Only you can answer that question for you.

Well I fast travel when I go to towns to trade cause I don't want to waste time doing that but if I got a good quest ill walk it and take on some giants here and there.

I was actually planning on doing a mostly no fast travel playthrough with this new character.
I've found that walking really does open up the world.

Yes, it is definitely worth it - the only downside being that you'll probably find waaaaay more loot and it will take you a
million years to get from city to city if you insist on selling every little piece of junk you find on the way since you have
to either trek back to the city you came from, or drop some of the loot on the ground so you can pick it up later.

But it is way more rewarding. Who knows, you might even stumble on to some random place you've never seen before.

Exactly, walking is great for exploration but I don't turn my nose up at fast travel if I need to get somewhere.

I disagree. I actually find fast-traveling just kills the entire game, period. It's a personal thing though, I'm not trumpeting "Perma Remove Fast Travel bawww", just that I think it totally ruins the game, but it's still just optional.

And yes, I have walked from Riften to Solitude over a dozen times. I generally plan my trips to fulfill multiple objectives along the way. I'm not a single-track player. Get quest -> Complete Quest - > Return for Reward, repeating one quest at a time. I'll get dozens of quests, complete them side-by-side, and turn in for rewards when the next objective brings me nearby.

I can see your point but eventually I just got tired of running down the same roads, killing the same bears and encountering the same random NPCs. Especially for some of the more mind-numbing fetch quests they send you on.

ive played this game close to 700 hours, now i just fast travel to get things done but the first 600 hours i never did and it was a real joy to explore the beautiul world so i would say when you first start out dont fast travel, or if you always did FT then do a run without doing it

I tend to walk more than fast travel. It really depends on the situation. Often I find myself walking from one city to another doing a quest, and then when I'm finished, I'll fast travel back. There are also some areas of the map that I love to walk across, and other areas that I almost always fast travel across because the walk doesn't appeal to me.

On my main account I usely don't fast travel, only if its like to the Grey Beards place ( cant spell it lol), but my alchemy skills are alot higher when I dont fast travell, Im sure whenever PS3 get 1.6 ill be riding horses like a boss!

I create rules for myself and try to follow them (I succeed most of the time). I use the carriage to travel to the hold capitals. If I take a carriage from, say Riften to Dawnstar, then I have to hoof it to the nearest capital with a carriage to get back to Riften. For the smaller villages and other locations, I travel to the nearest capital and walk from there. However, I'm currently grinding for my enchanting skill (didn't start it until late) so I'm fast traveling quite a bit to speed things up.

Honestly, I found it more realistic to play without fast traveling. One of the first things I did was run to all of the main cities, on the off chance that I wanted to complete a quest right away instead of running all the way across the map, but while running across the map, I would start to notice a bunch of new things I hadn't noticed before, like the Sleeping Tree west of Whiterun, I had never been there before in all of the hundreds of hours I've played Skyrim, so if you ever get really bored and want to find something new in the game, I'd say hell yeah it's worth it.

I'm just started on a no-fast-travel playthrough, and you do indeed get to experience a lot of things you would otherwise miss. On the other hand, it gets really annoying getting to a place to drop off loot if you're in the middle of nowhere, and Winterhold doesn't have a carriage. And lots of paths become very repetitive after a while. The fact that character speed is fixed also makes it kinda boring; even with maxed out fatigue sprinting is slow compared to a high speed stat in the past TES games.

I'm more a rper and most of the time it doesn't make sense to horde quests until you have a few in the same area. If the quest is made to sound urgent it's hard to justify putting it off instead of doing right now. Maybe that's why I use fast travel or a carriage half the time. Going to the same places over and over again is tedious.

i'll have to start doing that.

That's exactly why I fast travel. That or if I just recently took a path somewhere then have to go back, there isn't a whole lot of point walking right back because I most likely won't find a random encounter for a few days.

So to answer the question the only one that can really answer that for you is yourself OP. Basically it's do you think always walking will stay interesting enough to never ever use it to quickly just get somewhere.

Yes, it's all in how I structure my travels.

I am sick of seeing that "Farmer+Cow" Event... Oh, and I've probably given 2 or 3,000 gold to Deep-in-his-Cups... I thought he was going back to Black Marsh.

One interesting thing about never Fast Traveling though. Dragon Encounters become extremely rare. I'd say one every ten real hours at the most, unless I specifically seek one out at a Dragon spawn.

I love exploring so I don't fast travel much, only when I'm moving things between homes or shops or small quests that I've done a few times with one of my other guys. Also it brings me back to when I first bought a Bethesda game (fallout 3) and didn't even know you could fast travel for most of the game! I loved every second of not knowing!!! To be a nomad! That's hat I'd like.

Due to how I played Oblivion, I had been using the clicking fast-travel.. but now I only use carriages. I do visit the cities for the first time by running to them though, only then do I use the carriage to move between them. I also find it incredibly fun to use a horse in the game.

Also, I did install a mod that disables fast travel by clicking so I wasn't tempted to do it.. and I've gotten quite use to it.

If we had an awesome travelling ecosystem like in Morrowind, then I'd probably never, ever fast travel again. Even though I generally only use it now if I'm in a hurry (re: short gaming session) and want to accomplish something specific.

Its the only way to play in my Opinion

It's not worth it if you're stuck in the past morrowind and back but if you find running all over Skyrim time consuming yeah it is.

It's worth it for me, yes.
For you? Well no one can know, except you after you give it a shot.

Yes its totally worth taking it easy with the fast traveling. There are so many places, people, treasures, creatures, dungeons, monsters, treacherous terrain and epic views to be discovered by walking the world. Just last month i discovered two dungeons near Helgen i had never seen before. The sense of satisfaction of finding these huge detailed creepy dungeons with some very rewarding unique loot was quite euphoric and still is when i think about it. Makes me wonder how much more waits for me not to mention getting a hold of some of my favorite armor and weapons when starting a new character.

Only time i fast travel is if real world time is short or i want to get on with exploring an area which really has my attention and i dont want to end up distracted by the incredible temptations of other dungeons etc am bound to come across traveling to my destination.

Then theres the magical weather which is never the same and pretty intense in some areas usually a hint of some pretty hardy beasts prowling around for..something.

The issue I have with not fast traveling it all, is that you often find yourself walking between destinations with little to do along the way. For instance, in my first playthrough, I found having to walk repeatedly between Dawnstar and Solitude to be an extremely dull and unrewarding experience. Yeah, I could "see the sights" and fight a variety of enemies, but after you do it enough times it sort of ceases to be all that engaging. This is why I abandoned the no-fast-travel rule for my new Character. At some point, you're going to need to travel from place to place for no other reason than covering the distance, and in those situations fast travel is the best option. Unless of you course you can take a carriage, which is what I do when the option is available. I do so miss Morrowind, in that you had so many ways to instantly get around using actual in-game mechanics. I wish they'd do something like that next time around.