OD&D: Can Your Horse Carry You?

-

I had the sudden realization that since horses and mules in OD&D have a maximum load they can carry, that is applicable not only for carrying cargo but also for carrying riders plus whatever they are wearing or carrying as well. Below is the maximum load for each type of equine, in coins and pounds.

Equine Load (cn) Load (lb)
Horse, light 3,000 300
Horse, medium 3,750 375
Horse, heavy 4,500 450
Horse, draft 4,500 450
Mule 3,500 350

Below are assumed weights of riders, in pounds, at different degrees of encumbrance. We can guess that, at a minimum, they are using a saddle (anywhere from 15 to 60 lb) and other equipment in order to ride the horse. Barding (horse armor) weighs 75 lb, so count that in as well if you have it; on a tangent, maybe it improves the horse’s AC by 2 pips from 7 [12] to 5 [14].

Rider No Backpack Backpack
Unarmored 200 lb 225 lb
Leather armor 225 lb 250 lb
Chainmail armor 250 lb 275 lb
Plate armor 275 lb 300 lb

And there we go! Turning everything into 25 lb (250 cn) increments keeps it simple without really introducing new math. The horse’s surplus load basically becomes a function of what armor you are wearing, if you are wearing a backpack, and if the horse is wearing barding. Or you might not be riding the horse at all.

On the topic of treasure, we typically find it in thousands of coins (or hundreds of pounds) of copper, silver, and gold. It’s pretty clear that horses are necessary to carry all that back into town or wherever you came from, but it being in hundreds of pounds makes it easy to track in unit quantities. Below are experience values per thousands of coins:

Coin Type XP/1,000
Copper 20
Silver 100
Gold 1,000

What this means is that, conveniently, silver is worth its weight in pounds—which is historically interesting when we consider the pound sterling’s origin, as if the actual basis of OD&D’s economy is not really the gold coin but the silver pound. Or, rather, maybe this was the case, but not since the currencies were massively devalued by apparent inflation. Like in our supposed economy, a pound of silver (1 gold piece) is a month’s wages, whereas it may have been a year’s wages in the past. It’s just all convenient! Anyway.

That’s all!

Comments

  1. Simulated KnaveAugust 8, 2023 at 9:03 AM

    This article may be of interest to you.

    https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2023/07/how-much-weight-can-horse-carry-in-d.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

D&D Fifth Edition: Death & Rebirth

-
Image
Hashtag OSRisOverParty, Hashtag RIPBozo, etc etc. The initial… “edition” of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition tried to present itself as a reactionary return to some ideal past paradigm of D&D —be it Third Edition to win back territory lost prior to Paizo’s Pathfinder , or an even older Gygaxian edition to get in the pants of the sort-of nascent OSR. Practically, this resulted in a final product that was like a simple Third Edition with dogwhistle-like nods to OSR conventions (since the play-style’s influence in the end was tenuous at best and mostly abandoned after the public test phase). It’s maybe more succinctly described as a people-pleasing game, with the caveat that people-pleasers don’t please anyone. So, how did it become popular? And how does the new 2024 not-edition reflect major differences between then and now, in terms of how D&D is perceived and played? This is my ramble. Sent from iPhone. Fifth Edition: Born in 2014 Of course, nobody plays D&D as ...
Read more

OSR Rules Families

-
Image
So, here’s the thing: originally I wrote this like a fucking research article with a hypothesis, a methodology, and all that stuff. I’m not even a scientific research person. That’s my partner’s job. Not mine. So, instead of walking you through every single step I took, I’m going to take the journalistic approach and start with the big picture before I zoom into it and tell you about the little details. I read, reviewed, and statistically organized 38 different rulebooks considered to be OSR or OSR-adjacent. These include four rulebooks from TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons , as well as ten rulebooks from the 2000s and 2010s. The remaining 24 rulebooks postdate the closure of G+ in early 2019. Please refer to the bibliography at the bottom of this post for more information. After having collected and organized a dataset with ~90 variables, I found the statistical similarity between each pair of rulebooks based on that data. Finally, I ran an algorithm to determine clusters of these bo...
Read more

Bite-Sized Dungeons

-
Image
Workbook Now Available On Itch! Bite-Sized Dungeons by Traverse Fantasy Edit: This whole time, I said that a first level dungeon hoard had 100 times d6 gold pieces when it actually has just 10 times d6. This means the average hoard has an XP value of 70 without gems, or ~110 with gems. By extension, the eighteen-room dungeon only has 350 XP without gems, or ~550 XP with gems. That is downright dismal and I don’t think works out with modern play sessions and party counts, so let’s pretend it said 100 times d6 anyway. I just read an article by Yora of Spriggan’s Den about extrapolating a scheme for an eighteen-room dungeon from the procedural generation rules in B/X (1981) [1]. As Yora points out, eighteen rooms is a great size for a mid-to-large dungeon or for a floor of a multi-level dungeon, and the checklist of rooms makes it easy to make sure that the final product has a variety of interesting play interactions. But, being as large as it is, it can still be a tall order on the ...
Read more