhead, faster than we are, just go by. A 140 mile version on foot is equivalent to a 35 hour journey by car... just to put it into perspective for those who haven't actually done it. Which includes most, though not all, of us.

Example of a dense map, coincidentally filling the
countryside between where the players are and where
they want to go.

My issue with the "solutions" is that they essentially flatten the world, divorcing it from the one aspect that makes it an actual world: it's a big place, requires time and difficulty to get around, and often that time spent is, yes, actually boring. On some level I'm certainly ready to cut the scene and move on... but there is very little point in my systematically making a very dense map of a region only to then utterly ignore every hex that doesn't include a monster encounter, and then ignore that hex FOR the monster encounter. This seems counterproductive.

Rather, we might as DMs conceive of the land as the experience: rivers have to be overcome, terrain navigated, lakes gotten around or employed as an alternative, hills avoided, uncivilised hexes avoided, the right road taken... while the actual covered ground is comprehended like an actual journey we might take ourselves would do. If you or I were to spend 35 hours walking, starting in Buda and ending up just off the south edge of this map, we wouldn't be bored, right? Our walking tour of Bakony would be enlightening, we'd be staggered by the food, we'd laugh about the people we'd meet, we'd be standing at some crossroads arguing over a map, trying to figure out just exactly what crossroads we were at. And when we returned home, we'd regale our friends with what a great trip it was, and how they ought to do it too, especially this part, and this part... and oh, hey, this part too.

But none of this is possible for several reasons related to D&D... and I'll try and discuss a few in no particular order.

The first, the one foremost on my mind, is agency.

There should be no doubt that I am a firm believer in allowing the players to choose their destiny. I believe firmly that a party should be able to head out wherever they want, do whatever they want, overcome whatever they want... but, uh, well... all this sort of goes to pot where geography is concerned.

See, if you just want to go one hex, a mere six and two-thirds miles, most likely you're not feeling very constrained. Hell, it's right there. From this hill, we can see that hill, and it's just one hex away. Going feels like agency. It feels like we're in control of our lives. It feels great.

But going twenty-one hexes isn't like that. First of all, if you want to get there by the shortest route, and presumably you do, then you have to pretty much take a specific 21 hexes, one after another, on a specific road, that's going to go through specific towns that you have no choice about. And when the DM tells you, oh party member, that this little village is "Totvazsony," trust me, you don't give a damn. No more than you would if you were driving from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City and discovered that you'd just passed through Ogallah, Kansas. Let's be serious... you really wouldn't care.

I may have invested the name Totvazsony carefully, pulling it out of GoogleEarth as a real life place, but that doesn't make it interesting. It doesn't thrill you. What you, the player feel, is a lack of purpose, fatigue, and a strong desire to just get this over with.

Which is, coincidentally, what you're going to feel if you ever have to take a 12 hour flight to take a 2-hour flight to take a 1-hour bus ride to a really awesome hotel in, say, Costa Rica. A bus ride and two flights, incidentally, that you're going to have to take again when you leave your really awesome hotel. Because this is what travel actually is.

When we travel anywhere, we instinctively grit our teeth against it. We retain a certain level of calm as we stand in line, so we can stand in front of another line, then be moved to an area where we might find a bench or have to stand or possibly just say fuck it and decide to sit on our luggage or the floor. We know this is what travel is. Travel is time. Often, a very boring sort of time. Boring for the players, and boring for the DM. Which is what makes the "poof!" option so enticing. Wouldn't it be great if we could just be where we want to go?

I have systematically and brutally set out to bore my players by interminably describing each hex, in order, one at a time, for as long as it takes, to give the right impression of what it's like. Why? Well, why are you beating your head against that wall?  Coming to the end of such an experience is the only way to give travel through the game world an emotional shape. Otherwise, the game world might as well not be one. Or rather, I might just as well make the block house the players have to raid just down the street there, next to the Pyramids one block over and then locate Iguazu Falls the next block after that. I mean, what difference does it make. The teleport spell is irrelevant if the DM is just going to teleport the party anyway.

The argument, however, does not actually solve the problem. If the party wants to "see the world"... and after all, what else is a world for... then session after session cannot be filled with meaningless descriptions of rocks and trees and trees and rocks... and water. There must be game in them thar roadways, else for other reasons they still don't belong.

Before I go on, I'll just check my closets first for the Spanish Inquisition, because they're bound to show up if I write this. No one obviously ever expects them. My question is this: how much "travel boredom" would a player be willing to endure, to achieve the emotional shape of travel, if experience were available?

After all, by definition, experience is "the conscious process of observing, living through or undergoing an event. "Experiential travel" focuses on deeply engaging with a destination's culture, history and environment. Yes, its a real term.

