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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Grim Portent]

Well a draft horse costs 1 silver piece a day to feed (5cp per 10 pounds of feed and horses need 15-20 from what I've read,) moves ten feet faster than a human, and can pull a combined cart weight of 2700* pounds with the wagon taking up 400 pounds.

The human labourer costing 2 silver a day can pull a handcart and load with a combined weight of 750 pounds, but the closest thing we have to a handcart is probably a chariot which weighs 100 pounds and costs 250gp, or a 200 pound cart which is cheap at 15gp. Food costs for humans are either 5sp for rations per day, or if you bring flour, live chickens/goats and so on and cook proper meals on the trip it'll work out at just a few copper per day at the cost of baggage space.

Unless strapped for cash when setting up the venture draft horses with wagons are much better cargo carriers than commoners. The horses do cost 5sp a day to stable when stopped in a city or town where you can't just tie them to trees and care for them yourself though, which is obviously quite pricy, but the four commoners you'd need to replace them cost 8 sp in daily wages so the horse still wins. You may also need to bring one commoner per wagon to drive the horses unless you can rely on a more generally useful hireling to do it as part of their other duties.

*A real life draft horse can pull up to 8000 pounds. 5e's carrying capacity rules are pretty bad.

[scriver]

Don't horses and commoners move at the same speed of disyance/day, though?

[Grim Portent]

Due to how simplified travel is in 5e, yes provided the horses are pulling carts. Ridden horses can move faster for one hour per day which is obviously little help for draft animals.

If you get in a situation where things are trying to eat your draft animals or labourers then draft horses are better at escaping and better at fighting than commoners.

1 commoner, a draft horse and a wagon can pull just slightly less than 5 commoners with handcarts, but the former is cheaper to set up and maintain, the horse can be ridden if need be provided you bring a saddle, bit and bridle. You can also add more horses to a wagon cheaper than adding more commoners.

If you skip the vehicles and just carry stuff in bags on animal/people's backs then humans have a theoretically higher carrying capacity, but in practice a d&d backpack can't hold very much, 1 cubic foot or 30 pounds at max, so much of the carrying capacity would go unused. Saddlebags have no listed capacity.

[scriver]

I mean, there's sleds.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Hey peeps,

Thinking about DMing a one shot for my friends to get into playing DnD this summer, any suggestions for a budding DM???

[Iduno]

any suggestions for a budding DM???

If you want to tell a particular story, write a book. If you want to explore a new story with the players, GM.
Have some pre-set NPCs that you expect to use, but also have some stat blocks for other types of people, so you can just throw them in when needed. This advice probably applies to locations as well, especially in town.
Make sure everyone is on the same page about what type of game it will be before you start.

[andrea]

Whatever you think players will do in a situation, they will do something completely different in the worst way possible for your plans.

Yes, even if you prepared 30 contingency plans and alternative path. They will find a way to break it.

[Grim Portent]

I mean, there's sleds.

Given their price and weight I think carts are the better choice, though none of them have any information on how much they can carry or how big they are of course. Hurray for simplicity.

I tend to assume wagons are able to be big enough to carry just about anything you might want carried, while the heavier carriage is probably more comfortable but can't carry much cargo, not that comfort matters much in d&d, and the cart I assume is intended to be one of the two wheeled variety. Sleds are presumably meant to be dog sleds.

Obviously none of this is helpful for actually working out cargo limits, but I'm generally running on the assumption a wagon pulled by two draft horses/oxen is the most efficient way to transports the large amount of goods I had worked out in my old calculations

Some math in an excel sheet tells me that 2 oxen can pull feed and water for themselves and an elephant for about 6 days with some spare cargo capacity for gear and supplies for the elephant's rider/s, plus whatever the elephant can be laden with or pull, and the wagon, feed, water barrels, elephant and oxen only cost 352 gp before factoring in exotic saddles, weapons and so on. It's not a bad price for a CR4 war mount.

