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Message: <blockquote data-quote="machineelf" data-source="post: 7006269" data-attributes="member: 6774924">So travel rules can become "accounting-oriented" and annoying very quickly.  When I say "accounting-oriented," I mean those times when keeping track of minutiae becomes too big of a focus and takes away from the actual fun of playing the game. I've found that this is particularly true in wide open blank spaces in large worlds. This is why travel rules of 5th edition tend to suck in The Forgotten Realms, because there are often hundreds of miles of nothingness between cities. Well, there's not actually true because there are things in those blank spaces, like small villages, or old structures, or whatnot, but they aren't really placed on any map or in any campaign book, so you as the DM are left to fill those details in yourself. The real problem is the enormous distance from one city or village on the map to the next. Your PCs end up having to travel for a week or more just to get to the next interesting spot if they are traveling. That means a lot of, "OK roll for navigation. Anyone searching for food or water along the way? OK roll for that. Anyone sneaking? Great, roll for that. OK you travel for the day, not much happens. You sleep and wake up. OK, let's start it all over again." Rinse, wash, repeat for 7 days, with the occasional encounter thrown in here or there. That gets old, fast.I think that the travel rules need some fixing, and fast. But one way to make them work better is to play in a smaller world, with shorter distances between interesting locations. They work fairly well when you're playing in a smaller, well-defined area where you can actually come across something new every hour or so of traveling. Think of the region of Skyrim, and how in just about any direction, after traveling for a bit, you come across something interesting. It would only take maybe an hour of in-game time of travel before you come across the ruins of an old, crumbled tower half-buried in the snow. You see some smoke rising from the center of the debris. If you go to check it out, you find a saber-toothed tiger feasting on the body of an elf who seems to have been hunting in this area. A campfire with a pot of food mounted above it is still lit. Look around for a bit and you find a chest hidden behind some rocks with some valuables in it.That small-ish area, filled with interesting finds around every corner, and where it only takes a day of travel to make it to the next city, would work much better with the current travel rules. They still wouldn't be perfect, but they would be better. But in The Forgotten Realms, forget-about it. It's too large of a place, and so I think that if you do a day-by-day "accounting" of travel rules, you will bore your players out of their minds.You could put a ton of small points of interest all over the map in the Forgotten Realms, or design your own random roll chart for interesting encounters, but it still doesn't solve the problem of huge stinkin' distances between one city to the next. Again, I think a smaller world that takes a day or two travel from one city of note to the next works much better.</blockquote>

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