Mounted forced march

[Eladrinblade]

Forced March:


Mounted Movement
A mount bearing a rider can move at a hustle. The damage it takes when doing so, however, is lethal damage, not nonlethal damage. The creature can also be ridden in a forced march, but its Constitution checks automatically fail, and, again, the damage it takes is lethal damage. Mounts also become fatigued when they take any damage from hustling or forced marches.

Why?

Is there any particular reason why a mount auto fails the checks and takes lethal damage?

[Fouredged Sword]

It is an atempt at realism. You can ride a horse to death REALLY easily if you don't know the signs it is walking itself to death. I also think the idea is that the mount is walking for 2 so to speak, and thus pays dearly when pushed past it's limits.

[SangoProduction]

It is an atempt at realism. You can ride a horse to death REALLY easily if you don't know the signs it is walking itself to death. I also think the idea is that the mount is walking for 2 so to speak, and thus pays dearly when pushed past it's limits.

But it failing its forced march automatically is rather silly.

[Ashtagon]

It also reflects real life. Humans compared to almost every other mammal are evolutionary adapted for endurance. Chasing prey over miles (as opposed to high speed pounce chases) is literally how early man hunted. We literally walked our prey to death.

[Celestia]

It also reflects real life. Humans compared to almost every other mammal are evolutionary adapted for endurance. Chasing prey over miles (as opposed to high speed pounce chases) is literally how early man hunted. We literally walked our prey to death.
We're the Jason Voorhees of hunters. *sage nod*

Judging all animals based on human endurance is like judging all cars based on race car speed.

[Fizban]

Which is how it comes back around to failing forced march checks: the main rules of the game are based on humans (because the standard PC is human or human-like), so the standard walking time is 8 hours and you can push further with little danger. A horse bearing a rider needs to collapse much faster, so boom fail and straight to lethal.

Incidentally, you need to use the Handle Animal skill to even get a mount to do it, and quite a bit of it too. Pushing an animal is DC 25, rising to DC 27 if it has damage, such as from the last hour you pushed it to continue hustling or forced marching. You can retry and therefore take 20, but without at least a +5 or +7 you actually can't force your horse to run itself to death in DnD, which may be safer than real life.

In DnD an average horse can hustle for 3 hours and recover with one night's rest, or up to 5 hours and survive, but will die during the 6th hour. Forced march does flat d6's instead of exponential damage but hits about the same numbers: 5 hours is an average of 17.5 damage, but going to 6 hours will drop a normal horse into negatives where it will "bleed out" and die. Note that forced march gains you no real benefit over forced hustle: each hour is worth one hour of travel, but the first three damage ticks of hustle are reliably less than 1d6, and you spent less time overall on the road.

I've no idea what the times are for real life horses (look it up? bah), but I do find it amusing that in the Wheel of Time series they make a big point about a walk/trot/run mounted/dismounted cycle that's the most efficient way to cover ground with a horse. Sounds like something dug up from ancient military tactics and whatnot, but they don't actually say how fast you end up going. I find it funny because DnD makes a point of saying that you can't alternate walking and running without it turning into a hustle- except mechanically you should totally be able to, and here's a fantasy book that seems to be saying that's totally what they did.

[Fouredged Sword]

In real life, crossing large distances under load, you actually move about as fast on foot as on horseback. Over short distances a horse is faster, but if you load up a horse and attempt to move long distances you are looking at having to drop back to 3-4 miles an hour walking speed or risk floundering your horse. Under light loads a horse is a LITTLE faster than a human over long distances so long as it isn't hot out.

The advantage of a horse is that a horse can CARRY a lot more than a human on foot, and PULL a silly amount compared to a human, and beyond that has a much smaller supply footprint per pound carried. This goes double if you have ground suitable for mild grazing during your trek. Then you just have to carry supplemental high energy food for the horses like oats or grain and let them graze for an hour or two.

You also should note a large variance between breeds.

