D&D 5E Running Rime of the Frost Maiden

[Paul Farquhar]

So someone on reddit did an analysis that included the time the dragon spends burning, and it doesn't help - you can read it here. Essentially, the closest town is a 35 hour dog sled ride away, but that's the first town to be burned. Bryn Shander is the only town they can get to with any time to spare, and it's the last on the dragon's path.

He is wrong. Easthaven is 15 miles away, two of which are mountains, so call it 17. The dog sled travels at 1 MPH, so 17 hours. With zombie dogs, or otherwise bypassing resting the dogs (exhausted dogs can run another hour before dropping to half speed), it's 8 1/2 hours. You could get to Easthaven just in time. With giant eagles or phantom steeds you can do it in less than 2 hours.

NB, according to google a RL team of sled dogs can run at 6-7 MPH even in poor conditions.

 

[SuperTD]

He is wrong. Easthaven is 15 miles away, two of which are mountains, so call it 17. The dog sled travels at 1 MPH, so 17 hours. With zombie dogs, or otherwise bypassing resting the dogs , it's 8 1/2 hours. You could get to Easthaven just in time. With giant eagles or phantom steeds you can do it in less than 2 hours.

What? If it's 17 miles to Easthaven and the sled travels at 1 mile an hour, it's 17 hours WITHOUT taking breaks. If you do take breaks as the rules dictate then it's 34 hours.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

What? If it's 17 miles to Easthaven and the sled travels at 1 mile an hour, it's 17 hours WITHOUT taking breaks. If you do take breaks as the rules dictate then it's 34 hours.

MPH is average speed. I.e. it includes the breaks.

Also, even 2 MPH is unrealistically slow. They should be doing 6 MPH at least.

17 miles isn't that far even on foot. I have done winter hikes in the Lake District longer than that and still got home in time for supper.

 

[MarkB]

What? If it's 17 miles to Easthaven and the sled travels at 1 mile an hour, it's 17 hours WITHOUT taking breaks. If you do take breaks as the rules dictate then it's 34 hours.

I'm pretty sure the 1-mile-per-hour average travel time includes those rest breaks. In other words, the sleds travel at 2 mph for an hour, then take a break.

 

[SuperTD]

MPH is average speed. I.e. it includes the breaks.

Also, even 2 MPH is unrealistically slow. They should be doing 6 MPH at least.

17 miles isn't that far even on foot. I have done winter hikes in the Lake District longer than that and still got home in time for supper.

I disagree - the table says each hour of travel the dogsled goes one mile. Then in a later section it says that after each hour of travel the dogsled rests for an hour. To me, that means an average speed of 1/2 mile per hour. I've tweeted Chris Perkins/Jeremy Crawford/Dan Dillon asking for clarification.

Also, were your lake district hikes across a frozen tundra beset by blizzards, wading through feet of snow in land cursed by an evil goddess?

 

[MarkB]

I disagree - the table says each hour of travel the dogsled goes one mile. Then in a later section it says that after each hour of travel the dogsled rests for an hour. To me, that means an average speed of 1/2 mile per hour. Perhaps I'll tweet Chris Perkins/Jeremy Crawford for clarification.

Also, were your lake district hikes across a frozen tundra beset by blizzards, wading through feet of snow in land cursed by an evil goddess?

Overland speed on foot is 1/2 mile per hour.

Overland speed by dog sled is 1 mile per hour.

If the dogs move at 1 mph but have to rest every hour, while walkers don't, then travel times would be exactly the same with or without dog sleds.

However, every time the adventure mentions travel times between towns, it says that those times can be as much as halved if using dog sleds.

The only way that makes sense is if the dog sleds are travelling an average of 1 mile every hour even after you factor in their hourly rest breaks.

 

[Weiley31]

Yeah, I've seen people do the analysis for chapter 4 and it turns out that the PC's only chance is to go straight to the final town on the route to get there before the dragon does - and that's with a bit of generosity from the DM. I'm probably going to have Velynne's sled be pulled by zombie dogs (since she's a necromancer) so the party doesn't have to rest an hour every hour, meaning they can try and intercept earlier and save more towns.

