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DwarfFighter
2021-01-22, 05:19 AM
There is this weird thing I've noticed when playing RPGs with my group. Maybe it's just us, but my players don't like using horses. Or boats. Any time an adventure calls for the PCs to go cross country they insist on walking. Horses are available, but they'll prefer to bring a pack mule to riding. It seems to boil down to this mind-set: "If I buy a horse, the horse can get killed and I'm back to walking. If I just walk, I have nothing to lose!" A pack mule too can get killed, but somehow that doesn't register in the same manner. Why? I have no idea!

When it comes to boats, the players seem to immediately concern themselves with "What if the boat sinks!" I've had players insisting on wearing sacks of cork attached to them at all time, and this isn't always played as a joke. There is something about moving into what is essentially a moving house that can drop into an abyss at any given moment the makes my players worried about losing all their stuff in one big Gotcha! moment. How often does this happen in our campaigns? It never has.

I don't think this is an actual problem - if I need the players to just get with the program I can always guarantee for them that I won't use their commitment to a horse, or a boat, to screw them over. But it's still a curious quirk I wonder if other GMs have observed in their group.

-DF

Pelle
2021-01-22, 05:45 AM
Sounds like there are no consequences for taking a longer time to travel to their destination. If the time spent in-game would actually affect them I guess you would see a different behaviour.

Alcore
2021-01-22, 06:08 AM
Apply a penalty. At 30ft (assuming no dwarfs heavy armor) that is 3 miles an hour and (roughly) 24 miles a day before damage.

Measure time and distance. If a villain will move before then have the villain win. If they call foul remind them that horses are faster and that they could of made it.


In short; make your villains proactive

(Bonus if they are mounted)

MoiMagnus
2021-01-22, 06:14 AM
One core reason for this kind of behaviour is that the players do not perceive "normality" the same as you do.
Your players don't question the fact that their character wear cloths, because they consider it as normal rather than evaluating the pros and the cons of having clothing. But they don't see horses as something they would "normally" use, so they do apply strict scrutiny on whether or not they are necessary.

As said by Pelle and Alcore, you could enforce some more time restriction making horses "necessary" from an optimisation point of view, but I'd argue against. I'm more in favour of trying to make horses "normal".

At some points, you, as a DM, have to say to the players "That's not reasonable, that's not how a sane human being in this universe would do. Unless your character has the 'greedy' or 'humble life' personality trait, he doesn't want to walk for two week straight rather than taking an horse, and if his horse is killed he will immediately seek to buy a new one."

Something that works quite well IME is to ask to the players what kind of quality of life their character want. Do they want to live like a peasant or a beggar? A middle class artisan? A comfortable bourgeois life? An eccentric noble life?
And explain to them that this choice contain what they wear as clothes (and how often they get to clean them), how much they care about quality food versus having disgusting ration and suspicious beer every day, where they sleep when in town and how much stuff they take to sleep out of town. The kind of transportation they use, etc.
Then whenever in front of a RP choice, remind them that "your character probably want this" or "this is very uncomfortable to your character.". Don't force them to make choices they don't want, but act as a reality-check to them to make sure they understand that their choices would be looked upon as "weird" by the NPCs.

Then, I'd suggest to abstract this way of life into constant weekly or monthly expanses rather than keeping track of all of that. (Obviously, in times where money is short they will get to reduce their way of life)

Alcore
2021-01-22, 06:32 AM
As said by Pelle and Alcore, you could enforce some more time restriction making horses "necessary" from an optimisation point of view, but I'd argue against. I'm more in favour of trying to make horses "normal".

I disagree; i did not say necessary. It is normal. By 3rd level everyone should be able to produce four legs under them. Start having mounted NPCs when found on roads, add more horses into descriptions of villages/small towns and marketplaces.

Make them normal.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 06:39 AM
At some points, you, as a DM, have to say to the players "That's not reasonable, that's not how a sane human being in this universe would do. Unless your character has the 'greedy' or 'humble life' personality trait, he doesn't want to walk for two week straight rather than taking an horse, and if his horse is killed he will immediately seek to buy a new one."

As the DM you can't tell a player what their character thinks or what their attitude to the world is. All their thoughts are happening in the player's head and are responding to the world as you have presented it.


There is this weird thing I've noticed when playing RPGs with my group. Maybe it's just us, but my players don't like using horses. Or boats. Any time an adventure calls for the PCs to go cross country they insist on walking. Horses are available, but they'll prefer to bring a pack mule to riding. It seems to boil down to this mind-set: "If I buy a horse, the horse can get killed and I'm back to walking. If I just walk, I have nothing to lose!" A pack mule too can get killed, but somehow that doesn't register in the same manner. Why? I have no idea!

When it comes to boats, the players seem to immediately concern themselves with "What if the boat sinks!" I've had players insisting on wearing sacks of cork attached to them at all time, and this isn't always played as a joke. There is something about moving into what is essentially a moving house that can drop into an abyss at any given moment the makes my players worried about losing all their stuff in one big Gotcha! moment. How often does this happen in our campaigns? It never has.

Both of these are the same thing.

Your PCs do not trust you not to do those things to them. Because both of those are only things that can happen if you the DM make them happen. If your players are avoiding certain behaviours, it is because they expect punishment for engaging in those behaviours. That might be because you've done it once too often in the past or done something suspiciously similar in the past, or because they have an adversarial player vs. GM mindset towards the whole game.

You need to assess how you're providing risk and reward in your game. If you just make walking worse and try and make them buy horses to avoid a penalty they'll resent it, you need to make having a horse better than walking without making walking worse than it currently is, sufficiently better that they want to have them.

Then you need to not **** them over when they do it, because if you do sink the boat or kill their horses all you did was prove them right, that they should have just walked.

Pelle
2021-01-22, 06:57 AM
As said by Pelle and Alcore, you could enforce some more time restriction making horses "necessary" from an optimisation point of view, but I'd argue against. I'm more in favour of trying to make horses "normal".

At some points, you, as a DM, have to say to the players "That's not reasonable, that's not how a sane human being in this universe would do. Unless your character has the 'greedy' or 'humble life' personality trait, he doesn't want to walk for two week straight rather than taking an horse, and if his horse is killed he will immediately seek to buy a new one."


It's not necessarily a problem, though, just an observation.

Mastikator
2021-01-22, 07:00 AM
Show the players the benefit/necessity of using horses by having NPC using horses. Either by having friendly NPCs overshadow the PCs or enemy NPCs trounce the PCs using horses. Don't do any annoying "gotchas" though, nobody likes that.

Anonymouswizard
2021-01-22, 07:15 AM
I disagree; i did not say necessary. It is normal. By 3rd level everyone should be able to produce four legs under them. Start having mounted NPCs when found on roads, add more horses into descriptions of villages/small towns and marketplaces.

Make them normal.

This is very campaign dependent. I've played in games where near-campaign end characters would struggle to afford a horse between them. Also others where horses for long term travel are obsolete.

I've also played in games where I've begun with a cart and a beast of burden. Generally a donkey or mule rather than a horse, but honestly for our purposes it worked better. Let me haul wares from city to city to sell, at the very least.

Riding a horse also isn't a universal skill, even in a mediaeval fantasy setting. Many PCs might legitimately not know or be uninterested in learning how to control a horse, especially in settings where horses are rather expensive. Although I will admit that other mounts are available, and donkeys tend to be a good deal cheaper.

Actually that's a point, horses are expensive and valuable, especially if you want a decent, well-trained horse. They also eat a lot, so though you're saving on time you're spending more on rations (and spending more on rations all the time if you're owning the horse instead of renting one as needed). A farmer might be able to afford a mediocre horse and make more than the extra money needed to feed it, but a small band of mercenaries might not have the money to give everybody a horse, particular a fully trained warhorse if you want to ride them into battle.

On the other hand the D&D economy is messed up.

Xervous
2021-01-22, 07:51 AM
This looks like a case of players not trusting the GM. While the boat issue has some hurdles there’s a decent approach for easing them into trusting horses. Give them horses for free.

Yes free horses, but layer on a bit of contrivance so they can’t sell the horses immediately. Any precaution they describe for ensuring the safety of the horses should work so long as they’re not leading them up an erupting volcano or other silliness in that vein.

If you do random encounters there’s a few ways to play off the horses. The first is simple, let them ride away from something that can’t catch horses. If they stop to fight, again respect even modest precautions for ensuring the horses’ safety.

If they then choose to sell the horses later give them one minor plot point of ‘getting there too late’ and an opportunity to pick up new horses shortly after. This should demonstrate to them that they made a choice that set the party back. Just penalizing then for not having horses without the setup could be received as heavy handed GM coercion. Giving them horses as loot (or anti undead, or poison curing) and them throwing it away just to encounter the given thing (provided they were a little forewarned at least before selling) will get a D’oh! moment that most players will learn from.

Democratus
2021-01-22, 08:58 AM
The most famous adventuring parties (The Dwarves & the Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring) didn't use horses. And the fate of the world was on the line.

Many RPGs (D&D included) make it very difficult to keep a horse alive in combat.

Add to this the fact that overland travel by horse is not much faster than overland travel on foot.

In most campaigns I've played, horses are useful for pulling carts, plows, etc. But not fantastic for long distance overland travel.

Lemmy
2021-01-22, 09:21 AM
IME, the main reason players avoid horses and/or boasts is, respectively:

-If I'm on a horse and an encounter happens, I can't use some of my abilities, so I have to waste an action getting off my horse.

- If I'm on a boat, it'll be attacked. The boat is always attacked. And I very likely will have to fight in the water. I can't use some of my abilities in water. I'll likely die.


So... A good way to encourage players to use horses and boats is making those not only more common, but also less dangerous and more entertaining. Maybe add some social/fluff encounters during their travels, and make said encounters take place precisely because of their transportation (e.g.: a sea nymph is curious about the boat and decides to talk to them) or because they arrived earlier than they would otherwise (e.g.: they get to their destination 2 days earlier, so get to see the town's festival).

Alcore
2021-01-22, 09:28 AM
The most famous adventuring parties (The Dwarves & the Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring) didn't use horses. And the fate of the world was on the line.

Sure... if you watched the movies.


The dwarfs lost theirs in the goblin caves just after Elron and the followship let theirs go just before Moria. Bookwise i do believe Strider had his personal horse the entire beginning until then. It was awhile before either group got replacements.

Bugbear
2021-01-22, 10:23 AM
It's not weird at all, it is fairly normal.

Mounts and boats rarely add anything to the game except bookkeeping. Plus there is always the danger that the mounts might die or the boat might sink. And if the GM agrees not to attack mounts ever or sink a boat ever, then it feels a bit pointless to even use them. And it can get real silly when say a dragon breathes for 30 points of fire damage to a character, but the horse the character is ridding takes no damage.

And unless the GM is doing a ticking clock adventure, travel time does not matter. So if it takes the characters a week to walk from one town to another, it is no big deal.

But even if the GM does a ticking clock adventure, again it gets pointless and silly. If the characters need to get to the dark tower by midnight, it's just a game stopper to have the characters fail as their boat got eaten by a sea monster.

D&D does not offer much support for either mounts or vehicles, other then maybe a handful a vague rules. This is a big problem as even at first level mounts and vehicles are very weak in a magical fantasy world. And they only get beyond lower then weak after first level. And there is little characters can do, as by default magic items are either rare or expensive...or both...they can't have many. Plus each would need lots of useful necessary items.

And other then some set classes or maybe builds, any default character can't "do" much of anything with a mount or vehicle.

Some more exotic mounts and vehicles might help for a while, but they will soon enough run into the same problems....at least until you get to "Dragon".

So, most games keep them in the background, or just don't use them at all.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 10:32 AM
"And the Nine Walkers shall be set against the Nine Riders who are evil."

Also, Aragorn's common use name is literally derived from him walking all the time, Strider.

The Fellowship had a pack pony, none of them rode until they were riding with an army later. And they are the sine qua non of adventuring parties.

Segev
2021-01-22, 10:50 AM
Are there mechanical advantages to horses or boats that they are feeling the lack of? If not, then that's part of the issue. I agree that their paranoia is its own problem - whether because they're unreasonably afraid of something that is unlikely, or because they're reasonably afraid of something because you've hit them too hard with such events in the past - but any amount of paranoia can be overcome by altering the risk/reward calculation.

It's already been mentioned that they don't seem to mind taking far longer to get places; start having there be more time crunches. Maybe there are others also looking for the hidden ruins, and the PCs hear that the Horseback Harriers adventuring party has already staked a claim to them from a runner that the Harriers have sent back to let their hirelings know where to bring the wagon train to start loading it up with loot. Maybe they're given a crucial message to deliver as a mission, and it has to get there as fast as possible. Maybe they encounter something they can't beat easily in a fight and need to make a quick get-away. Heck, maybe taking a boat is just the fastest way to get to a location AND cart out the maximum loot: they can take pack animals, but walking with those is slow and costly while a boat is less slow and can carry more.

An oft-overlooked rule in 3.PF D&D is that attacking in melee from horseback against non-mounted creatures of the same size or smaller gives the +1 high ground bonus to hit. This is one tangible mechanical benefit that might tip things. If mounts can also attack, that is another reason they'd be desirable, especially if the mount attacking is easier to control/arrange for players than animals that are not ridden.

On the other side of things, mounts are often quite fragile compared to PCs as the PCs become more powerful...because mounts don't. Either they need more exotic, hard-to-acquire-and-justify mounts, or they need ways to keep their mounts relevant and protected. When a fireball that mostly inconveniences the 8th-level fighter wipes his mount out even on a successful save, the mount becomes a liability more than a help.

Protecting a mount gets expensive, and thus the reward again needs to be commensurate with the resources spent to make them durable enough to use at all.

Anonymouswizard
2021-01-22, 10:57 AM
Sure... if you watched the movies.


The dwarfs lost theirs in the goblin caves just after Elron and the followship let theirs go just before Moria. Bookwise i do believe Strider had his personal horse the entire beginning until then. It was awhile before either group got replacements.

:smallconfused:

That's incredibly inaccurate to the books,

The hobbits leave the Shire on ponies, which they lose when the Nazgul let all the horses out of the Prancing Pony stables. They get Bill the pony for their luggage, but the four hobbits and Strider are on foot. After Weathertop Bill carries Frodo due to the latter's weakness, and he later rides Glorfindel's horse to help get him to Rivendel quickly. At the council it is decided that they shall travel on foot, although Sam takes along Bill as a pack pony. They keep Bill with them, I believe even when attempting to cross Carradras, until they reach the entrance to Moria, where they let him go and Bill is seemingly killed. The journey through Moria to Lorien is on foot and the elves of Lorien do not provide horses for the journey to the centre of their land. The trip to the edge of Rohan is by boat, and thus horseless, and then the Fellowship splits. Frodo and Sam do not have a horse or pony on their journey to Mordor and do not have the capacity to pick one up,m Merry and Pippin are at first captured and then spend time with Ents willing to carry them about, before being carried on other's horses due to a lack of suitable mounts, and Aragorn and Legolas ride horses where advantageous and possible, while Gimli hitches a ride on Legolas's horse. The journey back to the Shgire is, I believe, carried out on horse and pony.

Been ages since I've read The Hobbbit, but I believe the dwarves had pack animals, not riding animals? May very well be mistaken there.


One thing I like about the 5e Middle-earth RPG is the fact that you get starting gear according to your culture. A Rohirim character probably spends a lot of time in the saddle, due to their Handle Animal skill and free riding horse, while everybody else is stuck walking until they can convince somebody to gift them a horse or raise a pretty decent sum of money. And a proper rider of Rohan will protect their horse from danger, and probably won't fight on it if it's not a trained warhorse to reduce the danger it's in.

LibraryOgre
2021-01-22, 12:19 PM
There is this weird thing I've noticed when playing RPGs with my group. Maybe it's just us, but my players don't like using horses. Or boats. Any time an adventure calls for the PCs to go cross country they insist on walking. Horses are available, but they'll prefer to bring a pack mule to riding. It seems to boil down to this mind-set: "If I buy a horse, the horse can get killed and I'm back to walking. If I just walk, I have nothing to lose!" A pack mule too can get killed, but somehow that doesn't register in the same manner. Why? I have no idea!


Some of this comes from the system, especially HP.

So, at early levels, horses are expensive. You don't have much gold, and buying a horse means your armor or weapons fall behind. Pack mules are a lot cheaper, and are pretty close to pure carrying capacity, so they tend to get a pass.

As levels rise, though, horses become impractical because anything that will threaten the players will outright slaughter the horses. Even at 5th level in AD&D, your horse has 2-3 HD, while a fireball from an opponent does 5d6 HP... so 9-15 HP for your horses (max 24, if you have a ranger), v. an average of 17 damage from a fireball or lightning bolt... your horse just became a very expensive set of rations.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 12:22 PM
The other thing to ask here is "are my players going to have more fun if they have horses to ride?"

Because if the answer to that is no, then why worry about them not riding them?

And the answer probably is no, because if they wanted to have fun riding horses they'd be doing that. It would be in their character concepts and they'd be picking skills that let them do cool stuff with their mounts. (Another reason why most people don't even think about them. If you want to do anything more complicated than "not fall off" you need to invest mechanically.)


Remember your primary role as a GM is to provide the players stuff to do with the characters they have, not punish them for not playing the game the way you want them to.

InvisibleBison
2021-01-22, 12:23 PM
Bill is seemingly killed.

No, actually, Bill survives. Gandalf places a protective spell on him before they let him loose, and he finds his way back to Bree where he is eventually reunited with Sam.

Telok
2021-01-22, 12:38 PM
Over the editions D&D has moved more and more character "advancement" into increasing hit points and damage. Horses and boats however have remained at roughly the same level of ability. So where the damage that characters are expected to dish out and take has doubled or tripled the horses and boats haven't significantly changed. Add to this that PCs are now expected by the normal game to purchase basic character survival in the form of magic items and exotic/tougher mounts are not default available. This creates a strong disincentive towards buying expensive mounts that will be killed in the first couple combats. The move away from hirelings, reliable hireing & loyalty rules means you can't offload mount care & replacement to offscreen npc actions.

Boats suffer the same sort of thing. PC damage & hit points have replaced saving throws, resistances, & immunities. So things that used to inflict conditions now inflicts damage, or the non-damage actions aren't useful anymore. But items don't get saves any more and their durability hasn't doulbed or tripled like PC damage & hit points, so boats became relatively more fragile. Add that many many DMs interpret drowning as a significant danger and the average swimming check is now relatively harder to succeed at. The players now correctly believe that their characters are in more danger of drowning (bypassing the increased hit points that are a primary measure of character advancement) from boarding boats that may easily have fewer hit points than the characters do and no damage mitigation from item saving throws.

TLDR: D&D PC & monster hit point & damage inflation over editions did not extend to mounts & boats, plus the failure states of mounts & boats are worse now. Systems without D&D hit point scaling often don't have (or have less of) a problem with these sorts of things.

Segev
2021-01-22, 12:42 PM
Over the editions D&D has moved more and more character "advancement" into increasing hit points and damage. Horses and boats however have remained at roughly the same level of ability. So where the damage that characters are expected to dish out and take has doubled or tripled the horses and boats haven't significantly changed. Add to this that PCs are now expected by the normal game to purchase basic character survival in the form of magic items and exotic/tougher mounts are not default available. This creates a strong disincentive towards buying expensive mounts that will be killed in the first couple combats. The move away from hirelings, reliable hireing & loyalty rules means you can't offload mount care & replacement to offscreen npc actions.

Boats suffer the same sort of thing. PC damage & hit points have replaced saving throws, resistances, & immunities. So things that used to inflict conditions now inflicts damage, or the non-damage actions aren't useful anymore. But items don't get saves any more and their durability hasn't doulbed or tripled like PC damage & hit points, so boats became relatively more fragile. Add that many many DMs interpret drowning as a significant danger and the average swimming check is now relatively harder to succeed at. The players now correctly believe that their characters are in more danger of drowning (bypassing the increased hit points that are a primary measure of character advancement) from boarding boats that may easily have fewer hit points than the characters do and no damage mitigation from item saving throws.

TLDR: D&D PC & monster hit point & damage inflation over editions did not extend to mounts & boats, plus the failure states of mounts & boats are worse now. Systems without D&D hit point scaling often don't have (or have less of) a problem with these sorts of things.

Honestly, modeling vehicles as creatures would be a good move. Maybe even letting them be creatures with derived stats that depend on the stats and abilities of their crews.

Mounts definitely need either more hp, or a way for their riders to share their hp. I would go so far as to suggest that either a default rule, or a part of something like D&D's mounted combat feat(s), should permit a rider to determine whether he or his mount's hp get used when either takes damage.

Willie the Duck
2021-01-22, 12:58 PM
There is this weird thing I've noticed when playing RPGs with my group. Maybe it's just us, but my players don't like using horses. Or boats. Any time an adventure calls for the PCs to go cross country they insist on walking. Horses are available, but they'll prefer to bring a pack mule to riding. It seems to boil down to this mind-set: "If I buy a horse, the horse can get killed and I'm back to walking. If I just walk, I have nothing to lose!" A pack mule too can get killed, but somehow that doesn't register in the same manner. Why? I have no idea!

Some of this comes from the system, especially HP.

It could also have to do with past gaming history, or just past exposure to old gaming tropes. I don't know how much cultural penetration this kind of stuff has, but there used to be old gaming comics such as Knights of the Dinner Table that sent up old TSR-era gaming tropes. I don't remember of KoDT specifically covered this, but it certainly was part of the gamer vernacular that the instant PCs got horses, they would die. Or, instead, they would simply need tending, in which case you needed hirelings to guard your horses while you went into the trap&treasure-filled dungeon -- in which case both horses and guards would die; or conversely said guards would betray you and ride off with your horses (and whatever else you foolishly left with them) which of course you couldn't do anything about since by definition they were on horseback and you weren't (plus head start. plus you probably came out of the dungeon low on hp). No one is exactly sure how often actual groups ended up playing like that, but like Mr. Johnson constantly betraying you in Shadowrun, it became part of the 'known lore' of D&D gaming.

kyoryu
2021-01-22, 01:02 PM
Also, realistically, traveling on horse isn't that much faster. If you're traveling on a horse for a long distance, it's at a walk - which is basically the same as a brisk human walk. You might manage 20-30 mi/day walking, and maybe 30-40 on a horse. It's faster, yes, but not that much.

The big advantage is that it doesn't leave you tired and lets you carry stuff as well.

But... ultimately, players are optimizers. They look for the most beneficial thing to do with the least cost. If they're not using horses, that's because the perceived advantages (faster, carrying capacity, etc.) are not actually valuable enough compared to the perceived costs (the chance the GM is going to murder their horses).

Both of these can be addressed. But the easiest thing to do is basically tell the players that enemies won't target horses, and unless the characters decide to engage in horse-mounted combat (and the decision will be on them), the horses will be allowed to just wander off and out of the combat without getting harmed. If they really believe that the mounts will be killed, they won't use them. Their logic (figuring out how to do it without a mount is a plan that survives not having a mount) is sound if they have reason to believe that the mounts will have a low percentage chance of making it.

More to the point, if they have that opinion, I'd also look at if they have reasons to believe (legit or not) that, as a GM, you will take advantage of any vulnerability you expose. Because that feels like the normal response to "if we give the GM any rope, he will hang us" mentality. It's a turtling game style that revolves around not exposing anything to attack, rather than being proactive and doing things in the world.

KaussH
2021-01-22, 01:30 PM
Eh, just let them walk. Play up the flavor text a little, moreso if it's a nasty place, but also if it's pretty and quiet, and keep track of time traveled if you do random encounters.


