It just occurred to me that I'm pretty likely to have times where a PC joins a fellowship mid-adventure, and thus post-journey. In most games you can handwave it pretty easily, but journeys in TOR carry significant risk, particularly fatigue-related.

I'm leaning towards a semi-arbitrary fatigue hit (I.e. assume they fail a roll or two) and moving on.

How do you generally handle that? Do you give PCs a free ride? Do you make them roll the travel dice?

Only ever happened once, when a character died in the early stages of 'Don't Leave The Path'.

Next week, they met the new character who was also travelling the Elf Path. I did not fatigue the newcomer that time, but next time I may give a few points. Take the party average loss and modify it up or down if he has a poor or very good travel skill.

Most likely I would just guesstimate any Hope, Fatigue, Endurance loss and go from there. The character's pre-game background story will likely impact how much these stats are affected.

I had the Company encounter (and assimilate!) a new Player-hero right at the adventure of the Marsh Bell, so just exactly after the Journey phase.

I made plain that I was just handwaving how the heck a Woodman got there on his own, given the (unspecified but perilous) perils of the Old Forest Road, and since the bell was tolling there was no time for questions!

I didn't hit him with any Fatigue or Endurance loss. It would have been embarrassing if a weary and travel-stained Company found themselves outshone by an artificially unfatigued newcomer, but it hadn't been a long Journey so there was no contrast to worry about.

There's no need to simulate the newcomer's own, separate Journey; it's not a focus of the drama at hand. And TOR already has plenty of 'downtime' travel happening off-camera -- at least in semi-safe country.

In principle you'd want parity in the party. So pull a number out of the air for Fatigue and possibly Endurance loss to correspond to the Journey of the 'main' fellowship. (But not Hope, which is too special to lose without the player themselves getting to spend it).

Or... I don't want to victimise anyone, especially not new additions to the gaming group or players already smarting from having lost a PC or feeling like they had to retire one and start a new one up. But it's not their story yet; they're the new guy who from a storytelling perspective should need to establish themselves a bit before going 'full hero'.
In my old MERP/RM I used to have new additions be just half a level below the rest of the party (easily caught up when XP targets are exponential). In TOR there could definitely be an argument for imposing a bit more Fatigue and knocking off a bit more Endurance than what's been incurred by the members of a decent-sized Fellowship with coverage of all the Journey roles. And if they're a lone traveller or a lone survivor of some incident etc., it would make perfect realistic sense as well as serving that narrative purpose.

Cheers,
--Os.

I just let them play as is.

I don't think it's that big of a deal (and luckily, my players don't as well).