How to make RPG travel scenes more fun

We know that both players and GMs have trouble with travel scenes. They feel boring, purposeless, and might seem like an unnecessary extra step before the party gets to the action. Most parties simply skip right over them, but they have some of the best storytelling, loot-gathering, and XP-earning moments of the whole campaign. While there aren’t nearly enough travel rules resources and supplements around for our liking, there are still plenty of creative ways to create more engaging travel scenes for your players. So stick around and read on to find out how to make RPG travel scenes more fun on your next adventure.

1. Prep for travel scenes like you would prep for a dungeon

When you treat travel as nothing more than a way to get from one encounter to another, that’s exactly how it will start to feel. Instead, you need to treat it like you would treat a dungeon. The basic ingredients for a dungeon are adventurers with a purpose, a creature to fight or problem to solve, and a reward for succeeding.

If you know your table has some traveling to do at their next session, arrive prepared with a map, monsters, puzzles, traps, rumours and challenges. You can plan these out to the last detail with a railroaded travel scenario, or you can put together a binder of random dice tables and improvise the travel scenes with your players.

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2. Create and print your own hex maps

Having a nice big hex map for everyone at the table to look at will make your travel scenes more purposeful. Your players will be able to see where they are and where they need to be, as well as the scope of what’s around them. They can use this information to choose whether to take a direct route to their next destination, or spend some time exploring their surroundings.

It’s also a great planning tool for you, as the GM. The individual hexes can be used to plan and position little roadside encounters and events. If the party lands on a specific hex, you’ll have something fun waiting for them that you have already prepared for. There are plenty of online resources and templates you can use to create your own maps, or to turn your existing maps into hexes.

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3. Use immersive descriptions of the scenery

Whether you’re traveling through thick forest, along a well-walked road or underground in a deep and dark dungeon, you want to give your players descriptions of where they are. Many GMs feel like they aren’t good at using elaborate language, and avoid this step. But you don’t need all that to set the scene.

All you need to do is have one sentence for each of the senses. What do your players see? What can they hear? Is there a specific scent in the air? Can they feel heat, cold, rain, dust in the wind? Even taste can come into travel descriptions if there is a thick stench or smoke that catches in the throat. A simple description will do the trick perfectly, especially if you have impatient players at the table. Over time, as you and your players get more practiced at working through longer travel scenes, you can start working in more detailed descriptions with players jumping in to add what they’re sensing as well.

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4. Reward your players for exploration

If there’s one way to get players to enjoy any part of combat-free play is to reward them with loot. When you’re planning their route on your hex map, leave things around for them to find. Maybe they need to clear a path through some forest thicket and discover some healing herbs or a satchel left behind by a past traveler. Or perhaps they come across a traveling merchant with items on offer, items they can only purchase on the road.

This is another way having a fully-prepared hex map can benefit the party. Your players can choose to explore beyond the most direct route to their destination by stopping at neighboring hexes. When they see that you have prepared for their travel scenes, they will be more likely to engage, and their natural curiosity will encourage them to find out what kinds of surprises you’ve scattered along their way.

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5. Stagger levels of danger

Getting your players from A to B doesn’t need to be the same as running a dungeon in every way. In a traditional dungeon encounter, you’d have the level of danger steadily building until the party meets the final boss at the end. Fortunately, or unfortunately, anything can happen on the open road.

Their camp could get ransacked by a high-level beast during their first night in the wilderness. They could get accosted by bandits hiding in the trees for a quick skirmish. They could find a perfectly serviceable cookpot lying in a ditch after it fell off a wagon a few hours past. Maybe they need to solve an elaborate riddle to cross a bridge. Stagger these events across the journey, so that your party is entertained the whole way, without burning them out from one boss fight after another.

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6. Reveal and conceal strategically

Print two or three copies of your hex map so you can cut out a group of hexes to place over your main map to hide what’s ahead strategically. Reveal things as your players get closer or pass them by, just as if they were travelling in real life.

You don’t have to worry about keeping everything concealed though! It’s likely at least some of the characters at the table have been out and about before, and that the party has some maps on them. Use extra hex print-outs, models or miniatures to illustrate big cities, landmarks along busy roads, trees, bushes, rocks, and popular villages and inns. Your players can decide if they want to make a detour into a city along the way, look under a rock or keep walking to see if they can reach one of their regular inns before nightfall.

