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?

I feel that over the course of this year, the ratio of RPG related posts on Dice Camp has increasingly be going down. (Not necessarily the actual number of RPG posts.)

Are there any people who mostly post about RPG homebrew and DIYRPG related stuff you think are worth following to have in your home feed?

Should we make our own blogroll on DIYRPG? Something like on /osr reddit or OSR discord?

When you buy a TTRPG, essentially, you're getting a bundle of two (or perhaps three) things.

I'm going to put aside the third one, for now, and just talk about what I think are the big two in terms of page count: System Mechanics, and Game World.

Lots of people who are keen on system mechanics seem to feel that game world can pretty much take care of itself.

As long as the game master has a rough idea of what they want to present ("Hey, generic fantasy medieval! D&D-ish. Warcraftish. Lord of the Ringsy. Sorta like The Witcher maybe. Man, you know what I mean!") then the main bulk of the game book is preoccupied with what dice to roll in what circumstances, refering to what game system. To make things simple, adventures are often geographically isolated—an underground complex, a mountain pass, an unexplored island, an abandoned fort. Aaaand with that, we're ready to roll!

In the opposite corner, there are folks who feel that background is vital. They're happy enough with a rules-light system, just as long as the game world adheres to a particular canon. That means EITHER that the game refers to other media—films or books or comics—that the GM really should be familiar with before they get started, OR the bulk of the game book will be dedicated to conveying game world lore.

Okay—so the proposition of many rules light systems is, "rulings not rules"—in other words, the GM can develop detailed or specific rules systems on the fly, to cope appropriately with the particular path the players take.

And the proposition of many open world, or "sandboxy" systems is that the GM can develop the game world as appropriate, often according to complex tables (AD&D wilderness amd random encounter tables, I'm looking at you!) responding both to what the player charaters do, and to the development of the players' skills and objectives.

I suggest that it's quite possible to have a great deal of RPG fun in either circumstance —rulings not rules, or exquisitely defined system mechanics… emergent game world, or fabulously detailed canon. Or anything in between.

Right then. So, if we buy that, we've just established that NEITHER system mechanics NOR game world is vital to a great game. In fact, games can do without either… so can they do without BOTH?

The very existence of one-page, ultra-light RPGs suggests the answer is yes!

Okay, so if that's the case, then why do we sometimes have disappointing game sessions? We can deduce that it must be the case that the disappointment of a poor game session is simply not addressed by EITHER the game world OR the system mechanics.

So what does address the problems that result in poor game sessions? And why isn't that the main focus of game books?