I had an idea similar to this I called the "Dora the Explorer method". Before the adventure starts, she pulls out the Map and describes all the different stops they'll make on the way to the end of the adventure. Each of those stops has a small story/encounter tied to them, maybe you'll meet npcs(diego) or nemeses (swiper), but those unexpected things spice up the adventure.
Not a bad system. A series of known encounters helps your players plan ahead to gather equipment and learn spells/abilities which they might expect will be useful there.
So basically encounters but they know beforehand. Right. That's not that different to just having 'random' encounters, just... they know about them beforehand.
@@7thlittleleopard7 Random encounters are good because they make the game more unpredictable and give the players interesting and challenging things to discover. 'Charted' encounters, as we might call them, would be more like landmarks to look forward to or significant obstacles you will need to have a solution to before ever you arive. These charted encounters give players something to plan toward, like knowing there will be an opportunity to refill their waterskins on day four of their seven day long journey from Town A to Town B means they only need to bring enough water to last four days of travel. On the other hand, if the players know their journey will take them to an extremely deep canyon with no bridge and no easy way down or back up, then they will want to secure a scroll which lets them cast a spell to fly across or buy climbing equipment to help them survive descending and ascending sheer cliffs- these are options you wouldn't have if you stumbled into the obstacle randomly. So I think it'd work pretty well if the players are given warning of the unavoidable dangers they will face if anyone in the area has traveled the same stretch of terrain, but most of what they encounter is still a surprise.
Yeah, this "system" seems to be "the DM uses their brain to decide what's actually going to be enjoyable for the game." Which I fully support. Random tables can burn with that closet.
If you're using mechanics you don't like, sounds like you need to use random encounter tables. Try this. Create a 20 line table, all blank. Run your travel rules, but each time the party leaves a loose thread hanging from an event, add it to the first blank line on the table. They killed all the bandits but one? Add an assassin to the random encounter table. After each event roll a d20 and, if you hit a row that's not blank, run that encounter and cross it off. Now we have a random encounter table that's perpetually shifting and adapting to our table, but adds a level of randomness to travel that makes sense in the larger story.
came here to suggest something very similar. Random encounter tables pulled from a book tend to be bad, but a table you've tailor-made to a given region that changes based on time and player action (or inaction) breathes life into the setting
welll... i've done this before. you take a step... you take another step... by the time we arrived i had said that phrase 13852 times. and everyone was asleep.
Its a dumb point he makes because people who run traveling like this just say 1 rations per day and they last 7 days, so if you eat in a tavern 5 days and only 2 days on the road out of your rations 5 of your rations will go bad. Simple really.
@@lonewaffle231 why would travel rations go bad? That's buying groceries or taking the soup or meat from the tavern with you. You pay for pemican and hardtack and they last for years.
As a random tables enjoyer I was immediately invested when you say you hated random tables. I'm probably not using them the way you are, because I'm reading them and using them for inspiration during my DM prep and not rolling on them at all. But I love your method and I'm absolutely combining it with my method. I'm excited to implement it into my games
This is how I use them too. Mine them for inspiration and flesh actual encounters from them. On the night, I’ll either give the encounter, or I won’t. Maybe I’ll roll on them WHILE prepping if I’ve got a block, sometimes that helps to force me to think creatively about one I wouldn’t have chosen.
I personally make a combination of actual random encounters but try to strain away from the „wolves attack“ and rather have something like „a shrine to goddess x that is already important in the campaign“ Plot hook Y for later to foreshadow something“ and I also preplan certain events to happen either in a fixed point on the road or at a increasing chance ( like an additional D6, at the first encounter it’s on a 1, than on a 1-2) so at some point it will happen I just don’t know when. Have some great fun with this method and I can simply plan a travel Arc as 6 encounters in the road from point A to B Like one event roughly every 2-3 days or something like that
It's just a big, long list of ideas for (insert random table title here). If several or all of them seem interesting, I'll do a roll to decide between them while still in the preparation phase (NEVER at the table).
This is objectively the best way to use them. Aside from maybe traps, I’ve never looked at a random table and actually used any of them how they’re written. I’ll see what that says “a gnome runs past the party in the opposite direction and disappears just as quickly” and my DM brain turns it into “a naked gnome runs up to whoever is currently leading the party, gives them a good ole nut tap, dealing 1d4 damage (unless player can succeed in DEX ST) and disappears into the night”
Unironically, I think it's the single best cold open (in concept and execution) I've ever seen in video. For reference: Steel Beach, by John Varley, has my favorite opening in print.
@fortello7219 The silence. The stern expression. The melodramatic acting. The hard cuts to raw audio of flames. Cinema, literally cinema standard drama. It's iconic because its bold and unexpected even if its purely a single video sketch.
I'm really glad I stayed for the whole video! When I was listening to it, I thought "cool, but this is just writing encounters or using random stuff anyways," but then you actually have a document breaking it all down with a ton of good examples. 10/10
It's funny when you consider that part of Ryoko Kui's inspiration for creating Dungeon Meshi was wanting to explore the "boring" parts of fantasy adventure that most other stories skip. She's openly stated that's why you couldn't really do a Dungeon Meshi spin-off TTRPG of its own, because it's literally about focusing on the fussy mundane aspects almost all D&D advice tells you to handwave.
@@zoushaomenohuFunny thing is, you probably could. It would just be hard. Plenty of TTRPGs focus on the mundane, but it’s hard to create interesting encounters like the ones in Dungeon Meshi in an improvisational manner like DnD. The level of detail alone would make it a difficult endeavor
@@zoushaomenohuwe have things showing snippets of what it could be like. Wilderfeast exists for instance. It has monster hunter DNA in it and has eating and gaining bonuses as a core part of gameplay
In a Out Of The Abyss campaign my Warlock and party once ate a UmberHulk and we agreed that the Blood of it would taste very bitter and the meat was tough and I'm not sure if we agreed that the meat taste bland and bitter too
I actually think having resting and required sleep can be really fun. Its a breather, moment to chat, and maybe a point of some tension. If you lack resources, something could show up in the night. Maybe you need refuge from weather, and are forced to stay somewhere not so safe, or maybe mysterious. It could be really spicy to add some rest with tension 100+ likes you guys are so great :)
Agreed. Setting up camp, doing morning routines and talking about normal life stuff often leads to great role play moments. Especially if combine them with stuff like fate roles which really help the world feel alive.
I agree and it actually got me thinking that it would be really easy to add resting into this system by just having a mini rest encounter after each encounter or maybe if the party feels like the territory is unsafe and they're worried about getting a bad rest encounter then they could push on but then they would be tired in the next encounter. it could even be like a risk reward thing where resting would usually be just like a time for the party to hang out and do silly stuff but you could have like a die roll where if they roll a certain number they get some kind of encounter that ruins their sleep so they have to push without sleep or waste even more time resting again so it could add an interesting tension to time sensitive travel.
I totally agree. With our travel system, which is based on skill challenges (one challenge per day of travel) I tell my players that if they take a short rest (max two per day) then they get advantage on the next skill check This is a 5 minute break in the session for me to catch up my notes, and for the player's characters to get to know each other. I also tend to introduce encounters in these rests. I think the best one was when my party took a short rest and 5 fairies showed up riding squirrels. I used that encounter to point to a location of interest. The location had two chronomentals there, and that final encounter was one of the most memorable we've had so far.
If we could, it would be awesome to come up with some "rest" systems". I've made my own because I think the break is a powerful utility that can generate more "brotherlyness" within a group
Maybe during travel you can choose to make camp as an additional event that the party initiates. The kind of event is up to the DM (blue has someone wander by the campfire and offer to share a meal, yellow means that something is weird about the campsite, red results in them being ambushed at night, etc) but after the event the party is refreshed and can continue on their way.
The method at our table has been to segment the days into: morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, and night. Each of these pockets of time gets a possible random encounter or a description of the weather or location. It seems to be a good happy medium between the monotony of every single hour or minute being described and just skipping to a location
Ironically this is exactly how random tables were originally made to be used. They were a tool to be used when you're stuck on what to plan next, not really ever supposed to be rolled in the middle of a session.
@@evilcomputer let me know where you found this information, first edition advanced and second edition DM guides explain why to use random encounters. For example straight from the book: "Random encounters make the game more exciting for the DM. The game has to be fun and challenging for him as well as the players. Part of the challenge for the DM is to improvise an encounters on the spot. The DM gets involved and excited, improving the play of the game." DmGuide 2nd edition pg 96 And the advanced PHB pg 103: " At prescribed intervals, your DM will generate a random number to find if any meeting with a wandering monster occurs. Avoiding or fleeing such encounters is often wise, for combat wears down party strength, and wandering monsters seldom have any worthwhile treasure." So, please... If you have a place that shares where it is a tool used when it used when you are stuck., and not in the middle of a session. Do tell.
@@savagefrito I promise you its not that deep man, literally all randomly tables are at least strongly implied to be for if the DM can't think of stuff. We stan planning out your random encounters beforehand around here
I have a DM who does Hextravel when the whole idea was to give our party a magical island demi dimension to explore with a fae court political war happening in various parts of the map. Since the idea was a sandbox that we could decide what to do and were to go travelling was a big part of the game. We would uncover parts of the Hexmap and eventually recieved a full island map. But the DM had every Hex plotted out... Different events, items, and encounters were already generated before we ever got to any one HEX. We generally would tell him where our party was planning on going and hed get stuff prepped. As we travelled we also had down time where characters could do various activities like crafting, hunting, scavaging. We found some unique resources in different places that we were able to leverage in towns. It was actually a blast. I've never enjoyed exploring as much as I did in that campaign.
This is generally how hexes are supposed to work. At least, this is what I’ve always understood and how I used them. They are a really great tool for emergent/sandbox storytelling. That being said, I think Antonio prefers more scripted plotting based on how he describes his views here, so it might not be his style as a dm
@@imagineitqllthe way you said that makes no sense to me... "yeah but he doesnt like that, he likes [insert the exact same thing worded slightly differently" has reading comprehension hit an all time low or am i the one misunderstanding? Example: the hexes in the comments mechanic ARE populated with predesigned events scripted to happen as the party interacts with the world
I Love the TES. Thank you for that. I have adapted it to my Game and enlarged it a bit. My Players love traveling. I added "Safety"(Safe, unsafe, dangerous) to "Distance" (close, far, very far) and multiply them with each other. And i added the "colors" white and black. Close and Safe are 1 Event, Far and unsafe are 4 Events, Unsafe and far away are 9 Events. (1x1, 2x2, 3x3) "White" is a positive suprise encounter, like a nice Tavern on the way or a beautiful landscape. "Black " is a negative surprise encounter, like extreme weather or Enemys who think you travel there Keep going, you´re Content is awesome
As someone who just started DMing and whose players havent left their starting city yet, THANK YOU! I found the rules for travel so insane to figure out. Def using this.
The first campaign I tan was a traveling campaign. I bit off way more than I could chew and we all gave up on it. The story was good, the story was great, but most of the gameplay was traveling from town to town and beating up bandits which got very boring very quickly. The campaign I’m currently running is a missing person whodunnit campaign where the party is looking for a specific NPC and in doing so uncovered a conspiracy between the city stage’s many thieves guilds to overthrow the city council and establish a monarchy to conquer nearby kingdoms. They’ve almost gotten out of the city to find Ms.McGuffin the NPC who knows everything and the one they’re looking for (not her real name).
