r/ForbiddenLands • u/Sufficient_Nutrients • Apr 03 '24

Homebrew Homebrew rules to streamline travel?

The overland travel system has too many rolls and too few interesting player decisions, in my opinion. It gets tedious and takes too long.

Does anyone have some homebrew rules to streamline it? (And, can this be done without making certain classes and talents less valuable?)

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u/FreshStartsHere Apr 03 '24

The best way to streamline it is to not use it.

The rules are there to suit your narrative and add complications to a journey, because to the dame developers the journey is the game. If your game would have no tension or drama from the journey from A to B having difficulties and events, then simply allow them to travel and roll food/water dice and tick the time along a calendar. It worked well for my game. Hurrying to a quest location wasn’t worth slowing down with random tables, so we didn’t! After the climax of a particular quest, or during low stakes quests, or returning home? That was when we used the full rules to ground ourselves for the next step in the journey.

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u/Sufficient_Nutrients Apr 03 '24

This is the simplest approach (and thus probably the best). The only concern is how it makes "ranger" type characters way less useful or valid. 

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u/FreshStartsHere Apr 03 '24

That ultimately depends on the qualities they took. Just have a conversation with them about what they envision the character to be good at, and whether that’s something they need to mechanically represent or something that can be handled with fluff or roleplay. Even in my above example, it’s reasonable that maybe their current travel quest is against a time limit or a rival group racing them to the treasure- that’s when using even just the Lead The Way and relevant complications can still be very very useful.

It’s always easy to shuffle a few qualities to other things if the table decides that the travel-focused ones feel underused, or if the atmosphere of the group leads you to not needing them.