How to fast forward a campaign?

[tedcahill2]

So this is probably a really simple answer, I'm just looking for some input since I'm a bit rusty at DMing.

My group has a ways to travel, roughly to equivalent of a month in game. How much of that time should I try and fill with side quests? Would it be boring to just say, "You walk 30 days nothing happens and you've reached your destination."?

[zlefin]

I'd say it depends on how interested the group is in such; generally spekaing, you don't "sidequest" while travelling, cuz quests actually take up time (i'm presuming there's some sort of goal at the destination).
I'd guesstimate 0.5 to 2 sessions worth of miscellaneous encounters and such. possibly less if the group isn't interested in them and/or the ways they're travelling are fairly safe.

[DarkSoul]

In the grand scheme of things, reducing the travel time to just a cutscene doesn't diminish the action of the plot in any way; at least not according to Indiana Jones.

[Nifft]

Ask your players to come up with a few interesting events that transpired.

Maybe a memorable random encounter (at the very least).

Roll for some random minor loot appropriate to the events, and give them this loot as the result of their journey.

Hopefully you can do this off-line (over email etc.) and start the in-person session with the journey over.

[tiercel]

Well I see travel time as a story-telling resource (one that gets scarcer as your PCs gain the ability to Teleport or otherwise magic-fast-travel).

Ideas:

1) What’s going on in your campaign world? Some of it may be pure background world-building, some of it may be foreshadowing for upcoming adventures or even an eventual BBEG, but “travel encounters” don’t automatically have to be combats.

A series of short RP encounters involving conversations at inns, waystations, small towns, or passing caravans may help establish that the harvest of wheat was unusually poor in the north this year, that King Somename XVIII has had an unexpected fourth child, that traveling merchants passing through have suddenly been buying up all the black onyx in sight, even at above-market prices...

Not all of these necessarily need to be plot hooks (or immediate plot hooks, but they may pay off later), but it helps make the world feel a little more “lived-in,” that your campaign world isn’t just “walk-through territory” in between adventure sites. (Depending on your players, they may even like the opportunity to do some sandbox RP/shenanigans; just don’t let things drag out if they start getting bored.)

Plus, of course, if you have several minor encounters like this, they are less likely to see it coming when you DO ambush them with a random combat encounter :amused:

2) The “sidequest”: in general, you probably want to keep this limited in scope (one gaming session or so), but if you want to run a small site-based adventure (haunted inn, missing food shipment, all of the healthy males between the ages of 18 and 35 (for humans) have begun to vanish, etc), this lets you squeeze in a quick premade module (e.g. see the web archive of WotC’s free adventures, http://web.archive.org/web/20040618123653/http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/oa/20030530b&page=1 )

3) Setting up your next adventure: general world-building is great, but at some point you might like to introduce why the next adventure is important. This lets you build the tone and urgency behind any upcoming quest: are all the commoners preparing for an upcoming festival in Bigtown ahead? Are local farmers increasingly becoming wary of crop damage and livestock loss, the closer the PCs get to their destination? Are there refugees on the road? Is there a permanent storm system, or smoke, on the horizon?

By time the PCs get to their destination, they may have some idea of what to expect and motivation to help (or, you know, profit, whichever) beyond “we go look for the quest-giver with the floating exclamation mark.”

...unless, of course, you’ve been carefully misdirecting them into preconceptions that play directly into your BBEG’s hands... :amused:

[ElevenSided Die]

Ask you players. If they want to roleplay, give them a session or two to do that. Maybe they want to do some crafting or other 'downtime activities': those might need some in-session time, or you might just be able to roll a die or three for outcomes.

Are there any points of interest the characters would pass along the way? If there are, give them a brief description and ask if they want to stop to explore...either make sure it's understood that these would be 'side quests', or don't, depending on how you want to play it.

Or, if everyone (or even if just you as the DM) wants to just get on with 'the action', then fast-forward to the next chapter of the story; nobody is going to miss the parts that were never there to begin with.

[zlefin]

as a videogame example:
diablo 2 was a fun game, and in between Acts I and II, you take the caravan to Lut Gholein; they don't do anything on the caravan itself, they just say you took it, and you arrive, it completely glosses over the travel. And they have a cutscene.
and it worked totally fine.

[WeaselGuy]

I think it was in one of the Neverwinter Nights games, you are taking a caravan somewhere (Calimshan, maybe?) and there is a scenario you play through where the caravan is attacked by giant scorpions or some such. This leads to, I dunno, a half hour session of hunting down scorpions to find the caravan master or merchant or something (don't judge me, it's been about a decade since I played this game) and then once the mini-mission is done, you talk to the caravan master and it resumes your cut scene journey to your place of destination.

[BearonVonMu]

I think this comic really addressed this succinctly:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0155.html

If you don't have anything you want to have happen, just skip the time.
If you have things you want to have happen, go to that.