
Today we had a session and during our 4h meeting, almost half of time was travelling from point A to point B with nothing particulary interesting happening. How much can you expect when you travel the route you already traveled few days ago? It was about 15 hexes, which took about 4,5 days (circa 18 quarters). So it was about 18 rolls for Keep Watch and 4 rolls for making encampment (and 32 in total rolls for food and water for all 4 players, but this is just a sidenote because these rolls would happen anyhow due to time passing). With no fishing or foraging, becuase of lucky rolls, resources almost never decrease. Heck, on of the players is still using the same "torches" resource dice since we started playing the game. In last year. Anyhow.
I mean… Two interesting encounters happened during travel today, just becuase I wanted to cheer my players a bit, but I noticed grimm on they faces when I said: "Ok, you travel further to the east on the route you walked west few days ago, please roll keep watch…” and again, and again, and again. After session they asked if we can just go faster than rules are saying (1 hex in this terrain, 2 hexes in this…) or maybe just fast forward few days.
How do you deal with all these "coming back to Stronghold/city/key location" when players have several or more hexes to go through and they are only interested in getting to the final destination as soon as possible? I could run full blown adventure site but instead we got these boring going and rolling and going and rolling and going and rolling and going and so on.
I could throw in a bunch more encounters, places but it would extend the travel time to 4 real time hours of even more. And yet, they are walking the same route they already walked and discovered.
What is the middle ground between long and full of encounters journeys and fast forwarding time to get the players to next adventure site?
On the other note, today they earned only 2 exp points, which was a bit disappointing (1 for participation and 1 for slaying a monster). But if they get into adventure site, they could easily go with 5 exp. And they love exp points
