How far a horse travels in one day

[Dana Villa-Smith]

Walking/Miles Walking/Kilometers Horseback/Miles Horseback/Kilometers Landscape


I rather prefer the kilometers reading, it almost feels further

[Brian McPhee]

Good forum!
I've been doing quite a bit of research on life in 14th-16th century Florence. Travel times between cities is fairly consisent at about 20 km per day. This is for long distances (Florence - Rome, Florence - Milan etc). These are people looking to get from A to B quickly (to avoid discomfort and expense) but not in a race.

[Dom de Mattos]

Thanks for doing the research and sharing here.
This has basically set the size of my world - and the scale bar just shrank!

[kortleggur]

When we started making our products, we did a good bit of research on this question and found - as the thread up to this point shows [...]

So these are 12 hour travel estimates on a good flat road in good conditions?

That would lead to an average travel of 2.5 miles per hour (4,2 km/h) walking and with horses it would be 3.8 miles per hour (6 km/h)

I am using 3 miles per hour walking and 6 miles per hour on horses for long distance travel of an average low training human for little less then 8 hours a day with normal brakes, we are on similar values here. I would also argue that with good training this could easily increase by 1/3 for speed and also an increase for number of hours used for travel per day. Exhausting the day could increase the speed by 1/2, but that would call for vulnerability on the road, an injury risk and a 2 days of rest afterwards.

Here is the travel speed modification table that I use for my game

Speed Penalty	0%	25%	50%	75%
Heat:	Cool	Warm	Hot	Frying*
Wind:	Calm/breeze	Windy	Gale	Storm*
Terrain:	Flat	Rolling	Hilly	Mountain*
Growth:	Open	Prairie	Woody	Forrest*
Flow:	Dry	Slippery	Ford	Deep ford
Drainage:	Steppe	Meadow	Marsh	Mire*

* No horse riding available, but you can led it on foot

Roads will improve Terrain, Drainage and Growth modifiers, and bridges will improve Flow modifiers

Edit: Yes, the guides. it is always good to have a local guide to help you with the trails and tracks in the more difficult terrain. Without the guide you may probably get a lost a lot or find hard time finding your way. If there is a road than this i not needed, also it is only actually needed when the travel takes the adventurers in the Mier, the Deep ford, The Forrest or the Mountains. The Storm will also mislead you if you do not have local knowledge or some way to find our way and the Frying conditions are extremely hazardous if you run out of water. A good guide should be able to speed up some trips, but it depends upon his skill, local knowledge and perhaps a little luck.

[Mark Oliva]

It's a good table. So are the tables you posted earlier. I certainly could use your tables just as well as ours.

As you point out, there are a lot of factors such as the degree of training and experience of both riders and horses that have a great effect upon the numbers in the tables.

A lot of people in Internet who claim to be real experts in such things produce very different tables. Maybe that's unfortunate. Maybe not. I'm not sure.

Question: You have a value in your table called mier. At the risk of looking like an idiot, can you tell me what that is?

Góðann daginn!

[kortleggur]

Góða kvöldi Mark
það er gaman að sjá íslensku hérna. Þegar ég sá orðin Jörð og Garður í spilinu þínu, þá sá ég spennandi tengingu við móðurmálið mitt. Ég sé að þig vantar eitt Æ í Ævintýri sniðug hugmynd.

en: hi mark, cool things you are doing [...]

Question: You have a value in your table called mier. At the risk of looking like an idiot, can you tell me what that is?

he he, you see... I just translated this from my Icelandic notes, (is:mýrin) becomes (en:mire) or quagmire... sometimes when I write things up and post them, some errors of the keyboard happen to come along. here I mixed up the order of the letter -er <> -re ... I corrected it in the table

[kortleggur]

A lot of people in Internet who claim to be real experts in such things produce very different tables.

I wonder about these alleged experts and the claims they give for their numbers.

[kortleggur]

Special surface is also interesting.


kapelluhraun_2___8_.jpg
Apalhraun -75% move
Source: http://www.ferlir.is/?id=14019

15252355372_3e9097fc0b_m.jpg
Helluhraun -25% move
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23569365@N00/15252355372


Apalhraun
(eats up shoos like walking on swords, not suitable for horses unless there is a path that has been made) would be like reduction by 75% in movement while Helluhraun the flat and easy asphalt like substance but with cracks would reduce the speed only by 25%

[Mark Oliva]

I wonder about these alleged experts and the claims they give for their numbers.

When we still were in the early stages of creating our Dungeons Daring (TM) fantasy RPG and our Jörðgarð (TM) campaign setting, the three of us who were working on the projects at the time did some heavy duty research on foot and horse travel times. We had started with the official D&D 3.5 travel times that were listed in the d20 (TM) Standard Reference Document, and we were quickly skeptical about some of the times listed there. That was bolstered by discussions with friends who have horses and who ride a lot, friends who told us that some of the things listed in the d20 document were nonsense. That was the thing that brought us to do our research.

After that we did searches in the Internet and found a wide variety of tables, lists, etc. We ignored those that had no attribution and also ignored those that were said to be based on individual deeds (When Adi Dong put on his traveling shoes, he was known to walk 60 miles a day, regardless of whether he crossed meadow, mountain or desert.), etc.

