I have been trying to figure out something. How far can a Human on a Riding horse travel in 8 hours?
Barring any other factors, the listed speed of a Human is 30 feet. The listed speed of a Riding Horse is 60 feet.
Can a Riding Horse use the Dash action, and can it take two of them? "A mounted character can ride at a gallop for about an hour, covering twice the usual distance for a fast pace."
As near as I can figure, the quote suggests a speed equivalent two Dash Actions for Human, and in D&D that takes two Dash Actions for a Riding Horse.
Speeds in combat are separate to long distance travelling. Usain Bolt can not run for miles at 100m every 10 sec. So the dash does ñot really apply.
Under travel pace where your quote for gallop came from it says a fast pace is 4 miles in a hour therefore a horse could gallop for 8 miles 8 in a hour. It would then be up to the dm whether it can continue at a walk of 4mph or would be too tired to go further.
There are already many threads on this topic, best to search for those rather than start another thread which will turn into a long discussion about long-distance travel.
I have been trying to figure out something. How far can a Human on a Riding horse travel in 8 hours?
Barring any other factors, the listed speed of a Human is 30 feet. The listed speed of a Riding Horse is 60 feet.
Can a Riding Horse use the Dash action, and can it take two of them? "A mounted character can ride at a gallop for about an hour, covering twice the usual distance for a fast pace."
As near as I can figure, the quote suggests a speed equivalent two Dash Actions for Human, and in D&D that takes two Dash Actions for a Riding Horse.
For your situation (I am assuming you are asking about moving as quickly as possible across a road), the speed of the human and the speed of the horse are irrelevant.
A human on a single riding horse can probably go 36 miles at maximum: at a gallop (8 mph) for an hour, then the horse slows down and the pair travel at a standard fast pace for 7 hours. If the human is strong enough to pick up the horse, then it's 40 miles in 8 hours, because the human can become a fresh mount for the horse during the second hour of travel.
A Riding Horse can take the Dash action, but that has no bearing on travel pace. It can't Dash as a bonus action.
Movement speed and travel pace are only sometimes related, and in this case they are not related at all. However, here are the relevant speeds.
30 feet every 6 seconds: 3.40909091 miles per hour
60 feet every 6 seconds (human dashing, riding horse base): 6.81818182 miles per hour
90 feet every 6 seconds (human rogue dashing twice): 10.2272727 miles per hour (faster than the galloping horse, in travel terms)
120 feet every 6 seconds (riding horse dashing): 13.6363636 miles per hour
180 feet every 6 seconds (awakened riding horse expert dashing twice): 20.4545455 miles per hour
8 mph (any land-based mount of any speed, fast travel pace during its 1-hour gallop): 70.4 feet per round
4 mph (fast travel pace): 35.2 feet per round
3 mph (normal travel pace): 26.4 feet per round
2 mph (slow travel pace): 17.6 feet per round
The dndbeyond link I gave you above is missing the DMG rules for "special" travel paces. The pace above is for traveling on land on creature legs. If you're traveling by air or water instead of land, or if you're traveling on land via "magic" power rather than muscle power (e.g. if your setting has cars), then and only then you derive your travel pace from your movement speed. Muscle-powered movement on land is assumed to otherwise be a constant.
I made this thread for the simple reason that there are indeed a lot of threads about it already, and the answer remained unclear. Rather than dig them up, I asked, as simply as possible, what the actual rules were. It seems that it's option 8: "3 mph (normal travel pace): 26.4 feet per round"
A Riding horse can Dash. It can take two Dashes because that's specifically stated when it says they can gallop. When ridden, they move at the rate of the rider, and are useless for anything other than carrying extra gear in long distance travel. I will set the base speed of a Riding Horse to 30 and make a note in their description that when in combat with a rider they cannot go any faster, but in combat they move at 60 when on their own. Thank you Quindraco for taking the time to answer in such detail.
P.242 of the DMG: Characters moving at a normal pace can walk about 24 miles in a day.
There are 126720 feet in 24 miles. Dividing this by 30 gives 4,224 turns of walking, equivalent to 422.4 minutes, or 7.04 hours of walking (or 7 hours, 2 minutes).
Therefore we can calculate that a creature moving at double the speed for the same number of turns moves 253,440 feet, or 48 miles.
This isn't at all realistic, though, and the truth is that horses get tired and in fact would cover about the same amount of ground that the walker does. You need to get off a horse and walk it now and again anyway, you'll knacker them if you ride 7 hours a day.
If you want to look up continuous Dashing, look at the Chase section in the DMG. After a few dashes, you have to make a CON save each turn in order to continue to Dash.
The rules on movement are only intended for use in combat, I wouldn't try to apply them to the rest of the game.
It doesn't make any sense for all creatures to travel at the same pace regardless of speed, but I haven't bothered looking up real creatures before now, partially because the rules we're discussing just aren't horse specific. An axe beak travels at the same pace, too. But out of curiosity, I googled it.
