User:IGTN/Feral Libram/The Wilderness Exploration Minigame

=The Wilderness Exploration Minigame=

Rant
Basic rant about wilderness exploration

Types of Adventures
Here I rant about what kinds of adventures you can expect to use this for.

Time-limited adventures can use this very well. For a time-limited adventure, the PCs are somewhere, and they need to be somewhere else before some time. If they're too late, bad stuff happens. An example could be needing to get to the dragon's lair before the prince is eaten, or needing to get to the mountaintop before the full moon.

Sandboxes can also use this even if the map isn't changing and other people aren't moving over the course of the adventure. In that case, there are a bunch of places you want to visit, and only so much time to visit them in. The PCs go wandering to find the adventure sites in the sandbox and feel like they found something, instead of feeling like the DM gave them a list of adventure sites to pick from.

Adventures that are completely static (the map doesn't change over time) and linear (the PCs aren't out to explore and find things) should not use this. If you already know exactly where you're going, and you don't care when you get to the one place you're going to, you don't need a wilderness exploration minigame to determine those things.

Basic Rules
The basic term definitions and so on needed to make the game work

Exploring the Wilderness
Putting the rules together into a wilderness exploration. Probably include encounters and examples

This will need a section on weather effects, times of day, and so on.

Also, calculate a table on which dawn/dusk hours can be looked up given (rough) latitude and month, to be used to determine how much of your marching time is under what kind of light (and what random encounter table).

Graduating
Basic rant about how, past a certain level, people don't really explore the wilderness and this is OK, they don't need to and have moved on to bigger and better things, because of mobility, information, and terrain modification magic. Include notes on how to gracefully retire this minigame and use that magic in a game.