A place to discuss the latest version of Dungeons and Dragons, the fifth edition, known during the playtest as D&D Next.
I bought the D&D 5e Adventures in Middle-Earth books and I gotta say I love the look of the journey rules. Cubicle 7's books are basically a 5e conversion of The One Ring roleplaying system. Basically:
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Journeying is meant to be the way it is in Tolkien's novels. The road is dangerous and exhausting, and traveling to a destination is called a journey phase. In a journey phase, players cannot benefit from a long rest. Like in the novels, a journey across Middle-Earth could take the better part of a year or more.
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There are random tables for the three stages of the journey: Embarkation, journeying, and arrival. The results of the embarkation table could make the journey more or less difficult. The journeying tables are basically a skill challenge, and the arrival table is influenced by how you rolled on the embarkation table and the random journey events that came up during the journeying tables.
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The hex map that comes with the book categorizes the level of danger certain parts of Middle-Earth are. The area right around Lake-Town is easy travel. Places more severely affected by Sauron, like Angmar and Mordor, would be the most dangerous terrain. The danger of a map region affects the difficulty of the journey rolls, and even makes travel through it take up to 5 times longer than normal in the most dangerous regions.
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There are four roles to divide up among the party. There's Guide, Scout, Lookout, and Hunter. Each role is responsible for rolling skill checks during the journey, but a lot of the important rolls are made by the Guide.
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Finally, in contrast to the difficulty of journeys, there's a Fellowship Phase. This is basically downtime rules for between adventures, A.K.A., when Bilbo writes his book. The players could travel to any place they've been before during the campaign or to the place their character is from and recover from exhaustion on the road, or do other typical D&D downtime stuff like roleplaying, training new skills and languages, etc. This phase should take about a season.
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Caveat: Killing the PCs with exhaustion levels on a travel segment isn't fun or interesting, so DMs are encouraged to let their players find Sanctuaries if they're in deep trouble, and players could even spend their Fellowship Phase establishing a sanctuary at any appropriate place they've journeyed to in the past. Maybe it's an camp where Mirkwood elves live or even Beorn's house in the Wilderlands. Also, this system assumes that the DM will not be throwing months' worth of random orc encounters at the party.
As a newish DM of 5e, and RPGs in general, I love the look of the journey rules. I ran Storm King's Thunder last year, and if I could go back in time and do it all again, I would definitely use these rules, especially for Chapter 3's free-roaming, player-driven sandbox. There's some other stuff that I'd have to keep in mind if using this on a higher-magic setting like Forgotten Realms. Middle-Earth doesn't have magical healers like clerics, and that setting doesn't really use a ton of high CR monsters.
In short, buy these books. They are so cool, and a real testament to the versatility of 5e's design. Has anybody here tried using these or a similar system with a more traditional D&D world?