Shadowdancer
First Post
I once ran a campaign in the Forgotten Realms that required the PCs to travel all over. They were on a mission to acquire pieces of a magic weapon that was needed to stop the plans of an evil cult. After assemblying the seven pieces of the weapon, they had to travel to the cult's eight religious sites and destroy the altars at each. The altar sites were laid out in a hexagon with each side 800 miles long. That's a lot of traveling.
At first, the players didn't mind too much, because they were low-level characters and each encounter was a true test. I like to plan all of the combat encounters in advance, so I would break the trips down: how many days travel, how many nights camping out, what cities and town would they pass through where they could sleep in an inn, etc? Then I would pre-roll for encounters for each day, and work up encounters as needed. Then during play, I would roll dice for encounters and ignore the results, giving the players the feeling that I was rolling everything as we went along. This helps to keep them in suspense, as I would roll for each day and for each night.
Sometimes, if a roll during play indicated an encounter should take place, I might make it a non-combat encounter -- a patrol or caravan coming from the opposite direction, an unusual site, etc. This also kept the players interested and on guard, and was a good way to hand out clues ("Yeah, there's reports of bandits about two days away in the direction you're traveling, better be careful").
But after this had happened a few times, and the players got familiar with the Forgotten Realms map and knew how long each trip would take, they began to get restless. They also wanted to complete their mission. So I started speeding things up. Sometimes, I would just say, "28 days on the road pass, nothing eventful happens." This was only on well-traveled roads in mostly civilized areas. And sometimes I would have an NPC hook them up with a magic portal that would transport them to their destination, or at least in the general area.
I think you need to base your overland travels on what your players like. If they're having fun with the long, drawn-out method, then continue with it. If they show signs of becoming bored, find ways to speed things up -- eliminate some details, skip over some days if nothing important is supposed to happen, let them find some magic portals, etc.
But I highly suggest you at least pre-roll all your encounter rolls for the trip so you can plan things out a little bit and not relie so much on randomn encounter tables. That will at least speed things up, and will allow you to scale things back if necessary. If you just had nights in a row in which the party fought, and they had a bad time of it and were hurt very badly, and the roll for the next night indicates another encounter should take place, it would probably be best to skip it, or hold off until the party has had an opportunity to recover some. No need to make the party road kill.
At first, the players didn't mind too much, because they were low-level characters and each encounter was a true test. I like to plan all of the combat encounters in advance, so I would break the trips down: how many days travel, how many nights camping out, what cities and town would they pass through where they could sleep in an inn, etc? Then I would pre-roll for encounters for each day, and work up encounters as needed. Then during play, I would roll dice for encounters and ignore the results, giving the players the feeling that I was rolling everything as we went along. This helps to keep them in suspense, as I would roll for each day and for each night.
Sometimes, if a roll during play indicated an encounter should take place, I might make it a non-combat encounter -- a patrol or caravan coming from the opposite direction, an unusual site, etc. This also kept the players interested and on guard, and was a good way to hand out clues ("Yeah, there's reports of bandits about two days away in the direction you're traveling, better be careful").
But after this had happened a few times, and the players got familiar with the Forgotten Realms map and knew how long each trip would take, they began to get restless. They also wanted to complete their mission. So I started speeding things up. Sometimes, I would just say, "28 days on the road pass, nothing eventful happens." This was only on well-traveled roads in mostly civilized areas. And sometimes I would have an NPC hook them up with a magic portal that would transport them to their destination, or at least in the general area.
I think you need to base your overland travels on what your players like. If they're having fun with the long, drawn-out method, then continue with it. If they show signs of becoming bored, find ways to speed things up -- eliminate some details, skip over some days if nothing important is supposed to happen, let them find some magic portals, etc.
But I highly suggest you at least pre-roll all your encounter rolls for the trip so you can plan things out a little bit and not relie so much on randomn encounter tables. That will at least speed things up, and will allow you to scale things back if necessary. If you just had nights in a row in which the party fought, and they had a bad time of it and were hurt very badly, and the roll for the next night indicates another encounter should take place, it would probably be best to skip it, or hold off until the party has had an opportunity to recover some. No need to make the party road kill.
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