Climbing's a Bitch

For those persons exploring the use of my sage abilities, who may also use encumbrance rules, just recently I've thrown a nasty curve ball into dungeon adventures and hauling treasure.

These are my scrambling rules:

The page explains it, but doesn't say that I'm imposing an arbitrary limit on three sorts of general movement based on the slope of ground involved.  For the present — and this may need adjustment at some point — I'm imposing no penalties on movement over ground that has less than a 30° slope.  There's no rule at all for any kind of slope in the original D&D rules, so I think this is safe.  I'm saying that any slope between 30 to 60° is very moderately hazardous, and that it takes training to move over it easily.  It's not said above, but slopes above 60° fall into the as-yet unwritten rules surrounding mountain climbing.

I've tried a couple of times to write mountain climbing rules, but remember I'm trying to make rules that have a bare minimum of die rolls, so the trouble has been to define the difference between a skilled person climbing a mountain with the reassurance of not falling, and situations where falling is distinctly possible, for anyone, regardless of skill.  I'm not a mountain climber; mountain climbers do not, unfortunately, describe their skill-set like a game metric.  Thus for the present, on that score, I'm stumped.  But I haven't tried it yet with chat, so we'll see sometime.  Not a rush.

Scrambling I've done.  Lots of it.  Not lately, granted, but I've climbed hundreds of yards of scree, roamed the inside of ice caves not under maintenance by a tourist department and maneouvred over bare rock between the 50 and 60° range.  It is very hard for some people and not to be treated lightly, though of course it ought to be doable for player characters, even mages and bards.

It's important to remember that all persons in the game world would be doing it without stippled shoes or crampons, without nylon ropes or straps, without a steel peg hard enough that it can be pounded straight into rock and so on.  This doesn't make scrambling impossible, but certainly it slows down the effort, since hurrying in the kind of boots that existed in the 16th century would have torn them to shreds in less than an hour.  We can't climb a scree slope in stockings, can we?

The speeds on the sage ability page are intended to reflect that.  An unskilled climber in poor shoes takes a 12-second combat round to move five feet up a 30 to 60° slope, because the shoes have to be protected.  Right off, that's a damn slow speed to move if there are a half dozen goblin archers 20 hexes upslope, who can see climbers every time they move out from behind a rock.

A good scrambler, on the other hand, might hurry from rock to rock well enough to get shot at less, while closing faster with the goblins.  Of course, we can't be sure the scrambler's strong enough to take them all on, alone.

That's not the cruel bit, however.  The cruel bit's the encumbrance.

My encumbrance system is highly individual to the character.  It's explained on the wiki (see link above), so I'll make this brief.

Let's say you weigh 231 lbs. and you have a strength of 15.  I've constructed a table on excel that takes these details to determine how much you can carry before losing movement, which is measured in "action points" (AP).   Most humanoids have 5 of these.  Every action your character can perform is measured in how many AP it takes to perform it.

The table shown indicates that your character can carry up to 44 lbs. and experience no loss in AP.  At 45 lbs., and anything up to 89, the adjustment is -1 AP; or, rather, that you have 4 AP.  Look at this short paragraph under "climbing speed" for scrambling:

"This [movement] assumes an encumbrance that allows the character a normal movement rate of 4 AP per round. Should the character's movement be 3 AP per round, this climbing speed is halved. An unskilled character carrying enough equipment to lower their movement to 2 AP per round could not climb slopes of this nature."

Therefore, as a robust, fairly strong character, who's also unskilled in scrambling, you can only climb or descend at even a slow pace as you don't carry more than 89 lbs. on your character — and trust me, after armour, weapons, gear and clothing, that's not so much weight to carry.  If you lower your normal movement rate to -2 AP on the chart above, or "3 AP," carrying a weight up to 134 lbs., you move at half speed.  One hex every two rounds climbing, 2 hexes every three rounds descending.  Carrying even a moderate sack of newly acquired gold coins, it's going to take you a long time to reach the bottom.

There's no way at all that you can hoist some massive chest on your back and head off.

And it's much, much worse for elves and other small characters.  This second table shows the encumbrance penalties for an elf with a 15 strength and a weight of 100 lbs.  The table, understand, works as a ratio of your strength measured against your weight.  An elf can't carry as much as a great big human.  It's one of the benefits there is in my game to being human.  You may not get a +1 to hit with sword and bow, but you can definitely carry extra weapons.