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7. Incorporate weather rules

More and more RPGs are including rules for weather to make everything from monster hunting to spell-casting more exciting and immersive. We recommend using a hex flower to determine your weather. This keeps things more realistic, so you don’t get a hot summer’s day followed by a winter blizzard. Hex flowers help the weather progress more naturally.

If you’re incorporating weather rules, you want them to have real consequences for your players and their characters. Adverse weather like heavy rain, fog or snow should result in fewer successful perception checks; Even the lightest rain can put out non-magical campfires or torches; extreme conditions on either end of the scale should have a negative effect on endurance and constitution.

Weather can also play a massive narrative role. A heavy storm from a few days ago might have flooded a river crossing and players need to find another way. If they’re stuck indoors or at their camp, do they have enough resources or gold to see them through. We also love the idea of including rare or magical weather phenomena at least once during a campaign. These could look like ashfalls, eclipses, magic lightning or meteor showers that enhance or diminish certain powers.

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8. Make slice-of-life moments fun

The popularity of simulation games have taught us that humans love pretending to do chores, especially in a cozy setting. If we were adventuring through the wilderness or a dungeon in real life, there would be plenty of work and rest activities keeping the crew busy that we don’t include in our games. You can turn collecting firewood, washing dishes, putting up the tent or even answering nature’s call into fun dice rolls, puzzles and moments for your players to relax and be a bit silly.

You could have your players engage in a friendly sparring session before getting dinner on the fire, to see who would win in a skirmish if they weren’t all on the same side. You could even award XP for this kind of training. Perhaps they could visit a local night market. A favorite from Reddit community members seems to be having their characters stumble onto a beach party where all kinds of hijinks ensue, everything from brawling over cheating volleyballers to skinny dipping.

Whether it’s at camp, in armchairs at a village inn or out on the town, slice-of-life moments on the road are the best for fun improvisation and creative roleplaying that helps bring every kind of player out of their shell while creating wild memories around the table.

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9. Roll for whimsy and creative engineering

This is an idea for a particularly lengthy travel scene that lasts for the whole of one session, or even multiple sessions, depending on how much your players dilly-dally. Tell your players that at any point during travel, they can choose to roll for something special when it’s their turn. They each have only one special roll, and they can choose whether it will be for whimsy or creative engineering. You can create your own random tables for these based on what you know your players will enjoy. They are not designed to have any real bearing on the game, but for simple joy and fun.

A whimsy roll can look like everyone seeing a shooting star and making wishes for their characters. It can be the whole party having to stop while a mama duck and ducklings cross the road. In these cases, the GM will be required to provide video footage of baby ducks. It can be a flower-picking excursion for the whole group, where everyone gets a magical bloom to craft with or add to their inventory for later.

Creative engineering is all about the party working together with the items they have on them to solve a problem or puzzle. Lost a cartwheel? Do they have what it takes to make and attach a new one? Can they find a water source to refill their waterskins? You can create puzzles and riddles around doing laundry, cooking the perfect breakfast, helping fellow travellers, or anything else that needs to get done on the road.

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10. Let players choose between dangerous shortcuts and fun scenic routes

Giving your players more agency during travel scenes is the best way to make sure they have more fun while playing them. Make sure you have a selection of routes to choose from on your hex map. Let your players know that there is a shortcut to their destination, but that it’s full of peril. If the party is in the mood for combat and eager to get to where they need to be, they can enjoy a high-stakes boss encounter along the road. Tell them there is also the option of a scenic route that is (mostly) safe and all about discovery and exploration. Instead of a boss fight, they can look forward to more worldbuilding, character development and unusual item collection.

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If you’re introducing travel scenes into your game with players who aren’t used to them, start out slow with short travel scenarios packed with the kind of action your players enjoy. Slowly build them out over time as everyone gets more accustomed to playing them. And remember, more travel scenes equal more dice rolls. And more dice rolls can only mean you’ll need more dice! Luckily, we’ve got you covered there!

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