Travel VS Exploration || D&D with Dael Kingsmill

don't worry kids the key to looking good in a scarf is just having the confidence that you will look good in a scarf just think cowboy and go you want to embrace your inner theater kid embrace hello humans my name is dale kingsmill and welcome to 2020. i refuse to believe that we're not getting a do-over for that this is you know do-overs i like do-overs do-overs are good this video is a do-over i recorded it last week and i just i didn't like it so i'm doing it again 2021 year of the do-over but anyway we're not here to talk about that we're here to talk about d d you've read the title you already know that this is a video about travel because i've been thinking about it again there's been a weird influx of new views on on the old video and i'm not sure if i necessarily stand by everything i said in that old video anymore and on top of that i actually have a travel session coming up in my home game if and when we have a play again so many of us have talked about travel have tried to work out how to make travel interesting and we never quite nail it spoiler alert we still won't after this video just a heads up but after giving it a lot of thought i i think that part of the trouble is that we keep conflating travel and exploration so in dnd in particular we talk about the the three pillars right combat that's the big one role play and exploration these are the things that we kind of have a scaffolding of rules to help us achieve within the game they're the three big things that that any dnd game is supposed to be made out of and so we get to talking about overland travel or travel in general and we're like ah there's like no rules here there's nothing for it and i do think that that's true i just think that uh we've kind of expected there to be stuff because exploration is covered and surely travel and exploration are the same thing they're not the same thing there's my phone i actually wrote notes for this video where oh it's in my hand it's in my hand found it what do these what do these notes mean what does this mean all right so i think that the the big trick to making travel good or exploration good is going to end up being uh knowing which thing you're wanting to achieve and then boiling down the techniques of that thing so that you can achieve it so if we're talking about travel we talk about travel uh meaning the passage of time and distance that nonetheless remains sort of thematically and narratively focused you're going somewhere with a clear purpose you might face obstacles on the way but in general you know where you're going or at least what you're going to i'm gonna go out on a limb here i'm going to say that i think that most modern d and d games follow this model so what are some examples of some uh some travel themed fantasy or fantastical text well you got the really glaringly obvious one middle earth hobbit lord of the rings and it kind of serves as the model for a lot of fantasy books or fantasy movies um willow del toro quest even shrek really so for example let's look at willow in willow the path is meandering but they're always going somewhere you have to take the baby to the daikini crossroads uh go find the sorceress finrassel ah we must make our way to tiraslin for safety p.s how good are those names really good naming in willow there is always a lot of purpose and intent to wherever it is that they're going next exploration also involves the passing of time and space but to a certain degree the point of it is the unexpected and the uncertain here we're talking about um treasure hunters delving into a dungeon frontier mercenaries hired to tame the the surrounding wilderness a mad max style wandering hero who just ends up in different scraps and different situations here and there wherever they go yeah i could be wrong here but it seems to me that d d games that use a lot of exploration are more likely to be about exploration west marches a really good example of this type of game pop cultural examples of exploration focus stuff um age of empires stellaris skyrim a lot of video games in this category not only video games though uh dinotopia not the movie with um you know wentworth miller before he could act and also that guy from being erica who looks like that guy from entourage piranesi wait pironessi by susanna clarke i actually haven't gotten the chance to read this yet but both my sisters have and they really loved it and i mean you've heard me recommend jonathan stranger mr neural enough times that this may as well just be a susanna clark stan account i have it on good authority that this entire book is is kind of explorationy stuff go buy the book i just wanted to have money you know what i mean fantastics by george mcdonald or you know more properly fantasties a fairy romance for men and women the techniques of exploration are more about like wandering without knowing where you're going seeing what you find oh actually you know what that does remind me of that reminds me of upon the hearth the fire is red beneath the roof there is a bed but not yet where we are our feet still around the corner we may meet a sudden tree or standing stone that none have seen but we alone tree and flower and leaf and grass let them pass let them pass hill and water under sky pass them by pass them by still round the corner there may wait a new road or a secret gate and though we pass them by today tomorrow we may come this way and take the hidden paths that run towards the moon or to the sun this is the walking song from early on in fellowship of the ring shouldn't have done that i never learned not to throw things but you know it's that spirit of like let's see what we can find let's let's all get get caught by our imagination by by some glimmer we see in the distance and let's follow it see where it leads if you've decided oh they're just going to the next city over so this is just travel how is it going to feel like travel how's it going to feel you know you you don't have the benefit of like the sweeping helicopter shots of new zealand so how you how are you going to do that if it's exploration how are you going to entice your players so i've i've got some ideas just jotted down a couple ideas i think key to both is going to be scenic description going to read out a couple of examples for you uh this one