Regulations required a 10-minute break every hour. Marching and fighting at night was rarely done, so the march was generally limited to the time between dawn and dusk. Moving troops would make their breakfast and coffee well before moving out at first light, and they'd make camp while they could still see, and dinner after it was too dark to march.This is one of those areas where a game designer is confronted by the challenge of making a game feel "fun" despite the annoyance of having units that represent human beings that get tired and need to rest.
Ten miles per day was fairly leisurely. Twenty was common, but pushing it. I've heard of thirty, and even forty, but a good fight had left the men after such a march. There are numerous incidents wherein a commander's excuse for not being aggressive enough was "my men had been marching hard all day and were wore out."
Almost every wargame I've every played just glosses this kind of detail. If a brigade has a movement of 4, it can move 4 hexes every day forever, and never needs to worry about camping over a weekend to wash and darn its socks. When controlling an army of dozens of troops, it would be laborious to commit to the bookkeeping of remembering when each individual brigade was too fatigued to fight well. Presumably the movement of "4" represents an averaging over longer days and R&R days.
Interestingly, you can find early RPGs trying to maintain this level of detail. The "party demands a 10 minute break every hour" was a feature of 1st edition dungeoneering (it's in every edition of Basic D&D up to the Rules Cyclopedia!) that must now seem curious to a modern player. I've noticed some similar drift from the early days of real-time computer RPGs (say, Baldur's Gate) where your party moves at some reasonable semblance of a walking pace, and more modern RPGs, where even the auction district of a capital city is populated by a more diligent set of joggers than the finish line of the Chicago half-marathon!
I have noticed that in games, players will move at the fastest speed allowed by the game. In RPG games the default movement speed is usually a leisurely jog, with no detriment over any distance. However you can often toggle this to a slower realistic walking speed, however it is never used. The only game I have played that encouraged walking pace was Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. In it, jogging consumed fatigue, and fatigue was determinant in how accurate or powerful your attacks were. thus if you jogged into a combat you would be at a disadvantage. Interestingly one of the end-game rewards was a magic item that regenerated you fatigue constantly. However, by the time I received said item, I had already constructed a better one of my own!
ReplyDeleteThis actually reminds me of the old James Gleick book "Faster", which talks about how people progressively acclimate to doing the same thing in shorter times, and then, once recalibrated, feel frustrated by reverting to anything slower. So back in the 80s, we all used rotary phones that took a minute to dial, and it took a computer the better part of five minutes to boot up, or load a dungeon level from the original Bard's Tale.
ReplyDeleteNow we expect all our phone numbers to require a single keystroke, and any time a 30 second loading bar appears in a game, 100s of players probably ragequit. Walking at a real-life pace would just feel so tedious.