Typical length of travel

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by 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.

Incidentally, I do have a simple rule for that. The time it takes to search a given area (circle/hex) is the time it takes to go from one side of that area to the other, but you make no progress traveling during that time. After that, the GM makes a secret Tracking roll. If you want to move to the next area after finding nothing, you have to spend the time traveling again.

Or, in bullet points, searching a 125-mile diameter area:

• Spend however long it takes to travel 125 miles, including meals and random encounters.
• GM makes Tracking roll; success finds, failure doesn't. You can cut time to find on a critical success to whatever, and a critical failure means really nasty random encounters.
• If you don't find it, move on to the next area. You need to go at least 125 miles since that's what you were searching, so you need to spend however long it takes to travel 125 miles, including meals and random encounters.

That area is a 5-mile hex in my game, though that sometimes means going through 5-mile hex by 5-mile hex until hitting the right one or catching a resident of the dungeon out and about and tracking it back to its lair.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Incidentally, I do have a simple rule for that. The time it takes to search a given area (circle/hex) is the time it takes to go from one side of that area to the other, but you make no progress traveling during that time.

Way too short. If you've got a forest 20 miles wide with visibility of 100 yards, you can probably hike across it in a day, but searching it will take about a year.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Way too short. If you've got a forest 20 miles wide with visibility of 100 yards, you can probably hike across it in a day, but searching it will take about a year.

Let’s plug in those figures.

RAW, thick Woodlands divide Move by 5. Given some peon with Move 5, that’s 2.5 miles per hour normally, or a half mile an hour here. That’s 40 hours, which is about four days, assuming 2 hours each day given to foraging and 12 given to camping. (If he’s untrained in Hiking and Weather Sense, that will be more time, and the randomization of weather will also cut into this speed.) So right off the bat a day isn’t happening unless someone uses Serendipity.

Now, does he have Tracking?

If not, he’s using his default of 5. That’s 6-in-216, so an average time to find the dungeon is thirty-sixfold the above, or 144 days to find the dungeon. That’s not counting time taken to stop and forage all day, which he’ll need to do often since he likely doesn’t have much Survival (Woodlands) since he’s hunting for a dungeon in the woods without Tracking. And again, weather, which gives penalties to both Move and Tracking, is random, which doesn’t cut in his favor. That’s hardly out of line with your claim of a year.

Furthermore, when hiding your dungeon from scouts, there’s the Camouflage skill. This makes matters a Quick Contest instead of a straight roll. Even someone with Camouflage-10 can slow things up a little, and wizards casting permanent illusions likely have skill in that spell at around 16.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Incidentally, I do have a simple rule for that. The time it takes to search a given area (circle/hex) is the time it takes to go from one side of that area to the other, but you make no progress traveling during that time.

This makes my math hurt. Searching an area should be a function of the area, not the diameter.

If the "area" in question is standardized, it can be tuned to work, but it should not be stated as the general case.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by martinl

This makes my math hurt. Searching an area should be a function of the area, not the diameter.

You are aware that area and diameter are related functions (area of a circle is half diameter, squared, times an irrational number that's roughly 22/7), right? (Area of a hexagon will be similar. I don't care about squares since wilderness maps wisely don't use them.) So searching based on diameter is ALSO searching based on area. Diameter, however, is something that is more available to any GM.

A skilled searcher (in game terms, someone with a high Tracking skill, like DF barbarians and scouts) will know to look in some spots and not others. He's not going to walk on every square foot of an area. Most areas that are slow for walking have low visibility owing to the barriers that make walking slow in the first place, and regardless, the searcher still needs to walk through the area.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

So searching based on diameter is ALSO searching based on area.

No it isn't. Searching based on diameter is searching based on the square root of area.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

No it isn't. Searching based on diameter is searching based on the square root of area.

I just gave the relationship between diameter and area of a circle in the part of the post you skipped in your quote, so I don’t know why you’re bothering to restate it as if I’m too stupid to understand what I wrote.

I’ll say what I also said in my last post more explicitly: I am picking diameter since a GM has that handy. (Much like picking the terrain modifier for an area instead of visibility, something which nobody has figured.) This has a predictable relationship to Area. Asking GMs to start plunking numbers into a calculator in the middle of a game to find squares and use pi slows down a game, and makes it less fun. GURPS and DFRPG have plenty of such approximations, like three feet is a meter and not having a 25 points being a tenfold increase in Wealth like it progresses later. You can apply the Long Distance Modifiers to this if you like. I’d likely do that if I had variable areas for searching on my game map instead of a constant 5-mile hex.

I’m done with this thread.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

I’ll say what I also said in my last post more explicitly: I am picking diameter since a GM has that handy.

Okay, let me be explicit: that's total nonsense, and doing it sensibly doesn't require extra effort: if you have a map in the first place, it takes X days per overland hex, modified by the terrain type of the hex, and X is only modestly related to the travel speed modifiers for that terrain.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Okay, let me be explicit: that's total nonsense

This is not acceptable. If you’re getting frustrated with a conversation, time to walk away.

[Humabout]

Originally Posted by GWJ

Hi!
How should I gauge travel distance to adventure's place? For example in the book there is in given example 30 or 40 days. I want skills like Hiking and Navigation to be good and useful, but not overpowered. I thought about d6d6d6 days, what are you thinking?

I spent some time back in September analyzing travel times for my setting and posted my work here. Mind you, I play Dungeon Fantasy, not DFRPG, so there may be minor differences, but not many from what I can tell.

The TLDR of it is that depending on season and terrain, a relatively short trip can vary tremendously in duration. Going from Town to Dungeon can take 2 days by boat across the lake or 60 days through the mountains and forrest in the dead of winter with oxcarts. I offered a few routes and means so players can decide how to approach the problem of travel. And to make the decision a little harder, I weight lake random encounters to occur more often and be more dangerous than land ones. So players have to choose between fast and dangerous and slow and expensive.

In all cases, Navigation and appropriate travel skills will speed things up. And 20% off of two days is a random encounter roll. 20% off of 60 days is 48 fewer encounters. This assumes a fairly normal roll per 6 hours; for longer trips I might drop the frequency to cut down on rolls, hut even at 1 per day, that'd be 12 fewer rolls with good shortcuts and fast travel.