A few weeks back there was the episode where Blogger ate a bunch of blogs, there was rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, and then things got back on track. All that this blog lost (I believe) was a post on Horse Movement Rates that I had struggled to write over a couple of days. A few comments I got suggested the rates were way off, the horses would be dead if you rode them that hard, etc. I'll attempt to reproduce the main arguments here in brief, mostly because there are issues in translating the per round or per turn movement rates for horses to wilderness rates in B/X and Lab Lord. And also because Jovial Priest has been politely badgering the hell out of me to repost this.
So the highlights:
Horses and mules are hell of slow by the rules. One with a cart can only move at 60'/turn or 6'/min or 1' in 10 seconds (LL p.17). I had a joke about having your ass in a sling:
And if my horse moved that slow I'd give it this treatment:
Okay, having recapitulated the yuks, here's my take. I suggest that the B/X per-turn rates are useless, but also so rarely used we don't need to think about them as a basis for daily movement rates except in a sort of relative way (e.g., horses are faster than donkeys, riding horses are faster than draft horses, unencumbered horses are faster than encumbered ones, etc.). I have looked at some info that probably represents extremes of horse ability here, though in his original comments JD Jarvis had suggested that the rates here on the same website are a better guide. I leave it to you, kind reader, to sort this out according to your best judgment.
The main details:
1) The speeds for a Riding Horse are probably okay.
2) War Horses, if we use early 20th C. US cavalry races as a benchmark, ~60mi/day is probably reasonable for an unencumbered horse (just a rider).
3) Mizarian Draft Horses are as equally awesome as a generic Arandish War Horse.
4) Any Horse should move faster than a human on foot under usual circumstances. For simplicity, though, we'll say they have an equal rate of movement.
5) Riding Horses and War Horses, per se, never pull loads.
and, the final simplifying conversion:
6) Draft Horses move at -1/3 the rate while pulling a load compared to the same conditions not pulling a load. (This might be modified with load thresholds for multiple horses, etc.)
This is our working house rule for now, as unrealistic as this may be. I'm happy to have more comments on this, particularly if they can help to improve this. In general I'm more interested in having a system that is consistent even if not realistic than to get bogged down in trying to accurately model an aspect of adventure mechanics that is, frankly, pretty boring.
