Given how vehicles work, a low strength character can carry much more than what they'd normally be able to get away with.
With a 200-pound cart, a 6 strength kobold can lug around 250 pounds of supplies, stolen goods and/or possibly a fallen ally, where its normal carrying capacity only allows 90 pounds. An 17 strength goliath can pull a 400-pound wagon, lugging around 2150 pounds of stuff!
In almost every game I've played in, nobody uses vehicles.
Carriages and wagons seem to be similarly sized, yet carriages cost more, weigh more and have less room inside them (built for comfort, I guess). Chariots are even more expensive and are tiny in comparison.
What turns people away from such a strong mechanical advantage?
I think it's mostly not wanting to keep track of them. Wagons are often kind of hand-waved as more or less a form of fast travel... you get in town and presumably you park it somewhere, maybe the DM remembers to charge you a boarding fee for your horses. But if you want to bring a cart along you've got to remember it. One of your characters is actively pulling it along. You have to park it, remember where you left it, and it just doesn't feel "cool" to be the guy stuck pulling the cart when you could either find a bag of holding or just get the wizard to get off their lazy butt and just cast Floating Disc.
Usually, you can’t bring it into the dungeon or any other indoor spaces with you. Then how do you guard your stuff while you’re in there?
Also, how much stuff are you really carrying? Outside of some unusually large art objects.
Bags of holding are typically easy to come by (campaign dependent, of course)
Also, I think most people ignore carrying rules, unless it really gets to be egregious, or the DM wants to throw a challenge at the players who are trying to make off with a giant statue.
We just got a cart in my game and I'm already stressing out about the donkey that pulls it. I'm afraid the first dungeon we enter they'll both be gone when we come back out.
In games I run, I just hand-wave stuff like carrying capacity. They have a cart or make a litter or whatever. Every minute we spend playing Medieval Times Simulator is one less minute we're adventuring.
One thing worth noting, for the folks who say "all this stuff is getting in the way of ADVENTURE!" when it comes to things like encumbrance, rations, and other such 'Medieval Times Simulator' stuff:
Not only are you devaluing many class or species features that interact with these rules (what's the purpose of Powerful Build in a game where you can walk around with a thousand pounds of junk on a 4 Strength kobold?), but you're devaluing the Strength attribute itself and any magical items which deal with carrying capacity or otherwise mitigating these rules.
Heh. It's fascinating to see what happens when you say "Variant encumbrance is in effect, coin weight is active, and food/water will be rigorously tracked." Strength instantly stops being a Universal Dump Stat for every non-fighter in the group, medium armor actually starts making sense again (sure, that breastplate is four whole points of AC below that full platemail - but it's also a quarter of the mass...), and things like vehicles or beasts of burden suddenly come back into the game. Players buy locked, heavily plated strongboxes to keep their coins in because carrying eighteen hundred GP worth of coinage around becomes prohibitively heavy - and they start getting real paranoid about where their box of money is being kept. Players might even start hiring porters, or lower-level guards to keep their camp and all the valuable beasts/vehicles in it safe while they're off adventuring. Not to mention the sheer, resplendent joy on the faces of such an adventuring group when they discover their first Handy Haversack or Bag of Holding.
How players solve the problems that come when they don't have magical video-game inventories capable of storing an entire castle armory's worth of gear and an entire castle vault's worth of treasure for free is part of being an Adventurer. Logistics are only as boring as you make them, and frankly chasing down the thieves that made off with the party's camp stuff while they were out adventuring is a pretty great story hook once in a while. I can guarantee the party will not fail to bite that particular hook.
yeah, how do people run around with unlimited coins they find when all they have from starting equipment is a pouch... which holds 300 coins total (50 coins = 1 pound, a pouch can hold 6 pounds)???
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I bought a cart, a few barrels and sacks and a mule in my current campaign. I take it with us when I can but it has to wait outside the "dungeon." I will take the cart, cover it with a canvass tarp and hide it, and I will take the mule and tie him somewhere else to allow him to eat, drink and move about a little while we are in there. I try and leave only mundane gear that I won't need and has less value, just in case it get's stolen.
