Travel times and distances

[Gilladian]

I love discussions like this! So what I'm distilling from this, is that with game trails and the occasional "orc hiking trail" (they'd better have to fight some orcs!), then with a guide and a reasonable chance of spotting and avoiding the worst geographic mistakes (the owl familiar), a ten-mile-per-day progress is at least feasible, if not likely.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I'd say the take-away is that you can make it as easy/fast or as difficult/slow as you want it and nobody can tell you you're wrong. Only the DM can really say for sure what the terrain is. Forest can have underbrush or be a flat, dry, easily traversed floor. Scrub can be brambles with steel-hard spike thorns or razor-sharp grasses. Or both. Or it could just be greenery that's an impossibly dense and impenetrable mess that's even worse if it's wet. Terrain can have rocks the size of golf-balls or the size of two-car garages. If it's the latter, can you just walk pleasantly between them, or do you have to climb over top of them for 5 miles? There might be tracks and trails - or there might not. In the real world we don't have intelligent plants that want to herd you into valleys you get lost in and can't climb out of by opening trails and then closing them behind you - that can happen in D&D. Maybe there's no large game trails because the stirges kill all the large game. Maybe the local tribal shaman or druids go around casting Plant Growth to remove traces of humanoid activity. And maybe the DM is just tired of rolling random encounters and announces that you simply get where you're going without any more fuss. And of course, if a merchant caravan of 10 wagons leaves city A to go sell wares in city B then it can't be THAT hard to get through, can it?

 

[S'mon]

I'd say the take-away is that you can make it as easy/fast or as difficult/slow as you want it and nobody can tell you you're wrong.

Yup. BTW I see the 5e DMG pg 112 has DCs for wilderness navigation, forest is DC 15 Wilderness (Survival). It doesn't say when to check but I'd think daily was reasonable. The rules are a bit vague compared to pre-3e exploration rules though. Looking at the PHB pg 181-2 it looks as if PCs are normally moving 24 miles/day in clear terrain, 12 miles/day in difficult terrain, with mounts making no difference - this is probably more realistic than prior editions. If the PCs have a guide let them move 12 miles/day through the woods. If they have a PC skilled in Wilderness (Survival) then either let them move full rate, or maybe 3/4 rate assuming some backtracking and reorienting is needed. If not then I'd suggest half rate 6 miles/day for straight-line distance achieved.

 

[Bluenose]

Yup. BTW I see the 5e DMG pg 112 has DCs for wilderness navigation, forest is DC 15 Wilderness (Survival). It doesn't say when to check but I'd think daily was reasonable.

I think it depends how often you want people failing. How skilled should you have to be before getting lost every week isn't likely? A +12 bonus against DC15 means you're probably failing at least once in the first week.

To make one comment to the more general question, the mounts and pack animals probably are going to slow you down and/or to need healing fairly quickly in this sort of exercise. They also massively increase the logistic problems, and attract predators where humans are perhaps less likely to. Plains are a different matter, but horses are not suitable for woodland/forest travel.

 

[S'mon]

I think it depends how often you want people failing. How skilled should you have to be before getting lost every week isn't likely? A +12 bonus against DC15 means you're probably failing at least once in the first week.

Lost here just means going off course and losing some time, so +14 to never fail seems ok to me, with a typical skilled character in 5e being +5 or so.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I don't think any version of D&D covers this rule well. In part because rules for horses are even more unrealistic than rules for people. This is to address the opening post, where using horses and mules were part of the scenario.

I recall reading about a battle in Ancient China, about 1800 years ago. The enemy stood between Cao Cao's forces and a grove. Cao Cao's troops were thirsty, too. Cao Cao told his troops that the grove contained peaches, and his guys got fired up and beat the enemy. I don't know if they actually found any peaches. Since Cao Cao survived for several more decades, probably! People can be motivated more easily than horses, as they can picture the future.

Horses can run far faster than humans, but their walking speed isn't that much faster. Horses in the versions of D&D I'm familiar with (2e to 4e) always have a much higher walking speed than a human. In 4e, a horse moves at speed 10, compared to an unarmored human's 6. Traveling by horseback, overland, is more than 1.5 times faster in that edition. I don't think this is realistic.* In 3e, not only does the horse have a similar speed ratio, but it has a high Con score and the Endurance feat by default, so it'll take longer than a human to get tired, which I don't think is realistic either. The horse will only walk a bit faster than a human and actually has less walking endurance. The human needs to get off (and possibly onto another horse) at certain times. A person might starve himself or herself for a bit if they need to push fast for a time, but the horse will balk at such treatment. I've read that you could move really fast if you took a lot of horses per person, but modern-day unfamiliarity with horses, but horrible rules complexity, means no version of D&D could model that effectively.

*In my game, I've set horses to speed 7... but gave them a special trait that lets them run and charge at horse speed. It doesn't really deal with the endurance issue, though.

