How do you deal with traveling

[Thanee]

Depends. As long as interesting things happen, or there is room for roleplaying, it'll be played out, but as soon as things are getting boring, the remainder of the journey (or at least up to the point where something happens, if anything) is shortened considerably.

Surely not every journey will have random encounters (some will, some won't) and some journeys are done after a couple minutes, while others might last for several evenings. It totally depends on how interesting and how important things are for the story.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Allanon]

A good article about travelling was written by Keith Baker in one of his dragonshard articles, it can be found here.

I handle travelling on a case by case basis, sometimes the journey is the adventure itself in which case I play it day to day, sometimes it's just the means to an end in which case I will gloss over the important detail, add some special highlights (seeing things in the distance, encountering fellow travelers or hearing rumors whilst passing a trading post) and be done with it ready to start the important part of the adventure.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

For each day of travelling I have a player roll a d10 for a random encounter and I roll one as well. If they match then there is a random encounter. If it is a more hazerdous area then I have them roll more dice. I do the same for each evening. It works well, my players feel they have an active part in it and they know they aren't being screwed over by the DM if they roll encounters back to back.

 

[kolikeos]

uselly the party just gets to where they want and i tell them how many hours or days went by. if there is anything interesting along the way such as monsters or towns or somesuch then i tell them about it, but if there's nothing i just skip to the point they want to get to.

 

[the Jester]

I like to give kind of Tolkien-esque descriptions of travel- "You guys head up the slope for a few hours, and the trees get increasingly sparse as you get higher and higher... It also gets cooler and now the plants are less trees and more short little scrubs..."

Usually takes five minutes or so per day of uneventful travel if I'm using that much description, and then any time for rp stuff the pcs do. If they're on a longer trip I'll paint in broader strokes, describing a week's travel at a time or something ("You follow the river for six days until you reach the delta etc").

 

[Darth K'Trava]

Mostly we gloss over it. The DM rolls random encounters but that's it.

 

[Helspar]

Travel is sometimes difficult to handle, as you need to instill a sense of scale to the characters without getting too dull. The wilderness of the world is a large place, and assuming that all the adventure isn't only an afternoon's walk from town the characters are going to spend a fair amount of time doing it. I try to gloss over most of the characters travel time unless I want stuff to happen or circumstances dictate otherwise. If the characters are simply travelling from one town to another you might describe the weather the terrain etc. to set up the next scene. If the characters are fleeing a town though the detail level might increase, especially if the chase is on

 

[Dark Jezter]

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.

 

[Tinner]

Travel should be tough

Travel should never be taken for granted in a (roughly) Medieval setting.
The average commoner in such a setting likely never travels more than a dozen miles from his home town.
Unless the PC's have access to magical means of travel ie. teleportation, airships, etc. then there should be risks IMO.
That said the best system for travel I've ever used has to be from the Warhammer Quest board game!
Travel was oftentimes more dangerous than the actual dungeon. There are weather hazards, bandits, and even just simple delays.
The delays always made sens to me in a society without paved roads.
If you've ever lived on a dirt road, then you know just how bad these roads can become after bad weather. And that's a modern dirt road built by machines! A medieval dirt road should be even more dicey.
As for sea travel, I read recently a statistic that even in today's modern world, there are usually at least three serious shipwrecks around the world each month. That serious as in "no survivors, all crew and cargo lost"
Mix some sea monsters, bad food and water storage facilities, and boat travel should be a scary prospect for someone in a medieval setting!

 

[Bigwilly]

Depends

I'll usually skim over travelling to get the PCs to the scenario. But then we are lucky to get one session a month, so I don't like to waste too much time getting there.

''It takes you a week to get there and you arrive without incident."

However, if the trip is the scenario then I'll go into day by day play. Then I'll be rolling for (random) encounters, having the players roll for foraging, check who is on guard duty and if they stay awake all night, etc.

On a recent journey, the players were ambushed by ankhegs (lost a pack horse belonging to one of the PCs to that encounter), awoken by blink dogs running through the camp, encountered a herd wild horses and were finally mauled by lions (this time the ox pulling the wagon got killed). My goal was to give them the feel that it took a long time to get where they are going, but I won't do the same on the return journey.

"It takes you a week to get back and you arrive without incident."

Bigwilly