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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 2469497" data-attributes="member: 8835">I'll have to agree with GrimStaff and Sweenytodd.  Don't play out traveling.  In fact, that's almost one of the biggest time wasters in RPG design.D&D's encounter frequency concepts are a bit biased towards making lots of encounters happen.This has the following side-effects:unlike a book or movie which sums up the journey or snapshots into memorable parts of the journey, it encourages doing hour by hour encounter checks, as if you were exploring a dungeon in a straight linewalking to the dungeon generates more XP than riding a horse, teleporting, or sailing, which further skews the level the party will be when they get there.With a 1 in 10 chance of wilderness encounter (roughly), PCs will encounter something once, every 10 hours, or twice a day.  Is the world really that hostile?  People who live in slums have  lower chance of "random encounter with thugs" in the real world.I'd propose a new way to abjudicate travel (well, not that new):figure out how long it will takefigure out the terrainRoll on the "# of interesting things that happen during trip" tableThen roll on the "what interesting thing happened in the relevant terrain" table per the first resultFrom there, either summarize, or play out ONLY those interesting bits, with summary text to make it flow from scene to scene.For the "How many" table, I'd try to keep it simple, it should range from 0 to 3 things.  Figure a really long journey doesn't really have all that much interesting encounters, in that, they would just keep repeating, and thus, not be so interesting after all.  Heck, a 1d4-1 roll would do the trick.For the "what happened" table, it could have weather, accidents, bandits, interesing NPCs, rare wildlife encounters.  Some of those encounters could occur while on the road, or while stopping at inns and camping.Consider my own 1500 mile trip back from Minnesota.  I drove it in 20 hours.  During the way back, there was the ice storm in southern MN/northern IA to keep things interesting.  Then there was the almost falling asleep in the last hour of the drive.  The former is worthy of a summary statement, but not RPing.  The latter, might be useful to do some die rolls to see if I fell asleep and resulted in an accident, but it too isn't worth actually playing out, if your goal is to get me to the dungeon of Texas.I think in general, we use encounter tables to try to simulate interesting things that happen while traveling to point B, but this method isn't producing the effect we really want.  We need a new methodology for handling travel.Janx</blockquote>

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