Only time I fast travel is when I complete a quest and have to walk all the way back to the quest giver in town, knowing that the path between was cleared by me already.

Absolutely agree. I also use that as asign to take a break. I fact, any time I feel theneed to rush its time to go do something else for awhile.

I fast travel every time I need to do something. I have had plenty of random encounters: ie, transporting prisoners, M'iaq the Liar, random couriers, fugitives, etc. I may have had more if I walked/ran everywhere, but I'm not for just walking around everywhere. If I'm out in the open, I'm sneaking around, and usually waiting until it's night time so I'm not seen. Perhaps this is boring to most people, but it's what makes the game fun for me. I'm over 200 hours in and always use fast travel. My gaming experience has been excellent. And to someone else who said the date and time change, this is true. I think the default setting on your date and time is 16x normal time, but it does occur when you fast travel.

I forgot to add: for those of you who fast travel everywhere, there are 95 distinct random world events which you'll NEVER get to experience if not on foot on the roads or roaming the wilderness. One of the biggest easter eggs is the Headless Horseman who only shows up on the roads between the hours of 10pm to 5am in a certain hold. Other more practical events are prisoner scenarios you can interact with like freeing a Thalmor/Imperial/Stormcloak prisoner, fighting dragons, and my personal favorite--a giant vs a dragon!

The best event ever: had the crazy luck to stumble across Alduin resurrecting a skeletal dragon from a dragon mound! The SOB had already flew off by the time I ran down the hill. So I vented my frustration on his newly created sibling and conveniently acquired a new shout.

If you ever get this rare oppurtunity when exploring, strike fast and kill it before it grows skin and flesh to cover its bones. Because apparently, dragons are at their weakest at that point (reloaded a save to confirm this). And should this be allowed to happen, there is a 100% probability that the dragon's powers will have been restored to their max potency as well.......

My decision to fast travel extremely infrequently has much more to do with enjoying the (gorgeous) scenery than even the random encounters. Skyrim is beautiful unmodded...but add some HD textures and something like Realistic Colours and Real Nights shader (for vastly improved, very realistic lighting -- check it out http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1875 if you haven't seen it and play on PC) and WOW. I don't care if the only thing I run across is a lone wolf in the way of "encounters," I'm enjoying myself anyway.

That said, it's not for everyone, obviously, or the option to fast travel wouldn't be there. IMO you miss a lot of gorgeous views by not walking around, and frankly I like the idea that if I don't conserve my arrows (for instance) I may be stuck in the wilderness without any. Makes decisions like "to raid this bandit hideout, or not to raid?" actually have a little more meaning than when you pop back to a store at any point and replenish your supplies.

But again, unlike some have suggested, I don't feel like I'm more "hardcoe" or playing it "properly" vs. people who use fast travel. I like realism mods, but one of my favorites has also been a very whimsical snowflake texture. -shrug-

EDIT: I also am one of those people who only does quests if I'm in the area. I'm not traveling across the entire map to deliver a letter or whatnot. If I'm in the area, why not? But definitely not going out of my way.

Phew I had to close my eyes fast here before he ruined my no Fast travel enjoyment!

I never get bored with my mage, because there's always tons of good alchemy ingredients to be found traveling from place to place. I don't know how anyone can be an alchemist in this game and use fast travel all the time. 99% of my ingredients are found in the wild while traveling, where the final 1% is found as loot in dungeons. It's fun chasing butterflies and trying to catch dragonflies, and the little fish ingredients in the rivers.

But I do get bored occasionally with my fighter, because he doesn't get as much out of "slow" travel as my mage does.

But like Pseron Wyrd said, when I start to feel bored/antsy/agitated regarding "slow" travel, I go take a break and do something else. Bethesda worked their asses off to painstakingly craft the world of Skyrim, and I feel like fast travel basically nullifies that whole aspect of the game.

I rarely fast travel. Running from place to place allows me to discover more areas quickly and raise my skills because I'm also encountering more mobs than I would fast traveling everywhere.

Besides that dragons will randomly drop from the sky if you're out running around.

I haven't used carriages either.....w/e they are.

For the love of Talos... Did you even take a second to learn about the command console? You don't need to use a mod to eliminate fast travel; a simple console command will do the trick. I'm playing Skyrim on the Xbox 360 and I know this.

Just open up the console and type in fasttravelenabled 0. There you go, no more fast travel, and you don't have to use up computer resources with a mod to get it done.

Just as a note, you can still encounter the Headless Horseman, even if you fast travel. It doesn't make him "not appear" because you fast traveled to the Hold. And, but I'm not certain, you might get more dragon attacks if you fast travel. I fight a dragon probably 3/5 times I travel to some area that isn't a main city. And as I stated earlier, I've encountered other things as well. Perhaps I don't get as many as available within the game, but it doesn't mean they simply are not generated because I fast traveled to a location instead of walking/running there.

why use a console command when you can just ignore the fast travel feature yourself?

