This ain’t the article I was going to write. It’s the article I have to write. See, I was talking in my Discord channel – which you can get access to by becoming a patron; it’s my way of saying “thanks for literally keeping this site online” – I was talking in my Discord channel about overland travel, exploration, and a bunch of related issues. Because that’s what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about how everyone – game designers, GMs, players – all fundamentally misunderstand exploration. Even me. Except I realized it. And now I know how to make it an actual pillar of gameplay. But I can’t write about that.

What happened was I discovered no one knows how to narrate anymore. Especially when it comes to wilderness travel. A lot of people are doing some very f$&%ed up things when they try to narrate their games as their players travel from place to place. And, worse than that, they don’t know how to pace their games. Or understand some very fundamental things. It’s a mess. And, worse than even that, it’s not just about wilderness travel. It’s, like, all aspects of the game.

Now, when someone suddenly says something that makes me realize I have been assuming people understand something that they really don’t and I’ve been writing lots of articles about it, I usually go into a low-grade panic mode. I reach out to a few dozen GMs I have on my proverbial speed dial. GMs of different levels of experience and different play styles. And I ask them about it to see if I’m not dealing with a small handful of screwy people or whether the whole gaming community has a fundamentally f$&%ed up understanding. I also ask general questions on various social media platforms sometimes, but it’s really my secret cabal of GMing friends and associates who I use to tell me how bad something is and whether I need to address it.

I need to address this.

So, let’s talk about narration, decision points, nondecisions, and why you – as a GM – don’t get to decide when things are important. In short, let’s talk about how you edit your game.

Saved in Editing

Yo! Listen up. I know what I’m about to talk about – film editing – seems like it should be part of the Long, Rambling Introduction™ and that some of you skip the Long, Rambling Introduction™ and use the first heading as the sign that the article has really started and that’s why I always start the article proper with the first heading and purposely repeat anything from the Long, Rambling Introduction™ that is central to the article IN the article. I get it. My Long, Rambling Introductions™ are not for everyone. And they are skippable on purpose. But don’t be fooled. This film editing crap IS important. It is fundamental to the article. It is not me f$&%ing up and breaking up my Long, Rambling Introduction™ with a heading. So please read it.

Most people don’t realize this, but probably the most important person involved in the production of a film is not the director, not the producer, not the actors, not the screenwriting committee. It’s the editor. It’s the person who takes all of the takes of all of the different shots from all of the different angles that were filmed and strings them together into a movie. Now, the editor usually does it with the help of the director. But sometimes, the director and the editor fundamentally disagree. Which is why, by the way, you sometimes see a “director’s cut” of a movie. Those come from the director and the editor having a disagreement about how to clip all of the pieces of the movie together and the director pulling a Henry VIII and saying, “I’m Film Pope now” and editing his own damned movie together himself.

If you want an amazing example of the power of editing – and how much editors can do – watch this video about how Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope was saved by heroic editors from Lucas being Lucas.

Why do I bring this up? Because, while the editor is responsible for a lot of things, there are two things of very significant importance the editor has to control: pacing and transitions. Pacing refers to the ebb and flow of tension, excitement, and engagement in the movie. You can’t just keep ramping tension up because that’s emotionally exhausting. You can’t let tension flag too much because that’s boring. So, tension has to rise and fall periodically throughout the movie. But tension also has to trend upward, so it feels like the movie is building toward something. You know, something like a climax? I hope none of this is news to you.

Transitions happen because a movie has to condense days, weeks, months, or even years of events into two hours and so you have to cut out a lot. Transitions cover all of the crap that isn’t good movie. I know movie editors don’t call them transitions. I mean, they don’t just call them transitions. There’s lots of different film editing things I’m covering with the word “transition.” Like montages and establishing shots and different types of cuts and fades. But the reason there’s a whole bunch of different tricks that cover the word transition is because when you cut out a big chunk of the movie, you can wreck the narrative if you’re not careful.