Unless the pcs are in a rush, no need to ride. Walking means they are low to the ground, more likely to see some stuff or get involved with things.


Now if your more of a travel handwaver, have them mark off the food and water for time traveled and have them arrive in good health :)

Elbeyon
2021-01-22, 01:40 PM
I wouldn't try to punish players for things they don't want to do. If they refuse to get mounts/boats/houses because they don't want to lose them and you really really want them to have those things, you could just make an agreement out of character that you will not attack their horses or house. Just take such a possibility off the table. I've seen such agreements for pets that offer no combat advantage, and it has worked well everytime.

Anonymouswizard
2021-01-22, 01:51 PM
No, actually, Bill survives. Gandalf places a protective spell on him before they let him loose, and he finds his way back to Bree where he is eventually reunited with Sam.

Hence seemingly killed.

gijoemike
2021-01-22, 01:53 PM
The most famous adventuring parties (The Dwarves & the Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring) didn't use horses. And the fate of the world was on the line.

LIES!!!!!! LIES!!!!!!

The absolutely used horses for the dwarfs/Legolas/Gandalf and ponies for the hobbits. But they were all killed/lost at Moria. IIRC, the watcher in the water snatched one. Gandalf even went to find the super rare special ultra fast horse, Shadowfax.

Same thing in the hobbit. The lost the horses at the goblin caves. Then they got more horses at the Bear-shifter and released them at the edge of Murkwood.

In fact those stories have a theme of "pony rides and May sunshine", lost the ponies ( Hope Bill the pony is alright), walk, new mounts, lost those too, walk, new mounts.


To the OP I will now address your topic in a strictly D&D 3.5 view...
To ride a mount in combat requires a character to have a decent chance of controlling it in combat. That mean training in the ride and handle animals skil*S*. Notice that is plural. If combat starts the horse will startle and most likely throw even a slightly trained rider to prone with some damage. Add in the fact they can be killed rather easily and you can easily see why a PC will avoid it like the plague. Unless one invests several character options into the ability to use horses they are a major pain.

Same thing with a boat. Unless the PCs have invested points in rope use, profession sailor, climb, and most importantly SWIM. They are worthless on a ship. Swimming is either something you are great at in D&D or its impossible especially with an Armor penalty. In D&D aquatic monsters are very very common and super terrifying. So yeah, as a PC I would avoid the boat and the water. If I go overboard I cannot melee fight, ranged attack, move, and sometimes breath. It is almost DM fiat you die. The DM isn't actually saying that but any encounter or storm at sea is pretty terrible for PCs.


Accepting either of these "boons" are a major drawback in any sort of hostile encounter for a character that isn't built for the concept.


EDIT:

My post was a knee jerk reaction to the earlier posts of they walked in the LOTR and didn't use horses hardly any. There is a lot of walking in the Hobbit and LOTR. But there are many instances of riding on ents, riding on horses, eagles, barrels, ships by various members of the fellowship. Sam and Frodo have to walk the most since the last leg of their journey is up the side of a mountain, through a cave, in lava fields, goblin towers, and then more mountains. And they are referred to as the 9 walkers. And the Horse Lords of Rohan and the Riders of Rohan are a major element of the story.

Quertus
2021-01-22, 02:17 PM
Boats are death traps - it's only good sense that your PCs avoid them. Award them bonus XP every time that they find an alternative to boat travel.

Mounts are more complex. Conventional wisdom in the current "pets" thread is that (in D&D) beasties *can* be useful at low level, but that utility quickly falls off.

Personally, I would rather walk than travel on horseback. So, were I playing *myself*, it would only be good role-playing for me to side with that party.

Logistically, horses are scarcely faster in D&D than walking is. And there's much better (and cheaper) ways to increase your overland rate than buying a horse.

Tactically and strategically, it depends on the system, but horses grant a few advantages, and a lot of disadvantages. They require upkeep, meaning that you have to earn more money per unit time just to break even (although they *can* be used as emergency rations, if you're willing to tell that story). They inherently split the party, as you usually cannot take them into dungeons, or sleep with them in the inn. They're one more living target for possession / vector for disease. They can provide cover, or be a pool of extra health… or, in 3e, they can increase the damage you take each round by 50% (8 vs 12 bandits surrounding you), and provide an easy means to reduce your actions (kill your mount out from under you). They usually represent 1 more skill you need to spend points on. They project your wealth and affluence in a way that invites thieves (in a way that an animated chair, crafted from the swords of your dead former enemies and adorned with the skulls of dragons does not). They attract new hazards (griffons, vegans / animal rights activists). In 3e, they grant a +1 "higher ground" bonus to hit… but so does the animated chair, or a soap box. They're one more creature you need to cast "Endure Elements" or "Invisibility" on. They cost you that much more when you Teleport, are running out of air, or crossing a rickety bridge (or, horror of horrors, boarding a boat (!) with limited capacity). They involve one more set of vocabulary to learn, one more vector for miscommunication between players and GM.

And they're highly suboptimal next to Dragons or Teleportation.

Anyone trying to oversimplify this issue, and tell their players what their characters think would probably be better off having their players tell them what they think.

Anyone trying to force the players to take a course of action that they obviously are avoiding should probably reevaluate their worldview.

But, to answer the *actual* question of the OP… no, I can't say as I really have seen such behavior before.

Xuc Xac
2021-01-22, 02:26 PM
But... ultimately, players are optimizers. They look for the most beneficial thing to do with the least cost.

The main problem is that they don't consider all the costs and benefits (partly because the system doesn't). Most systems that say you heal overnight while resting don't consider the difference in sleeping on cold rocky ground after eating iron rations or sleeping in a warm dry bed after eating a hot meal in a nice inn.

Unless you step on a trap, there's no difference between walking barefoot, wearing cheap shoes, or wearing expensive custom fitted boots (or riding a horse to save your own feet).

Some of it is just players not caring or thinking about how their characters feel. It's easy to say "We just eat iron rations every day even in town because it's cheaper" when you don't have to chew them (or live with scurvy). The same players who insist that their characters spend every moment of downtime training or studying to maximize their skills also have no problem watching three hours of reruns on TV instead of doing homework because they just don't feel like it.

Warlawk
2021-01-22, 02:27 PM
From my personal experience on this subject it's generally conditioned behavior. Why bother with a horse/boat/whatever when your DM is just going to use it as a tool to punish your character. It's obvious, easy and EXTREMELY overused by DMs. This just leads to players who avoid those circumstances because in the past they were quite literally worse off because they used them.

There's usually a reason for those sort of behaviors, and it usually originates with the circumstances forced on the players because they chose to use a horse/boat/whatever.

Alcore
2021-01-22, 02:35 PM
Mounts (especially horses) are often temporary anyways. Unless low magic by level 5 or 7 the party is no longer travelling on the ground. How long til "*pop* we there!"? So I have never had a problem buying a mount knowing it was going to die. Never has though. No party I have been around had that issue.


It's like buying acid for a troll fight and then not using it.

Mastikator
2021-01-22, 02:42 PM
From my personal experience on this subject it's generally conditioned behavior. Why bother with a horse/boat/whatever when your DM is just going to use it as a tool to punish your character. It's obvious, easy and EXTREMELY overused by DMs. This just leads to players who avoid those circumstances because in the past they were quite literally worse off because they used them.

There's usually a reason for those sort of behaviors, and it usually originates with the circumstances forced on the players because they chose to use a horse/boat/whatever.

Truer words have rarely been spoken. Many DMs like to play little "gotcha's" on the players, the players remember it between DMs.

Elbeyon
2021-01-22, 02:48 PM
I don't think using horses to travel is a big danger, but water is extremely dangerous for most characters. The average character is not equipped to fight in water, and aquatic enemies are specialized in fighting in water. Water is a hazard that severely weakens or outright neutralizes a character. Is the character an archer? Not anymore; bows can't be used in water unless the characters have a special aquatic bow. It's similar for magic, and to a lesser extent even melee options. And, people either have to swim slowly or might even drown. Boat travel is already dangerous due to natural hazards before magical beasts and nasties get thrown into the mix.

kyoryu
2021-01-22, 02:52 PM
The main problem is that they don't consider all the costs and benefits (partly because the system doesn't). Most systems that say you heal overnight while resting don't consider the difference in sleeping on cold rocky ground after eating iron rations or sleeping in a warm dry bed after eating a hot meal in a nice inn.

Unless you step on a trap, there's no difference between walking barefoot, wearing cheap shoes, or wearing expensive custom fitted boots (or riding a horse to save your own feet).

Some of it is just players not caring or thinking about how their characters feel. It's easy to say "We just eat iron rations every day even in town because it's cheaper" when you don't have to chew them (or live with scurvy). The same players who insist that their characters spend every moment of downtime training or studying to maximize their skills also have no problem watching three hours of reruns on TV instead of doing homework because they just don't feel like it.

That's kind of my point. What advantages there "should" be in reality are irrelevant. What matters is the actual, in-game benefit the players get.

Traveling faster is good. But it only matters if there's a (real) cost to being slower - the bad guy gets away, etc.

Being more rested is good. But it only matters if it gives some kind of penalty.

But, yeah, you're right. To some extent it's treating characters like emotionless tools, to some extent it's a matter of what constraints are putting on the GM, and to some extent it's what the system actually models.

But in any case the players respond to actual cost/benefit analysis, not what sad analysis would be like in the real world. So if players are doing things that don't make sense, the first thing to do is to look at the actual gaming environment they're in, and what the costs, benefits, and risks actually are in realistic terms.

LibraryOgre
2021-01-22, 03:11 PM
It could also have to do with past gaming history, or just past exposure to old gaming tropes. I don't know how much cultural penetration this kind of stuff has, but there used to be old gaming comics such as Knights of the Dinner Table that sent up old TSR-era gaming tropes. I don't remember of KoDT specifically covered this, but it certainly was part of the gamer vernacular that the instant PCs got horses, they would die. Or, instead, they would simply need tending, in which case you needed hirelings to guard your horses while you went into the trap&treasure-filled dungeon -- in which case both horses and guards would die; or conversely said guards would betray you and ride off with your horses (and whatever else you foolishly left with them) which of course you couldn't do anything about since by definition they were on horseback and you weren't (plus head start. plus you probably came out of the dungeon low on hp). No one is exactly sure how often actual groups ended up playing like that, but like Mr. Johnson constantly betraying you in Shadowrun, it became part of the 'known lore' of D&D gaming.

Heh. I know Knights of the Dinner Table quite well. Yeah, this is a common trope in older games... you had to do something with your horses, and failure to do it well resulted in their murder. I finished an adaptation of an adventure recently where your horses will get eaten by wargs if you're not careful... and that REALLY sucks if you're being chased by the pseudo-vampires at the time.

KaussH
2021-01-22, 03:16 PM
Now as a slight side track, isn't not riding horses or boats for out of game reasons a bit of metagaming?

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 03:37 PM
That's kind of my point. What advantages there "should" be in reality are irrelevant. What matters is the actual, in-game benefit the players get.

Traveling faster is good. But it only matters if there's a (real) cost to being slower - the bad guy gets away, etc.

Being more rested is good. But it only matters if it gives some kind of penalty.

This keeps coming up every time people mention players being slow, and I don't think people really get it.

If you use negative motivations (do this my way or be punished) players will resent it. You need to use positive motivations.

Travelling faster isn't good, you have to make it good. And you have to actually do that not just make travelling slower bad. Having faster means of travel needs to be better than baseline without making the baseline worse than it currently is.

Pure penalty avoidance is not fun.

Willie the Duck
2021-01-22, 03:54 PM
Now as a slight side track, isn't not riding horses or boats for out of game reasons a bit of metagaming?

'I don't want to pay for or look after this thing that I am sure is going to die in the environment into which I am heading' is perfectly sound in-game logic. If the world in which a person exists is more lethal to a half-ton animal than it is to a seasoned adventurer (who somehow has a lot more hp), and you are about to go into danger, then you leave the animal behind. Likewise, if the DM always attacks ships, then ships are deathtraps and the PCs are just being judicious in their actions. If the DM only attacks ships when the PCs are on board, then yes, the DM is metagaming (and if you think that metagaming is unacceptable, this is a problem). :smallbiggrin:

Darth Credence
2021-01-22, 04:00 PM
Honestly, modeling vehicles as creatures would be a good move. Maybe even letting them be creatures with derived stats that depend on the stats and abilities of their crews.

Mounts definitely need either more hp, or a way for their riders to share their hp. I would go so far as to suggest that either a default rule, or a part of something like D&D's mounted combat feat(s), should permit a rider to determine whether he or his mount's hp get used when either takes damage.

I like that idea, but I know how it would actually be used. Players would become horse rustlers, with 13 hp meat shields when they ride into battle.

My players use horses, even though horses have actually been killed. Well, one horse, any way, and it happened because they tried to ride down a orc on the horse, and the orc killed the horse. No one seemed to have an issue with it. I'll find out if they really have an issue with it tomorrow, as we left the last session with them inside a tiny hut inside a building, while their horses are grazing right outside. A hill giant and ogres are after them and they know it. If the players try to turtle up for the night, the horses are going to be roasted on a spit.

The main characters haven't been on a boat yet, although they have played a one shot in the same world where they did. [I take that back - I forgot about the river boat journey. Two of the characters took a week and a half to slowly travel downriver on a luxury riverboat, while the bard paid for their passage by singing. They had to sell their horses at a loss before leaving. The other three took a cargo barge that got there in a week with their horses, but they had to pay for that privilege.] They had no problem getting on the boats. They did eventually have a water combat, but that's because they left the ship for a long boat, and the barbarian decided they would swim rather than ride in the boat. What was originally just going to be some fins circling around them for atmosphere became a shark attack. I don't think they will stop being on boats after this.

I have no idea if it is the players, or something specific to your game that is the difference here. I would bet it is just the players are different. I wouldn't worry too much about it, unless you have something planned that can only be reached by boat.

Saint-Just
2021-01-22, 04:01 PM
Now as a slight side track, isn't not riding horses or boats for out of game reasons a bit of metagaming?

It seems that this degree of metagaming is 99.9% acceptable nowadays. How often have you seen prohibition on talking in terms of HP (even though it is actually suggested in 3.5) actually enforced?

I am under impression that policing metagame decisions was more common in the olden times, but nowadays it's usually reserved for the horror stories of the adversarial DMing (though I think it can be a valid style if less comfortable than current metagaming meta (ha!)). Now it's usually "please don't do that, guys" and guys (and gals) either agree not to do it or don't, no hard rules either way.

Alcore
2021-01-22, 04:04 PM
Now as a slight side track, isn't not riding horses or boats for out of game reasons a bit of metagaming?

yep...


Horses were vary common. Only the poorest of serfs and peasants couldn't find a way to get a horse. Understand that these were not warhorses; some were not even meant to be ridden. They were the cars of their time; they are status symbols. a PC wearing metal armor and no horse might be assumed to be a wealthy bandit while mounted a peasant might refer to you as "lord" but not because you are a known noble but as respect. If you had a bonafided warhorse? Noblemen and guards will treat you with scrutiny (especially if someone nearby is missing such a horse) if you are not dressing nice (metal armor still implies wealth and will work)

want to know more about horses?

Medieval Misconceptions: HORSES;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reoohqjqAyY

tyckspoon
2021-01-22, 04:05 PM
Now as a slight side track, isn't not riding horses or boats for out of game reasons a bit of metagaming?

Walking instead of horses is a bit odd if people are used to riding in the world, but it's not that strange/impossible to understand - if you don't like horses, don't want to carry extra feed and water for them, or plan to travel in areas horses don't deal with well (thick forests, mountains, swamps, blasted wastelands.. you know, places where adventures happen) it's reasonable to just not bother with them. Especially if your net travel time in the areas where horses can go isn't even sped up that much.

Boats is a bit weirder, IMO, because most of the times when 'go by boat' is a reasonable travel option 'just walk there instead'.. isn't. You can't walk across a large body of water or a major river. Assuming you aren't rich/magically powered enough yet to go with 'we're going to fly/teleport/Wind Walk across' instead, your option is a boat or not going at all.

(And of course in the perspective of D&D 3.5 and derivatives specifically 'how do we travel on land' is only a low-level problem anyways. Eventually you just summon up a Phantom Steed and ride everywhere on a tireless conjuration that moves at 200+ feet per round, or Wind Walk, or teleport, or everybody has permanent flight items, or any of a dozen other ways to completely obviate "how long will it take to get there" as an actual problem.)

Pex
2021-01-22, 04:09 PM
It could also have to do with past gaming history, or just past exposure to old gaming tropes. I don't know how much cultural penetration this kind of stuff has, but there used to be old gaming comics such as Knights of the Dinner Table that sent up old TSR-era gaming tropes. I don't remember of KoDT specifically covered this, but it certainly was part of the gamer vernacular that the instant PCs got horses, they would die. Or, instead, they would simply need tending, in which case you needed hirelings to guard your horses while you went into the trap&treasure-filled dungeon -- in which case both horses and guards would die; or conversely said guards would betray you and ride off with your horses (and whatever else you foolishly left with them) which of course you couldn't do anything about since by definition they were on horseback and you weren't (plus head start. plus you probably came out of the dungeon low on hp). No one is exactly sure how often actual groups ended up playing like that, but like Mr. Johnson constantly betraying you in Shadowrun, it became part of the 'known lore' of D&D gaming.

In addition DMs like to run random encounters when traveling. If the players travel by boat they WILL encounter pirates or sea monsters and bad weather on their journey. The warriors are screwed since they can't wear armor because if they are pushed overboard during the combat or bad weather they sink and drown. Traveling by road they WILL encounter bandits or orc/hobgoblin raiders and big tough monsters like owlbears or trolls. The horses become collateral damage. Some DMs will roll for random encounters every game day. Such an encounter could be benign - no combat pleasant conversation with NPCs or a noticeable natural wonder to explore that provides a minor valuable thing - but because it's rolled every day that further insists there WILL be that bandit/raider/big tough monster combat. Players don't get "a week later you arrive".

To encourage use of horses and boats a DM must have traveling times that don't involve encounters. Players must arrive a few days earlier than by walking whereever they need to go without any harassment of any kind on their journey and get to benefit somehow being early to their destination. This doesn't mean never have random encounters on journies, but it needs to happen a significant amount of time so that players don't feel like targets just because they travel a road or take to the sea. NPCs get to travel without being accosted. So too should they.

KineticDiplomat
2021-01-22, 04:18 PM
Sounds like a “I’m trying to make D&D realistic” problem. While I of course heartily endorse you playing not-D&D, there are a few ways around this:

1. Talk with the players. If they’re terrified that you’ll take equipment (and remember that for some classes equipment = progression more than actual progression does) explain to them that you are not out to use their equipment as a plot point.

2. A bit at the other end, you can start killing characters (preferably in lack of mobility related circumstances). Equipment is scary because it exists in the limbo where some DMs think of it as a lesser trick and therefore might use it freely, but players realize that it is a fate nearing death for the playability of a character in many cases. Whereas everyone in a modern D&D game assumes the compact is the DM won’t try to kill the PCs, indeed he’ll be sure to balance such that they are unlikely to die - death may have the higher greater impact, but it is unlikely to actually be used. Hence why players cheerfully assault a tribe of orcs but won’t use a horse.

3. Make equipment superfluous. Equipment everywhere. You don’t need to worry about losing your chain mail if you can easily and frequently get more chain mail.

4. As the mean version, penalize the crap out of anyone carrying more than 45 lbs. How do you end up not carrying said weight? Well, you put it on a horse...

Tvtyrant
2021-01-22, 04:44 PM
There is this weird thing I've noticed when playing RPGs with my group. Maybe it's just us, but my players don't like using horses. Or boats. Any time an adventure calls for the PCs to go cross country they insist on walking. Horses are available, but they'll prefer to bring a pack mule to riding. It seems to boil down to this mind-set: "If I buy a horse, the horse can get killed and I'm back to walking. If I just walk, I have nothing to lose!" A pack mule too can get killed, but somehow that doesn't register in the same manner. Why? I have no idea!

When it comes to boats, the players seem to immediately concern themselves with "What if the boat sinks!" I've had players insisting on wearing sacks of cork attached to them at all time, and this isn't always played as a joke. There is something about moving into what is essentially a moving house that can drop into an abyss at any given moment the makes my players worried about losing all their stuff in one big Gotcha! moment. How often does this happen in our campaigns? It never has.

I don't think this is an actual problem - if I need the players to just get with the program I can always guarantee for them that I won't use their commitment to a horse, or a boat, to screw them over. But it's still a curious quirk I wonder if other GMs have observed in their group.

-DF

If everything moves at the speed of plot they are probably right. Why spend money on a liability that changes nothing in their benefit?

Kraynic
2021-01-22, 05:17 PM
My belief is that over time the entire process of travel has been glossed over to the point that most game systems now just ignore it unless you are doing some sort of hexploration, which is often just reduced to dice rolls based on the travel speed of your slowest speed party member anyway. And the availability of travel enhancing magic makes overland travel obsolete at some point. Even magic that makes camping easier/safer isn't mount friendly. Well unless you have some way to get your horse to climb rope to rest in the Rope Trick dimensional space.

In reality, travel by horse has a lot of benefits. The distances people are throwing out aren't all the story, and aren't even necessarily all that accurate depending on how you are going about things. First of all, with decent trails, even in hilly country, you should be able to cover 30-40 miles per day pretty easily on horseback. But you will be covering that distance in maybe 4-5 hours, which would include a half hour break in the middle. This gives the horses a chance to graze (so no, you aren't carrying a bunch of rations for the horses) and rest, while you still have plenty of daylight to hunt, set traps, set up defenses around your camp, or whatever. If you want to cover more distance then you will be like a cavalry unit with an extra horse per rider and you would swap mounts at breaks and stretch your daily travel up to 60 or 70 miles. I think that was supposed to be a pace that could be kept to daily for a week or more. Or you could be like the Huns and have 3-4 mounts per rider and potentially cover up to 100 miles in a day. If you really want to be like the Huns, you just eat any horses that can't keep up with your pace, and raid for more as you go. If you are really pushing things, you might not be able to push your animals to the longer distances for more than a few days, but saying horse travel isn't any faster or give any benefits over being on foot isn't really accurate. There are of course a lot of factors that can impact travel distance from more rugged terrain, dense trees/brush, or horrible weather. The worse the conditions are, the closer walking and horseback will be as far as raw distance per hour goes.

I can certainly see all the game system objections to having a horse, though. I'm currently in a Pathfinder 1E game with someone that is trying out mounted combat. We have had a lot of combats that were mostly with small sized creatures. If he stays mounted, he doesn't usually take any damage except from ranged weapons, because all melee attacks are against his horse. I think it has been near 0 at least twice and unconscious at least once. I'm surprised the poor horse has lasted this long. We are only level 2, so we probably just haven't run into anything that could kill it that we didn't just run away from anyway.

As far as the water goes, boats and ships are scary. You don't even need real deep water, since an accident on a ferry crossing a river swelled with spring run off could easily be a tpk event if the dice aren't cooperating.

Telok
2021-01-22, 05:34 PM
If everything moves at the speed of plot they are probably right. Why spend money on a liability that changes nothing in their benefit?

It's also possible you're seeing the effects of "three level appropriate encounters between A and B" type stuff. While it's often paired with speed of plot and railroads it is also pushed by systems/adventures that want to meet certain fights-per-day goals.

