When my group of players got their first big haul of treasure and were splitting up the funds, I wasn’t surprised they added an additional “share” for a group fund. What caught me, for lack of a better word, unprepared was that the called it the “Wagon Fund”. With the group heading to the nearest town I knew some quick research was needed. In between social encounters and shopping my research brought me to the Carriage.
The group had a discussion on what they wanted in their potential land vehicle, nothing too surprising:
Cargo space
Security
Room for all four members and their extra creatures
Shelter at night
None of these items were outlandish or anything, but the carriage description was not going to make the process easy. Before I jump into a tangent let’s talk about what a Carriage is in dnd5e, Rules as Written:
Carriage
Type: Vehicle (Land)
Cost: 100 gp
Weight: 600 lbs
Aside from some notes on proficiency, that’s it… Now you can picture my disappointment. Luckily for me, the party got distracted with a little “domestic” matter among themselves and we wrapped the session before it was resolved. So I had a week to get a plan. Initially I did find a lot of homebrew rules that I found interesting, but nothing consistent. In the interest of having something new and interesting for my players, and the fact I enjoy wrapping my head around these kinds of puzzles, I decided to write my own rules around this. The first step was going to be consuming as much official content I could to keep it aligned to the rules that do exist.
So the question is, “Where do I start?”
The answer really simple and something I found in my initial search, The players handbooks section Mounts and Vehicles. The text in this content provides some context, but its the tables that have the crunchy numbers we need to evaluate. The problem that I have with them is that we are still stuck understanding what a Carriage is. From the rules above, all we know is it weighs 600 lbs. Trying to get an idea of a real world analog lead me deep into equine sources, but still nothing to tell me what a 600lbs Carriage truly is. But there was a piece of information that became very relevant, “The average large carriage weight is in the neighborhood of 1800 lbs. However, the wheels and design make the load on the horse lighter.” I have not gotten to the point where I need to start doing the towing calculations, although this will be something to consider later, but this page provided some useful information and further context. My idea of a Carriage is way off from what one really is. My expectation is “Small Living Space” but the reality is “Sitting Room Only”
Well Shit.
This is not the right direction, but not the wrong one either. We accomplished something here, just not what we wanted to. We have a real world analog of something that is relative to our target vehicle. We have our Honda Civic as a baseline, we just need to work our way up to more of an RV. There is still value in having some rules for a Carriage, but not for this week.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where this experiment continues.
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