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How to make travel more interesting in D&D

Posted by samuel.lyons93 on March 10, 2021

DM Encounters Travel

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How much money should a player have per level?

I'll be honest, when I first started DMing, I had no idea how currency worked. My first campaign was a short Tal'Dorei adventure, starting in Stilben and trying to steal some artefacts from the clasp. While looking around the small port town, one of my players, an aasimar paladin named Valmont, decided that he wanted to find a cape. The party's sorcerer had been summoning some errant bonfires in the previous fight and he wanted something to resist the flames. I wanted to accommodate the request and had put a gnomish artificer in the town by the name of Sprik who had a few magical items to help them out. I didn't expect them to go there this early, but after a bit of investigation, they found her shop. Now I had no idea how much an item like that should cost, but it seemed simple enough at the time and I didn't want to break the flow of the session. I sold a cape of fire resistance for 100 gold pieces (which was around the amount of the current party funds). A...

The D&D Golden Age - The Need for Collaborative Storytelling

Growing up, I like many others considered myself a geek. In the early 2000s, this was the beginning of the Golden Age of Geekdom. Video games were no longer a certain predictor of latent psychopathy, our we saw serious academic discussion around Batman movies, and we saw more of our friends online than anywhere else. But there was always one step beyond, that upper level of geekdom that many of us were too scared to cross over into. Above us all stood the elder geeks, and the preserve of this particular echelon was Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons was more of a symbol than a game: an indicator of the geek elite. Sure, we knew it involved dice, and numbers, and somehow Satan (?), but it was something beyond our experience. Still though, throughout my life I felt that siren call to the table top, to discover what I was truly missing. The first time I played a TTRPG (table top role-playing game), was when I was around 16. Me and a few friends were at our friend’s house, when...

How to make travel more interesting in D&D

At its core, Lord of the Rings is a three-book series about a group of people walking to a place. I know I’ve just made a lot of people very angry by saying this, but when you break it all down, the main plot of the story is a very long walk. Sure, there are things that happen in between, but if you had to sum up the series in one sentence, this would probably be it. And we love it anyway. It is the primordial ooze that so much of our modern fantasy sprung from. It is one of the primary inspirations for Dungeons and Dragons itself. So why is it, that in D&D, travel can be so boring? This question is more complex than it may appear at first, as the problem is there’s no one reason for this. Often, it’s the DM who gets the blame for this. They may feel they haven’t prepared enough, the pacing is off, or the random encounters are a bit too out of nowhere. When I was running Curse of Strahd, I certainly felt this way. The party is leaving the Amber Temple, barely escaping with ...

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