[0:20]Okay, so that's the June announcement done. We got that out of the way. Good. This is night three of solo van life. Hello, RV enjoyers. Everyone likes the idea of traveling. Some of the best stories that inspired tons of D&D campaigns are about traveling. Frodo and his friends glamping through Middle-earth in Lord of the Rings. The dwarven frat squad and their pet borrower in the Hobbit. Whatever other Tolkien thing I have to say here to prove my nerd card. Traveling is intrinsically tied to D&D, the stories that inspire it, and the fantasy genre in general. So why is it absolutely awful to actually travel in D&D? Rather, this stinks. I'm Antonio Demico, this is Pointy Hat and we're going to look at traveling and make it actually fun in this brand new episode of Tip of the Hat. Traveling edition. So here's an experiment I've been running on my own for a minute now. I've been playing D&D for a long time and I am a broken person with a fractured psyche and a type A control freak, which means I actually prefer DMing to playing. And that's something we can discuss some other time, maybe during therapy. But I've been doing this thing where I challenge myself to take a D&D thing I don't enjoy, like traveling or dungeon crawling or dragons. And sort of force myself to like it by running it in a way I would like. So for the last nearly two years I've been running a traveling base campaign. As a matter of fact, it just ended. The players were on this big pilgrimage, so like, honestly, a good 70% of their time was spent traveling, visiting new places, but never staying too long in them. It was mostly traveling. A thing I literally asked DMs to skip before because I hated it so much. Lames on the side of my face. And guess what? I love traveling now. I'm an RV pilled, tent maxing, Chad Walker, Travel mogging on Cedentoids as I load up on trail mix. Or at least I am when I run travel in a very specific way I came up with. And that's what this video and traveling in D&D in general is all about. So before I get into my weird little hat method of hit the roadjacking, we got to understand why I hated traveling so much. So let's see what the official copyrighted Do Not Steal book has to say about travel. So Mr. Dungeon and Mr. Dragon, the indie dev couple behind the acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons role playing game, have come up with their own system of travel. Let's see what's up. So, let's check the books. Oh, God, I hate it. Wait, I forgot. Human familiar, time to read.
[2:41]I love reading. I'll keep these around the tower to hold the doors open. So if you guys didn't know, D&D books don't really talk about traveling that much. I found relevant stuff in like three. So let's start with the DM's guide, you know, the most exciting one. So looking at the DM's Guide, which I'm sure everyone here has, right? The funniest thing is that the very first option presented for travel is just skip it. Yep, just montage it away, and you want to know what? I agree. If travel is not something you care about, skip it. Describe stuff, put in some flowery language in there, you know, the usual words. A pinch of breathtaking, a splash of damp, a sprinkle of vista, and boom. Our heroes have montage themselves to the evil layer. Was that, was that exciting? Did that feel like Lord of the Rings? Did it feel like the Hobbit? Did it feel like Freerenn? Did it feel like The Witcher? Did it feel like the brand chapters of a Storm of Swords that everyone skipped? No, right? Because those stories are about traveling. They are about the journey. Yes, reminding people that they can skip travel if that's not what the story is about is good. But as the hat said, there's a reason why people hate the way traveling is done in the game. It's because they want to travel. Because so many fantasy stories have travel as a central part of their story. And also, you know, D&D likes to pretend that exploration is one of its pillars, and it'd be nice to actually make it so. So what's the other option? Well, it's hour by hour travel, which is You know, just saying it's rate. This is the reason why people hate traveling in D&D. This is where the book employs the darkest of tactics that strike fear in the hearts of the bravest warriors. Random encounter tables. I'm not going to dwell too long on these, but, oh, I will. We're coming back to random encounters. Oh, are we ever coming back to them? Okay. Getting back to the tables, basically, this method asks you to roll on a random encounter table, mixing in some pre-made encounters that the DM has to cook to figure out what happens every hour based on travel pace. Travel pace is something the party decides and it's a whole bunch of math to decide exactly how fast they travel. So I hope you like to plan out exactly how many miles are between objectives and figure out based on how fast they travel that specific hour the time it takes them to get there. Fun. Other books like Tomb of Annihilation propose hex travel. Hex travel is when you travel one hex of a map a day, more or less, and don't bother to tell you exactly how many encounters happen on each hex. So you're on your own deciding that, I guess. Tomb of Annihilation also suggests tracking like the exact amount of miles traveled by characters. And then it literally tells you to not do it. So, I wonder why? I scourged more books for more travel info and the only thing I could find was more random encounters in Xanathar and even more random encounters. But this time they are jungle themed in Tomb of Annihilation. Again. So that's what the books offer. Basically, hour by hour travel where you combine calculating walking speeds to see what happens