Take for example The Super Mario Brothers Movie. Now, I am not holding that up as a good movie or an example of great cinema. I will call it well-edited, though, not because the final product came out good. But considering how that movie came to be and what happened on the set, that poor editor did the best he could possibly do with it. And I can prove it with one moment. One spot where the editor obviously realized something went bad and he had to fix it.

There’s a scene where Mario Mario and Luigi Mario are escaping from a police station in an alternate universe ruled by dinosaurs who look and act exactly like people. Really. Anyway, they are fleeing the cops in a crowded police station and then, suddenly, there’s a cut to Mario and Luigi running down an empty and very wide… alley? Industrial corridor? Warehouse? It’s not actually clear where the hell they are. You can’t even tell whether they are inside or outside. It’s just, suddenly, the camera cuts and they are in this weird alley thing and there is no one around.

But then, Mario proclaims – and this is clearly a bit of ADR that was recorded after the fact and then just dubbed into the scene – something like, “I can’t believe how big this police station is” or something like that. Okay. Got it. This is just some massive service corridor deep in the bowls of a ridiculously huge police station. They have ducked into this corridor and the police have lost track of them. And this scene follows immediately from the previous scene.

The editor recognized that there was not enough context from the two scenes to figure out how they fit together and how much time has passed in the cut between one camera shot and the next. And editors do that s$&% all the time. They cut in establishing shots to say, “okay, this next scene is in the heart of the city at night.” Or they cut in a bit of a car driving down a highway at dusk to say, “the characters got into a car after the last scene and drove for several hours and that’s why they are now in this cabin in the woods at night.” They might even cut a little dialogue over it where a character says something like, “well, we got away from the bad guys. We need a place to hide out for a couple of days. I know just the place.”

Now, you might wonder why I’m explaining all this film editing stuff to you. It’s not just to prove that I absolutely aced a couple of film studies courses in college or anything. But I did. Man, did that professor love me. Not the point though. My point is that, as a GM, in addition to all of your other jobs, you also have to be a film editor who edits a film together perfectly while it is still being filmed.

Game and Not Game

Film editors have to condense hours, days, or years of events into a two-hour movie. GM editors have to condense hours, days, or years of events into a fun game that also conveys a well-structured narrative. And that means a GM has to be able to tell the difference between the stuff that belongs on camera and the stuff that doesn’t. That is, what stuff needs to be part of the game and what stuff doesn’t. And, it turns out, a lot of GMs have some pretty wonky notions about this s&$%.

So, let me be as clear as possible: a role-playing game is a game about players pretending to be heroes in a fantasy world, making the meaningful choices those heroes would make, and then dealing with the consequences. That’s the GAME. Anything that is not about the players making meaningful choices and dealing with the consequences is part of the NOT GAME.

Now, some small amounts of NOT GAME are necessary. But the amount of NOT GAME that’s necessary is actually very, very small. Like tiny. Like, you might as well just assume that anything that is NOT GAME needs to be skipped. And even things that are really, really on the edge between GAME and NOT GAME need to be left on the cutting room floor. It is impossible to get the amount of NOT GAME down to zero. But that should be your goal.

Let me give you an example of some NOT GAME that one of my GMing friends thinks is GAME. It illustrates my point perfectly. And I know lots of GMS make this same mistake. So, my friend shouldn’t feel bad. Merely mediocre. Average. Just another standard GM in the crowd. Shout out to BT. You’re one in a million. Literally.

Anyway, at the end of each day travel across the wilderness, this GM, BT, tells the players that it is getting dark and night is coming and asks them if they want to make camp. And they do. And then BT asks if they are going to have anyone keep watch at night. And they do. And then BT asks who is taking which watch shift. Sound familiar?

Now, on the surface, it seems like the players are making choices. And they are. They are choosing to camp, choosing to keep watch, and choosing a watch rotation. But the problem is, none of those choices mean anything. Because, literally, they are the same choices they always make. And the same choices every party always makes whenever night falls. Everyone travels by day and sleeps at night. And everyone maintains some kind of watch rotation or casts an alarm spell or something. Hell, my players usually do both. Spells and lookouts.

