In a post from August, I said:
I walk at just about three miles an hour. A little faster unencumbered over short distances, and a little slower carrying a pack over a 500-mile trek. If a square counts as 6 miles, simple math tells me that it takes 2 hours.
What I neglected to take into account was that all my walking and hiking has been on well marked trails and roads. How different is it when someone is traveling across unknown and unmarked wilderness?
Reality: Alone
I recently discovered a reality TV series called Alone. It’s a wilderness survival show. Unlike other shows, the contestants in Alone are in complete isolation. As the title indicates, each contestant is alone. There are no producers or camera crews following them around. Instead they’re given camera gear and told to film themselves.
Season 4 was a little different. Instead of ten individuals, this season featured seven pairs. One contestant of the pair was dropped at their survival site, while the other was dropped off 10 miles away and given a compass bearing to their teammate.
When I saw this, I thought “10 miles at 3 miles per hour, is 3.3 hours. Add time for breaks and to be slowed down by the gear they have to carry, they should make it in 8 hours.”
I was wrong. Boy, how I was wrong.
Of the seven hikers, only four made it to their partner. One hiker was injured, and another just gave up. The third one’s partner was injured.
Of the four that made it, the fastest took 7 days to hike ten miles. That is an average speed of 1.4 miles per day.
Game Rules
I thought it would be interesting to see how close various game rules would come to reflecting this reality: an encumbered person traveling through a temperate rain forest and rough terrain travels about 1 to 1 ½ miles per day.
Dungeons & Dragons (1974)
The original version of D&D actually used another game, Avalon Hill’s Outdoor Survival, for its outdoor movement rules. The game uses 5 mile hexes, and assumes that you move at least one hex per day, for a rate of 5 miles per day.
Ryuutama
Ryuutama is a Japanese RPG about journeys. It was translated into English about 5 years ago. Being a game about traveling, it seems natural to see how close this comes.
In this game, characters have a base movement of 18 miles per day,1 which is pretty close to the 20 miles I said back in August. But that’s the base distance. The actual distance is modified by the terrain’s difficulty. In Ryuutama terms, I would say that northern Vancouver Island’s rain forest is “Level 3: deep forest, swamp, mountain.” That means that travel is at ½ normal rate, or 9 miles per day. If the traveler fails his “Direction check,” then that distance could be halved again to 4.5 miles per day. Pretty slow, but still faster than the “real world.”
Dungeons & Dragons (1991)
By the time the Rules Cyclopedia came out, D&D had its own travel rules. Here a heavily encumbered normal man traveling in the worst possible terrain will travel 4 miles per day.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1979)
The Dungeon Masters Guide has a table (naturally) that states that a heave man in very rough terrain can travel 2 miles per day. Not bad, but I think I would describe the terrain as "rough" instead of "very rough."
GURPS (3rd Edition)
GURPS prides itself on realism. Painfully detailed realism for me, but some people really like it. I really like it, too; but I have to streamline it by ignoring half the rules.
In GURPS your base travel speed is determined by your encumbrance. You encumbrance is dictated by your strength and how much gear you’re carrying. I think I remember the TV show saying the contestants had to carry around 35 pounds of camera gear. On top of that let’s add their normal survival stuff, the phone, and the locator beacon that they’re required to carry and say 60 pounds total. That would be border of medium and heavy encumbrance for an average strength person. Let’s say I forgot something and the pack is a little heavier to make it heavy encumbrance.
The base daily travel rate is 20 miles/day for heavy. On top of that, there are terrain modifiers. GURPS defines “Very Bad terrain” as “Jungle, dense second-growth forest, swamp, mountains, soft sand or deep snow.” That sounds like northern Vancouver Island’s rain forest to me. That makes the modifier 20%, so the total is 4 miles per day.
On top of that the weather was rainy2. The GURPS rules say “In general, rain will halve travel speed in any terrain,” which means that our expected speed is now 2 miles per day. That’s pretty close.
That’s it
That’s all for this week. I was just curious which game would map to this most closely. It looks like GURPS and AD&D win. Sadly, both of those are “closed” rules, so I can’t use them for anything I might want to do. Maybe I’ll look at some of the OSR games.
Have you seen Alone? It surely changes the way I look at outdoor survival rolls!
I have very little personal experience in the wilderness, so hearing about Alone certainly helps contextualize things!
ReplyDeleteAnd further reinforces my lack of desire to do things in wilderness/woods/etc. XD
Since you've got some thresholds and good comparative rules now, would you consider house outdoor travel rules which emulate some of the impacts defined by AD&D or GURPS?