Dragna's Devblog: Why D&D Travel Doesn’t Work

When I first started writing this devblog more than a month ago, I didn’t realize just how much IRL obligations would keep me away from my Patreon work. While I’ve been able to finish Act II: The Shadowed Town in Curse of Strahd: Reloaded, and begun work on my new Challenge Rated encounter-building webtool, I’ve been slacking on my promised Patreon devblogs, and for that I sincerely apologize.

To make up for it, you can expect two additional devblogs to follow this one shortly—one discussing my very recent revamp to skill challenges, and the other analyzing my efforts to factor non-damaging spells into CR2.0—plus a full-blown Vallaki postmortem once Act II goes live. Hope you enjoy!

On multiple occasions in the past several weeks, I’ve entertained discussions with multiple patrons in the Discord’s #campaign-advice channel about incorporating travel-oriented gameplay and narratives into campaigns, both Curse of Strahd and otherwise. So let’s talk about why so many people desperately want travel to work in 5e—and why it inevitably fails.

Travel is Part of the Aesthetic

From Lord of the Rings to Conan the Barbarian, the aesthetic of adventure fantasy is deeply tied to ideas of travel and exploration. This is replicated, too, in popular fantasy games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, and even the new D&D-inspired game Baldur’s Gate 3. Ever since Skyrim, “open-world exploration” has become a buzzword across the gaming hemisphere, with “immersive travel” and “exotic locales” not far behind.

It’s no surprise, then, that many DMs take an active interest in the concept of “travel” in D&D. The Player’s Handbook explicitly states that there are three “pillars of adventure” in the game: the Combat pillar, the Social-Interaction pillar, and the Exploration pillar. It defines “Exploration” as “the adventurers' movement through the world and their interaction with objects and situations that require their attention. Exploration is the give-and-take of the players describing what they want their characters to do, and the Dungeon Master telling the players what happens as a result.”

“On a large scale,” it states, “that might involve the characters spending a day crossing a rolling plain or an hour making their way through caverns underground.” Small wonder, then, that so many DMs take an interest in the concept of travel!

Yet many DMs confuse the concept of pillars of adventure with the concept of pillars of gameplay. They assume, therefore, that “exploration” means “exploration gameplay,” and treat overland travel appropriately. However, 5e’s travel gameplay is limited to barebones rules for foraging, marching speed, and getting lost, half of which involve little more than a single dice roll, and half of which don’t even include nearly that much. Small wonder that legions of DMs often take to Reddit to bemoan the lack of a strong exploration pillar.

But why? Why doesn’t it work? Why is “exploration” a pillar of adventure, but not of gameplay—and is it even possible to solve it?

The Lens of Design

In a previous devblog, I laid out the five elements that any game needs to have to be successful:

• a default loss state that will occur if the player does nothing, an idealized victory state that the player wishes to reach, and any number of “partial victory” states in between the loss and victory states;
• a fair set-up, such that the player could achieve a perfect victory on the first try if they were simply smart enough, fast enough, creative enough, strong enough, or so on;
• an iterative and cumulative game state, such that no player can win or lose with a single lucky or unlucky decision;
• a set of multiple tools and/or strategies, such that the player always has a choice to make when acting within the game; and
• an opportunity for meaningful choice between those tools and strategies, such that multiple routes could plausibly lead to victory and/or defeat.

Let’s take a look at how one of the other “pillars of adventure,” combat, stacks up here:

• Loss State: If the players do nothing, they’ll die. The players want to not die, and to also kill the enemy. Partial victory means killing the enemy while suffering heavy casualties and/or expending lots of resources.
• Fair Set-Up: If the DM has done their job right, the encounter is either calibrated to the party’s capabilities or the difficulty of the encounter has been sufficiently foreshadowed to the players such that they have an ample opportunity to strategize, prepare, or even avoid the fight altogether.
• Iterative & Cumulative Game State: Each combatant gets one turn a round, and the initiative order starts over at the top of every round. Damage taken or conditions suffered on previous rounds almost always linger into future rounds, meaning that one side or the other can snowball their way to a victory.
• Multiple Tools and Strategies: There are lots of different ways to win in D&D, and a buffet of tactical options. Do you focus-fire an enemy? Which one? Do you debuff the enemy tank, rush the enemy caster, or control the closest choke point instead?
• Meaningful Choice: These high-stakes decisions have an outsized impact on combat, often swinging the encounter in one way or another. Due to the relatively low hit points of both players and monsters and the relatively high damage outputs, smart (or stupid) tactics can make a real difference, especially when combined with powerful limited-use abilities like a barbarian’s Rage or a fighter’s Action Surge.

Looks good! All five elements are fully fulfilled. Combat is a great example of good game design—it’s iterative and cumulative, with multiple meaningful options, fair rules, and a clear loss state.