Imagine if your character had the Yeti secret, your adoptive Yeti family could appear outta nowhere and like pull/carry everything, or show you an alternative route that would cut the travel time in half to that destination.

 

[JValeur]

Regarding overland travel and the dragon, doubling the overland travel pace (in the Wilderness, not on the roads between towns) is something I would recommend everyone do. A snippet about it from our DM's resources for Chapter 1: Ten-Towns:

 

[SuperTD]

Overland speed on foot is 1/2 mile per hour.

Overland speed by dog sled is 1 mile per hour.

If the dogs move at 1 mph but have to rest every hour, while walkers don't, then travel times would be exactly the same with or without dog sleds.

So doing some more digging i think you're right, though the adventure isn't making it as easy as I'd like. For instance, it says that travel by road is even faster than across tundra, but never gives us actual road travel speeds (which are still much lower than normal road travel). It seems they were shooting for about 1.5 mph by foot on roads based on the distances given in the "Targos to Caer-Konig" section of the Targos quest, and cross referencing with the travel time sections to neighboring towns listed in the Bryn Shander and Caer-Dineval town sections. However, the Targos to Caer-Konig section also says that it's 23 miles from Bryn Shander to Caer-Dineval, but this trek takes 10.5 hours - a walking speed of 2.2 mph. And just for fun, a dogsled can do the entire 29 mile trip from Targos to Caer-Konig in 7 hours - a speed of over 4 mph.

I don't know whether they intended different trails to have people move along them at different speeds, but it's certainly made me realise that including a section at the start for "Road Travel" along with the existing Overland Travel and Mountain Travel tables would be very helpful, especially if The Eastway is meant to be a better, more easily traveled road.. But I can't argue that every section does say the time taken is halved for dogsleds - I just wish it made it clearer that the speed was taking into account the breaks.

I think I'll just say to make it easy that foot travel (with snowshoes) on The Eastway (Bryn Shander-Easthaven) is 2 mph, and on any other trails is 1.5 mph. Dogsleds always go twice as fast as the walking speed for any terrain, and not wearing snowshoes halves the speed.

 

[MarkB]

So doing some more digging i think you're right, though the adventure isn't making it as easy as I'd like. For instance, it says that travel by road is even faster than across tundra, but never gives us actual road travel speeds (which are still much lower than normal road travel). It seems they were shooting for about 1.5 mph by foot on roads based on the distances given in the "Targos to Caer-Konig" section of the Targos quest, and cross referencing with the travel time sections to neighboring towns listed in the Bryn Shander and Caer-Dineval town sections. However, the Targos to Caer-Konig section also says that it's 23 miles from Bryn Shander to Caer-Dineval, but this trek takes 10.5 hours - a walking speed of 2.2 mph. And just for fun, a dogsled can do the entire 29 mile trip from Targos to Caer-Konig in 7 hours - a speed of over 4 mph.

I don't know whether they intended different trails to have people move along them at different speeds, but it's certainly made me realise that including a section at the start for "Road Travel" along with the existing Overland Travel and Mountain Travel tables would be very helpful, especially if The Eastway is meant to be a better, more easily traveled road.. But I can't argue that every section does say the time taken is halved for dogsleds - I just wish it made it clearer that the speed was taking into account the breaks.

I think I'll just say to make it easy that foot travel (with snowshoes) on The Eastway (Bryn Shander-Easthaven) is 2 mph, and on any other trails is 1.5 mph. Dogsleds always go twice as fast as the walking speed for any terrain, and not wearing snowshoes halves the speed.

While including road travel times would have helped, most of the decent roads run between the towns, and we have travel times for those journeys listed within the description of each town. The only time you need to manually calculate journey times is when venturing into the wilderness, which doesn't have roads, aside from the Ten Trail.