When you know that travel results in X number of fights and each fight has to be in an "appropriate" range then it pushes players to prep for X number of fights and minimize losses (dead horses, drowning). They'll also know they won't find "appropriate" treasure that they can't carry. Contrast with an older style of a chance of an encounter once or twice a day, the random encounter table includes non-wombat encounters, and the possibility of loot that just the PCs can't carry. Players will start caring about travel speed, carrying capacities, and trade-offs.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 05:42 PM
If everything moves at the speed of plot they are probably right. Why spend money on a liability that changes nothing in their benefit?

The speed of plot is the only speed anything can move at, because the players are the plot. It is where they are and what they are doing. That's the nature of a game. If the players aren't there, the game doesn't exist.

If you want your players to take less time travelling between places, you need to make them feel like they're getting something by doing so. (And again, not merely avoiding losing something, getting something, it needs to be better if you want them to do it.)

InvisibleBison
2021-01-22, 05:49 PM
Now as a slight side track, isn't not riding horses or boats for out of game reasons a bit of metagaming?

It's only metagaming if you choose to make it metagaming. The characters live in the world, and they know things that are common knowledge. If everyone knows that adventurers' horses tend to get killed, or that boats tend to get attacked by aquatic monsters, then the characters should know that as well.


My belief is that over time the entire process of travel has been glossed over to the point that most game systems now just ignore it unless you are doing some sort of hexploration, which is often just reduced to dice rolls based on the travel speed of your slowest speed party member anyway.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Why would we spend a big chunk of our limited gaming time on the journey if the game is about what's at the end of the journey?

KaussH
2021-01-22, 05:58 PM
This makes a lot of sense to me. Why would we spend a big chunk of our limited gaming time on the journey if the game is about what's at the end of the journey?

Becouse in many games the journey is part of the game too. Places you see, encounters on the road, animals, views, weird stuff, ect. Even if the party has a "goal" at the end of the journey.

Segev
2021-01-22, 05:59 PM
The speed of plot is the only speed anything can move at, because the players are the plot. It is where they are and what they are doing. That's the nature of a game. If the players aren't there, the game doesn't exist.Untrue; if the world has things happening whether the PCs are there or not, they'll see the results of things be different if they're there early rather than late. If the solstice is the date the princess will be sacrificed to the dark god to conjure the demon suzerain into the world, and the PCs' choices of how fast they travel determines whether they arrive before the solstice, after the solstice, or during the solstice, that changes the encounter they have there and possibly going forwards.


If you want your players to take less time travelling between places, you need to make them feel like they're getting something by doing so. (And again, not merely avoiding losing something, getting something, it needs to be better if you want them to do it.)I don't disagree with this, but you keep saying it without providing any examples. What would be "gaining something," to you, rather than "losing something?" Anything I can think of that might be a reward for faster travel could be turned around and named a "punishment" for not traveling fast enough.

Tvtyrant
2021-01-22, 06:02 PM
It's also possible you're seeing the effects of "three level appropriate encounters between A and B" type stuff. While it's often paired with speed of plot and railroads it is also pushed by systems/adventures that want to meet certain fights-per-day goals.

When you know that travel results in X number of fights and each fight has to be in an "appropriate" range then it pushes players to prep for X number of fights and minimize losses (dead horses, drowning). They'll also know they won't find "appropriate" treasure that they can't carry. Contrast with an older style of a chance of an encounter once or twice a day, the random encounter table includes non-wombat encounters, and the possibility of loot that just the PCs can't carry. Players will start caring about travel speed, carrying capacities, and trade-offs.


The speed of plot is the only speed anything can move at, because the players are the plot. It is where they are and what they are doing. That's the nature of a game. If the players aren't there, the game doesn't exist.

If you want your players to take less time travelling between places, you need to make them feel like they're getting something by doing so. (And again, not merely avoiding losing something, getting something, it needs to be better if you want them to do it.)

I agree with Telok. If the party is adventuring between two cities and they know a town is in the middle, they can be pretty assured the game is going to go: Wilderness encounter, town encounter, wilderness encounter, you made it. Horses vs. not horses won't make a difference.

If the game is 1 encounter a day and it takes less days if you use horses there is some incentive to start with them, but chances are the horses are going to die partway and then you walk the rest anyway. The alternative is a clock of "you have to make it in 4 days" but then the horses become an escort mission.

Elbeyon
2021-01-22, 06:08 PM
You could give them an item that summons horses for free. If the magical horses die or if they have to leave the horses behind it doesn't matter. They just summon more. Tell 'em not to abuse the item, or if it is really needed put limits on the item like the horses can't attack or can only be summoned 1/day to prevent spamming.

King of Nowhere
2021-01-22, 06:11 PM
There is something about moving into what is essentially a moving house that can drop into an abyss at any given moment the makes my players worried about losing all their stuff in one big Gotcha! moment. How often does this happen in our campaigns? It never has.


what about other campaigns? maybe before you they had one of those jerkasses DM who conditioned them that way? or perhaps they read too many internet forums...
perhaps you could ask them



In 3e, they grant a +1 "higher ground" bonus to hit… but so does the animated chair, or a soap box.

now i am envisioning a fighter build based on dropping a soapbox and jumping on it as part of every attack

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 06:20 PM
Untrue; if the world has things happening whether the PCs are there or not, they'll see the results of things be different if they're there early rather than late. If the solstice is the date the princess will be sacrificed to the dark god to conjure the demon suzerain into the world, and the PCs' choices of how fast they travel determines whether they arrive before the solstice, after the solstice, or during the solstice, that changes the encounter they have there and possibly going forwards.

Unless they can reload their save and do it differently though, all of the things that didn’t happen couldn’t have happened. The events they experienced are the only ones that could have happened. That’s what I mean by things happening at the speed of plot. There only one thread and it always proceeds forwards at the pace of the players. You might think there were potential branches, but only the ones they chose were real in their game.


I don't disagree with this, but you keep saying it without providing any examples. What would be "gaining something," to you, rather than "losing something?" Anything I can think of that might be a reward for faster travel could be turned around and named a "punishment" for not traveling fast enough.

It’s super easy. You present it as an explicit bonus. You might not think it works that way, but it does. Way back in the dawn of time (like in the beta times) World of Warcraft had an XP penalty if you’d been logged in too long to discourage poopsocking (and server resource hogging by the AFK), and everyone hated it. So instead they changed it to give a bonus that accumulated whilst you were logged off, and it became a much more popular part of the game. Even though the actual numbers remained roughly the same, the fact that it was now presented as a bonus earned by the desired action made it accepted.

Instead of saying “because you walked you arrived late and got less” make the players believe they will get more than normal if they are particularly fast.

Instead of applying a penalty because they walked and are tired, give them a small temporary bonus because they took the boat and got to relax.*

You don’t start off with a -1 sword and earn your normal one for a reason.

*as long as their character concept supports it. A potential problem with the whole “can only rest properly in a bed” thing that people sometimes want to do to stop players camping because it’s free is that there are at least two whole character classes in the core set whose specific deal is the opposite of that.

Elbeyon
2021-01-22, 06:23 PM
It’s super easy. You present it as an explicit bonus. You might not think it works that way, but it does. Way back in the dawn of time (like in the beta times) World of Warcraft had an XP penalty if you’d been logged in too long to discourage poopsocking (and server resource hogging by the AFK), and everyone hated it. So instead they changed it to give a bonus that accumulated whilst you were logged off, and it became a much more popular part of the game. Even though the actual numbers remained roughly the same, the fact that it was now presented as a bonus earned by the desired action made it accepted.

Instead of saying “because you walked you arrived late and got less” make the players believe they will get more than normal if they are particularly fast.

Instead of applying a penalty because they walked and are tired, give them a small temporary bonus because they took the boat and got to relax.

You don’t start off with a -1 sword and earn your normal one for a reason.

I'd ride a horse for a well rested bonus, temp hp and a few minor bonuses.

Batcathat
2021-01-22, 06:32 PM
Unless they can reload their save and do it differently though, all of the things that didn’t happen couldn’t have happened. The events they experienced are the only ones that could have happened. That’s what I mean by things happening at the speed of plot. There only one thread and it always proceeds forwards at the pace of the players. You might think there were potential branches, but only the ones they chose were real in their game.

While that's true, that's not what most people mean by the expression (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TravelingAtTheSpeedOfPlot).

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 06:42 PM
While that's true, that's not what most people mean by the expression (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TravelingAtTheSpeedOfPlot).

It kind of is though. The core of “travels at the speed of plot” is that the interesting events will happen when the protagonists arrive. In a game the players are the protagonists, and without players you don’t have a game. So the only time any events can ever happen is when they arrive. What they experience is plot, what they don’t because of the road not taken doesn’t exist.

Saint-Just
2021-01-22, 06:42 PM
Unless they can reload their save and do it differently though, all of the things that didnÂ’t happen couldnÂ’t have happened. The events they experienced are the only ones that could have happened. ThatÂ’s what I mean by things happening at the speed of plot. There only one thread and it always proceeds forwards at the pace of the players. You might think there were potential branches, but only the ones they chose were real in their game.


That's not what a speed of plot usually means. I have seen that phrase used a numerous times as a criticism against lazy writing in actual books where no one expects ability to explore different branches. Even if you don't see it as bad it's not a description which applies universally.

If I were to put it in D&D terms I would use dichotomy of "tailored vs status quo". If an army of evil moves to strike at the capital and heroes can arrive days before (and help to prepare defenses) or just in a nick of time to get in before the gates are closed or right before Evil Overlord orders the assault or even to the burned out ruins (which means the "quest" to "protect the capital" has effectively failed) it's not a speed of plot. If they always arrive to the most dramatic moment it's a speed of plot.

Edit: there is a difference between "events will happen when they get there" and "a specific event known in advance will happen when they get there".

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 06:49 PM
That's not what a speed of plot usually means. I have seen that phrase used a numerous times as a criticism against lazy writing in actual books where no one expects ability to explore different branches. Even if you don't see it as bad it's not a description which applies universally.

If I were to put it in D&D terms I would use dichotomy of "tailored vs status quo". If an army of evil moves to strike at the capital and heroes can arrive days before (and help to prepare defenses) or just in a nick of time to get in before the gates are closed or right before Evil Overlord orders the assault or even to the burned out ruins (which means the "quest" to "protect the capital" has effectively failed) it's not a speed of plot. If they always arrive to the most dramatic moment it's a speed of plot.

But your job as a GM is to make the moment they arrive the dramatic one, that’s why they play the game, so they can experience the drama and the stakes. Whether it’s dramatic because they have to rush to prepare the defenses or because the first stones are flying from the mangonels or because they swear revenge for the fallen doesn’t matter.

If they arrive at the smoking ruins and you say “well, looks like you were too late” and start packing your books up because they failed and there’s no game after that, you goofed somewhere.

Batcathat
2021-01-22, 06:52 PM
It kind of is though. The core of “travels at the speed of plot” is that the interesting events will happen when the protagonists arrive. In a game the players are the protagonists, and without players you don’t have a game. So the only time any events can ever happen is when they arrive. What they experience is plot, what they don’t because of the road not taken doesn’t exist.

Sure, but usually the term "speed of plot" is used to express the protagonists always arriving "just in time", regardless of other factors. In the context of this discussion, a party traveling at the speed of plot would arrive at the same time (in the narration, if not literally) whether they go on foot or by horse. Meanwhile, the party who isn't traveling at the speed of plot can actually affect the outcome by changing their speed.

In an RPG, I suppose the difference between the two is basically how the GM plan things. Either a certain even happens "when the party gets there" or it happens "in two days, regardless of where the party is.


But your job as a GM is to make the moment they arrive the dramatic one, that’s why they play the game, so they can experience the drama and the stakes. Whether it’s dramatic because they have to rush to prepare the defenses or because the first stones are flying from the mangonels or because they swear revenge for the fallen doesn’t matter.

Yes, a GM should provide drama, but they should also provide meaningful choice and meaningful consequences. Not to mention the world of the game feels more alive, more real, if it keeps on going at its own pace.


If they arrive at the smoking ruins and you say “well, looks like you were too late” and start packing your books up because they failed and there’s no game after that, you goofed somewhere.

Sure, but in that case the problem isn't that the GM allowed the time to pass, it's that the adventure had a single point of failure. If the Big Bad's army is going to attack in a week and the party shows up after two, they might indeed find smoking ruins but that doesn't mean the game's over, just that it's taken a new direction.

Elbeyon
2021-01-22, 07:05 PM
Punishing players for not using mounts is a lose lose for the players. Either they have to use mounts, which they don't want to do, or they get punished for doing what they find fun. Either way, the players are probably going to be having less fun.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 07:10 PM
Sure, but usually the term "speed of plot" is used to express the protagonists always arriving "just in time", regardless of other factors. In the context of this discussion, a party traveling at the speed of plot would arrive at the same time (in the narration, if not literally) whether they go on foot or by horse. Meanwhile, the party who isn't traveling at the speed of plot can actually affect the outcome by changing their speed.

In an RPG, I suppose the difference between the two is basically how the GM plan things. Either a certain even happens "when the party gets there" or it happens "in two days, regardless of where the party is.

Right, but because the players can only experience one version of the events, none of the others matter.

The only way this actually resolves into a meaningful choice is if it’s upfront. If the players know openly and in advance how their specific choices will affect the future event. If they are specifically told “ride horses to stop the event or don’t and be too late” then and only then is there a possibility for events to diverge.

If a thing happens in two days and they don’t know that, then the version of events they get is the only one which could ever possibly have happened to them. The what ifs and never weres aren’t part of the plot of this game, and never could have been because they aren’t what this group of players would have done and experienced.

Saint-Just
2021-01-22, 07:16 PM
But your job as a GM is to make the moment they arrive the dramatic one, thatÂ’s why they play the game, so they can experience the drama and the stakes. Whether itÂ’s dramatic because they have to rush to prepare the defenses or because the first stones are flying from the mangonels or because they swear revenge for the fallen doesnÂ’t matter.

If they arrive at the smoking ruins and you say “well, looks like you were too late” and start packing your books up because they failed and there’s no game after that, you goofed somewhere.

Any of the above can be dramatic and there is no need to game over. Yet there is a difference between "an event" happens and "the event" happens.

From the tactical combat perspective "speed of the plot" usually means that the task before the characters is about the same whenever they happen to arrive. No sped of the plot means that situation may change, rewarding resourcefulness, ingenuity, and sometimes sheer dumb luck.

If the GM likes to prepare significant notes and plan encounters in advance you can look at the physical objects and know that they were preparing for different options depending on previous decisions and encounters.

And finally - there is an idea of "speed of the plot" outside of gaming. There is a difference, and people are using this phrase to denote that difference. To say that all events in a plot are "at the speed of the plot" is to remove that useful distinction.

All in all it seems that you are either arguing that a certain quality of fictitious timelines/plots wildly observed and discussed doesn't meaningfully exist (it's hard to swallow, and requires a little more explanation and proof) or that it shouldn't be denoted by the phrase "speed of the plot" which is... not even prescriptivist vs descriptivist, because there is no older usage or general rule which forbids it, it's just your own feeling.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 07:35 PM
Ultimately “speed of plot” is just a really badly applied phrase to a tabletop game which is driven by real-time human decision making.

It’s intended to describe decisions made by an author in order to produce a fixed narrative, it can’t adequately describe a narrative that has players who are required to remain involved no matter the outcome.

The reason is that in fixed media non-diagetic elements cannot affect the plot, but in games everything is driven by a non-diagetic element, the real-time experience of the players at the table.

Batcathat
2021-01-22, 07:39 PM
Right, but because the players can only experience one version of the events, none of the others matter.

But it matters whether the other ones could have happened or not. If I know my GM is of the "speed of plot school" then I know it doesn't matter how much I hurry or whatever clever plans I come up with to travel faster, since I'll just arrive exactly when the GM intended for me to arrive. If I know it actually matters how fast I get there, it's a pretty different experience, wouldn't you say?


The only way this actually resolves into a meaningful choice is if it’s upfront. If the players know openly and in advance how their specific choices will affect the future event. If they are specifically told “ride horses to stop the event or don’t and be too late” then and only then is there a possibility for events to diverge.

Yeah, sure. Though I'd argue that something like "the army is marching on the city with intent to plunder" or whatever should be enough to make the party realize that their own speed might matter.


It’s intended to describe decisions made by an author in order to produce a fixed narrative, it can’t adequately describe a narrative that has players who are required to remain involved no matter the outcome.

Why not? The author having the protagonists arrive just in time for whatever is planned to happen and the GM having the party arrive just in time for whatever is planned to happen are both correct (and rather similar) examples of the term.


The reason is that in fixed media non-diagetic elements cannot affect the plot, but in games everything is driven by a non-diagetic element, the real-time experience of the players at the table.

True, but I don't see how that relates to the idea of speed of plot.

Saint-Just
2021-01-22, 07:46 PM
Ultimately “speed of plot” is just a really badly applied phrase to a tabletop game which is driven by real-time human decision making.

It’s intended to describe decisions made by an author in order to produce a fixed narrative, it can’t adequately describe a narrative that has players who are required to remain involved no matter the outcome.

No it's not.

While I was talking about GM's preparations before there is even better example - published modules/adventures. They are something that people can experience multiple times (usually in different groups but sometimes even in the same one). And if the author has intended only one possible moment they will note so and if they intended the range of possibilities they will note so. In fact - in the "worst module" thread there is at least a couple of ones critiqued precisely for taking the speed of plot to extremes. They set up a high-pressure, high-stakes situation and then no matter what you do you are still end up mostly with the same combat encounters and same results. If you only play through it once you may not see it... and yet many players will. In fact "speed of the plot" is an often seen component of railroading (though you may have the first one without the second and vice versa). So in those situations "speed of the plot" actually describes decisions made by the author (of a module) - namely that no matter how clever or stupid, prepared, lucky etc. players are they will get the same series of cutscenes (and combat encounters). All of the above can apply to a GM's homebrew as well

GloatingSwine
2021-01-22, 07:52 PM
But it matters whether the other ones could have happened or not. If I know my GM is of the "speed of plot school" then I know it doesn't matter how much I hurry or whatever clever plans I come up with to travel faster, since I'll just arrive exactly when the GM intended for me to arrive. If I know it actually matters how fast I get there, it's a pretty different experience, wouldn't you say?

My argument though is that they couldn’t have happened. Even if the GM wrote them, this group of players was always going to experience the one they experienced. Their characters would not let them do otherwise (both real world and played)


Yeah, sure. Though I'd argue that something like "the army is marching on the city with intent to plunder" or whatever should be enough to make the party realize that their own speed might matter.

Unless they know how fast is fast enough in advance though, they aren’t making a meaningful decision.

For all they know the only way to get there in time is to teleport, unless you tell them.

Uninformed decisions are not meaningful decisions, if your players don’t know the conditions in advance well enough to reasonably predict the outcome of specific choices their decisions have no weight to them.

Batcathat
2021-01-22, 07:59 PM
My argument though is that they couldn’t have happened. Even if the GM wrote them, this group of players was always going to experience the one they experienced. Their characters would not let them do otherwise (both real world and played)

Now it feels like we're getting more into philosophical questions of free will than definitions and ramifications of speed of plot. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's something of a strange turn. (Though using your logic, it's the only turn the discussion could have taken, I suppose).


Unless they know how fast is fast enough in advance though, they aren’t making a meaningful decision.

For all they know the only way to get there in time is to teleport, unless you tell them.

Uninformed decisions are not meaningful decisions, if your players don’t know the conditions in advance well enough to reasonably predict the outcome of specific choices their decisions have no weight to them.

Not knowing every detail is not the same as making a completely uninformed decision. If you're in a situation where time is of the essence, it's quite easy to guess that using a faster method of travel might be important, even if you don't know the exact specifications.

The Fury
2021-01-22, 07:59 PM
After a few games where my characters got things like horses and they were lost or got stolen, I get why players might not find them particularly useful. Also, it pays to know your GM. If the campaign is going to be a lot of dungeon crawls, having a horse might suck. (Depending on the game of course. Some games do mention that horses won't enter a dungeon.)

I'm fine with having characters use horses if the quest-giver loans them to the party or something, so it's not something I'm opposed to on principle.

That said, if it's a modern setting, cars and personal vehicles tend to be much worse. Maybe this is just my bad luck or the kinds of games I'm in, but every car or vehicle I've ever had a character own has either been riddled with bullets or totally obliterated. At least with horses, GMs usually have some restraint about killing them.

RedMage125
2021-01-22, 08:17 PM
This is odd to me, because early in my play experience, 2e and up, starting in 1997(Pelor, I'm old), we always had horses. And that includes when I was a DM (early 3e). Horses got attacked usually only if it made sense to. Hell, in the first game I DM'd, I remember when one of the players' horses and one player were the only ones to make their Will save against a krenshar's fear (wasn't the guy ON that horse, either). Later, that same horse was the only one they were able to get Animal Handling checks to make go into a cave. I remember this, because I told them "that horse either has nerves of steel, or a brain of jell-o". And honestly, given that they had negotiated for a discount horse, I was inclined towards the latter.

My players have even had interaction with their horses as more than background set pieces. Warhorses, for example, are usually extremely ill-tempered brutes. There was one point where a paladin (4e) had forgotten to specify the care that he usually did when handling his horse, and I had it bite him. Which became funnier when he reminded me that he was wearing plate, which includes gauntlets. Stupid Horse.

It wasn't until like 2014 that I first encountered this "we don't want horses" mentality. My first Pathfinder character was a Dwarf Cleric of Cayden Cayleon (sp?). I had a horse and a wagon, and the rest of the players thought that was weird. Until my wagon was the only reason we were able to carry all the loot out of the dungeon. Same with my first 5e game.

People seem to not want horses anymore. And it baffles me, because it didn't used to be the case, IME.

Saint-Just
2021-01-22, 08:20 PM
My argument though is that they couldnÂ’t have happened. Even if the GM wrote them, this group of players was always going to experience the one they experienced. Their characters would not let them do otherwise (both real world and played)

Unless they know how fast is fast enough in advance though, they arenÂ’t making a meaningful decision.

For all they know the only way to get there in time is to teleport, unless you tell them.

Uninformed decisions are not meaningful decisions, if your players donÂ’t know the conditions in advance well enough to reasonably predict the outcome of specific choices their decisions have no weight to them.

First argument presumes degree of causal determinism not commonly presumed. People can decide one way or the other even if it's only about what they want to do; but in a game you have more possibilities for their decisions to be swayed one way or the other. Even the dies could have rolled differently - and even if you don't do something like the "enemy army is 1d6+1 days away from the capital" taking more or less damage or something like that can influence the decision to stop and rest instead of going deeper etc.

About the second: even uninformed choices can be dramatic when viewed in retrospect, but more importantly there is a difference between uninformed choices and choices made with imperfect information. There are a lot of games built entirely on making choices with imperfect information, and in almost every TTRPG you don't even have the TT part based on the perfect information (unlike most TT strategies/ skirmish games). Why would you base RPG part on perfect information only? Yes, it needs some baseline but it's not like in the numerous stories (and IRL situations) where people actually know distances involved and average speed of movement etc. there was no "we need to decide whether to send help given the fact that there is a possibility that we're already too late", or dozen other permutations. It's quite dramatic, in fact. So knowing the outcome is not 100% necessary. In fact it goes back to the "speed of plot" and the general railroading - if you are afraid of railroad you do need to know the consequences in advance (or how do you know you wasn't railroaded) if you are reasonably sure that the choice is not cosmetic you can try to choose between different actions with imperfect information.

Telok
2021-01-22, 10:38 PM
It kind of is though. The core of “travels at the speed of plot” is that the interesting events will happen when the protagonists arrive. In a game the players are the protagonists, and without players you don’t have a game. So the only time any events can ever happen is when they arrive. What they experience is plot, what they don’t because of the road not taken doesn’t exist.