um this is from my brother michael by mary stewart uh mary stewart did the uh the merlin trilogy very good fantasy if you haven't read it i recommend it but also she did a lot of um sort of thriller mystery kind of novels um that are very good so here's a description of some travel uh from my brother michael the hand of hermes god of wayfarers was over me still soon after i had passed lavaria the country began to change the grim banalities of attica the heavy technicolor prosperity of the plane sank back and were forgotten as the hills crowded in the road reared and twisted between great ribs of brown hill that thrust the landscape up into folded ranges at the foot of the steep waterless valley's dead streams curled white along their shingle beds like the sloughed skin of snakes the sides of the valleys were dry with the yellowish growth of burned grass and drifts of stones and crumbling soil bigger and bigger grew the circling hills bare the land drawn in with great sweeps of color that ran from red to ochre from ochre to burnt umber to lion torny with above all the burning the limitless the lovely light and beyond all at length a grey ghost of a mountain massif not purple not faintly blue with distance like the mountains of a softer country but specter white magnificent a lion silvered parnassus home of the ghosts of the old gods but no ghosts moved today no sound no breath not even the shadow of a hanging hawk only the bare lion-coloured hills and the illimitable merciless light ooh isn't that nice she's very good at description so good that my mother who doesn't like reading description uh the first time she was handing me a mary stuart book said skip the first chapter she's just describing flowers got another little excerpt here from uh from the hobbit would feel remiss not to include some tolkien they did not sing or tell stories that day even though the weather improved nor the next day nor the day after they had begun to feel that danger was not far away on either side they camped under the stars and their horses had more to eat than they had for there was plenty of grass but there was not much in their bags even with what they had gotten from the trolls one morning they fought at a river at a wide shallow place full of noise of stones and foam the far bank was steep and slippery when they got to the top of it leading their ponies they saw that the great mountains had marched down very near to them already they seemed only a day's easy journey from the feet of the nearest dark and drear it looked though there were patches of sunlight on its brown sides and behind its shoulders the tip of snow peaks gleamed it was not as easy as it sounds to find that last homely house west of the mountains there seemed to be no trees and no valley and no hills to break the ground in front of them only one vast slope going slowly up and up to meet the feet of the nearest mountain a wide land the colour of heather and crumbling rock with patches and slashes of grass green and moss green showing where water might be morning passed afternoon came but in all the silent waste there was no sign of any dwelling they were growing anxious for they saw now that the house might be hidden almost anywhere between them and the mountains they came on unexpected valleys narrow with steep sides that opened suddenly at their feet and they looked down surprised to see trees below them and running water at the bottom there were gullies that they could almost leap over but very deep with waterfalls in them there were dark ravines that one could neither jump over nor climb into there were bogs some of them green pleasant places to look at with flowers growing bright and tall but a pony that walked there with a pack on its back would never have come out again and i mean the hobbit and lord of the rings are obviously there so i just threw another one they're so full of this descriptive um momentum driving language none of us are expecting any of us to be able to uh to write out descriptions like that but i do think that we can look at them and we can learn some things from the techniques that they're using so first step i do recommend writing down your travel descriptions and just reading them out verbatim you might not be a person who takes many notes uh maybe you can you know ad-lib these on the fly in which case i'm so proud of you for those of us who are human um i think writing it down is a good idea get flowery get purple so what are some techniques that they're using um just to pull out a couple uh really obvious ones uh off the top of my head a lot of the language that these writers are using is deliberately personifying the landscape you know the mountains had crept closer to them the hills crowded about them or maybe uh maybe an animal like what's the animal version of personifying making an inanimate thing into animals the the riverbeds that were like the soft skins of snakes right in the mary stewart example uh we get a great bit of she's throwing in law there it's not technically her own law she's she's throwing in references to greek mythology but maybe you could use this as a chance to throw in little tiny snippets of the lore of your world be a bit wary with that uh it definitely works better as a technique if your players know what you're referencing because that's how intertextuality works colors a lot of colors were being brought up in in each of those examples one tricky technique that i think could work is uh scott mccloud in understanding comics aspect to aspect transitions what that means is basically uh you're looking at the one scene and it focuses in on different details of that one scene so he says here while uh while talking about aspect aspect he says aspect to aspect transitions have been an integral part of japanese mainstream comics almost from the very beginning most often used to establish a mood or a sense of place time seems to stand still in these quiet contemplative combinations rather than acting as a bridge between separate moments the reader here must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments now i think that that can be useful to us in our written descriptions sounds a bit weird applying a visual technique to the written word but if you think about it the way that these these sort of traveling descriptions are written it really does a very similar