A while back I tried to work out a system that lets you track overland travel on a 6-mile hex map without getting any fractions for the number of hexes traveled in a day. I did come up with one that is very simple:
- Characters move with a light load, medium load, or heavy load. (6, 4, or 2 hexes per day)
- Each hex is on average either easy terrain (full speed) or difficult terrain (half speed).
This results in six possible combinations of progress in a day, each one a whole number. (Horses would make no difference because horses only run faster than humans but walk about the same speed, and except for a few special bred and trained horses have worse endurance than humans. Every single fantasy RPG gets this wrong.)
The one thing that bothers me a bit about this system is that the speed for travel with a light load through easy terrain comes out at 6 hexes per day. Which would mean 36 miles. (50km) Such progress is absolutely possible. Some people have managed to do 100 miles in a day, and there are reports of soldiers with their equipment doing over 30 miles in a day without roads. But this would be a very big ask even of most people who walk long distances as regular exercise. And those who can do it wouldn’t be able to do it more than two or three days in a row at the most.
However, what kind of people actually travel long distances with a light load? In most RPGs with encumbrance, a light load is actually really light. It’s often the limit for thieves silently climbing up castle walls. With just food, weapons, and armor most PCs in many games will end up with a medium load and then you add all the travel gear on top of that. And if just one character moves at medium load speed, then the whole party does. As I see it, overland travel with light load would be very rare, and it really only makes sense for messengers. And messengers in a world where all nonmagical long distance communication is done on foot would be the 0.1% of best long distance runners in their society.
So I think saying that travel with a light load on easy terrain comes out to 36 miles per day might still be “believable enough”. Normal travel speed for marching armies or traveling adventurers would be 24 miles per day and by all accounts that really isn’t anything unusual for soldiers who do daily marches for hundreds of miles as a regular part of their service.
What do you think about this?
It’s weirder than that.
Humans outrun any land animal on the planet. In the long haul. In the short haul we’re among the slowest of large animals, but nothing beats us for endurance racing. Nothing.
Ancient peoples hunted horses and bisons and other such animals by just … running them to the point of exhaustion. There’s a herd of horses. Let’s run after them. They tear off multiple times our speed. But we KEEP COMING (like a zombie horde in a movie) implacably and before they have a chance to recover from the fatigue of their high-speed run we’re on them and they have to run again and again and again.
Sure it may take a few days, but we will eventually outrun them. Then we have our pick of the herd to slaughter as they lie helplessly immobile from fatigue.
It wasn’t (just) our brains that let us survive pre-civilization.