Interesting. So what was I doing when I set a date for the lizardmen to attack a fort? The players (who found & read the written schedule of the plan) could have rowed over from the island in a about 6 hours, hustled along a road for another 10 or so hours, and been there about 9 hours before the attack. Or they could have gone slower or rested on the road and gotten there just before the attack. Instead they rowed over from the island, then rowed up river at less than walking speed for 8 hours, then got off and ran for a few hours, then stopped to rest for 8 hours at the first bit of fatigue. After another 6 or some such hours the attack went off as planned with the PCs about 4 hours jog away. The PCs wandered into the wrecked fort some 10+ hours later with half the soldiers dead, handed over the attack plans & maps, said "sorry" and left.

So was that "speed of plot"? Because most of the time I see "speed of plot" referenced is like Pazio's Starfinder adventure path Dead Suns. In that, no matter how long you take walking place to place or how many weeks it takes to repair your spaceship, you're always a week behind the bad guys. Of course it also means that no matter how fast you go, spend money on actual vehicles instead of required armor & weapon upgrades, don't upgrade the ship because you take "you must hurry to catch up" at face value... nope, you're still a week behing the bad guys.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-01-22, 11:32 PM
As a note, the value of horses depends strongly on system.

For example, 5e D&D doesn't actually give you any overland travel-speed benefit from having horses unless you have multiple remounts. At most you might be able to argue that you can do the Fast travel pace (30 miles/day) without the Forced March penalties (for repeated fast days). But that's up to the DM, not set by the system.

Which does kinda make sense--it's not like even with horses you're moving all that much faster, and horses have to stop to eat (where humans can famously eat on the march). And horses carrying significant weight (or horses with wagons) tire faster--you can't reasonably move faster than a walk for most of the day, while people can (in theory) walk for 8 hours.

And if you've got wagons and followers (not all mounted), you're traveling at the slowest person's pace (which is why it doesn't also penalize "slow" races in overland walking).

So the main benefits of horses are
* carrying capacity (which depends on using variant encumbrance, because the default is really stinking generous unless everyone dumped STR and no one has a bag of holding)
* "comfort" which isn't well defined in the rules and subject to DM quibbling.

Contrast this with
* expense + difficulty feeding
* vulnerability
* having to figure out what to do with them while you're in a dungeon

horses don't look like such a good deal.
----------
My particular parties tend not to mount up. Although my current game's paladin has find steed (for a panther as a halfling) and was using a riding dog before that. They don't have problems with boats, however...or at least I hope not (spoilers!)

Segev
2021-01-23, 12:13 AM
No it's not.

While I was talking about GM's preparations before there is even better example - published modules/adventures. They are something that people can experience multiple times (usually in different groups but sometimes even in the same one). And if the author has intended only one possible moment they will note so and if they intended the range of possibilities they will note so. In fact - in the "worst module" thread there is at least a couple of ones critiqued precisely for taking the speed of plot to extremes. They set up a high-pressure, high-stakes situation and then no matter what you do you are still end up mostly with the same combat encounters and same results. If you only play through it once you may not see it... and yet many players will. In fact "speed of the plot" is an often seen component of railroading (though you may have the first one without the second and vice versa). So in those situations "speed of the plot" actually describes decisions made by the author (of a module) - namely that no matter how clever or stupid, prepared, lucky etc. players are they will get the same series of cutscenes (and combat encounters). All of the above can apply to a GM's homebrew as well

Exactly. "Speed of Plot" refers to your decisions about things like how to get someplace and how much to prepare and how long to rest having absolutely no bearing on when the plot event occurs. Only when you arrive will the plot event happen. You could go on 40 sidequests and get a bunch of magical items, then camp out right outside the plot event location to make sure you're at full resources before going in, or you can rush straight there after a tense fight that the bad guy who you'll meet at the plot location just fled from to try to catch him before he does something terrible, and he'll just be starting "something terrible" that you have to stop when you get there either way.

The module that made me stop playing PFS was like that: we had an NPC who we were trying to rescue who'd gotten chased into a ravine by some bad guys just after a really tense and draining fight. Turns out, we were intended by the module writer to take a night to rest before pursuing anyway. When we didn't, the fight still played out exactly as it would have had we rested, except we had to fight on our diminished resources. We didn't arrive any earlier in the scene, we didn't prevent anything from happening by rushing to it, and we wouldn't have missed anything if we'd taken the night to recover.

That's "speed of plot." Your choices don't change what events will happen because they happen when you get there, no matter how long it takes.

False God
2021-01-23, 12:17 AM
Honestly I wish I had this problem. My players are always in a hurry to get everywhere. And no, the time constraints are not that harsh, and yes, they've played with me through multiple games to understand the sort of time constraints I use.

-----
On the subject of horses in particular as a player I mostly find them troublesome. More food and water consumption, more "NPCs" to protect or corral, or leave behind to get stolen at the dungeon entrance. I think it's reasonable to have one "pack mule" at a time, maybe a wagon to go with it. Taking care of one horse and one wagon isn't so bad. But a whole group's worth?

But I'm not a big fan of pets in games at all. I tend to find that they're rather poorly equipped extensions of the character that are often used as cannon fodder by the system or as "motivation" via kidnapping or murder like character relatives. And then I find DMs to be massive sticklers on getting a new one, not to mention the in-game penalties for losing one.

Magical steeds are another story entirely. It it doesn't require food and water and I can magically poof it into my pocket when I need to go indoors, great!

Elbeyon
2021-01-23, 12:20 AM
Honestly I wish I had this problem. My players are always in a hurry to get everywhere. And no, the time constraints are not that harsh, and yes, they've played with me through multiple games to understand the sort of time constraints I use.That's something I hadn't thought about. In dnd people level up really fast. Spending some time traveling is good padding to slow down leveling IC.

JoeJ
2021-01-23, 12:57 AM
As a note, the value of horses depends strongly on system.

For example, 5e D&D doesn't actually give you any overland travel-speed benefit from having horses unless you have multiple remounts. At most you might be able to argue that you can do the Fast travel pace (30 miles/day) without the Forced March penalties (for repeated fast days). But that's up to the DM, not set by the system.

Which does kinda make sense--it's not like even with horses you're moving all that much faster, and horses have to stop to eat (where humans can famously eat on the march). And horses carrying significant weight (or horses with wagons) tire faster--you can't reasonably move faster than a walk for most of the day, while people can (in theory) walk for 8 hours.

And if you've got wagons and followers (not all mounted), you're traveling at the slowest person's pace (which is why it doesn't also penalize "slow" races in overland walking).

So the main benefits of horses are
* carrying capacity (which depends on using variant encumbrance, because the default is really stinking generous unless everyone dumped STR and no one has a bag of holding)
* "comfort" which isn't well defined in the rules and subject to DM quibbling.

Contrast this with
* expense + difficulty feeding
* vulnerability
* having to figure out what to do with them while you're in a dungeon

horses don't look like such a good deal.
----------
My particular parties tend not to mount up. Although my current game's paladin has find steed (for a panther as a halfling) and was using a riding dog before that. They don't have problems with boats, however...or at least I hope not (spoilers!)

The real benefits of horses in 5e aren't in overland travel, but in combat:

* 60' movement, or 120' if the horse takes the Dash action.
* The ability to use a 1d12 reach weapon one-handed.
* Depending on how the DM interprets the rule, you may be able to Dodge and Disengage without using your action (the horse can do these; the question is whether or not the DM allows you to get the benefit as well).

Add the Mounted Combattant feat and you also get:

* Advantage on attacks vs. unmounted opponents smaller than your horse.
* The ability to keep your horse alive by forcing opponents to target you instead.
* The ability to keep your horse alive by turning a Dex save for 1/2 damage into a Dex save for no damage.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-01-23, 01:10 AM
The real benefits of horses in 5e aren't in overland travel, but in combat:

* 60' movement, or 120' if the horse takes the Dash action.
* The ability to use a 1d12 reach weapon one-handed.
* Depending on how the DM interprets the rule, you may be able to Dodge and Disengage without using your action (the horse can do these; the question is whether or not the DM allows you to get the benefit as well).

Add the Mounted Combattant feat and you also get:

* Advantage on attacks vs. unmounted opponents smaller than your horse.
* The ability to keep your horse alive by forcing opponents to target you instead.
* The ability to keep your horse alive by turning a Dex save for 1/2 damage into a Dex save for no damage.

Yes, at a severe cost. Action economy. The horse and you take separate turns, despite having the same initiative count. So if you want to move and attack, you can't split it up. Or you have to ready an action, in which case you only get 1 attack.

And you're rather stuck in things like buildings (or anything without 15' ceilings and 10+' hallways). And become a huge, cumbersome target that mostly gets in the way. That mainly affects Mounted Combatant (a waste of a feat whenever you're not mounted) or specializing in lances (a bad idea unless mounted). Unless you're small riding a medium mount of course. And since there aren't as many creatures that are smaller than Medium (compared to smaller than Large), you waste most of the 1st point of Mounted Combatant. So Small on a Medium mount works ok. Medium on a Large only works if you're basically never indoors.
------
But more importantly, I talked about overland benefits because that's what the conversation had been about. Everyone was focusing on overland travel (speed and comfort), not combat uses. That's a whole separate ballgame.

Pauly
2021-01-23, 01:13 AM
The reasons when I play a game I avoid relying on a transport system (horse, boat, flying saucer):-
- GMs will always find a way to render them useless if you use them too effectively in the eyes of the GM.
- GMs have little qualms about killing them off or forcing the players to lose them if you use them too effectively.
- If the plot requires you to get somewhere faster than walking the GM will ensure an alternate means of transport is available.
- Players will always try to upgrade them beyond their intended capacity. A transport vehicle will be upgraded to a combat vehicle. A slow combat vehicle will be upgraded to a fast vehicle. Excess capacity will be used an opportunity to make money either as cargo or smuggling. GMs or other players will tire of this game within a game.
- Maintenance and upkeep at anything approaching realistic levels becomes another game within a game which takes away from the RP part of being in a RPG.

Unless the transport is an integral part of the game you are better off with you can hire/be loaned/steal one whenever you need one to be used once then forgotten about.

vasilidor
2021-01-23, 02:09 AM
In response to the original post (have not read the rest of the comment s yet) I stopped using horses in one campaign after about twenty or so died under my character due to random encounters in which monsters ate the horse.
This was a fighter/cleric from the early days of 3.0 who was specced out for mounted combat.
Then another game came along and I tried using horses again. 20 horses later again...
See where I am going with this?
It never failed, no matter who's horse it was.
the only reason the druids in our games started using companions in 3.5 is they advanced with us in hit dice and could be specked out to help it survive via gear, but our horses were always the same with no means of advancement so we saw them as a waste of time.
then our wizard got high enough to use teleport and solved our travel woes.

DwarfFighter
2021-01-23, 07:53 AM
People seem to not want horses anymore. And it baffles me, because it didn't used to be the case, IME.

This is what I am talking about.

This is also true in most video games: I don't think I have ever played one where riding is preferable to walking: Your ability to look around is usually poor or at least very different from your first-person view, combat from horseback is usually not an option, or a joke.

When my horse got killed by a dragon in Skyrim I regretted ever buying one since now I was out in the hicks and slowed down by being over-encumbered (can't leave those dragon scales behind!). I had relied on that horse, and thus put myself in an unfavorable situation. I never got another horse.

In Tabletop RPGs I make the conscious effort to acquire a horse when I am a player, and I see my fellow players shrug and simply not care. Their characters can walk or ride in the cart, and that's good enough for them. It's not even much of a discussion, ever.

"Hey, why don't we get horses! We can travel faster!"
"Nah."

There's no real discussion on the topic either, nobody argues against horses, it's just a streak of apathy and disinterest. Sure, horses are useful tools for when the plot demands it, but it's not something that has a wide appeal as part of the make-up of the party.

It's a first-person mindset, I feel. Players know their character is in control of their own 5 ft. square and are happy to leave it at that.

-DF

anthon
2021-01-23, 12:08 PM
it is totally true that if the DM sets up a horse to be killed for "dramatic flare" but the player dumped 200 gold into that horse at the expense of things like provisions or weapons or armor, they are going to be pissed.

at higher levels, few versions of DND do anything to save the horse, and vehicles are a favorite target for explosions and sinking.

the childish desire of a DM like an angry toddler to smash your toys is prime reason to act jaded about dependency on vehicles.


However,
if you want players to actually use vehicles, you have to make those vehicles worth using. They have to become characters. Characters are themselves, vehicles. Vehicles with containers.

So begin with the theory that a player character is a mecha with an AI. it has weapons, armor, limbs, mobility, articulation, actuation, prehensile ability to manipulate the environment, sensor sweeps for visual, audio, etc. And a personality. Its also a container because it can hold the pilot.

Now strip out the personality and you just have a pilot instead, and that's basically the mecha pilot.

Knock off a few options and you get to vehicles and horses. Horses think. Horses might drag your unconscious body back to the cleric across miles. Horses can kick really hard. Horses can sprint 50 mph. Horses can wear armor. Horses can tow carriages of nobility or carts of treasure. Even horse pouches are a container function. A character's inventory is an expansion of their capacity, and a horse or boat can do that. But if the DM tries to rob the player of that expanded inventory, by robbing the horse, or sinking/robbing the boat, or using plot narrative to make the boat/horse inaccessible, or not useful for this or that scene, the players will find the usefulness of the vehicle/mount to be worthless.

Boats can be decked out with special sails, tough hulls, cannons, ballista, grappling hooks and more. Below decks you can have officers cabins, mage libraries, or treasure vaults. Paintings of your adventuring party that remind them of how awesome they are.


The Show Knight Rider was about a car.. but the car was better than other cars.

if knight rider was about a dude in a leather jacket who got car jacked in episode 1, or had his car smashed by a truck in episode 2, it wouldn't be the same show.

bluntly, D&D editions often make vehicles/mounts SUCK. The are near worthless and ridiculously expensive, and then become targets of misery "awww, your dragon hoard on the 40,000 gp boat is now at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by 10 leviathans immune to magic stuck in a trade deal with the mer-empire... shoulda used a teleport spell."

Asmotherion
2021-01-23, 01:25 PM
Some players enjoy the RP and random encounters of taking months to reach a destination.

It's also not very beneffical if only one guy goes on horse while others go on foot, so it's kind of a group decision.

Saint-Just
2021-01-23, 02:51 PM
Some players enjoy the RP and random encounters of taking months to reach a destination.

It's also not very beneffical if only one guy goes on horse while others go on foot, so it's kind of a group decision.

In any world resembling reality one horse would be a huge benefit to the group. In a dangerous place horseman can scout ahead of the group without slowing it down and will find it easier to escape if he finds any trouble; in a settled place outrider can ride ahead to reserve places and make general preparations so the group will be able to rest sooner or better; even in empty wilderness being able to rest your legs in turns while still moving at the walking pace will allow you to cover more distance in a day without moving faster.

It's just the fact many of those are not really modeled by the majority of the game systems, and without mechanical reward many players will not do something in-character when they will absolutely do so if they have found themselves in similar circumstances.

Ravens_cry
2021-01-23, 03:53 PM
It might also help if mounts were more durable, so now the players have a reason to form an emotional bond with the character. You probably also want to avoid your typical dungeon design, as, while you can imagine a dog carefully making their way down a tilted ladder or being lowered by a rope iI]in extremis[/I], your typical fantasy RPG dungeon is not meant for a large quadruped without opposable thumbs. This always frustrated me, because I'd love to play a character with a mount more often. Riding dogs don't completely scratch that itch. So, awkward in a typical combat situation for a fantasy RPG, fragile, and expensive. Is it no wonder they don't want to use them?

quinron
2021-01-23, 06:09 PM
In Tabletop RPGs I make the conscious effort to acquire a horse when I am a player, and I see my fellow players shrug and simply not care. Their characters can walk or ride in the cart, and that's good enough for them. It's not even much of a discussion, ever.

"Hey, why don't we get horses! We can travel faster!"
"Nah."

There's no real discussion on the topic either, nobody argues against horses, it's just a streak of apathy and disinterest. Sure, horses are useful tools for when the plot demands it, but it's not something that has a wide appeal as part of the make-up of the party.

This provokes a question that I don't think has come up yet: your complaint in the OP is that your players don't use horses/vehicles. But when you say that, are you complaining that they don't choose to seek out and purchase horses for use, or that even when they can get them for free - say they're offered free horses as part of the reward or supply for a mission - they still choose not to ride them? Because I think these two scenarios look very different to a player.

LordCdrMilitant
2021-01-23, 07:12 PM
There is this weird thing I've noticed when playing RPGs with my group. Maybe it's just us, but my players don't like using horses. Or boats. Any time an adventure calls for the PCs to go cross country they insist on walking. Horses are available, but they'll prefer to bring a pack mule to riding. It seems to boil down to this mind-set: "If I buy a horse, the horse can get killed and I'm back to walking. If I just walk, I have nothing to lose!" A pack mule too can get killed, but somehow that doesn't register in the same manner. Why? I have no idea!

When it comes to boats, the players seem to immediately concern themselves with "What if the boat sinks!" I've had players insisting on wearing sacks of cork attached to them at all time, and this isn't always played as a joke. There is something about moving into what is essentially a moving house that can drop into an abyss at any given moment the makes my players worried about losing all their stuff in one big Gotcha! moment. How often does this happen in our campaigns? It never has.

I don't think this is an actual problem - if I need the players to just get with the program I can always guarantee for them that I won't use their commitment to a horse, or a boat, to screw them over. But it's still a curious quirk I wonder if other GMs have observed in their group.

-DF

Your party seems little paranoid. My players definitely see horses as a waste of money, but they're plenty happy to ride a boat places.

Horses can't be ridden into dungeons and other adventure areas, and someone has to guard them and prevent them from wandering away or being killed, so it feels like a waste of money to clothe and feed.


Boats though, not sure what the problem is, beside the old joke about how the GM has a slew of aquatic monsters they've been waiting to use and it's always the kraken.

Shpadoinkle
2021-01-23, 07:27 PM
This is what I am talking about.

This is also true in most video games: I don't think I have ever played one where riding is preferable to walking: Your ability to look around is usually poor or at least very different from your first-person view, combat from horseback is usually not an option, or a joke.

There are only two games I can think of where horses are preferable to walking. First is Ocarina of Time (and that's only because it's faster than walking... and even then, you pretty much only use your horse to cross Hyrule Field to reach new areas, then once you get the warp spell for the new area you don't need the horse anymore.)

Second is... well, a couple series actually: Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, and Warriors Orochi (which a crossover between the first two.) And even then, unless your character is particularly good at mounted combat (in DW5, for instance, Ma Chao was THE best horseman in the game, and considered top-tier when mounted, right up there with Lu Bu) you pretty much only used your horse to get from place to place faster, and you hopped off your horse to do actual fighting because on foot you're more maneuverable, and most characters while mounted would just simply swing their weapon in an arc that it was kind of difficult to hit anything with.

In D&D, horses are just... a liability. They need to be fed and groomed and more importantly paid for, and unless you want to spend your RP time taking care of your horse you have to hire someone to tend to them for you, and if THAT NPC dies not only are you directly responsible for his death but you have to take care of the horses yourself. Furthermore, the warrior classes are notoriously starved for skill points, so either you spec FULLY into being a horseman with Ride and Handle Animal, or you spend those skill points somewhere more useful, like Craft: Underwater Basket Weaving. And if your horse dies, your feats and skills are now completely useless, which means you're pretty much stuck with your crappy basic attack that you haven't specced for until you can get a replacement horse, AND you have to either replace your horse armor or somehow pry it away from whatever killed your last horse, which you're at a major disadvantage for because you don't HAVE a horse, which you've built your character around.

Alternately, you could ignore the existence of horses and completely ignore all the problems I just described. Hmm... I wonder why most players tend to go with the latter route...

As far as travel time? Riding a horse actually isn't particularly faster than just walking. It's less tiring, but there are spells and magic items and so on that remove fatigue and exhaustion.

There just plain isn't any incentive TO use horses, and lots of players have experienced their mounts either being killed, stolen, or spooked and running off, thereby losing any investment they had, to care about them anymore. Horses are only worth it IF you've specced for it, AND your horse doesn't die, and players have zero control over the latter, so why risk it?

Alcore
2021-01-23, 09:39 PM
Hmm... think the animal companion rules for 3.5 would work in 5e? :smallconfused:

HD doesn't translate to BAB there so that would be fine. Might need to half natural armor gain. Perhaps remove all specials except evasions. Maybe 'attune' to them like a magic item...

Something to think about to make the horse more useful in 5e :smallsmile:

Pex
2021-01-24, 12:41 AM
Is it inevitable at some point in a campaign every DM thinks their players don't have horse sense?
:smallyuk:

Elbeyon
2021-01-24, 12:48 AM
Apparently, horses are red shirts.

Telok
2021-01-24, 12:57 AM
Hmm... think the animal companion rules for 3.5 would work in 5e? :smallconfused:

HD doesn't translate to BAB there so that would be fine. Might need to half natural armor gain. Perhaps remove all specials except evasions. Maybe 'attune' to them like a magic item...

Something to think about to make the horse more useful in 5e :smallsmile:

Nah, the ranger class already did the air breathing mermaid thing to that. You couldn't make it any better than the trashy ranger pet from the PH and it's already pretty much the worst already.

I've realized 5e D&D has lots of air breathing mermaid issues, but that's not for this thread.

Segev
2021-01-24, 01:01 AM
Nah, the ranger class already did the air breathing mermaid thing to that. You couldn't make it any better than the trashy ranger pet from the PH and it's already pretty much the worst already.

I've realized 5e D&D has lots of air breathing mermaid issues, but that's not for this thread.

Technically, it's not an air-breathing mermaid issue because there was no baseline assumption of animal companions before that one, but that's me quibbling over definitions of "air breathing mermaid." It's definitely bad design.

Also, 5e has a habit of having alternate or optional class features that are just better than previously-published ones as unacknowledged patches for things. Homebrew can absolutely make something better.

VoxRationis
2021-01-24, 02:28 AM
I would have to rate the tactical value of horses as being rather larger, in spite of all the downsides. First, being mounted provides the ability for hit-and-run attacks against slower opponents using ranged weapons or magic. Second, it allows use of mounted lance charges, the efficacy of which depends on the system and edition, but they usually bear the advantage of not being within the enemy's reach until the attack actually occurs. Third, it provides heavily-armored characters the ability to flee a combat that has turned sour. In the D&D campaign I'm in at present (technically on hiatus), we lost half the party when the battle lines we were participating in collapsed and the heavily-armored characters couldn't withdraw fast enough by virtue of their lower movement speed. Having been mounted would have avoided that. Fourth, it allows the mounted character to more swiftly move to reinforce a distant position and potentially intervene several rounds sooner. Fifth, the horse represents a means of carrying more weight, either in cargo or in weapons and armor. Sixth, any attack eventually done against the horse is an attack not directed at a party member. If being dismounted caused 1d6 damage but the attack that caused the character to be dismounted (and thus was not directed at the character, but rather the mount) was 2d6+12, that's still a gain. Even if the horse did absolutely nothing else in that action, it saved a healing potion.

(Obviously, many of these considerations represent a bias towards a campaign style where much of the action takes place outdoors and are often actual pitched battles, and thus will probably be of lesser value in campaigns centered around large dungeons, palace intrigues, and so forth.)

Now, obviously the horse represents a point of vulnerability, but this can be shored up in a few ways, depending on the system/edition. A simple low-level sanctuary spell in D&D can make the horse unlikely to be attacked in the first place. The Mounted Combat feat in 3.5 may be even more effective at preventing physical attacks, depending on PC Ride skill and NPC Will saves; its 5e counterpart is even better. Common area-of-effect spells can be anticipated and the horse included in the list of recipients of defensive spells (resist energy, etc.); this might not even be a significant resource burden depending on the level of the caster and the edition. (And of course, in some non-D&D systems, the horse is tougher than the person riding it.)

