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Shoes: the unknown resource

One way to play exploration games like D&D is as a resource game. Spells, HP, food, water, and light. But there’s one resource I rarely see other DMs talk about.

Shoes.

On page 181 of the 5e PHB, we see this:

Forced March. The Travel Pace table assumes that characters travel for 8 hours in day. They can push on beyond that limit, at the risk of exhaustion.

For each additional hour of travel beyond 8 hours, the characters cover the distance shown in the Hour column for their pace, and each character must make a Constitution saving throw at the end of the hour. The DC is 10 + 1 for each hour past 8 hours. On a failed saving throw, a character suffers one level of exhaustion (see appendix A).

And XGE p 80 has:

Maintain Shoes. As part of a long rest, you can repair your companions’ shoes. For the next 24 hours, up to six creatures of your choice who wear shoes you worked on can travel up to 10 hours a day without making saving throws to avoid exhaustion.

Now, I don’t think they meant for this to apply in the dungeon or in cities, but we’ve been playing it that way and it’s been pretty fun, it makes the days go by and it make finding a good camp really important. It’s just something extra to add to your game if you wanna. If you don’t, that’s fine too!

A good way to keep track of time is with a notebook where in one column, you keep writing “timestamps’ of the current time. For example, if it’s 0920 and twenty minutes pass, you write 0940. I like to use 24h time for this even though I normally use 12h AM/PM otherwise, but you do you.♥︎

Next to that you can note torches and other stuff you wanna track. Spell durations.

For shoes, you keep note of the day’s “shoes-off time”. If they start their day at 0930, you write 0930 in the timestamp column but note 1730 separately, and if they work until 1140 and take a one hour rest until 1240, take a one hour rest, you update that “shoes-off time” to 1830.