Fixing Intracity Travel

Your players are in one part of a tabletop city. For their next task, they must travel to a different section of that same city. How do you make that process engaging?

This is a question that our patrons have asked repeatedly since we launched Borough Bound in 2021. We pride ourselves on filling our RPG cities with compelling locations and characters, but even a simple village sketched on a napkin or described in a few sentences can raise the same question: how do you handle the interstitial moments as players move from one district to another?

Let’s explore some methods for improving intracity travel, starting with my boldest suggestion.

Just Skip It

Varied pacing is critical to a tabletop campaign. A campaign that oscillates between dungeoneering, downtime, exploration, tense combat, and strategic socializing tends to keep players more engaged than a campaign that focuses too much on any one element. Most GMs know this, and it’s the key reason why so many want to improve intracity travel.

I’ll play devil’s advocate. If you and your players find the act of moving from one part of the city to another boring, why include it at all? That is: why not just smash cut to the next critical scene once your players say “hey, we should probably go to location x.”

You might say “this doesn’t answer the question, Will.” I disagree! You do not need to mechanicalize or narrativize every in-game second of play. It’s entirely acceptable to cover intracity travel with one sentence, something like “you make your way to the noble district and quickly find the lord you were seeking.” If you have no particular goal in mind for your intracity travel, simply excise it from your session.

Ultimately, that’s what this is about. To make getting around the city “better,” you first have to decide what you hope to gain. If you don’t have any particular goal, just ditch it! 

Narrate Sensory Experience

Maybe you want to use local traversal as an excuse to deepen immersion. If so, the most important thing you can do is to describe what the adventurers experience as they make their way across the city. When your players say where they want to go next, they let you take the reins. It’s now the GM’s turn to paint a vivid picture of the richly detailed city.

A classic piece of GM advice is to use the five traditional senses as prompts for what to say. What do the adventurers see when they look around? What is that odor coming from the manholes? If your barbarian were to munch some street food, what would they taste? Does the wintry air feel harsh and oppressive or exhilarating and refreshing? What are the sounds of sandals crunching in sand, street musicians performing in nearby taverns, or corrupt guards laughing at desperate refugees from atop the city’s walls? 

The whole “5 senses trick” is not a requirement but instead a shorthand. It’s a way to get you describing more than just what immediately comes to mind when considering the city. It may also help engage the senses of your actual friends—that is: the literal people at your table and not just their characters. 

If you’re a new GM, you can write some notes down ahead of time to help make this process easier. Improvising details like these will come more easily once you’ve practiced, but having a handful of potential sensory experiences written down can go a long way. Consider bullet points like these:

• The aroma of browning butter at the lord’s manor
• The grunts of vultures pecking at carrion
• The bold colors of textiles hanging from shopfronts 

Ideally, you’d cater those bullet points to the relevant district so that you paint a distinct tableau of each part of town, but giving any sort of immersive narration will go a long way. 

Immersion can come at any time, though. What if you instead need to give out key details about the factual state of the game world?

Narrate History and Context

You want a clean break in the action as your players move from district to district, but you also don’t feel a strong need to fill the space with immersive set dressing. Instead, you want to make sure your players understand where the hell they are and what’s significant about it. The goal is contextualization. 

Again, you switch gears away from coordinating your players' actions and into solo GM narration. You use the pause between scenes to explain the key details your party needs to know moving forward. Consider a brief description like this:

Your journey sees you quickly transitioning from outlying farms to sprawling port. This district consisted of barely a handful of homes a decade ago, but the end of the war prompted a rush of investment and migration. There is definitely more economic activity in the city these days, but also more crime, disease, and dissent. Mayor Lockton is officially in charge, but everyone knows that Cy—a crime-lord posing as a fishmonger—really calls the shots. With this in mind, you enter Cy’s market. 

Use this opportunity to share information that the PCs would actually know. You’re not giving them a lore dump or describing something that they’re deducing for themselves along their travel. Instead, you’re reinforcing details that you’ve either already discussed at the table, or you’re explaining aspects of the world that the characters would likely know even if the players don’t. 

There’s a risk, of course, that acting like a tour guide while your players are just trying to get from one place to another might can actually detract from the immersion, or worse: bore the players. Keep it brief and focus on the details that really matter.

If your players are the types to never pay attention unless they’re interacting with the world, then you still have a couple options. 

Roll for Random Encounters

Another classic piece of advice. If you want to make intracity traversal more mechanically engaging, throw encounters at your party. These encounters ideally serve multiple purposes at once: 

1. Add pacing variety
2. Deepen your players' understanding of the city
3. Incorporate compelling randomness
4. Create opportunities for both danger and reward

My suspicion is that this is the most common piece of advice for spicing up intracity travel mechanically. It means your players actually get to do something while traveling about. If you really want to accomplish those four purposes above, a random table of encounters can get you there, but there are some huge drawbacks you should consider. 

Drawbacks

Drawback 1 - Prep Time

If you’ve created your own city, then you won’t just have a perfectly convenient table of encounters lying around. You could snag a more-or-less generic table from some internet resource, but it won’t perfectly fit the city you’ve designed. Hell, even if you’re running a city from an external resource—ahem, perhaps one of our setting guides?—there’s still prep time required to figure out what sorts of stat blocks you’ll need, how you’re going to tie potential encounters to the main plot, etc. This is a nontrivial issue. Even if you pride yourself on the amount of effort you’re willing to expend for the sake of your campaigns, you still have a finite amount of time and energy to dedicate to prep!

