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Old 11-09-2018, 12:53 AM   #1
lugaid
 
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Default The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

A few years ago, when The Last Gasp was still fairly new, I asked a question about how to integrate TLG and the long-distance movement fatigue rules on p. B426. Mr. Cole mentioned that he had developed a provisional system, but it was broken and so it was dropped from the article. Has anyone managed to work out a good method for that?
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Old 11-09-2018, 12:23 PM   #2
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

Quote:
Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
A few years ago, when The Last Gasp was still fairly new, I asked a question about how to integrate TLG and the long-distance movement fatigue rules on p. B426. Mr. Cole mentioned that he had developed a provisional system, but it was broken and so it was dropped from the article. Has anyone managed to work out a good method for that?
Just for completeness: not me.
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Old 11-09-2018, 01:43 PM   #3
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

I have a method, but I don't know how good it is.

Travel
Every character has a basic daily rate, that is determined by their speed (or move). This represents the distance they can travel over average terrain without any ill effects such as lost fatigue.

Basic Daily Rate
A character’s basic daily rate is twice their basic speed, adjusted for encumbrance as shown in the table below. If a character has increased or decreased their move score, use that in place of basic speed.

Encumbrance Level and BDR
Encumbrance levels don’t have a huge effect on BDR. Carrying a lot of gear doesn’t greatly alter the speed with which you can walk. It will, however, affect how tiring a walk or hike will be.
Code:
Encumbrance      BDRx FPx
None	BL	×1.2	×1.0
Light	2×BL	×1.0	×1.0
Medium	3×BL	×1.0	×1.5
Heavy	6×BL	×1.0	×2.0
X-Heavy	10×BL	×0.8	×3.0
Travel Procedure
The group determines the pace at which they will travel, selecting it from the table below.
Code:
Pace	Daily Distance	FP
Walking     	BDR×1.0	0*
Hiking	        BDR×1.2	4
Forced March	BDR×1.6	8
All Out 	BDR×2.0	12
*Cost is zero only for encumbrance None or Light. It costs 2 FP for medium, 4 FP for Heavy, and 8 FP for Extra Heavy.

A successful hiking roll halves the fatigue expenditure. The hiking roll is optional, so critical failures are ignored. Any group travelling with a leader who has the hiking skill and leadership at 12+ can roll once for the whole group versus their average hiking skill.

The distances above assume that 6 hours are spent “on the march” with the rest of the day dedicated to striking or making camp, rest, meals, and so on, so dividing the daily distance by 6 gives speed in MPH. Every two hours beyond this increases the distance by 1/3, but also increases the FP cost by 50% and applies a -2 to the travel roll. The GM may impose other consequences for time lost to other travel-related activities.

Travelling at Different Rates
It is possible that slower party members can only keep up with the group by adopting a different pace. A hiking pace for some members may be a forced march pace for others or even a walking pace for some. Either set a pace and have the group travel the distance of the slowest member or have the leader set a target distance and then each member of the group will determine the pace that they must keep to achieve this.

Getting There First
Sometimes it is important to know how long it takes to get somewhere, not how far the party can go with 6 hours of travel spread over a 24-hour day. To determine speed (in mph), calculate the daily distance for the chosen pace and divide by 6. Every two hours of travel at this pace without regular breaks costs the FP given in the table above, modified for encumbrance. A travel roll may be made to halve this.

Terrain and Weather Effects
The type of terrain crossed will determine the actual distance travelled
Code:
Terrain Type	Examples	Distance Multiplier	Cost/ Mile
Very Bad	Dense forest, mountains. 	×0.20	5 miles
Bad            	Broken ground, forest, steep hills. 	×0.50	2 miles
Average 	Light forest or rolling hills. Typical roads. 	×1.00	1 mile
Good    	Level plains. Imperial roads. 	×1.25	0.8 mile
Snow         	1-3” snow. (Ankle deep). 	×0.50	2 miles
Deep Snow	3”-12” snow. (Knee deep.)	×0.25	4 miles
Ice    	   Ice from snow or sleet. 	×0.50	2 miles
Solid Ice	A frozen lake or river. 	×0.50	2 miles
Skis can be used on any depth of snow. Treat as average terrain and use skiing for the travel roll.
Skates can be used on solid ice. Treat as good terrain and use skating for the travel roll.

If I were going to further refine this, I'd think about making the FP reduction for the hiking roll more variable than "all" or "half".
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Old 11-10-2018, 01:16 AM   #4
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

Is BDR in miles/day in your system, so that an average person has a BDR of 10 miles per day, assuming six hours of daily travel?
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Old 11-10-2018, 07:32 AM   #5
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

Quote:
Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
Is BDR in miles/day in your system, so that an average person has a BDR of 10 miles per day, assuming six hours of daily travel?
Yes, for an average person walking in average terrain (hills or light forest) and ending the day with no fatigue loss.

