Travel Planning
Do you remember way back in the day when we posted Handbook of Heroes #1: Spider-Corn? Of course you don’t. Back then we had exactly one reader, and that was Laurel’s mom. I think you can see the relevance to today’s topic though. Getting your animal companions in and out of the dungeon is such a common hassel that we made it our very first gag. Slightly less common but no less frustrating is figuring out how to get your wide-load animal bros cross-country.
Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’ve powered through the early levels, and your wizard’s teleport spell is finally online. Unfortunately you’re rolling with a large party, which means that the warlock’s familiar and the ranger’s wolf and your bard’s entourage put you over the limit. It’ll be a minimum of three castings to teleport there and back and there again. Suddenly heading to that swingin’ house party in Far Far Away doesn’t seem worth the trouble.
It’s the same deal with weight limits on flying carpets. Or trying to shove your riding elephant through a puny tree portal. Or casting enough dimension doors to get everybody past this week’s arbitrary forcefield. As the party size increases, so too do the logistics headaches.
That brings me to the question of the day. What are your favorite strategies for getting the party where it’s going? Do you bite the bullet and waste all your spell slots on teleportation magic? Do you throw up your hands and walk like a peasant? How do you move around the map when you’ve got an allosaurus in tow? Let’s hear about your most genius moments of travel planning down in the comments!
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5e can teleport you and up to eight other creatures, so that problem doesn’t usually occur, as party size rarely gets over nine. Unfortunately, I have been banned from casting the teleport spell due to a one-shot.
My friend decided to play a one-shot due to absences, and he decided to let us be level TWENTY. I went for a divine soul sorcerer. I picked my spells, and with one spell slot left over, and I had to choose between scrying and teleport. I was leaning towards scrying, but just before the game began, I decided with teleport.
The good news was that we had to travel between locations a lot, so I ended up casting teleport at least a dozen times over the two sessions of the one-shot. The bad news is that #1 teleport has a small chance of mishap each time and #2 the DM rolls and #3 the DM is terrible at rolling for teleport.
So we’d learn about the evil army attacking a faraway city, the DM would roll with a 33% chance of mishap and a 10% chance of similar location, and a 57% of success, and the DM would roll a mishap. And on a mishap, you re-roll, allowing you to get multiple mishaps. This is what happened with my teleports:
1 mishap then an off-target.
4 mishaps then and off target into a battlefield.
0 mishaps, finally on target. I then rest and regain the damage taken from the previous battle.
3 mishaps, off target.
2 mishaps, on target. Rest.
0 mishaps, on target.
3 mishaps, on target.
0 mishaps, on target. Rest.
2 mishaps, off target.
6 mishaps, on target, unfortunately the target that we were aiming for was a town being attack by a dracolich and a scary bad evil CR 26 thing. Rest.
1 mishap, off target.
3 mishaps, on target.
Then we finished the game with a sweet, sweet teleport with no mishaps that landed on target.
Turn out, the DM was keeping track of the damage that we had taken, and totally up the damage to everyone, I had dealt a grand total of one thousand three hundred damage over two sessions to my own party! That’s more than I’d done to my enemies!
Yeesh. It’s almost as if they don’t want travel to be quick and easy.
Back the 3.5 days, though, my travel domain cleric would just open up our bags of holding, have everyone hop in, then teleport and let everyone else out.
(Yes, bags. We needed multiple because this DM had decided to prevent any shenanigans by deciding that bags of holding could carry about as much as a large sack. The limit on each bag: two cramped people or seven swords)
Despite the DM’s precautions, we still managed to do some pretty weird things. For instance, we ended up with a mind flayers PC. The thing was: in 3.5, mind flayers can plane shift at will. So he was fond of going of on his own, then returning by plane shifting into the extradimensional space in one of our many bags of holding. But then he took it too far when he decided, for some reason to planeshift into the bag of holding that he was holding. And plane shift takes what you are holding. So he ended up plane shifting the bag into… um… itself? The DM, after a lot of thought, decided that the bag was destroyed in a paradox, and the mind flayer made the dex save to escape with one object. Fortunately, due to the DM’s rules about the bag of holding’s size, that bag had only one object within it.