I keep a lot of valuable stuff in a Bag of Holding. I prefer to carry wealth in gems and not coins, but that can be a problem. I also carry some copper, silver and gold, so that in a pinch I have the 'right change' to handle transactions.
In a dungeon you might be able to use a dolly to help transport a loot box or barrel to bring stuff out. But I think more than a dolly and you'll probably face problems.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
When I played AD&D back in highschool, tricking out a Battlewagon stagecoach and buying cool creatures to pull it was one of the most memorable things we spent time doing, along with securing a home base to store all of our stuff in, and then collecting NPCs and hirelings to staff and guard that base and wagon. All of that stuff is meaningless when you have magic pockets, I agree with Yurei, inventory management is the adventure!
Wizards: the poor man's Wagon. AKA: Tenser's Floating Disk.
It can not be stolen.
Ritual spell, takes 10 minutes to give you an hour of carrying 500 lbs. Effectively slows you down by about 15% (takes you 70 minutes to move what normally takes you 60 minutes)
Another benefit of Tenser's Floating Disk is that unlike a hand cart it isn't dependent on flat terrain- it moves just as easily across a rock field as it does down a road.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Ah, but you know the great weakness of Tenser's Floating Disk? A busy street, a crowd of orphans, a hundred kobolds popping out of the mud.... your stuff is just out there for the taking, and a good DM should remind you of it once or twice. :D
yeah, how do people run around with unlimited coins they find when all they have from starting equipment is a pouch... which holds 300 coins total (50 coins = 1 pound, a pouch can hold 6 pounds)???
Gold is freakishly heavy compared to most elements. 11 ounces of gold is only 1 cubic inch. You only need 8.6 cubic inches to hold it. I have owned period pouches that could easily hold that. The leather straps may have come off by belt, but it could have held it.
And Stagecoaches as Chicken_Champpointed out are great. You can easily carry 4 PCs, gear on the top, crew on the front and back. I bought one of those back with a 2nd edition PC who - by the rules - started off with 100 times starting wealth. We traveled around Greyhawk in it.
Ah, but you know the great weakness of Tenser's Floating Disk? A busy street, a crowd of orphans, a hundred kobolds popping out of the mud.... your stuff is just out there for the taking, and a good DM should remind you of it once or twice. :D
Ain't nobody stealing a Minor Image of a cage full of skunks.
Ah, but you know the great weakness of Tenser's Floating Disk? A busy street, a crowd of orphans, a hundred kobolds popping out of the mud.... your stuff is just out there for the taking, and a good DM should remind you of it once or twice. :D
That applies equally well to using a handcart. If you really want to keep your stuff safe, get a Bag of Holding.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I believe what CC meant is that Floating Disc is floating twenty feet behind a wizard with absolutely nothing between whatever's on it and grabby hands. With a cart or wagon, ideally you're in close attendance to it, and also it has sides and sometimes even a roof.
One can also affix a lockbox to a wagon or cart, but not to a Floating Disc. FD is great for hauling loot out of a dungeon, but that's pretty much where its utility ends as written. Outside of that one time I used it to levitate our cart over a bunch of otherwise impassable broken ground (carts weigh only 200 pounds, well under FD's mass limit), which just goes to show that vehicles and FD can live together in glorious harmony.
I’m just saying, TFD is not a true replacement for a vehicle, because it’s more like a floating dinner plate than a container. You can absolutely build a box up around it, leave a party member on it, etc... but at that point, you have a disc-powered wagon instead of a horse-drawn one, and its one that the wizard isn’t allowed to ride in while fiddling with his books :)
I've used TFD with a low strength wizard to help her scale walls that were a tab bit too high; just ritual cast it next to the wall and give yourself a small boost (DM at that time was running LMoP and lenient with random encounters).