@OP: If you are concerned that the players don't use horses, if you consider it a problem that they don't, I would communicate to the players that speed will be a relevant factor in scenarios. Have NPCs estimate dates, or even give specific dates, for when an event will occur, so that the players know that if they invest resources into moving faster, they can make palpable gains. Hell, give them the opportunity to change a scenario from an assault on a fortified opponent to a defensive battle where they've already looted the dungeon with no opposition by beating their opponents to a location. Include battles where mobility is rewarded, such as against slow but strong opponents, or ones where the PCs may need to be present at several points.

LordCdrMilitant
2021-01-24, 04:53 AM
There are only two games I can think of where horses are preferable to walking. First is Ocarina of Time (and that's only because it's faster than walking... and even then, you pretty much only use your horse to cross Hyrule Field to reach new areas, then once you get the warp spell for the new area you don't need the horse anymore.)

Second is... well, a couple series actually: Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, and Warriors Orochi (which a crossover between the first two.) And even then, unless your character is particularly good at mounted combat (in DW5, for instance, Ma Chao was THE best horseman in the game, and considered top-tier when mounted, right up there with Lu Bu) you pretty much only used your horse to get from place to place faster, and you hopped off your horse to do actual fighting because on foot you're more maneuverable, and most characters while mounted would just simply swing their weapon in an arc that it was kind of difficult to hit anything with.

In D&D, horses are just... a liability. They need to be fed and groomed and more importantly paid for, and unless you want to spend your RP time taking care of your horse you have to hire someone to tend to them for you, and if THAT NPC dies not only are you directly responsible for his death but you have to take care of the horses yourself. Furthermore, the warrior classes are notoriously starved for skill points, so either you spec FULLY into being a horseman with Ride and Handle Animal, or you spend those skill points somewhere more useful, like Craft: Underwater Basket Weaving. And if your horse dies, your feats and skills are now completely useless, which means you're pretty much stuck with your crappy basic attack that you haven't specced for until you can get a replacement horse, AND you have to either replace your horse armor or somehow pry it away from whatever killed your last horse, which you're at a major disadvantage for because you don't HAVE a horse, which you've built your character around.

Alternately, you could ignore the existence of horses and completely ignore all the problems I just described. Hmm... I wonder why most players tend to go with the latter route...

As far as travel time? Riding a horse actually isn't particularly faster than just walking. It's less tiring, but there are spells and magic items and so on that remove fatigue and exhaustion.

There just plain isn't any incentive TO use horses, and lots of players have experienced their mounts either being killed, stolen, or spooked and running off, thereby losing any investment they had, to care about them anymore. Horses are only worth it IF you've specced for it, AND your horse doesn't die, and players have zero control over the latter, so why risk it?

I will offer the Mount and Blade series for a video game RPG where being mounted is desirable. Though the title might give it away, it is pretty much required to be mounted unless you want to play the game in hard mode. Not only is your overland speed on foot abysmal compared to mounted parties [who will either avoid you if you're stronger or just run you down if you're weaker], once combat is joined fighting dismounted puts you at a huge disadvantage both in basically all three of mobility, offense, and defense. Of course, the game is designed around mounted combat.

Alcore
2021-01-24, 08:45 AM
I will offer the Mount and Blade series for a video game RPG where being mounted is desirable. Though the title might give it away, it is pretty much required to be mounted unless you want to play the game in hard mode. Not only is your overland speed on foot abysmal compared to mounted parties [who will either avoid you if you're stronger or just run you down if you're weaker], once combat is joined fighting dismounted puts you at a huge disadvantage both in basically all three of mobility, offense, and defense. Of course, the game is designed around mounted combat.
I disagree. A common tactic i use is get a horse lord to follow me and try to beat him to a mountain. My *faster* infantry make short work of *slower* calvary on the near virtical slopes. Depending on the type of infantry they are in fact better for seiges.

Form up spearmen into a circle with archers in the middle if found in the open. Only a rookie, or the over confident, lets their troops rush the enemy horde style.


Mounted only is devastating when used right but it is not the focus of the game. Otherwise why does only one kingdom rely on it? Often i am the only one mounted with a few pack horses in inventory for extra speed.

Quertus
2021-01-24, 02:58 PM
Unless you can fast talk the GM into house-ruling the game to better match reality, the rules of the game *are* the reality that the characters live in. Claims that characters are "metagaming" by noticing those roles are fallacious - it's actually bad role-playing for them to act like their world matches ours in ways that is clearly doesn't.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: like our world unless otherwise noted. Germaine to this conversation, rules for overland movement are usually sufficiently detailed to qualify for the "otherwise noted" clause.


In any world resembling reality one horse would be a huge benefit to the group. In a dangerous place horseman can scout ahead of the group without slowing it down and will find it easier to escape if he finds any trouble; in a settled place outrider can ride ahead to reserve places and make general preparations so the group will be able to rest sooner or better;

That… sounds an awful lot like the lovechild of the cardinal sin of splitting the party and spotlight hogging: splitting the party for the express purpose of spotlight hogging. I'll not deny that a house could be useful in such scenarios, just that it's difficult to make such uses [good].

Which segues nicely into the issue of modern gamers wanting their characters to do things under their own power. Better to just walk under your own power until you can teleport under your own power, I recon.

Lastly, the *real* reason to avoid horses? "I put all my skill ranks in Ride(Dragon)!" :smallwink:

King of Nowhere
2021-01-24, 03:24 PM
That… sounds an awful lot like the lovechild of the cardinal sin of splitting the party and spotlight hogging: splitting the party for the express purpose of spotlight hogging. I'll not deny that a house could be useful in such scenarios, just that it's difficult to make such uses [good].:

so, the characters should make decisions based on convenience. except that here some decision results in splitting the party, so they should not take that decision? both can't be true at the same time.
and it's actually common, at least at my table, to split the party for scouting. you want to send the guy with high spot and hide to do it, not the bumbling brute in heavy armor that stands out like a beacon to anyone looking that way.
and when instead you need to scout with magic, divinations and stuff, then the caster takes the spotlight. it's how the game works, sometimes someone is best at a task and takes the spotlight.

you can't make an argument against horses by claiming that somebody with a horse would be more efficient, and hence he would hog the spotlight, so no horses. or someone else could make the same argument for spells. or skill points. Just imagine this: "if you take ranks in diplomacy, then you can get invited to the duke's party and learn stuff. and that's terrible! you'd split the party and hog the spotlight!"
it doesn't seem such a compelling argument any longer...

Trafalgar
2021-01-24, 04:49 PM
My Lizardfolk Barbarian uses horses for:
Breakfast
Second Breakfast
Elevenses
Luncheon
Afternoon Tea
Dinner
Supper

Ravens_cry
2021-01-24, 06:13 PM
My Lizardfolk Barbarian uses horses for:
Breakfast
Second Breakfast
Elevenses
Luncheon
Afternoon Tea
Dinner
Supper
Are you sure your Lizardfolk isn't three feet and change with fur bearing insteps?

Alcore
2021-01-24, 06:43 PM
Are you sure your Lizardfolk isn't three feet and change with fur bearing insteps?

Have you not met the Goblin King? :smallconfused:

Goblins of wealth clearly believe in all those meals too!

LordCdrMilitant
2021-01-24, 11:18 PM
I disagree. A common tactic i use is get a horse lord to follow me and try to beat him to a mountain. My *faster* infantry make short work of *slower* calvary on the near virtical slopes. Depending on the type of infantry they are in fact better for seiges.

Form up spearmen into a circle with archers in the middle if found in the open. Only a rookie, or the over confident, lets their troops rush the enemy horde style.


Mounted only is devastating when used right but it is not the focus of the game. Otherwise why does only one kingdom rely on it? Often i am the only one mounted with a few pack horses in inventory for extra speed.

Okay, this is true, but ish. Only 2 factions don't have cavalry, [I'm confused as to what you mean by only 1 faction relies on it? By my count Kergit, Swadia, and Sarranid all pretty much have a cavalry backbone, and Vaegir still have knights], and I know Nord Huskarlar have a speed boost to compensate.

On foot, and with foot infantry, moving up hills or engaging in forests is advantageous over the AI, but that's largely because you're fighting an AI, and you're doing that to overcome the mounted advantage.

If you, the player, are mounted and have a mounted party/party with lots of horses in it, you can chose your engages better than you can otherwise.

Infantry are better in sieges.

Misereor
2021-01-25, 02:20 AM
There is this weird thing I've noticed when playing RPGs with my group. Maybe it's just us, but my players don't like using horses.

Same here, both as a player and DM.
Adventurers go into dungeons, but horses don't. Horses have to stay outside, so you either bet that no wandering encounters happen, leave a party member outside to watch them, or get a hireling tough enough to beat a level approprate encounter, none of which are good investments. Even if you don't plan to enter any dungeons, random crap happen, and you then have to spend game time and energy dealing with mounts instead of heroic stuff. The result is that noone bothers with mounts until the cost is trivial, or as part of a build (character or adventure).

Also. Time factors are fine if the adventure warrants it, but if the DM was obviously inserting a time factor to the adventure in order to force us to use monuts, as a player I would probably just shrug and say "Deus ex machina. Not my !"#¤%&/ problem." and let the chips fall where they may.

Segev
2021-01-25, 03:56 AM
Same here, both as a player and DM.
Adventurers go into dungeons, but horses don't. Horses have to stay outside, so you either bet that no wandering encounters happen, leave a party member outside to watch them, or get a hireling tough enough to beat a level approprate encounter, none of which are good investments. Even if you don't plan to enter any dungeons, random crap happen, and you then have to spend game time and energy dealing with mounts instead of heroic stuff. The result is that noone bothers with mounts until the cost is trivial, or as part of a build (character or adventure).

Also. Time factors are fine if the adventure warrants it, but if the DM was obviously inserting a time factor to the adventure in order to force us to use monuts, as a player I would probably just shrug and say "Deus ex machina. Not my !"#¤%&/ problem." and let the chips fall where they may.

You could get a lot of hirelings and set up a defensible camp, which relies on the same thing that anything other than high level adventurers do to survive. I leave that nonspecific on purpose; something permits the world to have travelers who are not high level.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-25, 04:27 AM
@OP: If you are concerned that the players don't use horses, if you consider it a problem that they don't, I would communicate to the players that speed will be a relevant factor in scenarios. Have NPCs estimate dates, or even give specific dates, for when an event will occur, so that the players know that if they invest resources into moving faster, they can make palpable gains. Hell, give them the opportunity to change a scenario from an assault on a fortified opponent to a defensive battle where they've already looted the dungeon with no opposition by beating their opponents to a location. Include battles where mobility is rewarded, such as against slow but strong opponents, or ones where the PCs may need to be present at several points.

None of those really suggest "get a horse" in a meaningful way. Unless your players have a list of travel times and distances and they know what the date is, they're not likely to think "we need horses to get to those places in time". They're going to think "better set out now" and use the transport they were already using.

Especially not in D&D when it's a super short period of time where horses are reasonably available and not yet obsoleted by magic.

VoxRationis
2021-01-25, 04:56 AM
None of those really suggest "get a horse" in a meaningful way. Unless your players have a list of travel times and distances and they know what the date is, they're not likely to think "we need horses to get to those places in time". They're going to think "better set out now" and use the transport they were already using.

Especially not in D&D when it's a super short period of time where horses are reasonably available and not yet obsoleted by magic.

1) I fail to see how the same person could think that the situation was pressing enough to abandon whatever they're doing where they are so as to leave immediately but not think that it would be worth looking into a faster form of transport. "If I move faster, I could leave later to get there at the same time. Then I could spend the extra time doing something useful." (Or, of course, get there even earlier and get more time at the destination to make plans and preparations.) Anyone who's weighed different options for a commute has done that sort of analysis.

2) If the DM is providing dates for things in the game, the players likely know what the date is.

3) The period in D&D between horses becoming available and magical means of long-distance travel outpacing them is longer than you give it credit for, though it depends somewhat on what the party makeup and spell selection and the availability of particular magic items (I find it rare that one can assume access to enough of a particular magical effect via item that one can count on consistently being able to apply it to the whole party). Most low-level mobility enhancing spells are too short in duration for overland travel. Phantom steed will either take a prohibitive number of spell slots or a prohibitive amount of time to cast on a party of any reasonable size. 3e's overland flight isn't available until 9th level, and will only work on the caster. Teleportation circle in 5th is only available by 9th level at the earliest, and even then is of limited utility. If you're riding horses until you get above 10th level, that's still the better part of most campaigns and half of all but the very longest.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-25, 05:24 AM
1) I fail to see how the same person could think that the situation was pressing enough to abandon whatever they're doing where they are so as to leave immediately but not think that it would be worth looking into a faster form of transport. "If I move faster, I could leave later to get there at the same time. Then I could spend the extra time doing something useful." (Or, of course, get there even earlier and get more time at the destination to make plans and preparations.) Anyone who's weighed different options for a commute has done that sort of analysis.

In order to do that though, they need to already have the habit of using different forms of transport, otherwise they just won't think of it as an option. Remember the players don't know what's in your head, and the only things in the world are things you've told them.

If you want players to think about using horses, everyone else they pass on the road needs to be riding and the first thing they need to see in every town of any size is a livery stable. (And using horses for most of the things they're going to do on the road needs to not take skill investment or they'll feel like it's a bad choice).

StragaSevera
2021-01-25, 05:41 AM
I have never DMed in my life (because I'm too anxious to do so), but if I would encounter this problem, I would try to solve it via magic items. Something like this rough draft:

Saddle of Wise Adventurer. This magic saddle imbues the horse with a tiny part of her rider's essence, granting following benefits:
1) At the start of combat, your horse gains bonus hitpoints and saves based on her rider's level. This bonuses work for a surprise round (if any) and the first round of combat. The bonus hitpoints are spent first.
2) You can telepatically command a horse to run away from danger. If you are riding her at the time of the command, the saddle can slide you down, dismounting you with no action cost.
3) You sense the direction where the horse has gone, and can telepatically call back the horse. She tries to come back to you to the best of her ability, and you can sense if she for some reason cannot do it. This telepatic bond works in a certain radius [TBD, did not think about the balanced distance].

I think this item, if it does not cost much money, would solve many problems with having horses and still make combats kinda realistic - of course, some goblins can try to kill and eat the horse, but a wise horse owner would protect his steed from such attempts =-)

GloatingSwine
2021-01-25, 06:41 AM
Unless those are a standard off-the-shelf item like a standard longsword, that's not going to build the habit of riding a horse in your parties.

It would be a way to give a player who already wanted a horse a bit more utility, but it wouldn't make the whole party think "we should ride everywhere all the time", which was what the thread started with. Habitual riding.

To do that you have to do several things:

1. Normalise riding in the presentation of the world. Regularly meet riders, make livery stables a standard fixture of basically every significant civilisation and stabling a fixture of every inn, and specifically call them out in your descriptions even if the players don't have horses yet.

2. Shave off the inconvenience of horses by default. That means finding a way for them to not be mega-squishy in combat (sharing HP with their rider, for instance), and making riding in combat and fighting from horseback to at least some degree not require skill investment. (Remember, fighting is a day to day activity for adventurers). Also figure out how these horses are going to be secured in the wilds, using only skills that characters are likely to have taken anyway.

3. Give a mild bonus for riding when they could have walked in all situations not just "but now it matters because time".

StragaSevera
2021-01-25, 07:07 AM
Unless those are a standard off-the-shelf item like a standard longsword, that's not going to build the habit of riding a horse in your parties.

It would be a way to give a player who already wanted a horse a bit more utility, but it wouldn't make the whole party think "we should ride everywhere all the time", which was what the thread started with. Habitual riding.
Why not? For example, there is a cult of druids who think horses should not suffer for the questionable decision of their riders, and they are distributing such saddles en masse =-)

Misereor
2021-01-25, 07:24 AM
You could get a lot of hirelings and set up a defensible camp, which relies on the same thing that anything other than high level adventurers do to survive. I leave that nonspecific on purpose; something permits the world to have travelers who are not high level.

That would quickly become prohibitively expensive for low level adventurers.
It's something I would enjoy for a planned expedition, say the exploration of several jungle hexes, but that would also require some funding I think.
As for what allows low level travellers to survive, the answer is "adventurers who clear out dungeons and roaming monsters" :)


I actually ran a campaign at one point where the players were forcibly enrolled in a penal unit assigned to do sweep and clears of known dungeons, as he lawful evil society they were in didn't have many philantropic adventurers, and those there were tended to end up in trouble with the authorities. That party didn't have horses either, but of course that was to make it harder to escape until they had been sufficiently brainwashed to no longer think such thoughts.

Democratus
2021-01-25, 09:20 AM
I have mostly found that horses complicate things (mechanically and narratively) more than they help.

There are games where horses are much better, like Pendragon, because they are more central to the identity of the idiom.

But in most other games, they are too vulnerable. This results in them dying early or often - or then getting some kind of illogical special protections to prevent such. Both are narratively sub-optimal.

Xervous
2021-01-25, 09:21 AM
In my current campaign I’ve had great success with getting players onto mounts, baggage trains and ships (they’ve bought multiple ships and haven’t sunk one yet). More than a few are veterans of horrendous episodes like the Foggy Boat Scuffle and have good reason to dread setting foot on anything destined for the open sea.

The Squirrel Prophet has his goose gryphon mount that he steers clear of combat. The party has a small menagerie of pets and hirelings (okay they don’t care about the hirelings for some reason) but these don’t tend to be put in harms way.

I suspect their comfort in the ongoing campaign stems from transparency and consistency. If they announce they’re planning to sail along the coast and I remind them there’s been pirate sightings there (wereshark pirates no less) they took precautions and were not upset over sustaining damage and losses.

Generic travel is a default of no risk. If they were to encounter pirates, krakens, or eldritch grues every time they had the audacity to move from one area to the other I’m sure they wouldn’t have quite the entourage nor would they bring along the ship if they could help it. And furthermore how could the world even function if these random hazards cropped up with such frequency? Even making only one trip a year to sell goods at a neighboring market a farmer probably wouldn’t live to see twenty years.

Random mandatory attrition as a consequence of travel is something that boils down to an Oregon Trail event minus the PCs being much at risk (inherent in the definition of attrition ). Player survival being mostly expected, “you see bandits ahead and behind, its an ambush!” boils down to “lose 1d4 horses and 2d4 hirelings”. If the intent is attrition and the encounter is tuned such that the players can’t trivialize it (and thus avoid attrition) you might as well just roll the losses and move on with the game. With this understanding in place the only winning solution is to remove the resources from harms way. And again, if hirelings die this frequently who would want to be one?

But if the players see a big ol nasty beastie and decide to have a hireling poke ‘im with a stick? They’ve earned the ensuing combat and losses.

Inform the players, give them invitations to conflict as the general norm. Make normal travel safe (random encounters being at most 5% initially hostile). Flumph the sahuaghin, the party didn’t get on the boat to find combat, they did so at the suggestion of your plot hook leading them to another town. Show them it’s perfectly safe and fine. Reward dangerous PC actions with dangerous prizes. Let the safe and quiet path be just that. If the world as presented appears consistent to them, with inputs yielding hazard or safety as expected, then they’ll be more willing to interact with things like horses and boats rather than adopting a mindset that will serve them well against the perceived adversarial GM.

Quertus
2021-01-25, 10:32 AM
IMO, all this talk of making things easier is fighting for with fire - it's how we got here in the first place.

Horses were in more common use when things were *hard*, when we couldn't count on the GM to make things move at the speed of plot, when treasure and encounters weren't "balanced", and both whether you could flee, or how much you could bring back from successful venturers actually mattered.


you can't make an argument against horses by claiming that somebody with a horse would be more efficient, and hence he would hog the spotlight, so no horses.

Well, clearly I can, seeing as how I just did so. However, I could make that argument several much better ways.

Oh, let's start with your prompt:

or someone else could make the same argument for spells.

Actually, people *have been* making that argument about spells, for at least as long as "linear Fighter, quadratic Wizard" has been a meme. Most recently in the "why low magic" thread.

The post I was replying to talked about how, if *someone* had a horse, *they* could do this, and *they* could do that, quite literally leaving their party behind. It's one of the best arguments against horses I've heard.

Magic, OTOH, usually isn't quite so bad: everyone can stand around the scrying portal, making observations and commentary. Everyone can discuss what questions to interrogate their enemies with via Speak with Dead (in a certain web comic, the muggle leader was even the one *asking* the questions). Whereas the party cannot really participate in the spotlight opportunities of "having a horse".

Other posters have been harping on the disconnect between the fiction and the game. My point was that there are actually at least 3 layers: the fiction, the game, and the metagame. "Spotlight sharing" is a concern for the metagame. (Also, as I said earlier, with regards to travel speed, unless you can con your GM into making house rules to more closely match your vision of reality, the game *is* the fiction; insisting that the characters behave in accordance with a completely different set of rules than those of the world in which they live is… really odd.)


so, the characters should make decisions based on convenience. except that here some decision results in splitting the party, so they should not take that decision? both can't be true at the same time.
and

You should eat regularly, unless someone is actively trying to stab you in the face, in which case you should deal with that. Both can't be true at the same time.


it's actually common, at least at my table, to split the party for scouting.

Bleh! Hopefully, either your scout normally had severe spotlight deficit, or they'll find some nice, spotlight-friendly magic soon.


you want to send the guy with high spot and hide to do it, not the bumbling brute in heavy armor that stands out like a beacon to anyone looking that way.

Actually, they can make great scouts. Especially if they're tar babies, super tanks, red shirts, or straight-up decoys.


You could get a lot of hirelings and set up a defensible camp, which relies on the same thing that anything other than high level adventurers do to survive. I leave that nonspecific on purpose; something permits the world to have travelers who are not high level.


And furthermore how could the world even function if these random hazards cropped up with such frequency? Even making only one trip a year to sell goods at a neighboring market a farmer probably wouldn’t live to see twenty years.

Commonly dangerous random encounters should occur out "in the wilds", where traveling merchants don't dare (and needn't) go.


Random mandatory attrition as a consequence of travel is something that boils down to an Oregon Trail event minus the PCs being much at risk (inherent in the definition of attrition ). Player survival being mostly expected, “you see bandits ahead and behind, its an ambush!” boils down to “lose 1d4 horses and 2d4 hirelings”. If the intent is attrition and the encounter is tuned such that the players can’t trivialize it (and thus avoid attrition) you might as well just roll the losses and move on with the game. With this understanding in place the only winning solution is to remove the resources from harms way. And again, if hirelings die this frequently who would want to be one?

Removing such encounters removes the roleplay involved.


Make normal travel safe (random encounters being at most 5% initially hostile).

Strongly agree. Make Exploration and Discovery fun again!

Xervous
2021-01-25, 11:01 AM
Removing such encounters removes the roleplay involved.

What roleplay crops up in “you fight 20 bandits, carving through them in three rounds, while two of your hirelings ate crit arrows and instantly died. These four hirelings were hit and need healing or will perish, same for that horse,” that you wouldn’t see in the 2d4 hirelings + 1d4 horses case (offset by considerable table time savings)? You still have an event with consequences and the opportunity for players to say they did X or Y, but you’re not wasting 30min or more on trivial combat resolution. Again, this is assuming such encounters are routine and the intent is resource attrition that the players cannot fully avoid.

