Yora

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?

Though the 3.5e revised edition of D&D 3rd edition was widely regarded as a huge improvement of the game when it came out, over time it became more apparent that it actually was the start of a much greater shift than had been immediately apparent.

I still have a very great fondness for the early 3rd edition books from 2000 to 2002 which I just don't have for those that came out after the revision. The original core rulebooks have never been available in pdf to my knowledge (and you can't even find bootleg scans anymore), but the original SRD files are still around. Unfortunately they are really badly organized and formatted, but there is one website still around that has the content in HTML format, and more recently someone went through the trouble of sorting and formatting all the content as pdf and odt (pay what you want, but it would save you many hours of painful work).

But I am the first to admit that the original 3rd edition rules had real issues and that doing a revised edition was a good call. I just don't agree that all of the 3.5e changes were actually improvements to the game. With the SRD now available as an organized and formatted odt file, it's now really easy to make your own customized version of a 3rd Edition rulebook by just editing whichever parts you don't like.

What things do you think are the most unfun or just broken about the original 3rd Edition rules and how would you fix them?

(I've been informed that I had been told complete BS by the person trying to tell me that resin printing 1:72 wargame minis would be stupidly expensive. As such, my question here is no longer relevant.)

I am considering the option to get back into miniature painting by starting with 3D printing my own custom figures.

Given the price difference, it would have to be plastic (I read PLA is a good option), and for my purposes it would mostly be 1:72 scale figures.

The deciding factor is whether at such a small scale PLA can achieve a level of detail that doesn't look completely terrible. I'm used to 1:72 injection mold figures, and my previous paint work in the past was always so thick that much of the detail present on those would disappear anyway. So I'm really not looking for much.

But looking for existing images of such prints is very much not search engine friendly and I mostly just come up with Chinese soldier figures made out of some mystery material or figures of unknown scale.

Can anyone help me to find some reference pictures of 1:72 PLA figures so I can take a look if this level of detail is acceptable for me?

Saw this question on Mastodon and perhaps someone here remembers it.

For a while now I've been occasionally thinking how cool it might be to run a campaign in which the players are the captains of their own mercenary companies which have all been hired to support an army defending a realm against the monstrous horde of an evil sorcerer or warlord.

Roaming the countryside looking for the enemy, following their paths of destruction, sending out scouts to detect enemy warbands and determine suitable battlefields to engage them, defend towns from raid, secure supplies to feed their own troops, and all of that. Battles would involve each player controlling dozens or hundreds of soldiers and sending messengers between each other to coordinate, with strategy meetings and the questioning of prisoners and locals making up the bulk of the roleplaying elements.

Since you don't really need character stats for this as in a regular RPG, and the main effect of the PCs being present on the battlefield would be to boost the units they are attached to, I think it would probably be a good idea to simply design a complete system from scratch.

Though having never even played a single wargame ever, I've been wondering if anyone knows about any resources I should be checking out to get some idea about what other people in the past have found to be working well for them or not. Anything to recommend?