I’ve come to think that wilderness travel should feel more like a dungeon in play. A dungeon involves many turns, with empty rooms, monsters, and treasures. I think a wilderness should be the same–lots of turns and lots of possible events and encounters. I’d like to avoid the “empty rooms” feature, though. I know the best travel experiences I’ve had in my games have come when there were multiple events of some sort along the way, so the travel time felt like an adventure. That’s what I’d like to emulate.
I’ve been playing with traditional travel procedures and find the length of each turn to be part of why travel has long been decried as boring and a drudge. Of course, nothing’s going to happen if there are only three or four chances each day! I know when I changed to rolling to see how many encounters happened (D4+1 worked best for me), the “busier” days always played out as more interesting than the quieter days, with more happening and more to do.
So, I started playing with two-hour travel turns. A check for each travel turn can lead to several events during the day. I say “events” because they may not be straight up encounters with beasties or NPCs. There can be weather events, terrain events, wondrous events, and so on–all manner of things that can make the trail more interesting for PCs. Finding a small, stone statue that glows or spotting smoke rising through the trees or a mudslide having blocked the path can all add to the adventure of traveling. There are still “empty room” turns.
I’ve also been looking at pointcrawls, of late. There’s a good deal to be said in favor of interconnected sites of interest being the focus of travel. That approach removes the empty rooms, yet I still want there to be random events, though, so a straight up pointcrawl won’t really work for what I want…
…Unless I put some event rolls in between points. This is where I am now, with a hybrid approach to travel. PCs are choosing navigational landmarks as intended destinations. There are set piece events along the way or at each destination. Navigating towards terrain features such as a line of hills or along a river works as a de facto pathcrawl (as others have pointed out), so placing set piece events is likely to be easy to do
There are also sections where a number of checks are made for random events between those set pieces. Instead of playing out every turn in travel, the group can deal with only the places where something happens. As mentioned before, not everything that happens is an encounter, so there’s variety in what the PCs find. They may have to deal with a washed out bridge or a giant herd of herbivores that numbers in the tens of thousands of animals or see sunlight glinting off what turns out to be a polished marble obelisk well off the trail.
Testing will tell the tale of how well this fits with what I want. I suspect there are other folks who have experimented with such an arrangement, so there may be a term for this approach already. Punctuated point crawl? Active pathcrawl?