First second I was taken aback like "oh! He was in a closet." Then litteraly on the floor once the fire started realizing "Oh! He was in the closet!" I fucking love you
Almost once every session I find myself either getting super distracted during travel and my players will just forget the story because of a random encounter or I find a way to skip it to avoid it. Thank you for the tips, I’m excited to test it out in my next campaign!
DnD players need to play literally anything else (except Fatal) A lot of things I see DnD players complain are things that are better in other TTRPGs and they would likely see these ones are much better for them once they leave the confines of DnD
The random encounter tables from OSE created great stories for my world. At one point my players encountered a unicorn and were able to ally with him to hunt some gnolls who were afflicting the region. Until a little bit later one of them was caught in a trap by a hag, the rest of the group asked the unicorn for help and the hag sadly destroyed him promptly.
Pointy Hat is one of the most invaluable d&d channels out there. This has totally revolutionized my perception of large scale travel adventure campaigns
☝️This but more! Hands down favorite channel. I love thinking about how to do things more efficiently or better and I love D&D. This is both, plus free resources, AND presented with top tier comedic editing. 👨🍳 💋
After working my way through most of your videos over the past week, this seems like an appropriate spot to say: thank you. Not only are they wildly entertaining (even though I am *far too basic* to get most of the references), but they’re making me think more critically about the game and more creatively about ways to approach it, and man, that’s a gift.
12:40 *A horse born with a limp and a craving for hazelnuts in December would travel an approximate average of 1,267,200 inches of 105,600 feet of 18,103 refrigerators of 20 miles per hour.*
@@helloidharbl6753 As a Large creature, *if a horse carries weight in excess of 10 times its Strength score,* it is encumbered, which means its speed drops by 10 feet.
@@BigManOzzie Pointy said "length" which I interpreted as the longest side. So, like if you laid down 18,103 refrigerators end to end, horizontally. Each one should be about 70 inches in length.
In our campaign, we spent the first several hours of the last session just shopping and preparing for a trip through the underdark. Only in the last hour and a half did we finally get going. We were all excited, roleplaying our character's fear of and curiosity for this place, when our DM rolled the first random encounter: ...a friendly deep gnome merchant who sold us minerals. We were SO TIRED of shopping at this point, we considered killing him despite being a super lawful good group. We didn't, we played along and bought some of his minerals, and then the session ended in boredom. I wish my DM had fudged the dice roll on his table to be some cool new monster we could fight.
@@Mikano_ñ Yeah, I agree. That was the conclusion I also reached after that session and after I had that thought about faking the dice roll: Random encounter tables are bad and not fun, and it's better for the story and for everybody's enjoyment to consciously decide instead.
Rolling for random encounters is such BS. To any DMs out there: If you are prepared to play out anything, that the dice lands on, just decide something yourself and make it fun for everyone. Don't let a dumb roll spoil the fun for everyone. In the Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign I'm currently running, my players somehow avoided the dragon for multiple sessions. Contrary to what one might think, I actually absolutely love, that you roll for where the dragon currently is. If your party starts to understand what you're rolling there it gets really tense every time. Still, since they managed to avoid the dragon for so long, at one of our sessions, I just pulled out the mini I had of it and balanced it on top of my DM screen, looking across the table. It was basically the ever-looming threat (the party was level 3 or so at the time). When they came to the entrance of the dwarven mountain excavation thing, I described to them the sounds of nature they were hearing. Some birds flying above, maybe a mountain goat, wind blowing etc. When they got out of it, I described as the world falling eerily quiet, as if the planet itself was expecting a storm. Then I made the person, who was walking in front make a perception roll. "You're hearing it before you see it. *makes the sound of big leathery wings woosh-ing through the air*" They actually managed to bribe the dragon and trick it to go into that cave by giving it some jewels, that you can actually find within that cave according to the normal description of the adventure....and then they went after the dragon into the cave for a reason I do not understand to this day. Oh well. Made them all roll multiple Dex saves as they were running away from the dragon's breath attacks. I basically utilized the dragon as an "environmental encounter" and not as a "fight/monster encounter". My players gave me the feedback, that they absolutely loved the encounter with the dragon, so I'm assuming I did it right. Planned encounters can be so much fun. Plan your damn encounters, people. Then you don't have to roll for boring, random BS.
@@ruolbu I mean, we didn't know for sure that there was no interesting plot thing going on here before we were done with the interaction. Also our DM has in the past roasted us for not being very smart/strategic when we didn't make the most of friendly encounters, he does use this to give us unique discounts and access to rare things. We got cool stuff from the merchant, and we're able to sell some of our things for a fortune - it's not like it was a bad encounter. I just wish he'd put it into the next session instead.
Happy Pride! I came back to post after running 2 sessions with this video living in my brain, and it did WONDERS. I felt like I already strived for the same feeling as the color coded encounter system even if I wasn't as direct about it, but this time every time I was thinking about stuff that marks encounters between major points these ideas came to my head and I was able to mix them as described and it all just fell into place, and made the pacing feel better in my notes than I have noticed in prior entries. Not only that, but it genuinely felt like I could be less contrived on moving things forward, as I was more comfortable fast forwarding to the parts that either me (with surprises) or the party (with their end goals) were excited to get to. Both sessions had similar feedback: It was probably the best session I've hosted and run, and one of those tables has been very long running of a few years now! Every member, with their rather varying desires out of play, mentioned they felt happy and excited there was "always stuff to do" which made me reflect on how it must have felt prior, and I think I was leaning a bit too heavily on this idea of sandboxing things outside of the main events with the idea its all optional, and that just felt rather disconnecting for some of the players because the speed of pacing was shifting so much! So thanks Pointy Hat, you helped me a lot and Im excited to use this system more!!!
At a convention, i participated in a playtest for a system with a pretty neat travel system. Its called hearth and its being made in canada. The way their travel works is that you have prep activities, gathering activities and traveling itself that all lead into one another and loop until you reach your destination. We had a rogue climb up a tree to see how far we needed to go, a druid fly as a bird to find a path, and a fighter got people to stretch. These provided potential bonuses for the gathering activities and the travel itself. I enjoyed it :)
that sounds really cool, and gets into the parts of travel that I really like (I'm the type that always brings 10 pitons because you never know when you'll need to climb something or jam a door shut). Sounds like you could probably combine with this for a really travel focused couple of sessions.
That sounds super interesting! Since you play tested it it probably hasn't been released but do you happen to know if it is online at all to check out?
I made the forbidden mistake of using both the realism method and random encounter method of travel simultaneously when I first started writing for D&D, and it was exhausting. I eventually moved to sprinkling in predetermined, story-relevant encounters, but I'd never thought about making them as neatly organised as you've shown they can be. I'm honestly stoked to try this method in a few sessions when my party has to travel. Thank you a ton for all the ideas you've introduced us to over the past several years.
I'm on the opposite side of this spectrum, I did four years of improv and goddammit if I don't make good use of them I may as well die, so I do realism, and random encounters... by melding fantasy, biology, and physics, and by tying those random encounters I roll into the story, and I wind up with roughly the same result of people having a good time, I won't knock his method(in fact I plan to try it) as I've been on the player side of it and I love it it's just always about making sure the table is having fun
I’ve been doing something very similar and loving it. I come up with 4 encounters for the group. 1 combat, 2 noncombat, and 1 that could go either way depending on the players. Then they roll a d4 no more than 3 times, taking turns. If they roll a number already rolled, I explain that they think back on their recent experience, giving their character a second to reflect and role play with the others at the table. I love it and am glad you are doing something similar. The key is making each encounter relevant to the story
Regarding random encounter tables, the video has a point about them when we play traditional narratives with a main quest or narrative plots to be followed by the characters. When we play a sandbox game, on the other hand, this type of table is one of the elements that can bring the game world to life. Without a main narrative, a main quest or mandatory plots to be followed for the story to progress, the world can be structured differently. To be honest, travel and resource management are part of sandbox adventures. I believe that the problem with travel in many TTRPGs is much more connected with the purpose of the game and the way in which the group is playing than with the rules and travel structures themselves. Not that D&D's travel rules are perfect (they're not, and I don't quite like them, which is why a prefer other systems), but they're not a huge problem if you're playing a game whose goal is the travel itself and not a main quest or main plot. And this also depends on who plays and the interests of the group.
I agree. Besides, the notion that encounter tables are strictly for combat encounters is very short-sighted. If you roll 5 trolls in your table it doesn't mean that suddenly there are a bunch of giants in the middle of the road ready to kill you, it means that there are a bunch of trolls in the region you're traveling in. Now what to do with these monsters is up to the dm, are the trolls battling another group of adventurers? are they eating the merchants they just ambushed? maybe they are fighting amongst themselves or you don't even find the trolls there is just an ominous guy that says "Be careful traveler these roads are infested with nasty trolls, if you don't want to fight them, best hope they don't see or smell ya from far away!". The encounters not only determine what you meet but they can also determine where you meet them. Making a bunch of giant spiders live in the middle of a clear hill is senseless, but making your players have to make a detour in their regular travel path and crawl trough spider infested caves makes for an exciting exploration moment, will they fight the arachnids head on? will they attempt to destroy the nest by sabotaging the cave? or maybe they'll try to avoid them all together by traversing the lair silently. Anyways my point is, encounter tables are much better than just going "here dm you have these categories of encounters in this amount for a trip, now wing it". If you had time to prepare exactly what would happen in a trip you'd be able to do it without pointy hat's method, and without encounter tables aswell. But in the case you don't have the time to prepare anything, pointy hat's method gives you nothing, while the encounter tables can give you a solid basis to build your travel events on.
I have been doing something like this with custom role tables, just determining the amount of events per travel or by vibe and my players loved it, but, you have shown me the way. This is amazing and just saved me so much time putting a system in for it. You're amazing.
First off, I love this. I don't have a "system" per se, but this is how I've always approached travel, for all the same reasons. And that's even coming from an accountant! I do enjoy random tables as a tool, though. Their place isn't at the table; they can be useful during the brainstorming phase of prep. Especially if you're painting in the gray edges of the fantasy map, where pretty much anything could be, it can be helpful to get a little inspiration. It helps to overcome what I like to call the Tyranny of the Blank Page. There are few things as overwhelming as infinite possibility, so by rolling on a few random tables you can at least have SOMETHING on the page that you can start to work with. Now it's not "what in the world are the PCs going to encounter next?" but the less existential-crisis-inducing "WHY are the PCs encountering... dire wolves in the... ice caves that... contain the lost tomb of... an ancient & forgotten paladin?" and "how do I shape that into something that fits and serves the narrative of the PCs and their main and/or side quests?" And I think that can apply just as well within TESS, to create generate endless things to go inside the coloured dots.
Honestly, this is exactly what I needed. My group has been traveling for a bit now, and i can FEEL the lack of energy in it. Even though they are all super nice and appreciative of me running, I can tell traveling is a slog with the day-by-day random rolling. I may devise a simple system to account for getting lost/setbacks/generally difficult terrain, so survival still has a prominent place in wilderness travel, but changing to something like this could help tremendously. Thanks PH!
I love the implication that the closet door at the end was singing, since it stopped when the door broke. By the way, thank you for constantly giving us amazing content mr. Demico, if I had like any money I would happily give you some to support you
Once he started dropping Trixie & Katya clips I wondered if he was mayyybe Part Of The Community, but I didn't want to assume. What a guy, what a channel, what a reveal!