every hour by rolling on random encounter tables or hex travel or montage it away, I guess. Thank you so much, human familiar. Now, let me calmly explain why I cannot stand any of these at all. Personally, in my opinion, for me, Let's talk about my actual problems with traveling. The point of travel is first to see the world, right? If there's no world, it's, you know, hard to travel on it. So how are you going to go about creating this world to actually travel on? Well, I heard of a map, a map that you can beam your literal thoughts into. Ideas, hopes and dreams, and the map will answer by creating the literal world you just built in front of you. It's power is said to go even beyond mountains and rivers, being able to build literal people, countries, factions, everything you could ever need to travel through an adventure. Its name, World Anvil. That's right. World Anvil is back in a thematically appropriate pointy hat episode. I've talked about World Anvil a whole bunch and you know why. It's an incredible resource to assist you in world building. You can create wiki style articles to organize all those little weird ideas floating in your brain. For your own reference or to share with players and readers. And I wasn't getting about the map thing. They literally got interactive maps that you can place your articles on, like directly on the map. Literally click on a nation and see its info. There is no more excuse not to put pen to paper or digits to keyboard, I guess, and start world building for TTRPG campaigns or actual novel writing. World Anvil supports more than 45 systems including 5E of course. And guess what? This is not only for DMs. World Anvil has inventory, spellbooks and of course, all you need to actually build your characters, your PCs, dramatic back story included. And if you're finally ready to write the great, insert country here, novel, World Anvil is an amazing resource for you to do so. Perfect for writing, world building, but also literally manage your story and keep all that info in check. So if all of this sounds good, I have a code. Use my code PointyHat all one word to get 51% off any yearly subscription. It's the very first link in the description. And now that we have a world to travel on, let's see what the official content tells us about how to travel through it. So a lot of tips and design relies on making travel realistic. And boy, do I think that's exactly the wrong path to take if you want to make a game, you know, actually fun to play, which is commonly what games are meant to be. Or at least I think, I mean, I've heard rumors. Like yes, if you are actually traveling through the wilderness, there are plenty of things to worry about. So if our goal here is to replicate this experience realistically for immersion, you should worry about miles per hour travel and how that changes depending on the pace you set for yourself. And don't forget how pace affects exhaustion, you got to keep it realistic, after all. You should also worry about food. Rice, where we going to find rice? How much of it you have, how much you can carry, how quickly will that food spoil, same about water. Are you traveling with it? Are you counting on finding it on the road? How are you making sure the water is safe to drink? People need more water than food, especially if they're walking, so that is obviously something to take into account, you know, for realism. Oh, and also, since we're designing for realism, you should take into account each party member's constitution. A halfling can only eat as much food and drink as a Goliath or a human. It's for halfling and pixie. Same question applies if you're traveling with a Ranger companion or any animal. How much food does a bear need? What about a druid in wild shape? What about fuel for any construct? What about different mobility ranges? What about different speeds? What if someone can fly? Are you having fun yet? Are you having fun yet? Are you having fun yet? Are you having fun yet? Okay, you get it. I'll drop it. Now, I know there's someone out there that would find this fun, somehow. But let's bring it back to reality. Most D&D players don't bother to track arrows. Arrows! That's too much to ask for most players. I don't track arrows and for good reason. You want to know what that good reason is? It's not fun. Not for most people. Yes, calculating the stomachal volume of a young adult gnome and figuring out their metabolic rate is a realistic concern. And it's also nominally boring for most people. Boring. Yawning. The problem that people have with D&D travel isn't that it isn't realistic, it's that it's boring and bad to play. So all of these realism enhancing tips are literally useless if your problem is that you or your players are falling asleep at the table when they're supposed to be in the middle of a life-changing adventure. Wake up, the video's not done. The second thing I see from both official books and internet advice from internet people and hats, I'm sure there's another one out there and they are my rival is honestly my biggest issue for travel. Random tables. I hate random tables. Do you have an I feel statement? I feel like random tables are the devil. Actually, let me rephrase that. I hate random tables meant to decide anything that happens in an adventure. No beef with, I don't know, wild magic tables or whatever. She's cool, we're buddies, she can hang. I find that whenever someone brings out a random table to decide what happens next in the story, that is inkind and not at all hyperbolic here, the death of pacing, the death of story and the death of fun. If you're playing the sort of narrative heavy game all about making a complex character with