thing it gives you the landscape and then in order to emphasize the depth and the breadth of that landscape as you're passing through it it focuses in on little things the bubbling of a stream the color of a hill a hawk hanging overhead in the sky now i do think that there would be a bit of a difference in the way that you write these if you're writing for travel or writing for exploration for example if you look at the fellowship of the ring a lot of the travel between um hobbiton and rivendell tolkien has this habit he sort of develops um kind of a rhythm to to his descriptions where he'll he'll give you little sort of tight packed segments of travel description and then he'll cut into that with what in d and d we would call an encounter might be a simple encounter it might be a complex encounter but he kind of cuts into that rhythm and in between focuses on these really detailed aspect aspect descriptions we'll touch more on this in a little bit exploration on the other hand i think um there should be a focus on enticement um there's there's a technique in youtube actually that's called information deficit basically you pull people onwards by creating a lack of information on youtube this is basically clickbait you give your video a title like i don't know five things you didn't know about warthogs and either the person will be like you know what i don't know enough about warthogs please teach me but more commonly the videos will get clicks from people who are like don't you assume what i know but they have to watch the video to find out what the five things are about warthogs to find out whether they know them so just by giving it that title uh you make the person aware that they don't know something whether that thing be the information about the warthogs or whether it be the content of the video right there's a little a happy youtube lesson uh but the way that that would work in this case the reason i'm bringing this up is that when it comes to exploration you know if you tell someone oh there's a ruin up ahead of a windmill or a church you know that's cool they might want to go and explore it but you've kind of given them the information there is nothing about a ruined church that tells them that something exciting lies within as far as they know they've got all the information so you want to create descriptions that that leave these little bits of ooh what is that for your players you know a glimmer off the next ridge something shining that catches the sun smoke rising in the east a great hulking shadow moving through the mist or maybe an eerie song that's carried to them on the night breeze make sure that your descriptions are including things that that almost make them want to divert of course because that's what explorations are about baby resource management all right for exploration resource management is huge a lot of those exploration based video games that i mentioned earlier use resource management as kind of their core puzzle element to to make exploration fun or challenging ideally both you know you're playing age of empires and you start with only this tiny little bit of the map illuminated the rest of is covered in the fog of war you have to send out scouts in order to start discovering what is around you but making scouts takes resources that you could be using on other things so then you want to use your scouts to find a place with more resources so you can set up another place so that you can make more scout you see what i mean and in your tabletop rpg you can start to play with those dials as well the dials that stand out to me as being really significant to uh to consider would be time uh rations carrying capacity and uh character stuff you know spells health whatever for exploration in particular i think that's where you're really going to want to dig into things like rationing and carrying capacity you know if you're a treasure hunter delving into the dungeons you're going to want to make sure that you have enough torches and food to get yourself there and back again and carrying capacity is going to be a big deal as well because how much are you able to actually take back with you you have to balance how many rations you bring because they're going to take up space with the stuff that you're going to be able to bring back the spoils of your adventure there's a game called five torches deep which is uh an independent sort of it's basically a reintroduction of osr elements to 5v mechanical structure it's got a lot of cool stuff going on but like a huge part of its premise comes from this idea of like your five torches deep in a dungeon are you gonna have enough torches to get back what happens if something goes wrong what if you're cut off from the path that you took here you don't know how long the return journey's gonna take and that same thing applies to like food as well if you know we've we've set up these descriptions of the the shinies and the smoke and whatever we're enticing our players off in different directions if they have planned an eight day journey four days in four days back to town if they get to day three day four and they see something just a little bit further ahead are you going to be able to entice them to to push their resources just a little bit further than they had planned if they do end up in these sticky situations are they going to be able to forage for food exploration i think you really get a lot more out of a more granular approach to resource management it doesn't that doesn't mean that it has to be like super detailed or mathematical or anything but just putting even a little bit of effort into tracking carrying capacity tracking the passage of time tracking the the use of your supplies because then it really becomes part of the this this risk reward nature of the exploration model travel i would say i i personally would take a much simpler approach i think the the stuff to track when doing travel over exploration is like maybe focus on time and maybe on character stuff my current method for example i have my own kind of take on the gritty realism mechanic if you don't happen to be familiar uh in the dungeon masters guide there is a variant rule that you can use called gritty realism which basically uh it replaces short rest and long rest so so ordinarily a short rest takes one hour a long rest takes eight