Traveling (daily travel distance) rules and FP, Fit and Very Fit

[Grayscale]

Just wondering what am I missing, as I like reading overland traveling rules, specifically the ones in Basic Set and DF16.

Now, when travelling with heavier loads, I understand the speed penalties from Encumbrance and therefore smaller travel distance, reflect longer rest periods.

However, there's no adjustment to daily mileage for either higher FP (say 10 vs 15 FP) or even Fit or Very Fit (at least that I know of).

At a cursory look, there's a case to be made that more Fatigue / Fatigue recovery should increase daily mileage. If so, is this published somewhere?

Perhaps someone did the calculations already and decided there's not much of a difference in the end to justify adding more rules?

[Stormcrow]

Long-distance travel assumes regular stops for rest, so as long as you do this, it doesn't really matter how much FP you have, so long as you have enough.

The benefit of being Fit or Very Fit is that when you stop marching, you regain lost FP at twice the normal rate (and only lose half if you're Very Fit).

Remember the advice of Kromm: "Read Rules, Not Titles." Don't take Fit and Very Fit just according to their titles; take them as their game effects. Being Fit or Very Fit doesn't make you move faster; it just reduces the duration of lost FP (and helps with certain HT checks, arguably its main function).

If you want more mileage, take Hiking skill.

[Grayscale]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Long-distance travel assumes regular stops for rest, so as long as you do this, it doesn't really matter how much FP you have, so long as you have enough.

The benefit of being Fit or Very Fit is that when you stop marching, you regain lost FP at twice the normal rate (and only lose half if you're Very Fit).

Remember the advice of Kromm: "Read Rules, Not Titles." Don't take Fit and Very Fit just according to their titles; take them as their game effects. Being Fit or Very Fit doesn't make you move faster; it just reduces the duration of lost FP (and helps with certain HT checks, arguably its main function).

If you want more mileage, take Hiking skill.

I am not so sure.

Long distance travel assumes regular stops for rest, and regular stops for rest assume you are in need of resting in the first place.

Whether you assume "tired" as a direct game mechanic (e.g. <1/3 FP) or something else, considering say, an expenditure of 2 FP per hour, a character with 10 FP will be at 2 FP after 4 hours a character with 20 will be at 12. If you take <1/3 FP as a marker here, one will be at half move and the other will not.

We can then look at Fit and Very Fit for 2 characters with 10 FP each.

For Fit, whatever rest a "non Fit" character takes, a character with FIt needs only half as much, and therefore could spend the "other half" traveling.

For Very Fit, the above stands and it says "you also lose FP at half the normal the rate" - meaning that when a non Very Fit character loses 2 FP, a Very Fit loses 1, and therefore considering sustained exertion, should need to rest much later (indeed he should endure twice as much before needing to rest).

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Grayscale

Whether you assume "tired" as a direct game mechanic (e.g. <1/3 FP) or something else, considering say, an expenditure of 2 FP per hour, a character with 10 FP will be at 2 FP after 4 hours a character with 20 will be at 12. If you take <1/3 FP as a marker here, one will be at half move and the other will not.

I don't think you're doing that right. See p. B426. "If the party enters combat while on the march, assume they've been walking for an hour, unless events dictate otherwise, and assess fatigue accordingly."

Suppose you've got 10 FP and light encumbrance and you're going on an eight-hour hike. The weather is mild. If you stop for an encounter at any time whether it's one, three, five, or seven hours or whatever, you'll be down to 8 FP. Your buddy with 10 FP, light encumbrance, and Very Fit will be at 9 FP because he only loses half the FP you do. You don't cumulatively lose FP as you march because you rest periodically.

[Grayscale]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

I don't think you're doing that right. See p. B426. "If the party enters combat while on the march, assume they've been walking for an hour, unless events dictate otherwise, and assess fatigue accordingly."

Suppose you've got 10 FP and light encumbrance and you're going on an eight-hour hike. The weather is mild. If you stop for an encounter at any time whether it's one, three, five, or seven hours or whatever, you'll be down to 8 FP. Your buddy with 10 FP, light encumbrance, and Very Fit will be at 9 FP because he only loses half the FP you do. You don't cumulatively lose FP as you march because you rest periodically.