And that’s my story on how a mind flayer destroyed a universe via paradox. (Sure, the bag of holding is a pocket universe, but it still counts!)
I’ve seen GMs claim that bags of holding have small mouths.
“Sorry. You can’t fit a body in there. You just won’t be able to get through the opening.”
That solution always seemed to invite shenanigans though.
“OK. So first we shrink ourselves, then we get in the bag, then we teleport.”
That sounds like a job for escape artist!
You’re up, Lemmiwinks. Get in there!
I knew reminding you of the existence of Allosaurus was a good idea.
You may sleep easy at night knowing that, through your efforts, Allie escaped extinction.
Airships tend to have a decent flight speed, and usually have a decent amount of storage capacity. In addition, you now have a base of operations that can house not only your entire party, but also any followers, cohorts, henchmen, etc that you may have acquired over your levels. Did I forget to mention that depending upon what sourcebook you are using (I personally use Ships of Skybourne) can be very affordable? You basic merchant airship (with no weaponry or special doo-dads) can be purchased for roughly 2,000gp (1/10th the cost of a carpet of flying). Ofcourse, the downside is that you generally won’t be using them for combat.
It always seemed a bit of a bugger that the base rules insist that airships are priced for late game:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/vehicles/air-vehicles/
Especially when “airship” just screams fantasy for so many people.
The economy in 3.5 was pretty bjorked, and I guess PF could only fix so much. There’s a difference between owning one though, and something like renting one or “acquiring” the use of one because of plot.
Also there’s the issue that I’m sure concerns some GMs that the players could sell it to cash in on the gold value, but I’ve never liked the anything-goes-market system either. I think it would be well within your rights to say that airships are a highly ill-liquid asset that can be bought or sold easily because there just isn’t a large market for them, no matter how “valuable” they are, so you can either spend months trying to sell it or cash it in for only a fraction of it’s value. Or have the party get ahold of one the same way.
Video game mindset hurts tabletop markets. I tend to agree that things get much more interesting when you can’t just hit “sell ship” in the options menu of GM largess. That’s why I’m such a fan of the Starfinder solution. You can only sell old gear for 10% of market value. That encourages players to value found gear more highly, which I think makes for a more interesting game than “we always buy exactly what we want every time.”
I actually just reskinned a folding boat wondrous item into a folding cart on my cowboy gunslinger character. Because I already have a horse, and this let’s me haul around the party and anything else we need without getting too pricy or weird. As we’re trying to stay under the radar, and no one would bat an eye at a traveling “merchant” and his covered wagon except bandits, and they get the business end of my revolver anyway.
There’s a cool boat in Exalted with a magical keel that allows it to sail on land. I never had the chance to play with one, but I always thought it would be amusing to roll up to an inn and tie off a friggin’ man-o’-war at the hitching post.
5E streamlined this a fair bit. Paladin Steeds can just be re-summoned, and Familiars can just be put into Hammerspace until needed.
Small party members weigh 30~ pounds, so you can put them into your Bag O’ Holding, which has a weight capacity of 500 pounds. Objects that are on your person, such as the bag telepork no problem.
Love that 8-person limit. Solves a lot of problems. Of course, I find myself listening to episode 90-something of Critical Role at the moment, and those guys still have this discussion whenever their allies show up.
I can’t bring myself to care aboot Critical role. I’m more of a Dice, Camera, Action!/Dark & Dicey/Trapped in the BirdCage person myself.
I simply don’t wanna sit down for 4 hours of anything.
It’s what I’m doing my scholarly work on. I find that I’m digging the GCP more for entertainment purposes. *shrug*
GCP?
https://glasscannonpodcast.com
Love the Glass Cannon Podcast.
Playing Tomb of Annhilation right now, and our party has grown redolent with animal companions. The PC attrition means we still have the giant axebeak one of our party adopted, after that party member was killed by a vampire. Plus my shield guardian, familiar, the ranger’s panther and a baby allosaurus someone hatched, and our guide and HIS mount.
Currently my wizard casts fly on the shield guardian and he carries the rest in stages.
Well hey, keep us posted as your technique develops. I’m considering starting up a ToA game, and I’d love to know the secret life hacks of the experienced dino-wranglers.
