Perfecting the Travel Rules

11 Jul, 2026

The redesign of travel rules described in the previous post and tested in the Destiny of Kings playtest had already proven itself superior in handling and understanding compared to its predecessor, but the thoughts about its further improvement didn't leave me.

Contents

• Fivefold Scaling
• Mount Variety
• Minor Changes
• The Updated Travel Rules

Fivefold Scaling ↩

One of the preferred features for the new travel rules would be a seamless scaling to larger hex sizes and time periods. The ideal system should function the same for the 5-mile hexes/daily travel and 25-mile hexes/weekly travel (5 days of travel per week), so that the referee could swap between them depending on the level of detail required at the moment.

The 20-minute time segments (3/hour) that were chosen as a compromise between 10-minute (6/hour) and 30-minute ones (2/hour) are a bad fit for this, being undivisible by 5. Moreover, the 24 TS/day budget with a 5 TS "grace buffer" still strikes me as unnecessarily complex. Can we go simpler? Sure, we can!

By switching to the 30-minute (2/hour) segments and increasing the daily travel from 8 to 10 hours, we get a neat 20 TS/day budget easily divisible by 2, 4, and 5:

• TS/2 = hours passed in daily travel;
• TS/4 = days passed in weekly travel (assuming a 5-day-long travel week);
• TS/5 = time segments per day for weekly travel (so, 4 TS/day, each equal to 5 TS of daily travel).

The "grace buffer" becomes 1 TS, and every two hours of Forced March add 4 TS.

Mount Variety ↩

For better distinction of different types of mounts, let's separate them into their own travel cost categories, moving the "Road" into the Modifier group.

^* Camels: –2 TS off-road in a desert;

^† Elephants: –3 TS off-road in a forest.

Despite the size of the table increasing, the overall complexity decreases, and the niche for each particular mode of transportation becomes clearer: horses dominate clear landscapes, donkeys excel in difficult terrain, etc. This also leaves a possibility for an easy addition of new types of transportation.

A part of the calculations for the new travel system. As you can see, even with the half-hour time segments, it manages to keep some granularity and maintain believable travel paces as long as we don't drop lower than 3 TS/hex.

Minor Changes ↩

There were also some minor changes unrelated to the main system:

• The "jungle" difficult terrain is changed to "forest", as a more general term, jungle being a type of high-density forest; consequently, the "forest" rugged terrain is changed to "woodland" — a wooded area with lower density of trees.
• The animals' cargo capacity is adjusted slightly.
• The mule cost is bumped from 20s to 50s.

The Updated Travel Rules ↩

Travel for 10 hours/day before resting for the night. The daily travel is divided into 20 time segments (TS), 30 minutes each. TS cost of every 5-mile leg of the journey (or 5-mile hexagon) depends on the terrain and certain factors listed below.

Lacking 1 TS to finish the last leg, you can complete it regardless. Lacking more, you can perform a Forced March: every 2 extra hours of travel adds 4 TS, but requires an Exhaustion Check right after.

Exhaustion Check: you or your mount must make a STR Save or lose d4 STR and stop for today, becoming exhausted (major hindrance) until a day of rest.

Rest for a day every 5 days of travel, or make an Exhaustion Check for every extra day of travel.

• Clear: grassland, plains;
• Rugged: desert, hills, woodland;
• Difficult: forest, mountains, swamp.

^* Camels: –2 TS off-road in a desert;

^† Elephants: –3 TS off-road in a forest.

Minor Hindrances: fording a river, harsh weather, large groups (caravan, army unit, etc.).

Major Hindrances: concurrent activities (exploring, sneaking, foraging, etc.), exhaustion, extreme weather, overload, wading across a river.

v2.4	previous	current

Discuss this post on Reddit or itch.io

#gamedev #itdr #ttrpg