Paths!
I love to categorize stuff to make my life easier when running exploration tabletop games. Today I'm thinking about pointcrawl paths and their characteristics. Three key characteristics of a path:
- its length
- its difficulty/ruggedness
- its prominence (how easy / hard it is to not lose the path).
Cross-Examining Characteristics
- Difficulty x Distance = time to traverse
- Difficulty x Prominence = chances of meeting an npc
- Distance x Prominence = chance of losing the path
Difficulty & Distance
This one is simple. A short, easy path doesn't take much time to travel, while a long difficult path will take you a while. Boom, done. This is going to be a nice short blog post.
Difficulty & Prominence
If a path is well-defined that means it is likely used frequently.
If a path is well-defined and also difficult, it means people suffer the hardship of using it for some reason; there's something worthwhile at each end, at least from the perspective of those who typically use it.
If it's well-defined and easy, it's probably connecting fundamental resources.
If it's faint but easy it's probably not very important.
If it's faint and difficult it means that SOMEONE is making the difficult journey, so it might lead to a cool secret!
This basically determines the odds that you're going to bump into the people who use and maintain this path. A prominent path means lots of people use it, so it follows that the more time you spend on the path, the more likely it is you'll bump into them.
Prominence & Distance
The prominence of a path also determines how difficult it is to follow. Some paths might be clearly marked, well tended highways, but others might be little more than game trails. A poorly marked trail presents plenty of opportunities to get lost, and the longer it is, the more opportunities to get lost.\
Special Cases
Two types of path come to mind which break the rules a bit, especially when it comes to prominence:
- Rivers: A river certainly can be a busy, frequently used highway, but that doesn't meaningfully affect its prominence. A wide, powerful river does not wither away without human intervention! In fact, for rivers I'm almost inclined to use its difficulty as a metric for the likelihood of meeting an NPC; a roaring rapid isn't as likely to see traffic as a placid brook.
- Promethean ruins: sometimes a road is well defined because it was simply built to stand the test of time. Move over, Ozymandias, let the professionals show you how it's done! It might NEVER be reclaimed by nature, regardless of how few feet tread upon it. Though, maybe modern people do frequent this path simply because it maintains itself. Who knows!
An Example Path
A path might look something like this:
- 6km
- 50% rugged
- 25% prominence
- travel time: 6 hours
- chance to get lost: 45% (9 or lower on a d20 roll)
- chance of meeting an NPC: 15% (3 or lower on a d20 roll)
- Beating sun, dusty soil, yellow leaves
- A poorly-marked path rising and falling over cactus-choked hillocks
- The ear-numbing tone of infinite grasshoppers