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.