# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 07 - Journey tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] No, not this.  *(Great, now I'll have that stuck in my head for days.)* No, let's talk about travel. Traveling in RPGs has been a big deal since the early days. **[Wilderness Survival](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17007/wilderness-survival-guide-1e)** was an incredibly popular supplement. The trip between town and dungeon can itself be the focus of your campaign, rather than just heading into underground environments and killing the inhabitants. There's an entire subgenre of game design called *[hexcrawls](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl)*, which are all about setting off into the Outlands, hunting game, finding water, and getting into silly shenanigans. Often, the environment is just as much, if not more, procedurally generated on the fly as pre-planned. The journey is the point in a hexcrawl. Let's say that you don't want the annoying artistic overhead of drawing a map as you go. You know what? I'm there with you, friend. My artistic capabilities are limited to utterly abstract concepts and stick figures. There is a game design concept just for you and me, and it's the *[point crawl](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/48666/roleplaying-games/pointcrawls)*. In a point crawl, you don't actually plot out the specific places between point A and point B that you pass through. Instead, you discover a set of nodes which may be connected to other nodes. Within those nodes, you resolve whatever is there, but they aren't set on a static grid. An individual edge which connects nodes could be six months of travel, or it could be an hour. You could have a dozen nodes between town and that dungeon, each of which represents an encounter, a point of interest, or something else that was generated along the way, without any of that annoying activity, like having to draw individual hexes which themselves may not contain anything of particular interest. Having made it to a destination once, you don't have to actually traverse the nodes again to get there unless you really want to. The mechanics allow for you to decide whether to do so. A trip to a known place sometimes has a complication come up along the way, but doesn't require you to make test after test, because it's a known quantity. In both of these cases, the journey is the thing that you're focusing on—the trip is the story. The actual state of affairs when you get to your destination may not even be of interest to you, like taking a trip on the Orient Express. You don't actually care about where your last station is, except insofar as how much time it implies that you have left at any given stop to figure out who's the murderer. Now, I am terribly tempted to sit here and write up an actual example, step by step of how that might work. But that seems like an awful lot of effort, especially when what I really want to talk about is not the specifics. I want you to pause and think about what it is that travel represents in your games and stories. Is it just something that fulfills the need for simulation? The characters are going X amount of distance, and so you need Y numbers of encounters, or to explore Z number of hexes in order to fulfill the requirements to get to do what it is that they wanted to do the whole time. Is it worthwhile in and of itself? In a way that has the players look back on it and want to tell people about the story of the trip? Did they accidentally stumble on a beautiful waterfall overlook and take a moment to wonder at the power of nature and tighten the bonds between the members of the party? Did they drop like a rock out of orbit and slam the dropship down amidst an entire swarm of the enemy to leap out and look forward to the fight to relieve another squad days away through rough terrain? Did they stumble on a terrible enemy, purely by accident, which they awakened and loosed on the world, and now what you thought was going to happen is completely derailed? Did the travel matter? Did the journey itself change the characters? If not, maybe they didn't need the journey. Maybe it would have been better to cut out that whole bit of dice rolling, map drawing, node mapping, or whatnot. Maybe they should have traveled by red line, like Indiana Jones going from Boston to Cairo. Think about journeys in your game. Think about what they represent and what you want them to represent. Think about whether they need to be there or whether they justify everything else. I'm not coming down on either side of that question, for the record. Both answers are important at different times, but you need to come up with an answer. You just need to *understand* the answer.