hours if you're using gritty realism the change that it makes is that a short rest is eight hours a long rest is a week and it's meant to reflect you know you can't just heal overnight and all those things kind of cut down on that video gamey element of uh of taking long rests where players will be like oh well we're about to face the boss battle we should heal up let's camp outside and just i guess the boss will wait for us my take on this is actually quite different short rest is still one hour long rest is still eight hours but while traveling a long rest doesn't restore hit points and only restores half of your level in spell slots so like you can still heal you can still use your hit dice to heal you can still use potions or spells or you know character anything anything to heal except that you do not get hit points from a long rest and with regards to spell it's like you know if if you're level four you wake up after a long rest and you can choose to restore either one second level spell slot or you can choose to restore two first level spell slots because i do like the idea of um travel feeling like a cumulative experience you know it's not just like oh you have this fight and then you have this other fight and you can go nova in any version of them no you know the the effects of this fight will linger into the next one but i also don't want it to be like a huge deal you could play with rations and stuff for travel i don't to me it's not the most important thing if it's your jam if you like doing it then go for it it's not going to wreck it by any means but if it's not your favorite thing then you can skip it it's not going to harm anything either and the final section encounters and party interactions exploration this is where we get the most tools that we have for exploration random encounter tables baby always i've been like i like the idea of a random encounter table but it just doesn't feel right sticking it into the middle of my journey it makes no sense it doesn't fit with the story and what's going on and it's just one and done and forgotten about forever you know why because i was trying to shove it into travel it belongs in exploration it is such a beautiful fit and match to exploration where the the point of it is the uncertain and the unexpected monster attacks you know bandit tolls flash floods mysterious castles that appear overnight oh random encounters were built for this use all of them oh i did have one other idea that i think could be cool i've never tried it but i think it could be cool the idea was that um if if you happen to be someone who loves like doing world building and sort of planning the setting ahead of time and you've just got so much more designed than your players will ever be able to encounter or it would even work even if you just have the local region kind of mapped out you've got your players there in their starting position and you have a map in front of you and it's like face down on different tiles and they pick a direction to go in and as they travel you flip the tile and they find out what's on the map as they go it doesn't have to be a drawing you could easily write what's in different places on index cards and have them face down and have it be sort of an abstract system you know the cards are in the general direction and you flip and it's just words but it kind of feels like a map i don't know i think there's something in that now with travel like i said at the beginning travel is more uh narratively and thematically focused you're not you're not forgetting what your current quest is in the middle of travel you're traveling to the daikini crossroads to get rid of the baby so having random things happen in the middle of it doesn't really serve that story first thing that i will say is plan out your travel just like any session you've got your session plan you plan it out travel is exactly the same plan it like you would a dungeon it is that easy but more thoughts i was saying earlier tolkien has this kind of these these sections of beautiful landscape description interspersed with what we would call encounters different kinds of encounters you know that the hobbits have to hide from the black riders on the road but there's like a a skill check a little stealth check in there they have role play encounters here and there with farmer maggot or barliman butterbur they have combat encounters with the barrow whites and with the nazgul at weathertop there's that rhythm to the progress and to the obstacles and through that rhythm you can control the intensity of the story you're telling through travel let it play into the narrative at the beginning it's just stealth checks and role play and at this end it's getting poisoned by a poisoned ghost dagger and having to race across the river in time some of these encounters the tolkien includes you'll notice are just enter inter-party interactions and these are beautiful covering distance is something that the party of characters spend probably most of their time doing this is when they would be doing the most of their like bonding and talking stuff and to me it seems like a very unfortunate event uh if if you have to skip over that stuff it should feel a little bit like a like a road trip with pals just a little you know fellowship of the ring how much of that trip from hobbiton to rivendell is them singing walking songs i mean come on stop and have a meal get a little bit drunk on fairy juice and laugh at what loses the ring racer i do think that there is a tendency for us all to think that uh dnd sort of has to be improv and of course a lot of it is i'm not saying it isn't but but it doesn't have to be pure improv we're not improv people what are improv people called players comedians but he is one of the greatest pieces of dnd advice that i've ever heard i was at uh oz comic-con and jazz organized this panel of d d stuff uh she helps around d d new south wales and during that panel someone asked um if you have players who are hesitant to role play how do you encourage them to get into that now of course if we're talking about players who are really uncomfortable role-playing who are shy who don't want to do it don't make them do it don't make him do it but if it's just like you have players who are happy to give it a go but they just it's always awkward to get it in there jazz's