If you spend any amount of time trawling through the variety of RPG/TTRPG design spaces you tend to see a cycle of different posts. There’s usually a variety of posts asking for feedback on dice mechanics (We’ll get to that one soon, too…) or help refining a new spell system. But what tends to stand out, to me anyway, are the number of posts asking for help on their Travel Systems.

Traveling in TTRPGs has a very mixed reputation. If you spend time counting or watching all of the posts, you can see that there’s still a very healthy community of people who want their games to have a distinct, fun and engaging Travel system of some kind.

The usual references are The One Ring RPGs, Ryuutama, the usual suspects. Games that have getting to the place being the actual adventure.

I’m not here to poopoo over travel systems. But I want to focus on one key mistake I see being made time and time again, that is designers are trying to design their system to force behavior and not outcomes.

Behaviors

When the measure outcome becomes a target requirement, it ceases to be a good measure requirement ~ Goodyear Tires Law

Game design is odd. When you design a system, you’re often trying to design mechanics that push the players to do what you want them to do. You’re creating behaviors that you want.

For example; You play as a Barbarian Archetype character. That means you have a BIG weapon, often don’t wear much armor and you run around the battlefield as a human Slap Chop.

You, the game designer, want the player to get in there and start Slap Choppin’ enemies. So you think that you should create mechanics, actions and abilities that give the character incentives for doing what you want them to do.

I’m going to give you two different abilities. Two mechanics that both effectively accomplish the same thing, but…you know what, you just tell me which one is better.

Barbarian Charge You run at enemies and give ’em a good bonking.

Option A: You move up to your speed towards an target, if you make an attack against that target, your attack has a +2 Bonus to hit and deals an additional 1d8 Damage.

Option B: If you attack a target that was not within melee range at the start of your turn, your next attack has a +2 Bonus to hit and deals an additional 1d8 Damage against that target.

Now, which one seems…better? There’s probably a split. Some of you look at Option A and think “Wow that has free movement, that’s pretty good” and some of you think “Option B seems very flexible, I can do some fancy footwork to dance in and out of combat to keep my bonus up”

Ultimately, I would select Option B to implement. Why? Because I designed for the Outcome I wanted, which was I want the players to run at enemies as quickly as possible.

Option A forces you in to the behavior (run at enemy, make attack) while Option B let’s the player decide how they go about getting that bonus. (I run at the enemy, make an attack, use my Barbarian Sneeze action/Bonus Action/Whatever to move away from the creature and use my Fighter Ally to keep him away from me, so my next turn…)

Now the action isn’t amazing. I’d probably want to change the wording to incentive ping-ponging between enemies, but I made it up on the spot, alright? But the point here is that I want to design a mechanic that both incentives what I want the player to do, but also focuses on the outcome. Let the player decide how they get that outcome.

Which leads me to dissecting common problems I see in

Travel Systems

Sometimes the real travel system is the travel systems we made along the way

Travel Systems are hard to design. It’s true, I designed one for my own game and it’s…not perfect. It has some rough edges for sure and it will not appeal to everyone which, in my opinion, is fine. But what I see constantly in these forum posts, Discord discussion, etc are designers trying to force players to behave a certain way, instead of just giving them the levers they need to make their own choices.

Here’s the big one: Resource Management. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of mechanics being proposed for Water, Food, Wagon Supplies, Animal Food/water/whatever.

There’s mechanics for rationing, mechanics for starving, mechanics for foraging for new food or items or water or thousands of other little things that just…drive me nuts.

The Designer wants these things to matter, they want resource management and tracking to be important. I get it, I do, I understand…but this is not the way to do it.

Take a step back. What is the Outcome you want with these resources? You want the players to have made some important decisions that will reward them for their planning. The outcome that you want is for your players to seriously discuss and plan out their resources and how they plan to get from Point A to Point B with minimal interruptions or goofs.

A quick aside

Most travel systems fail because the best case scenario is that nothing interesting happens. You plan everything, have plenty of supplies and stick to established trails.

You set off on your journey, it’s a 4 day trip so you all roll a bunch of dice 4 times. Since you have plenty of resources and you all took the appropriate actions to avoid any conflict, we can spend an hour marking off resources and wow, you get there, that was fun!

In my own opinion, I don’t understand what a few interesting random challenges with some fun side stuff can’t accomplish that a super in depth travel system can.

