Time or distance?

[alsih2o]

The maps that characters in my homebrew have been able to find have been scaled to time instead of distance.

Instead of having a square on the grid be Xmiles wide or high I have been trying to morph the maps to represent a days travel per square. Obviously different races see travel as taking different amounts of time but this hasn't been a real problem so far.

Has anyone else experimented with this, and do you have any insight or tips?

 

[Morrus]

How does that manifest visually? Do mountain ranges and swamps take up more space than they actually do on a distance map because it takes longer to cross them?

And how do roads work? Travelling by road is faster, but it is often through terrain that is slower. Thus the terrain running alongside the road would be physically longer on the map than the road itself.

Interesting idea. I'd be interested in seeing an example of a time and distance map of the same area side by side.

 

[alsih2o]

How does that manifest visually? Do mountain ranges and swamps take up more space than they actually do on a distance map because it takes longer to cross them?

And how do roads work? Travelling by road is faster, but it is often through terrain that is slower. Thus the terrain running alongside the road would be physically longer on the map than the road itself.

Interesting idea. I'd be interested in seeing an example of a time and distance map of the same area side by side.

Yes, mountain ranges and swamps and roadless areas take up much more space.

Roads have been the thorn in my side. Especially since they usually only go through a square one direction.

One thing I thought would be cool is to have folks who travel by river having drastically different maps.

I have the main "Lands" of Maissebn mapped for time, maybe I should draw one up finalized for distance for comparison...

 

[Hand of Evil]

How does that manifest visually? Do mountain ranges and swamps take up more space than they actually do on a distance map because it takes longer to cross them?

And how do roads work? Travelling by road is faster, but it is often through terrain that is slower. Thus the terrain running alongside the road would be physically longer on the map than the road itself.

Interesting idea. I'd be interested in seeing an example of a time and distance map of the same area side by side.

I have done both, mapping software making it easy for distance.

When I have used time, I hex grid and color code my maps, as based on the terrian types in the DMG, roads as the listed but also keep people from getting lost.

From the SRD:
OVERLAND MOVEMENT

Characters covering long distances cross-country use overland movement. Overland movement is measured in miles per hour or miles per day. A day represents 8 hours of actual travel time. For rowed watercraft, a day represents 10 hours of rowing. For a sailing ship, it represents 24 hours.

Walk: A character can walk 8 hours in a day of travel without a problem. Walking for longer than that can wear him or her out (see Forced March, below).

Hustle: A character can hustle for 1 hour without a problem. Hustling for a second hour in between sleep cycles deals 1 point of nonlethal damage, and each additional hour deals twice the damage taken during the previous hour of hustling. A character who takes any nonlethal damage from hustling becomes fatigued.

A fatigued character can’t run or charge and takes a penalty of –2 to Strength and Dexterity. Eliminating the nonlethal damage also eliminates the fatigue.

Terrain: The terrain through which a character travels affects how much distance he or she can cover in an hour or a day (see Table: Terrain and Overland Movement). A highway is a straight, major, paved road. A road is typically a dirt track. A trail is like a road, except that it allows only single-file travel and does not benefit a party traveling with vehicles. Trackless terrain is a wild area with no paths.

Forced March: In a day of normal walking, a character walks for 8 hours. The rest of the daylight time is spent making and breaking camp, resting, and eating.

A character can walk for more than 8 hours in a day by making a forced march. For each hour of marching beyond 8 hours, a Constitution check (DC 10, +2 per extra hour) is required. If the check fails, the character takes 1d6 points of nonlethal damage. A character who takes any nonlethal damage from a forced march becomes fatigued. Eliminating the nonlethal damage also eliminates the fatigue. It’s possible for a character to march into unconsciousness by pushing himself too hard.

Mounted Movement: A mount bearing a rider can move at a hustle. The damage it takes when doing so, however, is lethal damage, not nonlethal damage. The creature can also be ridden in a forced march, but its Constitution checks automatically fail, and, again, the damage it takes is lethal damage. Mounts also become fatigued when they take any damage from hustling or forced marches.

See Table: Mounts and Vehicles for mounted speeds and speeds for vehicles pulled by draft animals.

Waterborne Movement: See Table: Mounts and Vehicles for speeds for water vehicles.

