Mike Mearls Games
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Outdoor Survival
🕑 Added 2025-03-07 15:49:13 +0000 UTCEarlier this week I wrote up my approach to exploration. The procedure works well for tactical scale exploration, like moving through a dungeon or a ruined city. What about larger scale exploration?
I like the idea of a journey as a challenge, one that evokes a real sense of dread or excitement in the players. You're not venturing into any old swamp. You need to cross the Fen of Screaming Souls, from which no expedition has returned!
I wanted rules for evoking that feel. Dungeons are easy for me. The detail they offer - hallways, chambers, and so on - make it easy for me to wrap my head around managing them. I can describe an area, evoke a feel, and manage the action.
Outdoor exploration has always been trickier for me. The players can strike off in any direction, and my impulse is to gloss over the details or break a journey down into a few distinct choices. For instance, I've run journeys as a series of A or B choices. You come to mountain pass. Do you take the low route and risk running into the sludge goblins, or take the high route and risk an encounter with the storm dwarves?
That worked within the context of that campaign, where the destination was a lot more important than the journey. Each choice affected what happened when the characters reached the end of their journey. I think that works as an approach, but I don't think it is the approach.
This is an area of design where you can expect a lot of iteration. I don't have a system backed up by my experience in play, but I do have some thoughts on what I want the system to do.
So, here are my outdoor survival design pillars:
Bring the Wilds to Life
I want the players to feel the difference between crossing a desert or traveling through a forest. The feel needs to come from the game rules, not just the DM providing a vivid description. It needs to feel like a challenge that you need to prep for by gathering the right spells and gear. In play, it should present tactical challenges that align with the players expectations and the DM's goals.
Keep the Action Moving
I don't want wilderness exploration to turn into a series of die rolls. For me, plotting out how long a journey takes and then making one die roll per hour, per ten minutes, or whatever, feels dull. Instead, I want mechanics that create a sense of rising tension. The first draft of my rules ties into this with the idea of threat, but I want outdoor travel to have something that feels distinct. A dungeon is a constrained environment. It's easy to think of a slumbering dragon slowly waking up, or the angry guardian spirits growing more aggressive as the party meddles in their rituals. The vast scale of the outdoors makes that harder to communicate.
Make it Fantastical
There's a scene in Poul Andersons Three Hearts and Three Lions where the characters must came for the night in a fey forest. They set up a small, holy icon to bless their camp site and ward off the intrusion of evil fey.
That's exactly what I want from outdoor exploration. I like the idea of the wilderness as a mystic place, a scary world where strange monsters run amok and you can't trust the map the sketch vendor back in town sold you.
Tying it All Together
Predators are often territorial. That's an insight that I'd like to use to drive the basic system. The wandering monster approach does a good job of capturing the concept of roaming predator, but it doesn't intersect well with the bringing a region to life. So, here is what I am thinking of building:
Outdoor regions are divided into territories
Each territory has an alpha threat, the magic effect, NPC, creature, or other danger that makes it hazardous to cross
That threat is tied to the region and can be encountered anywhere, in some cases everywhere, within it
Making it safely across a region requires the players to mitigate, eliminate, or avoid that threat. Getting that wrong leads to the threat turning into a direct danger.
A region can be a patchwork of threats, or it might be dominated by a single, powerful element.
This approach lets me use the threat mechanic, but I want to add another twist.
In campaign play, the threat in a region evolves. Ecosystems never exist in stasis. The characters' actions change the threat over time, perhaps feeding into a flow chart-type structure that changes the threat it poses or the magnitude of its danger. I like this approach because it means the journey through the haunted forest to reach the dungeon evolves over time, giving a way for it to level up as the characters delve deeper into the dungeon.
Finally, areas that lack an alpha threat are filler space. Not every square foot of the wilderness has to be cursed, haunted by undead, or ruled by a cruel tyrant. We have empty rooms in dungeons, and so we can still have room for civilized region or mundane wilds.
Comments
Michael Sixel
Agreed on all points.
Merric Blackman
I've been trying a few travel systems of late (Uncharted Journeys, A5E Trials & Treasures, etc.) and I keep running into frustrations. One of the major things to consider is that there isn't one type of wilderness travel. Travelling with a known destination is a far different matter than travelling to explore, and I think there are more types beside. (Travelling when lost is its own type!) Running Empire of the Ghouls - with a *lot* of travel - is really showing how running too many encounters during travel can kill the pacing of the adventure. My experiences with the Lord of the Rings travel system... have not actually been good. (I haven't used the new 5E one, but I like it even less!) One System To Rule Them All probably won't work due to the different types of travel, but working out how you want to pace wilderness travel depending on its function may be a very good starting point.
Thoughts
I really like this approach. I like the idea of setting up potential problems for the PCs to solve during wilderness exploration, and not having set mechanics for solving them, allowing for creative and emergent play. "There's the ruins of a homestead a few miles to the east, by the looks of things. Some game to be had, but no water in sight. It is said that a direwolf stalks these parts, and the wind speaks of an oncoming snowstorm. You will need food water and shelter for the night. What do you do?" I've found that the more mechanical wilderness travel gets, the more abstracted, and therefore the more boring; it just turns into a series of pass/fail die rolls to do the thing, instead of any kind of actual problem solving or engaging with the world.