This is when the feat Craft Construct really shines.
Colossal Animated Object costs 30,000 gp to make. Can house the entire party, can have a fly speed, and most of all it kicks ass whenever the party is in an outdoors setting. The party doesn’t need much room, but I do because I keep making more constructs. Alchemical Golem, Scythe Glass Swarm, my Construct Mount Tyrannosaurus (from the Construct Rider Alchemist Archetype, DM approved), etc.
I’d say about 75% of my wealth is in constructs, maybe even 80% as I recently traded a party member an artifact we got for 30k gp to make my most recent construct, a Scythe Glass Swarm with 10 advanced HD. The rest of the party is in-character and out afraid of my character, who is Lawful Evil. My constructs are a huge boon to the party, but they fear if I ever turn on them.
In other words…
https://youtu.be/rAMuLNDiWHg?t=26
Crafting always makes me nervous since you’ve got to rely on your GM to give you down time. If you set those expectations in Session 0 though? Full steam ahead on your Tyrano-engine.
That’s the beauty of the colossal animated object though. I call it my Walking Workshop because I can craft full time while travelling. Not to mention my DM is lenient on the limit per day for crafting and even gave me an everwake amulet so I can craft 24/6 with a day of rest every week
I wonder if you could get rest by using object possession to travel while your body is asleep? Naw though… Constructs don’t count as objects. And it’s only 10/minutes per level. Back to the drawing board!
I am not a DM and to me this is the kind of troubles a DM needs to resolve. In my party we have never thought of this. We just go where we want, free and with the sun to shine in our glorious and bloody path. I mean, familiars and animal companions are not creatures form me. One is technically a part of the wizard with physical form, that is children how your wizard cast spells from his familiar, the are one and the same thing. At least is what i think, and remember i am not a DM, one can say “Familiars are a expression of the wizard soul” or “Familiars are animals captured and manipulated with a magic ritual to give that living being special characteristics that suit his master”. And that is just the familiar, i have read the other posts, if you are taking an army in your bag of holding then you are taking a whole army with you, even when they are in the bag of holding. So why to worry about, just leave your PC Live their already troublesome life. If they abuse that easy going or appears a situation where you must intervine, lets say a behir familiar even more big than his master wizard, then one can say that it counts against the limit Soul-part-of-the-wizard or not. Maybe in my group in general, and for me in particular, just want to kill the thing in the dungeon, i for one, don’t want to struggle with the logistic of taking an adventure party to that dungeon in the first place. Mostly because i play many necromancers and prefer necromancy school over conjuration, but complains against logistic aside, an dozen of zombies help very much in any effort were spare hands are needed 🙂
You know where a dozen zombies don’t help? Getting through the initiative quickly. 😛
I can understand the desire to handwave. For me though, this is more of a designer issue than a GM issue. If you’re going to say “only X dudes per level” or “exactly Y dudes” can be teleported, you’re placing that logistics question into the game. I feel like these questions of transportation are supposed intended be an obstacle for players. Whether or not it’s any fun solving that issue is another matter.
You know where a dozen zombies help? Getting through the iniciative rolls and the day of the DM, a dozen zombies, a dozen happiness for the trollish players 🙂
Also about the rules questions they are not for the players, they are for the DM because the players throw at him that issue. You can design a game, you can tell people what are the rules, but you can not expect that they play the game as you want. Truth they are obstacles for the players, even truer the players don’t care. It is a universal design rule, “you design the things in a way, the users use it in another, because they are users and you a designer”. As a necromancer with a dozen zombies i need to care about their initiative rolls. FALSE. As a necromancer with a dozen zombies i just roll once and use that for me and my rose-smelling minions, or just let the DM rolls twelve times if he cares that much about the initiative rolls. In a roleplay game players use the rules acorded between them, not between them and the game designer. Just think all that time a DM or even the rules put in front of you a problem and you resolve it in a non-conventional and “wrong” way and the times you just ignored the problem. Bag of Holding Army (2.500 GP) if a good example.
