I'm working on a hex-based sandbox campaign in 5e DnD that follows the "points of light" put forth during 4e DnD... a vast dangerous wilderness dotted with safe communities.

Realistic medieval demographics would have villages, at best, a day's travel apart, with slightly larger "trade towns" acting as nexuses amidst them, and even more rarely cities.

However, I don't want realistic. I want dangerous wilderness speckled with a few communities here and there. Points of Light, right?

So what's a good "standard" travel distance between communities, in terms of playability and fun? A few days? A week?

Even just a day or two is a lot longer if you're practically guaranteed a dangerous random encounter along the way.

Hmm, taking encounter frequency into account... if we say there's a 25% chance of an encounter on any given day, there's an almost certainty of an encounter after 5 days of travel, and a good chance of having had two encounters.

In reply to Tortuga (msg # 3):

Standard, maybe, but you're describing "a vast dangerous wilderness" so encounters would likely be much more likely.  That's part of the danger: frequency.

If it's truly dangerous, daily issues are most likely, in which case, 1-2 days between towns may be a necessity, just to heal up.

Make them 2 days apart if you want folks to travel wounded.

There's an 80+% chance of an encounter in three days. So, a good distance to separate villages as they could go from one to the next with only one encounter likely, and possibly no encounters. That'd be the ma I mum safe separation of any two villages.. Further apart means likelihood of more encounters.

So I'm going to share this quote from a blog run by someone called brotherentropy



So you can go with a frontier feel, endless wastelands full of natives orcs and forests full of bears owlbears.  And in between ancient ruins left behind by the Spanish Elves or the Aztecs Strange Old Ones.  The idea that you're in a land that has a history, a full-on logic, that does not have any concern for the white man's lawsyou and yours...if you wanna go back to red-box, a landscape that's full on Chaos (Law in this metaphor would be the natural habit of "sivilized" folk from back east).

To be fair, this is not exactly a new idea.  One of the sample scenarios in an early edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles is the story of a Dwarf Engineer exploring the southern jungles who assembles a rag-tag bunch of misfits to take on the frog-men who're guarding an ancient temple. A norse-dwarf and six mixed mercenaries against the cold-blooded waves.  They called it, naturally, The Magnificent Sven.

I've always liked the idea of incorporating a "Western" sort of feel. In fact, I'm naming the kingdom Vaquero and modeling it after a less-well-settled post-reconquest Spain, and it'd be simple enough to incorporate a bit of Mexican-frontier flavor.

I think encounter frequency is going to vary depending on the hostility of the region.  The Mountains of Goblin Death and the Forests of Mild Unpleasantness probbly have significantly different encounter rates.

In a "points of light" style setting, most major settlements will probably be large (500+ inhabitants) and fortified, with outlying farms supplying the town.  (Aside from crazy frontier people who have made a deal with the devil?)

The "playable" distance between communities is going to be dependent on how dangerous you want the region to be.  My personal recommendation (with your given rate of 25%/day) would be 3 days apart for general travel.  This gives about half a chance of a safe trip.  That's enough to seem dangerous without burdening every narrative road trip with a random encounter.

(Of course, we can't forget the Laws of Encounter Probability: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0145.html )

Here's a preliminary "large scale" map of the Kingdom of Vaquero. White dots are towns 3-4 days apart, mostly along major waterways and coastlines. Numerous smaller rivers aren't shown at this scale.

http://i.imgur.com/lTKpWFz.png

The wilderness is dangerous. Not exceptionally dangerous by DnD standards, but if you're one of the CR 0 commoners that make up 99% of the population there's a 25% chance that going for a trip on any given day will result in running into something that will kill you.

You're more or less safe if you never leave the farm or do so only in large groups of a half-dozen or so to take the crops to market after harvest, and even then farms tend to be clustered around walled market towns that the commoners can retreat to.

Agriculture provides most of the civilization's product, because successful hunters are by necessity more competent and therefore rare.

Still, a functional kingdom requires some degree of trade and travel and that's where adventurers come in. Only they are capable of facing the rigors of routine travel from town to town, city to city, collecting taxes, escorting officials, protecting caravans, and seeing to the needs of the smaller communities. The King does have his military and his champions, but they can't be everywhere at once.

Adventurers fill the gap.

Despite their obvious utility, Adventurers also tend towards being iconoclastic individuals who amass great deal of personal power. They're the heroes of legend. They topple tyrants and change regimes. They are a constant threat to the status quo, even if only in potential. As a result, in the past there have been frequent crackdowns on Adventurers to try and keep them in line... not just in the Kingdom of Vaquero, but the lands to the north as well.

This led to the establishment of the Adventurer's Guild. Not truly a single guild, its form is remarkably similar in every city where guildhalls have been established. Members pay annual dues and give the guild a share of their treasure in exchange for legal protections, lobbying power within local government, access to healing magic, appraisal, and a market for recovered treasure.

That's what I have so far. Thoughts?
This message was last edited by the user at 18:14, Sun 20 Nov 2016.

Sounds great!