This is something I kind of wonder, frankly. If you prefer walking/riding/wagon-ing, you're gonna do it anyways. If you start having the urge to use it when you typically don't, you either just need to take a break or you weren't that crazy with walking everywhere in the first place.

I would fast travel, but I always have the worst luck of freezing after a fast travel, so I don't fast travel. Carriages, on the other hand, have not given me any problems (*knock on wood*). The carriage is my only means of fast traveling.

That's me, too.

Reducing the world to a series of hotel rooms on a corridor, which is what fast travel does, is an excellent way to finish the game as quickly as possible, but every time I've checked, there's no reason or benefit to doing so. In spite of the insistence of some NPCs, I've never had any quest fail because it took my character awhile to get around to finishing it.

I use carriages, but that instant transport thing feels too much like something an action junky would prefer. Also, I love the feeling I get when finally arriving somewhere after a journey, and fast travel gets rid of that whole delicious "are we ever gonna get there?" feeling.

no fast travel seems pointless to me, theres nothing i would see walking on foot that i havent already seen a dozen times includingg the random encounters, which just get annoying after a while. cant ride 50 feet on my horse without getting attacked by something. whic is wy i dont even use horses anymore.

A lot of people who say they never fast travel are fibbing.

Cheers

Well, I guess you would know.

Somehow.

I thought the same as the op as well, but after reading about the benefits of not fast traveling I might actually try it out. It sounds like fun. It is good that the option is there though.

No, not really.

For me, I try RP my character as much as possible... even on a road trip. I'll stop inside a tavern if it's noon or dusk for a bite to eat and a place to rest. On the way to my quest location, I'll picture in my mind about what to expect in the quest that I'm on all the way down to character planning and refinement. I'll even venture out just a tad bit off the road to clear out road monsters so that the NPC travelers won't get mauled by them.

It's things like this that keeps road traveling interesting when I don't fast-travel.

That's the thing.... I'm easily distracted by all the interesting things along the way (dungeons, sidequests, etc). But I'm also somewhat OCD about looting and hoarding stuff. It would take me weeks to walk from Riften to Solitude - because I'd get distracted by a dungeon, loot it, and then have to walk all the way back to Riften (or Whiterun, or wherever my base is) to sell & drop off stuff, then back to where I left off. And probably get distracted by another dungeon on the way. But be incredibly frustrated by the fact that my inventory was full.

(I had a similar problem with the one STALKER game I got.... I need to pick up and sell all the loot. But each fight drops several inventory loads full of it. And it's a long walk back and forth to the trader. And enemies respawn fast enough that each trip to the trader means 2-4 more fights. Each producing more loot. Which means more back and forth trips to sell stuff. Which means more fights. And more loot. And that game doesn't have fast travel. )

So yeah - I love to explore and see the sights and just screw around in Oblivion/FO3/Skyrim (rather than just pounding out quests). And fast travel lets me do that, without going mad from frustration and loot withdrawal.


----
(first character in Skyrim, didn't get to Solitude on the main quest until I was in my 30's. Didn't finish the MQ until the mid 50's. )

This thread really makes me miss my Enchanted Portable Tent from Oblivion. :<

My character was generally not well-received in towns anyway, so camping out made all the more sense.

i love not using fast travel but Bet make it if you dont like just to open your map and fast travel you can take a carrier to the big citys make it more RPG, i just hate that when you do that the travel is always safe and nothing happen will be cool if a dragon atack you or badit do it too

I tried the non fast travelling and it did indeed last me up until the 200 hour mark upon which my character has already completed pretty much every single quest I can find in the entire game and am level 76. Problem with not fast travelling though is that you will often find that after you have discovered every location and killed most of the enemies that you will simply run for the 30th time down the same patch for about 30 minutes travelling tro another city and not encounter a single enemy.

It just isn't enjoyable when you're seeing the same exact scenery for the 30th time and not encountering a single enemy for a good 30 minutes due to the 10 day re spawn timer in the outside world. I cant understand why Beth didn't just make all re spawns 3 days the same like oblivion and fallout. I can handle waiting for 2 or 3 days in a town when I arrive so that I have enemies to kill on my return trip but having to wait for 10 days or 30 days for interior cells is far too long. If you don't do it however then the game is basically just running.

Slow-travelling, so to speak, affords me the chance to explore and appreciate the world a bit more. The simplistic quest system really kills immersion for me - the less time spent chasing a quest marker, the better. Grinding quests is just as tedious as walking everyone, to me.

What I do (since we aren't given general directions in the dialogue) is look at the quest marker on the map at the beginning of a journey, note the general location, turn the marker off and then set out. This also helps me not devour content too fast, because most of the faction quest lines are pretty short.

For those of us that explore for fun, recovering the same steps over and over again for purpose of quest ping-pong gets tedious.