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.

In both 11.300 and 11.311, when I open my Dragonbane campaign for which I have not installed the official content module but instead created all the items manually, I always get three messages "Formula can not be evaluated".

I believe that had something to do with items that I made, apparently improperly.

But I don't have the slightest clue which of the many items might be causing these error messages to appear. Any way to find out where the problem is caused that is producing these messages?

I am thinking about expanding my RPG fantasy setting into running wargames in it as well. What I am looking for is a game in which several players play the commanders of different units in the same army, each commanding hundreds or a few thousand soldiers.

I want to start with a fairly mundane baseline of medieval combat and then perhaps later gradually add small numbers of special units with unique magic abilities to it. But it should work without any magic elements as well.

I've started looking at DBA as a rules system, as it is looking relatively compact and simple to play. Would that be a decent pick for someone completely new and running a campaign for others, or are there other games that might be better recommendations for that purpose?

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?

Unfortunately, most of the time people are writing about medieval social structure, they almost never include any numbers to give any kind of reference for the scale of things. But from pieces and fragments I've come across on various sites (without sources) I pieced together these general guidelines I want to apply creating domains for my setting.

A common borderland domain has 1 lord who lives in a small keep with his family and some 20 to 30 servants. Next to the keep is the town with some 1000 to 2000 townspeople, who are the merchants and craftspeople for the area. Surrounding the town are 20 to 30 manors that each support 1 "knight" and around 5 fully trained and equipped men at arms and their families. The lands of the manor are being worked by roughly 200 to 300 peasants who might be free farmers paying rent for their plots, or serfs and slaves working directly for the "knight"'s own household.

That would mean such a domain has 1 lord, 20-30 "knights", 100-150 men at arms, 1,000-2,000 townspeople, and 5,000-10,000 farmers. (Allowing for a peasant levy of some 1,000 men if the domain is attacked.)

At 3 acres of farmland to support one person, this would be a total requirement of 20,000 to 40,000 acres or 80 to 160 km². Which is one or two 6-mile hexes.

Does that seem broadly plausible as a general reference for scale?

For reasons I've not really grasped yet myself, I think the idea of magic masks and magic lanterns is just really cool and evocative. And I really want to have a lot of them make appearances in my next Dragonbane campaign.

The mechanics of Dragonbane don't really care about weapons enchanted to make stronger attacks, armor that provides better protection, or rings and amulets that increase your character stats. Instead, the game is more suited to magic items that grant characters new abilities you can't get from leveling up. That's the kind of enchantments that I am in need of.

The main trait of a mask is that it covers your face. So I think any enchantment that protects your mind against mental attacks or intrusions would be a great fit. It also gives you a new face, so enchantments that hide your identity or give you a new one also fit well. I can see enchantments that let you do magic with your voice fit too. A mask also makes you look through two holes for your eyes, so it makes for a great base for enchantments that grant you special vision. I'm sure there's tons of things that could be done with magic masks and I'd love to hear what things you would think would make for really cool enchantments.

I also really like the idea of magic lanterns, and unfortunately for those there are really not many existing examples. The function of any lantern is to provide light that lets you see things that you can't see in the darkness. A lantern that banishes illusions would be a very useful item to have, but I feel that such an ability would be way too broad which makes it way too useful. I think perhaps it would be better to have magic lanterns dispel specific enchantments on a specific location or from a specific being, but then the usefulness might be too narrow and the item be useless after the end of the adventure. Which would not be that great.

A related but completely different effect of a lantern making the hidden invisible is that it could keep away creatures that either gain their main power from being hidden, or who are being actively hurt by the radiation of the light that is harmless to ordinary beings. Though again, this might also run into the problem of being either too good because it's too useful, or being too specific to be used more than once.

Have you come across or had ideas for cool enchanted masks and lanterns that would make for great or interesting magic items in a game?