I understand the intention behind these rules, but this whole paragraph is confusing to me. Just before the quote you mentioned, it says

• Use the FP costs for fighting a battle, but assess them per hour of road travel; e.g., one hour of marching with light encumbrance costs 2 FP. (Per hour is even emphasized on the book).

And then it goes and says what you quoted. Quite confusing to me. Why mention per hour fatigue cost for hiking if we are not supposed to use it?

Is it just so you can establish what's the one hour FP cost for hiking and then say you should use that one hour cost for sudden stops for combat? If so that's convoluted to me, and indeed DFRPG drops the "per hour" thing entirely.

Still, characters with higher FP can dig, run and swim more before needing to rest, compared to lower FP characters. Why should hiking be any different?

When you say "You don't cumulatively lose FP as you march because you rest periodically", what comes to mind is what I said in the previous post: you stop to rest because you're tired - if you have 60 FP, it should take a long time for you to get tired in the first place.

I can deal with the game assuming Fit and more FP do not matter. From a game design point of view it's fine. Doesn't make sense to me so far, but game design doesn't need to make sense all the time

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Grayscale

And then it goes and says what you quoted. Quite confusing to me. Why mention per hour fatigue cost for hiking if we are not supposed to use it?

Because not all travel is planned with convenient rests. If you're being chased by an enemy, you might not want to stop to rest.

When you say "You don't cumulatively lose FP as you march because you rest periodically", what comes to mind is what I said in the previous post: you stop to rest because you're tired - if you have 60 FP, it should take a long time for you to get tired in the first place.

When hiking, you don't stop to rest when you're tired; you stop to rest at regular intervals so you don't get tired.

If you want to take FP into account, go ahead and calculate travel hour by hour, counting ten-minute periods of rest to restore FP. The rules you're looking at are generally assuming a day-long hike with regular and abstracted periods of rest. But the lists of per-hour FP usage allow you to switch to hour-by-hour if you want to see how long you can travel without regular stops for rest.

The hiking rules are meant to be simple, not simulationist.

[Refplace]

Yeah, logically it should help. RAW there may be rules for it somewhere but I cant recall any off the top of my head. I think that using Hiking here is a good simple option.
Apply the HT bonus to the Hiking roll to determine if can make the increased distance. Yes I know Fit/Very Fit does not add to skill rolls but in this case I tihnk its a good match.
If you make the Hiking roll you can travel farther and if you lose less FP from those advantages you get a smiliar result.
The math does not match perfect but as I said its an easy simple off the top of the head solution.

[Flowergarden]

I always thought it was move/2 miles per hour, and resting is on you. Especially considering that Hight Tech saying: 'good fp scores and fit will give an edge here'. So I suppose it was a simplification for DF of not counting resting hours.

[Rupert]

Adding Fit/Very Fit in makes a fair mess of things.

The rules assume you're down a hour's worth of FP any time you bump into an encounter. If we assume this is an average, characters are doing something like marching for a couple of hours and then resting until all their FP are back. Assuming this is the case, if they're unencumbered they walk for two hours, then rest for 10 minutes, normally. Fit turns this into two hours then 5 mins. Very Fit also does because GURPS doesn't do half-point FP losses. This in this case the pace improves by all of 130/125 = 1.04 times.

But at heavy encumbrance we have two hours walking and 40 minutes of rest, going to 20 minutes rest for Fit and 10 minutes for Very Fit, and thus ~1.14 times and 1.23 times, respectively.

So Fit and Very Fit add much less value when lightly encumbered than when heavily encumbered. It's probably easiest to just assign flat bonuses like +5% and +10%, and note that Very Fit means a character is missing fewer FP in the event of an encounter.

Having more FP doesn't do anything with the RAW, because characters don't burn down all their FP. If they did, they help, but not that much unless encumbered such that the extra make the difference between having to rest to avoid 1/2 move and not having to rest.

Unfit and Very Unfit have quite strong effects, especially at high encumbrance levels - -15% and -30% to distances are reasonable averages.

So skill matters more than being exceptionally fit, and being notably unfit matters most of all.

[Flowergarden]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Fit turns this into two hours then 5 mins. Very Fit also does because GURPS doesn't do half-point FP losses. This in this case the pace improves by all of 130/125 = 1.04 times.

Isn't very fit doubles time between FP loss and FP loss rolls for long actions? Always thought it should.