@@WinningSidekick We love the reveals! Yeah it could have been allyship gone too far but i was pretty sure he was in alphabet mafia. It's a good thing not to assume until it's confirmed though 😉.
Dungeon Meshi was really inspirational for what a D&D campaign could be and then you realize you're the only one interested in a campaign where you're cooking whatever you kill and going into fun detail instead of rations. A lot of D&D thoughts is man these are things I'd love oh wait i'm the only one who wants this.
I'm currently playing a PF2e game where one of the players is Senshi but halfling. At first I was doing my own thing, as a slightly insane alchemist, but slowly I started to became a secondary character in their story as I took on the role of somehow more unhinged Laios. It's honestly fun when you support another player's playstyle
I’ve been binge watching your dm dnd videos. I’m getting ready to dm for my friends, first tome for all of us, and your videos are getting me pumped. You have such great ideas and the way you present them is so fun
Ryuutama is basically DnD inverted in this case: Really bad combat mechanics but amazing travel mechanics, you even get xp based on the topography and biome explored at end of session.
I love Ryuutama so much. I ran a oneshot for some friends and crossing the grasslands did more damage to them than any combat they encountered. Rolling to set up camp was the scariest kind of roll. The rulebook looks all cutesy but this really is borderline survival horror. It's great
A great concept, Pointy Hat! This is very similar to the Tracking system from Heliana's! That system has Hostile ('red') and Narrative ('green' and 'blue' coombined) encounters. The GM writes them or, in the case of the book, there are ready-made ones pertinent to the biome travelled through, each with unique flora & fauna. It has one addition, the Tracking check. This is where your players get creative in how they use thier abilities and skill proficiencies to do wayfinding/get from Fantasylandia to Fanatasycitia/find a quarry. On a successful check the encounter is one of the Narrative ones. On a failed check, it's a hostile one. The hostile encounters are usually pertinent to the story, usually giving clues about the monster the party will fight.
I love that idea! Do you implement that in a way that on a failed roll its a direct consequence to what they are doin? Like a failed tracking check leads them to a monster instead of the stead they were following or is it more random? And if you do, how would you plan on the outcomes of the checks? Im sorry for the 101 questions, new DM here who decided homebrewing was the way to go (oops)
Hm... Why do I feel like o can fucking wrap in the clock system blades in the dark has with this to really make a actively moving encounter system/progressive change. No it's because ones a party variables the others a dm centric giving both a small task. Dm cracks time rolls party figured the fuck were A is to B so they can get to C. Hu I just made a nifty travel systemnfrom unrelated ideas.
*sigh* first vid of yours I've ever seen and you got a like, a comment, and a subscription. All of that is AFTER you called me out in the beginning for using random encounter tables and made me feel very guilty. So... nice job. On all of this. It's gonna make a world of a difference in my games. Thank you
I’m so sorry you lost your day job. That’s always such a hard thing to overcome. I am glad though that you can find work here that’s personally fulfilling, at least somewhat sustainable for the time being, as well as truly inspirational for the D&D community. I seriously have a dedicated folder just to your homebrews so please keep ‘em coming. (Especially Which Lich and Drag-On Race because those kick ass.) So don’t despair and keep on keeping on. God bless. ❤
I can't express enough how glad I am that you made this video. One of the biggest aspects I've struggled with as a DM has been travel and how to measure it , distance and time with various travel methods. This makes things so much easier for my tiny brain to process and obviously will be alot more fun for my players. Much love pointy and keep up the great work.nyou really do inspire so great things.
I'm so on board for this. I'm currently running a campaign with a lot of travel and this is basically what I'm doing, except I am still tracking days of travel using a hex map. On days when no encounter is going to happen, I ask the PCs what type of skill check they want to make for the day. This has led to so much fun RP--the spores druid carving a little wooden figure for his girlfriend and trying to hide while he casts Sending to her; the rogue searching for poison ingredients in the woods; the stars druid finding a massive mushroom that she named, dressed, and now carries around; the minotaur feeling super accomplished as he rolls crazy high on Survival checks and shaves a day off the travel time; the list goes on. Basically, it lets the players take front and center during travel instead of me! This works at my table because my players really enjoy RP and bouncing off each other, but this plus TESS-style events has made travel so fun in this campaign.
I really dig the color-coded encounter system. Ironically, I can see it spicing up the much-maligned random tables too. 2d6 wolves is pretty boring combat encounter. But what about 2d6 wolves as a Social-Exploration encounter? Imagine needing to reunite a wolf with its pups by searching the surrounding area, and making Animal Handling checks to coax them out of their hiding spots. Maybe after finding them all, the wolves follow the party for a while, or come to their rescue during a tough Combat encounter. Lots of possibilities.
This channel breaks things down in such a fun, funny, and most importantly, SIMPLE way. I've learned so much from the creativity presented in these videos. I'm a better DM every time I watch something from Pointy Hat!
From the example travel given at the end of the video: You encounter a traveling circus troupe and have a social event My players would say not interested and move on. That's exactly what happened when I ran Curse of Strahd, they had absolutely ZERO interest in Rictavio and his traveling circus. They didn't figure out who Van Richten was until much, much later
but the thing is.. it WAS relevant to the story. You as a dm told them something(so it's most likely important or interesting). They skipped it. And later they will find out about that circus that was actually important to the story and they missed their chance (to gain/resolve something?). It's already a good "unlucky that we skipped it, eh" scene, no? :) It was there, your world is alive, it's cool. Yeah, skipped encounters will make game session shorter but who cares - we just eat pizza and talk a little more before we go
I swear when I was watching this anime I was like wait isn't this exactly like dnd? although the dm had a background as chef and want their players make food xD
Man I watched the same anime, and after reading this comment I'm now thinking about an Iron Chef encounter... no relation, but that's where ADHD brain decided we were going today.
@@warmachine5835 and you have a minios as a food dishes xD and yup adhd brain here too which is trying to find a job and having videos on the background as well as hearing japanese rock music in spotify
This is what you do in Mutant. All food is weird mutant beasts. Domesticated farm animals are weird mutants. Each monster manual entry has a note on how to eat it and how to do so safely if the PCs have the right skills. Not being poisoned by weird mutant beasts is an important part of field cooking. The locals often know what to do with stuff if you ask them. Sometimes you need to boil some weird wolf for hours, sometimes the best part to eat are the weird lumps under the skin. One giant bug has neural clusters people consider a delicacy and can be sold to restaurants in town. Other animals taste like mud but are safe. You just need to hide the taste.
Recently I read an article by the Angry DM titled "Actually... Players Don't Suck at Taking Inventory". It goes into the fact that tracking rations, ammunition, carry weight is tedious and basically only serves to punish the players, despite such things being very important to serve as limiters. His discovery was that players don't mind it so much if you make it as easy as possible. Personally, I enjoy exploring in games the most. I will go out of my way to calculate my carry weight even if no one else at the table, not even the GM, cares. Determining what equipment I can afford vs. how much I can carry vs. what I will concievably need is like a minigame for me. The threat of running low on supplies ammunition is a source of tension and drama. Being forced to get scrappy and creative with scavenging things from the local environment to solve problems is a source of excitement. When mechanics and narrative do not align, it annoys me severely. That goes in both directions. I hate when rules are handwaved because they're inconvenient, but I also hate when rules are poorly created so that they have to ignored for the sake of a compelling narrative.
The one thing I would note is that 3e had advantages here as while they had a lot more tables and was more granular and such, they also offered a fair amount more detail, like monsters having climate/terrain as part of their entries, and the DMG having all of those grouped together by terrain, along with instructions for how to put them together to make your own encounter tables, or just using those lists as starting points for building encounters. In all, a solid video, and not a bad system at all. I don't know that every game would want/call for it, but it is nice and clean. Well done!
There's definitely something to be said for the Exploration gating, where you go from scrounging for coppers to stay fed; to being able to afford to travel a day or two to reach the dungeon; to having enough foraging skill to travel a week or two into the wilderness; to collecting enough Murlynd's Spoons and Everfull Waterskins to Simply Walk Into Mordor. But making that gradation interesting without merely inflicting suffering on the PLAYERS (the characters can suffer, but the real people at your table should not) is difficult.
Haven't other people used the "closet" pun?I feel like others would make it. And as someone who doesn't want to see 2 people engage in "petplay" on the sidewalk,I agree with him.Please don't use the next 30 days as an excuse to be weirdos.
Here's another realism helper. As an unfit 25 yr back in the day I missed the last bus home... 16 miles away from home and couldn't get a ride. It took about 4 or 5 hrs at a slow and steady pace with no breaks and by the end my feet had blisters. So the amount of miles an adventurer can travel in a single day should at least be 30 miles.
Nice intro. Good advice too, but sometimes some of us actually want the sort of game where a table of randomness hits the PCs with seemingly pointless encounters, and we improvise how those encounters fit into the greater story in the middle of things. It depends on the style of game the GM and players are in the mood for. Your red, blue, white system is great for those other times. Happy June!
Just found this channel the other day and I'm loving everything I've seen so far. The cold open is absolutely iconic, and happy (belated) Pride! Next up: Wrath.
The first and last few seconds are cinemati gold. What a beggining to the month!! Hope the human familiar can find a new and better opportunity soon! And as always thanks for great content and tips!! (P.S. that drawing of your hat sister is so cute!!)
thank you so much Pointy Hat, there is such a small handful of DnD content creators that have actually helped me in DMing and by far you have helped me the most. I always look forward to seeing your videos :) much love
I think it's a good time to try and formulate how I personally appreciate your videos. You have an approach to D&D that is so refreshing because your treat it as not just a game comparable to a video game, but a game that focuses on a story, which is much more relevant. Plus, you always have ideas that are surprising and well built, and I think it's absolutely awesome. As a new DM, and more generally as a neurodivergent person who recently discovered D&D and is now obsessing so much about it, I find your videos extremely useful, and genuinely interesting as such. It tickles my brain just in the right spots. Congrats on coming out, the scene was cool, and best of luck to you and your human familiar. Can't wait till next month to see what you have in store !! Love ya
Thank you for this! I have a travel heavy campaign coming up and this could not have come at a better time. I appreciate how intuitive you made this as well.
your creativity is brutal and your art is so expressive and beautiful, i envy you so much! I've been watching you for so long and learnt so much from you, I hope nothing but the best for you ❤
Good video! And good ideas. But in defense of random tables, for "Random Events", i always like the Dael Kingsmill, from Monarchs Factory, style of random events that can happen during travel. Not everything needs to be combat, or even interaction with npcs. Things can happen within the party. Equipament breaks or worm off, needing time on the next town to fix it, or if there's someone with the tool proficiency they can do it during their long rest. The food can end up attracing wild dogs, that doesn't attack, but are annoying and distract the sentry at night. If it's an tropical area, insects can impede a full rest, and the players may recover everything from the long rest, but roll constitution to see if they wake up exhausted. I think a mixture of both systems can be interesting.
This is an excellent travel methodology, not just for DND mind you. I really like the last event in the example, being literally tied specifically to how the players interacted with the world during their travel. I wasn't using something similar in my own games, i was using something much, much simpler with the focus to just get some excitement during travel segments for the group, primarily through combat. This is so helpful its unreal. Good job!
