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Message: <blockquote data-quote="M.T. Black" data-source="post: 9758426" data-attributes="member: 6782171">The party had to travel from Iskandar to Deepwater last night, which is about fifty miles on a well established road. Making these sorts of journeys feel interesting and meaningful has been a long running challenge for me, and I know lots of you have mentioned similar.  I really dislike just handwaving this sort of travel ("Ok, you leave Waterdeep. 10 days later, you are at Neverwinter"). It makes your world feel small, and leads to nonsensical behaviour ("I left my signet ring behind? I really wanted that for next months ball. I'll just walk back to Waterdeep and get it. Yeah, 20 days round trip.") However, a lot of attempts to gamify journeys through random encounters quickly become grindy in my experience. It's like I want people to feel the danger and tedium of a long journey - but without it being tedious! What is the solution?I've concluded that "variety is the spice of life" in this regard. There is no one method that I can just use each time or it becomes dull. Instead, I have 4 or 5 little travel techniques in my bag, and I mix them up for each leg of the journey. The Iskandar journey above, I split into three legs:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">For the first leg of the journey, I just rolled a random encounter table. They encountered a group of dust mephits causing trouble and had a short fight. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">For the second leg of the journey, I asked one player to propose an obstacle, and another player to propose how the party overcame it. In this instance, the issue was a corpse on the side of the road. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">While they were resting during the third leg, I used D'Amato's "Ultimate RPG Campfire Deck" and asked them to discuss a topic (their favourite meal), with the most popular reminiscence getting inspiration.</li> </ol>We spent a bit over and hour on the journey and the players seemed engaged. It made the journey feel "substantial" but it was also fun, so I was well satisfied with the outcome. How do you handle travel in your game?</blockquote>

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