Travel in D&D isn't broken

Just a quick blog post as I've not posted something in the last few days, one thing you can find in abundance on YouTube is advice videos on how to "Fix" travel or "how to make travel more interesting" this implies that travel in D&D is broken or boring and to be honest I disagree I think D&D Travel does exactly what its trying to.

Firstly I think this is an issue about what fiction exactly we are trying to emulate, a lot of the assumptions around "fixing" travel seems to be from the premise that high fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time are the examples to be followed, in these story's the journey lasts a considerable amount of time, in a lot of ways more important than the destination, it is during the journey that a lot of character development and action happens this is a polar opposites to D&D's heavily abstracted travel.

If however we compare it to some Swords and Sorcery story's on the other hand this glossing over or abstracting of travel makes more sense, in theses story's large parts of the characters journey are briefly described apart from noteworthy encounters, be it some sort of foe to defeat, obstacle to overcome or character to interact with

This style of travel is a lot more about going from A to B than focusing too heavily on travel, you calculate how long the journey will take, note off any resources expended and roll for random encounters and weather, after you deal with any consequences (combats or roleplay generated by encounters, effects of weather condition on travel etc) you arrive at your destination, it lends it self well to location based play where exploration of a location is the highlighted part and the to and from is more a matter of logistics than anything else.

As I said at the beginning this is just a quick post and this is definitely a topic I would like to talk about in more detail, I am currently running a Apocalypse sandbox using the Stars without number system that I will be starting up again next week so expect some play reports coming soon for that.

M.C.