[scriver]

No, I didn't mean like in the books, I meant like in general. Also I meant sleds for people. As in pulled by people. It's what people used to use.

Of course there a no reason it couldn't be a handcart either. I guess I just thought "what else is there besides carrying stuff on your back" and thought of sleds and then thought hey you don't need horses to pull sleds unlike a cart and then I linda just thoughtlept over the notion that at that point you might as well use a small person-sized cart rather than a horse cart since you've obviously got wheels anyway.

[Grim Portent]

No, I didn't mean like in the books, I meant like in general. Also I meant sleds for people. As in pulled by people. It's what people used to use.

Of course there a no reason it couldn't be a handcart either. I guess I just thought "what else is there besides carrying stuff on your back" and thought of sleds and then thought hey you don't need horses to pull sleds unlike a cart and then I linda just thoughtlept over the notion that at that point you might as well use a small person-sized cart rather than a horse cart since you've obviously got wheels anyway.

Oh those things, weren't they usually similar in scale to a wheelbarrow?

You could have hirelings pull any vehicle, but you'd need several to make it worthwhile compared to one horse/ox/giant duck because of the weight of the vehicle and they wind up costing more than a horse does to maintain.

Interesting note is that warhorses are terrible value for money, 400 gold just to buy them compared to the 200 for an elephant, 50 for a camel or 75 for a riding horse. Given that Paladins get mounts for free and can replace them when they die you'd think they'd have made warhorses more reasonably priced for people who wanted to play something like a mounted fighter.

[Kadzar]

Meh. Guess it's my turn to start becoming disillusioned with Sage Advice rulings. What with the Twinned Dragon's Breath tomfoolery

This made me realize that you can twin-spell booming blade, and it stands to reason that you can also quicken it and also twin-spell that if need be. Combine this with the Mobile feat, and you have a pretty good pseudo-disengage action that puts the hurt on anyone trying to run after you.

Then I got thinking about how you might build a melee-focused sorcerer. Probably go dragon-blooded for the AC boost (basically mage armor, but you don't have to know it, cast it, or worry about it being dispelled) and extra HP. It sucks that there aren't any thunder damage dragons to boost booming blade's damage at 6th level, but I suppose it's not too bad to pick fire to use with green-flame blade.

Another option might be to start as a fighter to pick up armor proficiency and and a fighting style, then action surge at level 2, then possibly stick in it for another level for something like battle master maneuvers (though that might be too much investment in fighter levels). Alternatively or in addition to this, you can take Shadow Magic and be able to pull off the warlock's Devil's Sight trick.

As you go up in levels, there are a few spells you might have wanted that are only available to wizards for some reason (like steel wind strike or tenser's transformation or foresight), but you can still have fun with haste and shadow blade and various protective and teleportation spells. Overall, probably not the most optimized build, but it might be fun.

[Persus13]

Booming Blade with Swashbuckler doesn't even need Mobile.

I had a player who did a similar sorcerer build. Had one to two levels of fighter and the rest was sorcerer, but he had to quit because of work schedules changing. It was a fun character until that happened though.

[IcyTea31]

Booming Blade with Swashbuckler doesn't even need Mobile.

Yep, I've played this build before. You don't even need to multiclass, since you can take the Arcane Initiate feat for Booming Blade and another cantrip and 1st-level spell of your choice (Find Familiar is a good choice in my opinion). Did you know that even though it's a Cast a Spell action and not an Attack action, Booming Blade's attack can be a sneak attack?

[Kadzar]

Yeah, I'm aware of all of this. My idea is more to get multiple attacks with Booming Blade in a round, which admittedly is probably a worse build idea, but it likely doesn't benefit much from levels of rogue, since the idea is to spread the use of Booming Blade around rather than doing lots of damage to one target.

[Grim Portent]

Found some third party material detailing baby monsters/magical creatures and now I want to run a magical academy sort of game where each PC has a randomly chosen baby monster to take care of during the course of their shenanigans.