D&D 5E (2014) Miles per day on horseback: how many?

[doctorbadwolf]

Just to clarify, I don't recommend (or do myself) for DMs to ALWAYS mess with horse (or mules). I do recommend that DMs be aware of some of the ways in which they can use mounts (or hirelings/retainers/etc) to spice up of boring parts of the story or even add interesting parts to the plot.

It's just another tool for the DM. As with any tool, it should be used for fun, however the table defines that.

Fair enough. Most y’all like that I hear is from DMs that delight in doing stuff like that frequently, brag about their players not trusting anyone or anything, and still somehow have players.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Are they ever in a hurry or have a lot of stuff to carry?

Sometimes they are in a hurry, but mounts haven't seemed to be relevant yet for those situations. Urban, jungle with raft, that sort of thing. They've rarely had problems with their carrying capacity, and since they've been to Sigil they now have almost enough bags of holding to go around the whole party. Of course the latter mostly is about pack animals, which won't speed you up, but I do like the idea of occasional pack animals coming along. There's just something interesting to me to bringing along beasts of burden or transportation that apparently my group doesn't share.

 

[DeaconBlues]

Here are the results from a basic Google search, with options for Phantom Steed added:

A horse's traveling speed over distance varies by gait, but a comfortable, sustained average is around 4-5 miles per hour (mph) at a walk, while a trot can cover 8-12 mph for extended periods, and a canter tops out at 15 mph. While horses can gallop much faster (25-30 mph), this is not sustainable for long distances.

Consider there are many factors when calculating the distance an individual horse could cover, including the horse's fitness and breed; the terrain; regular breaks and downtime/rest; and of course, the load the horse is carrying. A horse carrying a rider will travel a shorter distance than a regular horse, and let's face it, no one here cares how far the horse can go without its rider.

So, considering a horse's movement speed of 60 ft. in D&D, this means that a horse walking steadily for 8 hours can cover roughly 32-40 miles. Assuming the party has the common sense to allow 3 or 4 short rests in there, this can also be equated to a 12 hour day of traveling assuming normal breaks for food, water, and rest for both horses and riders.

The DM may allow you to modify this somewhat by incorporating trotting and cantering, with regular walk breaks, a horse could potentially cover 40-50 miles in a day (though this is not advised in difficult or unfamiliar terrain, as a cantering horse can easily hurt itself - gopher holes, ditches, bogs, etc.).

Galloping horses can cover much greater ground over very short distances, but require a rest twice as long as the time galloping, so it doesn't save time over the course of a day, but could come in very handy when you need to leave a specific area very quickly for a hour or so.

Phantom Steed: Now... here's the fun part. Phantom Steed creates a horse-like mount out of nowhere that can move at 100 ft. speed. This is 60% faster than the Riding Horse stat block's speed of 60 ft. True, the Steed only lasts for an hour, but then again, it doesn't require food, water, or rest like a horse does... it only requires 11 minutes after each hour to cast it again as a ritual. So, you could be fully justified as a DM (or as player arguing with your DM) allowing a PC riding a Phantom Steed to extend their travel time and distance by an additional 60% ... maybe even 70-75% since they don't need as much rest as a live animal.

So, by this logic, a horse might get you as far as 40 miles over a given day (20% faster than the 32 miles done by a walking human). But a Phantom Steed could bear its rider/caster somewhere between 64 and 72 miles in a given day. On a grid map, it's just 100 ft. vs. 60 ft. speed. But over the course of a full day of travel, it's even more, with no repercussions of possibly endangering or injuring the mount. (This is why every wizard I have learned Phantom Steed as soon as possible. It's awesome!)

 

[Emerikol]

Wilderness Survival Guide says 48 miles on a light unencumbered riding horse. You can force march up to 72 miles but the chances for a lame horse go up. And exhaustion sets in rapidly so unless you arrive after 72 miles it's not good for an extended journey.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

If the party has access to fresh horses every 8-10 miles:
60 miles per day, or 8 miles per hour.
Otherwise it's 30 miles per day, or 4 miles per hour.

Even then you will need restdays and the horses need high quality fodder like crushed oats or other grains. The Mongols and the like sustained their rapid movement by having a lot of spare riding horses and pack animals.

 

[Pamphylian]

My quick and dirty approach for hex-crawls (where this most often comes up for me) is 1.5x "standard" PC walking speed, rounded to nearest hex in open terrain (roads, plains). So with 12 mile hexes, a party going 2 hexes a day on open terrain goes 3 if mounted, etc.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Wilderness Survival Guide says 48 miles on a light unencumbered riding horse. You can force march up to 72 miles but the chances for a lame horse go up. And exhaustion sets in rapidly so unless you arrive after 72 miles it's not good for an extended journey.

That was from a very different era and when people didn't know what the hell they were talking about. The actual 5E rules are, for once, closer to reality here.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

My quick and dirty approach for hex-crawls (where this most often comes up for me) is 1.5x "standard" PC walking speed, rounded to nearest hex in open terrain (roads, plains). So with 12 mile hexes, a party going 2 hexes a day on open terrain goes 3 if mounted, etc.

Something like that would be my solution as well.

I totally appreciate that it's not particularly realistic, but the realistic reasons you ride a horse in a vaguely medieval setting (an easier journey, being able to have the horse carry some of your gear, marking you as being of higher status) are mostly abstracted away by the rule system, and the major combat advantages are also mostly not modeled well and only rarely come up in the small area, battlemap-oriented play of the game. Basically if players have gone to the trouble of getting horses they should get something with actual game benefits and the simplest and most intuitive thing for them to get is a travel speed boost.

 

[Pamphylian]

Fair enough. Most y’all like that I hear is from DMs that delight in doing stuff like that frequently, brag about their players not trusting anyone or anything, and still somehow have players.

This is why I like having a straightforward open procedure for this sort of stuff, that the players have meta-knowledge of. If you leave your horses unguarded outside of the dungeon while you're delving, I'm going to roll daily or whatever to see if anything happens, probably with stated odds. No gotcha, it's part of the planning and risk reward calculation the party makes.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Something like that would be my solution as well.

I totally appreciate that it's not particularly realistic, but the realistic reasons you ride a horse in a vaguely medieval setting (an easier journey, being able to have the horse carry some of your gear, marking you as being of higher status) are mostly abstracted away by the rule system, and the major combat advantages are also mostly not modeled well and only rarely come up in the small area, battlemap-oriented play of the game. Basically if players have gone to the trouble of getting horses they should get something with actual game benefits and the simplest and most intuitive thing for them to get is a travel speed boost.

Yeah. 5e doesn't particularly give you any good reason to bother messing with the hassle of a mount. A meaningful travel speed boost makes intuitive sense and is desirable.