That works with how I was thinking about it, namely that it should be possible to encourage an army to march for longer than the standard 10 hours, but with consequences.
In this model, as in the one I sketched, you can conceivably push your troops to march 14 hours a day without destroying them physically. If I understand movement rates, that gives you 56! miles of travel for organised troops who are being pushed along. (Movement rate 4 to account for heavy armour and carts.)
Now, I can see slowing a mass of people down to half movement rate of the slowest, restricting the hypothetical army to 20-28 miles' travel in a day (comparable to Roman legions), but that still permits a party to have a range of 56-64 miles per day (at a walk), with time left for an extended rest of at least 8 hours.
(If the distance traveled is half movement rate at a walk, as part of the example suggests, then 2 hours' slow walking only gets Vincent 2 miles further, collapsing 4 miles and 8 hours' crawl from his goal)
One thing I would suggest, though, in line with nottheterritory's desire for epic heroes getting exhausted less easily, would be that either at heroic tier or at epic tier, characters should be able to take 10 on the roll (or preferably, buy a heroic feat, indefatigable, where they can take 10 on the roll), essentially giving them a base buffer of movement beyond that of mere mortals.
Depending on desired level of superheroedness, the feat could go up to 'take 20' at epic tier, which would give the hero somewhere between 15 and 20 hours of running before they start failing checks, which puts them solidly on the extreme upper limits of possibility.
To add, the Transeurope Ultramarathon, which can easily serve as an example of what highly conditioned distance runners can do, is 5100 km (3169 miles) from Lisbon to Moscow in 64 days, meaning an average of 79.7 km / day (49.5 miles/day).
In actual fact, the stages range from 9.6 km to 99.6 km (61.9 miles), so as to not completely destroy the athletes, meaning that permitting an epic character to run 15 hours / day without fatigue is very far outside the realm of human possibility, over double it, in fact.
To be honest, we have to keep in mind that insanely good runners have great Constitutions (16+) and are trained in Endurance, giving them at least a +8 to Endurance, even at level 1. But I agree with the extra feats. That would easily make it possible to pull off epic races (11 hours of solid running at 30th level is CRAZY! 88 miles in a day!).
Another thing to keep in mind is that the whole 10 hours standard takes into account that most people can do 8 hours at most, but they wanted your characters to be more hardcore than regular folk.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. This would have been ugly without it.
An amendment: That feat should be paragon tier; I mixed up my descriptors.
Don't forget fast runner, fleet-footed and unfettered stride, which combine to give the epic character a base speed of 9, a running speed of 11 and let them ignore difficult terrain. Meaning that the hypothetical atanarjuat could maintain a running speed of 121 miles / day, easily pushing them into mythic status. (Making this run naked and barefoot across arctic ice is a separate matter, of course.)
However, on the opposite end of the scale, if your NPC army can only travel 8 hours before needing an endurance check, that actually means that under forced march conditions, they'd be travelling 24 miles in a day, pretty much spot-on to what (the BBC claims that) the Roman legions would do in an emergency.
As a note on units, that means that a D&D league is three miles, or the same as a UK league. (And that, if dwarves measured overland distance in leagues, their league would be 2/3 a human league.)
In this model, as in the one I sketched, you can conceivably push your troops to march 14 hours a day without destroying them physically. If I understand movement rates, that gives you 56! miles of travel for organised troops who are being pushed along. (Movement rate 4 to account for heavy armour and carts.)
Now, I can see slowing a mass of people down to half movement rate of the slowest, restricting the hypothetical army to 20-28 miles' travel in a day (comparable to Roman legions), but that still permits a party to have a range of 56-64 miles per day (at a walk), with time left for an extended rest of at least 8 hours.
(If the distance traveled is half movement rate at a walk, as part of the example suggests, then 2 hours' slow walking only gets Vincent 2 miles further, collapsing 4 miles and 8 hours' crawl from his goal)
One thing I would suggest, though, in line with nottheterritory's desire for epic heroes getting exhausted less easily, would be that either at heroic tier or at epic tier, characters should be able to take 10 on the roll (or preferably, buy a heroic feat, indefatigable, where they can take 10 on the roll), essentially giving them a base buffer of movement beyond that of mere mortals.
Depending on desired level of superheroedness, the feat could go up to 'take 20' at epic tier, which would give the hero somewhere between 15 and 20 hours of running before they start failing checks, which puts them solidly on the extreme upper limits of possibility.
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In actual fact, the stages range from 9.6 km to 99.6 km (61.9 miles), so as to not completely destroy the athletes, meaning that permitting an epic character to run 15 hours / day without fatigue is very far outside the realm of human possibility, over double it, in fact.
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Another thing to keep in mind is that the whole 10 hours standard takes into account that most people can do 8 hours at most, but they wanted your characters to be more hardcore than regular folk.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. This would have been ugly without it.
Reply
An amendment: That feat should be paragon tier; I mixed up my descriptors.
Don't forget fast runner, fleet-footed and unfettered stride, which combine to give the epic character a base speed of 9, a running speed of 11 and let them ignore difficult terrain. Meaning that the hypothetical atanarjuat could maintain a running speed of 121 miles / day, easily pushing them into mythic status. (Making this run naked and barefoot across arctic ice is a separate matter, of course.)
However, on the opposite end of the scale, if your NPC army can only travel 8 hours before needing an endurance check, that actually means that under forced march conditions, they'd be travelling 24 miles in a day, pretty much spot-on to what (the BBC claims that) the Roman legions would do in an emergency.
As a note on units, that means that a D&D league is three miles, or the same as a UK league. (And that, if dwarves measured overland distance in leagues, their league would be 2/3 a human league.)
Reply
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