Underground Travel

[taliesin15]

How many miles can an adventuring party travel per day, in underground caves and dungeons, with the slowest party members travelling at a rate of 20', while continually searching for traps along the way?

I'm tending to think no more than 10 miles per day.

Unfortunately, I can only find stats for overland travel. And am not sure how much continually searching for traps will slow them down.

 

[phindar]

Well, if it takes a full round action to search a 5x5 section, I guess the party would be moving at a rate of roughly 5' every other round. My math may be a little off, but I'm getting 1/4 mile per hour. (If a 15' move is 1.5 miles per hour, and they're moving 1/6th of that, that'd be a a quarter mile, right?) So, figure 2 miles per 8 hours of travel, or a little less since any time they have to climb up or down or cross obstructions will slow things down a bit. And also, they'd just be clearing a 5' wide path.

I've actually had a character try to do this, back in 2e. I made a rogue to join a higher level party of long-time player-characters who were heading off on an underdark quest, and they were offering me 100gp per day as a trapfinder. I was playing an elf, so I had a few hundred years to spare, so I was making F/R Traps rolls every round per 10' of movement. This lasted until the other pcs realized we had been walking for an hour of game time and were still in sight of the doors to the module. They decided that paying an immortal by the day was not the best way to go about it, and we started forward at a normal pace-- and immediately fell into a trap. Granted, it was the GM screwing with us, but it was funny.

Although, with Detect Snares and Pitshttp://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/detectSnaresAndPits.htm, they'd be trucking along at 20'. Wouldn't detect every type of trap, but its much more time efficient.

 

[Jack Simth]

It's a full-round action to search a 5x5 square, or a volume of goods five feet on a side, per the Search skill description.

You can take a five-foot step if you don't otherwise move that round.

So you're going at a rate of five feet per round, or 1/2 a mile per hour.

Per the overland travel section of the SRD, you can go for 8 hours without incurring penalties. That's four miles a day.

Now, concentrating on a spell is merely a standard action; if you have Detect Snares and Pits, as well as Detect Magic up (two different casters; both spells are Persistable) you'll go a bit faster (normal pace - one standard to concentrate, one move).

If you have Find the Path up, you'll just go at a normal pace.

 

[The Levitator]

At that rate, I'd think they'd be more at risk from the increased encounters than the damage they would sustain from occasional traps. I'm curious though, as a DM. Why are they constantly checking for traps? Is the place rumored to be unnecessarily booby-trapped? Does the DM (I didn't want to assume it was you) run more of a puzzle/challenge type campaign? Or is the party not very experienced as players? I'm curious because we recently added a new player to our group and she is very paranoid. She's playing a rogue and wants to constantly check everything for anything. I don't run a challenge/puzzle style game, so the players will never have to worry about traps just popping up out of nowhere for no reason. At first, the other players were getting very frustrated. I just had to remind them that there are a lot of different gaming styles out there, and rather than give her a hard time for slowing the game down to a crawl, that we take some time and explain our campaign world and gaming style. I once played as a player with a DM who used to do a lot of illogical things in his campaign just to "get us", like traps in the middle of the forest that served no purpose other than to catch us off guard and wear the party down. I think that always kind of stuck with me so I've always strived to only have traps and puzzles and the like in my campaign if they make sense within the story and the party has a reasonable chance to expect and overcome them.

Back to the subject of characters moving at the speed of smell; do you adjust your random encounters to balance out the very slow rate of speed that they are travelling? I always have, and I'm just wondering what other DM's do to balance out characters bogging the game down when they are trying to be a little too safe?

 

[taliesin15]

I'm the DM, and this party basically likes to constantly check for traps. I do use a lot of puzzles but probably avg. number of traps.

Thanks for all the suggestions, folks.

 

[The Blow Leprechaun]

Are you trying to punish them for being overly cautious, or do you just want to see how things would work?