I don't play D&D but I love your videos because your creativity has been such an inspiration for other things I've been doing such as character creation and writing. This sounds like an amazing way to build a good travel journey and will use it on a story I'm making, because I myself love fantasy exploration but don't know how to make it interesting yet. Love you pointy hat, you're amazing!
This I can't believe how much this opened my mind, travel is such an organic tool to develop a plot and I NEVER SAW it that way, even thought most heroic fiction is LITERALLY BASED around that! Your method is so simple, it makes me want to gm real adventure campaigns again, and it low-key should be in every manual of every game. It's not weird at all that you were so excited about it I didn't really notice your channel before, great freaking work.
Came here to say that I’ve just used the Tess method in my last sessions where the party were travelling from 1 city to another, and by the end of the session I had two players tell me it was there FAVOURITE EVER SESSION. GASSED! BRB going to go watch every other video you have made
I had no idea pointy wasn't out. The drag clips in every video were quite the hint. But it's even better that he's feeling confident to be completely open.
Hating random tables smells of loving the narrative more than the 'adventure'. If a player dies to a random encounter it presents a great opportunity for the DM to insert a revenge quest by creating a nemesis. Random tables are chaos. Chaos drives plot.
Yup, different styles. The story is the past of the game. You play to find out what comes next. vs the story is already written (mostly) and the players play to find out what the dm has planned.
I think you're missing the point of random encounters not just being battles. They can be chance meetings, weather situations, mini-dungeons. They can lead to latter storylines and connections to situations. If you're making them boring, that's on YOU not on the system. For example, okay, so you fight a bunch of wolves. As you're skinning them you find a wedding ring in ones' stomach. At the next town you visit you hear about a missing caravan and are tasked with taking down a vicious pack of wolves that's been attacking people nearby. Oh, look, you already killed them. Hand over the ring to the grieving widow of the last hunter who went after them. You've now made a memorable experience. Maybe later on you meet the widow again, further down the road, on a pilgrimage to return to her parents' house, or maybe she talked you up to family and they've a quest for you down the road. The idea behind encounters is to make them a chance for you to make something interesting happen during travel that YOU, the DM, can use later on for plot relevant situations if you wish. And if someone dies to one? No big deal, make a story revolve around that for a while.
You are of course right, but to be honest, it is quite ok to blame the system presented in the DMG. It does not tell you to do those things and the given examples of random encounter tables are just lists of monsters. If the DMG gave stuff you depict, no DM would hate Random Encounter Tables.
@@tommihaapanen846indeed. The inate system was not written for what you really want in it. Inexperienced will have to dig to learn or take hard roads.
I agree, encounters are also a chance to reveal more about the world or setting, maybe those wolves only attacked because their hunting ground is being controlled by a larger predator, or the bbeg's plan is hurting the ecosystem. Using random encounters frees you from massive amounts of prep time if you use them well or put thought into the why or how they happen.
You haven’t seen random encounters run proper. A good GM will tie such encounters into the story. For example, in one campaign our fighter kept rolling an eagle encounter everytime we were outdoors, so our GM rolled it into the story as being a trained eagle spying on us, and when we reached the BBEG’s lair, we found a room with the eagle kept inside showing us how the enemy was using the eagle. That was an awesome story point built completely from random encounters.
Imho, I like how traveling is solved in Gloomhaven. When you travel away from the city, you draw a card which contains an event. So, I just inspired by that. When my PC's travel from A to B, I either put a skill challenge, hexcrawl or some event, and just skip the rest. Before I skip the travel, I always ask the PC's if they want to roleplay between characters during the travel, otherwise we just skip the walking part. Example of an event: Up ahead, you see the path you are on leads into a dark and unfamiliar wood. It gives you an eerie feeling. As you step closer, you can feel your skin crawl and it forces you to pause. You can’t help but think that this wood might best be avoided. So, basically I do the same as happens in the movies. Either there you see a scene/event or some time frame during which you hear something interesting or funny.
Random tables make the game fresh, surprising, and unpredictable. Not all encounters have to be violent either, in fact most of them shouldn't be. They work best (during travel) as random happenings that would reasonably take place on the road, not just goblins, orcs, or wolves popping out at random to eat the PCs around every corner. That's dumb. Each biome should have their own unique encounter tables to reflect the unique things that can happen in that area. Also, town gossip should mention these areas. So when you go to the forest known to have ogres in it the players won't be too surprised when they happen upon a hungry ogre within. Each time the players interact with the encounter in any way they should be rewarded, whether gold, exp, items or whatever, making it worth their while. If they don't want to interact with the encounter, so be it, but they also get nothing. Some players like rail-roaded stories, others don't. But at the end of the day your campaign isn't a novel. Just go write a book if that's what you want. Not a bad travel system however. Simple and straight forward. A bit too curated for my liking, but still a good system.
I've been subconsciously doing this whenever I have to travel, but avoiding travel like the plague. Having TESS written down s absolutely brilliant, I cannot express how much I love it
Cannot thank you enough for this one. I’ve been running Tyranny of Dragons/Hoard of the Dragon Queen for about 4 months now and my players made a point of wanting to play out the entire journey from Greenest to Waterdeep, which had me worried. I’ve gotten through it from just having them go a certain amount of distance each day, and spending the actual time on inter-caravan interactions. They have a roll each morning to determine the type of day it’s going to be (good travel, rough travel, dead stop while carts are repaired, etc.) but then the rest is just split up as “What do you do with your morning, what do you do with your evening” and various encounters and landmarks they come across. Mixed in some carts that help keep supplies covered, so that never becomes a major issue… it’s been fun so far, but I really wish I had seen this video before getting into it.
Pointy Hat coming out of the closet is the most DnD thing possible. En cualquier caso, si lees ésto Antonio, siempre es un riesgo y da miedo salir del closet, incluso ante gente que sabes que te aceptará, especialmente con la realidad actual de tu país hacia las personas LGBT+. Gracias por la confianza en tu audiencia.
I've been playing DnD for years and LGBT+ is definitely not anywhere near the core. There's plenty of other games where it is like sword lesbians but not DnD.
Ok, a few months later. This is my favorite addition to our house rules of the year. We were a skip the montage kinda group for years, but now travel is fight to be some of our players favorite part of the game! Thank you so much for this!
Random tables are great for inspiration. You don't have to follow them blindly, but you can always roll for encounter ideas. Books like Tomb of Annihilation give you a lot of encounters (not just fights) that are place specific. You can roll somthing out then decide you use something else, or palce it elsewhere because it fits more. There is a middle way between following it to the minute and coming up with everything by yourself.
If you absolutely do not want a random encounter it should not be in the chart. Maybe you think the entire bear population has migrated or want to replace them with hippos because it fits the river.
Love the concept of "I hate random encounter tables" the. Pressedes to describe a light version of encounter tables lol. Whatever works for your party, that's why my last group lived on a train. No need for travel events unless the train stops. Choo Choo all aboard the fast travel express!
I clicked on the video and realized, I’ve alway ran red events. I’ve been trying to find a way to spice up travel, but all I’ve found is red events. I’ve been dying to find a way to make my world feel more alive without just throwing a bunch of somatic fights at my players. They all love them, but I can’t help but feel I’m not flushing out the world enough for them. When you mentioned “a yellow encounter“ I actually slapped my forehead and realized how dumb I’ve been of course I could build events based around skill checks. I don’t know why I never thought of it before though this video also helped me realize, in my pursuit of moving away from just throwing “red encounters“ I’ve already started implementing “blue encounters” so thank you for this. This video is exactly what I needed.
Two criticisms 1. The story is whatever happens to the players 2. Sometimes random shit happens, thus random tables Hex maps and tables are still the right way for me to run travel and my players have yet to complain. Some of the most memorable moments from our past campaigns came out of a table
This has been the travel video I’ve always needed but never had. This has been something I struggle with consistently as a DM. Your videos are incredible and your products are phenomenal, please keep sharing your gifts with this community. I at least am forever grateful
Okay, seriously that example scenario is PHUCKEN FENOMENAL holy shit. I'm not gonna steal it wholesale, but that T.E.S.S. method is probably the best idea you've had. That I'm gonna nick, and obviously gonna credit you. I know it's July now, but you've got a LOT to be proud of. 🧡❤️💜💙💚💛
Get in y'all we're going traveling
Are we there yet?
You know what time it is?
@@doubleturgutgangnews3649 5:24
*eats the seat*
Yassss❤
I had an idea similar to this I called the "Dora the Explorer method". Before the adventure starts, she pulls out the Map and describes all the different stops they'll make on the way to the end of the adventure. Each of those stops has a small story/encounter tied to them, maybe you'll meet npcs(diego) or nemeses (swiper), but those unexpected things spice up the adventure.
The name of the method: 💀
Not a bad system. A series of known encounters helps your players plan ahead to gather equipment and learn spells/abilities which they might expect will be useful there.
So basically encounters but they know beforehand. Right. That's not that different to just having 'random' encounters, just... they know about them beforehand.
@@7thlittleleopard7 Random encounters are good because they make the game more unpredictable and give the players interesting and challenging things to discover.
'Charted' encounters, as we might call them, would be more like landmarks to look forward to or significant obstacles you will need to have a solution to before ever you arive. These charted encounters give players something to plan toward, like knowing there will be an opportunity to refill their waterskins on day four of their seven day long journey from Town A to Town B means they only need to bring enough water to last four days of travel. On the other hand, if the players know their journey will take them to an extremely deep canyon with no bridge and no easy way down or back up, then they will want to secure a scroll which lets them cast a spell to fly across or buy climbing equipment to help them survive descending and ascending sheer cliffs- these are options you wouldn't have if you stumbled into the obstacle randomly.
So I think it'd work pretty well if the players are given warning of the unavoidable dangers they will face if anyone in the area has traveled the same stretch of terrain, but most of what they encounter is still a surprise.
Sounds like something Chris MacDowall would've made. I'm taking this idea.
-> How many roads must a man walk down?
-> However many the DM decides.
42
You decide where the expedition travels and what path.
2d10, apparently.
42. We already settled this.
Next question.
Yeah, this "system" seems to be "the DM uses their brain to decide what's actually going to be enjoyable for the game." Which I fully support. Random tables can burn with that closet.
If you're using mechanics you don't like, sounds like you need to use random encounter tables.
Try this. Create a 20 line table, all blank. Run your travel rules, but each time the party leaves a loose thread hanging from an event, add it to the first blank line on the table. They killed all the bandits but one? Add an assassin to the random encounter table.
After each event roll a d20 and, if you hit a row that's not blank, run that encounter and cross it off.
Now we have a random encounter table that's perpetually shifting and adapting to our table, but adds a level of randomness to travel that makes sense in the larger story.
Ooh love this idea!
This idea is actually really dope and I’m surprised I’ve never seen anybody else say anything like this
Gonna ducktape this to a notepad.
Fucking genius, love it!
came here to suggest something very similar. Random encounter tables pulled from a book tend to be bad, but a table you've tailor-made to a given region that changes based on time and player action (or inaction) breathes life into the setting
"If there's no world,its hard to travel on it"
Such wisdom,so good.
Everyone: "Hey guys its pride month, show you prid-"
Antonio Demico: *Burns a closet*
Don't be weird? YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD
"Don't be weird about this"
Impossible nowadays
Hard album cover fr
It took me way way too long to realize what that meant. I thought it was a Narnia reference at first.
