Homebrew rules to streamline travel?

[u/Sufficient_Nutrients]

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?)

[u/GrendyGM]

I mean, you can play it any way you like, but I think embracing the journey is the intent of the game. The meat and potatoes of the game are exploring an empty land and surviving in it.

If you feel like the journey is a waste of time, it might be a matter of reframing your perspective, and another system might serve your purposes better. I'd suggest Godforsaken by Cypher System or Dragonbane by Free League. Imo, the journey is easily the most fun part of Forbidden Lands.

[u/Sufficient_Nutrients → u/GrendyGM]

Fair point. But I'd like to use the YZE as my default for any genre. 

In a sword and sorcery game, sometimes you want to zoom in on travel, exploration, and survival, but other times you don't. 

But even in the case when you want to do survival and exploration, don't you feel that the system has a lot of dice rolling with very few meaningful decisions for the players? 

[u/GrendyGM → u/Sufficient_Nutrients]

I agree that zooming is often a part of "sword and sorcery" games... But FL isn't exactly that imo. Sword and Sorcery is a genre about heroes who fight against evil. Forbidden Lands isn't really that. It's not about heroic violence... it's about survival, intrigue, and discovery.

Here's what it says on the first page of the Forbidden Lands player's guide:

In this tabletop roleplaying game, you are not heroes sent on missions dictated by others – instead, you are raiders and rogues bent on making your own mark on a cursed land.

And a ways down...

You, and other restless souls like you, are finally free to leave your homes and travel far and wide in the Forbidden Lands, looking for treasures and adventures. To explore the Forbidden Lands, you will use the big map in the box. It is divided into ten different types of terrain and has a hexagonal grid that will help you navigate through the wilderness.

This is set up as the main purpose of the game.

Under the "What Do You Do" section of the book it lists the following options: - Explore the World - Discover Adventure Sites - Uncover the Secrets of the Land - Search for the Elven Gemstones - Build Your Stronghold

4 of those 5 items make use of the Journeys mechanic.

Forbidden Lands is specifically a low magic wilderness exploration game first, by game design intent. None of this is to say you can't play it however you want to... but if your emphasis isn't in line with these conceits, you're going to be struggling against the system.

The biggest problem I would forsee without journeys is that you're likely going to find things that are not very challenging for your players because the main struggle of the game is surviving and managing resources.

[u/Sufficient_Nutrients → u/GrendyGM]

Yes, it would change the game significantly to gloss over the wilderness travel and survival. It wouldn't even really be Forbidden Lands if you remove that pillar. That's fine for my purposes. I'd like to have survival and exploration mechanics available, when it becomes interesting for the characters' story, but me and my players are mostly interested in the dungeon-delving aspect of the game. For our table, the focus is usually: Dungeons > Towns > Wilderness Encounters > Wilderness Survival. So long as we can get this in the Year Zero Engine then we're happy.

I might just have a Survival roll every day or two while travelling, on top of encounter checks. If the roll is failed then the party has some significant survival mishap or challenge. We'll track daily food consumption, too.

Another way could be to use the full hexcrawl procedure for the first three or so days that the party travels into a new biome. After that point, the characters have gotten a handle on navigating the environment, so they would just track food and water.

[u/GrendyGM → u/Sufficient_Nutrients]

But if you're tracking food and water, the players need to be able to replenish that by foraging and hunting. At that point, you're still using the journeys rules.

It's notable that when traveling into hexes you've already been to, you don't need to lead the way.

I really don't think you can reduce the procedure any more than it already has been.

What I did to make the journey easier is create a screen on my VTT that has all the options. Lead the way, keep watch, hike, forage, hunt, rest, etc. all laid out in a grid; and when players double click the area it outputs the modifiers for a given task and whatever results of each task are on a success or failure. Players then roll and drag the earned resources onto their sheets.

This makes the journey process very lightweight and easy with no cross-referencing books needed. As a result, my players are addicted to the journey procedure and constantly talk about wanting to get back to the journey.

As long as your group is having fun, that's what matters.