Here are a few house rules my friends and I came up with to make caravan combat survivable throughout the “Jade Regent” adventure path:
1) The JR Player’s Guide offers this advice when putting together your caravan:
“Primary Statistics: You initially have 3 points to spend among your primary statistics. Each primary statistic begins with a score of 1, and you can split these 3 points up in any combination you want between your caravan’s Offense, Defense, Mobility, and Morale scores.”
These 3 points seem to be available only at first level. By mistake, we’ve been adding the same 3 points every time the caravan gains a level and it’s been a big help to survive so far, so I suggest doing the same for yours.
2) When it comes to damages caused by the caravan in combat, the Guide says this:
“Each round of caravan combat, both sides of the battle make a single Attack check. If a combatant’s Attack check equals or exceeds the target’s AC, it deals an amount of damage to that foe equal to its level (for a caravan) plus 1d6.”
As some of you have remarked, when your caravan gets to higher levels, the damages from the caravan don’t amount to much when facing some of its adversaries. So we came up with the following formula to compensate:
Ld8 + P, where L is the level of the caravan and P is the number of PCs in the adventure. In our case, we have 7 PCs participating in Jade Regent, which gives us the following: 7d8 + 7 points of damages in caravan combat. In the event that the number of PCs in your campaign is the minimum of 4, change the formula to this:
Ld8 + 2P, to compensate for the smaller number of PCs.
I hope this will help make caravan combat more enjoyable for all you Jade Regent players out there.