Once upon a time, I considered a system that would reflect the difficulties of travel by assigning a set number of hit points lost by a party per day of actual travel. Let us say 1 point per day, as a base line, merely to express the discomfort of sitting in horse saddles or trudging on foot, the feel of packs on backs, the unpleasantness of not sleeping in a bed, being subject to the weather, not having a decent physical toilet to sit on, etcetera. Theoretically, I imagined, a really nasty rainstorm could drain every member of a party of three hit points in the space of a half-hour deluge; a furious snowstorm, likewise; hail, for instance, might contribute. Losing the party's tent because a mule falls into the canyon, so that even when the tent is recovered, it's ripped asunder.  Steadily, day after day, the party would have to stop somewhere and treat themselves to an inn, a decent meal, a night not under the stars, a new tent, a second tent... and so on.

Two problems killed it. The first was that the effort was going to turn travel into accounting. The second was simply that the system, no matter how refined it became, would be felt keenly and resentfully. For the most part, a party higher than fourth level can largely just obliterate the effects anyway through healing, mending cantrips, the creation of food and so on. So I abandoned the idea. It was too much work to produce the wrong emotional response. It was, essentially, negative reinforcement.

So, okay, why not positive reinforcement? Why not a system that simply awards a set amount of experience for every hex travelled, to provide for the "worldliness" of the player character? 'Course, pure water hexes wouldn't count; they all look alike and most can't tell where they are anyway. And returning again and again to the same hex, well, that doesn't serve either, since we've been there and, reasonably, we can't just make every hex an eternal well of experience. No, the goal's got to be to encourage the players to travel, despite the actual tedium of the journey, so that they feel it's all worthwhile and we can still retain the "it feels so good when it stops" structure. Yes?

Of course yes.

Ah... but how much?

10 x.p. per hex?  Fair when you're first level, and yet it still means a thief would have to tour 125 hexes to do it without combat. There's always the argument that experience ought to be received for "risk," about which I agree, but then travel is a risk. If the game world is dense enough, there are storms, there are chances of getting lost, or meeting encounters, or suffering maladies, if the mechanics for these things exist. We can certainly take Bilbo's words for it:

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door..."

But then, he meant it colloquially, in the sense that the world is so interesting that you may not feel like coming home. That acknowledged, in D&D the premise remains. You enter a new hex, there is always a chance for an encounter to come and take your life. Would that, perhaps, change player opinions about wandering monsters and encounter checks if they knew, every time the check produced nothing, they'd be rewarded?

How about 50 x.p. per hex?  That reduces the 1st level thief to a journey of 25 hexes in order to reach second level. That might be a shade too generous, yes?

Now, I have players who were in what I used to run on the blog and later on a wiki as the "Juvenis Campaign," in Norway. And now they're in Hungary. If I establish such a rule, I'm sure to get a player raising hand and asking, "How many hexes did I travel through between Stavanger and Ozd?"

To which I'd have to answer, "None. You tripped and fell into a gate and came out the other side. You didn't see the hexes in between, so you get no experience for them."

But... there is another way.

In my last session, the players had just started to purchase things in Buda & Pest while considering the next part of their journey. "Buda-Pest" is an enormous city in my game, founded in 89, well before Berlin (founded in 1237), with 188,000 people. It is rich in architecture, culture, concept and aesthetic. I have felt for a long time that any such moment where the players enter a city with at least 50,000 people, or perhaps any city of 25,000 founded a thousand years before (pre-650 AD), ought to be a combination between awe-inducing and revelatory. That, in turn, could be reflected by offering not actual experience, but an experience bonus, say of 2, 5 or 10 per cent, which would last for a few days, a week, a fortnight... even a full month.

For Budapest, I might say 5% for every character's experience for the space of a fortnight, one time only, meaning they'll never get it again from Budapest. They'd have to travel to some similar city to get it again. The benefit of this is that (a) the party has a different reason to travel from place to place; (b) each new place gives it's own bonus; and (c) the party is encouraged, in a specific time period, to do something risky to take advantage of it.

Though the 5% is just arbitrary. What's needed is some calculation that takes size of the city AND age of the city in some way that produces a precise number between 4 and 15%, what I think should be the lower and upper limits of such a bonus. Paris should give 15%, obviously. But imaginatively, the very ancient and very small town of Delos in Greece... well, that must be worth something, surely. I could, I suppose, use a formula, "Presence" = population x age x distinctiveness... with the last being defined by the number of world historical sights present in the city. That is a defensible mechanism, and easily searched. Worth considering.

What if every new hex offered a one-time 1% bonus to experience for a day. That would make actual travel-gained experience better than experience gained in the same dungeon over and over. It might encourage players to want a random encounter. It would mean that travel alone wouldn't be a benefit... not unless the party subsequently risked itself while the bonus was active.

Every new idea needs a shaking out period. Any ideas?