A big heavy charger can likely trot under heavy load for a number of hours, but will not have the long endurance of a cart horse.

Interesting enough the main barrier to how much a horse can carry isn't strength, but rather stability and their ankles. If a horse can pull a load without having to support the load on their tiny ankles they can actually USE their massive strength to full effect. Horses are stronger in pull strength than oxen in real life.

[Eladrinblade]

a walk/trot/run mounted/dismounted cycle that's the most efficient way to cover ground with a horse. Sounds like something dug up from ancient military tactics and whatnot, but they don't actually say how fast you end up going.

This is what you do in practice, because it specifies "a mount bearing a rider", so you dismount after 8 hours and it makes it's checks just like you. You both have to continue at the riders land speed, but whatever, you still got the mounts speed for the first 8 hours.

[Fouredged Sword]

And with a mount's speed you can hustle a little to move at the speed of the mount, so jogging besides a horse as it moves the last few hours.

[Eladrinblade]

And with a mount's speed you can hustle a little to move at the speed of the mount, so jogging besides a horse as it moves the last few hours.

Ooh, good point.

[Necroticplague]

Forced March:



Why?

Is there any particular reason why a mount auto fails the checks and takes lethal damage?

To encourage you to use actually interesting mounts, instead of your standard horse we've all seen a half million times. This rule encourages you to find something with Regeneration or Fast Healing to serve as a mount, thus adding in a little sense of fantasy to the fantasy game.


It is an atempt at realism. You can ride a horse to death REALLY easily if you don't know the signs it is walking itself to death. I also think the idea is that the mount is walking for 2 so to speak, and thus pays dearly when pushed past it's limits.

If that was what it was supposed to represent, the rule would be based on how encumbered you are, not whether you're being ridden. It seems incredebly arbitrary that 150 pounds of gear is perfectly fine, but 150 pounds of rider is too much to keep up.

[Elkad]

Sure, we could put rules in for weight carried vs rider carried.

And then we could go overboard and put in all the other stuff.
Creatures that can sweat vs creatures that can only pant. (plus the amount of fur on the creature, and the temperature they are running in, and their size, and their normal body temperature)
And creatures with a nuchal ligament (or similar) vs those that have to support their bobbing head on muscle alone.
And creatures that can breathe independently of foot speed (bipeds), vs those that always have them in sync (quadrupeds).
And creatures with disproportionate leg length, and over-developed glutes, and high arches, and...

Pretty soon the rules for hustling take 82 pages, plus an extra line on each creature entry.

[Deophaun]

To encourage you to use actually interesting mounts, instead of your standard horse we've all seen a half million times. This rule encourages you to find something with Regeneration or Fast Healing to serve as a mount, thus adding in a little sense of fantasy to the fantasy game.
Or something without a Con score. Especially if it can double move/run.

[Eladrinblade]

Or something without a Con score. Especially if it can double move/run.

Like skeletal horses

[jmax]

And creatures that can breathe independently of foot speed (bipeds), vs those that always have them in sync (quadrupeds).


I had never heard anything like that before - very interesting! You've inspired me to dig a little deeper, and it looks like bipeds are not wholly independent of foot speed but rather maintain phasic ratios. Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6849136 (alas, the full article is behind a paywall)

But agreed that it probably isn't necessary to build that into the core rules :-)

[Necroticplague]

Sure, we could put rules in for weight carried vs rider carried.

We already have those rules. Mounts auto-fail the fort saves and take lethal damage from forced marches (and hustles, for that matter), while creatures carrying a lot of stuff is merely slowed down.

[Elkad]

I had never heard anything like that before - very interesting! You've inspired me to dig a little deeper, and it looks like bipeds are not wholly independent of foot speed but rather maintain phasic ratios. Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6849136 (alas, the full article is behind a paywall)

But agreed that it probably isn't necessary to build that into the core rules :-)

As an intelligent biped, you can force your breathing to a non-phasic pattern, but it takes concentration. But just changing ratios to fit the workload we all do naturally.

