Giraffes in Africa

Photo by Krzysztof Szkurlatowski; 12frames.eu. Click the image to visit his website.

Another filler article, I’m afraid. I’ve made quite a lot of progress but – due to external factors – simply ran out of time. I’ve been saving this one for just such an eventuality…

For the purposes of this article, “FRPG” is considered restricted to D&D / Pathfinder and similar systems. I know that’s unrealistic, and unfair to all the other game systems out there, but the title was just too long otherwise!

I am writing the first draft of this article (longhand!) while sitting in a train carriage on the way to a belated Christmas with part of my family who I didn’t get to see back in December. This is not a long trip – about three hours by train and bus, if you take the express – but it is travel beyond the city nevertheless, and that has inspired today’s topic of conversation.

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The skyline of this landscape is almost identical to that of the Africa picture above – but they are definitely NOT the same place despite that similarity.

How Much Travel Do You Roleplay?

It would be my preference to roleplay every step – well, almost. I want to describe the changing terrain, the evolving weather, the bird-songs and wildlife both recognizable and exotic. I want the PCs to feel what the world around them is like, to immerse them in its colors and textures, and to make the players feel like their characters are part of that world and not simply passing through.

My players, on the other hand, would prefer I mention none of this, unless it is absolutely necessary because something potentially significant is going to occur – and even the “potentially” is a concession. They don’t want me to mention the buildings on the street, or the cobbles beneath their feet – they just want to know where the one building that they are looking for can be found, and is anyone watching?

An Evolved Compromise

Over time, between complaints from both sides of the table, we have evolved a compromise, a gradated diminishing of reality, or – more precisely – a graduated diminishing of the intrusion of reality. The purpose of today’s article is to explain that compromise, and reveal a secret implication or two that my players may not have been previously aware of.

Beginner’s Levels

At very low levels, when the PCs are (mostly) traveling on foot, they get – and are required to give – full detail. They establish protocols and routines with the understanding that they won’t vary these unless presented with compelling reason to do so on, and then only for this one occasion. These include setting up camp at night, breaking camp in the morning, and the “daily routine” of life as an adventurer.

Low Levels

Sometime around 3rd or 4th level, the PCs usually acquire horses, or some other means of conveyance appropriate to the game world. As soon as they do so, the protocols and routines that are not affected by the change of conveyance or the need to care for such mounts as may be involved, are considered fixed and complete. The players can only alter the routines or add a new one if they tell me explicitly that they are doing something different from now on and roleplay the variation a time or two, and I will take it as read that they are performing their routines in the manner established.

At the same time, I begin cutting back on the level of narrative detail – instead of describing every change in surroundings or landscape, I will break each major time period – morning/afternoon/evening – into two (or, more usefully, three) parts of a couple of hours duration each. Given that the PCs travel speed has increased enormously at the same time, descriptions retreat into generalities and summaries.

Of course, exceptions are always made for significant encounters.

Lower Mid-Levels

As the PCs continue to go up in levels, so the time covered by each narrative passage increases – without extending the amount of game time that I am expending on these descriptions. By about 7th or 8th level, I no longer give place names unless these are expected to matter to the PCs (or I am asked explicitly by a player), and the miles are beginning to get seriously compressed. By this point, a single block of narrative covers the entire morning or afternoon, and – if there is not much to distinguish the two – it might even be the entire day.

By this point, there is very little that a CR 1 or 2 encounter with a non-sentient can do to make the PCs even break stride, and the XP- and Treasure rewards from these are also pretty minimal, so most of these get hand-waved as well – but note the narrowness of definition. Every 2 PC levels thereafter, this “Threshold of notification” will increase by 1.

It’s not that the PCs are traveling any faster (though they might be) – it’s just that there is so much less that is relevant to them.
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Mid-levels

By around character level 11 or 12 – approaching upper mid-level – I am starting to approach the levels of compression that the players want. A whole day’s travel is described in a single paragraph, and unless it is exceptional, weather never even gets mentioned. The same is true of most terrain, though swamp, desert, and mountains usually still rate at least a passing mention.

Most casual encounters don’t rate an acknowledgement, either. Unless it’s a sentient being (who can impart useful information no matter what CR it might be), anything less than CR 4 or 5 is trivially simple for the PCs to deal with, and that takes in an awful lot of ground – and even some sentients aren’t worth mentioning.

This also marks the point at which I can begin to take advantage of the players’ desire to skip over the trivial, because what they are really asking for (without necessarily realizing it) is that they want to ignore context and clues unless these are obviously important or potentially dangerous in a combat sense. The alternative is for me to bury the “important” encounters amongst ones that aren’t important, because of a simple but very important principle:

  • If the PCs can’t tell that an encounter is important, the players should not know it either.

i.e. If there is nothing that would make the encounter stand out as significant to the PCs at the time, the GM should not do anything to make it stand out to the players – though it should get mentioned when the significance becomes clear: “You didn’t think anything of it at the time, but…” If I’m feeling generous, I might even permit a PC an INT check – eventually – to put two and zero together and come up with a speculative “four”.

From this point on, then, the players are increasingly diving into things without knowing what they are getting themselves into, a situation that can only work to the GM’s advantage.

High Levels

This situation can only grow more overt when characters gain Flight, or the ability to Teleport, or the capability of jumping from one Plane of existence to another. The use of such means may save the players from all that arduous, boring travel – but it is also a direct challenge to the GM: “Come on, do your worst – we’re ready for anything.”

The PCs now stride the game world in 7-League Boots (or the equivalent thereof) – Arrogant, Cocksure, and Defiant. What better time to dole out some Humble Pie?

Speaking of 7-league boots, there are some fascinating conclusions and conundrums that arise from the concept of a league when it is applied to RPG mapping – a definite subject for another article sometime!

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If it were just a little flatter, this would be exactly the same as the landscapes I grew up with. Photo by “leagun”.

A little context

It would be unfair not to mention that at least part of the motivation behind the players desire to skip through to “the interesting stuff” is that we can’t play any given campaign as much as we would like. There would be more time to waste, and more time wasted on detail, if we played every week, for example. With an average of 11 games sessions per year, maximum, for most campaigns, time is always at a premium. Nevertheless, I am sure that every group, no matter how often they gather, would agitate against encounters that are trivial, meaningless, and/or irrelevant. They always want to get to the adventure, and are only marginally tolerant of the intrusion of realism in the form of “the slow bits” in between.

While most groups won’t have the same pressures that mine do, therefore, the same arguments and compromises still apply.

How much travel do you roleplay – and is it more, or less, than is desirable?


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