[Edited to add]
An average person (Move 5, no hiking skill) on good terrain (plains or road) without encumbrance going at a hiking pace (so that they're tired, but will recover with a single overnight rest 4FP at 20/10=2 FP/Hour is 8 hours for full recovery), would travel 10*1.2*1.2*1.25 miles, or 18 miles. Three miles per hour for 6 hours a day doesn't seem overly low for an everyman to me.
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Last edited by Brandy; 11-10-2018 at 08:14 AM.
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Old 11-10-2018, 05:09 PM   #6
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

Every time you spend 1 AP to walk around (giving you 10% of your Move in Movement Points) you might make a skill roll against Hiking so that it costs you 0 AP if you get a critical success, like with attacks.

For long-term walks, the AP/step cost could be averaged out at 1 minus 0.1 x however many points you have hiking above 10, minimum 0.1 for realism.
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Old 11-10-2018, 06:56 PM   #7
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

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Originally Posted by Brandy View Post
Yes, for an average person walking in average terrain (hills or light forest) and ending the day with no fatigue loss.

[Edited to add]
An average person (Move 5, no hiking skill) on good terrain (plains or road) without encumbrance going at a hiking pace (so that they're tired, but will recover with a single overnight rest 4FP at 20/10=2 FP/Hour is 8 hours for full recovery), would travel 10*1.2*1.2*1.25 miles, or 18 miles. Three miles per hour for 6 hours a day doesn't seem overly low for an everyman to me.
That sounds reasonable. I'm not sure about the six hours per day of travel, though. An average day of twelve sunlit hours plus around an hour of usable twilight gives thirteen hours. Travelers will need at least one break during the day, and will take time striking and setting up camp as you've noted. From experience, I can set up a tent or take it down in maybe a half-hour if I'm taking my time. Call it an hour for less user-friendly tents, and to account for other camp tasks. That's two hours, one for setup and one for striking. Making and eating a meal, plus preparing the morning's breakfast (they might do that in the morning instead, but it's still about the same amount of time - not to mention that a lot of meal prep could actually be done during dark hours, but we'll count it during lit hours anyway), at the end of the day might take another hour, and morning preparation other than striking the camp will take less than a half-hour for eating and so on. The breaks during the day might take up a half-hour total, or more if the pace is leisurely but let's leave it at a half-hour since adventurers are typically more interested in getting to their destination. That takes up a total of around four hours of our average thirteen hour day, leaving nine hours a day for travel. Drop travel speeds down slightly to account for various unexpected events, and our hiking travelers should still be going around 20-25 miles a day on clear, flat terrain with dirt roads in good weather. So, to me, 18 as an average seems a little on the low side.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Plane View Post
Every time you spend 1 AP to walk around (giving you 10% of your Move in Movement Points) you might make a skill roll against Hiking so that it costs you 0 AP if you get a critical success, like with attacks.

For long-term walks, the AP/step cost could be averaged out at 1 minus 0.1 x however many points you have hiking above 10, minimum 0.1 for realism.
I'm not sure that dipping into the AP section of the article is necessarily going to prove useful. Those numbers are rounded for combat purposes, and probably won't match up well to the needs of long-distance travel. Mainly, I think that it's probably better to concentrate on the levels of fatigue of the first half of the article, and adjust the FP costs for long-distance travel to fit.

It might be interesting at some point to work out in detail the AP costs of hiking and resulting FP losses and compare those to the movement costs in TLG, but for now I just want to set the regular FP costs of long-distance travel, so we can get an estimate of how tired the characters will be when they arrive at their destination and have to jump straight into a fight, or whatever.

Last edited by lugaid; 11-10-2018 at 07:01 PM.
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Old 11-11-2018, 07:30 AM   #8
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

A fairly simple idea I had was to have many of the things that currently cost FP - hiking, extra effort, magic, etc - be tracked somewhat separately from TLG FP. This temporary FP loss would follow the normal rules (EDIT: by which I mean those from Basic, not The Last Gasp) for recovery, and each point of temporary FP loss you are suffering reduces your maximum AP by 1 (although thinking further on it, 2 or even 3 may be more appropriate). It may be appropriate to limit how much temporary FP loss you can suffer, and going beyond this takes away from the long-term FP from the article.
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Old 11-11-2018, 07:33 AM   #9
Brandy
 
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

Quote:
Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
That sounds reasonable. I'm not sure about the six hours per day of travel, though.
One of the data points that I used when I was researching this was the Roman Army, which IIRC used to be on the march for 5-6 hours per day. I didn't retain any of that research, so my memory of that could be wrong.