Here's a source giving specific numbers for a reasonable travel pace for a trail horse, where the horse will need to rest every other day, not every other hour. As expected, it's just nonsense to think that horses and humans travel at the same pace - there's a reason the Pony Express used horses in the first place. One of the issues that makes comparing the DMG rules to the real world harder is humans - real world Earth humans have radically out-of-band good heat resistance, meaning we can keep moving forever compared to almost anything else. It's no surprise at all a horse would need a bigger break than we would after traveling the same distance. Just as the DMG/PHB rules are not specific to horses, they're not specific to humans. If we were to have a significantly larger degree of specificity in our PC race rules, just to pick a race where we can make credible guesses to answer questions like "does this race sweat?", Tabaxi would have among the worst travel endurances possible in a playable race, and it would be trivial to get your Tabaxi Monk to literally die of exhaustion trying to keep up with a sustained forced march that merely gives the humans in the party foot blisters.
I think the 5E rules on this are clearly broken and not a good way to handle it, simply because land travel pace is independent of your movement speed and air travel pace is dependent on it, and the contradiction makes not a damn lick of sense. It's also important to remember that some abstraction is absolutely necessary. I don't really have anywhere I'm going with this, just providing commentary.
"For short spans of time (up to an hour), many animals move much faster than humanoids. A mounted character can ride at a gallop for about an hour, covering twice the usual distance for a fast pace. " - so it can do 8 miles in one hour, but not for the full day; and as a DM I would suggest that the horse would need go rest after that hour or walk at a much slower pace to recover, thus maintaining the 24 miles/day.
I have been trying to figure out something. How far can a Human on a Riding horse travel in 8 hours?
<Insert clever signature here>
Speeds in combat are separate to long distance travelling. Usain Bolt can not run for miles at 100m every 10 sec. So the dash does ñot really apply.
Under travel pace where your quote for gallop came from it says a fast pace is 4 miles in a hour therefore a horse could gallop for 8 miles 8 in a hour. It would then be up to the dm whether it can continue at a walk of 4mph or would be too tired to go further.
There are already many threads on this topic, best to search for those rather than start another thread which will turn into a long discussion about long-distance travel.
Some of the rules (all of the ones you need for this question) are here: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/adventuring#Speed
For your situation (I am assuming you are asking about moving as quickly as possible across a road), the speed of the human and the speed of the horse are irrelevant.
I wouldn't get too hung up on taking actions outside of initiative order.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
I made this thread for the simple reason that there are indeed a lot of threads about it already, and the answer remained unclear. Rather than dig them up, I asked, as simply as possible, what the actual rules were. It seems that it's option 8: "3 mph (normal travel pace): 26.4 feet per round"
A Riding horse can Dash. It can take two Dashes because that's specifically stated when it says they can gallop. When ridden, they move at the rate of the rider, and are useless for anything other than carrying extra gear in long distance travel. I will set the base speed of a Riding Horse to 30 and make a note in their description that when in combat with a rider they cannot go any faster, but in combat they move at 60 when on their own. Thank you Quindraco for taking the time to answer in such detail.
<Insert clever signature here>
P.242 of the DMG: Characters moving at a normal pace can walk about 24 miles in a day.
There are 126720 feet in 24 miles. Dividing this by 30 gives 4,224 turns of walking, equivalent to 422.4 minutes, or 7.04 hours of walking (or 7 hours, 2 minutes).
Therefore we can calculate that a creature moving at double the speed for the same number of turns moves 253,440 feet, or 48 miles.
This isn't at all realistic, though, and the truth is that horses get tired and in fact would cover about the same amount of ground that the walker does. You need to get off a horse and walk it now and again anyway, you'll knacker them if you ride 7 hours a day.
If you want to look up continuous Dashing, look at the Chase section in the DMG. After a few dashes, you have to make a CON save each turn in order to continue to Dash.
The rules on movement are only intended for use in combat, I wouldn't try to apply them to the rest of the game.
It doesn't make any sense for all creatures to travel at the same pace regardless of speed, but I haven't bothered looking up real creatures before now, partially because the rules we're discussing just aren't horse specific. An axe beak travels at the same pace, too. But out of curiosity, I googled it.
Here's a source giving specific numbers for a reasonable travel pace for a trail horse, where the horse will need to rest every other day, not every other hour. As expected, it's just nonsense to think that horses and humans travel at the same pace - there's a reason the Pony Express used horses in the first place. One of the issues that makes comparing the DMG rules to the real world harder is humans - real world Earth humans have radically out-of-band good heat resistance, meaning we can keep moving forever compared to almost anything else. It's no surprise at all a horse would need a bigger break than we would after traveling the same distance. Just as the DMG/PHB rules are not specific to horses, they're not specific to humans. If we were to have a significantly larger degree of specificity in our PC race rules, just to pick a race where we can make credible guesses to answer questions like "does this race sweat?", Tabaxi would have among the worst travel endurances possible in a playable race, and it would be trivial to get your Tabaxi Monk to literally die of exhaustion trying to keep up with a sustained forced march that merely gives the humans in the party foot blisters.
I think the 5E rules on this are clearly broken and not a good way to handle it, simply because land travel pace is independent of your movement speed and air travel pace is dependent on it, and the contradiction makes not a damn lick of sense. It's also important to remember that some abstraction is absolutely necessary. I don't really have anywhere I'm going with this, just providing commentary.
Horses travel 24 miles in 8 hours travelling at a normal travel pace, according to https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/adventuring#Speed
"For short spans of time (up to an hour), many animals move much faster than humanoids. A mounted character can ride at a gallop for about an hour, covering twice the usual distance for a fast pace. " - so it can do 8 miles in one hour, but not for the full day; and as a DM I would suggest that the horse would need go rest after that hour or walk at a much slower pace to recover, thus maintaining the 24 miles/day.