a back story and a goal to achieve, nobody wants that character to die in a random encounter with a pack of wild wolves that has nothing to do with the plot of the campaign. But that's what the random encounter table said was happening, so one of two things happen next. You get into a combat encounter that is quite literally the definition of a waste of time as most tables don't do experience leveling nowadays. And so nobody is actually at peril of dying since nothing could be more anti-climactic than dying to a surprise puppy attack with no connection to the story. Or you actually do die to the pack of wolves, making your character death literally meaningless and insignificant and not related to the story at all. Like what is the party going to do? Get revenge on wolves or whatever big monster the table decided was going to spawn, like a video game mob.
[11:33]Great. Super cool. Yes, in reality, realistically, realism, real reality, things happen for no reason. Do you know where things don't happen like that? In stories, that are crafted by people. Now, which one are we trying to do here when we play the storytelling game? Gotcha. You can theoretically make random tables when traveling. I mean, I haven't seen it, but maybe someone is, but to get them to the point where they do work would require so much tailor-made work that you actually are just playing the better off doing something else entirely. They make the travel experience skewed because they are random. So there's by definition, no thoughtful design to how they appear at all. By design, a story made out of random encounters is honestly, I don't know how to put this nicely. It's literally just a bunch of random bullshit happening for no reason. It's bad. So if you don't decide your campaign plots by throwing darts at a wall, why are you running travel like that? Well, because the book says so. But we can do better. Traveling run like this to me ends up being either an excel sheet powered accountant simulator math problem marathon as you try to calculate how many inches of a foot of a mile of the length of a refrigerator per hour would a horse that was born with a limp and a craving for hazelnuts in December would travel, all while immersing yourself in the fascinating fantasy world of looking up the shelf life of medium to highly cured cheese and/or a string of disconnected, blood irrelevant, miscellaneous happenings that affect the story in no meaningful way and waste time until you actually get to the good part. It's like a layer of hell designed just for me. So, yeah, that's why I don't like traveling. Or rather, I did it. Until I ran it differently. How? Well, remember that thing I said that these things are what happens when you design with realism in mind? Maybe, just maybe, that's the problem. At the very beginning of this video, I said that we put traveling in D&D because it's a thing that happens in fantasy stories. Well, let's get back to that. Why does traveling happen in fantasy stories? Well, because it's exciting. Traveling in a fantasy world is a set up for a story or countless things can happen. And a set up that allows you to show countless different things at the table. I know this might be hard to grasp because it's so boring in baseline D&D. But going around a fantasy world, seeing different places, meeting different people, encountering new fauna and flora of a world that is not your own, finding new love at every port, embracing strangers as you led their body warm yours. All of your body intrinsically, except for your heart, which you know, whatever. Travel is exciting. A D&D campaign can be a story where it's all journey and no destination, where the point of it is what happens on the way to the thing and less about getting to the thing. But in order for that to happen, traveling has to be exciting to play and to run. So how are we going to do that? Well, let's establish some goals for this new way of traveling. One, it needs to be exciting, not realistic, exciting. This is the cornerstone of this design. This is the goal we're going for. It needs to feel like the fantasy stories we love, so things need to happen, and the things need to be fun and exciting and novel and just quite literally fun to play through. Two, it needs to be simple. Once again, we're going for the KISS method. Keep it simple, stupid. If you want to add the magical world of accounting, bookkeeping, speed calculations and food rationing to this, be my guest. But I'm not even like remotely interested in that being an aspect of this design. Besides you can just set up how much food is consumed per day and be done with it. And finally, three, it needs to be deliberate, as in it can't be random. A good way to make something feel exciting is planning it to be that, not letting a die roll decide that now you'll have to slog through three different inconsequential boring fights with two packs of wolves and a slug monster because the Almighty Table said so. Cool. So we have our goals for our design. It's time for me to present to you the Pointy Hat Travel Event System or the Tess. Let's give it a mascot for fun. There, that's Tess, the Travel Fairy of the Tess method. So how does this travel event system work? Well, literally, very simple. I'm going to explain it with an example. Let's say our heroes live in the country of Fantasylandia. Working title. And they are trying to get to Fantasy City. Working title. On the way there, they'll pass two villages. Simple. In the travel event system or test, things are not measured in actual feet of inches of miles or however many washing machines Imperial system enjoyers used to measure things nowadays. In test, things are either