A Guide to Travel and Survival Encounters in D&D
What’s that old adage? Life is about the journey, not the destination. Well, the same can be said about your Dungeons & Dragons campaign. And no situation in the game makes that more abundantly clear than when your players are on the road between one city, village, or town to the next.
Unlike our roadtrips in cars, munching on snackies, sippin’ on soadies, listening to our favorite tunes or podcasts for a few hours between cities, or states, or countries (lookin’ at you Europe), travel in most D&D campaigns is often filled with dangerous or even deadly perils and countless surprises. Whether traversing treacherous mountains, dense forests, or arid deserts, the path to adventure is rarely smooth.
Because of this, travel and survival encounters provide a wealth of opportunities to engage players, test their skills, and immerse them in the world you've crafted. They can also feel a bit daunting as a Dungeon Master as you try to balance encounter types, roleplaying opportunities, exploration prompts, and unique mechanics, all while pushing the narrative forward and tying it all to the overarching campaign. But, with the right approach, they can become some of the most memorable and rewarding experiences for players.
While we’ve already covered creating unforgettable encounters as a whole; in this guide, we'll delve into the art of crafting compelling travel and survival encounters and adventures, equipping you with the tools and techniques to make your sojourns into the wild a ride to remember.
The Importance of Travel and Survival Encounters:
It can be easy to skip past travel scenes and simply use a paragraph or two of dialogue to describe how your party got from one place to the next. In my opinion, that’s a mistake. Incorporating travel and survival elements into your campaigns can significantly enhance the overall experience. These encounters serve several crucial purposes:
Break Up Monotony: Travel and survival encounters provide a welcome change of pace. While exploring cities and towns and interacting with the denizens of these areas is always important, and where the bulk of your campaign will typically take place, there is a whole world out there to explore. It allows for more diversity in the types of encounters and adventures you can throw at your players and also allows for you to make this world you’re creating feel more lived in, vibrant, and visceral.
Highlight Character Skills: These encounters bring in many of your players typically less-used skills such as Survival, Nature, and Animal Handling, encouraging creative problem-solving and forward thinking. With this it can really allow those high -Wisdom characters to shine, like Druids and Rangers.
Immerse Players in the World: Exploration becomes the key ingredient during these adventures, which give you as a DM the chance to let all that good lore take center stage. Be thinking about the places your characters will be able to explore and the beings they can meet that will give hints to the world at large its history. Use this time to foster a deeper connection to the game world.
Encourage Banter: They’re on the road, spending days on end with few other people, make them talk. Get them to engage with one another and connect. Get them to share backstories and memories. There is no better chance to bring your characters together and get them to know one another than when they’re traveling, stopping in inns and taverns, or sitting around a fire at a campsite. Play these scenes out. It may be a bit uncomfortable at first for those who aren’t used to roleplay, but if they open up, it can lead your campaign to places it hasn’t been before.
Crafting Memorable Travel and Survival Encounters
While these adventures are important, the only way they work is if you take the time to craft them in creative and thoughtful ways. To create truly memorable travel and survival encounters, consider these key elements:
Vary the Encounters: Avoid repetition by incorporating a diverse range of challenges. Travel shouldn’t just be, wake up, hit the road, reach next destination, small encounter at new destination, rinse, repeat. Each day of travel should have a mix of encounters such as navigating treacherous terrain, encountering hostile wildlife, or facing unexpected weather conditions.
Encounter types:
Dangerous Terrain
The terrain through which your adventurers journey plays a crucial role in shaping their travel experience. Whether they're traversing tangled forests, navigating unyielding mountains, or braving vast, scorched deserts, the environment should present unique challenges and opportunities. This should include things like incorporating difficult terrain, levels of exhaustion from exposure, and routine navigation checks to avoid getting lost.
Weather Hazards
Along with terrain, weather can add an extra layer of unpredictability and excitement to your encounters. A sudden downpour can turn a simple path into a treacherous obstacle course, a blinding hot sun can lead to dehydration and exhaustion, an avalanche can lead to a deadly race to free trapped members from their icy tombs.
Skill Challenges
Throwing various skill challenges at players will test their abilities and force them to use teamwork to overcome obstacles. These can be as simple as foraging for food in a barren wasteland or tracking animal footprints to find a water source in a desert to navigating a climbing expedition up the side of a cliff or dashing to safety through a collapsing cave. These will allow different players to take the lead using their best skills.
Environmental Puzzles
While I strongly suggest using puzzles infrequently, as they can be tough to incorporate in a way that is satisfying and often end up becoming frustrating for players. Environmental puzzles can integrate seamlessly into your travel encounters, challenging your players to use their wit and problem-solving skills. A hidden cave entrance that can only be seen by ingesting mind-altering mushrooms, an ancient artifact that can only be grasped once the players have crafted and ingested a potion using ingredients found in various parts of the woods, or something as straightforward as a cryptic riddle could all serve as compelling puzzles.
