An Approach To Fabula Ultima Travel Rolls

15 Sep, 2025

As part of prepping the next adventure in my Fabula Ultima campaign I am looking at how travel rolls work. Mechanically they are straight-forward - use die size to set danger level, have the party roll the travel die when they move one day's worth of travel, then on a 1 they find something good and on a 6+ they find something dangerous. Some class skills and items can affect the roll, but otherwise it is simple and elegant.

I approach travel in RPGs from a resource management perspective. Chalk it up to playing The Oregon Trail, Final Fantasy, and The Final Fantasy Legend/SaGa as a kid. Fabula Ultima's key resource management cycle has player characters expending HP and MP until they get too low, then using IP to replenish those attributes with potions or tents. Again, pretty straight-forward.

Fabula Ultima's default advice is dangerous encounters should be hazards that cause flat HP damage if they aren't avoided or overcome or else conflict encounters, i.e., a random encounter with a foe. Player characters only die in Fabula Ultima when their player decides to sacrifice them and it is dramatically appropriate to sacrifice them. While it will vary from game-to-game, dying to a random thunderstorm or pack of bandits you encounter on the road isn't dramatic enough to warrant sacrificing the character. So if character death isn't a risk, what are?

I settled on resource depletion, negative effects, and time. Resource depletion includes losing HP, MP, or IP. Negative effects include status effects, disabling or limiting the effectiveness of character abilities, or loss of equipment. Time is how much actual play time it takes to resolve. I then structured this into four types of encounters based around Time Cost (TC) and Resource Cost (RC)

1. Low Time Cost / Low Resource Cost (LTC/LRC): Encounters deplete target common resources or apply low-risk negative effects that can be resolved quickly in actual playtime. Examples include taking HP or MP damage or acquiring a status effect, all of which can be fixed by spending MP or IP. If it can be cleared by pitching a Tent or stopping to rest in a town, then it is LTC/LRC.
2. High Time Cost / Low Resource Cost (HTC/LRC): Encounters that deplete common resources or apply low-risk negative effects, but which take a notable amount of time to resolve (30 - 120 minutes is a good rule of thumb). Most conflict scenes are HTC/LRC encounters.
3. Low Time Cost / High Resource Cost (LTC/HRC): Encounters that apply powerful but temporary negative effects that can't be removed with a resting scene, but also don't take particularly long to resolve. An example might be a strange fairy cursing a character so they start the next three conflicts with Weak. The encounter with the fairy is short, but the consequence is spending three conflicts debilitated and having to decide whether to spend resources clearing the status effect each time.
4. High Time Cost / High Resource Cost (HTC/HRC): Encounters that apply powerful negative effects that can only be resolved by spending a notable amount of playtime to resolve. An example is a bandit stealing an important item that the party can only retrieve by diverting from the adventure to chase the bandit down to her lair.

From here I can map encounters to the scaling dice sizes, working from LTC/LRC encounters being more prevalent on lower die roll results toward HTC/HRC encounters occurring more frequently on higher die rolls. Here is how I distributed them.

*Bolded numbers indicate shifts in the size of the travel die rolled.

This results in the following odds of a given type of encounter occurring.

I distributed the encounters where I did with the idea that I want there to be a small chance of a more costly encounter occurring within a tier and with HTC/HRC encounters being very rarely encountered. And then I stuck one of those HTC/HRC encounters at 13 because I think it's cute to toss that on an unlucky number.

Is this approach good? I don't know! I have yet to test it. It certainly appeals to my dungeon-game, resource-depleting sensibilities. It also gives me a framework for designing encounters for different regions of my game. Even if my players never pick-up on the design philosophy I think having this rubric to work with will help me with prep.

#fabula ultima #rpg #ttrpg