Practical questions about exploration

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Edgewise

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I've had a project on the back-burner for a few months - a mid-fantasy hexcrawl where the PCs are charged with blazing a trail from one hex on the map, through a forest, to the other side of the map. There's an ancient road that ran through the area, although in some places it is entirely overgrown and in others there are obstacles the PCs might want to steer around.

The mission was initially intended to be pure exploration, the party being hired to scout out the path that a trading company wants to take through the area. But over time, that has morphed into the idea that the PCs are in charge of directing and protecting labor crews in cutting a traversable route. I struggled to consider how it would be valuable for the party to merely traverse the map and report back, and it was harder to make into an adventure - hence the change.

Now I'm struggling to determine the required labor (as well as materials and expertise) to do such a thing. This is being designed for Old-School Essentials, so I want to keep the mechanics very simple. Basically, I'm trying to determine how many person-hours it would take to cut one mile of road through a forest. Such a road would not be paved, but could conceivably be used for humans, draft animals and carts. Essentially something level, wide and straight enough to manage this kind of traffic.

Once the road is complete, the trading company would maintain it, so that's out of scope. My assumption is that the project would probably need one skilled construction overseer, and would benefit from skilled labor (though it could probably get by with green workers). In terms of the materials and their cost, I'll probably just handwave that as some ratio of labor costs and require materials to be carted out on a periodic basis.

But I'd like to be more accurate in terms of determining the hours of labor that would be needed for a mile through different kinds of terrains. Being off by more than an order of magnitude could look really silly to anyone with any clue (which doesn't include me). Forest and hills, with an outside possibility of the swamp - I'm guessing the latter might be prohibitive.

There are also a few cases where the players might need to commission bridges, so I should probably look into that, as well.

I'm pretty clueless about this stuff. I have zero experience with clearing terrain, leveling land, cutting trees, considering drainage, etc. Like any homeowner, I've done isolated small jobs of this sort but nothing on the scale that would give me any insight. Any suggestions or ideas are appreciated.
 
You could handwave it away; the PCs are responsible for clearing out monsters/enchantments and let the workers they're not paying for deal with the road work. Presumably that would involve logging, burning or hacking out stumps, using the resulting logs to bridge or pave any bad spots. The work crews might include guards to fend off the occasional wandering creature, with the PCs having to backtrack and make side forays which would explain why they don't cover ground faster than the work crews behind them (and staying near to be close enough to respond to any such situations). (In the extreme, the work can be done by magic involving hand waving if players are too critical of whatever rate of road construction you choose.) If you stick to the ancient road, the amount of trees to clear could be reduced significantly versus clearing an entirely new path through old growth forest, and assume relatively little work to get a usable road surface.

I don't really know how long road construction should take; just repairing a very short segment of existing road with modern construction equipment seems to take more than a year, to judge from all of the detours I'm impeded by in real life. As a complete guess, clearing by hand with horses or mules, maybe a couple of workers could cut down an old growth tree in a day, drag it aside, remove the stump and fill in the hole and clear lesser growth in three more days, and then repeat every 20 feet or so? With five mile hexes, that would be about 100 days per hex for a crew of a hundred. Longer if they have to dig ditches on each side to build up the road in between. Faster through grassland, then; slower through swamp if possible as they bring enough logs or stone to be brought in on wagons.

I wouldn't find managing the exact logistics that interesting as a player, but some tables revel in that stuff. If that's your table, make them figure this out. In my game I'd be more interested in random tables of problems that might arise.
 
You could handwave it away; the PCs are responsible for clearing out monsters/enchantments and let the workers they're not paying for deal with the road work.
Nah; the way I'm going with this, the party has a budget for this sort of thing, so there are a number of interesting risk-reward decisions (e.g. cut a shorter route through haunted ruins or go around). The intent is for the players to be the sole planners of this route.
I wouldn't find managing the exact logistics that interesting as a player, but some tables revel in that stuff.
My intention is to keep the mechanics of the logistics a little abstract but not the logistics themselves. In other words, players aren't going to be worried about every plank, and they'll know the average cost/time to build road across a hex. The mechanics behind the scene will be simple, so it's easy for the GM to easily insert rulings e.g. the effects of an overseer skimming materials or a tricky obstacle could be easily handled on the fly.