Quadrupeds are stuck. Some have abdomen and legs so excessively linked (rabbits) that a dead sprint until the muscles fail means they literally cannot breathe afterwards and can suffocate.

Of course when your only defense is your rear legs (running and/or bunny kicking), there is no benefit to having your legs give out while you can still breathe. Either you escape and flop over with your rear legs twitching in a safe space, or you die - having expended every scrap of muscular energy in the majority of your body. Whether you die of exhaustion or fangs doesn't matter. Only SPEED matters.

As to forced marches with mounts. Keep a chariot handy. Pulling a load doesn't invoke the rule.

[jmax]

As to forced marches with mounts. Keep a chariot handy. Pulling a load doesn't invoke the rule.

Both realistically speaking, and in game terms, how far can you take this? Carrying capacity (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/carryingCapacity.htm#liftingandDragging) states that a character can generally push or drag 5 times maximum load, but I imagine that's not at full speed, and it certainly doesn't account for wheels or terrain. I think we're past the point at which the rules stop describing it, but pulling maximum load horizontally with wheels at speed on a smooth road seems like a good upper bound - unless perhaps it should be less than that?


As an intelligent biped, you can force your breathing to a non-phasic pattern, but it takes concentration. But just changing ratios to fit the workload we all do naturally.

Quadrupeds are stuck. Some have abdomen and legs so excessively linked (rabbits) that a dead sprint until the muscles fail means they literally cannot breathe afterwards and can suffocate.

Of course when your only defense is your rear legs (running and/or bunny kicking), there is no benefit to having your legs give out while you can still breathe. Either you escape and flop over with your rear legs twitching in a safe space, or you die - having expended every scrap of muscular energy in the majority of your body. Whether you die of exhaustion or fangs doesn't matter. Only SPEED matters.

As the sort of person who buys The Audubon Encyclopedia of North American Birds to research appropriate stats for new flying forms in Wild Shape, I can only stand and applaud at this level of detail :-D

(Incidentally, reading the particulars of avian flight in that book has convinced me that the creators of D&D 3.5 have never been in a natural environment or ever encountered non-domesticated animals. That or they felt the need to put in some semblance of game balance to avoid advantaging flying forms even more.)

[Fizban]

Both realistically speaking, and in game terms, how far can you take this? Carrying capacity (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/carryingCapacity.htm#liftingandDragging) states that a character can generally push or drag 5 times maximum load, but I imagine that's not at full speed, and it certainly doesn't account for wheels or terrain. I think we're past the point at which the rules stop describing it, but pulling maximum load horizontally with wheels at speed on a smooth road seems like a good upper bound - unless perhaps it should be less than that?
Arms and Equipment Guide is the book with the chariots, and it divides total weight by 4 for wheeled vehicles or 3 for water vehicles and sleds. So the "drag" for those is x4 or x3.

(Incidentally, reading the particulars of avian flight in that book has convinced me that the creators of D&D 3.5 have never been in a natural environment or ever encountered non-domesticated animals. That or they felt the need to put in some semblance of game balance to avoid advantaging flying forms even more.
I haven't bought a book for it, but I did do some wiki research on bird speeds and whoo boy are those speeds off. From a previous thread:

Movement and carrying capacity are some of the only things in the rules that actually are calibrated roughly against real-world figures. If it's the fact that animals so big shouldn't fly so good that bothers you, you're wrong on two counts: one, we have fossilized evidence of ridiculously large flyers, and two, standard fantasy mechanics are that big versions of little things are just as good if not better than the smaller version, square-cube law to the abyss.

