Travelling and Leading Large Groups

[mica]

The fellowship are about to lead a party of 40 from Mirkwood to Mountain Hall. These are not PC's so rolling 40 travel checks is not going to happen. That said, a party of 40+ blundering through the wilderness must increase the chance of things going wrong.
My thought on handling this is make fellowship use 2 feat dice, selecting the worst. This will increase chance of fatigue (lots of stops, slowing things down) and hazards. Not sure whether to increase difficulty as well. On the one hand it should be harder going due to taking care of those not quite up to the task, on the other, the feat dice should take care of this.

Has anybody used other mechanics or otherwise have view?

[Falenthal]

I think the idea of using two feat die and keeping the worst is perfect.
I wouldn't increase the difficulty anymore.

Great and simple idea!

[shipwreck]

I like your idea and I wish I had thought this through before my last session -- my PCs were leading some Woodmen settlers to Sunstead.

Another option would be to simply roll your own Feat die for every Fatigue Test to see if you get an Eye, representing a hazard caused by one of the NPCs.

[Majestic]

Great idea, mica. I really like this, and it's elegant in its simplicity!

[Stormcrow]

Perhaps a more by-the-book approach would be to only require Fatigue tests from the player-heroes, as normal. One of the player-heroes would be in charge of managing the group of forty Loremaster characters, and would need to use his two actions while traveling to make Travel rolls or have something bad happen to the group (some get lost, some stir up trouble, etc.). Parties could mitigate some problems by giving more than one player-hero the job of managing the Loremaster characters.