I'd probably start with the average time in labor per hex, and the average cost per hour of work (based on labor and materials). Then there will be a simple roll to see how many hours a given hex actually takes. The GM can modify that value easily without any complex mechanics.

The party will be given a big budget that's released gradually by their agent based on progress. In the end, they get paid a fee plus whatever they save on expenses (and they can eat into their profits if they go over-budget). The players should be told about the labor costs and averages ahead of time, just to make things simpler. There should be tricky decisions but not complex accounting.

I think that's all very doable. It might not be for every table - so be it. We'll find out in the end. In any case, for what I have in mind, I'd like to have some semi-realistic idea about the scale of labor required.

Any civil engineers in the pub?
 
Going by Medieval and Early Modern Texts here the only thing I can get so far is that maintenance of a road of circa 10-15 miles was six days of work (eight hours a day) for a team of two.
 
Well I happened to have reformated the old judges guild rules on this stuff in Wilderlands of the Fantastic Reaches. Hope it is useful. I consolidated all the construction rules that Judges Guild had in the guidebook. The road rules are simple, calculate the distance through various 5 mile hexes, roll the dice and that your cost.

Note that these rules are written for OD&D not AD&D.

As for time that given on the preceding page as well as how many laborers each race is worth. Humans = 1 laborer, cost 2 gp per month and require 20 gp per month support.

Calculating Construction Time
Cost in Gold Pieces divided by 600 = # of weeks per 100 equivalent laborers. Round fractional weeks upwards. Winter doubles construction time.

Road Rules from Judges Guild.jpg
 
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This feels like a topic that, if not already covered by a Harn supplement somewhere, should be.
Strangely Harn doesn't have detailed construction rules. Estate Management yes but not how much details other than an overall price for a castle, keep, or manor.
 
As for time that given on the preceding page as well as how many laborers each race is worth. Humans = 1 laborer, cost 2 gp per month and require 20 gp per month support.

Calculating Construction Time
Cost in Gold Pieces divided by 600 = # of weeks per 100 equivalent laborers. Round fractional weeks upwards. Winter doubles construction time.
Let me play around with these numbers. You're basically saying the cost of one man's labor is 22 GP per month (work + materials). That means the cost per day of a laborer is about 73(.33...) CP. The reason I put it this way is because I'd like to express work requirements in terms of man-days. It's probably simpler to round that to 75 CP (which equates with a cost of 22.5 GP per laborer-month).

I was thinking of making each hex a league, which is basically three miles. But I'll start by computing things in terms of (single) miles, because it's easy to multiply by three when the time comes.

So a four-foot-wide gravel road through the forest is going to cost 700 GP per mile, or 70,000 CP, on average. That suggests it should take about 933 man-days to create a single mile of road, or 2800 man-days for a hex. For a team of one-hundred laborers, this takes exactly four weeks.

That's a much larger scale project than what I had in mind! I was thinking that the adventure itself might take a couple months of game time and entail a smaller workforce. Something on this scale would not be entrusted to low-level adventurers who are not well-trusted by their employers. And it would create a major disruption in a region with a small hamlet and a logging post.

Let's briefly consider your numbers for a dirt road. The cost is a lot less - more like 90 GP per mile. That's about ten days for a dozen men. That's...not too bad, but still a little more than I was expecting at a month per hex. I could work with this by making each hex a single mile, and providing a significant bonus to building over the ancient road - one hex in three days for a dozen men on that terrain seems reasonable, as that's a little better than clear terrain (which would entail one hex per five days).

With a 1-in-6 chance of an encounter per day, I think that's a good pace to motivate the players without overwhelming them. Running an active labor camp probably increases chances of encounters, although setting up proper watches will improve surprise rolls.

Still, this means I will have to tweak a lot of things, and I can always fudge things by at least a factor of two without feeling terribly inauthentic. It's very useful to have something as a baseline for designing even simple mechanics, so thanks for these resources.
 
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You can adjust as needed by having a much lower cost to restore the ancient road where that's feasible, and the full cost where they have to detour or rebuild from scratch.