As you've already noted, if anything flying creatures in DnD are getting completely shortchanged. You mentioned migratory birds, I don't know if there's a common raptor that isn't migratory but red tailed hawks and bald eagles (which I could have sworn were cited as matches for the MM stats), go 30-40mph soaring. With 80'-100' flight speed you need either a run action or a downward hustle to reach 32-40mph (assuming you interpret the flight rules so the downward hustle even works). Now that I've looked at it that's probably how it's supposed to work: birds reach their real life speeds by running at low altitudes, or by flying a constant slight down angle to get them double speed while riding a thermal that negates the downward movement from the angle.

In fact, the most unrealistic thing about most DnD flight is, if you ask me, the fact that its so slow. The slower you go, the smaller you need to be, and there are some creatures with phenomenally slow flight speeds (20', 2mph or less) for their size. I find it much harder to believe that a large or even bigger creature could fly at a speed of .75mph for any amount of distance with wings from the Starspawn feat, or a Dragonborn to fly at 1.5mph (half walking speed, only 2.5 ft per second, minimum before stall), than I do for a large beast based on an eagle to soar like an eagle. I may have just said square-cube law need not apply, but at low speeds you need insect style wings to invoke the fantasy trope effectively (bats and humming birds are too far removed from the humanoid body type).
Of course the problem with that is that the soaring speed is still based on a hustle, when soaring is the low-energy all-day thing. A dnd hawk or eagle that's low-energy "soaring" at a constant down angle is still only going half the speed it should be. So even when you squint it's still off.

[Elkad]

Arms and Equipment Guide is the book with the chariots, and it divides total weight by 4 for wheeled vehicles or 3 for water vehicles and sleds. So the "drag" for those is x4 or x3.

Which is an estimate heavily padded for hills. On stone roads with steel tires, weight should be divided by 20. On the flat anyway.

Still, 2 light horses can pull 1200 pounds of chariot at full speed. That's 2-4 passengers+gear and the chariot itself.

[jmax]

Arms and Equipment Guide is the book with the chariots, and it divides total weight by 4 for wheeled vehicles or 3 for water vehicles and sleds. So the "drag" for those is x4 or x3.

I haven't bought a book for it, but I did do some wiki research on bird speeds and whoo boy are those speeds off. From a previous thread:

Of course the problem with that is that the soaring speed is still based on a hustle, when soaring is the low-energy all-day thing. A dnd hawk or eagle that's low-energy "soaring" at a constant down angle is still only going half the speed it should be. So even when you squint it's still off.

Yep, that's exactly what I was referring to. A lot of the bird flight speeds listed aren't even enough to prevent stalling.

I bought the book because I wasn't certain the speeds listed on the internet were credible. I cold-emailed an ornithologist who had published some of them asking for a reference, and he suggested I check out the Audubon Encyclopedia. I bought it used online - in great condition - for a fraction of the price of a D&D sourcebook. It's an absolutely gorgeous book, with lots of full-page, high-gloss, full-color photos, and it seems to be the original source for a lot of the best bird photos I've found on the internet. The organization is by family, so it's really hard to navigate unless you already know what you're looking for, but at the time Google Books allowed for searching inside to get page numbers (that capability seems to be gone now, so I'll just have to resort to using the index in the back).

As part of this research, I also learned that barnacle geese are some of the worst parents in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose#Ecology.2C_behavior_and_life_histor y). Great flyers though! Must be that early weeding out of the weak ones...



Which is an estimate heavily padded for hills. On stone roads with steel tires, weight should be divided by 20. On the flat anyway.

Still, 2 light horses can pull 1200 pounds of chariot at full speed. That's 2-4 passengers+gear and the chariot itself.

Yep, that'll do nicely for a leg up in low-level games. Think it's fair to say that a chariot costs half as much as a wagon (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/goodsAndServices.htm#transport)?

[Fouredged Sword]

A good war chariot would be much more expensive than a farm wagon. A spoke with a wooden platform, two wheels, and a yoke could be very cheap.

[ShurikVch]

Note: according to "Sladami szwadronow. O taktyce walki konnej kawalerii II Rzeczypospolitej (1919-1920 i 1939)", normal daily march for cavalry is - with good weather and good roads - about 50 km; "forced march" is either faster than that, or for more than 10 hours/day.

