Typical length of travel

[Black Leviathan]

This isn't really the focus of Dungeon Fantasy. The core rules don't even include horses and tack or wagons or the cost of hiring someone to drive you somewhere. The journey should be 3d6 meals long and have one encounter and one environmental hazard, and if you roll navigation well you'll reduce or increase that number by margin of failure. You could make the trip planning more of a focus in the game but it would mean adding much more nuanced complexity to travel as house rules.

And @Rasputin makes a point. A trip further than you can stagger home without food or water is much more dangerous than fighting a dragon, even travelling along roads and farms. Dungeon Fantasy sort of soft-sells that risk by putting well stocked markets and helpful temples in every village but it's still not a world you'd want to be out of luck in. If you're planning to travel more than a week you're probably hopping from walled city to walled city, paying what you have to to avoid trouble.

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by GWJ

. . . longer trip makes these skills more useful and worthy, shorter trip makes these skills less useful and worthy - all I need is the golden balance ;)

You've nailed the reason for not glossing over travel times to and from the Dungeon and Town.

I set the multi-level dungeon's distance from my campaign's Town at 30 days because it was suitably far enough that logistics—lacking survival skills especially—are a real concern, yet not a crippling one. It also makes the time-reducing success rolls of "Getting There Quickly" (Exploits, p. 17) significant. Knocking off one or two days of travel time is nice, but knock off more than a week and you've really cut down on supplies as well as hireling wages. "Foraging" rolls (Exploits, p. 17) become just as tense at the table as some attack rolls once in the dungeon.

It's worked well enough in actual game play so far that I've not considered changing it.

However, when making the "Forced March" rolls, we make sure to note the rules from "Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem" (Exploits, p. 6) for the party's Hiking skills. The rules allow us to use "the party’s highest skill level and subtract a penalty equal to the number of members who have no points in the skill." The outcome of one roll affects everyone. The way the "Forced March" rules are written, it allows for this even with a strict reading of RAW.

That has been an excellent choice. It makes everyone take 1 point in Hiking, as well they should, but doesn't make characters dump heavy loads of points in it just for the group to have any chance of succeeding in a "Forced March." A win-win.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Stripe

I set the multi-level dungeon's distance from my campaign's Town at 30 days because it was suitably far enough that logistics—lacking survival skills especially—are a real concern, yet not a crippling one.

It's a fairly ridiculous distance though. Thirty days march is something like 1000 km in most terrain. There may be places in the Siberian arctic or Amazonas that are 30 days walk from a major city, but I doubt there are many other places that's possible - the middle of the Sahara or the Outback aren't remote enough. If you allow for places that are just substantial towns rather than major cities, I suspect there are none left, and may not have been in Eurasia since the bronze age.

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It's a fairly ridiculous distance though. Thirty days march is something like 1000 km in most terrain.

Sorry, it's 15 there, 15 back.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

This isn't really the focus of Dungeon Fantasy. The core rules don't even include horses and tack or wagons or the cost of hiring someone to drive you somewhere. The journey should be 3d6 meals long and have one encounter and one environmental hazard, and if you roll navigation well you'll reduce or increase that number by margin of failure.

I'd roll encounters per day, with the frequencies in Exploits (9 or less for the wild, 6 or less for civilization). For a week-long trip each way, that's about 4-5 encounters for the round-trip. Doing this rewards groups that do focus on the outdoor skills, and random encounters are the time clock of RPGs. Avoiding them is good. They're far more important and fun than food supply.

My point is that you don't need a long trip in a pre-industrial world. Again, if you walk for three weeks, you've walked across France. That's way more territory than you need for a game. My own sandbox is the size of Slovakia, and my players haven't seen everything even after years of play.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Stripe

Sorry, it's 15 there, 15 back.

Better, but I'd still look for a closer village you could use as at least a rest stop or supply cache.

Hm, if there's a lot of adventurer traffic, as you might expect for something you could label a *mega*-dungeon, there's a great business opportunity for some retired adventurer to set up an Inn in the nearest village.

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Better, but I'd still look for a closer village you could use as at least a rest stop or supply cache.

There is, and it's also an "adventure location" with a battle map. It's the first part of the opening adventure on the road to the multi-level dungeon. Town to little village, encounter in forest (jellies and small "dragons"), encounter in mountain cave (goblin-kin bandits), find entrance to MLD, return to village, return to Town.

Later, the same village comes under attack.

Originally Posted by malloyd

Hm, if there's a lot of adventurer traffic, as you might expect for something you could label a *mega*-dungeon, there's a great business opportunity for some retired adventurer to set up an Inn in the nearest village.

Yep. Inn, blacksmith, apothecary, butcher, backer and candlestick maker. Most stuff a traveling PC party would want (other than weapons or armor for sale), but not so much that it can act as full-fledged generic Town.

Note that I don't call my dungeon a mega dungeon, though. Not to be pedantic about semantics; I just don't want to compare my feeble efforts to a real mega dungeon, the likes of Rappan Athuk or Castle Greyhawk or whatever.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

I'd roll encounters per day, with the frequencies in Exploits (9 or less for the wild, 6 or less for civilization). For a week-long trip each way, that's about 4-5 encounters for the round-trip. Doing this rewards groups that do focus on the outdoor skills, and random encounters are the time clock of RPGs. Avoiding them is good. They're far more important and fun than food supply.

I must admit that I like random encounters in theory (possibly from a sense of old-school nostalgia), but in play, even in DF, I find them fairly tedious. When I write my own adventures, I rarely include wandering monster tables. When I run published material, I often look over the lists, choose a flavorful assortment, and sprinkle them in. Usually, we end up with fewer than the dice-odds would dictate. I do make timing matter in other ways (supplies, beating adversaries, time-critical features, etc.).

As to the OP's question, I would be surprised if Kromm had a sweet spot in mind. For all games I've ever been involved in, travel time varied significantly between adventures, depending on the setting and the needs of the story. Sometimes you want the dungeon way off in the boonies. Sometimes it's better in town.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Dalin

I must admit that I like random encounters in theory (possibly from a sense of old-school nostalgia), but in play, even in DF, I find them fairly tedious. When I write my own adventures, I rarely include wandering monster tables. When I run published material, I often look over the lists, choose a flavorful assortment, and sprinkle them in. Usually, we end up with fewer than the dice-odds would dictate. I do make timing matter in other ways (supplies, beating adversaries, time-critical features, etc.).

I'm the opposite, in part because I don't always have static encounters always go off when the PCs step into the room/outdoor hex (I run a hexcrawl). I like monsters moving around, and write things so that happens. It's part of the mindset of not scripting where folks go, and letting them go wherever they choose.

[Anthony]

The easiest way to make hiking and navigation relevant without ridiculous travel distances is to have the dungeon somewhat hidden. If the dungeon is only visible from a tenth of a mile away, even with an optimal path it takes five miles travel to search a single square mile, and a party can search a couple square miles per day -- assuming they have the navigation and cartography skills to neither miss areas nor double up.