Pretty short and sweet, how do you successfully narrate travel between points of interest as a GM without it being all hurky-jerky?
I’m imagining attempting to narrate the epic travel scenes in Lord of the Rings, where they travel for days in fast-forward with nothing really interesting happening, only to then suddenly have time reel down to normal when something is about to happen. Every time I try this in a game though it just feels awkward and abrupt, while also clearly indicating to the players that something is going to happen.
Is there a way to make this a more smooth and natural transition?
First decide how gamey and mechanic you want it. A tried and tested but fairly prep intensive way is a hexcrawl. Rolling tons of random dice for every travel day can also be a neat way to fill a session! Roll for weather, environment, maybe a big list of random encounters, geographical features, local fauna etc pp. The dice will surprise even you, be ready to improv.
More free form ways would be to make the travel a skillchallenge/extended challenge, or use a montage approach as presented in fellowship or 13th age.
I like to mix and match the last 3 things I mentioned: random rolls, skill challenge and montage. Of course, this heavily depends on gam, too!
I’m shooting for a combination of the 2 kind of. Think spaced out hexes with montages linking them together. It’s the transition between the 2 that I’m having a hard time with. Maybe looking at games like Fellowship that really specialize in this sort of gameplay for inspiration could be helpful!