Horses?
 

The riding skill shows up in a few professions, as does the vow to own no more than a horse can carry.

Am I missing an explanation of what a horse can carry, or what benefits riding one can give, or where one can be bought?

Re: Horses?
 

I'm pretty sure you're missing nothing. A quick search of Adventurers and Exploits only reveals that you need spend $4,000 for "a pair of horses" (p. 16) to haul a half-ton in a wagon.

Re: Horses?
 

This is a rather irritating oversight.

Re: Horses?
 

Here the Basic Set: Campaigns book, covering horses, looks like a requirement. Of course this never has been a problem for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, unlike the standalone Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game.

Re: Horses?
 

Indeed. It would seem that if sales warrant supplemental product, the first should be a book of monsters, which would include horses. Indeed, even Monsters & Treasure included stats for four kinds of horses and mules.

Re: Horses?
 

I noticed this some time ago, but never got around to saying something about it.

Re: Horses?
 

If you've got the option of Riding skill, but no detailed rules for using it in action, or stats for horses, then the DF thing to do is probably offer situations in which it gives a quick mechanical benefit. Say, off the top of my head...

Characters can rent horses for $10 a day each, including upkeep. There's a network of livery stables with mutual trust, so you can pick up in one place and drop off in another. They halve travel times between The Town and The Dungeon or whatever, but you'll need one NPC Ally or Hireling for every four horses to tend them while you go into the dungeon (and those NPCs will of course need their own horses). The entire party must make a Riding roll for every day of travel; on a failure, lose 1d FP that can only be restored by a full night's rest, and on a critical failure, you also take 1-2 points of damage from a fall. It's up to the GM to set up situations where travel time is important.

Expand from these rules for things like monster attacks on horses once you have stats for the things.

Re: Horses?
 

They're gonna need twice that in food, per this.

Re: Horses?
 

If we were looking at PDF support, a 24 page PDF with fleshed out rules for riding and a wide variety of fantasy-appropriate mounts for newbs through to elite delvers would be pretty good. You could probably get it to 36 pages with horse/warg/whatever furniture (including items of quality), and 42 with magic items related to mounts and mounted combat.

Other things to pad it out to something like 64 pages would be: rules for capturing and taming wild monsters to be mounts; Cleric, Druid, and Wizard spells for summoning/creating mounts and making riding/mounted combat easier or posher; an entire mount-focused profession and/or "upgrade" lenses for the existing templates (knights, scouts, and barbarians in particular cry out for it; cool riding and mounted combat related power-ups.

More stuff that could go in if you need to get pagecount up for paper would be an Encounter designed to tutorial mounted combat, and/or a little adventure to send your PCs on a quest to get a cool mount (to help introduce them into an existing game).

For mounts I'm thinking you need a wide range, and they do double-duty as a bestiary.

Real animals, although not all real mounts:
Horses
Camels
Donkeys
Mules
Cattle
Big dogs or wolves
Sled dogs (if we're including carts and chariots)
Elephants
Llamas
Ostriches
Golden Eagles (for halflings?)
Deer
Antelope/Impala
Elk
Moose
Four legged dinosaurs (Triceratopsians and Anclyosaurians)
Two legged dinosaurs (the biggest raptors (like Deinonychus or Deinocherus) and then the spectacular ones like T-Rex or Albertasaurus or Carnotaurus (it has horns and eats meat!) )
A selection of the not-dinosaurs that people confuse for dinosaurs, including flying (Quetzalcoatlus!!) and perhaps even swimming creatures

Fictional stuff:
Really giant eagle
Gryphon
Hippogriff
Hippocampus
Dire boars
Giant monitor lizards or giant iguanas (why not both?)
Wall-climbing giant geckos
Giant ants
Giant wasps or dragonflys (why not both?)
Giant butterflies or moths
Enormous snakes (land and water and climbing!)

Giant spiders, wyverns, and dragons are in the monsters book but might need some treatment for mounts, or mount-friendly variants

Re: Horses?
 