While the cost of a larger scale project may be daunting, the workers may already represent a sunk cost and not using them would not represent much of a savings (including waiting to find higher level and better trusted adventurers).
 
Oh, and also thanks for including bridge prices. I was wondering if it would be more expensive to cross a deeper gorge, since you can't rely on support posts. But I don't mind hand-waving that kind of consideration.

Thinking about reducing the scale to miles instead of leagues, I'm actually happier with the idea. I like the idea of a more "intimate" hexcrawl. The entire forest is now only 12 miles across, which means that it can be crossed in a single day of hiking. So when they do identify different sites that they want to visit in order to plunder or remove obstacles, it doesn't need to be a serious expedition.
 
You can adjust as needed by having a much lower cost to restore the ancient road where that's feasible, and the full cost where they have to detour or rebuild from scratch.
Yup that's an easy fudge.
While the cost of a larger scale project may be daunting, the workers may already represent a sunk cost and not using them would not represent much of a savings (including waiting to find higher level and better trusted adventurers).
I think the idea here is that this area is basically a monster-riddled backwater, and there just aren't a lot of people who are eager to take the job. Meanwhile, the employers will be initially quite stingy about releasing funds to the PCs, requiring a review from the lazy agent every time more funds are to be released.

A simple mechanic would be that the agent initially releases only enough funds for a single hex. After verifying that this is completed, he releases enough for two hexes. Next time, three hexes. Etc. Of course, if costs are rolled per hex and complications arise, then costs can go up, and the PCs may have to sweet talk the agent. The GM can make this as much of a hassle as he or she wants.

Meanwhile, there's one location where they can try to build a bridge over a gorge riddled with monster-filled caves, or take a detour and try to build a gravel road through a mile of witch-infested swampland. That one mile through swampland is going to be costly and take time, which is time for lots of regrettable encounters with wandering monsters. But the bridge over the gorge is not going to be cheap, and those monsters simply must be cleared out before making it.

This just naturally arises out of the terrain and these kinds of rules. Maybe the PCs can figure something else out, like cutting further west through the forest to cross the gorge miles away, or make a deal with the witches. Or maybe do something with magic to make the lake come to the road! After all, it's only a mile away. What could go wrong?
 
Let me play around with these numbers. You're basically saying the cost of one man's labor is 22 GP per month (work + materials). That means the cost per day of a laborer is about 73(.33...) CP. The reason I put it this way is because I'd like to express work requirements in terms of man-days. It's probably simpler to round that to 75 CP (which equates with a cost of 22.5 GP per laborer-month).

That correct

So a four-foot-wide gravel road through the forest is going to cost 700 GP per mile, or 70,000 CP, on average. That suggests it should take about 933 man-days to create a single mile of road, or 2800 man-days for a hex. For a team of one-hundred laborers, this takes exactly four weeks.

No actually it is

700 gp/600 gp = 1.167. So it take 100 laborer equivalent to build 1 mile of road in a forest in 2 weeks per RAW (because of the rounding)
If you want to be exact you can keep the fraction and multiply by 7 to get # of days. In which case the above would take 9 days (1.167 * 7 = 8.167 rounded to 9).

For a 3 mile hex it would 2,100 gp/600 gp = 3.5 or 4 weeks for a 100 laborers.

Remember 100 laborers is a baseline if you only have 50 laborers equivalent then it is double the time, if you have double the laborer equivalent it halves the construction time. There is a chart on the preceding page that list out some laborer equivalents for giants, dwarves, halflings, and zombies.

Hope that clarifies things.

That's a much larger scale project than what I had in mind! I was thinking that the adventure itself might take a couple months of game time and entail a smaller workforce. Something on this scale would not be entrusted to low-level adventurers who are not well-trusted by their employers. And it would create a major disruption in a region with a small hamlet and a logging post.

I hope my figures make it more manageable.

Let's briefly consider your numbers for a dirt road. The cost is a lot less - more like 90 GP per mile. That's about ten days for a dozen men. That's...not too bad, but still a little more than I was expecting at a month per hex. I could work with this by making each hex a single mile, and providing a significant bonus to building over the ancient road - one hex in three days for a dozen men on that terrain seems reasonable, as that's a little better than clear terrain (which would entail one hex per five days).

