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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hautamaki" data-source="post: 5538194" data-attributes="member: 42219">I too find it somewhat dissatisfying to simply say something like 'okay, you're there now' to hand wave long periods of travel.  So I generally do my best to come up with a couple of ways to make a long travel time actually feel like a long travel time.1) 'random' monster attacks.  These are good but in some systems every combat is meant to be a major event that can take quite a while to resolve, so you have to be careful that you don't start to slow down the gaming session with meaningless encounters that do nothing to advance the plot with systems like that.  Just make the encounter ridiculously easy if that's the case.2) optional encounters; the party comes across tracks left by a cave bear.  The party spots a gryphon flying high over head.  They can choose to track these animals to their lair, for whatever reason, or just ignore them.  My PCs include a ranger who hoped to tame the cave bear and gain it as a loyal battle companion.  It didn't work, so they were forced to kill the cave bear.  Then discovered its lair led to a long lost underground dwarven kingdom.  That was pretty cool; it made a great interlude on their 3 day journey to the army and made that travel time really feel more like 3 days.  Other examples of this could be a village afflicted with some kind of plight the PCs can choose to clear up with a few hours work if they so choose, or not.  The good thing about these optional encounters is that options not chosen by the players always remain available to be chosen at a later time.  Even if they have levelled up and increased in power a lot, hopefully you can scale the encounters up by adding more powerful enemies.3) Encourage role playing between the players by asking how certain characters feel about certain events, or asking a player to tell more about his backstory... in other words, just start up a conversation between the characters to pass the time while they travel.  If you have good players this could be as simple as 'So your characters are travelling down the road; what do they talk about to pass the time?'</blockquote>

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