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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6691195" data-attributes="member: 4937">In terms of the 3 miles a day theory, I have a couple of complaints/observations.First, that's straight line distance, not the total distance travelled - what someone called the 'useful distance'.  Yes, I grant you that sometimes it might require 6 miles of travel to go 3 miles because you have to deflect out your line of travel or you find yourself at a dead end or simply because you get a little bit lost and wander out of your way.  But these are to my mind all problems of navigation and not problems related to physical endurance, and as such D&D has no good rules available for dealing with not going along the best route or not going where you intend.  If you agree that some of these problems will be alleviated by having a guide familiar with the terrain, then I think you are also implicitly agreeing that there is some skill that you can have that lets you effectively travel farther for the same effort.  I also think that in terms of long distance travel, useful distance might be defined differently than it would be when the goal is to see something specific and return from the trip.  As long as it is vaguely in the right direction, it's all useful, and the added travel time is mostly measured in the extra hexes I add to the path.I have such a skill, called 'navigation', that helps you travel in a straight line and not get lost.  In general, it's impact on the campaign is only observed if the PC party neglects it.   If a PC is skilled in navigation, by the time they are expected to travel in the trackless wilderness they are usually pretty good at it.  For example, right now 7th level, 10 ranks + 1 wisdom + 3 enhancement bonus from a magic item + 2 circumstance from a PC that can assist = +16 bonus.   They can navigate trackless wilderness with unfamiliar geography on a 2+ (18 DC) most of the time.   Soon, it will be trivial.  They can just do it.  Yes, if they can't do this, they better hire a guide.Secondly, I have hiked in the wilderness off trail and I'm familiar with some of the worst terrain in North America - swamps, pine tickets, blackberry brambles - where even walking can be next to impossible and if you had to force your way though it you'd be a very tough person to make even 4 miles in a day.  But its actually rare for such terrain to be even 4 miles thick or to require a large deflection to avoid it.  It's also rare for such terrain to be completely trackless.  Deer for example use pine tickets as shelter, and blackberry brambles as feeding habitat.  If you have large game animals in an area, you are going to have game trails.   In the case of most D&D settings, you are also going to have trails used by aboriginal populations of some sort, even if these don't rise to the level of an improved trail or primitive road.  If the goal was simply to be vaguely 8 miles away from where I started in a certain direction (NW) I can think of few places where I couldn't manage it if I were fit.Which brings up what I think is a major problem in compare our own personal experience with that of the PC's.  The PC's are supposed to be heroic persons.  They don't have a desk job.   They aren't generally out of shape or obese, and there are generally no rules for becoming either.  D&D has very few rules for really dealing with fitness and endurance, and they mostly only come up when the PC's try do something above and beyond norms which are set by examples of very fit and very healthy persons to be begin with.   I know what I'm capable of doing now, and what I was capable of doing when I was younger and even though when younger I was never super fit, what I could do then was vastly greater than what I can do now.   D&D doesn't in general make the act of struggling on a journey have drama or granularity.   You don't expend 'endurance' points for each mile you travel or each hill you climb, and track how much endurance you return by resting.  It doesn't make the party take a 1 hour break to recover enough endurance that they'll be able to finish the days journey, it doesn't make them stop and take a full days rest because they haven't recovered from the exertions of the previous day or days.  Personally, I'd be hard pressed to keep up 20 miles a day or 10 miles a day in rugged terrain over a long period as things are.  A mere two miles up a hill at 1500' elevation change a mile and I'm heaving and collapsing these days, light pack or not.  But D&D has no way of simulating this in detail, and I think that is by design.   If you look back historically, someone like Daniel Boone is not making just 3 miles a day headway exploring the frontier, and if he is, it's because he's mostly doing something else ('cilled a bar').  I'm not sure that I'm convinced by testimonies of what average persons can do when trail breaking, even those that are fairly fit.  Perhaps if you told me that you compete in long distance wilderness travel and ultra-marathons and then told me that after 3 miles of trail breaking you were exhausted, I'd take that seriously and reconsider.  But I've hiked a lot in the hills of the south-eastern United States, on and off trail because mostly I wasn't in park land, and I'm not sure 1-3 kilometers represents the output of a fit person doing anything except maybe attempting to summit a peak or pushing cave passage, much less superheroes like the PC.  What the anecdote is useful for is countering claims that it's unrealistic that the PC's only managed 6-8 miles of travel in a days time while carrying gear in rugged terrain.  If I tried to force one my players though 1-3 miles travel in a day, I'd expect sufficient revolt that I would have to create detailed endurance rules to justify it.Much like the example with navigation, my expectation is that if you rigorously implemented endurance in your game, the PC's would simply have invested in the resource and it would only matter much in the game if they neglected it.  And to the extent that they did neglect it, they'd remedy the situation by employing porters, mules, and even litters to carry that wizard in ill-health at low levels and at higher levels flying carpets and other extraordinary 'mounts' or just circumvent the difficult travel entirely with teleport  (if they don't already).  If that is what you are going for, then by all means implement that but it's not really going to arise out of the current rules regardless of how you set long distance travel per day.</blockquote>

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