[DF] 40 Days Travel Time?

[DAT]

Originally Posted by JMason

Ignoring the rules in Wilderness Adventures for the moment, DF2 offers up using a set amount of time for travel. The example given is 40 days and nights.

This has always struck me as very long. Does anyone actually run games that include this length of travel? I had my PCs go on a 20 day trip and it has been a logistical nightmare to get all the food they need. They ended up buying a wagon and 2 horses! And with random encounters, we only got 1/2 way there in our last session (and they are using quick march to shorten this to 10 days!)

I'm not planning on altering my game to make travel longer, I was just curious where this time came from. Is there some president in "old school" games?

A 40 days there and 40 days back overland trip, without resupply, is insane.

That is a minimum of 240 meals per person. Using Traveler's rations, that is $480 ($2 per) and 120lbs (0.5 lb per). If you have to carry water too, that could add 160 to 640 lbs. And you have to add container weight to that.

The quick thought answer is to bring pack/draft animals, but they need food too (5+lbs per day, comes to mind; so +400 lbs per animal).

The better DF answer is to bring a Cleric with Create Food and Create Water, or travel slower and have your scout do lots of hunting along the way.

As a GM, I place most of my Dungeons within 2 days travel of a town.

[Refplace]

For the big dungeons I have a town within a days travel, much like a mining town where the adventures provide a lot of the towns income.
This works well for ruined cities or border towns.
Remote dungeons are rarely more than a week away from a town or village and Inns (sometimes with a couple of other support buildings like a blacksmith and shop) are fairly common.

[(E)]

How many places 40 days out into the wilderness have tracks good enough for wagons? Or even just an absence of barriers that would stop a wagon.

Delver supply camps maybe? Pay for someone to handle the logistics for those hard to reach dungeons or cut them in on the action?

[Flyndaran]

There are few places on land that humans can't live... but DF worlds aren't full of just humans. So every place is potentially someone's home if not paradise.

Of course sneaking past the man-eating lands or just a dragon's hunting grounds devoid of any sane individual could easily take 40 days.

[dcarson]

Had one adventure where we had to cross two weeks of desert . Ended up having to buy more pack animals then we liked and having to do what some of the polar expeditions did. Every so many days you use up a pack load of food and water and that animal becomes food.

[(E)]

Originally Posted by Ransom

How many places are 40 days out into the wilderness period?

You here and read about different expeditions that end up moving at a snails pace, a bare handful of miles a day.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by (E)

You here and read about different expeditions that end up moving at a snails pace, a bare handful of miles a day.

I once read that even at the height of the Oregon Trail, moving 20 miles per day across the plains and through the Rockies was considered "a good travel day". With today's rapid transport, where you can travel up to a thousand miles per day on the open road, it's hard for us to imagine traveling only 20 miles between sunrise and sunset during the summer months, but that's how it worked. Most of the time, that was moving at little better than a walking pace.

And that 20 miles was on days where the TL5 engineered wagons did not break down, horses and oxen avoided health problems, and they weren't interrupted by Indian and bandit attacks, inclement weather such as early-spring blizzards, etc.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by (E)

You here and read about different expeditions that end up moving at a snails pace, a bare handful of miles a day.

If you are walking, you are not going to move more than 30 miles a day for an extended period even in the most wonderful conditions. And humans are rather fast (and high endurance) travelers as animals go, so expect to move slower if you have livestock with you - horses don't get you there any faster if the trip is more than a dozen miles or so.

In bad terrain you don't already know (or have a TL5+ topographic map for) you can expect to waste a lot of time backtracking, bridging or going around obstacles, or having the main party sit still waiting for scouts to return, which makes average straight line distances of a mile or two a day entirely plausible.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ransom

Agreed, but if you manage to sustain 20 miles a day you'll never go 40 days between resupply opportunities even on the Oregon Trail in 1842.

Close though. It's about 700 miles from Independence MO to Laramie WY (Fort Laramie in 1842), which was the first significant stopover on the Oregon Trail at the time. There's not much in Nebraska for another decade.

But 40 days isn't a bad estimate for the time to get from one country to another in the days before mechanization. Rome to Paris is about 40 days, Marseilles to Cologne is a little shorter thanks to the rivers, even London to Edinburgh is a 3 week trip.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by JMason

Because I was trying out running DF "by the book"...

Ah. My bad, I often forget people do that.

Originally Posted by Ransom

How many places are 40 days out into the wilderness period?

Depends on the campaign. In a Points Of Light campaign, everything that isn't "town" could be that far away.