One in twenty such events? Sure, play it out. Any time you decide to follow where the GM pointed the plot arrow? Probably worth streamlining.

If the players constantly get random ‘lose 1d4 horses’ encounters dropped on them that they can’t consistently turn into ‘lose 0 horses’ might as well just not take horses when the GM seems determined to ensure they won’t have any for the return trip anyways.

It’s the difference between “that one time we had to rob a passing caravan for their horses to get back with the loot” and “I pay the MMORPG horse tax at the next town to refill this consumable”.

Segev
2021-01-25, 11:35 AM
That would quickly become prohibitively expensive for low level adventurers.
It's something I would enjoy for a planned expedition, say the exploration of several jungle hexes, but that would also require some funding I think.Typically, I believe, low-level adventures are not long expeditions where travel time is a massive concern. Expeditions to clear out dungeons multiple days' travel by horseback out that will require logistics such as carts or pack animals tend to start after the PCs have gotten some loot and wealth of their own.

As for what allows low level travellers to survive, the answer is "adventurers who clear out dungeons and roaming monsters" :)Conveniently, the PCs' hireling encampment travelled there with such adventurers, who are clearing the nearest dungeon, so the monsters have to go through the PCs to get to the encampment, anyway. :smalltongue:


IMO, all this talk of making things easier is fighting for with fire - it's how we got here in the first place.

Horses were in more common use when things were *hard*, when we couldn't count on the GM to make things move at the speed of plot, when treasure and encounters weren't "balanced", and both whether you could flee, or how much you could bring back from successful venturers actually mattered.That's an interesting point. I think elaborating on it more might be useful. Could you please do so?

Mastikator
2021-01-25, 12:16 PM
What roleplay crops up in “you fight 20 bandits, carving through them in three rounds, while two of your hirelings ate crit arrows and instantly died. These four hirelings were hit and need healing or will perish, same for that horse,” that you wouldn’t see in the 2d4 hirelings + 1d4 horses case (offset by considerable table time savings)? You still have an event with consequences and the opportunity for players to say they did X or Y, but you’re not wasting 30min or more on trivial combat resolution. Again, this is assuming such encounters are routine and the intent is resource attrition that the players cannot fully avoid.

One in twenty such events? Sure, play it out. Any time you decide to follow where the GM pointed the plot arrow? Probably worth streamlining.

If the players constantly get random ‘lose 1d4 horses’ encounters dropped on them that they can’t consistently turn into ‘lose 0 horses’ might as well just not take horses when the GM seems determined to ensure they won’t have any for the return trip anyways.

It’s the difference between “that one time we had to rob a passing caravan for their horses to get back with the loot” and “I pay the MMORPG horse tax at the next town to refill this consumable”.

Not to mention that as soon as one of the PCs have to travel by foot the others must slow down with their horses. The only benefit they could have at that point is if the PCs are trained knights AND the horses are trained war horses they will have tactical advantage in combat.

On the flip side it's weird that a GM would kill horses at all if they are attacked by bandits. Horses aren't exactly loyal to their owner, the bandits are just destroying the very loot they're risking their lives to acquire. Even an orc that may want to eat the horse should still consider riding into camp and THEN slaughtering it. Ultimately it's dumb for the GM to kill horses, it makes no sense in game and only discourages the players from having fun.

VoxRationis
2021-01-25, 01:42 PM
In order to do that though, they need to already have the habit of using different forms of transport, otherwise they just won't think of it as an option. Remember the players don't know what's in your head, and the only things in the world are things you've told them.

If you want players to think about using horses, everyone else they pass on the road needs to be riding and the first thing they need to see in every town of any size is a livery stable. (And using horses for most of the things they're going to do on the road needs to not take skill investment or they'll feel like it's a bad choice).


1. Normalise riding in the presentation of the world. Regularly meet riders, make livery stables a standard fixture of basically every significant civilisation and stabling a fixture of every inn, and specifically call them out in your descriptions even if the players don't have horses yet.

Who are these players you have who don't think of horses as a transport option in a pre-modern setting? Do your players also have their characters only eat raw grain because you never mentioned gristmills in the setting? Have they all been going barefoot because you never talked about shoes? I mean, you'll never hear me asking for less setting detail and description, but both common understanding and popular depictions in media underscore the prevalence of horses for anyone who could afford them before the advent of the car.

JoeJ
2021-01-25, 01:50 PM
Unless those are a standard off-the-shelf item like a standard longsword, that's not going to build the habit of riding a horse in your parties.

It would be a way to give a player who already wanted a horse a bit more utility, but it wouldn't make the whole party think "we should ride everywhere all the time", which was what the thread started with. Habitual riding.

To do that you have to do several things:

1. Normalise riding in the presentation of the world. Regularly meet riders, make livery stables a standard fixture of basically every significant civilisation and stabling a fixture of every inn, and specifically call them out in your descriptions even if the players don't have horses yet.

2. Shave off the inconvenience of horses by default. That means finding a way for them to not be mega-squishy in combat (sharing HP with their rider, for instance), and making riding in combat and fighting from horseback to at least some degree not require skill investment. (Remember, fighting is a day to day activity for adventurers). Also figure out how these horses are going to be secured in the wilds, using only skills that characters are likely to have taken anyway.

3. Give a mild bonus for riding when they could have walked in all situations not just "but now it matters because time".

I would add also:

4. Show that horses are a benefit rather than a drawback in combat by having the party get attacked by something (like bandits) that would normally be a very easy fight but is harder because the attackers are mounted. If the rules you're using don't make this possible, tweak them so that they do. That eliminates one of the major reasons PCs often don't buy mounts.

Xervous
2021-01-25, 02:04 PM
I would add also:

4. Show that horses are a benefit rather than a drawback in combat by having the party get attacked by something (like bandits) that would normally be a very easy fight but is harder because the attackers are mounted. If the rules you're using don't make this possible, tweak them so that they do. That eliminates one of the major reasons PCs often don't buy mounts.

As is the case with 3.5 and 5e there are underlying design structures that render mounts unfavorable. To go about changing that is no small task in such cases. You need a fire horse that can survive enough hits and doesn’t get immolated by the dragons breath, but then you’ve gone and broke your presentation with a dollop of the fantastic.

Warlawk
2021-01-25, 02:20 PM
I'll grant you that I've skimmed rather than deep read the several pages of responses since my own, but I didn't see anything that addressed what i wanted to bring up.

One thing that most games, including D&D, model poorly is that a human in good physical shape can outdistance a horse over the course of a day. As long as your party doesn't include a 'Raistlin' type, they probably aren't actually losing much in the way of travel speed. If there is any sort of difficult terrain or heavy forest the bipeds are likely to gain a significant distance advantage as most riding animals just don't do well in those situations. People used horses because by nature people are lazy, if they push themselves they can pace or even outdistance the horse but it takes considerably more effort to do so. Additionally horses tend to be able to carry a bit more than a human without serious impediment, but that ceases to be an issue very early in most adventuring careers as soon as a haversack or bag of holding becomes available.

From a bit of googling average horse travel per day is considered 25 to 35 miles. Average human travel per day clocks in around 30. Horses bred and trained for endurance can cover up to 100, while trained distance runners can also cover around that same distance. So, when you're looking at how things actually work rather than what the game system says for travel times it's entirely possible that this travel speed issue is a complete non-issue.

Now, boat travel is a whole different ballgame. Boat travel at the tech levels of most fantasy games was historically considered to be pretty dangerous and that's without all the dangers of a fantasy world and DMs who think that aquatic battle is 'spicing up' their game when in reality everyone just dreads it. Avoiding naval travel is probably the closest thing to common sense most adventurers will ever do.

Mastikator
2021-01-25, 02:22 PM
As is the case with 3.5 and 5e there are underlying design structures that render mounts unfavorable. To go about changing that is no small task in such cases. You need a fire horse that can survive enough hits and doesn’t get immolated by the dragons breath, but then you’ve gone and broke your presentation with a dollop of the fantastic.

I think once you're fighting a dragon you'll probably be equipped with a magic item or two, your mount should be suitably awesome. The paladin doesn't ride a mere horse, he rides a unicorn! Bandits on horseback is kinda a low level threat to adventurers, before they have a bunch of fancy +3 weapons and ride regular horses.

JoeJ
2021-01-25, 02:22 PM
As is the case with 3.5 and 5e there are underlying design structures that render mounts unfavorable. To go about changing that is no small task in such cases. You need a fire horse that can survive enough hits and doesn’t get immolated by the dragons breath, but then you’ve gone and broke your presentation with a dollop of the fantastic.

In 5e there's a feat that does that. If you want horses to be a major part of the game, the easy tweak is to give that feat to every PC for free.

On top of which, dragons aren't common fights. Especially outside and above ground, where the horses will be. If being mounted gives you an advantage in the encounters that are most common while travelling, that's all you need.

Democratus
2021-01-25, 02:26 PM
The Romans spent a great deal of time studying the cost/benefit of varying means of moving men and materiel overland.

They discovered that the amount of food required to carry each pound of luggage was the same for a man, a horse, or an elephant over long distances. Furthermore, an overworked horse could break and be forever useless whereas a man could nearly always recover no matter how hard he had been pushed.

Turns out that humans are well designed for traveling long distances carrying a burden.

Xervous
2021-01-25, 02:30 PM
I think once you're fighting a dragon you'll probably be equipped with a magic item or two, your mount should be suitably awesome. The paladin doesn't ride a mere horse, he rides a unicorn! Bandits on horseback is kinda a low level threat to adventurers, before they have a bunch of fancy +3 weapons and ride regular horses.

Oh that’s ironic! My phone autocorrected dire (and also sent this post prematurely).

My main point is that you need fantastic or at the very least outlandish mounts by 5th level or so, and that is liable to clash with GM desires and expectations.

Lord Torath
2021-01-25, 02:31 PM
I'm a 2E Grognard, but I favor giving horses (and other pets, like guard dogs or hunting cats) 1 HD every time their owner levels as a way of keeping them useful at higher levels, and adding to their survivability. In 2E, Hit Dice determine THAC0 (that's the equivalent of the BAB for you "young'uns" with your "newfangled" editions :smallwink:) as well as hit points, so your mounts will still be able to hit your opponents as you level. Feel free to add BAB and whatever else is required in other editions to keep them useful.

As Segev has said, regular people are capable of traveling across the continent with few enough losses that it is still considered worthwhile. All you need to do is have the hostile encounters consider the horses to be treasure, rather than targets, and let minimal reasonable precautions on the PCs' part protect their mounts when they are not in use. And most importantly, communicate this information to the players! If they know their horses will not be singled out, they are more likely to want to use them.

As far as scouting "hogging the spotlight", it doesn't need to. Scouting ahead can be as simple as riding 300 yards ahead of the rest of the party. See anything hostile? Ride back and tell them. If you feel the mounted player (or any other player) is hogging too much spotlight, tell them so! Communicate, dang it! Tell them you will resolve their 'hogging" times as quickly as possible and get back to the rest of the group.

Kazyan
2021-01-25, 02:33 PM
Dealing with horses sounds like busywork and mental overhead, but doesn't actually help me get immersed in the setting or anything. Have you seen 5e's sourcebooks? There's a floating eyeball-squid shooting lasers on those, and the adventurers fighting it look like they're winning. So if you ask me to care about horses and the animal husbandry thereof, I will feel bored and bait-and-switched.

Avoiding boats is different--that's just self-preservation. If you've played in a fantasy setting before, you know to avoid the boat. It will get attacked.

noob
2021-01-25, 02:37 PM
Rewarding for speed is not too hard: there is a lot of stuff that are better if done fast.
For example killing the evil 1hd bandit that rules over the poor titans sooner will allow to get a better reward because the titans have lost less wealth.

Mastikator
2021-01-25, 02:42 PM
Oh that’s ironic! My phone autocorrected dire (and also sent this post prematurely).

My main point is that you need fantastic or at the very least outlandish mounts by 5th level or so, and that is liable to clash with GM desires and expectations.

Then the GM needs to reassess their expectations and consider that mounts have more in common with equipment than hirelings and should scale with the party's weapons and armor. If you have a +1 sword you should also have a +1 horse. Bring out the unicorns, the pegasuses, the nightmares, the ki-rin, the trained wyvern, the griffon, etc. Flying a hippogryph is awesome anyway.

InvisibleBison
2021-01-25, 02:55 PM
The Romans spent a great deal of time studying the cost/benefit of varying means of moving men and materiel overland.

They discovered that the amount of food required to carry each pound of luggage was the same for a man, a horse, or an elephant over long distances. Furthermore, an overworked horse could break and be forever useless whereas a man could nearly always recover no matter how hard he had been pushed.

Turns out that humans are well designed for traveling long distances carrying a burden.

Do you have a source for this? I'm familiar with a similar analysis done in the 19th century, and I'm curious how the two would compare.

Alcore
2021-01-25, 02:57 PM
I think once you're fighting a dragon you'll probably be equipped with a magic item or two, your mount should be suitably awesome. The paladin doesn't ride a mere horse, he rides a unicorn! Bandits on horseback is kinda a low level threat to adventurers, before they have a bunch of fancy +3 weapons and ride regular horses.

While i do agree a level 10 character should be either sharing magic items or riding something suitably awesome and durable for his level why is an intelligent dragon fighting the PCs in a spot they might have advantage over it? In fact the horses are the safest things on the battle; it is a free meal once it wins. An obvious pack horse is even more safe for it knows pack horse = treasure. The PCs could even clump around it to prevent/discourage a fire breath attack.


Most of the things players gripe about rely on everyone, even the GM, to metagame; to roll play. Wolves don't do "stand and deliver" combat unless desperate. Like most animals they want the most benefit for the least loss so they'll beseige the party in the hopes of getting a horse. Orcs will see a horse as a meal for later, a mount or a means of carrying loot. Most things that kill horses are done in such a manner as the "white room" level 1 commoner vs cat; without rhyme nor role play.

quinron
2021-01-25, 03:19 PM
I'm a 2E Grognard, but I favor giving horses (and other pets, like guard dogs or hunting cats) 1 HD every time their owner levels as a way of keeping them useful at higher levels, and adding to their survivability. In 2E, Hit Dice determine THAC0 (that's the equivalent of the BAB for you "young'uns" with your "newfangled" editions :smallwink:) as well as hit points, so your mounts will still be able to hit your opponents as you level. Feel free to add BAB and whatever else is required in other editions to keep them useful.

The easiest and most practical solution - in 5e, adding hit dice doesn't increase AC, but whether it's a horse or a hireling, most attacks are going to hit it anyway; boosting its HP is usually enough to make the difference


As Segev has said, regular people are capable of traveling across the continent with few enough losses that it is still considered worthwhile. All you need to do is have the hostile encounters consider the horses to be treasure, rather than targets, and let minimal reasonable precautions on the PCs' part protect their mounts when they are not in use. And most importantly, communicate this information to the players! If they know their horses will not be singled out, they are more likely to want to use them.

A major reason players don't like buying horses is that they're so expensive, and it would make perfect sense for a bandit gang or an orc horde to know the same thing. As for less intelligent creatures, there's a reason you don't hear a lot about riders in the Old West getting their horses taken out from under them by cougars or wolves: horses are big animals, and their sheer size is usually scary enough to keep animals at bay. If an animal is going to attack something, between a horse and its rider, it's usually going to pick the rider. As for things that have no use for money and are smart enough to know attacking the horse could be advantageous - this is one of my big complaints about 5e. There just aren't enough threats for a party over around 5th level that are simultaneously unintelligent and incapable of attacking both a horse and rider in the same turn (often with an AoE action).


As far as scouting "hogging the spotlight", it doesn't need to. Scouting ahead can be as simple as riding 300 yards ahead of the rest of the party. See anything hostile? Ride back and tell them. If you feel the mounted player (or any other player) is hogging too much spotlight, tell them so! Communicate, dang it! Tell them you will resolve their 'hogging" times as quickly as possible and get back to the rest of the group.

The usual given rules for how long a horse can be ridden hard imply a pretty easy fix for this: if one person keeps scouting and returning frequently, they're going to wear out their horse and slow the whole party down. Much more practical to just take turns scouting - considering "as big as a horse" is an actual phrase we use to call something massive, the stealthiness of the rider probably won't be a major concern.

Democratus
2021-01-25, 03:58 PM
Do you have a source for this? I'm familiar with a similar analysis done in the 19th century, and I'm curious how the two would compare.

I'll see if I can locate my source. Probably in a textbook I have on the shelves around here.

I want to say it was a precursor to the Marian Reforms, but I'm not solid on that. :smallsmile:

Doug Lampert
2021-01-25, 04:50 PM
I'll see if I can locate my source. Probably in a textbook I have on the shelves around here.

I want to say it was a precursor to the Marian Reforms, but I'm not solid on that. :smallsmile:

Marian reforms would at least seem plausible. For those unaware of it, in the Marian reforms the Roman army largely eliminated its baggage train in favor of having legionaries carry all their own gear and supplies, and the reason I've heard given was that the army would move faster and need to spend less time foraging.

The Roman Legion most people are familiar with is the post Marian reform legion. The system worked.

The Romans were definitely willing to experiment on military equipment and logistics, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a comparison done prior to that change which showed that Marian reform legions were faster than legions travelling with wagons, carts, or other vehicles.

There's also a claim I've encountered occasionally that draft animals pulling wagons eat their entire load in about 300 miles, and it doesn't much matter what type of animal you're using, you either need to slow down and spread out to let the animals graze, or in 300 miles you're wondering what happened to all that grain and what you're going to feed the horses tomorrow.

Mastikator
2021-01-25, 05:18 PM
While i do agree a level 10 character should be either sharing magic items or riding something suitably awesome and durable for his level why is an intelligent dragon fighting the PCs in a spot they might have advantage over it? In fact the horses are the safest things on the battle; it is a free meal once it wins. An obvious pack horse is even more safe for it knows pack horse = treasure. The PCs could even clump around it to prevent/discourage a fire breath attack.


Most of the things players gripe about rely on everyone, even the GM, to metagame; to roll play. Wolves don't do "stand and deliver" combat unless desperate. Like most animals they want the most benefit for the least loss so they'll beseige the party in the hopes of getting a horse. Orcs will see a horse as a meal for later, a mount or a means of carrying loot. Most things that kill horses are done in such a manner as the "white room" level 1 commoner vs cat; without rhyme nor role play.

If you're fighting dragons you shouldn't be on just a horse, its should be a unicorn or wyvern or something of that caliber. Horses are low level mounts for low level PCs that fight low level bandits.

JoeJ
2021-01-25, 06:11 PM
Of course, the slam-dunk easiest way to get player to jump on the idea of horses or boats is to make it part of the campaign premise from the beginning. If they come into the game expecting to play, for example, knights errant or barbarian riders on the steppe or (for boats) pirate hunters, you won't have any trouble convincing them to use the form of transportion that those kinds of characters should be using.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-01-25, 06:19 PM
My players are actively searching out boats. At least some of them. It helps that their current mission requires crossing a sea to a pirate base (going around would be theoretically possible but highly impractical, mainly due to adding a thousand miles unto a time sensitive issue).

As for mounts, one is a paladin with find steed (and is a halfling to boot). Another wants a big exotic mount like a rhino or elephant or something mechanical. He's a knockoff warforged, so he's not exactly light weight. The other three don't seem to care one way or another.

Saint-Just
2021-01-25, 08:03 PM
The post I was replying to talked about how, if *someone* had a horse, *they* could do this, and *they* could do that, quite literally leaving their party behind. It's one of the best arguments against horses I've heard.

Magic, OTOH, usually isn't quite so bad: everyone can stand around the scrying portal, making observations and commentary. Everyone can discuss what questions to interrogate their enemies with via Speak with Dead (in a certain web comic, the muggle leader was even the one *asking* the questions). Whereas the party cannot really participate in the spotlight opportunities of "having a horse".

Other posters have been harping on the disconnect between the fiction and the game. My point was that there are actually at least 3 layers: the fiction, the game, and the metagame. "Spotlight sharing" is a concern for the metagame. (Also, as I said earlier, with regards to travel speed, unless you can con your GM into making house rules to more closely match your vision of reality, the game *is* the fiction; insisting that the characters behave in accordance with a completely different set of rules than those of the world in which they live is… really odd.)


My examples were assuming that the resulting split of the party is mostly (but not fully) runs in the background. Of course if the scout spots the trouble they do get a spotlight, but otherwise it should not be that different. Admittedly the only use that doesn't result in splitting the party (resting in shifts while others are walking) is not usually modeled by the game systems. Well, GURPS does but it's not something normally expected.

But the final part is where we seem to have a disagreement. I think that actually behaving a little bit closer to real life than CRPG is a strong attraction in TTRPG (and LARP for that matter). I think that adhering to the fiction is desirable (especially in something that costs very little time and money). Especially in D&D where even 90% optimization can break the game in twenty different ways, so in many campaigns PCs are held back from achieving every thing they technically can. But even when game takes priority (and it often takes priority) forbidding or even marking as undesirable things that are good in-game for metagame reasons is not something I comfortable with. Again this is another thing where I seem to be in minority, but I find the problem with spotlight hogging as it often formulated something that rarely happened in my experience.


Who are these players you have who don't think of horses as a transport option in a pre-modern setting? Do your players also have their characters only eat raw grain because you never mentioned gristmills in the setting? Have they all been going barefoot because you never talked about shoes? I mean, you'll never hear me asking for less setting detail and description, but both common understanding and popular depictions in media underscore the prevalence of horses for anyone who could afford them before the advent of the car.

There is no proof that Aragorn wore pants.

Alcore
2021-01-25, 08:22 PM
If you're fighting dragons you shouldn't be on just a horse, its should be a unicorn or wyvern or something of that caliber. Horses are low level mounts for low level PCs that fight low level bandits.

annd.... that completely ignores anything i said :smallsigh:

Telok
2021-01-25, 10:59 PM
There is no proof that Aragorn wore pants.

Go on, show the nice game police on the character sheet where the wicked DM bad-wrong-funned you.

vasilidor
2021-01-25, 11:30 PM
I like the idea of adding hit dice to horses to keep them alive. Spheres of might gives this option in the Beast Mastery sphere, so that you can have your fighter with a horse that is unlikely to die on you to the surprise fireball on the first round.
With the whole bandits attacking the party on horse, I just kill the horse out from under them. the thing only has around 12 hp and 12 ac. unless the riders have the beast mastery sphere and appropriate talents. none of these were options when I first started 3rd edition.
I really wish I was exaggerating on the twenty horse thing.

Elbeyon
2021-01-25, 11:43 PM
It is a lot easier to kill horses and break equipment than to kill the heroes. It's a good move by the dm to not break the warriors sword every combat instead of trying to kill the hp stack.

JoeJ
2021-01-26, 01:19 AM
It is a lot easier to kill horses and break equipment than to kill the heroes. It's a good move by the dm to not break the warriors sword every combat instead of trying to kill the hp stack.

It also makes sense that many attackers would view the horses as part of the loot, not part of the opposition. Why attack what you hope to obtain?

Elbeyon
2021-01-26, 01:32 AM
It also makes sense that many attackers would view the horses as part of the loot, not part of the opposition. Why attack what you hope to obtain?The more reasons for the gm to not attack horses the better! Horses are precious

GeoffWatson
2021-01-26, 03:53 AM
Now, boat travel is a whole different ballgame. Boat travel at the tech levels of most fantasy games was historically considered to be pretty dangerous and that's without all the dangers of a fantasy world and DMs who think that aquatic battle is 'spicing up' their game when in reality everyone just dreads it. Avoiding naval travel is probably the closest thing to common sense most adventurers will ever do.