You gotta do what you gotta do
Daamn! Before this I thought the only way to not skip travel is “you take a step. You take another step”
welll... i've done this before. you take a step... you take another step...
by the time we arrived i had said that phrase 13852 times. and everyone was asleep.
Roll me an athletics check, DC is 1. Nat 1? you tripped and fell.
12:50 The shelf life of medium to highly cured cheese is about 12 months, if it has been kept cool, dry, and out of direct sunlight.
thank you... but kill me, for I can no longer breath
Its a dumb point he makes because people who run traveling like this just say 1 rations per day and they last 7 days, so if you eat in a tavern 5 days and only 2 days on the road out of your rations 5 of your rations will go bad. Simple really.
@@lonewaffle231 why would travel rations go bad? That's buying groceries or taking the soup or meat from the tavern with you.
You pay for pemican and hardtack and they last for years.
Goodberry, Create Food/Water, Heroes Feast, Create Water none of these are the shiniest of spells but they do this job.
WE HATE THAT HE LOST HIS JOB BUT WE LOVE YOU AND CANT WAIT TO SEE MORE IN THE FUTURE
Losing your job sucks, been there.
If you think losing a job is bad, try not being able to get one!
If you think not being able to get a job is hard, try getting tortured
“to skip it” *rolls ad* that was top tier editing actually.
As a random tables enjoyer I was immediately invested when you say you hated random tables. I'm probably not using them the way you are, because I'm reading them and using them for inspiration during my DM prep and not rolling on them at all. But I love your method and I'm absolutely combining it with my method. I'm excited to implement it into my games
This is how I use them too. Mine them for inspiration and flesh actual encounters from them. On the night, I’ll either give the encounter, or I won’t.
Maybe I’ll roll on them WHILE prepping if I’ve got a block, sometimes that helps to force me to think creatively about one I wouldn’t have chosen.
I personally make a combination of actual random encounters but try to strain away from the „wolves attack“ and rather have something like „a shrine to goddess x that is already important in the campaign“
Plot hook Y for later to foreshadow something“ and
I also preplan certain events to happen either in a fixed point on the road or at a increasing chance ( like an additional D6, at the first encounter it’s on a 1, than on a 1-2) so at some point it will happen I just don’t know when.
Have some great fun with this method and I can simply plan a travel Arc as 6 encounters in the road from point A to B
Like one event roughly every 2-3 days or something like that
Yeah exactly if I see a table of 10 i might really like 1 or 2
It's just a big, long list of ideas for (insert random table title here). If several or all of them seem interesting, I'll do a roll to decide between them while still in the preparation phase (NEVER at the table).
This is objectively the best way to use them. Aside from maybe traps, I’ve never looked at a random table and actually used any of them how they’re written. I’ll see what that says “a gnome runs past the party in the opposite direction and disappears just as quickly” and my DM brain turns it into “a naked gnome runs up to whoever is currently leading the party, gives them a good ole nut tap, dealing 1d4 damage (unless player can succeed in DEX ST) and disappears into the night”
That opener is fucking iconic.
The enthusiasm 💀
Unironically, I think it's the single best cold open (in concept and execution) I've ever seen in video.
For reference: Steel Beach, by John Varley, has my favorite opening in print.
@@gogauzeProps for Steel Beach appreciation!
Can you explain it to me? I don't get it.
@fortello7219 The silence. The stern expression. The melodramatic acting. The hard cuts to raw audio of flames.
Cinema, literally cinema standard drama. It's iconic because its bold and unexpected even if its purely a single video sketch.
I'm really glad I stayed for the whole video!
When I was listening to it, I thought "cool, but this is just writing encounters or using random stuff anyways," but then you actually have a document breaking it all down with a ton of good examples.
10/10
THE DUNGEON MESHI THUMBNAIL
one of us... one of us...
We shall relish in the act of eating, for it is only us understand its profound meaning.
It's funny when you consider that part of Ryoko Kui's inspiration for creating Dungeon Meshi was wanting to explore the "boring" parts of fantasy adventure that most other stories skip. She's openly stated that's why you couldn't really do a Dungeon Meshi spin-off TTRPG of its own, because it's literally about focusing on the fussy mundane aspects almost all D&D advice tells you to handwave.
@@zoushaomenohu Nah, IMMA MAKE A COOKING TTRPG!
@@zoushaomenohuFunny thing is, you probably could. It would just be hard. Plenty of TTRPGs focus on the mundane, but it’s hard to create interesting encounters like the ones in Dungeon Meshi in an improvisational manner like DnD. The level of detail alone would make it a difficult endeavor
@@zoushaomenohuwe have things showing snippets of what it could be like. Wilderfeast exists for instance. It has monster hunter DNA in it and has eating and gaining bonuses as a core part of gameplay
In a Out Of The Abyss campaign my Warlock and party once ate a UmberHulk and we agreed that the Blood of it would taste very bitter and the meat was tough and I'm not sure if we agreed that the meat taste bland and bitter too
I actually think having resting and required sleep can be really fun. Its a breather, moment to chat, and maybe a point of some tension. If you lack resources, something could show up in the night. Maybe you need refuge from weather, and are forced to stay somewhere not so safe, or maybe mysterious. It could be really spicy to add some rest with tension
100+ likes you guys are so great :)
Agreed. Setting up camp, doing morning routines and talking about normal life stuff often leads to great role play moments.
Especially if combine them with stuff like fate roles which really help the world feel alive.
I agree and it actually got me thinking that it would be really easy to add resting into this system by just having a mini rest encounter after each encounter or maybe if the party feels like the territory is unsafe and they're worried about getting a bad rest encounter then they could push on but then they would be tired in the next encounter. it could even be like a risk reward thing where resting would usually be just like a time for the party to hang out and do silly stuff but you could have like a die roll where if they roll a certain number they get some kind of encounter that ruins their sleep so they have to push without sleep or waste even more time resting again so it could add an interesting tension to time sensitive travel.
I totally agree.
With our travel system, which is based on skill challenges (one challenge per day of travel) I tell my players that if they take a short rest (max two per day) then they get advantage on the next skill check
This is a 5 minute break in the session for me to catch up my notes, and for the player's characters to get to know each other.
I also tend to introduce encounters in these rests. I think the best one was when my party took a short rest and 5 fairies showed up riding squirrels.
I used that encounter to point to a location of interest. The location had two chronomentals there, and that final encounter was one of the most memorable we've had so far.
If we could, it would be awesome to come up with some "rest" systems". I've made my own because I think the break is a powerful utility that can generate more "brotherlyness" within a group
Maybe during travel you can choose to make camp as an additional event that the party initiates. The kind of event is up to the DM (blue has someone wander by the campfire and offer to share a meal, yellow means that something is weird about the campsite, red results in them being ambushed at night, etc) but after the event the party is refreshed and can continue on their way.
The method at our table has been to segment the days into: morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, and night. Each of these pockets of time gets a possible random encounter or a description of the weather or location. It seems to be a good happy medium between the monotony of every single hour or minute being described and just skipping to a location
Ironically this is exactly how random tables were originally made to be used. They were a tool to be used when you're stuck on what to plan next, not really ever supposed to be rolled in the middle of a session.
You are incorrect
@@savagefrito No, you.
@@evilcomputer let me know where you found this information, first edition advanced and second edition DM guides explain why to use random encounters. For example straight from the book:
"Random encounters make the game more exciting for the DM. The game has to be fun and challenging for him as well as the players. Part of the challenge for the DM is to improvise an encounters on the spot. The DM gets involved and excited, improving the play of the game." DmGuide 2nd edition pg 96
And the advanced PHB pg 103:
" At
prescribed intervals, your DM will generate a random number to find if
any meeting with a wandering monster occurs. Avoiding or fleeing such
encounters is often wise, for combat wears down party strength, and
wandering monsters seldom have any worthwhile treasure."
So, please... If you have a place that shares where it is a tool used when it used when you are stuck., and not in the middle of a session. Do tell.
@@evilcomputer where did you get this information? Advanced PHB and 2nd edition DM disagree with you.
@@savagefrito I promise you its not that deep man, literally all randomly tables are at least strongly implied to be for if the DM can't think of stuff. We stan planning out your random encounters beforehand around here
I have a DM who does Hextravel when the whole idea was to give our party a magical island demi dimension to explore with a fae court political war happening in various parts of the map. Since the idea was a sandbox that we could decide what to do and were to go travelling was a big part of the game. We would uncover parts of the Hexmap and eventually recieved a full island map. But the DM had every Hex plotted out... Different events, items, and encounters were already generated before we ever got to any one HEX. We generally would tell him where our party was planning on going and hed get stuff prepped. As we travelled we also had down time where characters could do various activities like crafting, hunting, scavaging. We found some unique resources in different places that we were able to leverage in towns. It was actually a blast. I've never enjoyed exploring as much as I did in that campaign.
This is generally how hexes are supposed to work. At least, this is what I’ve always understood and how I used them. They are a really great tool for emergent/sandbox storytelling. That being said, I think Antonio prefers more scripted plotting based on how he describes his views here, so it might not be his style as a dm
@@imagineitqllthe way you said that makes no sense to me... "yeah but he doesnt like that, he likes [insert the exact same thing worded slightly differently" has reading comprehension hit an all time low or am i the one misunderstanding? Example: the hexes in the comments mechanic ARE populated with predesigned events scripted to happen as the party interacts with the world
I Love the TES. Thank you for that. I have adapted it to my Game and enlarged it a bit. My Players love traveling. I added "Safety"(Safe, unsafe, dangerous) to "Distance" (close, far, very far) and multiply them with each other. And i added the "colors" white and black.
Close and Safe are 1 Event, Far and unsafe are 4 Events, Unsafe and far away are 9 Events. (1x1, 2x2, 3x3)
"White" is a positive suprise encounter, like a nice Tavern on the way or a beautiful landscape.
"Black " is a negative surprise encounter, like extreme weather or Enemys who think you travel there
Keep going, you´re Content is awesome
As someone who just started DMing and whose players havent left their starting city yet, THANK YOU! I found the rules for travel so insane to figure out. Def using this.
The first campaign I tan was a traveling campaign. I bit off way more than I could chew and we all gave up on it. The story was good, the story was great, but most of the gameplay was traveling from town to town and beating up bandits which got very boring very quickly.
The campaign I’m currently running is a missing person whodunnit campaign where the party is looking for a specific NPC and in doing so uncovered a conspiracy between the city stage’s many thieves guilds to overthrow the city council and establish a monarchy to conquer nearby kingdoms. They’ve almost gotten out of the city to find Ms.McGuffin the NPC who knows everything and the one they’re looking for (not her real name).
First second I was taken aback like "oh! He was in a closet." Then litteraly on the floor once the fire started realizing "Oh! He was in the closet!" I fucking love you
At first I thought it was a door
Almost once every session I find myself either getting super distracted during travel and my players will just forget the story because of a random encounter or I find a way to skip it to avoid it. Thank you for the tips, I’m excited to test it out in my next campaign!
Antonio's take on random tables makes me realize he needs to play Ironsworn...
Yes! Thank you! Just steal from Ironsworn as much as you can!
Or Rolemaster.
