How do you deal with traveling

[Evilhalfling]

One problem I have with travel recently is that is many cases its not just you travel 4 weeks to get there, but passing through a variety of cities and cultures on the way - most of which they had seen before, but the options in each are slightly differerent. Describing each city change in road condition can verge on being tedious.

As for encounters -
They are 10th level and so I tend to put in something like
"A band of wolves and goblins attack you, they regret it severly, they were carrying about 50 gp and some weapons you can sell if you want to bother. "

At 5th level it would have been a hard fight, but the goblins cant always tell 5th from 10th.
The other one that made me smile is the same group running into a carniverous plant that had nearly killed them at 4th - the female player -
askes "are the berries as good as I remember?" and we move on with nothing more said.

This is while they are traveling in realtivley civilized lands, If there are random ecounters to challange a 10th lvl party, they should have wiped out the same group at lower levels. If they travel to lands not controlled by humans than it gets tougher.

 

[jmucchiello]

If the characters are low-level, I'll usually describe the travel and roll up random wilderness encounters.

When the characters reach mid-to-high level, however, they've gotten strong enough that random wilderness encounters no longer have any element of risk or danger. So when mid-to-high level characters are travelling I usually just skim over it, perhaps having them meet occasional NPCs on the road.

One thing you should always remember about this though is that the characters should still have these low level encounters. Just don't play them out. A pair of wolves will still "check out" the party at night. They just won't advance as close. But with the higher level characters' Spot bonuses, they will spot the wolves.

So one way to handle that is "The day is mostly uneventful except for the occasional wolf or wild boar that strays too close to the party and runs off as you easily intimidate it." If the players say so, they could also have killed such creatures. This allows you to delay the party without wasting a lot of time. "If you are going to cook that boar, it'll take you a few hours out of your travel to make a camp here, set up a roasting pit, etc."

 

[Arnwyn]

The question I'm asking is how do you handle travel and/or make it exciting?

When I DM, the faster the mode of travel, the faster I'll gloss over the travel time.

As many others have mentioned on this thread, travel can be tough and ugly - especially in an undeveloped medieval-type world. Thus, the slower the method of travel, the more painstaking it will be for the characters... and even the players sometimes. Walking is the worst - IMC, we go day by day, rolling encounters each and every day and each and every night.

Traveling by ship, however, would go very quickly IMC. We'd probably just gloss over a 14-day trip very quickly, with the DM simply pointing out things of interest for the sake of the players (and their future reference).

What this method of dealing with travel encourages, IMC, is for the PCs to spend money on resources to make the trip go by faster (just as one who really lived in such a world would do). If walking was glossed over as quickly as a chariot, why would the PCs ever buy a horse and chariot (barring RP reasons, etc)? My players were shocked when (a long time ago) they bought horses for once, and discovered that the overland travel time sped up enormously (and noticeably in game). "Why didn't we do this before?" Duh.

That's how we do it, and it works very well for us.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I do a mix of what's been posted.

In settled areas the encounters tend to be fairly easy to deal with (small pack of wolves, small beasts) though there are still risks (aerial or burrowing creatures, plus bandits). There I focus on the social aspects, providing enough NPCs with flavor that if they want to socialize they can but if not they move on.

In less settled areas I provide the option for them to get involved or continue on at their choice "you notice what appear to be wolves following you" (oh, how I love the phrase "what appear to be"!) Some attacks they avoid by speed (flight), size (1 gnome, 1 halfling, 4 humans, 1 elf, 3 dogs, 6+ horses), or intimidation factor (their pack animals wears mithril chain barding!). The flip side is that they are a *rich* prize and many foes will follow them for days to lay the perfect ambush.

Recently IMC they've gone from a well-controlled land into a magically-twisted wilderness. Other than some handwaving and a bit of social interaction, the first two hundred miles were handwaved away in a previous session with "you see the now typical elven village for several days." The last hundred and fifty have been slower, with each village approached with care and ambushes by wildlife and raiders common. Each night I make sure of their watch rotation and they sit with baited breath to find out if an attack is coming and if they'll be awake for it.