The point is, those decisions aren’t meaningful decisions because there’s not really any good reason to change things up. Oh, sure, sometimes there is. Sometimes, when the party is on the run and they need to squeeze an extra few hours of travel out of every day to keep ahead of the bad guys, then they might try to travel into the night. For a while, anyway. But, that’s the rare exception.

As for the watch rotation, well, that’s a meaningless decision too. I mean, I know it’s all about knowing who is awake at what time in case something terrible happens. It’s so that if the GM decides something goes bump in the night at 2:00 AM, he knows who hears it and can run that scene. But, there’s actually a quicker way to figure that out. It’s called, “assume everyone takes a shift on lookout duty and then roll randomly to determine on who’s shift the bump happens.”

And that is why I said that GAME happens when the characters are making meaningful decisions. Decisions that are based on resolving internal conflicts or dilemmas and that have substantial consequences and repercussions and whose consequences follow from the choice. I mean, sure, it seems like deciding who is awake at what time has important consequences when wolves surround the camp, but the problem is that the wolves will surround the camp at some random time in the night anyway. So, basically, picking your watch rotation is as consequential as carefully picking your lottery numbers.

Another thing that is usually NOT GAME but often gets confused for GAME is die rolls. Like, for example, when another mediocre GMing friend of mine deals with navigation. And tracking. According to the rules, whenever you’re traveling from one place to another, the party is supposed to make periodic die rolls to make sure they end up where they want to or to stay on track. Which, fine, that’s an okay way of handling things. Not great. There’s better. The problem is that the period die rolls are actually NOT GAME. Because there’s no decision involved. And so, they should just be rolled in the background. And the players don’t even need to be involved.

See, if the players set out from Blunderberg intending to travel to Port Titsup, the players are pretty much just going to keep on course for that entire time unless something substantial happens. They are not going to suddenly wake up on day three of the six-day trip and say, “we suddenly turn off the path and walk in a random direction just to see what happens.” They stated a goal – an intention, if you will – and they described a way of achieving that goal – an approach, you could call it – and now that task needs to be resolved. “We want to go to Port Titsup by navigating the wilderness on foot.” That’s the GAME part. And then they either reach Port Titsup safely or else they realize seven days later they are lost. Those are the results of their actions and thus also the GAME part. The s$&% in between the choice to travel and the outcome? That’s actually NOT GAME! Even if you need six die rolls to figure out if it happens.

And yes, I am FULLY F$&%ING AWARE that I am making a damned good argument for NOT making all those die rolls every day about whether you navigate successfully or anything else. Because once upon a time, I told you one die roll is enough. And it STILL. F$&%ING. IS.

And yes, I am also suggesting that if there is a good road or navigable path that the party is following, that they don’t need any die rolls to get where they are going. If the action is “we want to travel from Blunderburg to Port Titsup via that perfectly navigable, marked, paved road,” then as soon as I ask “can that action fail,” I realize there’s nothing to roll. They just make the damned trip.

See, there’s some actions that, by their nature, smear the resolution out over long periods of game time. But they are still just actions. And the basic rules of action adjudication don’t change just because you need six die rolls to resolve the action. But remember, the action adjudication part – determining the outcome – is NOT GAME. It’s the RNG deciding what the resolution is.

Running in the Background

I don’t often encourage GMs to think like computers because the major thing that makes TTRPGs great is that they are administered by human brains instead of computers. But there are some things computers are actually kind of good at. And one of them is doing s$&% in the background and just showing me the result.

For example, let’s say the party is going to travel from Blunderburg to Port Titsup. And let’s say there isn’t a perfectly serviceable road. Let’s say there’s just wilderness between the two. So, the party might get lost. They might not reach Port Titsup. Now, I do need some die rolls. Suppose, for some stupid reason, I decide they need to navigate every day. And if they blow a navigation check, they become lost. Is there any reason I can’t just grab six d20s, roll them all, and see if any of them are failures?