Carriages can also be climbed on (they go a lot higher than TFD), and they can be used as cover for combat and a shelter for a long rest. Heck, a Powerful/Equine Build race and/or a Bear Totem Barbarian character can tip one on its side to pin down most medium-sized creatures!
Given how vehicles work, a low strength character can carry much more than what they'd normally be able to get away with.
With a 200-pound cart, a 6 strength kobold can lug around 250 pounds of supplies, stolen goods and/or possibly a fallen ally, where its normal carrying capacity only allows 90 pounds. An 17 strength goliath can pull a 400-pound wagon, lugging around 2150 pounds of stuff!
In almost every game I've played in, nobody uses vehicles.
Carriages and wagons seem to be similarly sized, yet carriages cost more, weigh more and have less room inside them (built for comfort, I guess). Chariots are even more expensive and are tiny in comparison.
What turns people away from such a strong mechanical advantage?
I think it's mostly not wanting to keep track of them. Wagons are often kind of hand-waved as more or less a form of fast travel... you get in town and presumably you park it somewhere, maybe the DM remembers to charge you a boarding fee for your horses. But if you want to bring a cart along you've got to remember it. One of your characters is actively pulling it along. You have to park it, remember where you left it, and it just doesn't feel "cool" to be the guy stuck pulling the cart when you could either find a bag of holding or just get the wizard to get off their lazy butt and just cast Floating Disc.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
Usually, you can’t bring it into the dungeon or any other indoor spaces with you. Then how do you guard your stuff while you’re in there?
Also, how much stuff are you really carrying? Outside of some unusually large art objects.
Bags of holding are typically easy to come by (campaign dependent, of course)
Also, I think most people ignore carrying rules, unless it really gets to be egregious, or the DM wants to throw a challenge at the players who are trying to make off with a giant statue.
We just got a cart in my game and I'm already stressing out about the donkey that pulls it. I'm afraid the first dungeon we enter they'll both be gone when we come back out.
In games I run, I just hand-wave stuff like carrying capacity. They have a cart or make a litter or whatever. Every minute we spend playing Medieval Times Simulator is one less minute we're adventuring.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
One thing worth noting, for the folks who say "all this stuff is getting in the way of ADVENTURE!" when it comes to things like encumbrance, rations, and other such 'Medieval Times Simulator' stuff:
Not only are you devaluing many class or species features that interact with these rules (what's the purpose of Powerful Build in a game where you can walk around with a thousand pounds of junk on a 4 Strength kobold?), but you're devaluing the Strength attribute itself and any magical items which deal with carrying capacity or otherwise mitigating these rules.
Heh. It's fascinating to see what happens when you say "Variant encumbrance is in effect, coin weight is active, and food/water will be rigorously tracked." Strength instantly stops being a Universal Dump Stat for every non-fighter in the group, medium armor actually starts making sense again (sure, that breastplate is four whole points of AC below that full platemail - but it's also a quarter of the mass...), and things like vehicles or beasts of burden suddenly come back into the game. Players buy locked, heavily plated strongboxes to keep their coins in because carrying eighteen hundred GP worth of coinage around becomes prohibitively heavy - and they start getting real paranoid about where their box of money is being kept. Players might even start hiring porters, or lower-level guards to keep their camp and all the valuable beasts/vehicles in it safe while they're off adventuring. Not to mention the sheer, resplendent joy on the faces of such an adventuring group when they discover their first Handy Haversack or Bag of Holding.
How players solve the problems that come when they don't have magical video-game inventories capable of storing an entire castle armory's worth of gear and an entire castle vault's worth of treasure for free is part of being an Adventurer. Logistics are only as boring as you make them, and frankly chasing down the thieves that made off with the party's camp stuff while they were out adventuring is a pretty great story hook once in a while. I can guarantee the party will not fail to bite that particular hook.
Please do not contact or message me.
yeah, how do people run around with unlimited coins they find when all they have from starting equipment is a pouch... which holds 300 coins total (50 coins = 1 pound, a pouch can hold 6 pounds)???