 

[bgbarcus]

I got curious about the difference between horse and human travel pace and did some research. Horses have short bursts of speed but more rest and more long food/water breaks than humans. Horses also have far more restricted terrain options. Over a long journey humans are more resilient and make better time than horses and humans are able to move through terrain that will block of kill a horse. Riding does leave humans less tired for those battles but the horses need to take at least one day a week to rest.

 

[N'raac]

First question to ask is whether we want realism or genre emulation. Everyone wants horses to travel in fantasy games. If we want the players to gravitate to horses in game, there must be an advantage to travel using horses.

To me, the advantage isn't speed of travel, but carrying capacity. The horses can haul a lot of baggage without slowing down the pace of travel. I'm pretty sure that was stated to be the case in at least one older edition, but probably got removed for the easier/more intuitive "movement speed dictates speed of overland travel" model in later editions.

Man in the Funny Hat nails it, though. "And maybe the DM is just tired of rolling random encounters and announces that you simply get where you're going without any more fuss. And of course, if a merchant caravan of 10 wagons leaves city A to go sell wares in city B then it can't be THAT hard to get through, can it?"

I'd say the take-away is that you can make it as easy/fast or as difficult/slow as you want it and nobody can tell you you're wrong. Only the DM can really say for sure what the terrain is.
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And maybe the DM is just tired of rolling random encounters and announces that you simply get where you're going without any more fuss. And of course, if a merchant caravan of 10 wagons leaves city A to go sell wares in city B then it can't be THAT hard to get through, can it?

Is it adding anything to the game to meticulously work out overland travel speeds, or to play through an endless series of navigation rolls, cam setup and breakdown descriptions, animal handling and veterinary horse rolls. random wandering monster checks, etc. etc. etc., or should we just assess some travel speed we can live with, announce that "it takes three weeks of difficult, dangerous travel through the orc-infested broken terrain so you are tired, dusty and sweaty when, at long last, you crest a hill and see your destination in the distance."

I haven't played in many games where the GM follows that with "Unfortunately, another band of adventurers beat you hear and cleaned out the dungeon before you arrived. Where do you want to look for new adventure hooks?" Somehow, no matter how long and arduous, or short and convenient, the journey, the PCs seem to arrive right around the time that would best suit the adventure.

 

[bgbarcus]

First question to ask is whether we want realism or genre emulation. Everyone wants horses to travel in fantasy games. If we want the players to gravitate to horses in game, there must be an advantage to travel using horses.

To me, the advantage isn't speed of travel, but carrying capacity. The horses can haul a lot of baggage without slowing down the pace of travel. I'm pretty sure that was stated to be the case in at least one older edition, but probably got removed for the easier/more intuitive "movement speed dictates speed of overland travel" model in later editions.

Man in the Funny Hat nails it, though. "And maybe the DM is just tired of rolling random encounters and announces that you simply get where you're going without any more fuss. And of course, if a merchant caravan of 10 wagons leaves city A to go sell wares in city B then it can't be THAT hard to get through, can it?"



Is it adding anything to the game to meticulously work out overland travel speeds, or to play through an endless series of navigation rolls, cam setup and breakdown descriptions, animal handling and veterinary horse rolls. random wandering monster checks, etc. etc. etc., or should we just assess some travel speed we can live with, announce that "it takes three weeks of difficult, dangerous travel through the orc-infested broken terrain so you are tired, dusty and sweaty when, at long last, you crest a hill and see your destination in the distance."

I haven't played in many games where the GM follows that with "Unfortunately, another band of adventurers beat you hear and cleaned out the dungeon before you arrived. Where do you want to look for new adventure hooks?" Somehow, no matter how long and arduous, or short and convenient, the journey, the PCs seem to arrive right around the time that would best suit the adventure.

My game covers multiple parties (same players) across a large portion of the world. Several are setting up dominions. Travel times are important although I don't spend time in travel encounters unless they add to the story or do something entertaining. I keep a world timeline so everyone can know who is where and when.

 

[Greenfield]

I got curious about the difference between horse and human travel pace and did some research. Horses have short bursts of speed but more rest and more long food/water breaks than humans. Horses also have far more restricted terrain options. Over a long journey humans are more resilient and make better time than horses and humans are able to move through terrain that will block of kill a horse. Riding does leave humans less tired for those battles but the horses need to take at least one day a week to rest.

Care and feeding can also be an issue.

Horses are adapted to eating grass and other greenery, and like most large herbivores, they normally feed through most of the day. Just not that many calories in grass, after all.

We bypass that by feeding them seed grains, like oats, which are like candy to them. Lots of energy.

But if they live on candy all the time, they get sick. They get digestive problems unless they can consume their normal food at least some of the time. Even hay can be a problem, since it's much drier than fresh grass.

And if they get sick...
http://cameron.kangaweb.com/jokes/Farside/vet.jpg