"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night"- traveling like the pony express.

[p_johnston]

So a little backstory. Me and my group, four level 5 PCs in total right now, are hunting drakes and if we can kill four different types in a month we get a huge bonus. The catch is the GM has straight out told us that finding and traveling to each of the different drakes locations will be difficult and probably require us pushing our self's for multiple days to get to each location. After thinking this over I came up with and idea that I think might work. I want to buy a one or two first level wands of mount and have the party literally ride the horse nearly to death on each summon.

The math
1. each horse has a max carrying capacity of 690 lbs. This should easily be enough to have each horse carry two people, even if one is in heavy armor.
2. each horse should be able to be forced to hustle for the duration of their summon. As per the rules they will take only one point of damage for the second hour of hustling. Even if they DM doubles it (which would honestly be fair) this is not enough to kill them.
3. assuming each horse moves at a hustle for their entire conjure time they will move 8 MPH, because their base speed is 50 and they are carrying a heavy load bringing it down to 40. over an average day of travel this will mean they go 64 miles, without force marching on the pc's part.
4. assuming we put two people to a horse we should use 8 charges a day costing the party 120 gp worth of casting.

My two main questions are
A) would you allow this as a GM and if so what kind of ride checks would you require?
B) Am I overlooking a cheaper/easier way to travel?

[InvisibleBison]

A) would you allow this as a GM and if so what kind of ride checks would you require?

I would allow this, and I wouldn't call for any Ride checks to pull it off, as the section in the PHB about mounted overland travel doesn't indicate that any are necessary.


B) Am I overlooking a cheaper/easier way to travel?

Your plan uses 8 charges of mount each day for a month. Assuming a 30 day month, that comes to 3,600 gp (or 3,750 gp if you can only buy fully-charged wands). The only cheaper way to travel that I could find a definite cost for is hiring someone to cast teleport for you to take you into the vicinity of various drakes. Assuming a total of five castings, that would cost 2,250 gp; hiring someone to cast scrying four times to locate four different drakes would cost an additional 1,120 gp. It's only about 10% cheaper than the mount option.

Alternatively, you could rent/hire some mounts. I don't know of any definite rules about how much this would cost, but judging from the NPC hireling rules in the DMG, it would be dirt cheap - assuming you can find something faster than a normal horse, that is. Flying mounts would be your best bet, as they tend to be faster than walkers.

[Tiktakkat]

Not cheaper, but faster:

1. Traveler's Mount, preferably CL 8 (1 hour/level). Get +20 speed, hustle without taking damage or fatigue.
2. Phantom Steed at a higher CL 12 (for 240 ft. max speed), or 14th (for fly speed, avoiding being slowed down by terrain).
3. Wind at Your Back. Double overland speed, but will require CL checks as it is a 4th level spell.
4. Wind Walk. Speed is up to 600 ft./60 MPH, but requires really good CL checks as it is a 6th level spell.