Wilderness Exploration and Journeys

 For a long time now I've wanted to develop a robust rule-set for traveling on long journeys as opposed to the classical hex crawl of D&D. What I mean by a journey is when the PCs want to go from city A to City B and they take the King's Road or some such. They aren't mapping or getting lost or doing any kind of exploration. They just want to get to the destination, and it is anti climactic to just say you travel for eight days and you get there, or they travel for 3 days, random encounter, travel, for 2 days, random encounter, travel for 3 days and they arrive. It never feels like they actually traveled. 

So towards that end, I've been looking at the house-rules of other people, and most recently examining The One Ring and its 5e adaptation Adventures in Middle-Earth. I was working on converting it wholesale when it hit me: long journeys and detailed wilderness exploration don't need separate rule-sets. Sure I can have a robust travel ruleset that expands on the normal D&D rules by giving PCs tasks of scouting, or foraging, etc, but I can use the same method for both aspects. The only real difference between the two modes of travel is the navigation, or getting lost. Just skip that step when the PCs are on a road or river. Resolving all the travel tasks every day, instead of trying to figure every 3 days or 5 days like TOR, can give the journey a sense of length. Every single day matters. 

I'm also of the opinion that wilderness exploration should not be done on a day by day basis, and even the 4 hour watch may be too long of a time frame, because the PCs are exploring and don't have a destination in mind; if they did they would be following a road or river. But that's beside the point. Journeys require the same day to day resolution of tasks as wilderness exploration, discounting navigation rolls.

Movement Rates for Old School Essentials

Go to the Delvers and Denizens Index

So due to the absurd movement rates provided in classic D&D I'm finally putting forth my own take at revising it for realistic game use. I have done this before for D&D back in high school but I don't particularly like the rates I came up with then, and I also came up with standard rates for my own rpg system based on statistics of real world athletes, but this is for D&D which is an abstract system and I want something that plugs into the D&D rules already there.

I think everyone agrees that moving 120 feet every ten minutes is ridiculously slow if we assume the PCs are actually moving, that is 0.14 miles per hour. Sheesh! Someone didn't do some basic math. So I think we need a basic walking speed that is different. The base encounter speed of 40 feet per round is 2.7 miles an hour which is reasonable for the average person, so lets use that. the other huge problem is the given speed for running during a pursuit in the wilderness (40x3x3(because yards instead of feet) which is 360 ft per round, which can be maintained for 5 minutes! That is 24.5 miles per hours, which is humanly impossible. Usain Bolt reaches an average of like 21 or 22 miles per hour in the 100 meter dash(its been a while since I look up the stats), and he can definitely not do that for 5 minutes. So the running speed needs to be paired down. After talking to my brother, who ran cross country and track in high school and college, and doing some math I came up with different rates of speed for the unencumbered man.

Searching: 120 feet per turn. Causes 1 Fatigue point after 1 hour.

This is the speed at which PCs explore dungeons at a cautious rate, looking for traps, secret doors, listening at doors, mapping, etc. When traveling at this rate a roll to find secret doors and traps is automatically made, and the players do not have to specify that they are searching. This could be interpreted as moving in a straight line down a hall or searching 12 10'x10' squares.

Walking: 40 feet per round (800 yards per turn, 2.7 miles per hour). Causes 1 Fatigue point after 1 hour.

This is your standard walking rate, both indoors and outdoors. This is the rate used for overland movement, and the players can decide when they want to rest.

Hustling: 80 feet per round (1600 yards or 0.91 miles per turn). Causes 1 Fatigue point after 1 turn.

This is the standard combat encounter speed.

Running: 120 feet per round (2400 yards or 1.36 miles per turn). Causes 1 Fatigue point after 20 rounds (3 after 1 turn)

This is your running speed during a pursuit. It can only be sustained for a few minutes. 

Sprinting: 200 feet per round. Causes 1 Fatigue point after 1 round.

This the fastest a PC can go, they are bolting for their life their life here. This is also the speed used during a charge in combat.

The above speeds are for the unencumbered human and elf. Gnomes haves speeds of 30/60/90/150. Each Encumbering Item decreases speed by 10/20/30/50.