Traps and Hazards
Your players are walking through a forest when fhwip one of them falls through what looked like fallen leaves and sticks into a hidden pit. They’re trudging through a desert and glrrp their feet start sinking as they fight to free themselves from quicksand. They’re navigating a narrow mountain pass, all tethered together when slllp one of them loses their footing on some loose rocks, falling over the side, dangling from the ropes, moments away from death. Utilizing traps and hazards that fit the environment can add an element of danger and excitement to your encounters, and can also lead players to possibly wanting to roll perception checks too often, so use them sparingly.
Social Encounters
Just like everywhere in your world, your players should be running into memorable NPCs while on the road. While the most obvious ones will be innkeepers, traveling merchants, and hostile bandits, make sure and think about more unique options like guides to aid in traversing dangerous environments, awakened animals to offer information about a certain area, or possibly gods or goddesses of the wilds.
Resource Management
Part of travel and survival is making sure you are smart with the supplies you have on hand. In harsh environments, your players may need to manage their resources carefully, such as food, water, and ammunition. This not only adds a layer of realism and challenge to your survival encounters, but also a chance for some downtime activities to add in such as hunting, fishing, foraging, or crafting ammunition.
Long-Term Effects
This is one more way to add some realism into this type of adventure, make the consequences of travel and survival extend beyond the immediate challenge. As your players brave the wilds and the forces of nature, there will be chances for injuries, diseases, exhaustion, and more. While D&D has plenty of spells and potions to counteract some of these things, during grueling travel sequences maybe these setbacks are longer lasting than usual. A lack of good rest can easily begin to hinder physical and magical abilities while resources will start to dwindle leading players to tough choices.
Random Encounters
While random encounter tables are something I typically steer clear of as I like each piece of my campaign to build toward the meta-narrative. I do find that random encounter tables can be useful while doing travel and survival adventures. While there are literally thousands of these o be found all over the internet and in most sourcebooks, I personally like to scour a handful or more and think of ways to tailor them to the campaign I’m running. Instead of having a group of Gnolls attack your players, instead they simply hunt them and using barks and howls push them toward a bigger threat or an area where your players will find some of the main lore necessary for the upcoming arc of your campaign. Your players come across a person stuck in a trap. They were traveling through the area with a guide and they were attacked by (insert monsters), the guide was taken prisoner. If your players follow this they get some lore, an added companion, and ostensibly, a guide. You can use random encounters, just make sure they count.
Tailor Encounters to the Characters: While using a good blend of any of the various encounter types above is a surefire way to make sure the adventure stays exciting and engaging. Make sure you consider the strengths and weaknesses of your players' characters when designing encounters. This ensures that the challenges are intriguing for all of the players and appropriate for their skill levels.
Reward Clever Play: Along these same lines, make sure that you recognize when your players rise to the challenge in ways that you maybe never even imagined. If your players are using their skills and abilities in innovative ways reward that behavior which will encourage more creative problem-solving from everyone at the table.
Tips for Managing Travel and Survival Encounters
Even if you’ve been DMing for a while now, this type of adventure offers its own set of unique problems. Unless you are set to run a pure sandbox campaign there are some things to take into account to make sure, while you’re not railroading, you don’t stray too far from the tracks.
Set Clear Goals: This is important in most any encounter, but it is overly important when traveling. If you are one of the best DMs in the world, you may be able to run an open-world RPG. But, it is no easy task. When you are describing the situation at hand to the players, clearly define the objectives of each encounter. Whether it's reaching a specific destination, overcoming an obstacle, or gathering resources, if they know what it is they are supposed to do they will likely not stray too far from the path that you have written in your notes and swimming around in your noodle.
Pace the Encounters: Balance the pace of travel to make sure that players don’t get overwhelmed, or use up all of their resources. Make sure that they have a nights rest every session or two, even if it is a poor night of rest because of the hazards you are throwing at them. While it can be fun to add some realism into the campaign, nothing is more boring, especially for magic users, than playing multiple sessions with nothing but cantrips. Remember, even when the going gets tough for the party, the whole point of this is to have fun.
Tie It to the Story: Sure, you may not be running into the BBEG on the road or in the woods and there may not be major points of intrigue pushing the overarching plot forward, make sure not to lose the meta-narrative during the in-between times. This is why dropping lore and adding in interesting locations and NPCs is so important when running this style of adventure. In most table settings, if you’re not continuing to build toward the main storyline, players will get bored and even more likely, will lose the plot.