I'll disagree on this one.
In pre-modern times, water travel was much faster and more efficient than land travel.

noob
2021-01-26, 06:27 AM
{{scrubbed}}

GloatingSwine
2021-01-26, 07:11 AM
{{scrubbed}}

A lot of that assumes boat = sea.

Most pre-modern boat travel was river travel. Waterways were the most important logistical network until the invention of the steam train.

Navigable stretches of rivers would be well known, and controlling their crossing points would be of great importance. (So if you want to put the party on a boat and have a fight on the boat, hire them to clear out the bandits lurking near a navigable river rather than put them on the boat first then throw the encounter at them).

Willie the Duck
2021-01-26, 08:51 AM
{{scrubbed}}

Riiight, it's because all the other game masters are dumb. Gotcha. Couldn't have anything to do with them being perfectly competent, but having different priorities.

In all seriousness, this is just a sub-portion of a larger genre shift that occurred in D&D -- that the wilderness wandering monsters started appearing on the well-travelled routes (be they road, river, or ocean). The primary reason for this seems to be that hexcrawling stopped being a major component of most gameplay, and as such most PCs didn't spend much time going out into the 'untamed wilderness' parts of the world (yet there were still all these lovely monsters in the book -- that don't make sense living in dungeons-- that you the DM desperately want to use). As such, the road and boat routes between City A and City or Dungeon B become filled with danger that 0th-level npcs have no hope of overcoming. So how does the average npc get from point A to point B? This is something to which the official material never really has answered (although, to be fair to it, many editions do not specify that you should put the wandering monsters on the road, that's just part of how the game-culture started doing things). Individual DMs seem to always answer that in different ways, ranging from 'they always travel in large, guarded, convoys (want a job guarding a merchant caravan, oh 1st-level party?)*,' to 'npc have access to special non-hero routes you don't know about**,' to 'it's a player-facing fame, don't worry about it.***'
*Nevermind that most versions of the game have monsters that can defeat a neigh infinite number of low-level NPC guards.
**Yes, this one fails if the Players keep pulling on that thread.
***Hi MaxKilljoy! Yes this does break your verisimilitude requirements. Everything about D&D always will.

Regardless, I haven't seen this issue specifically come up all that much more frequently on/with boats than it does on land/with horses. Regardless, it does lead back to my original position on the issue -- if the Players are reticent to use either form of transport, it is because they (or people they have heard of) have done so in the past and the DM has punished them for the decision. If you want them to change this behavior, you have to show them 1) that there are benefits to doing so, and 2) that you will not (immediately and continuously) take advantage of their decision as an avenue to screw them over.

gijoemike
2021-01-26, 09:29 AM
yep...


Horses were vary common. Only the poorest of serfs and peasants couldn't find a way to get a horse. Understand that these were not warhorses; some were not even meant to be ridden. They were the cars of their time; they are status symbols. a PC wearing metal armor and no horse might be assumed to be a wealthy bandit while mounted a peasant might refer to you as "lord" but not because you are a known noble but as respect. If you had a bonafided warhorse? Noblemen and guards will treat you with scrutiny (especially if someone nearby is missing such a horse) if you are not dressing nice (metal armor still implies wealth and will work)

want to know more about horses?

Medieval Misconceptions: HORSES;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reoohqjqAyY

Have to disagree. It is not meta-gaming to avoid horses. In many games, D&D being the worst one, PCs must have training to ride, control, and care for a horse. Sometimes this is multiple skills. As a suburban living man in the 21st century I have just as much if not more training in the care of and riding of horses as most D&D characters, which is zilch. There is absolutely no way I would ever consider getting on a horse and riding it for days. If no other option existed, I would walk. All because I have 0 training. In your example every single person knows a lot about horses and how to properly treat them. There is no game to meta. I don't actively use a thing that I have no knowledge or training in how to use.

But Horses are cars of their day!
I agree 100%. Now, would you let a 12 year old who has never been in the front seat of a car or seen how the gear shift works (even in a video game) drive away in a car unsupervised? Oh, you wouldn't? And that is because they are totally clueless as to what they are doing. That is most characters in roleplaying games. Cars are common and people train and take proficiency tests to be allowed to drive them. Most table table top characters have 0 training and are clueless.

Let me amend your statement.

Horses were very common. And the knowledge and ride on and care for those animals was even more common as the stable hands and servants of the lord had to care for the animal.

DwarfFighter
2021-01-26, 11:46 AM
If you want them to change this behavior, you have to show them 1) that there are benefits to doing so, and 2) that you will not (immediately and continuously) take advantage of their decision as an avenue to screw them over.

The weird thing is: that bad stuff never happened in our games.

The closest thing has been shipwrecks that transition the campaign from a sea-based adventure to an island-based adventure, and even then there was no loss of investment (they were merely passengers) and in these cases they were able to salvage their gear from the wrecks, including their horses.

Obviously the players aren't refusing to go aboard boats, ever! when the plot was heading in that direction, but given the option they ALWAYS walk.

-DF

Kraynic
2021-01-26, 11:51 AM
As a suburban living man in the 21st century I have just as much if not more training in the care of and riding of horses as most D&D characters, which is zilch.

I think this is more a problem with D&D than anything else. Knowing nothing about animals that make your world work would be about like a 21st century individual from an industrialized nation knowing nothing about electrical appliances.

Also, driving a car is a very poor analogy. I'm not even sure where to start in describing how bad of an analogy that is.

Willie the Duck
2021-01-26, 11:52 AM
The weird thing is: that bad stuff never happened in our games.
Oh, I know. That's why I previously mentioned that I think it is previous gaming, or picking up on gamer culture memes and notions.

Lord Torath
2021-01-26, 11:55 AM
2nd Edition AD&D at least said that anyone could ride a trained horse. If you wanted to do tricky stuff with them (use one without reins in combat, for example), then you needed the proficiency. And that applied to all land-based mounts.

Flying mounts, on the other hand, required either the Riding - Airborne proficiency or someone else in the saddle with you who had it.

kyoryu
2021-01-26, 12:06 PM
Oh, I know. That's why I previously mentioned that I think it is previous gaming, or picking up on gamer culture memes and notions.

And that's why sometimes just saying "no, I promise I won't do this" is sufficient.

RedMage125
2021-01-26, 01:41 PM
1. Normalise riding in the presentation of the world. Regularly meet riders, make livery stables a standard fixture of basically every significant civilisation and stabling a fixture of every inn, and specifically call them out in your descriptions even if the players don't have horses yet.

What shocks me is the reports from others that this somehow isn't the norm.



On the flip side it's weird that a GM would kill horses at all if they are attacked by bandits. Horses aren't exactly loyal to their owner, the bandits are just destroying the very loot they're risking their lives to acquire. Even an orc that may want to eat the horse should still consider riding into camp and THEN slaughtering it. Ultimately it's dumb for the GM to kill horses, it makes no sense in game and only discourages the players from having fun.
Also a very sensible point.

Honestly, the only time I, as a DM have ever specifically targetted the horses is when it narratively makes sense to do so. For example, griffons explicitly prefer the taste of horseflesh and prefer horses over any other kind of prey.



Avoiding boats is different--that's just self-preservation. If you've played in a fantasy setting before, you know to avoid the boat. It will get attacked.
That's not an absolute truth. There are dozens of official modules where boat travel is essential and part of the adventure. Not to mention how many thousands of home games where travelling on a boat was not a death sentence.

And even if the boat were attacked, players are usually quite capable of defending it. They are armed, dangerous individuals, after all. And in all likelihood, the PCs aren't the ones steering or manning the boat in any way, so they are free to solely focus on the defense of the ship and her crew.


2nd Edition AD&D at least said that anyone could ride a trained horse. If you wanted to do tricky stuff with them (use one without reins in combat, for example), then you needed the proficiency. And that applied to all land-based mounts.

Flying mounts, on the other hand, required either the Riding - Airborne proficiency or someone else in the saddle with you who had it.

This is one of the key elements that undercuts all the claims about PCs "knowing how to ride". A horse that has already been broken (or better yet, bred domesticated), and trained to accept a rider requires very little training and expertise to something as simple as "travel from Point A to Point B". Getting one not trained for combat to engage with dangerous enemies (especially beasts and monsters) is another matter.

Now, someone who wanted to use a mount in combat...yes, THAT requires specific training for both mount and rider. But just as transport? No, a short amount of time to get used to doing so will enable anyone even mildly competent to direct a horse with saddle, reins, and bridle.

Telok
2021-01-26, 01:55 PM
2nd Edition AD&D at least said that anyone could ride a trained horse. If you wanted to do tricky stuff with them (use one without reins in combat, for example), then you needed the proficiency. And that applied to all land-based mounts.

Flying mounts, on the other hand, required either the Riding - Airborne proficiency or someone else in the saddle with you who had it.

Yeah, but AD&D characters could expect to get better at making their saving throws as they went up in level too. Don't you dare talk about opening stuck doors or you'll make the fighters wonder where their mighty thews went.

More seriously (maybe not) Zelazny, just before he died, put out Forever After. A light fantasy book with four other authors. In one of the sections a dragon asks an adventurer why they had so much trouble traveling from A to B when normal people regularly made the trip without problems. It was suggested that either the locals giving directions were intentionally steering adventurers towards danger or that the adventurers were seeking out the danger themselves.

Over the years I've incorporated both of those into my games. Settled trade routes and civilized areas tend to be boring "pay passage/tolls, mark off days, artive at destination" trips. The only real excitement in travel comes when the PCs go looking or total-snob-fail talking to (or ignoring) local knowledge.

TheStranger
2021-01-26, 02:45 PM
I want to jump in on this, because I’ve walked several thousand miles in all sorts of terrain and spent far too much time thinking about travel rules in D&D. And my conclusion is that 3.5 is surprisingly accurate about overland travel speed. In decent terrain, anywhere from 20-30 miles a day with a light load is reasonable (it takes a week or two to build up to this, though), and I know people who would say 30-40. Which is all generally pretty comparable to what you might cover with a horse. Consider that horses are expensive, can’t cover rough terrain as well as a human, and give you another thing to take care of, and there’s a case to be made for walking.

Of course, history tells us that people did in fact use horses regularly as both pack and riding animals throughout pre-modern times, and they presumably didn’t do it for no reason. In fact, many people still use horses for these things in remote areas. So, why?

Aside from the fact that some people just really like horses, I’ve seen two, maybe three big advantages to having a horse. The first is that horses can carry a lot more weight. If all you need to move is yourself, your food, and a little bit of gear, go ahead and walk. But if you need to haul more than 50 pounds or so, you’re going to have a bad time. Not that it can’t be done, as anybody who’s been through boot camp will tell you. But given the choice, carrying lots of weight yourself probably isn’t plan A.

The second big reason to have a horse is that walking all day is freaking hard. Sure, you can walk 30 miles in a day. At the end of which you’ll be sore, exhausted, and hungry. And if you do it for any length of time, you’ll need to eat about 2-3 times what you do at home or your body will start cannibalizing itself to keep going (turns out 10 hours of exercise daily is a good weight loss plan, go figure). While riding is physically demanding as well, it’s still nice to be able to offload some of that hardship onto a horse.

The third advantage to horses is that while you might cover the same 30 miles in a day, a horse can move much faster than a human over short distances. Which might not come up on every trip, but if it does it’s likely to be important, so it’s nice to have the option.

Of course, none of that translates well to D&D. Odds are good that the party barbarian can carry almost as much as a horse even before bags of holding come into play. The barbarian can also run almost as fast as a horse, the monk can run faster, the wizard can fly and/or teleport, and the druid can just be a horse if you really need one. And character comfort is rarely a concern, though to be fair it’s hard to expect somebody to get too worked up about blisters when near-lethal wounds are a daily occurrence.

Bottom line, players don’t use horses because most of the good reasons for using horses don’t apply beyond very low levels. Add in the build resources it takes to get the most from a horse and the logistics of keeping one alive, and it’s hard to make a great case that PCs should use horses for any reason beyond maintaining the medieval flavor of the setting.

I’m not really sure there’s a reasonable mechanical “fix” for this. Even if you made horses basically free and gave them plot armor, there just isn’t that much reason for PCs to use them in D&D. Real-world humans use/used horses to overcome limitations that mostly don’t apply to PCs. Putting those limitations back in play is just punitive. And making horses give advantages without any of the obvious drawbacks breaks verisimilitude at least as much as PCs walking does (YMMV). If you really want players to ride horses for aesthetic/worldbuilding reasons, your best bet might be to just talk to them OOC and convince them to go along with it.

GloatingSwine
2021-01-26, 05:53 PM
This is one of the key elements that undercuts all the claims about PCs "knowing how to ride". A horse that has already been broken (or better yet, bred domesticated), and trained to accept a rider requires very little training and expertise to something as simple as "travel from Point A to Point B". Getting one not trained for combat to engage with dangerous enemies (especially beasts and monsters) is another matter.

Now, someone who wanted to use a mount in combat...yes, THAT requires specific training for both mount and rider. But just as transport? No, a short amount of time to get used to doing so will enable anyone even mildly competent to direct a horse with saddle, reins, and bridle.

On the other hand, these are adventurers, and going into combat is their day job. If they can't use the horse in combat because it requires skill investment, they're at a disadvantage any time combat starts when they have their horse, which is any time they're travelling now. The first thing they have to do any time that happens is immediately get off, and the last thing they have to do is find where the bugger's run off to.

So the horse just became a burden again.

If you want players on horses as a habit, you need to provide that their basic class features work on a horse.

Quertus
2021-01-27, 08:55 AM
What roleplay crops up in “you fight 20 bandits, carving through them in three rounds, while two of your hirelings ate crit arrows and instantly died. These four hirelings were hit and need healing or will perish, same for that horse,” that you wouldn’t see in the 2d4 hirelings + 1d4 horses case (offset by considerable table time savings)? You still have an event with consequences and the opportunity for players to say they did X or Y, but you’re not wasting 30min or more on trivial combat resolution. Again, this is assuming such encounters are routine and the intent is resource attrition that the players cannot fully avoid.

One in twenty such events? Sure, play it out. Any time you decide to follow where the GM pointed the plot arrow? Probably worth streamlining.

If the players constantly get random ‘lose 1d4 horses’ encounters dropped on them that they can’t consistently turn into ‘lose 0 horses’ might as well just not take horses when the GM seems determined to ensure they won’t have any for the return trip anyways.

It’s the difference between “that one time we had to rob a passing caravan for their horses to get back with the loot” and “I pay the MMORPG horse tax at the next town to refill this consumable”.

I guess it depends on how much agency the players/PCs have. Could the PCs direct the formations of the NPCs, choosing which are more likely to survive ("his wife is hot - let's put him on the front lines")? Could the PCs protect the NPCs, take an arrow for the NPCs, change the outcome of the fight ("I hold an action to move to provide cover for whoever (or whoever's on my 'nice' list) the bandits fire at")? Can we look at this, and say, "we need to start slaying farming Dragons to provide armor in order to protect our hirelings" as a precursor to creating our Legion of Doom?

Yes, if the attrition is railroaded with no agency involved, then it's probably pointless (the game, not just the roleplay). But where there's the potential for agency, when death is on the line, yeah, I'd kinda like to play through that.


That's an interesting point. I think elaborating on it more might be useful. Could you please do so?

Probably not? But I'll try.

When you sit down at a table with me as GM, secure in the smug knowledge that Wizard is a synonym for little god, you'll probably quickly learn that d4 HP and no armor is a synonym for "dead man walking" - and that's before the occasional foe who actually actively targets casters.

When you sit back down at that table, mostly secure in the knowledge that Cleric is still mostly synonym for Tier 1 god, but with d8 HP and heavy armor, you'll likely learn that what's there is what's there, it's not curated to be level appropriate, and with your 20' land speed in heavy armor, you'll come to appreciate the Wisdom of the old adage that you don't have to be faster than the tiger / 2-headed T-Rex / tribe of anthropomorphic landshark Barbarians, you just need to be faster than the slowest party member.

And, when you do nervously sit back down, wondering how all your training reading through articles on the Playground could have so poorly prepared you for the game, and actually do manage a win? When you discover that WBL isn't some magical mandate of heaven, stridently enforced by an army of Inevitables ("the cog giveth, and the cog taketh away"), but that you actually have the agency to be as rich or as poor as the treasure and your capacity to carry it dictate?

In such a "hard mode" setting, you might just rethink the value of horses.


As far as scouting "hogging the spotlight", it doesn't need to. Scouting ahead can be as simple as riding 300 yards ahead of the rest of the party. See anything hostile? Ride back and tell them. If you feel the mounted player (or any other player) is hogging too much spotlight, tell them so! Communicate, dang it! Tell them you will resolve their 'hogging" times as quickly as possible and get back to the rest of the group.

That was a… GM-centric response, that assumes a good GM. Often as not, the GM is causing or exacerbating the problem, springing (and running) ambushes that the scout failed to spot, denying the rest of the party the chance to recognize that the scout is in trouble / making the encounter occur too fat away for the party to get there in time to participate. Role-playing the interactions in getting the room for the night. Describing the monsters / terrain / town for the scout, but not for the party. Triggering events for the Scout, but not for the party. Encouraging interaction with the environment / NPCs from the scout, but not from the party.

And, a lot of the time, a lot of that's just realistic. Some of the time, that hits the meta layer of, "we already sat through the scout poking at / investigating / talking to these ferrous flowers / cannibal anthropomorphized squirrels / kindly townsfolk, we're done with this encounter".


Of course, the slam-dunk easiest way to get player to jump on the idea of horses or boats is to make it part of the campaign premise from the beginning. If they come into the game expecting to play, for example, knights errant or barbarian riders on the steppe or (for boats) pirate hunters, you won't have any trouble convincing them to use the form of transportion that those kinds of characters should be using.

If I'm hunting pirates, I'm gonna ambush them at Tortuga, on dry land, while they're drunk (or maybe even passed out), not face them at sea where they likely have the advantage!

noob
2021-01-27, 09:26 AM
When you sit down at a table with me as GM, secure in the smug knowledge that Wizard is a synonym for little god, you'll probably quickly learn that d4 HP and no armor is a synonym for "dead man walking" - and that's before the occasional foe who actually actively targets casters.

When you sit back down at that table, mostly secure in the knowledge that Cleric is still mostly synonym for Tier 1 god, but with d8 HP and heavy armor, you'll likely learn that what's there is what's there, it's not curated to be level appropriate, and with your 20' land speed in heavy armor, you'll come to appreciate the Wisdom of the old adage that you don't have to be faster than the tiger / 2-headed T-Rex / tribe of anthropomorphic landshark Barbarians, you just need to be faster than the slowest party member.

Horseriding could make sense for a low level cleric in heavy armour but getting to know how to ride horses in combat is hard.
Surprisingly I died less as a wizard than as a monk because some of the defensive spells are ridiculously strong (looking at you prismatic sphere).
But a low level wizard is in danger(less so than a 3e monk but those monks have an horrible life).
I did think that this entire thread was about 5e in part but you mentioned d4 hd for wizards suggesting an older edition.

Telok
2021-01-27, 11:30 AM
I did think that this entire thread was about 5e in part but you mentioned d4 hd for wizards suggesting an older edition.

If it was a 5e D&D thread it would be in the 5e forum and there wouldn't have been answers involving travel other than horses and boats. Besides the D&D 5e answer is "homebrew/find a spell/ranger subclass", 4e is "homebrew/buy level appropriate mounts", 3e has a big pile of answers, and the pre-WotC D&D answer is anything from "better DMing" to "hunt down & subdue dragons for everyone" to Spelljammer.

Once you leave D&D behind there are usually fewer problems, mostly because there's less insane damage/HP scales. Supers games either someone is rich enough to buy whole car dealerships for pocket change or the vehicles/mounts are part of the the character powers, for those who even need them. Cyberpunk you steal, "borrow", or have souped up custom vehicles. Delta Green/Twilight 2000 type games you get assigned or just have a car, truck, helicopter, AFV. Horror games vary but generally someone has or steals something if running away will help/work. Some games the PC have a freaking space-battleship to do orbital bombardments and a squadron of heavy sci-fi tanks.

D&D is about the only place you run across the expectation of riding characters with 20 times the durability of their mounts, or large boats having fewer hit points than the party face character and taking the same damage.

Doug Lampert
2021-01-27, 01:11 PM
I'll disagree on this one.
In pre-modern times, water travel was much faster and more efficient than land travel.

Yep, there's a discussion in "On the Wealth of Nations" (published 1776) pointing out that transporting a set number of tons of cargo from India to London by ship was MUCH MUCH cheaper, easier, and safer than transporting the same amount overland from Edinburgh to London.

Similarly, Roman roads were legendary, but, if you're a Roman and want to move a legion from Italy to Syria or Egypt? The Roman method was to get a bunch of ships and sail. In the Civil War, Julius Caesar needs to get from Italy to Greece with his army, and doesn't have sufficient shipping. Rather than marching, he takes only as many men as he has ships for.

The Suez canal existed repeatedly in classical times, because ships are that much easier. They couldn't dig a canal at Corinth (too much hard rock), so they built a portage way that would let them carry entire ships across the isthmus.

Ships were the preferred method of travel pretty much throughout history. If you could use a ship, you did.

Warlawk
2021-01-27, 03:06 PM
The comments about boats are completely fair, my mindset was stuck in Deep Sea mode when I wrote that portion of the post. River travel and coast skimming were both safe and efficient.

JoeJ
2021-01-27, 03:34 PM
If I'm hunting pirates, I'm gonna ambush them at Tortuga, on dry land, while they're drunk (or maybe even passed out), not face them at sea where they likely have the advantage!

Cool. But you're not a powerful spellcaster yet because the campaign is just beginning. Tortuga will be rather hard to get to without a boat.

Ogun
2021-01-27, 09:38 PM
Between running away from foes chasing down foes and carrying stuff, I find mundane vehicles and mounts to be pretty useful.
If the enemy war band is on foot, traveling up the road with a days head start, horses might let you travel cross country to head them off with an ambush, and maybe escape if things go south.
I particularly love mounts because I love minions.
I love minions because they are disposable.
I have found horses to be undervalued in 5e, along with looted weapons and armor.
I tend to let others fight over the coin and gems while I snag the equipment.
So far, encumbrance has been largely ignored, but if it became a thing, horses would be important.


In at least one 3.5 campain, encumbrance was a thing.
We would ride horses to the point of exhaustion, and as we leveled, we started summoning new ones from our wands of Mount, and ride those to exhaustion as well.
Operating as a strikeforce in a mercenary army, getting to where the fight was gonna happen on time mattered.
Sometimes we were reinforcements, some times we were commandos
Even on the battlefield, horses let us keep our foes at range.
After us kiting them for a bit, the opposition might target the horse, who can blame them?
If we lost one, we fought on foot, stole another,or rode two to a horse.
Sometimes you rode into a situation you knew you could only fight your way out of, but PC's do that with holes in the ground and beanstalk as well.
We saw horses as semi disposable movement/encumbrance boosters.

Boats we used as well, river boats plying the canals our employer had created using high level magic.
We used keelboats to patrol the river and canals while having a place to sleep.
We even kept horses on board for occasional raids ashore.
A single horse or mule can pull an entire barge, assuming you are not in a hurry.
Fighting with the risk of drowning added challenge.
Knowing we were going to fight on or near water affected spell choices.
Before we gained access to Control Water, we always tried to retreat to the shore for fights against aquatic monsters.
After we got Control Water, we brought the shore to the fight.
Challenge accepted and overcome,it was time for new challenges.
.

I've only played one mounted character, a 3.5 scout/cleric "horse archer" with no feats dedicated to being mounted.
Cleric buffs plus Skirmish damage plus Skills worked well enough.
The horse was, again, disposable equipment.