Exploits p. 22 under Lifting and Shoving helps with carts and such. The Riding skill is explained in skills, including its benefits.
Mounts are normally limited to Medium Encumberance but I cant find tht in my DFRPG books so that may indeed be an oversight, If not I dont think its in an intuitive place or the index.

And I would buy a mounts book like Bruno suggested. Make sure it includes feeding requirements.

Re: Horses?
 

I totally didn't think to check the skills section for the riding skills benefits, thanks for pointing that out!

Re: Horses?
 

I ignore those rules as DF 1 specifically calls out what books are needed to play it and Bio-Tech isn't on the list.

[EDIT]
Also this is DFRPG, so we're really not reaching for those rules.
[/EDIT]



Excellent idea! You or Matt Rigbsy* should definitely write it up!



* Or if someone can find S. E. Mortimer and poke him, get him to do it. He wrote the June 4, 2004 Pyramid article "Horse Sense" after all...

Re: Horses?
 

You seem to be missing this or are being deliberately obtuse, but those rules do NOT require you to use Bio-Tech at all. They don't even ask you to use Bio-Tech. They are only derived from a table in Bio-Tech, the whole of which just surface area when determining food requirements.

Re: Horses?
 

F'real? This isn't a DFRPG release anymore. Heck, it isn't a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy release at this point. It's an outright part of the putative GURPS Bestiary line.

Re: Horses?
 

So uh... what page are they on in the DFRPG books then?

Right, like I said, ignorable.

Re: Horses?
 

Are you asking about DF, or DFRPG? Because your original relevant comment ("I ignore those rules as DF 1 specifically calls out what books are needed to play it") is about DF. In which case, the (SM 1) information is contained in DF10:Taverns, as PK points out in that post. It's the difference between total cost and cost of lodging.

If you're playing DF then you're playing with Basic Set, and you should have a general idea that bigger SM means "more" - so you could even eyeball the food requirement from there. PK is right to say his calculations are "off the cuff and unofficial." They don't take into account the different biologies, and that more than anything is the deciding factor.

Two caveats to this:

1) If you're actually talking about DFRPG, then your point about DF1 is irrelevant and you're correct, there's nothing in DFRPG that gives anything close to the info.

2) Horses aren't people and their food requirements (and costs) are radically different. The conversion above, at least as it applies here, is between an omnivore and an herbivore - and that won't work regardless of where it comes from.

In other words, you can't use DF10/Bio-Tech anyway.

Re: Horses?
 

The Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game covers dungeon adventures. Wilderness, town, and extradimensional adventures will be covered later if the core game sells well. Beyond the Dungeon (Exploits, p. 84) is all the game has to say about such adventures for the moment. Mounts rarely fit into dungeons, so discussion is limited to: (1) using Riding to get to/from the dungeon, should mounts be available in the abstract, perhaps thanks to a quest-giver (Exploits, pp. 17, 64, 65), and (2) buying horses to drag wagons full of loot (Exploits, p. 16). Mounted combat is explicitly outside the scope of the game, as Riding (Adventurers, p. 87) states.

If an adventurer wants to have a mount to carry stuff – say, to keep a Vow – charge half the price of the generic pair of horses ($4,000/2 = $2,000). That covers a large horse untrained for battle, a big mule, or an exceptional riding horse. Assume that half a team can carry half the generic "half a ton" of stuff that a pair of horses could pull in a wagon (a wagon is horribly inefficient off road, and just a way to avoid needing the Riding skill to haul loot). To set a figure, that's 500 lbs., which for such a mount would be Heavy encumbrance where GURPS talks about Medium . . . but this isn't GURPS, so exact speed and encumbrance level are abstracted. The delver can add her or his own weight, or not, as preferred; Riding is required to avoid needing Hiking and to lose fewer FP to travel, in the absence of which it's best to use the beast as a load-bearer and devote all 500 lbs. to gear.

Re: Horses?
 

That should be obvious as i specifically call out "DF" and "DFRPG".

