Terrain movement modifiers in AD&D 2e

 This isn’t really spelled out in the books so I’m documenting it here. 

Terrain Costs for Overland Movement are multiplied to the distance of the terrain. 

For example, travel over 5 miles of rocky Desert terrain, with a terrain cost of 2, becomes effectively 10 miles of travel.

Daily travel time in AD&D 1e

The PHB states that the players can move their inches rate in miles in "a half day's travel". Would that imply that a full day's travel is double that number? One would assume that means 12 hours, but if you cross-reference those numbers with the DMG, you'll notice those numbers are still too low. But they do work out if you use 14-16 hours of travel per day.

AD&D 1e assumes 16 hours of travel per day.

It may not be the most realistic metric, but I like the idea that characters are spending the entire day sans rest time, traveling. The 12 hour travel rule otherwise gives characters 4 hours of downtime in which they are not sleeping or traveling. AD&D 2e explicitly states 10 hours of travel, allowing for 6 hours of downtime and 8 hours of sleep every day. Kind of a waste, I think, even if it is more realistic.

Random encounters shouldn’t feel random

 They should feel like they’ve been there the whole time.

Final Fantasy like random encounters are annoying and boring, don’t be like Final Fantasy.

Even though you, the GM, have randomly determined an encounter, the result of that encounter is now a permanent fixture in your world. If it was a monster that your PCs have killed, it’s corpse now stays in the location where it fell, and could lead to further complications in your game world.

Don’t make monsters just jump on the players at random intervals, make it seem like the monsters were just on their way and were going to cross that area all along, and the player characters just happened to run into them.

Wilderness encounters should not be like dungeon encounters. When I make wilderness encounters, they are a full dungeon or of a scale such that they cannot be resolved with a single RP instance or combat round. You can call my wilderness encounters “wandering dungeons.” 

If you don’t want to do that, and want little wandering encounters in the wilderness, then make multiple encounters per day. The AD&D DMG has a very tight method of rolling an encounter check multiple times per day, depending on area terrain type and population density. Any other method can be used as well, for example rolling a check, selecting an encounter from a table, and then rolling another die to choose the number of encounters. Space these encounters out during the day or place them apart in distance, and then describe how the players travel into them. Your map does not need to be that precise in scale, as long as you can believably narrate your players traveling from one encounter to another until they make it out of the hex.

New Wilderness travel rules

 You’ve all been handling wilderness travel wrong! The wilderness only exists as a means for linking dungeons together! Every encounter in the wilderness should be a mini dungeon! The wilderness should be static so the players can know where everything is and can return to it! A wilderness with random generation and small scale random encounters is indistinguishable from a dungeon and offers no unique variety, it is glorified set dressing!

 I would never force my players to travel linearly through the wilderness. They can take any route they want, the point is that the relationship between all elements in the wilderness is static. The players know exactly where they’re going and what they’ll run into on the way (except unexplored areas)

Wilderness encounters should be large enough such that they cannot be resolved in a single combat turn or RP event. Wilderness monsters should be in a monster camp or a full traveling army, not bands of 4 or 5 as in a dungeon. Getting past a wilderness encounter should be a half-day or full day event itself.

Even friendly encounters should be large in scale. Instead of meeting a peddler by the side of the road, the players should run into an entire merchant caravan on route.

Towns are just friendly dungeons. The wilderness only exists to link dungeons together (and “random” dungeons that we call wandering monsters) 

 In this method, the players can see the hexes and move hex-by-hex. When players enter a hex, I can ask them if they want to continue their journey, or spend the rest of the day exploring the hex. If they choose to explore, I reveal to them all the features of the hex (typically three). If they choose to travel, I give them a chance to accidentally find one feature of the hex, and I increase the chance of a wilderness encounter.

My wilderness travel rules

OD&D and AD&D use a default wilderness scale of 1 hex = 5 miles. B/X and BECMI use a default scale of 1 hex = 6 miles.

In my personal game, I don't let my players see the hexes. Instead I let them choose a compass direction and a length (distance or time) in which they want to travel, and I then describe what they see and experience on the way. This roots them firmly in the perspective of their own character, instead of breaking immersion into a top-down map view, and they never see the changes in scale. Ideally, the experience for the players would be identical whether they are traveling across the overworld or through a dungeon.

On the DM side, I use hexes as handy boundaries for a collection of stuff. As the players' party enters a hex, I'll describe the features within the hex that they can see. This is similar to a videogame like Skyrim or GTA where, as the player avatar nears a location, the compass fills with icons of interesting things to do. In practice, this means telling the players something like "You see a stone tower off in the distance" or "You can see smoke rising from a firepit between a camp of tents", or "you can see a band of goblins down the path".

I never force my players to stick within the bounds of the hex. The PC party travels according to their own judgement and I simply describe what's nearby, even though they would actually be "between" two hexes.

A wilderness travel scale in terms of hours is useful for certain situations and types of terrain, but sometimes days is a more wieldly scale.

I haven't yet tested the mapping procedure for cities by individual streets that I described in this post, but I intend to subject some poor party to it anyway.

Wilderness as a dungeon

Here's a thought: Treat city streets as corridors of a dungeon that players must move through and map. Of course, since they're outdoors they move at a faster rate - 10 yards per turn of mapping, or 100 yards per turn not mapping.  They can accurately map out a city, and the DM can explain it, by walking down the streets and noting intersections and important buildings along the sides. Of course no one does it this way, because it's too cumbersome.

Traps in the wilderness are way more natural to my imagination. Snare traps hidden under a pile of leaves, pits dug into the ground and covered with moss, spikes dug into the ground, nets in tree canopies, razor wire across barks, bear traps in the ground. These are all great traps that have actually been used in the real world. It's gruesome but the fighting in Vietnam and WW2 in the Pacific have many examples that can be used for inspiration.

Wandering monsters actually have a reason to wander in the wilderness. In a dungeon, it's assumed that they're aimlessly walking about, or occasionally stalking the players. In the wilderness, they could just be going somewhere. In the case of orcs and goblins, they can actually be an organized band on patrol. Maybe they're actually a unit marching to a destination and run into the players by accident. Maybe they're camping and taking a rest. Maybe they found the players' tracks, and are actively following the players. Maybe the players accidentally walked into the territory of a large predator. All of these create encounters with a purpose.

Wilderness travel, for small scale exploration or town activities, should be measured in terms of hours. The conversion is simple, 60 yards for every hour of travel in an unknown wilderness, if mapping carefully, so a character with 12" movement can cover 720 yards per hour.
Without mapping, that's 7200 yards per hour, or roughly 4.09 miles per hour, which is about average human walking speed IRL.

Also, moving over the hex map - Give the players a large radius of sight, but don't reveal the whole map. Have the players move with natural directions - orienting towards a landmark, or a compass direction, and setting a distance. Reveal hexes according to the players' sight radius, or multiple hexes at once. Obviously this technique is meant more for VTT that handles line of sight for you.