Quertus
2021-01-27, 10:30 PM
dragons for everyone" to Spelljammer.

Those are, of course, the correct answers. :smallwink:


Cool. But you're not a powerful spellcaster yet because the campaign is just beginning. Tortuga will be rather hard to get to without a boat.

Touché.

noob
2021-01-28, 10:20 AM
If it was a 5e D&D thread it would be in the 5e forum and there wouldn't have been answers involving travel other than horses and boats. Besides the D&D 5e answer is "homebrew/find a spell/ranger subclass", 4e is "homebrew/buy level appropriate mounts", 3e has a big pile of answers, and the pre-WotC D&D answer is anything from "better DMing" to "hunt down & subdue dragons for everyone" to Spelljammer.

Once you leave D&D behind there are usually fewer problems, mostly because there's less insane damage/HP scales. Supers games either someone is rich enough to buy whole car dealerships for pocket change or the vehicles/mounts are part of the the character powers, for those who even need them. Cyberpunk you steal, "borrow", or have souped up custom vehicles. Delta Green/Twilight 2000 type games you get assigned or just have a car, truck, helicopter, AFV. Horror games vary but generally someone has or steals something if running away will help/work. Some games the PC have a freaking space-battleship to do orbital bombardments and a squadron of heavy sci-fi tanks.

D&D is about the only place you run across the expectation of riding characters with 20 times the durability of their mounts, or large boats having fewer hit points than the party face character and taking the same damage.
And it is due to dnd being one of the rare rpgs where mounts suffers from dangerousness escalation of things(encounters you meet are more and more dangerous relatively to the hp of the mounts) to ridiculous points that I assumed that the players were playing dnd.
Horses are also often bad in superhero games unless the horse is a power of the character.
But superheroes games are often in modern settings so you have a huge variety of vehicles instead of horses.

Segev
2021-01-28, 10:26 AM
And it is due to dnd being one of the rare places where mounts suffers from dangerousness escalation of things(encounters you meet are more and more dangerous relatively to the hp of the mounts) to ridiculous points that I assumed that the players were playing dnd.
Horses are also often bad in superhero games unless the horse is a power of the character.
But superheroes games are often in modern settings so you have a huge variety of vehicles instead of horses.

It's noteworthy that superhero vehicles are also often "part of the character." It happens in some of the more recent movies, and oddly a fair bit in Batman Beyond, but in most fiction about Batman, you rarely see the Batmobile get wrecked. If a character has a motorcycle, it's largely ignored even if he's fighting from its back, treating it as equipment and thus as untargetable as his gun, sword, armor, or jacket. (i.e. at most it's likely to take some cosmetic damage, unless "dramatic crash" is the express goal of a particular scene/resolution.)

Perhaps part of the problem with mounts is that they'd be better treated as if they were equipment, mechanically?

Willie the Duck
2021-01-28, 11:34 AM
It's noteworthy that superhero vehicles are also often "part of the character." It happens in some of the more recent movies, and oddly a fair bit in Batman Beyond, but in most fiction about Batman, you rarely see the Batmobile get wrecked. If a character has a motorcycle, it's largely ignored even if he's fighting from its back, treating it as equipment and thus as untargetable as his gun, sword, armor, or jacket. (i.e. at most it's likely to take some cosmetic damage, unless "dramatic crash" is the express goal of a particular scene/resolution.)

Perhaps part of the problem with mounts is that they'd be better treated as if they were equipment, mechanically?

It's certainly an option. I think those who started with simulationist games and darn well want simulationist games (and either gloss over than sword breaking rules may or may not exist in-game), or realism/verisimilitude advocates who darn well want creatures who might reasonably attack a horse (including lots of monsters in a fantasy world) to darn well attack the horses, might rebel against the notion.

I think one of the major problems is that fantasy worlds are different from many-to-most other RP game worlds -- in a Western, the horse is the most valuable thing most people own and they are more likely to be stolen than attacked (and coyotes and cougars and stuff out there aren't realistically going to take them on much). In superhero stories, the vehicles are rarely attacked. In wargame, mecha, and spaceship games well sure the vehicles are attacked but that's likely the primary combat scenario and you are probably effectively playing 'as the ship' to a lesser or greater degree. However, in fantasy games, there are creatures who will reasonably attack your mount, you probably aren't fighting 'as' your mount, and the mount is probably more vulnerable than you are (even in games like GURPS where the mount probably has more body than your swordsman, they are likely wearing less armor in less places and DR plays a big part of survivability).

Doug Lampert
2021-01-28, 11:44 AM
It's noteworthy that superhero vehicles are also often "part of the character." It happens in some of the more recent movies, and oddly a fair bit in Batman Beyond, but in most fiction about Batman, you rarely see the Batmobile get wrecked. If a character has a motorcycle, it's largely ignored even if he's fighting from its back, treating it as equipment and thus as untargetable as his gun, sword, armor, or jacket. (i.e. at most it's likely to take some cosmetic damage, unless "dramatic crash" is the express goal of a particular scene/resolution.)

Perhaps part of the problem with mounts is that they'd be better treated as if they were equipment, mechanically?

Equipment would work, but to me it misses out on the whole, "It's a mount" thing.

As long as you can't bring most mounts into buildings or dungeons, they're not really comparable to a sword in the sense of being something you can count on having like most of your other equipment.

My preferred solution for a game like D&D 5e would be that (A) any combat trained adventurer can ride, there is NOTHING in the rules that requires a skill proficiency to attempt and horses are not a tool so you don't need a tool proficiency, this is like climbing an easy slope, you're a faux medieval adventurer from a social class that can afford 100 or so GP worth of gear PLUS apprenticeship in a class, you rode a horse all the time when you were a child; (B) any creature with the mount keyword (yeah, I know 5e doesn't really use keywords, their mistake) being ridden by a character of a level higher than the creature's CR gains 6 HP per difference in level or CR, one HD appropriate to its size per difference in CR (round up), and a flat +1 to AC and all saves; (C) the rider gains advantage on all melee attacks against non-mounted foes his own size or smaller; (D) the mount's actions and the rider's are on a single common turn, the mount may move and act independently but will not normally attack unless intelligent or war-trained; and (E) make sure a mount is of reasonable speed, absolute minimum of 60' (seriously, that's less than 7 MPH, quarter horses have been times at up to 55 MPH; granted that's a short sprint on good ground and they can't keep it up, but less than 14 MPH for a full out run is not too fast for a horse, if anything it's way way too slow).

Segev
2021-01-28, 12:12 PM
Equipment would work, but to me it misses out on the whole, "It's a mount" thing.

As long as you can't bring most mounts into buildings or dungeons, they're not really comparable to a sword in the sense of being something you can count on having like most of your other equipment.


Just because you aren't wearing your armor at the fancy ball doesn't mean your armor isn't equipment.

TheStranger
2021-01-28, 12:54 PM
Equipment would work, but to me it misses out on the whole, "It's a mount" thing.

As long as you can't bring most mounts into buildings or dungeons, they're not really comparable to a sword in the sense of being something you can count on having like most of your other equipment.

My preferred solution for a game like D&D 5e would be that (A) any combat trained adventurer can ride, there is NOTHING in the rules that requires a skill proficiency to attempt and horses are not a tool so you don't need a tool proficiency, this is like climbing an easy slope, you're a faux medieval adventurer from a social class that can afford 100 or so GP worth of gear PLUS apprenticeship in a class, you rode a horse all the time when you were a child; (B) any creature with the mount keyword (yeah, I know 5e doesn't really use keywords, their mistake) being ridden by a character of a level higher than the creature's CR gains 6 HP per difference in level or CR, one HD appropriate to its size per difference in CR (round up), and a flat +1 to AC and all saves; (C) the rider gains advantage on all melee attacks against non-mounted foes his own size or smaller; (D) the mount's actions and the rider's are on a single common turn, the mount may move and act independently but will not normally attack unless intelligent or war-trained; and (E) make sure a mount is of reasonable speed, absolute minimum of 60' (seriously, that's less than 7 MPH, quarter horses have been times at up to 55 MPH; granted that's a short sprint on good ground and they can't keep it up, but less than 14 MPH for a full out run is not too fast for a horse, if anything it's way way too slow).

I don’t know about 5e, but in 3.X a piece of gear that gave comparable benefits would be very powerful. I mean, it accomplishes the goal of making horses an attractive option, but it does that by making them far more powerful than any comparably priced item. I’m not sure what I’d expect to pay for a to-hit bonus, doubled move speed, and extra actions - maybe 20,000? Maybe less, because it is situational. Way more than the price of a horse, regardless of the exact number.

Saint-Just
2021-01-28, 03:13 PM
Just because you aren't wearing your armor at the fancy ball doesn't mean your armor isn't equipment.

I am sure that at many tables (and it's not something that happens only in D&D) armor is presumed to be available at the fancy balls. It bends verisimilitude but usually players do not like to be suddenly "depowered" even if it makes sense from the in-game perspective. Enforcing historical weapon codes is even worse; giving pass to the concealable weapons at least resembles infiltration missions, but if you can wear a sword but not an axe or polearm or two-hander it looks downright arbitrary (it is in effect arbitrary; historical restrictions on weapons were not usually based on their possible deadliness but only on what is fashionable, proper, or traditional)

Segev
2021-01-28, 03:19 PM
I am sure that at many tables (and it's not something that happens only in D&D) armor is presumed to be available at the fancy balls. It bends verisimilitude but usually players do not like to be suddenly "depowered" even if it makes sense from the in-game perspective. Enforcing historical weapon codes is even worse; giving pass to the concealable weapons at least resembles infiltration missions, but if you can wear a sword but not an axe or polearm or two-hander it looks downright arbitrary (it is in effect arbitrary; historical restrictions on weapons were not usually based on their possible deadliness but only on what is fashionable, proper, or traditional)

I have never, ever seen a DM pass up an opportunity to require PCs to leave their gear behind if they don't want ... problems.


That aside, this is missing the point I was making: treating the mount as equipment mechanically means that it is as unlikely to be damaged as that armor. The fact that you can't bring this piece of equipment into every single place doesn't change this. I hardly think making mounts less of a liability will make them less attractive, as seems to be implied by saying that they don't work as "equipment" because "you can't bring them into dungeons."

noob
2021-01-28, 04:10 PM
There is a lot of cool equipment you only use situationally and if horses were items then you would find out the situations where they can be used are quite numerous: basically as soon as you are outside horses becomes interesting(if you are slower than one).

Democratus
2021-01-28, 05:38 PM
"Horses as Equipment" may even be a cleaner solution than the 100hp horse that I've been contemplating.

After all, most characters treat their mounts like equipment as it is. It's a rare player who constantly reminds you how they brush down their horse after a hard run or take time to re-shoe and trim their hooves.

quinron
2021-01-28, 08:01 PM
"Horses as Equipment" may even be a cleaner solution than the 100hp horse that I've been contemplating.

After all, most characters treat their mounts like equipment as it is. It's a rare player who constantly reminds you how they brush down their horse after a hard run or take time to re-shoe and trim their hooves.

And those are usually the same players who constantly remind you how they're sharpening and polishing their swords when resting.

Beleriphon
2021-02-05, 12:29 PM
:smallconfused:Been ages since I've read The Hobbbit, but I believe the dwarves had pack animals, not riding animals? May very well be mistaken there.

The dwarves very specifically have ponies up to the point the goblins catch them. Bilbo even notes that they have very fine ponies. I think that Beorn provides them ponies again, which they promptly lose in Mirkwood.


I think this is more a problem with D&D than anything else. Knowing nothing about animals that make your world work would be about like a 21st century individual from an industrialized nation knowing nothing about electrical appliances.

I think this is pretty fair. If you think about it no matter what the specifics of particular kitchen appliance are you can probably grab one from anywhere and make it work. Might not be quite what you want without bit of trial and error, but it will work correctly.


Also, driving a car is a very poor analogy. I'm not even sure where to start in describing how bad of an analogy that is.

I think riding a bicycle is much better. It is most a function of balance and knowing how to guide a horse. A trained riding horse will accept a rider without complain, and generally go where you want them to go.

Of course the biggest benefit of horses isn't so much their speed, they don't really go that much faster that being on foot over a long distance, but that you can carry way more stuff and your feet aren't covered in blisters by the end of the day.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-05, 01:48 PM
The dwarves very specifically have ponies up to the point the goblins catch them. Bilbo even notes that they have very fine ponies. I think that Beorn provides them ponies again, which they promptly lose in Mirkwood.


Been reading this to my kids, so:

The dwarves have ponies, some-to-all of whom they lose on the way to Rivendell. At Rivendell, they get more ponies, all of whom they lose to goblins. Given this track record, Beorn loans them some ponies that they have to send back once they get to Mirkwood. They get ponies again when they reach Laketown, but lose them to Smaug, who awakens after Bilbo steals the cup.

Long story short: Horses are not an investment, they are a consumable. :smallbiggrin:

Mastikator
2021-02-05, 02:08 PM
Been reading this to my kids, so:

The dwarves have ponies, some-to-all of whom they lose on the way to Rivendell. At Rivendell, they get more ponies, all of whom they lose to goblins. Given this track record, Beorn loans them some ponies that they have to send back once they get to Mirkwood. They get ponies again when they reach Laketown, but lose them to Smaug, who awakens after Bilbo steals the cup.

Long story short: Horses are not an investment, they are a consumable. :smallbiggrin:

Tolkien would've been a killer DM who fosters murder-hobo PCs. Confirmed

Beleriphon
2021-02-05, 02:17 PM
Tolkien would've been a killer DM who fosters murder-hobo PCs. Confirmed

And gets pissed off and takes revenge on the player that outsmarts him in the next campaign he runs.

Shpadoinkle
2021-02-05, 03:58 PM
"Horses as Equipment" may even be a cleaner solution than the 100hp horse that I've been contemplating.

After all, most characters treat their mounts like equipment as it is. It's a rare player who constantly reminds you how they brush down their horse after a hard run or take time to re-shoe and trim their hooves.

Honestly, I really like this as a concept. Is it realistic? No. But then neither are wizards slinging Sleep spells or Fireballs, so who cares. It's a GAME.

So, rough outline of simplifying mounts into a piece of equipment, like a shield or a bag of holding, off the top of my head (3.5e/PF1):

- Mounting or dismounting is a Standard action. A DC 15(?) Tumble/Acrobatics check reduces this to a Move action, DC 20(?) brings it down to a Free action.

- Directing a mount is a free action, but you have to be able to move freely - you can't do it if you're Held because your mount is effectively Held with you.

- Being mounted increases your character's effective size by 1 category, so a mounted human is considered Large for pretty much all purposes (yes, including weapon damage - you're situated above someone and can bring your weapon down on their heads harder, right? BUT you're not as flexible and you can't maneuver as tightly as you can on foot, so you take a penalty to AC and attack rolls.) Exceptionally large or exotic mounts (a human riding an elephant, for instance) might increase your effective size category by 2 or more.

- Mounts increase the rider's base speed by 10'.
-- Exotic mounts may have a lower move speed but different modes of movement - flight, swimming, being able to walk up walls, etc. or a higher speed, but these naturally cost proportionally more. (These should probably be priced like magic items - a flying mount should cost about as much as a Carpet of Flying, for instance, and so on.)

- The cost of a mount includes things like a proper saddle, bit and bridle, food, etc. (Unless it's a super low-level campaign or something comes up that puts a major emphasis on survival, almost every group I've been in abstracts things like food and water anyway. It's just assumed that the characters restock on food and water when they have the chance, and the cost is pocket change past level 1 anyway.)

- Mounts can be attacked, but this is treated like the Sunder maneuver. A 'Sundered' mount is only able to move at half speed, and can't run or charge, until properly 'repaired' (healed) via any healing spell or a Heal check (DC 12 + half the damage dealt, base DC might be higher for more exotic mounts.)

- A character can be forcibly dismounted with a successful Trip maneuver. A DC 15(?) Tumble/Acrobatics check (or maybe a successful opposed Trip check) allows the dismounted character to land on their feet, otherwise they land prone.

Thoughts?

Jay R
2021-02-05, 06:33 PM
Wouldn't it be wonderful to run a campaign in which the your biggest complaint about the players is that they don't use horses?

Quertus
2021-02-05, 07:08 PM
Wouldn't it be wonderful to run a campaign in which the your biggest complaint about the players is that they don't use horses?

No. Because then I'd be someone who cares whether my players use horses or not.

Segev
2021-02-05, 07:32 PM
Honestly, I really like this as a concept. Is it realistic? No. But then neither are wizards slinging Sleep spells or Fireballs, so who cares. It's a GAME.

So, rough outline of simplifying mounts into a piece of equipment, like a shield or a bag of holding, off the top of my head (3.5e/PF1):

- Mounting or dismounting is a Standard action. A DC 15(?) Tumble/Acrobatics check reduces this to a Move action, DC 20(?) brings it down to a Free action.

- Directing a mount is a free action, but you have to be able to move freely - you can't do it if you're Held because your mount is effectively Held with you.

- Being mounted increases your character's effective size by 1 category, so a mounted human is considered Large for pretty much all purposes (yes, including weapon damage - you're situated above someone and can bring your weapon down on their heads harder, right? BUT you're not as flexible and you can't maneuver as tightly as you can on foot, so you take a penalty to AC and attack rolls.) Exceptionally large or exotic mounts (a human riding an elephant, for instance) might increase your effective size category by 2 or more.

- Mounts increase the rider's base speed by 10'.
-- Exotic mounts may have a lower move speed but different modes of movement - flight, swimming, being able to walk up walls, etc. or a higher speed, but these naturally cost proportionally more. (These should probably be priced like magic items - a flying mount should cost about as much as a Carpet of Flying, for instance, and so on.)

- The cost of a mount includes things like a proper saddle, bit and bridle, food, etc. (Unless it's a super low-level campaign or something comes up that puts a major emphasis on survival, almost every group I've been in abstracts things like food and water anyway. It's just assumed that the characters restock on food and water when they have the chance, and the cost is pocket change past level 1 anyway.)

- Mounts can be attacked, but this is treated like the Sunder maneuver. A 'Sundered' mount is only able to move at half speed, and can't run or charge, until properly 'repaired' (healed) via any healing spell or a Heal check (DC 12 + half the damage dealt, base DC might be higher for more exotic mounts.)

- A character can be forcibly dismounted with a successful Trip maneuver. A DC 15(?) Tumble/Acrobatics check (or maybe a successful opposed Trip check) allows the dismounted character to land on their feet, otherwise they land prone.

Thoughts?
I'd make it simpler: Mounting/dismounting is as per the existing rules. While mounted, you have your mount's size and speed. (You can't have a mount that isn't bigger than you.) Depending on the system, I'd possibly make the mount's action options available to you, but the combined "you and your mount" creature doesn't get extra actions.

Possibly some rules for forcibly knocking/pulling you off your mount, but while mounted, you're the target of any relevant attacks. Your mount is equipment and can no more be attacked than your armor or sword can.

Democratus
2021-02-08, 03:19 PM
No. Because then I'd be someone who cares whether my players use horses or not.

You only complain of things you care about?

You're missing out on a rich tradition of idle bitching. :smallcool:

sockmonkey
2021-02-09, 02:33 AM
This is why you should be a necromancer. Your horses (and allies) are still usable after they get killed.

icefractal
2021-02-09, 05:53 AM
Maybe a contributing factor - in most campaigns I've played, the travel time didn't actually matter. Either it was a sandbox and getting there later wasn't necessarily worse, or there was a plot and ultimately we were going to get there at the speed of plot unless we did something really fast or slow - like teleporting or taking several weeks to get moving.

So in that context - why pay for a horse, have the sadness of losing it when a fight happens, and risk being disadvantaged in a critical moment (not likely but possible), when you can just walk everywhere and get the same results?

Also, the last time I bought a horse (a somewhat fancy one, even) we rode them for one trip that took a couple days, then ended up leaving the mounts with the elves while we followed a chain of portals and actually finished the entire campaign before returning to them. :smalltongue:

farothel
2021-02-09, 12:59 PM
I think it also depends on where you adventure. If most adventures take places underground in small caverns or in thick jungles or similar places, you can't use horses. So why bother taking them if you have to leave them somewhere and hope they're still there when you come back. So players who know that even if it would speed up this bit of the journey they will have to leave them behind at some point will mostly not bother. Especially if coupled to random encounters and other points already mentioned before.

Also doing combat from a horse is not easy if you're not trained (ie ranks in ride, have the appropriate feats), so you have to dismount to do combat and hope the horse doesn't run away (as horses tend to do in combat). And some weapons (I'm looking at you, longbow) simply can't be fired from horseback. All that combined make players go 'why bother'.

Segev
2021-02-09, 01:13 PM
I think it also depends on where you adventure. If most adventures take places underground in small caverns or in thick jungles or similar places, you can't use horses. So why bother taking them if you have to leave them somewhere and hope they're still there when you come back. So players who know that even if it would speed up this bit of the journey they will have to leave them behind at some point will mostly not bother. Especially if coupled to random encounters and other points already mentioned before.

Also doing combat from a horse is not easy if you're not trained (ie ranks in ride, have the appropriate feats), so you have to dismount to do combat and hope the horse doesn't run away (as horses tend to do in combat). And some weapons (I'm looking at you, longbow) simply can't be fired from horseback. All that combined make players go 'why bother'.

I don't think there are penalties for fighting while mounted with no special training. You even get +1 to hit for higher ground advantage against foes your size that aren't mounted!

Quertus
2021-02-09, 01:13 PM
You only complain of things you care about?

You're missing out on a rich tradition of idle bitching. :smallcool:

I suppose I meant as opposed to being exuberant / excited / thrilled / whatever that the party is memorable / has character / whatever for, you know, actively avoiding horses.

Especially if they are capable of producing a Playground-level detailed analysis of their reasoning.

farothel
2021-02-10, 09:17 AM
I don't think there are penalties for fighting while mounted with no special training. You even get +1 to hit for higher ground advantage against foes your size that aren't mounted!

It's been a while since I did mounted combat myself and it depends probably on system, but don't you have to use an action (move I think) and roll to control your horse?

Segev
2021-02-10, 12:37 PM
It's been a while since I did mounted combat myself and it depends probably on system, but don't you have to use an action (move I think) and roll to control your horse?

Not in 5e; I'd have to dig up the rules for 3e.

icefractal
2021-02-10, 03:06 PM
In 3.x - not if it's a war-trained mount, then it's just a trivial DC 5 Ride check to direct it as a free action. You get +2 for a good saddle, so moderately dexterous characters don't even need ranks.

Non war-trained mounts do suck to be riding in combat though, and even to have around during it since they might get frightened and bolt. Better to walk if you can't easily afford a warhorse.

quinron
2021-02-11, 03:58 PM
I know this has been touched on a couple times - the big advantage of horses in reality wasn't usually speed, it was strength. A horse can carry a lot more than a human. I have a couple players who buy horses in every game they're in, and they always buy them alongside carts.

If the complaint is, "my players don't do mounted combat or overland travel," you're not going to change that unless you either start seriously rewarding them for riding or seriously punish them for not riding. If the complaint is, "I feel like the party should have horses for my immersion," the answer is simple - track encumbrance closely and start handing out heavy treasure objects instead of coins.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-12, 11:12 AM
I know this has been touched on a couple times - the big advantage of horses in reality wasn't usually speed, it was strength. A horse can carry a lot more than a human. I have a couple players who buy horses in every game they're in, and they always buy them alongside carts.


Nothing says economy and carrying capacity like a donkey cart. Plus, it helps with your slower characters... your dwarves, halflings, and gnomes... putting them up at a more human movement rate.