[Necroticplague]

Note: according to "Sladami szwadronow. O taktyce walki konnej kawalerii II Rzeczypospolitej (1919-1920 i 1939)", normal daily march for cavalry is - with good weather and good roads - about 50 km; "forced march" is either faster than that, or for more than 10 hours/day.

Are you sure that's Calvary? Those speeds are are more consistent with people on foot walking than those riding horses (humans walk at roughly 3.1 miles an hour, 10 hours of walking puts you at about 31 miles, roughly 50 km).

Of course, DnDs assumption of a march assume you normally move overland for only 8 hours a day, not 10.

[jmax]

A good war chariot would be much more expensive than a farm wagon. A spoke with a wooden platform, two wheels, and a yoke could be very cheap.

Found it in the Arms & Equipment Guide (p56). A single chariot costs 100 gp and can be pulled by a single light horse at 60-ft land speed. A double chariot costs 400 gp and requires two light horses to achieve the same speed. Not sure the requirement for two horses on the double chariot is realistic, but the single chariot at least solves the mounted forced march problem fairly cheaply. For combat, you're probably better off riding so you can control your mount with your hands free.


Note: according to "Sladami szwadronow. O taktyce walki konnej kawalerii II Rzeczypospolitej (1919-1920 i 1939)", normal daily march for cavalry is - with good weather and good roads - about 50 km; "forced march" is either faster than that, or for more than 10 hours/day.

Sounds like the stock rules (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/movement.htm#tableMovementAndDistance) are extra generous then. Extrapolating to a horse's 60-ft land speed, you get 50 miles per day, which is roughly 80 km.

[Fouredged Sword]

You can also have a person ride and control the horse while a character without ranks in ride can use the chariot in combat. Good action econ to get around.

[Deophaun]

Of course the problem with that is that the soaring speed is still based on a hustle, when soaring is the low-energy all-day thing. A dnd hawk or eagle that's low-energy "soaring" at a constant down angle is still only going half the speed it should be. So even when you squint it's still off.
Seems like an easy fix with a feat that's a bonus for things like hawks, pegasai, and dragons: move 4X your fly speed for overland travel with no further penalty, cannot be used with hustling.

[ShurikVch]

Are you sure that's Calvary? Those speeds are are more consistent with people on foot walking than those riding horses (humans walk at roughly 3.1 miles an hour, 10 hours of walking puts you at about 31 miles, roughly 50 km).Yes, I'm sure - the book is about cavalry
(And Calvary (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/calvary) is something completely different. Phone and T9? :smallamused:)
And the "31 miles" you mentioned is for unencumbered humans
During the WWI, weight of equipment for French footsoldiers was 29 kg; for British - 30-31 kg; for Russians - 38 kg
How long you will be able to carry such weight? And how far you will get by that time?
Tactical manual from 1888 says daily march for infantry is 25 km

[Fouredged Sword]

The numbers jump around based on a LOT of assumptions about ground conditions, marching hours, load, and starting and ending supply situation.

A lot has to do with assumptions about setting up camp and the number if hours of daylight saved for that.

Horses are faster than people. Horses are not a LOT faster than people. It is more like a 5-10% increase.

[Elkad]

There is a big difference between a small mounted party and an army.

An army has perpetual issues with dust, mud, etc. Four squares of double-move muddy terrain where the road crosses a creek turn into 100 yards of 5' steps by the time a couple thousand horses ride over it. And then you have to get your supply wagons through. (or far more packhorses)

If you are hustling the horse, that means trotting (or pacing). Which is VERY efficient for the horse, but hard on the rider. And if the rider isn't fit and skilled (able to post correctly the whole time), it's hard on the horse as well.
Hustling a horse should probably involve a sequence of ride checks (or one check where the result indicates how many hours you can sustain it.) The Ride check should let you avoid the damage for the horse, but you take it instead.