DF 10 Taverns doesn't mention SM at all in relation to anything other than the NPCs and their stats. What PK was calling out was that the Cost of Living was roughly half Food and half Lodging... as per DF 10 Taverns.

From Basic Set I have the general idea that Increased and Decreased Consumption control whether one eats more or less than normal. Nothing in Basic Set would lead me to believe I need to use rules from Biotech.

Yup. And if I were away from my computer I'd just handwave it as "costs the same as feeding an Adventurer". Which the old Pyramid article Horse Sense (a great article for using Horses) pretty much says exactly that*...




* Horse Sense estimates it at about $5 per day for a 900 pound horse under moderate work conditions... and an Adventurer costs $6 per day to feed... so, hey look at that!

Re: Horses?
 

It does seem like a bit of an oversight to have the Vow available, but not any explanation of how it works.

Re: Horses?
 

Yup. And only the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game is on-topic in this forum. For GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, there's the GURPS forum. GURPS isn't on-topic here. In the DFRPG, horses graze or something when left at the dungeon entrance, and are basically ways to: (1) carry 500 lbs. of extra stuff to and from the dungeon entrance, and (2) use Riding if you lack Hiking when rolling to reach the dungeon. That's it and that's all.

Re: Horses?
 

I agree completely, whence the lengthy explanation in my post. I hope that I can get that into print at some point.

Re: Horses?
 

I don't get your argument here.

"It would be useful in GURPS, therefore it can't be DFRPG. It would be useful in GURPS, therefore it can't be GURPS DF."

This-does-not-follow.

Things from DFRPG can be useful to people who aren't playing anything dungeon and/or fantasy. Or GURPS related at all, really.

They probably don't care about gryphons, but a lot of DF8 Treasure Tables is handy just in historical games - doesn't mean DF8 has to immediately be exiled from the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy line forever.

GURPS has a long and honoured history of producing products with lots of general usability. I don't see why the DFRPG line can't produce things of general usability either.

Dungeon Fantasy Monsters is clearly full of things that would go great in a Bestiary, as are GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1, 2, and 3 - doesn't mean they must immediately and henseforth declare too good for Dungeon Fantasy.

Re: Horses?
 

It wouldn't follow, were this my argument, instead of the strawman argument you just made up to put in my mouth.

My argument is, since it isn't obvious:

1) As Kromm just said, the DFRPG is for going into a dungeon, slaying monsters, and taking their stuff. It's a little hard to take your mount into a dungeon. While not having horses in the set is an oversight so long as Riding (Horse) is on a few templates, there is a reason why someone might leave it out. There aren't even basic rules for mounted combat in Exploits.
2) GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is about doing the same, with the exceptions being that you also can go into the wilderness, track monsters back to their lairs, slay them, and take their stuff, and also tap into the rest of the GURPS line. There are already rules for using mounts in combat and in the wild in the Basic Set and DF 16 that are more than enough for a DF game, wherein most combat won't happen while mounted, much less with everyone mounted. Even in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, horses are mostly a way of speeding up going from point A to point B, and bearing more stuff.
3) What you're proposing is more an expansion of the riding, mounted combat, and Animal Handling rules, with a few magic items and fantastic mounts thrown in. You could cut this as part of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, I suppose, though, to borrow from your own argument, you seem to be missing that products pitched at one sub-line (say, GURPS Zombies: Day Zero) also have support for other sub-lines. There are fantastic martial art styles in GURPS Martial Arts, which is fine; the focus is the rules, not the trappings.

Re: Horses?
 

Your argument absolutely wasn't obvious. But I think there was some confusion about what I was suggesting for the product.

I didn't say "expansion" or elaboration or what have you on the rules for riding and mounted combat. I just said to put them in - "them" being the stuff out of Basic Set, possibly modified and cut back as appropriate for DFRPG. I certainly didn't mean to propose they be made more complicated than they already are (I think that they're already a bit fussy).

Because I was specifically proposing a DFRPG product about how to ride a horse, since that bit was missed, the core material has to be "how to ride a horse". GURPS already has that.

