Travelling action

By kevandish, in Deathwatch Gamemasters

Hi Everyone

I am new to RPG so i have a question. Let's say kill-team need to travel for 45 minutes to get to the destination. So, how will GM make this work ? GM let them teleport to that location or make them walk for 45 minutes? If GM make them walk, how will they role-play when walking for 45 minutes ?

Thanks

Of course you can "teleport them".

The idea here is to make an ellipsis . So what you'd do, basically, is that: "You travel 45 minutes to that location." Then you may add some description about what they can see on their way there (for example, if they are in a desert, if anything is out of the ordinary, if there are buildings around them...). They can as well role play some if they want. Or they may decide that their character remains silent.

That is because the "in game" time (that is, the time of the story you're telling) is different from real-life time, and that means a 45 minutes walk can be resumed in a 5 minutes talk between you and you players if nothing else is needed.

I like to discribe things and have some little event which takes some time.

It helps the players keep track of how much time has passed in game if it takes a few minutes to walk for 45 in game.

Roleplaying is about story telling. If nothing exciting is going to be happening for 45 minutes, you can just say 'You hike through the jungle for 45 minutes', but I prefer to either prepare or ad lib a bit of narrative for such things. Something like:

"You head off towards your objective - several miles through dense jungle. Through this kind of terrain, it would take mortals upwards of 5 hours to blaze a trail, but -as Astartes- the jungle should pose no real obstacle to you and your powered weapons, and estimate that it will take you a little under an hour. You set off; carving a path through the undergrowth; attentive and alert in case of ambush. The jungle is thick with life, and clouds of small avians with bright plumage take to the skies at the sounds of your passing, but no threat is evident: The predators of this jungle seem to sense your power and prowess and steer clear of the Kill-Team. The only delay comes when you encounter a deep ravine filled with rushing water that was not shown on your maps, but you soon bypass the problem by pushing down a suitable tree using your superhuman strength in order to make a natural bridge, and reach your objective in around 45 minutes."

It's a bit of prose that's more interesting to hear than 'you walk for 45 minutes', and shows the players how cool their characters are ('hey, tigers run away from us, we're better than normal people, and we can push frikkin TREES over!')

You can of course expand it and make it interactive: Perhaps having the players come across the ravine and let them figure out how to get across themselves. But generally, I don't make my players sweat stuff that isn't important, and I'm quite happy to narrate them being awesome.

It can be a good time for getting them to dictate a 'standard formation' for future reference, though. That way you'll know who is at the front and who is at the back of the team. Handy to know!

Some players like to interrupt this kind of thing and want to tell you that they're going to start shooting the birds, or that they're going to do things differently. There are times when that's appropriate for them to do, and if they want to detour or involve themselves with an impromptu tiger-hunt, then you can roll with it (but perhaps remind them that they are on a time limit, if that's the case) and let them mess about, or you can subtly (or not very subtly!) hint that you're whisking them through 'a boring bit', and the sooner they let you finish the narrative, the sooner they can get back to killing proper stuff!

It's also important not to really screw over characters when using narrative, nor to make important or crucial choices for them, or make them look like asses without letting them pick the dice up and trying not to be! The above narrative is fine but 'You walk into the jungle, cutting a path through the undergrowth and then there's an avalanche and you all take d10 wounds' is not!