DnD players need to play literally anything else (except Fatal)
A lot of things I see DnD players complain are things that are better in other TTRPGs and they would likely see these ones are much better for them once they leave the confines of DnD
@@RocknRoll301199or at least learn from, for those scared to venture into other systems.
The random encounter tables from OSE created great stories for my world. At one point my players encountered a unicorn and were able to ally with him to hunt some gnolls who were afflicting the region. Until a little bit later one of them was caught in a trap by a hag, the rest of the group asked the unicorn for help and the hag sadly destroyed him promptly.
Pointy Hat is one of the most invaluable d&d channels out there. This has totally revolutionized my perception of large scale travel adventure campaigns
☝️This but more! Hands down favorite channel. I love thinking about how to do things more efficiently or better and I love D&D. This is both, plus free resources, AND presented with top tier comedic editing. 👨🍳 💋
After working my way through most of your videos over the past week, this seems like an appropriate spot to say: thank you. Not only are they wildly entertaining (even though I am *far too basic* to get most of the references), but they’re making me think more critically about the game and more creatively about ways to approach it, and man, that’s a gift.
12:40 *A horse born with a limp and a craving for hazelnuts in December would travel an approximate average of 1,267,200 inches of 105,600 feet of 18,103 refrigerators of 20 miles per hour.*
At what encumbrance?
@@helloidharbl6753 As a Large creature, *if a horse carries weight in excess of 10 times its Strength score,* it is encumbered, which means its speed drops by 10 feet.
Many thanks, I needed this for my Campaign
Are the refrigerators horizontal or vertical?
@@BigManOzzie Pointy said "length" which I interpreted as the longest side.
So, like if you laid down 18,103 refrigerators end to end, horizontally.
Each one should be about 70 inches in length.
In our campaign, we spent the first several hours of the last session just shopping and preparing for a trip through the underdark. Only in the last hour and a half did we finally get going. We were all excited, roleplaying our character's fear of and curiosity for this place, when our DM rolled the first random encounter: ...a friendly deep gnome merchant who sold us minerals.
We were SO TIRED of shopping at this point, we considered killing him despite being a super lawful good group. We didn't, we played along and bought some of his minerals, and then the session ended in boredom.
I wish my DM had fudged the dice roll on his table to be some cool new monster we could fight.
I dont like faking rolls. But just make some cool shit up
@@Mikano_ñ Yeah, I agree. That was the conclusion I also reached after that session and after I had that thought about faking the dice roll: Random encounter tables are bad and not fun, and it's better for the story and for everybody's enjoyment to consciously decide instead.
Rolling for random encounters is such BS. To any DMs out there: If you are prepared to play out anything, that the dice lands on, just decide something yourself and make it fun for everyone. Don't let a dumb roll spoil the fun for everyone.
In the Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign I'm currently running, my players somehow avoided the dragon for multiple sessions. Contrary to what one might think, I actually absolutely love, that you roll for where the dragon currently is. If your party starts to understand what you're rolling there it gets really tense every time. Still, since they managed to avoid the dragon for so long, at one of our sessions, I just pulled out the mini I had of it and balanced it on top of my DM screen, looking across the table. It was basically the ever-looming threat (the party was level 3 or so at the time).
When they came to the entrance of the dwarven mountain excavation thing, I described to them the sounds of nature they were hearing. Some birds flying above, maybe a mountain goat, wind blowing etc. When they got out of it, I described as the world falling eerily quiet, as if the planet itself was expecting a storm. Then I made the person, who was walking in front make a perception roll. "You're hearing it before you see it. *makes the sound of big leathery wings woosh-ing through the air*"
They actually managed to bribe the dragon and trick it to go into that cave by giving it some jewels, that you can actually find within that cave according to the normal description of the adventure....and then they went after the dragon into the cave for a reason I do not understand to this day. Oh well. Made them all roll multiple Dex saves as they were running away from the dragon's breath attacks. I basically utilized the dragon as an "environmental encounter" and not as a "fight/monster encounter".
My players gave me the feedback, that they absolutely loved the encounter with the dragon, so I'm assuming I did it right.
Planned encounters can be so much fun. Plan your damn encounters, people. Then you don't have to roll for boring, random BS.
weird, why not just as a group tell the merchant, not interested, and then move on, another encounter roll, done in 3 minutes.
@@ruolbu I mean, we didn't know for sure that there was no interesting plot thing going on here before we were done with the interaction.
Also our DM has in the past roasted us for not being very smart/strategic when we didn't make the most of friendly encounters, he does use this to give us unique discounts and access to rare things. We got cool stuff from the merchant, and we're able to sell some of our things for a fortune - it's not like it was a bad encounter.
I just wish he'd put it into the next session instead.
Happy Pride!
I came back to post after running 2 sessions with this video living in my brain, and it did WONDERS.
I felt like I already strived for the same feeling as the color coded encounter system even if I wasn't as direct about it, but this time every time I was thinking about stuff that marks encounters between major points these ideas came to my head and I was able to mix them as described and it all just fell into place, and made the pacing feel better in my notes than I have noticed in prior entries. Not only that, but it genuinely felt like I could be less contrived on moving things forward, as I was more comfortable fast forwarding to the parts that either me (with surprises) or the party (with their end goals) were excited to get to.
Both sessions had similar feedback: It was probably the best session I've hosted and run, and one of those tables has been very long running of a few years now! Every member, with their rather varying desires out of play, mentioned they felt happy and excited there was "always stuff to do" which made me reflect on how it must have felt prior, and I think I was leaning a bit too heavily on this idea of sandboxing things outside of the main events with the idea its all optional, and that just felt rather disconnecting for some of the players because the speed of pacing was shifting so much! So thanks Pointy Hat, you helped me a lot and Im excited to use this system more!!!
At a convention, i participated in a playtest for a system with a pretty neat travel system. Its called hearth and its being made in canada. The way their travel works is that you have prep activities, gathering activities and traveling itself that all lead into one another and loop until you reach your destination. We had a rogue climb up a tree to see how far we needed to go, a druid fly as a bird to find a path, and a fighter got people to stretch. These provided potential bonuses for the gathering activities and the travel itself. I enjoyed it :)
that sounds really cool, and gets into the parts of travel that I really like (I'm the type that always brings 10 pitons because you never know when you'll need to climb something or jam a door shut). Sounds like you could probably combine with this for a really travel focused couple of sessions.
Sounds like a rich way to incite RP, I like it!
That sounds super interesting! Since you play tested it it probably hasn't been released but do you happen to know if it is online at all to check out?
Somehow reminds me of Darkest Dungeon firewood rests
I made the forbidden mistake of using both the realism method and random encounter method of travel simultaneously when I first started writing for D&D, and it was exhausting. I eventually moved to sprinkling in predetermined, story-relevant encounters, but I'd never thought about making them as neatly organised as you've shown they can be. I'm honestly stoked to try this method in a few sessions when my party has to travel. Thank you a ton for all the ideas you've introduced us to over the past several years.
I'm on the opposite side of this spectrum, I did four years of improv and goddammit if I don't make good use of them I may as well die, so I do realism, and random encounters... by melding fantasy, biology, and physics, and by tying those random encounters I roll into the story, and I wind up with roughly the same result of people having a good time, I won't knock his method(in fact I plan to try it) as I've been on the player side of it and I love it it's just always about making sure the table is having fun
That was quite literally the coolest introduction to a TH-cam channel
I’ve been doing something very similar and loving it. I come up with 4 encounters for the group. 1 combat, 2 noncombat, and 1 that could go either way depending on the players. Then they roll a d4 no more than 3 times, taking turns. If they roll a number already rolled, I explain that they think back on their recent experience, giving their character a second to reflect and role play with the others at the table. I love it and am glad you are doing something similar. The key is making each encounter relevant to the story
Regarding random encounter tables, the video has a point about them when we play traditional narratives with a main quest or narrative plots to be followed by the characters. When we play a sandbox game, on the other hand, this type of table is one of the elements that can bring the game world to life. Without a main narrative, a main quest or mandatory plots to be followed for the story to progress, the world can be structured differently. To be honest, travel and resource management are part of sandbox adventures. I believe that the problem with travel in many TTRPGs is much more connected with the purpose of the game and the way in which the group is playing than with the rules and travel structures themselves. Not that D&D's travel rules are perfect (they're not, and I don't quite like them, which is why a prefer other systems), but they're not a huge problem if you're playing a game whose goal is the travel itself and not a main quest or main plot. And this also depends on who plays and the interests of the group.
I agree. Besides, the notion that encounter tables are strictly for combat encounters is very short-sighted. If you roll 5 trolls in your table it doesn't mean that suddenly there are a bunch of giants in the middle of the road ready to kill you, it means that there are a bunch of trolls in the region you're traveling in. Now what to do with these monsters is up to the dm, are the trolls battling another group of adventurers? are they eating the merchants they just ambushed? maybe they are fighting amongst themselves or you don't even find the trolls there is just an ominous guy that says "Be careful traveler these roads are infested with nasty trolls, if you don't want to fight them, best hope they don't see or smell ya from far away!".
The encounters not only determine what you meet but they can also determine where you meet them. Making a bunch of giant spiders live in the middle of a clear hill is senseless, but making your players have to make a detour in their regular travel path and crawl trough spider infested caves makes for an exciting exploration moment, will they fight the arachnids head on? will they attempt to destroy the nest by sabotaging the cave? or maybe they'll try to avoid them all together by traversing the lair silently.
Anyways my point is, encounter tables are much better than just going "here dm you have these categories of encounters in this amount for a trip, now wing it". If you had time to prepare exactly what would happen in a trip you'd be able to do it without pointy hat's method, and without encounter tables aswell. But in the case you don't have the time to prepare anything, pointy hat's method gives you nothing, while the encounter tables can give you a solid basis to build your travel events on.
I have been doing something like this with custom role tables, just determining the amount of events per travel or by vibe and my players loved it, but, you have shown me the way. This is amazing and just saved me so much time putting a system in for it. You're amazing.
Wait, I just searched for Travelling on DnD. Antonio is either a prophet, or a luring mimic.
Yes? Both?
¿Por qué no los dos?
ooh this is an excellent video but also check out Monarch's Factory ;)
why "or" ?
:D
or part of the AI algorithm that listens to everything you say so you keep watching youtube forever...
First off, I love this. I don't have a "system" per se, but this is how I've always approached travel, for all the same reasons. And that's even coming from an accountant!
I do enjoy random tables as a tool, though. Their place isn't at the table; they can be useful during the brainstorming phase of prep. Especially if you're painting in the gray edges of the fantasy map, where pretty much anything could be, it can be helpful to get a little inspiration. It helps to overcome what I like to call the Tyranny of the Blank Page. There are few things as overwhelming as infinite possibility, so by rolling on a few random tables you can at least have SOMETHING on the page that you can start to work with. Now it's not "what in the world are the PCs going to encounter next?" but the less existential-crisis-inducing "WHY are the PCs encountering... dire wolves in the... ice caves that... contain the lost tomb of... an ancient & forgotten paladin?" and "how do I shape that into something that fits and serves the narrative of the PCs and their main and/or side quests?"
And I think that can apply just as well within TESS, to create generate endless things to go inside the coloured dots.
