[DF] 40 Days Travel Time?

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Bruno

[1] Theres a "twisted" ankle that stings and makes you limp for a while. They're not fun. A sprained ankle turns your foot a spectacular puffy black and blue and it swells up too big to fit in your boot.

You generally want to keep the boot on unless you can commit to being in place for a while, because even minor swelling will make putting it back on difficult and painful, and the boot is very likely stabilizing the injury. But if you don't take the boot off before swelling sets in, you may have to have it cut off.

If you can walk at anything close to a normal pace without assistance, you don't have a leg injury. You have an ouchy.

[(E)]

Originally Posted by (E)

Leg injuries would heal well while walking.

Typo sorry or more likely an auto correct gone horribly wrong.

"Wouldn't heal well" pulled stitches, fresh exposure to filth, moisture from sweat, more bandages used due to exterior dirt, the list goes on.

[Celjabba]

40 days is not totally improbable, if unusual .
http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/cape-wrath-trail.shtml 400km of trail in a low population area that people walk in 2-3 weeks.
The top half, above Ulapool, can be done without meeting anyone.
Double the time because you need to forage, hunt, and don't benefit from a marked trail and topo maps and TL8 gear, double it again for trail cutting and dealing with random encounter and you will be close to 40 days of travel.
For another 40 days travel possibility :
In a jungle, or in moutain above the snow line, you can get down to a few kilometers (or less) a day.

[JMason]

As the OP, I'd like to clarify a bit...

I'm not complaining about anything. I simply wanted to know if DF2 stated "40 days" was a real suggestion or just a number pulled out of thin air. And I wanted to know if anyone does or has run DF games with that sort of travel time.

Also, I have no issue with daily/nightly encounter frequency given in DF2. I purposely chose 20 days as the "long road" option for the party's current problem (the other was a day trip to a necromancer). That they chose the "good" solution but had to then stock up for a long trip, buy a wagon, etc., all made that choice more interesting ... I don't regret it. It simply put in focus how painful a 40 day trip might be, and prompted the original question.

[starslayer]

I at one point started using more realistic travel times for adventures and Kal started getting really worried by it by it taking two weeks by anything but Pegasus to get to the bad guys lair. The base assumption was that towns were about 1 day apart by single rider on horseback (or about 5 days by ox drawn wagon), once you start getting off the roads travel time increased radically.

I think it may have contributed to almost all of his newest PCs having a flying mount and good foraging skills.

[dcarson]

In a settled area hamlets are two hours apart because a hour commute is what people will put up with. If it takes more then an hour to get to your fields to farm you start a new hamlet. Towns are spaced so that on market day you can get there, buy and sell, and get home in dusk to dawn travel.

[Kalzazz]

Well, the specific adventure that sparked my great unhappiness (and sparked Godogma starting a whole new campaign based around warp gates) was 2 weeks of hiking to go help some merchant jumped by some bandits that was resolved in 2 combat rounds, so a 4 week round trip for 10 seconds (this wasn't GURPS, if it was, would have been 2 seconds) of work

And the quest giver had hiked 2 weeks presumably to give us this quest. Which had nothing to do with any of our specific abilities and could have been just as easily accomplished by any other random replacement level adventurers.

Said adventure did likely contribute to my fondness for characters who had some way of getting from A to B briskly

There is nothing wrong with travel in the right context. For instance, people travel to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston from all over the globe since cancer. You don't travel to Houston from Abu Dhabi to use the laundromat

Similarly if the party wants to visit the Lost Temple of Lost Loot in the Lost Lands makes sense for that to be a hike

An example of a very good use of extended travel in starslayers game was a multi session story arc where the party escorted a sapling of the Elder Tree from the Enchanted Forest to the New Continent. It was explained IC that elder tree saplings are delicate magically and can't be magically transported so we had plausible in game justification for why we weren't just using a portal