Going through the numbers it is 90 gp / 600 gp = .15 meaning it would take a 100 men 2 days to build a mile of dirt road through forest. A dozen men it would take .15 / (12/100) or 1.25 or 2 weeks per RAW rounding or 9 days per rounding to the nearest day.

With a 1-in-6 chance of an encounter per day, I think that's a good pace to motivate the players without overwhelming them. Running an active labor camp probably increases chances of encounters, although setting up proper watches will improve surprise rolls.

Still, this means I will have to tweak a lot of things, and I can always fudge things by at least a factor of two without feeling terribly inauthentic. It's very useful to have something as a baseline for designing even simple mechanics, so thanks for these resources.
 
You can adjust as needed by having a much lower cost to restore the ancient road where that's feasible, and the full cost where they have to detour or rebuild from scratch.

Much of the leveling and stump removal has been done. One only has to deal with the places were streams have cut through the road bed. I would consider cutting the price by half definitely a third.
 
For a 3 mile hex it would 2,100 gp/600 gp = 3.5 or 4 weeks for a 100 laborers.
...
Hope that clarifies things.
Ah, I think I misunderstood your original equation for the completion time per 100 workers. I thought that was a derived value and not a given, so I had derived my slightly different value based on the daily cost of labor and the cost of a project.

In other words, if a worker costs 22.5 GP per month in compensation, materials and resources, then the cost of the project is simply derived from (time-to-completion for one laborer in months) x (monthly cost of one laborer). Thus, if we know the final cost and the monthly cost, we can derive the time-to-completion in man-months. Multiple by around thirty and you get man-days.

It's interesting that the result of this formula and my derivation are similar but not the same. I guess this difference accounts for project overhead - profit, perhaps?

If I'm to use your much simpler calculation, then the time-to-completion in man-days is simply (cost x 1.17). I might simplify by just fudging it to cost in GP! Thus, a 90 GP project (i.e. one mile of dirt road in the forest) takes 7.5 days for the same crew.
Much of the leveling and stump removal has been done. One only has to deal with the places were streams have cut through the road bed. I would consider cutting the price by half definitely a third.
Right. Clear terrain would take 3.75 days with this computation, so it would be reasonable to take 2 days where traces of the old road can be found and re-used.

A mile of gravel road in the swamp now entails about 1050 man-days, which is three months for a dozen laborers. You're going to want more workers to speed that up; more on that below. A forty-foot wooden bridge is much more reasonable at a little less than a month.

Now, if it's as simple as linear costs and linear output, I think it's natural to want to get as many workers as possible. The less time exposed to random encounters, the better, without any greater overall cost. But a few issues are going to limit that. First, the nearby hamlet is small, with a limited pool of workers. The nearby logging camp has a much better supply of workers, but they are more costly, and still not infinite.

Second, the larger the work crew, the greater the chance of random encounters. The party can improve security by hiring thugs from the logging camp, but that will increase overhead. And it doesn't actually prevent random encounters so much as reduce chances for surprise and, of course, improve the results of combat.

Finally, the agent of the company will disburse funds to the PCs at a slow rate, at least initially, which entails downtime between visits to his inn and subsequent inspections.
 
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But a few issues are going to limit that. First, the nearby hamlet is small, with a limited pool of workers. The nearby logging camp has a much better supply of workers, but they are more costly, and still not infinite.

One thing about the Wilderlands is it had all the labor pools listed for all the settlements on the map i.e. pop listed as able bodied men. So PCs after a bit of surveying and exploring knew what they were in for in terms of labor and resources.
 
One thing about the Wilderlands is it had all the labor pools listed for all the settlements on the map i.e. pop listed as able bodied men. So PCs after a bit of surveying and exploring knew what they were in for in terms of labor and resources.
I'll be able to do that for both settlements, although there will be some flux, and the logging camp will replenish this pool at some rate TBD. It naturally attracts a broad spectrum of men from the wider region looking for quick bit of coin in exchange for hard work and a little risk.
 
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