What we concluded in the end is that there is a near-infinite number of factors that substantially influence the number of miles/kilometers that a creature (particularly a walking human or a horse) could cross in a certain period of time. Every table we had found had values that were based upon a narrowly finite set of factors. When we asked ourselves after this research what we were going to do to create a travel time guideline. Our Scottish professor suggested a table six pages long. The rest of us said - and he agreed almost immediately - that we were doing this for a fantasy role playing game, and only maniac game masters would use such a table. Others would shudder and run.

As a result, we conjured our own table, which I posted farther above, and like all others we had seen, it is narrowly finite, excluding 100 valid factors for every factor it considers. That's why I said it's probably not much better or worse than most other tables.

In your last post, your comment Special surface is also interesting. is particularly germane. I don't think we ever encountered a travel time table anywhere that took into consideration the aa lava beds you showed (Icelandic: Apalhraun) or the more crossable pahoehoe lava fields (Icelandic: Helluhraun) in your comparison.

For our project group, it's great that you posted this, because to make our future Jörðgarð campaign setting accessory The Northeast, which will include Miðgarð, Ásgarð and Tröllheim, it will be necessary to include aa lava beds (Aphalraun) and pahoehoe (Helluhraun) lava fields. We hadn't considered that yet, and perhaps wouldn't have given it proper consideration at all. So your posting already has been helpful.

That poses some questions. I've never walked through an aa lava field (Aphalraun), nor do I known anyone who has, but your photo is impressive. Based upon the picture, I would guess that if a PC party had to cross such a lava field, it would have to leave pack animals and riding horses behind. This doesn't look like the kind of terrain through which one could lead a horse on foot. Is that assumption correct?

I also wonder with what tempo a PC party could cross this lava field. Based only upon the photo, I would guess that a party on foot could cross - at the very most - about 5% of the distance in a given time frame that it could on a flat, level road. You estimate it at 25%. How about saying more about why your figure is so seemingly generous.

We have a good collection of textures, but none that are suitable for aa and pahoehoe lava fields like those shown in the photos. Does anyone know where there are some textures that replicate these well?

A last point of interest: When we were doing our travel time research, a U.S. Army infantry major who was a D&D (R) fan sent us a study that was done during the Vietnam war to determine what kind of march times were optimal for foot soldiers. Premises behind that study were the assumption that non-exhausted foot soldiers could fight considerably better than tired soldiers, and that too many commanders were forcing infantrymen to march too far in a day's time, increasing one's own losses and diminishing potential enemy losses.

One of the interesting findings in this study was that field grade infantry officers (major, lieutenant colonel, colonel) who had top physical fitness scores still could march in a day's time only about 65% as far as enlisted infantrymen and company grade officers (2nd lieutenant, 1st lieutenant and captain). The reason, the study concluded, was that field grade officers almost always moved by jeep and/or helicopter, while most enlisted infantrymen and company grade officers were on foot. The field grade officers were physically fit but not especially fit for long travel by foot.

This conclusion is not particularly surprising in its own right, but the relevance to fantasy RPG campaigns really stood out for us. Many RPG groups in overland campaigns travel on horseback. Such PCs, when forced by events or circumstances to do without their mounts, should have penalties for long marches, for the same reason that field grade officers can do less than their counterparts of lower rank.

[kortleggur]

In your last post, your comment Special surface is also interesting. is particularly germane. I don't think we ever encountered a travel time table anywhere that took into consideration the aa lava beds you showed (Icelandic: Apalhraun) or the more crossable pahoehoe lava fields (Icelandic: Helluhraun) in your comparison.

For our project group, it's great that you posted this, because to make our future Jörðgarð campaign setting accessory The Northeast, which will include Miðgarð, Ásgarð and Tröllheim, it will be necessary to include aa lava beds (Aphalraun) and pahoehoe (Helluhraun) lava fields. We hadn't considered that yet, and perhaps wouldn't have given it proper consideration at all. So your posting already has been helpful.

That poses some questions. I've never walked through an aa lava field (Aphalraun), nor do I known anyone who has, but your photo is impressive. Based upon the picture, I would guess that if a PC party had to cross such a lava field, it would have to leave pack animals and riding horses behind. This doesn't look like the kind of terrain through which one could lead a horse on foot. Is that assumption correct?

I also wonder with what tempo a PC party could cross this lava field. Based only upon the photo, I would guess that a party on foot could cross - at the very most - about 5% of the distance in a given time frame that it could on a flat, level road. You estimate it at 25%. How about saying more about why your figure is so seemingly generous.

The Apalhraun.

Out first variable is the age of the lava. At one time I was walking over to hot lava and the bottoms of my walking shoes began to melt.
As time sets in, moss and other growth will start to form on top of the lava.

Young Apalhraun is sharp and the it will eat up the footwear in only few days, boots that was suppose lo last months if not years. But this is also tempered by the overgrowth.

Near settlements there are paths that have been made in the lava fields, by walking on the same surface repeatedly, the sharpness is dulled down to a point that even horses can be lead on them paths without harm to there feet. Also here toe overgrowth will make it all easier.

The lava is usually relatively flat even if the top layer is fussy and sharp.

There are often ways around young lava on older lava with moss and other good things on top.

Walking on thick moss can be boring as you sink into the soft moss.

So travel speed is dependent upon many factors regarding the age of the AApal-lava