[3.5/PF] Dragging during a march?

[AncientWolflord]

Hello! I'm running a campaign using rules from 3.5 and Pathfinder, and my party and I are unsure how much stuff we can put in the shiny new cart we bought for our mule. I've tried to find discussions on this, and I feel like RAW doesn't address this specific situation, but can we use the mule's drag weight on a march?

For example, using the rules from (I believe Arms and Equipment?) let's say everything in the cart, and also the cart itself, is treated as 1/4 its weight because of wheels. The mule has a heavy carrying capacity of 690, and a drag of 3450. The cart weighs 200 lbs.

If we put 3000 lbs of loot in the cart, then with wheels and the cart itself the mule would effectively be moving 762.5 lbs. Can that mule still march for eight hours while dragging that load? There are speeds listed for mules carrying up to 690 lbs on a march, does that imply that any more weight can not be dragged on a march?

[Kyrell1978]

Well, it didn't make the jump from 3.0 to 3.5 but the rule used to be that a cart could only hold 1,000 pounds due to the structural integrity of the cart itself (There really should be some sort of upper limit set on that to maintain verisimilitude). I don't believe that they have a precise ruling on that in 3.5 but I'm not 100% certain on that. The overland movement rate of a cart is 2 miles per hour up to 16 miles per day.

[Berenger]

I found this: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=563978

tl;dr: ~465 to ~665 pounds per mule depending on circumstances, plus the weight of the cart.

[AncientWolflord]

Well, it didn't make the jump from 3.0 to 3.5 but the rule used to be that a cart could only hold 1,000 pounds due to the structural integrity of the cart itself (There really should be some sort of upper limit set on that to maintain verisimilitude). I don't believe that they have a precise ruling on that in 3.5 but I'm not 100% certain on that. The overland movement rate of a cart is 2 miles per hour up to 16 miles per day.

That makes sense, I'll probably throw something in if we start to get ridiculous. But the crux of the question is "Am I (or my beast of burden) allowed to use dragging weight on a long march?


I found this:

tl;dr: ~465 to ~665 pounds per mule depending on circumstances, plus the weight of the cart.

That's actually really close to the listed heavy load on a mule. I might use that for my ruling, since nobody I know can find published rules on it. (I try not to make rulings on that stuff without either published rules or a real world analog, I am really bad at figuring out what weights and distances actually MEAN in the real world lol)