Let’s try now, however, to do the same calculus for travel, incorporating the rules for travel pace, foraging, and getting lost found in the Player’s Handbook. (To be generous, we’re assuming that the players are traveling for multiple consecutive days through the untamed wilderness—otherwise, they’d be able to purchase rations in a local general store, or simply stick to the road.)

• Loss State: If the players do nothing (e.g., go nowhere, don’t forage, and don’t try to find their way), they’ll get lost, which means that they won’t reach their destination and might fail that quest if it’s a time-sensitive one. (Many quests are not, but let’s ignore that for now.) Since they’re not foraging, they might also die, which seems bad. Given that players replenish all of their spell slots and hit points (plus half their hit dice) on a long rest, though, this is pretty much a binary—either the players reach their destination on-time, or they don’t. Let’s say that this element is technically met.
• Fair Set-Up: It’s normal for players to have an idea of how long their journey might take and how dangerous or difficult that journey might be. Let’s call this element met.
• Iterative & Cumulative Game State: Given our (exceptionally generous) assumptions, the players will be making regular navigation and foraging checks. The navigation checks make for an iterative and cumulative process (you have to try and get more or less lost every day you travel), but the foraging checks are only iterative (you’re either hungry or you’re not), and the travel pace is neither iterative nor cumulative (once you pick a travel pace, you’re probably going to keep it forever, since short and long rests are so easy to come by). Let’s be generous again and call this element half-met.
• Multiple Tools and Strategies. The players have exactly one way to navigate or forage: tell the DM that they’re trying to do so. However, the players do have three different ways to pace their travel, so I guess we can be generous and call this one half-met.
• Meaningful Choice. This one’s a big, fat zero. Navigation and foraging don’t offer any choices at all, and there’s always an obvious choice for travel pace—if you’re heavily wounded or clearly outmatched, travel slow; if not, travel fast.

Even under the most generous conditions possible, travel in D&D 5e only meets three out of five of the elements of good game design. If any of our initial assumptions aren’t present (e.g., because the players are only traveling for one day, because they can purchase rations, or because there’s a road), things get even worse.

Now, it’s conceivably possible that you could design entire systems or subsystems to fulfill these elements. You could bootstrap together an in-depth system that immerses players in a simulation of foraging the woods for berries, hunting or trapping wild game, navigating by the land and the light of the stars, and selecting multiple different paces depending on the nature of the route chosen.

Alternatively, you could just let the players play the heroic, action-adventure game they signed up for, rather than forcing them to play a survival simulator.

Just a thought.

The Death of Immersive Exploration

So maybe I’m being a bit unfair here. After all, when people say “exploration,” they don’t necessarily always mean travel. Very often, they also mean “investigating the world in search of hidden secrets and delights.”

This is the foundation of the “exploration” gameplay pillar in games like Breath of the Wild and Pokemon—the player wanders around the world while keeping their eyes open, notices something odd, and delves more deeply to take a closer look.

This is a huge part of the draw of the idea of “random encounters” on and around the road—the DM prepares a wandering creature, a nearby landmark, or a clue by the side of the road, and the players can investigate it to find a hidden dungeon, secret treasure, or some other interesting feature. It makes the world feel bigger and more immersive, and rewards the players for their curiosity.

There’re just two problems:

1. First, the players don’t see anything except what the DM describes.
2. Second, the DM—not the players—controls the pace of travel.

Let’s picture an imaginary “exploration encounter” in a game like Pokemon: While walking through the woods, you notice a tree that seems to be shaped slightly differently from its neighbors. You draw upon the cutting power of your Pokemon and slice the tree down, clearing a way through the underbrush. You navigate around twisted ledges and emerge on the shores of a crystal-clear lake. Drawing upon your Pokemons’ power once more, you swim across the waves, disembarking onto a small isle that bears a large red X on the stone at its center. You dig beneath the stone and uncover an old wooden chest. You open the chest and find therein—some money and a healing potion! Your lust for exploration has been rewarded.

Now, let’s try and imagine the equivalent encounter in a game of D&D:

