Exploration movement and "normal walking pace"

[cupbearer]

Hi guys,

I Need your help with ruling on how fast a normal walking pace would be and how fast someone can move while "exploring". I use the term "exploration movement" as its used in D&D, ie. the pace you can move and still notice things..... Perhaps the answer to these two questions is the same. I've been reading the books but can't seem to find a clear answer. I realize its probably staring right in front of me, but can't see seem to see it.

so my two questions according to RAW:

A) In gurps how do you determine a "normal" walking pace", not for hiking or overland movement, just like second by second?
B) Is there is a speed that optimizes perception (ideal for exploration movement/dungeon crawling)?

One more thing - I'm not really interested in knowing how fast people can walk in real life, I'm looking for rules in published gurps books (trying to pre-empt a hiking debate here lol).

[weby]

By the basic rules walking is defined only for the daily move speed. Paced running/sprinting are defined for shorter periods of time.

In the second to second rules you can move up to your move. There is no official rule for giving penalties to any own actions except stealth and attacks. Stealth gets a penalty for moving more than move 1 and attacks get penalties for moving more than a step(about the same).

So giving similar penalties to other actions requiring concentration is reasonable, but a house rule.

And good luck in trying to not get this thread hijacked into a discussion on hiking rules.. :)

[Jeraa]

Dungeon Fantasy 16 has a method of determining travel speed per hour. Basically, assuming ideal conditions, multiple Move by 1.25, then divide by 2 to get the distance traveled per hour. Humans average Move 5, which results in an average speed of 3.1 miles per hour, which is the real-world average walking speed for a human.

It is more complicated than that, as terrain modifies it (an absolutely flat plain multiplies Move by 1.25, which is what I used above), as does a number of other things.

At 3.1 miles per hour for Move 5, that works out to about 4.5 feet/second. Just to do it easily, you could just say average walking speed (in feet per second) under ideal conditions equals Move.

[cupbearer]

Hi

thanks for replies. using your max move per second isn't reasonable because that is basically running, (15 feet per second walking!) but working it back to 4.5 feet per second as a house rule might work.... perhaps assuming that "exploration movement" is your move in feet per second would maybe work, but I was kind of hoping for a RAW answer.

[Flyndaran]

Real people walk at the speed of the slowest group member. How slowly that person walks is more a matter of fitness and preference than any proportion of maximum haul-butt speed.

[cupbearer]

Hi

thanks for posting - my question is what is the speed of walking as per rules in GURPS. If an average man has a move of 5, that would be 15 feet per second maximum move, but that is basically running, so I wondered what the walking speed would be. And I ask about exploration speed, to see if there is some trade offs for not running everywhere because really people don't really do that.

as for speed of the slowest member, how do you determine what the speed is lol?

Oliver.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by cupbearer

Hi

thanks for posting - my question is what is the speed of walking as per rules in GURPS. If an average man has a move of 5, that would be 15 feet per second maximum move, but that is basically running, so I wondered what the walking speed would be. And I ask about exploration speed, to see if there is some trade offs for not running everywhere because really people don't really do that.

as for speed of the slowest member, how do you determine what the speed is lol?

Oliver.

Walking speed is 2-4 mph in the real world, but has little to do with maximum speed. In GURPS, characters will have Move 1-2 when they are walking. At Move 1, they are using Step and not a full Move maneuver and can be concentrating on something else during it, like mapping a dungeon or searching for trap.

At Move 2, it is a Move action, which carries with it penalties to Stealth and will usually mean a shorter period of time to observe surroundings, translating into a worse TDM to any Per-based check, but a sensible GM will give a lesser penalty to Stealth, Per checks, Navigation, Per-based Traps or Search checks at Move 2 than at higher Move.

For characters far removed from the human norm, with a very high Move because of Size Modifier or just raw speed, I'd allow them to move at up to half their Move, rounding down, but still count as 'walking' for fatigue purposes. They would not get any better odds on Stealth or Per-based rolls while moving faster, though.

[cupbearer]

Hi

thanks for reply, where in the rules does this penalty (TDM?) for perception appear?

[Ulzgoroth]

Concentrate maneuvers allow only a step of movement. While you can make Per checks and generally notice things as a free action, Concentrate is definitely the action for focusing on that. Tactical Shooting's situational awareness rules for example give -4 if you're trying to get the picture as a free action rather than taking a Concentrate maneuver.

So while the exact benefits aren't entirely clear, moving one step per second probably is the speed that gives the best awareness. Of course, you could slow that down further and spend more than a second trying to notice things for each step taken if you really wanted to.

EDIT: A difficulty here is that many action, including (in this case) perception actions, fail to specify what the baseline use case is in terms of time spent and level of focus.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by cupbearer

Hi guys,

I Need your help with ruling on how fast a normal walking pace would be and how fast someone can move while "exploring". I use the term "exploration movement" as its used in D&D, ie. the pace you can move and still notice things..... Perhaps the answer to these two questions is the same. I've been reading the books but can't seem to find a clear answer. I realize its probably staring right in front of me, but can't see seem to see it.

so my two questions according to RAW:

A) In gurps how do you determine a "normal" walking pace", not for hiking or overland movement, just like second by second?
B) Is there is a speed that optimizes perception (ideal for exploration movement/dungeon crawling)?

One more thing - I'm not really interested in knowing how fast people can walk in real life, I'm looking for rules in published gurps books (trying to pre-empt a hiking debate here lol).

Bruce Quarrie's Napoleonic Wargames in Miniture has a series of graphs which gives the average march rate of types of troops from each army. However this would be mass columns and not a small band. They rated between ten and twenty miles a day.

I once talked online to a paratrooper who did a forty mile yomp in training. He had a splintered legbone at the end, so that is probably a good example of an extreme of what a very healthy man can do. He was also not affected by traffic difficulty as a concentrated Napoleonic force would be as he was with a small detachment.

Both of those are examples of route movement. What you are talking about might be called "tactical" movement. You are stopping to examine stuff. And there might be a monster over the hill.

I won't say I am giving apples vs oranges. They are actual numbers you can do something with-what I don't know.

I don't know if there is a speed that optimizes perception. I should think a slow walk could do it. Come to think of it, a pre-modern general could analyze terrain and tactics fairly reliably while riding a horse fast enough to move along a line. If what you mean is stopping to do a scientific analysis-picking up bugs, etc, it will surely be much slower.