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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Delemental" data-source="post: 2156868" data-attributes="member: 5203">The best thing you can do is talk to your players.  You may want to have more descriptive scenes between adventures, but the players may not.  You should see if you're on the same page before doing a lot of work crafting evocative panoramas of wilderness that they are just going to see as filler between point A and B.I wouldn't overdo random encounters between cities, or rather random hostile encounters.  If the roads were so dangerous that even experienced adventurers have difficulty getting through unscathed, then normal people wouldn't even try, and intercity commerce and communication would grind to a halt.  Traveling across untracked wilderness is another matter entirely.As far as the cities themselves, the best way to put across the flavor of the city is through the people they meet.  Tavern owners in seedy parts of town will be gruff and suspicious.  Merchants in open-air markets will pressure the PCs to make a sale.  Nobles will look down on the scruffy mercenaries.  Make sure people react differently to the characters based on their role; try to avoid what commonly happens, where NPC's somehow sense the "PC aura" and treat the characters the same way no matter who they are.  I won't call the "PC aura" a mistake, because it's perfectly legitimate for some types of game.Along the same lines, if your players have particular kinds of NPCs they interact with regularly, give them a personality beyond "dispenser of goods and/or services".  Give the smith that the fighter regularly visits to get his weapons and armor repaired a wife and kids that he talks about constantly.  Make the old alchemist that sells spell components to the wizard a bit senile and prone to rambling stories.  Names of places are also a good way to establish a setting.  Inns in high-class neighborhoods are called "The Shining Unicorn" or "The Golden Griffin"; in less reputable areas they're "The Dirty Badger" or "Six Daggers Tavern".  Keep the environment of the city in mind; a port city is going to have more nautical names, while a city in the middle of the forest is going to gravitate toward names evoking fey creatures.If you want players to notice the physical aspects of your cities, give them cause to interact with them.  Plan a game with a chase scene through the city where the characters have to deal with crowded markets, narrow streets, and twisting alleys.  Plan to have a major holiday or festival going on in the city when the PCs arrive.  Also, give the players reasons to hang around in the cities and check them out.  If you set up a situation like "okay, you're all in city A, and there's an adventure waiting at location B, what do you do?", I'm willing to bet that they'll say "we go to location B immediately".  Once given a concrete objective, most players will proceed to that objective with little delay.  Don't feel like you always have to have something ready for them to do the moment they finish the last adventure.Probably the best thing you can do to get players interested in interacting with the enviroment is to award some form of roleplaying XP, and letting the players know about it.  That way there's a tangible reward for their characters putting up with the barkeep's dirty looks at the Dirty Badger, or for listening to Alzrius the Herbalist ramble on about how he almost turned lead into gold... again.Well, now that I've rambled on long enough, I think I'll post, so that I can see the 37 other posts that came in while I was typing telling you the same thing or even better advice.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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