An "accountant" 👀
Pretty much my approach too! I love random tables and how they shatter my blank page dread. Good starting point for everything else this system offers
Honestly, this is exactly what I needed. My group has been traveling for a bit now, and i can FEEL the lack of energy in it. Even though they are all super nice and appreciative of me running, I can tell traveling is a slog with the day-by-day random rolling. I may devise a simple system to account for getting lost/setbacks/generally difficult terrain, so survival still has a prominent place in wilderness travel, but changing to something like this could help tremendously. Thanks PH!
I love the implication that the closet door at the end was singing, since it stopped when the door broke.
By the way, thank you for constantly giving us amazing content mr. Demico, if I had like any money I would happily give you some to support you
The vibes were crystal clear from the beginning but i love the efficiency of this reveal 😂✨💯👑
Brutally succinct(?) 😂
Once he started dropping Trixie & Katya clips I wondered if he was mayyybe Part Of The Community, but I didn't want to assume. What a guy, what a channel, what a reveal!
@@WinningSidekick We love the reveals! Yeah it could have been allyship gone too far but i was pretty sure he was in alphabet mafia.
It's a good thing not to assume until it's confirmed though 😉.
It’s hard to be surprised when dnd is such a queer game
@@aduckinlingerie Really? It seems the straights are just everywhere in overwhelming numbers lol
The editing for the closet bit was really good. I know that's not the main message, but it really was shot and edited well.
Dungeon Meshi was really inspirational for what a D&D campaign could be and then you realize you're the only one interested in a campaign where you're cooking whatever you kill and going into fun detail instead of rations. A lot of D&D thoughts is man these are things I'd love oh wait i'm the only one who wants this.
I'm currently playing a PF2e game where one of the players is Senshi but halfling. At first I was doing my own thing, as a slightly insane alchemist, but slowly I started to became a secondary character in their story as I took on the role of somehow more unhinged Laios. It's honestly fun when you support another player's playstyle
I’ve been binge watching your dm dnd videos. I’m getting ready to dm for my friends, first tome for all of us, and your videos are getting me pumped. You have such great ideas and the way you present them is so fun
Ryuutama is basically DnD inverted in this case: Really bad combat mechanics but amazing travel mechanics, you even get xp based on the topography and biome explored at end of session.
I love Ryuutama so much. I ran a oneshot for some friends and crossing the grasslands did more damage to them than any combat they encountered. Rolling to set up camp was the scariest kind of roll. The rulebook looks all cutesy but this really is borderline survival horror. It's great
Hell yeah Ryuutama represent!
I LOVE Ryuutama.
And I recommend Fabula Ultima if you want Ryuutama but want to improve on the combat aspect too.
A great concept, Pointy Hat! This is very similar to the Tracking system from Heliana's!
That system has Hostile ('red') and Narrative ('green' and 'blue' coombined) encounters. The GM writes them or, in the case of the book, there are ready-made ones pertinent to the biome travelled through, each with unique flora & fauna.
It has one addition, the Tracking check. This is where your players get creative in how they use thier abilities and skill proficiencies to do wayfinding/get from Fantasylandia to Fanatasycitia/find a quarry. On a successful check the encounter is one of the Narrative ones. On a failed check, it's a hostile one. The hostile encounters are usually pertinent to the story, usually giving clues about the monster the party will fight.
I love that idea! Do you implement that in a way that on a failed roll its a direct consequence to what they are doin? Like a failed tracking check leads them to a monster instead of the stead they were following or is it more random? And if you do, how would you plan on the outcomes of the checks? Im sorry for the 101 questions, new DM here who decided homebrewing was the way to go (oops)
Hm... Why do I feel like o can fucking wrap in the clock system blades in the dark has with this to really make a actively moving encounter system/progressive change. No it's because ones a party variables the others a dm centric giving both a small task. Dm cracks time rolls party figured the fuck were A is to B so they can get to C. Hu I just made a nifty travel systemnfrom unrelated ideas.
*sigh* first vid of yours I've ever seen and you got a like, a comment, and a subscription. All of that is AFTER you called me out in the beginning for using random encounter tables and made me feel very guilty. So... nice job. On all of this. It's gonna make a world of a difference in my games. Thank you
I’m so sorry you lost your day job. That’s always such a hard thing to overcome. I am glad though that you can find work here that’s personally fulfilling, at least somewhat sustainable for the time being, as well as truly inspirational for the D&D community.
I seriously have a dedicated folder just to your homebrews so please keep ‘em coming. (Especially Which Lich and Drag-On Race because those kick ass.)
So don’t despair and keep on keeping on. God bless. ❤
I can't express enough how glad I am that you made this video. One of the biggest aspects I've struggled with as a DM has been travel and how to measure it , distance and time with various travel methods. This makes things so much easier for my tiny brain to process and obviously will be alot more fun for my players. Much love pointy and keep up the great work.nyou really do inspire so great things.
I'm so on board for this. I'm currently running a campaign with a lot of travel and this is basically what I'm doing, except I am still tracking days of travel using a hex map. On days when no encounter is going to happen, I ask the PCs what type of skill check they want to make for the day. This has led to so much fun RP--the spores druid carving a little wooden figure for his girlfriend and trying to hide while he casts Sending to her; the rogue searching for poison ingredients in the woods; the stars druid finding a massive mushroom that she named, dressed, and now carries around; the minotaur feeling super accomplished as he rolls crazy high on Survival checks and shaves a day off the travel time; the list goes on. Basically, it lets the players take front and center during travel instead of me! This works at my table because my players really enjoy RP and bouncing off each other, but this plus TESS-style events has made travel so fun in this campaign.
I really dig the color-coded encounter system.
Ironically, I can see it spicing up the much-maligned random tables too. 2d6 wolves is pretty boring combat encounter. But what about 2d6 wolves as a Social-Exploration encounter?
Imagine needing to reunite a wolf with its pups by searching the surrounding area, and making Animal Handling checks to coax them out of their hiding spots. Maybe after finding them all, the wolves follow the party for a while, or come to their rescue during a tough Combat encounter. Lots of possibilities.
This channel breaks things down in such a fun, funny, and most importantly, SIMPLE way. I've learned so much from the creativity presented in these videos. I'm a better DM every time I watch something from Pointy Hat!
Advice begins at 14:02.
I wish I saw this before wasting half my work break xD
Watch time babey 😂
Stfu I watch this for pointy hat, otherwise I’d read a Reddit thread
From the example travel given at the end of the video:
You encounter a traveling circus troupe and have a social event
My players would say not interested and move on. That's exactly what happened when I ran Curse of Strahd, they had absolutely ZERO interest in Rictavio and his traveling circus. They didn't figure out who Van Richten was until much, much later
but the thing is.. it WAS relevant to the story. You as a dm told them something(so it's most likely important or interesting). They skipped it. And later they will find out about that circus that was actually important to the story and they missed their chance (to gain/resolve something?).
It's already a good "unlucky that we skipped it, eh" scene, no? :)
It was there, your world is alive, it's cool. Yeah, skipped encounters will make game session shorter but who cares - we just eat pizza and talk a little more before we go
I swear when I was watching this anime I was like wait isn't this exactly like dnd? although the dm had a background as chef and want their players make food xD
Man I watched the same anime, and after reading this comment I'm now thinking about an Iron Chef encounter... no relation, but that's where ADHD brain decided we were going today.
@@warmachine5835 and you have a minios as a food dishes xD and yup adhd brain here too which is trying to find a job and having videos on the background as well as hearing japanese rock music in spotify
This is what you do in Mutant. All food is weird mutant beasts. Domesticated farm animals are weird mutants. Each monster manual entry has a note on how to eat it and how to do so safely if the PCs have the right skills.
Not being poisoned by weird mutant beasts is an important part of field cooking. The locals often know what to do with stuff if you ask them. Sometimes you need to boil some weird wolf for hours, sometimes the best part to eat are the weird lumps under the skin. One giant bug has neural clusters people consider a delicacy and can be sold to restaurants in town. Other animals taste like mud but are safe. You just need to hide the taste.
Recently I read an article by the Angry DM titled "Actually... Players Don't Suck at Taking Inventory". It goes into the fact that tracking rations, ammunition, carry weight is tedious and basically only serves to punish the players, despite such things being very important to serve as limiters.
His discovery was that players don't mind it so much if you make it as easy as possible.
Personally, I enjoy exploring in games the most. I will go out of my way to calculate my carry weight even if no one else at the table, not even the GM, cares. Determining what equipment I can afford vs. how much I can carry vs. what I will concievably need is like a minigame for me. The threat of running low on supplies ammunition is a source of tension and drama. Being forced to get scrappy and creative with scavenging things from the local environment to solve problems is a source of excitement. When mechanics and narrative do not align, it annoys me severely. That goes in both directions. I hate when rules are handwaved because they're inconvenient, but I also hate when rules are poorly created so that they have to ignored for the sake of a compelling narrative.
The one thing I would note is that 3e had advantages here as while they had a lot more tables and was more granular and such, they also offered a fair amount more detail, like monsters having climate/terrain as part of their entries, and the DMG having all of those grouped together by terrain, along with instructions for how to put them together to make your own encounter tables, or just using those lists as starting points for building encounters.
In all, a solid video, and not a bad system at all. I don't know that every game would want/call for it, but it is nice and clean. Well done!
There's definitely something to be said for the Exploration gating, where you go from scrounging for coppers to stay fed; to being able to afford to travel a day or two to reach the dungeon; to having enough foraging skill to travel a week or two into the wilderness; to collecting enough Murlynd's Spoons and Everfull Waterskins to Simply Walk Into Mordor.
But making that gradation interesting without merely inflicting suffering on the PLAYERS (the characters can suffer, but the real people at your table should not) is difficult.
THAT INTRO! XD What started off as an excellent pun escalated *inconceivably quickly* and ended on *perfect* comedic timing. Well done, Antonio. :P
Haven't other people used the "closet" pun?I feel like others would make it.
And as someone who doesn't want to see 2 people engage in "petplay" on the sidewalk,I agree with him.Please don't use the next 30 days as an excuse to be weirdos.
@@BrunoMaricFromZagreb I mean so few people do that sort of thing in a completely public place anyway
Here's another realism helper. As an unfit 25 yr back in the day I missed the last bus home... 16 miles away from home and couldn't get a ride. It took about 4 or 5 hrs at a slow and steady pace with no breaks and by the end my feet had blisters. So the amount of miles an adventurer can travel in a single day should at least be 30 miles.
Opens video asking people to not make it weird. Then proceeds to silently set the furniture on fire.
The guy using drag queens in every video comes out of the closet. Was he closeted straight?
I didnt even get it until someone pointed out that he "set the closet on fire"
Nice intro. Good advice too, but sometimes some of us actually want the sort of game where a table of randomness hits the PCs with seemingly pointless encounters, and we improvise how those encounters fit into the greater story in the middle of things. It depends on the style of game the GM and players are in the mood for. Your red, blue, white system is great for those other times. Happy June!
Just found this channel the other day and I'm loving everything I've seen so far. The cold open is absolutely iconic, and happy (belated) Pride! Next up: Wrath.
The first and last few seconds are cinemati gold. What a beggining to the month!! Hope the human familiar can find a new and better opportunity soon! And as always thanks for great content and tips!! (P.S. that drawing of your hat sister is so cute!!)
thank you so much Pointy Hat, there is such a small handful of DnD content creators that have actually helped me in DMing and by far you have helped me the most. I always look forward to seeing your videos :) much love
that was a creative way for coming out of the closet. Im proud bro!
can you explain to me why he burned it? im confused :(
@@corydonk My take is it was burned so he can't go back in.