advice was the best thing she said i contact them ahead of the session and i say hey i would really like to see you play out a scene about this thing and that blew my mind because that's that's it they don't have to script anything out ahead of time they shouldn't script out anything ahead of time but it just lets them think about it it just it just gets to stew in their brain for a while and when they go to say it during the session they have some general idea of the shape of the scene so you can do that you can you can get in touch with your players and you can say hey uh daniel and kiara these are two of my players i know that they get along great as people as friends and i know that their characters have a little bit of comical tension so i might get in contact with them and i might say hey when the party um settle down to make camp at the end of the night i'd really like to see a fun little scene where you two argue about something would you be interested in that if they say no no skin off your nose but if they're interested if they want to do it then you've just given them time to consider it as the sun sets the party begin to uh unpack their bags roll out their sleeping rolls divvy up the jobs for the evening gesture to daniel and kiara they have their little moment of role playing you get that little bit of like party banter party bonding i really love the walking songs that keep popping up in the fellowship of the ring and my party has a bad jinx played by my friend dolly who uh she back in the before times attended a lot of uh sea shanty gatherings and folk festivals so she knows a lot of folk songs and that's she sings those uh as jinx when she's casting spells or you know being a bad doing bad do so i might think to myself wouldn't it be nice to have a sort of a walking song moment and i might contact dolly and say hey do you know a song about travelling would you be up to singing that as part of this travel session tomorrow organize with her a q when i begin to talk about how tired everyone is jinx is suddenly reminded of an old song sing hole for a rave in a gallon ship with a fair and favoring breeze with a bully crew and a captain to carry over the seas to carry me over the seas me boys to my true love far away i'm taking a trip on a rickety ship ten thousand miles away i literally got in contact with dully and said hey would you be willing to do a song about traveling for a d thing and she said yes talk to your players it's you can have the just just ah isn't communication wonderful when you actually do it and through these things you can begin to acknowledge past events that have happened in the game that the characters the players might have talked about it but the characters maybe haven't had a chance to sit down and debrief about it you can use it to acknowledge changes in the group over time character progression it's all in travel folks so the these are my these are my personal breakdowns of the techniques for travel and the techniques for exploration and how you can make them feel different to one another and how you can make them feel like what they're meant to be obviously there are other ways of handling this that work for a lot of people montage travel from the from the middle middle earth rpg i don't actually know which lord of the rings the tabletop rpg it is but uh that one that has the montage travel great little system z bashu has a great video on how he runs travel that sounds like it would be fun a lot of people totally skip travel and and that works fine for them because that's not the meat of it for their game but these are just my specific musings on what i would do if i maybe was trying to make the passage of three hours feel like the passage of three days without it getting boring tedious or off message because i think that there is value in that sort of road trip quality as well as in the quality of uh the hardships of the wilds anyway i hope that you found some of that that was very it was always muppety in anyway hi i hope that you found some of that useful even just a little bit of it that can inspire you to come up with your own system your own what what works for you for travel in your dnd game ah i just choked on my spit i'm extremely attractive apart from that i do believe that's it i'm done email this to your grandma and i'll see you some other time and it's blowing my winds high ho i'll rove and i will go i'll stay no more on this old show to hear the music play before i'm foreign and i won't be back again i'm taking a trip on a rickety ship ten thousand miles away ugh i just felt a literal like like a drip of sweat travel travel down my torso gross aren't you glad i shared that information with you

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 51,113

Rating: 4.9724422 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek and Sundry, Geek, nerd, australian, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, funny, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeons, dragons, pathfinder, 5e, rpg, ttrpg, fairytales, grimm, dungeon master, dm, travel, exploration, overland

Id: DiMiug0T93s

Length: 30min 2sec (1802 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Generalitary]

This is very timely. I was just reading the "Adventures in Middle-Earth" module for 5e, and have been playing an open world RPG on my computer, and thinking a lot about how to emphasize travel and exploration in TTRPGs.

[u/sqrt_minusone]

Great video as always! I really like how you use literary references - they definitely add depth to the video.

I don't know if you take suggestions or anything on future video ideas, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on creating/running a Fae Court. Though I am also curious about those 5 warthog facts you promised us!

[u/Myschly]

This was really nice timing, I've been considering running a shorter campaign with Gestalt-characters (powerful multiclass) and wanting to put an emphasis on versatility and very big epic encounters. Having travel matter could be a way to make the players planning & investigating pre-encounters more interesting. Travelling the fastest route gives them more time, but checking out that smoke may be the remnants of an attack by the monster they're on their way to slay, or perhaps they encounter a druid who blesses them on their quest to slay it.