Realistically, a player continuously looking for traps isn't going over every 5 feet of ground they encounter with a fine tooth comb. Unless I wanted to punish them, I'd probably just put them moving at half the speed of the slowest party member and any time they got near a trap make the rogue roll a search check to see if s/he noticed it.

I doubt it's RAW, but I think it makes more sense that way, to represent cautious travel.

 

[Felnar]

as the DM, one way to speed things up would be to pre-roll the rogues search check for all traps. then you can just hand wave all of it. it would greatly speed up the playtime, but the 'in-game' time and moverate will still be slow

Alternately, you could apply some realism to the characters. And unless they all have the patience of a super-stoic monk, their characters will get bored, drop their guard, and get sloppy.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

How many miles can an adventuring party travel per day, in underground caves and dungeons, with the slowest party members travelling at a rate of 20', while continually searching for traps along the way?

I'm tending to think no more than 10 miles per day.

Unfortunately, I can only find stats for overland travel. And am not sure how much continually searching for traps will slow them down.

Overland travel underground...
I don't think you can quite equate this, but to put it into some sort of perspective I once went caving with a couple of freinds in a relatively open cave system {ie, walk upright for most of the time} and went in about 3 miles before turning around.. took us 8 hours to do 6 miles. {

In another cave system that was much more restricted {ie, knees or climbing braced wall to wall most of the time} the same 8 hour adventure covered maybe 4 miles.

Compare that to the 2 miles covered walking at a move of 20'... it comes out to be roughly 1/4 the overland rate.


But the biggest restriction to linear travel underground is the cave in question. Most mundane cave systems don't go in straight lines... So if your caves are huge tunnels running straight through the earth.. 10 miles per day sounds about right, basically treating it like difficult terrain. More narrow/twisted caves might be better represented by trading the Move with a Take 10 climb check... which could considerably slow a group down.
{fx, fighter with a 5 ranks in Climb and no armor would have an equivilent Move of 15. Toss Plate Mail on him and that drops to a 9... but thats HR territory }

{caving experience from the Tucson Az area, Peppersauce and Scroll caves references above}


Searching for Traps? Without Magic it would be a snails pace....

 

[taliesin15]

I like a couple of those suggestions, to simply either pre-roll or come up with an approximate average speed that's a bit slower...

As to the story about the person doing spelunkering in caves, yes, I've done a bit of that, and these are very important things that maybe should be in the rules, but FWIW, the underground complex itself as actually anchored around a straight running rough-hewn corridor, 10' x 10' x 10', which runs into a variety of caves along the way, several quite massive, in a generally-speaking straight direction. Every few miles or so the party will encounter a chasm wherein the ancient dwarves that built this 72 mile underground highway dumped all the debris from the area, now all tidily filled in. I was considering having some of these filled in chasms swarming with some sort of evil monster or other.

There's also side passages here and there, but mainly its this straight line passage starting (from the party's POV) at the bottom of what was formerly the lair of a high level gnome illusionist, but to them it was the dungeon where they fought kobolds, goblins and the likes as 1st lvl characters. Every major intersection of this highway has a longish semi rambling announcement hewn in ancient dwarvish runes, i.e. you are now only 55 miles from the gates of the Realm of the Dwarf Kings, etc.

As to whether I was wanting to punish the party, or whatever, nah, I just wanted something that seemed reasonable. Basically, if the party can manage to travel at least ten miles per day, they should be able to reach the gates of the former Dwarvish kingdom on the day the exiled dwarves and men assault the keep from the outside, while the high level allies keep the BBEGs distracted at the fortress back door.

 

[Kmart Kommando]

That's one of the reasons I hate trap encounters.

They usually slow down the game because of all the paranoid searching of every square, often times in someone's living quarters.

Then the traps get set off 80% of the time anyway, either by blundering into them, failing to disable them, or the meta-knowledge of PC trap tactics where the rogue in the room is fine, but the party in the next room explodes.