Seriously, here me out. Instead of tracking a bunch of resources and hoping you roll well enough to not have to…spend more time interacting with the travel system, why not, as the GM, just sprinkle in some fun Challenges, little side quests and just fun “Road Trip” style content for the players to interact with? That could be the journey right there!

quick aside over

With our outcome in mind, how do we handle food and water? Rations basically? You don’t. Because that’s up to the players to figure out. Rations (which is going to be my combination of enough food and water for one person) costs N $currency, if you buy a lot, maybe you can get a bulk discount.

But your party is going to be traveling up a road for…let’s say 3 days. A pretty simple trip. Now you the designer have created some interesting Random Challenges (NOT Random Encounters…a story for another blog post…) and these will be fun little bits of content that make for an interesting travel session.

• If you eat your rations every day, you get…an Inspiration Dice or some other kind of cute little bonus that you maintain so long as you continue to eat properly.
• If you can’t eat a full ration every day, then you’re okay, you just don’t get a bonus for being a big healthy boy.
• If you can’t eat at all, or not enough (which is subjective…), you begin to take penalties on Rolls for the skill challenges.

That’s it, that’s an ENTIRE resource system for traveling. Hell that’s probably a third of an entire travel system right there. My outcome was that I wanted players to feel like their choices mattered and there is tangible rewards for planning properly. That’s it, I did it. When Random Challenges on the road happens, well prepared players get bonuses that lead to greater rewards. Some players who didn’t really plan (Or had bad luck) don’t get the extra rewards. And poorly prepared players (Or players who are broke, but still gotta get there) have an uphill battle to fight.

You can still wrap all of this up in some kind of overly complex tracking system…but this is what I mean, design for the outcome, let the players handle the hows and means (their behaviors)

“But what about consequences” I hear you bemoan. Look, you as the designer have to decide something early on: Will your players die because of the lack of rations? If so, then is that going to be a fun experience?

You were a bit unlucky so you don’t have much cash, you can’t afford all the rations you need to get there…oh and the dice continued to not cooperate so your foraging has failed aaaaand you’re all dead. Great game, who’s up for some Stratego?

I’m not trying to rile anyone up. I get it, if you’re trying to travel in the desert then yeah maybe Death is on the table. But I would argue that’s poor Adventure design to begin with.

Change it up a bit. Players are running low on rations, their foraging has failed. Does your game have a Push your Luck Mechanic to try those Mushrooms you aren’t super sure about? Maybe you try some…different types of Forest Cuisine such as these little grub guys. Apply some penalties for later and get ’em back on the road!

Wrapping up

I could go on about Travel Systems in General (And I will in an upcoming blog post!) but I just wanted to drop a little blog post to get some thoughts on the ole’ digital paper.

So remember: identify the outcome that you want, design for it, and let your players figure out how they’ll go about getting that outcome. It’s more fun that way anywho. You can force them to move up to their speed to an enemy. Or give them some flexibility to dance around and come up with their own strategies. The point is to stop forcing them to play the game in a specific way, and just give interesting levers to pull.

Let me put it this way: if you saw a game that required the players to use specific actions in a specific order without deviation or the game just wouldn’t go, you’d say that bad game design. I don’t mean that it would be suboptimal, I mean the rules state “The Oldest Player at the Table MUST make the Attack Action, then, the second oldest MUST cast a spell…”. That stinks, but that’s almost what you’re doing by demanding the players sit down with a sheet of paper and say “Okay, we have to have 190 rations to get to the next city. We also have to have the following items to avoid all of the bad random encounter outcomes, in this order it’s….”.

Unrelated Musings

I’ve been using VSCode as my primary IDE/Editor for…years. But the big push for nasty AI integration (“SIGN IN TO USE COPILOT C’MON SIGN IN YOU WANT TO USE COPILOT RIGHT? SIGN IN NOW TO USE COPILOT”) has made me realize that it’s time for a change. My buddies have been hounding me on swapping over to NeoVim for a while. So this is my first blog post written in it!

There’s some sticky bits for sure. I need to…disable markdown linting because no, I don’t gaf that my line length is greater than 80 (who tf decided that was a rule? King of Markdown?) and I’m still figuring out all the hotkeys. I’ve learned my Keyboard is not at all ready for Neovim shortcuts. It might be time to finally design my own keyboard.

Anyway, happy new years everyone, have a great rest of your month. This is Dad who’s going to get back to packing up for the big move this year.