The main pitfall of travel scenarios is keeping them from turning into aimless wandering. With a dungeon, you can more or less force the issue easily just by how it's put together. With travel, it's still only slightly trickier to funnel them towards the end while still making it feel like they have choices.
I would also put before any anti-cantrip posters: how is it functionally different from the wizard with a crossbow? Most cantrips to 1d4 iirc, which is pretty piddling damage, and about the same or less than a basic ranged weapon the wizard probably is proficient in. Because it is magical? Yeah, no shit, it's a magician, you chose the class to do magic stuff. Because it is elemental? 1d4 elemental damage isn't going to be the make or break on any encounter, unless they are trolls or something where dealing just 1 damage cancels something out, but that is still not that different than throwing acid or alchemical weapons, which do MORE damage anyway. Some systems don't even have that, and the wizard just sort of stands around doing nothing as a result. I distinctly remember early game wizards in BG1 being kind of underwhelming because they just ended up as shitty fighters for 90% of fights because they would fire off their two magic missiles and be left with their staff to bonk people with.
3rd edition in general suffered from the problem of requiring far too many feats for melee characters to not be dog shit, or giving you what seemed like some marginal coolness in exchange for a nut-kicking penalty to hit.
5e cantrips do higher damage, but no ability bonus, so in practice they do about half the damage of a weapon attack.
Shows how much interaction I have had with 5e then, because I was clearly thinking about PF1e's implementation.
TBF some of the OSR systems include crit fail/success tables.
For most multi-attacks, unless RAW says different, natty 1s past the opening attack just miss and I don't bother starting any critical fail flowchrts. That said I'll also often drop the rewards for critical hits.
Every party member is a
Crossbow requires the Wizard to put points into a stat that isn't INT, so cry some more.
The thing is that few systems have engaging or interesting or even viable crafting systems out of the box, which means 9/10 you have to either make up some bullshit or suffer. Items like wands are either single-use, which we return to the fundamental problem of "fire off your limited spells and dick around", or rechargeable, then we have to have another system dedicated to restoring them OR they are per encounter, or day, or whatever.
Buddy, I roll for my characteristics; assigning points to a secondary attribute isn't the problem. The problem isn't that you have to have a decent dex, as you should probably have that as your second or third best attribute for things like AC, since you don't have armor, or touch attacks that a lot of good, low-level spells need to connect. Rather, it is the fact that you simply don't get additional attacks or bonuses to hit from class features, regardless of edition or system. You just end up as the shittiest fighter in the universe because you have no more spells.
There are no crafting abilities for low-level wizards in the old D&D editions. Even in ACKS, you can't do shit until 5th level, which takes a while to hit. This isn't a solution at all. If the DM isn't going to be fairly liberal with wands, you go session after session with your thumb up your ass because your ranged to-hit is garbage, and you can't fire into melee anyway.
That's kind of the world of being a low level spellcaster. You have to make what little you have count. In exchange for being outright puny early on, you get incredibly good at damage dealing and versatile.
Given how often travel can offline rails, I find having a few different options on hand as detours help a lot. You don't put a ton of thought or focus into them, just doing napkin notes for what they'd be like until they declare their intention, and then fill out as you need until the next game.
This was an incredibly stupid and fun game. Most of the gameplay was rolling giant handfuls of six siders.
No, this could just be a CoC one-shot where the players are tourists during the bite of '87 or whatever the disaster is.
I think it would really work as a short little campaign if you had a box set full of feelies and handouts to really sell it as a "real" place. Like a map, adverts, a little visitor's guide, a softcover info book. Play up the clash between the surreal and otherworldly with the mundane. But as a whole campaign? Nah gtfo.
The DM is supposed to be fairly liberal with magic items. And if you use the alternate XP rules, magic-users should be leveling up from finding arcane knowledge and artifacts. That is, they should be avoiding combat at every and all costs. Paying off the local goblins so they can record the arcane runes inside the ruins they've made their base is the correct path for a medieval nerd.
It's still boring to not have anything to do. The wizard getting to roll a single die with no bonuses to do damage breaks nothing.