Table: Movement and Distance

——————— Speed ——–————
One Hour (Overland)
Walk 1-1/2 miles 2 miles 3 miles 4 miles
Hustle 3 miles 4 miles 6 miles 8 miles
Run — — — —
One Day (Overland)
Walk 12 miles 16 miles 24 miles 32 miles
Hustle — — — —
Run — — — —

Table: Hampered Movement

Condition Additional Movement Cost
Difficult terrain x2
Obstacle1 x2
Poor visibility x2
Impassable —
1 May require a skill check

Table: Terrain and Overland Movement
Terrain Highway Road or Trail Trackless
Desert, sandy x1 x1/2 x1/2
Forest x1 x1 x1/2
Hills x1 x3/4 x1/2
Jungle x1 x3/4 x1/4
Moor x1 x1 x3/4
Mountains x3/4 x3/4 x1/2
Plains x1 x1 x3/4
Swamp x1 x3/4 x1/2
Tundra, frozen x1 x3/4 x3/4

 

[DragonLancer]

I always design maps by distence not travel time. Travel times vary but distences are a constant. I think it would confuse most players.

 

[diaglo]

civilized vs. wilderness.

how many people in your campaign can read a map?

in our campaign few people can read. so a map is a measure of time mostly as told to others who can read and write. took us one day to get to this X..and another day to get here... and a week to get.. so of course it is distorted.

 

[drnuncheon]

One thing you might do is draw by distance, but put the grid on by travel time. That way the 'squares' on the mountains are smaller, the 'squares' on the roads are long and thin, etc.

 

[Vaxalon]

This is a nifty idea that gets complicated in practice. Let's say you've got a swamp between two cities, like this:

-------
-------
--vvv--
*-vvv-*

That gets bigger because it takes longer to travel through, right?

-------
-vvvvv-
-vvvvv-
*vvvvv*

Now assume thta instead of going THROUGH the swamp, you're going around it. Suddenly you've made that trip take LONGER than it did with the "accurate" map!

I'm sorry... there are unresolvable problems with this system.

Instead, a useful thing would be to make a "triptych" from your authoritative map, to show the players. This is something that was commonly used in Medieval times. It's a map, a long strip of paper, that shows the major landmarks along a trip, often with sketches for the illiterate.

 

[alsih2o]

Instead, a useful thing would be to make a "triptych" from your authoritative map, to show the players. This is something that was commonly used in Medieval times. It's a map, a long strip of paper, that shows the major landmarks along a trip, often with sketches for the illiterate.

OOH!

Vaxalon wins!

Fantastic.

 

[fusangite]

A few related thoughts that pop into my head:
1. During the negotiation of the treaty that created Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud demanded that all the boundaries be expressed in two units of measurement: fast camels and slow camels. This is one of the many reasons that some of Saudi Arabia's borders remain unclear to this day.
2. In a campaign I ran in the late 1990s I went a step further than you and had a purely oral tradition empire that had a central map room which was the location of a continuous poem describing the terrain of the empire. New scouts were always showing up and adding or changing verses to the song that had to be constantly sung around the clock to describe the empire.
3. Finally, here are some excerpts from a review essay I just submitted on landscape Christianization in early medieval Europe that might be helpful to our discussion:

While acknowledging the church's presence at the centre (ideologically if not geographically) of a parish, the study conceives of the christianization of landscape as the process whereby this locus of holiness functioned to claim the space around it. While parish boundaries were influenced by previous boundaries such as those of Roman-era villas and estates , or even earlier Iron Age boundaries , in many cases, christianization was about the process of creating new boundaries or, at least, altering what existing boundaries meant .
Hooke points out that the new parish boundaries of the Anglo-Saxon period were not simply abstract lines on a map; these boundaries functioned as one of the ways that people experienced landscape . Through practices such as "beating the bounds," people reconceptualized new and pre-existing topographical features as part of a single boundary line that was then transformed by human activity into a real boundary. Many charters of the period described boundaries with reference to a wide variety of features including historical features like Iron Age earthworks and Roman roads , natural features like trees, hills and watercourses and more ephemeral features like copses . These charters functioned, Hooke argues, as a reflection of the experience of walking the perimeter of the parish at the time of its establishment . Once established, the boundaries were often gradually made real and self-evident by the field and cultivation boundaries resulting from the establishment of the parish. Although not the subject of her study, the author notes that village- and townscapes were also structured by the siting of churches and the entrenchment of the economic structures that supported them .

Although not directly engaging the process of christianization in his article, Howe adds to our understanding of how folk belief about landscape combined pagan and Christian elements, offering the example of a charter defining the bounds of a thegn's fief in which all legal and financial terms are rendered in Latin and all landscape terms rendered in Old English . He also adds to Hooke's observations about property boundaries by observing the experiential and ephemeral nature of beating the bounds, referencing charters which included such ephemeral features as "old manure pile" in establishing supposedly permanent boundaries . Land descriptions, he argues, were of boundaries rather than contents and of experiential sequences rather than vistas . This idea of a phenomenological approach to landscape is considered at length by Benozzo but contributes little to our understanding of the christianization process beyond the observations of Hooke and Howe.