Seeing a recent question regarding the new Journey rules on the board raised a question to my mind: what was the genesis (and, intent) of the new abbreviated Journey rules?

Is it to reduce the amount of dice rolling required to resolve individual Travel tests? Or, an attempt to alleviate the overall potential for "Wearied" and its associated loss of 50% of your skill die? Could it be to reduce the need for everyone to have skill points dedicated to Travel, thereby limiting the amount available for other skills? All of these? None? Other reasons?

The reason I ask is I'm fairly new to the game and the boards, having stumbled across the game this past summer and purchased back in August so, and I think I missed much of the discussion surrounding Journey rules and the subsequent alternate method offered by Francesco. Obviously, I could run a search (which I will) to find threads detailing the feedback and thought process involved but, in the meantime, was simply wondering if some of the veteran board warriors might enlighten me.

Mainly it was Francesco's tinkering problem But, another big reason was to reduce the number of required die rolls.

You can find Francesco's own explanation and documents on his blog: A Stranger to Blogs.

IIRC a mix of people saying that there were too many die rolls involved and that everyone needed the Travel skill. The revised journey rules address both of those.

Thanks, JRB and Valarian!

I think I'll keep the Journey rules as written - I certainly get the point that RAW essentially makes Travel a must-have skill but, it seems internally consistent to me that, after some period of years, you would get better traipsing about the countryside. Although, I absolutely understand how folks may feel this takes away a bit of their freedom to build their characters in any way they want, focusing on other skills.

Also, thanks for the link to Francesco's blog, I found the information there to be helpful and will be stopping in from time-to-time.

Everyone needs one or two dice in Travel, but not much more. Virtues like Beorning cakes make travel a lot easier, and with appropriate Lore rolls the company can obtain a lot of bonus dice that can then be given to the worse travellers in the group. My group rarely sees a travel hazard, and nobody ever gains that much fatigure, now that the Beorning can bake honey-cakes. None of them has more that three Travel dice.

Remember that you only use the single best Lore roll to alleviate travel, and you can only choose each option (-1 day/1 person passes one travel test/make travel tests easier for 1 person) once. Honey cakes are pretty good though.

Not according to the "preliminary rolls" PDF by Francesco (every success gives a bonus dice, just like Battle works). I like those rules, and I forgot how it's done in the book.

Ah ok, I haven't read those - I thought you meant the ones in the MRB...