It’s the same with random encounter checks. If the party is traveling for a week, I can roll a week’s worth of random encounter checks all in one go to determine how many times the party gets stopped by something. And this is why, by the way, I spent all that time talking about the Tension Pool vis a vis wilderness travel and what “normal” travel looked like and why it was okay to just roll a whole damned pool at once. Because if the party is just traveling normally, yes, the Tension Pool really does turn into a “random event check.” Working as intended, kiddos.

After the action is declared, you – the GM – need to do whatever you need to do to resolve that action and determine the outcome. But you don’t need to bother the players with that s$&%. And you don’t need to do anything else while you’re resolving it. And I promise, at the end, I’ll give you an example of perfectly normal wilderness travel done the right way.

But, I want to mention something else some GMs do that is really f$&%ed up and a phrase I heard A LOT when running my diagnostic on how bad the GMing community was doing.

When I Want it to Matter

One of the things I heard a lot of GMs say in a lot of different contexts was that some things were GAME “when I want them to matter” but NOT GAME at all other times. For example, things like navigation and random encounters in the wilderness. The basic practice seems to be this. “If I want navigation TO MATTER, then I resolve travel action by action and narrate the passage of days and roll things and all that crap. But if I don’t want it TO MATTER, I just say ‘you travel for three days and get to where you are going.'”

With all due respect to my mediocre GMing friends, that’s pretty f$&%ed up. I mean, do you even know what a role-playing game is?! That’s no different from the GMing saying “this encounter is a combat encounter and nothing you – the players – do to avoid or avert the fight will get you out of it.” Which, admittedly, a lot of GMs do.

You don’t get to do that. That’s an abuse of GMing power. Your job is to describe the situation, ask the players what the characters do, resolve the action, and describe the result. And your job is also to maintain the three hearts of the game: agency, consistency, and engagement. The minute you use different rules depending on whether you want something to matter or not, you’re breaking agency, you’re breaking consistency, and you’re not resolving actions and describing the result. And if you need a refresher on this s$&%, maybe you should grab a copy of my book.

When you travel from Point A to Point B, you need to be able to navigate to Point B. Roads, rivers, or a landmark at your endpoint that is visible from your starting point make it so that navigation is very unlikely to fail. Otherwise, you might miss your target and end up wandering the wilderness. That’s reality. You can’t just decide sometimes that doesn’t work that way. Or else the players will never know when they have to worry about navigating.

And note, someday, I’m going to write an article about the magical power that modern people ascribe to maps because they are used to carrying accurate maps drawn by satellites that also track their exact location at all times. Navigating with a map before the modern era is actually rarely a “can’t fail, no roll” situation. But I digress.

Same with random encounters. Those things, Tension Pools, navigation checks, random encounter tables, all that crap, they are there for you to use to determine the outcome of actions. When the players travel from place to place, you use those rules to determine how the travel goes. But not at random. Sorry. If you don’t want navigation to matter, put a road or give the PCs a guide who never fails. But don’t just shove the way the world works aside.

Narrating the Results and Knowing Where to Stop

Ultimately, if you haven’t realized it by now, the real point of all of this is to show you that everything in the game – even wilderness travel – falls under the same basic GMing skills as everything else. Action adjudication and narration. All of the problems with how to handle wilderness travel – and social interactions and all sorts of other weird situations – they all arise because GMs forget that s$&% and think those things need to be special. They aren’t. They don’t.

The players state an action. That action includes or implies a goal, something they want to accomplish, and it includes an approach, a method by which they think they can achieve their goal. “I attack the ogre with my longsword” is no different from “I lie to the guard and claim I have authorization from the king to enter the room” is no different from “we travel the road on foot to Blunderburg” is no different from “I kick open the door” is no different from “I search the treasure chest for signs of a trap.” They are all exactly the f$&%ing same thing.

And once the players have declared an action, your job – as GM – is to make sure you have all the information you need to resolve the action. And to make sure the players understand the consequences of their actions to the extent that they should. “Okay, but you have disadvantage on attacks because of that poison” or “do you have anything to back up your claim like that forged note with the king’s seal” or “that trip will likely take a week if you travel at a normal pace; is that okay and do you have enough food to cover the trip.”

