How to take care travel

[Ausk Valrosh]

I'm new to the whole tabletop scene, and so are all of my friends. We've been playing for only a little while, and in our adventures we decided to travel to another town. The town wasn't too far away and when we mapped out the distance (im using the inner sea world guide for reference) it was about 100ish miles, so we figured it would take about 5 days of full travel. When we played it out, we of course had some random encounters, and those took minimal time, but the entire travel sequence took almost all of our session time.

So my question is, does traveling have to take this long/is there a better way to handle it. If it does take that long, then how can i make it entertaining.

[EldonG]

A lot of travel is simply hand-waved...with a little description of the journey. The higher the level, the more that makes perfect sense.

[tonyz]

Yeah, pretty much. If you're a well-armed party traveling through a not-too-bad area, you shouldn't have anything that's a big problem. The GM should just say "five days later, you reach Desna's Gulch."

If you're trying to sneak through a bugbear-haunted wilderness to reach their base camp without anyone noticing and rescue the kidnapped accountant before he straightens out their payroll system, then it's a lot more complicated and your GM probably should be running a lot more planned encounters and random encounters to see how you react, and what happens, and whether you want to ambush or dodge the bugbear patrol....

[Ausk Valrosh]

That makes sense. Thank you tonyz and EldonG

[Little Skylark]

If you want to play it faster, just hand-wave it. If you want the party to feel like it's a long journey you could play more of it.
My players were once arrested and transported, that was a long and dull journey for the characters, so I played some of it to make sure the players felt it that way.

[Whitefox-san]

If you want to go into further detail, you could use the travel period to describe the state of affairs in the area you're in or drop hints and clues for your characters. Merchants, travelers, and farmers are good sources of information that could be encountered on your travels.

Patrols are also a good source and patrols would be a good reason for why your players go unmolested their entire trip if they are on a well-traveled road. The lack of patrols could also be commented on to describe the declining state of the area or nation you're currently in.

As they said above, at higher levels random encounters are generally less common; what group of low level bandits would want to take on a group of level 10+ "legendary" heroes.

[Mark Hoover]

What settlements are in between Golarion towns; is this in any sourcebooks? For example, the town of Falcon's Hollow is noted in the guide to Darkmoon Vale as "Isolated" meaning it basically has to be self sufficient. The fluff around the town says trade is infrequent and there don't seem to be a lot of farmers there. Add to that its location on the guide's map and they'd better hope NONE of their crops falter.

So how does everyone else handle a 50 mile stretch of absolute wilderness between these self-sufficient towns and cities that appear to dot the PF landscape?

In overland travel in my own homebrew I tend towards a bit closer of a parallel to RL. I usually have some little rut or track leading off main roads every 10 miles at least, if not closer. On top of that most cities in my world have settlements, like suburbs in their hinterlands.

For example: one of the major cities of my world is Inderwick. This used to be a much bigger city with it's own outlying fields and internal gardens. These were hardly enough to feed such a sprawl, so there were at it's height roughly 16 villages, hamlets and manors in the immediate hinterlands and 62 settlements total that were scattered in that hex of my map at one time. These places sent trade into the city and supplied them with food, resources and labor.

Unfortunately the cataclysmic event of my world (the Wilding) has destroyed much of this landscape. Now there are only 6 outliers keeping this city afloat that are well known. There MAY be others, scattered throughout the new wilds and forests or still rebuilding and isolated, but these are waiting to be discovered through the course of overland travel.

[Odraude]

Since you're new, I'd suggest going Indiana Jones when it comes to travel. However, once you get settled and get your GM chops, I'd highly recommend doing some adventures with traveling to destination. It can be as simple as some random encounters, or perhaps a little side encounter with some more meat in it, or you could take a chapter out of Jade Regent #3 and have an entire adventure in itself dedicated to the journey. I find it gets you a lot of mileage for adventure and side-quests, and with level up along the journey, you can allow for some tougher fights when they actually make it to the destination.

[Ausk Valrosh]

For some reason my mind had completly blocked out the ability to simply "hand-wave it". Thats useful (and would have been useful) especially in areas like we are now. Thank you all for the advice

[Lincoln Hills]

Bear in mind that unless you're running an adventure themed around a pilgrimage, safari, voyage, escort mission, gypsy caravan or white-water rafting trip, the open space between adventure sites is a distraction from your main theme. It's a great place to drop color, though, especially when your PCs are moving along a patrolled road between established communities. You can mention in passing that the PCs meet two tinkers, three mounted patrols, four merchants' wagons, a bandit's corpse on a gibbet, a charcoal-burner, a pair of ragged refugees, a squire leading a war-horse, five guards escorting a covered palanquin and a wandering minstrel over the course of the journey: if the PCs pause to have words with any of these folks, you can expand on the scene a little, but if they're not interested you can skip to the next important bit.

Once your PCs are mid-level or so, you can do this with very minor hostile encounters, but that's a matter of taste and pacing. Not all GMs would be comfortable saying, "You encountered a band of six gnolls and sent the sole survivor running back to the hills," even though that's better for pacing than spending an hour or more detailing a fight that's a foregone conclusion. (Mind you, sometimes the party's just finished a grueling adventure climax and is in the mood to kick around somebody smaller than them: that's different.)