I bought a cart, a few barrels and sacks and a mule in my current campaign. I take it with us when I can but it has to wait outside the "dungeon." I will take the cart, cover it with a canvass tarp and hide it, and I will take the mule and tie him somewhere else to allow him to eat, drink and move about a little while we are in there. I try and leave only mundane gear that I won't need and has less value, just in case it get's stolen.
I keep a lot of valuable stuff in a Bag of Holding. I prefer to carry wealth in gems and not coins, but that can be a problem. I also carry some copper, silver and gold, so that in a pinch I have the 'right change' to handle transactions.
In a dungeon you might be able to use a dolly to help transport a loot box or barrel to bring stuff out. But I think more than a dolly and you'll probably face problems.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
When I played AD&D back in highschool, tricking out a Battlewagon stagecoach and buying cool creatures to pull it was one of the most memorable things we spent time doing, along with securing a home base to store all of our stuff in, and then collecting NPCs and hirelings to staff and guard that base and wagon. All of that stuff is meaningless when you have magic pockets, I agree with Yurei, inventory management is the adventure!
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Wizards: the poor man's Wagon. AKA: Tenser's Floating Disk.
Another benefit of Tenser's Floating Disk is that unlike a hand cart it isn't dependent on flat terrain- it moves just as easily across a rock field as it does down a road.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Ah, but you know the great weakness of Tenser's Floating Disk? A busy street, a crowd of orphans, a hundred kobolds popping out of the mud.... your stuff is just out there for the taking, and a good DM should remind you of it once or twice. :D
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Gold is freakishly heavy compared to most elements. 11 ounces of gold is only 1 cubic inch. You only need 8.6 cubic inches to hold it. I have owned period pouches that could easily hold that. The leather straps may have come off by belt, but it could have held it.
And Stagecoaches as Chicken_Champ pointed out are great. You can easily carry 4 PCs, gear on the top, crew on the front and back. I bought one of those back with a 2nd edition PC who - by the rules - started off with 100 times starting wealth. We traveled around Greyhawk in it.
Ain't nobody stealing a Minor Image of a cage full of skunks.
That applies equally well to using a handcart. If you really want to keep your stuff safe, get a Bag of Holding.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I believe what CC meant is that Floating Disc is floating twenty feet behind a wizard with absolutely nothing between whatever's on it and grabby hands. With a cart or wagon, ideally you're in close attendance to it, and also it has sides and sometimes even a roof.
One can also affix a lockbox to a wagon or cart, but not to a Floating Disc. FD is great for hauling loot out of a dungeon, but that's pretty much where its utility ends as written. Outside of that one time I used it to levitate our cart over a bunch of otherwise impassable broken ground (carts weigh only 200 pounds, well under FD's mass limit), which just goes to show that vehicles and FD can live together in glorious harmony.
Please do not contact or message me.
Nothing at all keeps the halfling rogue from riding on the Wizard's Disk.
Or the Half Orc Barbarian from walking next to it.
Yeah, you can be an idiot and travel through the worst slum with a Disk full of Gold while ignoring it. That's a totally valid option for a fool.
I’m just saying, TFD is not a true replacement for a vehicle, because it’s more like a floating dinner plate than a container. You can absolutely build a box up around it, leave a party member on it, etc... but at that point, you have a disc-powered wagon instead of a horse-drawn one, and its one that the wizard isn’t allowed to ride in while fiddling with his books :)
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
I mean... it can hold a lot of weight. The barbarian and Rogue can ride it together!
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
I've used TFD with a low strength wizard to help her scale walls that were a tab bit too high; just ritual cast it next to the wall and give yourself a small boost (DM at that time was running LMoP and lenient with random encounters).
Carriages can also be climbed on (they go a lot higher than TFD), and they can be used as cover for combat and a shelter for a long rest. Heck, a Powerful/Equine Build race and/or a Bear Totem Barbarian character can tip one on its side to pin down most medium-sized creatures!