@@corydonk for the funny
I know man, homie Aslan is gonna be piiiiiiiissed
I think it's a good time to try and formulate how I personally appreciate your videos. You have an approach to D&D that is so refreshing because your treat it as not just a game comparable to a video game, but a game that focuses on a story, which is much more relevant.
Plus, you always have ideas that are surprising and well built, and I think it's absolutely awesome. As a new DM, and more generally as a neurodivergent person who recently discovered D&D and is now obsessing so much about it, I find your videos extremely useful, and genuinely interesting as such. It tickles my brain just in the right spots.
Congrats on coming out, the scene was cool, and best of luck to you and your human familiar. Can't wait till next month to see what you have in store !!
Love ya
Thank you for this! I have a travel heavy campaign coming up and this could not have come at a better time. I appreciate how intuitive you made this as well.
This is really one of the most entertaining to watch channels on TH-cam. It is just so well put together.
your creativity is brutal and your art is so expressive and beautiful, i envy you so much! I've been watching you for so long and learnt so much from you, I hope nothing but the best for you ❤
Good video! And good ideas.
But in defense of random tables, for "Random Events", i always like the Dael Kingsmill, from Monarchs Factory, style of random events that can happen during travel.
Not everything needs to be combat, or even interaction with npcs.
Things can happen within the party.
Equipament breaks or worm off, needing time on the next town to fix it, or if there's someone with the tool proficiency they can do it during their long rest.
The food can end up attracing wild dogs, that doesn't attack, but are annoying and distract the sentry at night.
If it's an tropical area, insects can impede a full rest, and the players may recover everything from the long rest, but roll constitution to see if they wake up exhausted.
I think a mixture of both systems can be interesting.
This is an excellent travel methodology, not just for DND mind you. I really like the last event in the example, being literally tied specifically to how the players interacted with the world during their travel.
I wasn't using something similar in my own games, i was using something much, much simpler with the focus to just get some excitement during travel segments for the group, primarily through combat. This is so helpful its unreal. Good job!
I don't play D&D but I love your videos because your creativity has been such an inspiration for other things I've been doing such as character creation and writing.
This sounds like an amazing way to build a good travel journey and will use it on a story I'm making, because I myself love fantasy exploration but don't know how to make it interesting yet.
Love you pointy hat, you're amazing!
This
I can't believe how much this opened my mind, travel is such an organic tool to develop a plot and I NEVER SAW it that way, even thought most heroic fiction is LITERALLY BASED around that! Your method is so simple, it makes me want to gm real adventure campaigns again, and it low-key should be in every manual of every game. It's not weird at all that you were so excited about it
I didn't really notice your channel before, great freaking work.
The human familiar is a snaaaaaaaack
Fur real
did you not see that butt at the start of the video? he's a MEAL!
Antonio is basically a timelord judging from that intro
Came here to say that I’ve just used the Tess method in my last sessions where the party were travelling from 1 city to another, and by the end of the session I had two players tell me it was there FAVOURITE EVER SESSION. GASSED!
BRB going to go watch every other video you have made
I love that im starting a new campaing centered around travel and you post this golden video
I had no idea pointy wasn't out. The drag clips in every video were quite the hint. But it's even better that he's feeling confident to be completely open.
Hating random tables smells of loving the narrative more than the 'adventure'. If a player dies to a random encounter it presents a great opportunity for the DM to insert a revenge quest by creating a nemesis. Random tables are chaos. Chaos drives plot.
Yup, different styles. The story is the past of the game. You play to find out what comes next. vs the story is already written (mostly) and the players play to find out what the dm has planned.
I think you're missing the point of random encounters not just being battles. They can be chance meetings, weather situations, mini-dungeons. They can lead to latter storylines and connections to situations. If you're making them boring, that's on YOU not on the system. For example, okay, so you fight a bunch of wolves. As you're skinning them you find a wedding ring in ones' stomach. At the next town you visit you hear about a missing caravan and are tasked with taking down a vicious pack of wolves that's been attacking people nearby. Oh, look, you already killed them. Hand over the ring to the grieving widow of the last hunter who went after them. You've now made a memorable experience. Maybe later on you meet the widow again, further down the road, on a pilgrimage to return to her parents' house, or maybe she talked you up to family and they've a quest for you down the road.
The idea behind encounters is to make them a chance for you to make something interesting happen during travel that YOU, the DM, can use later on for plot relevant situations if you wish. And if someone dies to one? No big deal, make a story revolve around that for a while.
You are of course right, but to be honest, it is quite ok to blame the system presented in the DMG. It does not tell you to do those things and the given examples of random encounter tables are just lists of monsters. If the DMG gave stuff you depict, no DM would hate Random Encounter Tables.
@@tommihaapanen846indeed. The inate system was not written for what you really want in it. Inexperienced will have to dig to learn or take hard roads.
I agree, encounters are also a chance to reveal more about the world or setting, maybe those wolves only attacked because their hunting ground is being controlled by a larger predator, or the bbeg's plan is hurting the ecosystem. Using random encounters frees you from massive amounts of prep time if you use them well or put thought into the why or how they happen.
Babe wake up, new pointy hat video just dropped!
You haven’t seen random encounters run proper. A good GM will tie such encounters into the story. For example, in one campaign our fighter kept rolling an eagle encounter everytime we were outdoors, so our GM rolled it into the story as being a trained eagle spying on us, and when we reached the BBEG’s lair, we found a room with the eagle kept inside showing us how the enemy was using the eagle. That was an awesome story point built completely from random encounters.
Imho, I like how traveling is solved in Gloomhaven. When you travel away from the city, you draw a card which contains an event. So, I just inspired by that.
When my PC's travel from A to B, I either put a skill challenge, hexcrawl or some event, and just skip the rest. Before I skip the travel, I always ask the PC's if they want to roleplay between characters during the travel, otherwise we just skip the walking part.
Example of an event:
Up ahead, you see the path you are on leads into a dark and unfamiliar wood. It gives you an eerie feeling.
As you step closer, you can feel your skin crawl and it forces you to pause. You can’t help but think that this wood might best be avoided.
So, basically I do the same as happens in the movies. Either there you see a scene/event or some time frame during which you hear something interesting or funny.
Random tables make the game fresh, surprising, and unpredictable. Not all encounters have to be violent either, in fact most of them shouldn't be. They work best (during travel) as random happenings that would reasonably take place on the road, not just goblins, orcs, or wolves popping out at random to eat the PCs around every corner. That's dumb. Each biome should have their own unique encounter tables to reflect the unique things that can happen in that area. Also, town gossip should mention these areas. So when you go to the forest known to have ogres in it the players won't be too surprised when they happen upon a hungry ogre within. Each time the players interact with the encounter in any way they should be rewarded, whether gold, exp, items or whatever, making it worth their while. If they don't want to interact with the encounter, so be it, but they also get nothing.
Some players like rail-roaded stories, others don't. But at the end of the day your campaign isn't a novel. Just go write a book if that's what you want.
Not a bad travel system however. Simple and straight forward. A bit too curated for my liking, but still a good system.
As a beginner to DnD I appreciate these videos. Thank you very much Mr. Pointy Hat ❤❤
I'd love to buy a book of your revised rules. I know they're all free but I want a physical book of them
I've been subconsciously doing this whenever I have to travel, but avoiding travel like the plague. Having TESS written down s absolutely brilliant, I cannot express how much I love it
Cannot thank you enough for this one.
I’ve been running Tyranny of Dragons/Hoard of the Dragon Queen for about 4 months now and my players made a point of wanting to play out the entire journey from Greenest to Waterdeep, which had me worried. I’ve gotten through it from just having them go a certain amount of distance each day, and spending the actual time on inter-caravan interactions. They have a roll each morning to determine the type of day it’s going to be (good travel, rough travel, dead stop while carts are repaired, etc.) but then the rest is just split up as “What do you do with your morning, what do you do with your evening” and various encounters and landmarks they come across. Mixed in some carts that help keep supplies covered, so that never becomes a major issue… it’s been fun so far, but I really wish I had seen this video before getting into it.
Pointy Hat coming out of the closet is the most DnD thing possible.
En cualquier caso, si lees ésto Antonio, siempre es un riesgo y da miedo salir del closet, incluso ante gente que sabes que te aceptará, especialmente con la realidad actual de tu país hacia las personas LGBT+. Gracias por la confianza en tu audiencia.
De que país es?
@@caurd España.
Thanks for not making it weird
Bien dicho
I've been playing DnD for years and LGBT+ is definitely not anywhere near the core. There's plenty of other games where it is like sword lesbians but not DnD.
14:20 The meat of the video starts roughly around this point.
Fucking thank you.
Ok, a few months later. This is my favorite addition to our house rules of the year. We were a skip the montage kinda group for years, but now travel is fight to be some of our players favorite part of the game! Thank you so much for this!
Random tables are great for inspiration. You don't have to follow them blindly, but you can always roll for encounter ideas. Books like Tomb of Annihilation give you a lot of encounters (not just fights) that are place specific. You can roll somthing out then decide you use something else, or palce it elsewhere because it fits more. There is a middle way between following it to the minute and coming up with everything by yourself.
If you absolutely do not want a random encounter it should not be in the chart. Maybe you think the entire bear population has migrated or want to replace them with hippos because it fits the river.
Love the concept of "I hate random encounter tables" the. Pressedes to describe a light version of encounter tables lol. Whatever works for your party, that's why my last group lived on a train. No need for travel events unless the train stops. Choo Choo all aboard the fast travel express!
Gatcha moment. (Honkai)
I clicked on the video and realized, I’ve alway ran red events. I’ve been trying to find a way to spice up travel, but all I’ve found is red events. I’ve been dying to find a way to make my world feel more alive without just throwing a bunch of somatic fights at my players. They all love them, but I can’t help but feel I’m not flushing out the world enough for them. When you mentioned “a yellow encounter“ I actually slapped my forehead and realized how dumb I’ve been of course I could build events based around skill checks. I don’t know why I never thought of it before though this video also helped me realize, in my pursuit of moving away from just throwing “red encounters“ I’ve already started implementing “blue encounters” so thank you for this. This video is exactly what I needed.
i love hats
Glad to see the Familiar finally came out of the closet
Two criticisms
1. The story is whatever happens to the players
2. Sometimes random shit happens, thus random tables
Hex maps and tables are still the right way for me to run travel and my players have yet to complain. Some of the most memorable moments from our past campaigns came out of a table
11:28 GIGANTIC Pointy hat W
This has been the travel video I’ve always needed but never had. This has been something I struggle with consistently as a DM. Your videos are incredible and your products are phenomenal, please keep sharing your gifts with this community. I at least am forever grateful
Okay, seriously that example scenario is PHUCKEN FENOMENAL holy shit. I'm not gonna steal it wholesale, but that T.E.S.S. method is probably the best idea you've had. That I'm gonna nick, and obviously gonna credit you.
I know it's July now, but you've got a LOT to be proud of. 🧡❤️💜💙💚💛
If I may request. Could you possibly do a video on ship to ship combat in D&D at some point?
Try reading the 50 Fathoms rulebook. It's for Savage Worlds, but you can surely use the concepts in DnD in a similar way
3:00 *"There and back again"*
[Taken too literally]