close, far, or very far. And depending on how far something is, more or less events will happen. Anything that can happen during travel. Events are divided in three categories, and guess what? You already know them because they are the three pillars of D&D. A red event is a combat event. A fight happens, but not just any fight. A fight that the DM has tailored to the place you're traveling in and what has happened in the story so far. Because the DM is making these instead of just rolling on a random table, these can actually be, you know, story important fights that happen while traveling. Because traveling is exciting and part of the story. But they can also be exciting because they show you what sort of weird fauna lives in this fantastical world you're traveling in. It doesn't have to be a pack of wolves or a pack of direwolves if the random table was feeling daring that day. So those are red events. A yellow event is an exploration event. This is your rickety bridge suspended above a chasm. This is your dangerous desert. This is your spooky cave. This is where skill challenges live. Where the environment takes center stage and you actually get to explore the world part of fantasy world. This is where the DM gets to flex their description muscles. This is where you go, "Wow, I'm actually in a fantasy world. It's so cool." Sorry, I'm getting excited. Anyway, finally, a blue event is a role play event. You know a fun thing that can happen when traveling, meeting new people, meeting back with people you already know. Fellow adventurers, rivals, enemies, vendors, nobles in distress, the big bad evil taking a break to smell the flowers, you're missing mom, my own, sister. This is where most of the drama and the story happens while traveling. So great. We have our events and we have our distances. And here's where the genius of the Tess way of running travel resides in its stupidity. I mean, in its simplicity. The DM is going to come up with events for however much travel you're going to do. And they're going to sprinkle them according to the distances we talked about. If the place you're traveling to is close, the party encounters one event, and that's it. You're there. You made it to your destination. If something is far, the party encounters two events, and they made it. If something is very far, the party encounters three events, and that's it. They made it. That's all it takes. How many long rest between events? How many miles have they exactly traveled between one event and the other? What is the position of the sun relative to the moon when they encounter the first wolf pack?
[18:19]It doesn't matter. We're going for exciting. You just need to know if it's close, far, wherever you are. The events are what makes travel exciting. Take as many long rests as you want, come up with whatever distance. The goal is not to make this realistic. The goal is to make this actually fun to play. But here's the thing about Tess that makes it good for D&D specifically, it's customizable. You can make a close distance take two events instead of just one. A far one take three. A very far one take four or more or less. If the players feel like they're taking too long and they would rather get to the place, you can take away events. Since this system is not actually tied to actual distances or time passed, you can just say, days give way to nights as you travel the mountains of Fantasylandia working title, and before long, the spires of Fantasy City working title appears the horizon line. And you're there. You're no longer beholding to a ruler and inches to miles conversion calculations. It allows you to tailor traveling to what actually matters. Make it exciting and fun to play. And guess what? Once you've got into the hang of it, you know what you can do? Mix and match. What if the blue event, a role play one where the party meets their rivals, could turn south? Well, baby, that's a purple event. A mix of role play and combat. What if while going through the abandoned mines, they find and make friends with a friendly Cobold? Well, that's a green event. A yellow exploration event that is also a blue role play event. The DM can dot the map with different colors of events and give their players a traveling experience that centers the excitement of travel, rather than a chore to make the make believe game about elves casting Abra Kadabri spells realistic. But talk is cheap. Let's see how the Tess method actually works. Our heroes start their journey to Fantasy City working title. Their first stop is their nearby village of Fantasy Village working title, and it's very close. It means only one event happens between the two. Let's make it a blue one, role play. Our heroes encounter a group of circus performers. They are also going to Fantasy City working title, and they decide to make a bet. The circus will take a different route, and whoever makes it last to the city has to pay 100 gold to the one that got there fastest. And so, off they are. The one event between the starting place and Fantasy Village working title is done. So they get to the village and they immediately leave because they are on a time crunch. Maybe they should have waited though because the distance between Fantasy Village working title and their next stop is a very far distance. That means three events. The first one is a yellow event, exploration, and it's finding their way through the trip swamp. Call that because of the hallucinatory pollen the flowers here release into the air. Our heroes trip a lot and hopelessly failed a skill challenge. They take a long time to make it through the swamp. Long enough for someone to notice. Our second event is, surprise, a purple