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I know that one of my weaknesses as a gamemaster is narrating travel scenes or otherwise making them interesting. I'm just not very good at getting the players from point A to point B without either giving the players a pretty bland description of the trip, or having a random encounter.
Do any of you know of any tips/resources for how to make overland travel interesting without bogging down the game?
I always think of this scene from The Gamers as something I aspire to, though I feel like in a non-visual medium it would take a bit more description to give a sense for the journey.
I would also like to know how you make things interactive for the players without just having them roll Survival checks or the like.
Because the game is event-oriented and can be episodic, it IS difficult to make extended travel without any events interesting.
Nothing wrong with aspiring to make weather patterns, scenery and geography more interesting -- since plagiarism is a DM's best friend, take time to research different actual geographical regions on our own little marble in space and take crib notes on them while you have the time to think up creative, emotive and immersive descriptions instead of trying to come up with things, "off the cuff."
I like to have the players roll a D12 and on an 11 or 12 they get a random encounter and do the same again for weather on 11 or 12 they get that regions version of harsh weather. I do this for each 24 hours on the road.
The first couple times you do it just ask them to roll don't tell them what for will build the tension if they aren't sure what they're rolling for randomly.
Also you get to use a D12 which is nice.
Just makes things a bit more exciting gets them to do something on the travel rather than rolling it all in secret.
I went searching through soime of my old posts, as I recall giving some advice based on something one of my DMs tried one time, that I thought worked out well. It essentially ewntials involving your PCs in the whole experience, which also downlaods some of the responsibility off you as DM.
The advice was as follows, coming from THIS THREAD:
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It's all about fun, of course, and I endorse the idea of bucking the conventional encounters trend if it's not going to be much fun for you.
To give you some food for thought, I had a GM who came up with some interesting ideas for a long travel sequence in a home brew campaign (we had previously had a fairly uninspired experience with a travel portion of one of the D&D 5E campaigns).
They're "outside the box" ideas, but were lots of fun. They also cut down on some of his workload (and mental efforts) as a DM, and gave the players a chance to do a little cooperative worldbuilding.
- Campfire Stories -
The party was fairly 'new' and didn't necessarily know one another well, so he asked us each to have a campfire story prepared that gave some insight into the character's past, or which was otherwise just a bit of fun.
We then interspersed these through the trip, which was a nice way to give each player some time to shine, and break up the usual encounter format.
- Narrative Encounters designed by PCs -
The other thing we did was have each player come up with a purely narrative, non-combat "encounter" ahead of time. Each player was then called upon (at a releveant time) to introduce the encounter, and then designate one of the other players to tell us how his or her character resolved it.
Like I said, it was all done via narrative and entirely without dice rolls, and was another good way to give a fun insight into the character's personality, skill set, etc.
For example, my 'encounter' was woods filled with willow trees. As the group went through, they noticed the smell of decay. Before we could get further, the willow branches suddenly grabbed the group and started strangling us. I designated one of the other players to respond, and his bard character managed to play a soothing tune which caused the trees to let us go, and he continued playing until we got clear. He subsequently revealed he had heard of this rare sort of tree before (tying it back to one of his Knowledges or something, as I recall).
EDIT: I found a link to the episode where I told my own campfire story (I played Mahmoud), so you can see what I'm talking about. Link is HERE, and the campfire story starts around 9:00.