And then you have a nice winter, whilst the wizard slaves in the lab...

[Mark]

There is variety. This is good.

The best of campaigns I have run and in which I have played, have always been paced in such a way as to have long stretches of time pass as PCs pursued interests outside of straight up adventuring. The GM just needs to present an environment in which not only are such pursuits possible but rewarding in some fashion (not necessarily, though possibly, through XP). It's a pacing issue that every GM eventually has to balance against the intrigue and more compeling aspects of adventuring that many players associate with RPGing.

 

[Gez]

In the campaign I DM, the party bought a wagon so that the wizard could make magic items during wilderness travel. So if there's a combat encounter, the wizard has to either forsake the item and waste what was already invested in, or hope the rest of the party won't need her and will be able to protect the wagon from any sort of disruption.

So, they travelled very slowly, doing a lot of scouting around to avoid making any encounter, slowing the trip so much it didn't make them save time compared to fast trip plus downtime.