If SJG doesn't intend on issuing an errata to eradicate the Riding skill from the DFRPG, which they don't seem to be indicating is the plan at the moment, then something needs to be done with them, and that can either be a Pyramid article just repeating the rules and providing the statblock for "a horse", or it can be a PDF book, at which point including all the rideable animals from the Basic Set seems the bare minimum to get the pagecount up to a useful level.

Even adding some riding animals not covered in the Basic Set doesn't make this a book that's some kind of Bestiary book. if you jamn a lot in, that's great, but as I was pitching a Dungeon Fantasy RPG book, I put the emphasis on things that are of more immediate interest to DFRPG that aren't Bestiary material, because they're also needed to meet the core need of "how to ride a horse". Much of the equipment is going to be repeated whole cloth from Low Tech and Basic Set, again because it's not in DFRPG at all. That's not new GURPS material, that's old GURPS material.

After that, treasure like magic items and spells is a core DFRPG (and GURPS DF) interest, and I'm of the opinion that anywhere you can squeeze in a new potion, four magic items, and a handful of spells is probably the right place. Those would be totally new, and of use to DFRPG players and GURPS players.

This wouldn't even be "compling GURPS rules about riding that are all over the place", GURPS rules about riding are pretty much all in the Basic Set; DFRPG doesn't use techniques so the stuff from Martial Arts is largely irrelevant.

The problem with the idea of "Well we can write it for GURPS and therefore it will still be good for DFRPG" is that this is very much the opposite of the stance SJG have taken. They're pushing very hard to keep the GURPS from leaking into this forum, and making the DFRPG stuff not require GURPS stuff. Releasing a book designed specifically to plug a hole in the DFRPG that doesn't exist in GURPS under the GURPS banner is perverse.

Re: Horses?
 

Thanks for acknowledging the oversight. Your explanation of what to expect from a horse is great because it quashes my reflex to import full GURPS horse/riding rules that we really don't need.

Re: Horses?
 

Pointless reminiscence: Back in the day, as one of a group of teens still figuring out D&D, I talked the DM into letting my fighter ride his warhorse all throughout the dungeons, lance-charging dragons in their 10'x10' rooms for ridiculous damage. "The rules don't say I can't do that..."

That was before we realized what a DM/GM is actually for. : )

Anyway, I agree with the wish for some simple expansion in the future, fleshing out horses in DFRPG-appropriate detail. And some non-horse mounts, including weird ones. Because fantasy.

Re: Horses?
 

I actually think the quick and dirty rules given under the ride skill are just about all the riding rules you really need.

All we'd need to ride horses into battle are horses to ride into battle. And maybe saddles and such to up the riding skill so it's less of a drag on combat skills.

Including lances would complicate things, but there are no lances in DFRPG, so it's a non-issue.

Re: Horses?
 

To be fair, players will try to get away with anything. I never had a player ask to ride a mount in tunnels . . . However, I did once have a group try to roll ballistae on wheels (like this, I guess) – yes, plural, as in a pair of them – around a dungeon. Perhaps at some future date, a supplement can cover battlefield fun in general: horses in barding with lance-wielding riders, small siege weapons, battering rams, etc. as well as spear-carrying hirelings. Heck, forges and anvils for crafting right there on the spot! At a sufficiently over-the-top power level, these things become practical.

I'm sure the knights would appreciate it . . . They get the fewest special tricks, so it would be fun to turn Born War-Leader into something worrisome.

Re: Horses?
 

I'm always happy to own up to errata and oversights. Not happy that they happen, but willing to acknowledge the fact.

Re: Horses?
 

The mounted Knight charging a Dragon is almost iconic and would be cool. Something to consider for that outdoor supplement.

Re: Horses?
 

I think this is extremely important, that DFRPG isn't GURPS. This probably ought to be plastered everywhere possible, it'll solve a lot of forum arguments.

You might have blown a bunch of people's minds, too.

Re: Horses?
 

I'd love to see it!