This elf-version of the table is brutal.  Remember that while an elf's armour has less body to cover, the weapons are still the same weight, and so are the coins, the rope, the backpack that holds the same amount and so on.  If you want your elf to be well-equipped when you get to the dungeon, all the way up there on the mountainside, you'd better hire a porter to carry it for you, so you can dress in it when you get there.

And this is what I like.  Players would no doubt carp and moan about the "unfairness" of it all, or how it "kills" gaming and what not, but for me it says that the goblins are pretty smart to choose a cave that's 2200 ft. above the valley floor.  If a party wants to kill those smart goblins, they better be smart too.

This is how tropes get broken in D&D.  It's how we throw a curve ball at the player who's all, "Oh well, climb to the dungeon, same-ol, same-ol."

I haven't thrown this at my own players yet.  I just know they're not going to like it.

_____

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List of Mountain Types

Just now, I'm trying to fit together some mountain climbing rules ~ and I'm sorry the link I'm giving there does not direct to much content. However, to make some of my rules ideas work, I need to make a list of mountain types. Frankly, that's easier to do on the blog here than it is on the wiki. Then I can link the wiki to this blog post and it all works out.

And so, this post gives details and images for 4 mountain types, for the purpose of determining the amount of time, or number of slope lines, that a mountain represents for the prospective climber. There are many more than 4 types of mountain in the world ~ but this number should be sufficient for a DM's needs.

Pyramidal Peak

In its most extreme form called a glacial horn, this describes an angular, sharply pointed mountain that results from cirque erosion, due to multiple glaciers diverging from a central point.  See also Nunatak.

The example on the left is the famous Matterhorn, found on the border between Switzerland and Italy.  The modern climb usually consists of 12 to 15 hours, with the benefit of a cable car that enables the first 963 meters to be skipped over.  The full climb, including the cable car section, from the base of the mountain to its top, is 2,858 meters (that's counting from Zermatt in Switzerland to the peak.

The time necessary to climb a mountain like the Matterhorn would likely be excessively greater than the modern period, as most of the equipment we now take for granted wouldn't exist.  In point of fact, it might even be impossible to fully climb a mountain like this with 17th century equipment.

Arete

This is a narrow ridge of rock that separates two valleys, which is typically formed by two glaciers eroding parallel U-shaped valleys.

The example on the right is the Striding Edge in England, near Ullswater.  The modern climb usually requires about 5 and a half hours, from a point only 48 meters above sea level.  The total ascent is 908 meters.

As a mountain like this is usually done with minimal climbing gear, the difference between a modern day ascent and the time of my game's world would likely be very little ~ though it must be noted that much of the actual trail on a mountain like this has been tailored and worn down by untold thousands of day visitors.

Fold and Thrust Belt

These are mountainous foothills that can feature stacked and breaks, as younger rocks are pushed up and over older rocks, resulting in a collection of cliff walls, cracks, scree fields and chimneys.  The example on the left is Yamnuska, or Mount John Laurie, which is about 60 miles east of where I live.  It features both easy climbs and expert climbs, depending on the slope lines one desires to take.  The easy scramble that is offered to most tourists takes about 4 to 5 hours and features a 1200 meter elevation gain.

Yamnuska is the first "mountain" that can be seen along the highway that goes west into the Rockies.  It is just a tiny little thing, mostly notable for being stuck out by itself and looking like a ridge-back dinosaur, complete with head, when viewed from the highway.  The larger, higher mountains further to the west are of a similar geology, only higher and snow-covered.

Conical Hill

I will skip a picture for this.  Conical hills may be of any size, as large as Mount Fuji in Japan or ~ like a shield volcano ~ as vast as Mount Kilimanjaro.  The time necessary to climb such a mountain, the number of "slope lines," as it were, is more a matter of total distance of the slope, affected by the degree of incline, the presence of snow and the total altitude (as a very high altitude, above 10,000 feet, tends to slow climbers due to a lack of breath, so that slope lies become shorter and shorter as one nears the summit.


Well, that might be a bit to simplistic to build rules upon, but for the present I'd rather not get too ambitious.  Hopefully, the rabbit hole that mountain climbing is proving to be won't make it too difficult to complete.