Once you have all of the information you need to resolve the action, you resolve it. You call for die rolls or make die rolls yourself. If there’s a lot of dice that need to be rolled and a lot of things that need to be determined, you do that stuff in the background. Roll random encounter checks for however many days you need, roll navigation checks, roll stealth or perception checks, whatever has to be rolled. Make note of the results and figure out what that says about travel. And then, you narrate the results and move to the next decision point.

If six days of travel pass uneventfully and the party ends up where they meant to be, you narrate that. “You travel along the winding coast road for six days and then reach Port Titsup. Mark off six days of food.” Done and done. You need no more than that. It’s not hard. It’s not rocket science. That said, you should probably embellish a little. You are supposed to bring the world to life.

Of course, if the results aren’t so favorable, you need to figure out when those unfavorable results need a response. You need to know whether to stop the narration and invite another set of decisions. For example, if your rolls indicate that the party will have a random encounter on the third day, you probably want to stop at the moment when they become aware of the impending encounter and ask for actions. “There’s a sound of crashing in the underbrush along the road. A snarling beast leaps from the bushes into the road and charges the party, what do you do?” Standard stuff.

For that reason, I advise you to make things like random encounter checks, Tension Pool checks, navigation checks, and tracking checks, one at a time for each day of travel. You still make them quietly behind the screen. In the background. But when one of them goes wrong, that might indicate you need to narrate the results up to that point and then seek a decision. For example, if the party is traveling and navigating for six days, I grab a d20 and 6d6 to roll the navigation check and tension pool. I know what I need to see on the d20 to count for a successful navigation check. I roll it all at once. If there’s no complication and the navigation check passes, I pick them up and roll for the next day and the next day and the next day. You can quickly burn through several days like that, looking for a result that interrupts travel.

Once something does go bad, I figure out where I have to stop the action. For example, once the party is lost, they might not notice they are lost right away. So, now I have to roll a check each day for them to notice being lost and roll a tension pool check each day for a complication. If they don’t notice they are lost, they keep traveling gormlessly in the wrong direction and I make note of how many days they’ve gone in the wrong direction. Once they should have reached their destination – say, after seven days – I tell them “okay, after traveling for seven days, you are not even in sight of Port Titsup. You’re lost. Mark off seven days of food.” Now they can panic and start making decisions again.

On top of that, I also know things they don’t. For example, I know that a troll has taken up residence on the bridge four days out of Blunderburg. So, I am going to stop the action there because something is going to happen. “On the fourth day out of Blunderburg, you cross a big bridge over a river and a cliched troll wearing a goatskin loincloth jumps out and demands a toll.”

In general, though, as long as everything goes as expected and nothing changes or no new information gets revealed, all you need is a single sentence of narration to resolve the action. And when things do change, you cover everything before the change with a single sentence. And when the party says “we resume our trip,” you go back to resolving the trip in the background until it’s over or the next change happens. And then you cover all of that with one sentence.

That’s not to say, by the way, you can’t add a few extra sentences of narration now and again. And that’s where the idea of transitions come in. Because whenever you drop out of narration and go back into setting the scene and asking the players what they do, the current scene has to make sense in the context of the previous scene and all changes have to be accounted for. So, if the party is traveling from Blunderburg, which is in the rocky hills, to Port Titsup, which is on a forested coast, you probably want to make sure you mention the terrain change as well as the amount of time that has passed. Something like, “you spend three days crossing the rugged, rocky hills around Blunderburg. On the fourth day, the landscape starts to become gentler. Exposed rock ridges give way to rolling, grassy hills with an occasional stand of trees. The air becomes warmer and wetter. On the fifth day, the trees become denser and soon you’re winding through a thick forest. On the sixth day, the forest suddenly ends. The ground slopes sharply down to a sandy, grassy seashore. A few hundred yards up the coast, you see the shining white walls of Port Titsup.” That’s more than a sentence, but it’s still not stopping the action every few minutes to ask the players whether they continue doing what they’ve already decided they were going to do. It makes it clear how the actual GAME parts of the game connect together. And it brings the world to life. Which is a part of the whole “engagement” thing.

And that’s the power of good editing.