RPG-a-Day 14: Safety
Today’s prompt for RPG-a-Day is ‘Safety’.
As I wrote before, I like having rules for travel in an RPG - your adventure is not a picnic, it’s a journey through the unknown. Dangerous things might happen! Ryuutama, the One Ring and Against the Darkmaster all have travel rules that mean that you’re never really safe on a journey. One of the tropes of RPGs is that you regain your hitpoints under certain circumstances, which means you’re ‘good as new’ again. D&D heals you fully at each eight-hour period of rest, no matter where (unless you are interrupted). But (most) games with travel rules only give you HPs back in safe locations - and a camp out in the open is never safe. Only when you reach your destination (or even only when the people at the destination welcome you and it’s a ‘sanctuary’ for you) do you heal from any wounds you got on the road.
That puts a whole new dynamic on the whole thing. If you’re exploring a dungeon or a wilderness, you have to manage your resources more carefully than if any night’s sleep will heal you fully. Events on the road can have a real, lasting impact on how the ‘real’ adventure progresses. Because to me, travel is its own adventure, not just a prelude.
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.