Day 24 Prompt: Distance
Week 5 Prompt: Emotion
Weekday Prompt: Fair of Face
We have a new weekly prompt of “Emotion”, and we’ve cycled back to the weekday prompt of “Fair of Face”. The Day 24 prompt for the RPGaDAY 2026 Challenge is Distance. So, what am I going to do with this one? I’m going to lay down some common sense.
When characters need to get somewhere, then remember this simple rule. The game should move at the speed of plot. Think about it. When John McClaine was moving through the ducts at Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard, we saw the character-building moments. But we don’t see him going through every inch of the ducts. We didn’t see every light-year that the USS Voyager traveled to get home, or all the steps that Phileas Fogg took on his 80-day journey. We see the parts that help the story.
So, with the players controlling their characters, we don’t need to see everything they do all day. Even during the gaming session. Focus on the parts that enhance the story, build the characters, or are just entertaining. There was one game that I was involved in where the GM made the players roll just to dock their starship. It wasn’t a challenging event, but it made the players freeze for a second because there was no helmsman that was a PC. They eventually remembered: “Oh yea, we have Ensign so-and-so who can do that” I remember rolling my eyes thinking this interaction didn’t help. The ship was never really in any danger; we weren’t collecting in game currency (like momentum), the scene didn’t really enhance the game. In my humble opinion, it should have been skipped. “Ok you’ve ordered your helmsman to dock, and you hurry to the Admiral’s office for your briefing.”
If there is a distance between plot points is where you get the characters to assist the gamemaster. Hopefully you’ve already had a session zero where you know some of the goals the players want to do with their characters. “In the seven days it took to travel to Promise Station describe what your character did to improve their fencing skills.” Perhaps that could be worth a die roll to see how well they did on that front.
Another GM trick that I just recently used is correspondence from connections the characters have. This is a good way to get PC knowledge into the minds of the players. This allows them to contribute to the game when clues pop up that their character can assist with. Just before session two of my Star Trek Adventures campaign (yea, I know I need to post play reports here) I sent emails to my players with different nuggets of information. Two were personal correspondence letters from contacts which were directly tied into the next session. The CO, XO and Chief of Security all got the same security briefing that was sent out by sector command. Some of the nuggets were valid; others were just there for flavoring. The Chief Engineer got a subspace message from a friend in the Quartermaster Division talking about what supply requests were and were not fulfilled. This helped when the ship went into battle, and the character already knew what was missing out of inventory for repairs. The Chief of Communications got a duty report from the third shift which really didn’t connect to the upcoming session but did still give them some ‘this is real’ vibes on what happened between sessions. Some time and distance had happened between session one and two and the players noticed it, but it didn’t drag down the game. It also kept the players engaged between sit-down sessions as some players sent character responses to me. And when player A popped up with “well this unknown term came up” then player B was able to quickly say “Oh, that’s this…” without hearing it from the GM before they parroted it out to the rest of the table. I received several compliments about the between-game emails and how it helped with the roleplaying in the session.
So, if your players are on their way to Far2Go to reach Promise Station or traveling through the jungles to find the Well of Desires in a lost city you don’t have to track every mile. But you can make it feel like it was a long distance by the way you presented it. If done right, your games can run a lot smoother.
What suggestions would you recommend for keeping travel distant without drying up the adventure? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.