I don’t think you can discount the designer so easily. Calls to check out errata and “look at the forums” are commonplace. Folks tend to go by the rules if they can, then ask for a ruling when they can’t. That’s been my experience anyway. I mean, the ghost of Gary Gygax isn’t going to rise up through the grid and tell you to stop having bad-wrong-fun, but the designers’ opinion has some weight too.
Also, how do you manage all those zombies in practice? It’s more the multiple attacks than the initiative headache that put me off of necromancy and minion-mancy in general.
For Pathfinder, we LOVE the “Carry Companion” spell.
Love it.
You just have to be able to convince your companion that you’re going to be SUPER BORING and they really would rather miss it, wouldn’t they? And you promise to bring them right back out as soon as things get interesting again….
Hosteling armor. I’d take that mess over a +1 any day of the week.
So…. equipment-hunt quest!
(Unless you have a crafter, finding just that perfect item you really need is always a bit of an adventure in itself, no?)
Monster hunter style pairs well with kingdom-builder types. Absolutely.
(Otherwise, you can stack that pup-shape spell with reduce animal to get an allosaurus down to a medium-sized creature, but that takes up a lot more spell levels for an admittedly cute, but far less efficient, result.)
The only correct answer for “How should we get around?” has and always will be “Airship”.
Of course airships are typically outside the rules and not something you can reasonably expect in most games.
Which just means that being sad about not great travel methods is the expected experience.
Personally I think vehicular travel of some kind is better than teleporting because… well it’s about the journey.
As far as getting past obstacles… if there’s an invincible barrier between you and another room and you can’t teleport past it, the correct answer is clearly to BREAK THE WALLS DOWN until you get where you wanted to go. If this happens to result in the collapse of the dungeon/floating castle/entire Underdark cave network, well they shouldn’t have put the structural supports in the path of least resistance now should they and it’s hardly your fault now is it? =P
I think we talked about the whole “the journey is more important than the destination” thing back in this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/troubles-with-teleportation
I think we’re on the same page there.
Monte Cook actually made up the idea of “blue steel doors” in my megadungeon. They’re too hard to mine even with adamantine, and they’ve got anti-teleportation magic to keep players from skipping past too easily. It’s a bit ham-fisted as an approach, but since the adventure was shaped by “let’s publish one dungeon room per day,” it served a necessary function by keeping players from getting ahead of the material.
Even if there’s no airships in core you can always run a bunch of planks between a bunch of flying carpets
Ah, the old inverse aerial catamaran. Truly a classic.
You know, the issue raised here is one of the things that always bothered me about the city of Sigil from the Planescape setting. It’s supposed to be the perfect merchant hub because most of the doors and windows in the city turn into magic portals under the right circumstances, but this ignores the fact that they’re hoing to have a difficult time getting a merchant caravan through somebody’s cellar door, even if it is a mystical portal to another world. And a lot of the portals require really specific conditions to function, so the caravan may be stuck there for a while because a lot of portals have conditions like that they only work on the second wednesday of the month and only while the people going through them are banging pots and pans or something, and their destination portak could very well be one of those.
Thus the “Guild of Door Greasers” was born, allowing pack animals to squeeze through cat flaps the world over!
My players recently replicated one of your previous comics. They had the choice of either waiting three days for a wizard to return and teleport them to where they were going, or spend five days at sea and seven days on land to get to the place.
Naturally, as adventurers, they choose to take the latter path.
Adventure!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/travel-time
Irlana had her boar’s saddle enchanted with the Wings of Flying. Not one person has said the joke.
Give it time. It pretty much has to happen.
Sadly, as the joke has actually been mentioned, it’s unlikely to happen. Unless we get a new player who doesn’t know about the item.
Maybe this problem calls for the assumption that there is low-rent polymorphing available, a low-level spell that takes upwards of an hour to cast, and/or it needs to be cast again the next day before it works, so practically zero combat applicability but still convenient enough for portal diving and other logistical issues.
That’s a solution from the player’s perspective, but the problem comes from the design side. You want players to go on a journey and experience the landscape between Point A and Point B. Except that sometimes you don’t and the campaign is better served by “quick travel.” I’m beginning to think that the 3.X convention of % dice to teleport off-target is an attempt to solve that problem.