Quote:
<snip>

That takes up a total of around four hours of our average thirteen hour day, leaving nine hours a day for travel.
Let's see what that looks like using the rules above.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandy
Every two hours beyond this increases the distance by 1/3, but also increases the FP cost by 50% and applies a -2 to the travel roll.
So, our 9 hours per day everymen going at a Hiking Pace are going 3 hours beyond the standard 6. This would increase distance by 1/2 (1/3*3/2) and fatigue by 75% (50%*3/2). This makes the FP expenditure for the day 7, 4 with a successful hiking roll and makes distance travelled 27 miles. If they can't make a hiking roll, 7 FP per day isn't sustainable for our everyman characters -- they'll need some extra rest every couple of days.

Quote:
Drop travel speeds down slightly to account for various unexpected events, and our hiking travelers should still be going around 20-25 miles a day on clear, flat terrain with dirt roads in good weather. So, to me, 18 as an average seems a little on the low side.
"Drop travel speeds down" -- Let's look then at walking pace. Even with medium encumbrance our everyman characters can do a sustainable walking pace (4 FP per day) with 10 hours of walking per day. Doing that on good roads, they get 10 (BDR)x1(Walking)x1.25 (Good Terrain)x1 2/3 (10 hours) or just under 21 miles per day. And that's doing a pace that an everyman (HT 10, no hiking skill) can sustain, day after day, without making hiking rolls.

Let's move away from "everyman" and look at some adventurers.

Consider a group of adventurers with HT 12 and speed 6. With HT 12, 6 FP per day is sustainable, so they can go at our hiking pace for 8 hours per day and not need to make the hiking roll, which would be at -2, and still be able to do the same distance the next day with 8 hours rest. On good terrain, they would travel 12(BDR) x 1.2(Hiking) x 1.25 (Terrain) x 4/3 (8 hours)=24 miles per day. Given HT 12, that matches what you're looking for pretty well ISTM.

This does assume Light Encumbrance. Take them up to medium, and now they're pretty much dependent upon being skilled hikers or restricted to 6 hours per day as a sustainable pace.

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Old 11-18-2018, 03:59 PM   #10
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Default Re: The Last Gasp and Hiking Redux

I've been away, I apologize. Life sometimes, neh?

Varyon: That's an interesting idea, but it seems like it removes a lot of the benefits of using TLG in the first place, other than maybe incorporating AP.

Brandy: You're convincing me more, but I am still left wondering how to enforce the break time in the middle. One of the things about TLG that doesn't fit this is that there's no real benefit to resting for a half hour or so. In the original system, that would bring back 3FP for use in the second half of the day. I'm also not convinced that an organized military schedule is appropriate to small groups. As the authors said in Swordbearer, many years ago when explaining why they chose to use data from wilderness walking and hiking groups rather than military data, "This is probably a fairer test of typical travel times than military values, since very few groups of casual adventurers and travellers function with military discipline or fitness, but yet few are plagued by military bureaucracy!" They went on to account for the latter factor by increasing the number and length of breaks required for large groups in much the same way that you have above. This also helps to account for the faster movement of scouts and other small detachments.

My thinking during the last week or so has been that maybe we should consider revising TLG slightly to allow for some FP to be recovered at something like the original rate. My current thoughts are also that each "stage" of fatigue should take an order of magnitude more time (or so) to recover. So, Mild Fatigue should recover at 2 hours (or 120 minutes)/starting FP, Severe Fatigue at 20 hours/FP (the TLG rate for Mild Fatigue), and Deep Fatigue remains at 240 hours/FP.

This actually could allow us to simply use the travel fatigue rates as listed, since a half-hour or so (36 minutes—and we could change that to 100 minutes/FP if we want an exact 10 minutes/FP for a starting 10FP character, but that seems a slim benefit that screws with other things like the simple hour to recover all Mild Fatigue losses) gives back 3FP in the middle of the day. That allows the 10FP character to spend as much as 13FP per day in fatigue costs for travel, just as the current system does, then requires 3FP recovered during the midday break, an hour for the first 5FP (at 12 minutes per FP recovered), followed by 2 hours per each additional FP recovered, or usually up to 8 hours to recover 4FP. All assuming No Encumbrance, of course. Carrying more increases the FP cost considerably, which seems right. This also seems to me to help with the Magic/TLG disparity to some degree, as well as other similar unintended consequences.

EDIT TO ADD: Does that seem reasonable?

Last edited by lugaid; 11-18-2018 at 05:05 PM. Reason: Needed question
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