• As the players are walking down the road toward their next destination, the DM describes that one of the trees looks slightly different from its neighbors. However, players often struggle to pick out flavor text from “rules text”; as such, the DM spends an extra sentence or two clarifying that this tree is different from the others in an important and obvious way. The players have now lost the opportunity to notice the tree for themselves, diminishing the gameplay experience and eliminating the joy of discovery.
• Because players can’t interrupt the DM, the DM has to pause the “travel montage” and intentionally transition their narration into the start of a new scene, forcing the party to stop and staring at the players expectantly. The players are no longer the ones deciding to stop to explore; the DM is.
• The players investigate the thicket and decide (using the barbarian’s axe) to chop the tree down, uncovering a secret path beyond. However, the bard pipes up, reminding the party that they’re supposed to get to the goblin cave to rescue the prisoners, and maybe the party shouldn’t waste time venturing down random secret paths, especially since they have no reason to believe that there’s anything useful at the end? Two other players shush the bard’s player, suppressing their character’s desires (“I want to get to my destination”) in favor of their own out-of-character desires (“I want to see what the DM has hidden here.”) The players’ immersion has now been totally thrown out of the window.
• The players navigate through the ledges—through a montage of course, rather than any real gameplay—and emerge on the shores of the lake. Though the players can see the isle at the center of the lake, there’s no indication of anything interesting there. There’s not even any particular reason to believe that the isle should be the players’ destination, rather than any other arbitrary point in or around the lake. Nonetheless, the players arbitrarily decide that Cool Game Rewards are more likely to be found on strange islands in the middle of lakes than elsewhere, and decide to swim across (which the DM handles once again with a montage).
• The players disembark onto the isle, notice the obvious X, and dig up the buried treasure. They’re rewarded with some gold and a healing potion! (Presumably, a bandit or other entity with a need to hide their treasure put it here—though it’s unclear why they’d mark the site with an X.)

Let’s recap what we’ve got: Despite our best efforts to create a fun and delightful exploration sequence, we’ve instead violently yanked the players out of their immersion, removed any semblance of meaningful gameplay or agency, and manufactured a random reward with no reason for its existence and no ties to anything else the players have encountered before, or ever will again.

In addition to the preservation of player agency and gameplay, this kind of sequence works in video games because they are intentionally an abstraction—we’re willing to suspend our disbelief under the assumption that there really are random Ultra Balls just lying around the woods, and that random people left quivers of enchanted arrows tucked away in ceramic pots outside of ancient temples.

But D&D is a simulation—an experience that’s expected to have real integrity and cohesion in the way that it portrays the world of the game. Exploration encounters . . . just don’t have that.

So What Is Exploration, Anyway?

So you’ll notice one thing that I’ve conspicuously omitted from the section right before this one, which is a gameplay analysis of this kind of “exploration-is-when-you-explore-a-confined-space” definition.

That’s because this isn’t one kind of gameplay, but multiple. Specifically, it’s a combination of two different types of gameplay challenges; (1) obstacle courses, and (2) puzzles.

Here, an obstacle course is a challenge in which the players must bypass or overcome a series of physical obstacles obstructing their progress, such as walls, patrolling guards, locked doors, mazes, or cold trails. Obstacle courses do not involve the use of combat initiative, and players are ordinarily free to approach their obstacles without any notable time pressure.

Meanwhile, a puzzle is a challenge, such as a mystery, trap mechanism, riddle, or puzzle box, in which the players must achieve a series of small, distinct tasks. Each task in the puzzle provides a clue when completed, and when all clues are assembled, the answer to the puzzle can be easily deduced. To create a puzzle, begin by identifying its answer. Then, decompose the answer into its basic facts.

(For example, you might decompose the answer "Klarg the bugbear killed the knight Sildar Hallwinter in Cragmaw Cavern to stop him from alerting the players to Gundren's kidnapping" into the following facts: Klarg is a bugbear; Sildar Hallwinter is a knight; Klarg killed Sildar; Klarg and Sildar were in Cragmaw Cavern; Gundren was kidnapped; Sildar knew of Gundren's kidnapping; and Sildar wanted to send the players a message.)

Once you've decomposed the answer into its basic facts, turn each fact into one or more clues that reveal that fact when uncovered. To uncover a clue, the players must perform one or more small, obvious tasks, such as investigating a drawer, unlocking a locked door, digging up a grave, or (in the case of a riddle, mathematical problem, or logic puzzle) by making a single logical deduction.

(Why do we set up puzzles like this? After all, the most well-known D&D puzzles better resemble things like, “Figure out that the statue contains a hidden switch, and then find and press that hidden switch in order to open the door to the next room.” Or, they might resemble something like, “Descend to the bottom of the pit to find a box containing a bronze key, which unlocks and opens the door to the next room.”)

(The problem with these examples is the need for revelation—an arbitrary “meeting of the minds” in which the players uncover, by luck or divine grace, the exact answer that the DM has prepared for them to find. This is terrible game design because it’s fundamentally unfair, and because there’s no iterative and cumulative gameplay loop beyond “make blind guesses at what the DM wants you to do.”)

The key realization for both of these challenges, however, is that, because (as noted above) the DM controls the “camera” and pacing of the game world, a game of D&D can almost never offer a true joy of spontaneous and self-directed “discovery.” The delight of exploration cannot come from the decision to explore. Instead, that joy can come only from the reward that lies at the other end—and the experiences that the players had along the way.