Drawback 2 - Slowness

You roll for a random encounter and get some version of “fight a bunch of bad guys.” Combat takes 90 minutes, and the fight doesn't enrich the narrative nearly so much as you’d hoped. Yes, you add variety to the session, but you also spend 90 minutes on trash mobs. This won’t always happen, of course, but random encounters are definitionally random. You can’t say how long they’ll take. Even if the encounter is brief, rolling and conducting the exchange takes at least some amount of time. 

Drawback 3 - Unpredictable Balance

One of the entries on your table is “meet a wandering salesmen who offers cheap magical items.” The other is “fight an enemy with 1,000 HP.” Randomness is the point of a rollable table like this, but that same randomness might complicate efforts to run a balanced campaign. You could make all the options equivalently punishing/rewarding, but that undermines half of the benefits of rolling in the first place!

Drawback 4 - Generic vs. Mandatory

If your table entries are unrelated to your primary plot, they run the risk of feeling wholly generic and unimportant. If they do tie into important narrative elements of your campaign, then you might feel as though you really shouldn’t miss them. In other words, it’s difficult to tune a table of random encounters such that any option feels valuable while no option feels so important that you’d lament its absence. 

Fixing Random Encounters

Despite those drawbacks, I still make use of random encounters during intracity travel with some regularity. Here’s how I address key shortcomings. 

Fix 1 - Only Quick Encounters

A battle against 12 goblins might be easily winnable, but such a fight invariably takes a long time. If you’re going to include combat options in your list of encounters, make sure they skew dangerous but quick: glass cannons work best. Alternatively, consider nixing combat encounters at all! If there positively must be danger, frame threats as traps, inconveniences, or strictly narrative obstacles. 

Fix 2 - Include “No Encounter” on your table

You can easily tweak a table to be more forgiving by adding plenty of options that are some variation of “nothing happens” or “something purely narrative and primarily non-interactive occurs.” If it’s a d10 table of encounters, consider making options 1 through 5 nothing. This way, there’s a bit of excitement every time your party moves about the city, but there’s no guarantee that you're about to have a wrench thrown into your pacing. 

Fix 3 - Plot Adjacency

If something good happens to the party, it need not have any relevance to the plot. They’ll be satisfied if someone shows up and offers something or if they get invited to some secret gala or whatever. If there’s anything dangerous or threatening about an encounter, though, it should probably be adjacent to the plot. That is: not critical to the plot but adding in a wrinkle. Maybe a disgruntled member from an enemy faction wants to attack the party, but, if defeated, this person reveals some compelling auxiliary piece of lore. You don’t want your encounters to feel pointless, especially the ones that primarily slow your party down.

Punt to the Party

I started off spicy by saying you’re allowed to skip travel montages and whatnot. Ready for an even bolder take? Local traversal doesn’t have to be your responsibility. Every once in a while, you can ask your friends how they want to approach the travel. Ask them if they want to take backstreets or the main thoroughfare. Ask them what they talk about as they make their way. Let them roleplay a little scene amongst themselves. Do a frickin’ Sorkin-esque walk and talk where they plan their next moves en route. From the standpoints of both pacing and player agency, letting your table take charge during these moments often works best.

The obstacle to this is pretty simple, of course. Your players might not have anything to say. They might just groan “yeah, I don’t know, I guess we just walk in silence to the next spot.” This is an opportunity to prompt them with questions that encourage more compelling self-guided roleplay, but it also might be your cue to expedite the process. If they are telling you that they want to just carry on with the meat of the session, you’re allowed to acquiesce. “Okay, that works. We cut now to the party entering the police station.” That doesn’t make you a pushover. 

Practical Logistics

Maybe you clicked on this blog post because you wanted purely practical guidance on city navigation. You might have questions like:

• How long does it take to push through a mile of thick crowds?
• What’s the going rate for a carriage ride across town?
• If a city has 5,000 people in it, how wide would it actually be?

If you’ve read my other blog posts, you might have predicted my answers to these questions: it doesn’t matter unless you decide it matters. Measure things are broadly as you possibly can. If your players want to visit multiple spots in multiple parts of the city, you’re allowed to be vague. “Yeah, you can do all that, but it’ll take all day.” That’s plenty! You don’t need to calculate that it’d actually take exactly 7.5 hours or whatever. 

If you do want to engage with these questions, make it a story beat instead of a math problem. “You need to reach the vampire’s castle before sundown. It’s a few miles from you. If you really hoof it, you can make it there in time. Roll to see if you have the energy to sprint there despite the busy day you just had.” 

That’s how I like to run campaigns. Don’t try to get super realistic while crunching numbers. Anything that would be too complicated to figure out in a totally fair and logical sense should be decided by GM fiat, maybe with a bit of wiggle room for modification by random rolls. 

What Do You Really Want?

When you say you want to improve intracity travel, you have to first figure out what you think it’s lacking. If you’re just looking for some way to add complexity to proceedings, take a second to deeply consider if the solution is really to add something to intracity travel instead of focusing more on the primary arc of your campaign.

If intracity travel is the target after all, though, you have lots of options.

• If you want your players more engaged, try handing them the reins! Sometimes, the answer is to let your players direct the action.
• If you want to enrich the scene and enhance immersion, narrate the fine details of how your players experience the city. Use the five senses as a jumping off point.
• If you need to give your players a breather while still furthering their understanding of the city, use intracity travel as an opportunity to provide necessary backstory or context. 
• If you want the players to experience random but meaningful challenges and opportunities, roll on an encounter table. Just make sure you don’t fall into the many avoidable pitfalls that rollable tables introduce!
• If you decide that what you really want is to just get on with the plot, don’t make a big fuss out of intracity travel. Jump right to the narrative beats that are actually important.