event. A mix between blue role play and red combat. A hag visits the heroes as they are tripping balls and she dissipates the pollen. She offers the party a deal. She'll replace one of their eyes with an eye of her own that can see past the hallucinations of the swamp. But in exchange, she'll always be able to see where the heroes are going. The heroes could fight the hag, but they are in rough shape after spending two full days in this hell swamp. And they don't even know if they can make it out alive even if they defeated the evil drama. They take her up on that offer. And after some creative surgery, they now have a hag eye that can see through the swamp. Great. This eye will prove invaluable for our third event, a red combat event. A bunch of red caps are waiting at the edge of the swamp to attack people that have barely made it out of the trip swamp. Relying on those people being, you know, confused by the plants. Fortunately, for our heroes, one of them has a hag eye, and this encounter is much easier than it could have been. And with three events done, our party makes it out to the swamp and to their second destination. Fantasy Village, two. Electric Boogaloo, working title. And it's here that they hear that the circus pass through here just one day ago. The heroes might still be able to catch up with them. And Fantasy City working title is only far away, which means two events. So off they go. Off directly into the climb wood, a forest where weather changes at the drop of a hat, and the forest changes with it. One second it's a hot and humid jungle made of palm trees and tropical foliage, and the next, it's a snowed in pine forest. What's behind these insane weather patterns? It's not other than our red combat event, a weather fly, an insect that can change the weather around it by batting its wings. It uses the changes in temperature to weaken its foes and attack them when they're at their weakest. It's a tough battle, but our heroes use the changing foliage as cover and managed to defeat the weather fly. They emerge from the now climate stable climb woods, relatively unharmed. But the same cannot be said for the circus troop. The climb wood slowed them down a bunch, which means that our heroes have caught up with them. And right at the moment where our heroes lay eyes on the troop, is when the hag teleports right in front of them. It's a rare white event. Apparently, the troop fooled the hag once, and she's been seeking revenge ever since. She used the hag eye embedded in one of the heroes' skull to locate them, and now she plans on taking that revenge she's been after. She summons with her a bunch of hallucinogenic flowers that not even the hag eye she gifted to the party can see through. And our heroes must make a choice. It's a white event because it can be a blue event if they try to reason with the hag and the troop. It can be a red event if they fight the hag or the troop or both, I guess. And it can be a yellow event if they try to make a run for it through the hallucinogenic pollen. So what do you choose? I don't know. You do. If you use the test method in your games, the drama, the intrigue, the adventure, that's what travel can be. That's what a travel system based on making things exciting, on making something feel like the stories that actually inspire us to play D&D, looks like. As I said, I playtested this thoroughly, like two years of playtesting it, and honestly, I don't often say this about the things I make, even though you all are nothing but kind about them. Thank you. Thank you so much. I love the Tess method. I really want you all to try it. If you and your group have fun going for the whole survival, tracking food and distance play style, this is clearly not for you, and that's fine. But I really, really feel many, many people that are just not that into accounting would love the Tess method for traveling. I mean, it existed, that is. I guess it doesn't really matter, right? Since it's not like this whole thing is easy for you to take from this video and use. I mean, it's not particularly complicated, but it'd be nice to have it, you know, in written form. And what about examples of events to get you started? Those would be nice to have and all. But what is this? That's right. You're in a blue role play event yourself right now. The rules for the Pointy Hat Travel event system method of traveling are in the description of this very video for 100% certified free. And all you have to do to get them is, I don't know. I guess you can just click on them and that's it. This is a very boring role play encounter, I guess. I mean, you could leave a comment or subscribe if you like that at all. A bunch of you don't subscribe, YouTube told me, and it would make me happy if you did. That'd be nice of you. And getting real for one second here, life has not been the easiest lately. The human familiar just lost his day job, so YouTube has been a literal lifesaver. And I know I've come down on the rambling at the end of videos because of YouTube retention reasons, but I don't care, and I wanted to say thank you and be real for you all for Pride Month for stuff. Who knows? Maybe someone will find it inspirational in some way and try their head at this because I think that they should. I think that you should if you want to do it. I have a bunch of stuff planned. You all don't even know what's coming next month. I cannot wait to tell you. And in the meantime, though, if what you're having trouble is not traveling but combat, here's a whole video on it that I'm still so shocked people loved so much. So, thank you. Happy Pride Month. I never asked for a free ride. I only asked you to show me a real good time.
