Game Master Guidance: The Joy is in the Journey

With “adventuring” being the central theme of most roleplaying game systems, travel takes on considerable narrative and mechanical significance. While planning out their campaign, a game master needs to decide how this will factor into the narrative they have in mind. Even if you confine the player characters to a single city, you need to capture a sense of travelling in some way. The players shouldn’t feel like their characters are instantaneously zapping to their destination. Unless that’s literally what they’re doing. Regardless, a GM should decently simulate the idea of traveling without negatively affecting the flow of the game.

After you or the PCs establish how they intend to get around, determine a way to integrate that into the narrative. No matter what option they’ve taken, it can offer an opportunity for an encounter. Cars break down, coaches get robbed, and starships get boarded.

Even campaigns with restricted settings can use this method. A walk across a city will bring the PCs into contact with pickpockets, authorities, or worse. These sorts of encounters create an interruption between point A and point B, in turn offering a tangible representation of that journey. Particularly intrepid GMs can set a session around one of the PCs detours. This is an easy way to bring in something off the beaten track, while also conveying the sense that considerable time and distance have passed.

Of course, nothing this involved is essential. Even the Indiana Jones films often depicts the hero’s journeys as a line traversing across a map. An easier way to capture the sense that the PCs have traveled is to create an immediate contrast between their starting point and destination. Whenever you introduce an area, make a point of establishing as many details as you can manage. The architecture, the inhabitants, the distinguishing features, the weather, even the stench and temperature. Besides adding to the player’s immersion, this will make it easier to distinguish to different areas. The contrast that creates can substitute for actually having to describe the journey. This route does require more commitment, even if it is less invasive than other methods.

Even if you take a more minimalist approach, make sure to work the PCs’ journey into the narrative in some way. End or begin a session with them boarding or departing from their means of travel. In a more advanced setting, sticking the PCs in a customs office can have a similar influence, while offering some memorable roleplay opportunities. Of course, you can take the opposite approach and make traveling the center of the entire campaign. The PCs goal can be to simply reach a city, military base, or other place. The destination can exist entirely as an endpoint, possibly to be explored in a later campaign. The different sessions can unfold from the obstacles that prevent them from doing so and the other issues with traveling can influence the challenges posed. Travel can be a small component of the story or alternatively the entire narrative. It’s up to the GM to decide how much of a role it will play.