I don't know how many people are even poking around here at this point, but I figured I'd toss this out there anyway.
My group just finished Brinestump Marsh and I'm getting ready for the initial journey to Brinewall. I'm planning to use the caravan rules mostly on my end, letting the players know what they are and how they work, having input on things that affect them, but mostly leaving the mechanical parts in the background on my end as a framework for me to provide description for things that happen along the way, and track the simulationist bits like provisions, travel time, and the like.
I'm tweaking a few things to try and counter what feel like some of the shortcomings.
Traveler jobs: I'm allowing a bit of overlap here, with NPCs being able to fill more than one position as long as they meet the requirements and they don't have more than one that adds bonuses to the rolls. My Sandru is able to serve as driver, wainwright, and trader, for instance. All three of those jobs take place at different time, so it seems reasonable to allow him to multitask, and it is HIS caravan after all.
Damage: I'm having primary combat NPCs add a flat +1 to the caravan's damage (Sandru, Ameiko, and Shalelu at the start), and some upgrades, like the ballista mount, might add an extra d6 or something instead of an attack modifier.
Combat Encounters: I'm intending to have all caravan combats split as a normal player combat encounter, with the caravan combat rules letting me figure out how all of the NPCs are doing. Each round I describe how one of the NPCs is doing in the background while the players deal with their own fight. Depending on how each respective part of the battle goes, overlap may occur.
Still kind of poking at it, but that's what I've got so far. I overall like the idea of the caravan rules, and think they can potentially be helpful and fun.
The combat system does not work and will destroy the caravan in short order, just a fair warning. The system wasn't playtested and needs extensive houseruling, either by significantly upping caravan damage ( much more than a +1 for every NPC ) or by just leaving out the caravan combat entirely and focusing on making the rest of the rules work in some way. Otherwise the caravan will simply explode as soon as you get into the tougher encounters of the AP.
Personally, I completely ditched caravan combat, ignored morale checks and made a separate mechanic for security check, substituting it for a combined Survival check against a pretty high DC. I kept track of caravan hitpoints and wagons, but that was about it.
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What I've been doing is increasing the damage by +1 at second and every other level there after and +1d6 at 3rd and every other level there after. Basically that means you're picking up either a +1 or +1d6 every level. After that I follow it up with some better weapon options that improve damage dice instead of just atk and it starts to pad back out. It's a shame we have to house rule them this much considering how cool the caravan system is but that should help you get moving.
Second you may want to check out the trade routes expansion by Louis Forter jr., they've added a lot of support on the matter to help out.
I agree with Magnuskn, once you get to Book #3 at the latest and run into encounters that do 8d8+4 damage each hit, you notice that your 1d6+6 really looks a bit shabby against it.
Those encounters will have less HPs than the caravan but not by the same ratio, so they'll more than likely just obliterate the caravan.
Trade Routes Expanded is a nice pdf, gives a few fun wagons, feats and mostly ideas for encounters, but that's it really, it's not a fix in itself.
We're now in Book 4 and we more or less ditched Caravan Combat almost entirely, as well as handwaving most of the managing parts of it. Buying food, etc for example. It's really boring to track that stuff, especially since they can just stop for a day or two if necessary and refill their stores with Survival checks.
Caravan Combat (even when fixed so encounters are fairer) are really rather boring. I roll, you roll, I roll, you roll, for 10 rounds till one side is at 0. Oh yeah fun. There's no real tactics involved or anything.
For a while I was having Caravan Combat and PC combat side by side, influencing one another but that's getting way too complicated, and really adds very little. By now we're just saying "Ok the rest of the caravan is actually fighting off more bandits, lets just assume it goes well - unless you lose then they lose too"
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What about using some of the other check types while in combat? Like say bandits attack and every couple of rounds you need to make a security check to make sure they don't steal any supplies or mobility checks to chase down fleeing opponents? What could be cool is allowing the players caravans to do this kind of stuff as well, like being able to pull smash and grabs on raiders or other caravans. This could also give the rest of the party something to do during combat with one character tasked with hitting security checks to keep bandits off their supplies. It's not a big sweeping change but it is a start.
Might work for your game maybe.
My biggest gripe with the caravan rules is that there's little strategy involved and it's really just a one on one fight, and it's usually one person rolling for the caravan while 3 or 4 others sit and wait.
We rotated the person rolling, it still wasn't really fun.
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Might work for your game maybe.
My biggest gripe with the caravan rules is that there's little strategy involved and it's really just a one on one fight, and it's usually one person rolling for the caravan while 3 or 4 others sit and wait.
We rotated the person rolling, it still wasn't really fun.
Yeah that's what we did, and it's part of why I wanted to do some patching. The other rule I'm working on is one that allows some of the damage from a fight to transfer to the people in the caravan. I always liked the idea of the party rushing through the caravan and helping to treat the wounded and seeing who did and didn't make it.
Ohh what about the wainwright or security team being able to make a security or resolve checks to boost morale and grant some temp health?
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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.
This is not an expansion of the caravan rules, but I wrote a rather large adventure path plug-in that fits inside of the journey between the "player's hometown" and the "final destination" of Chapter One.
I also tweaked the caravan rules. However I always found them rather bland at the best of times, so all of my encounters can be played out using traditional combat and rules.
It has beautiful maps that actually depict the caravan wagons right on them, using the Paizo Player Guide's basic wagon dimensions.
The encounters deal with natural hazards on the road as well as trading opportunities. There are limits to what we could do as we couldn't use Paizo's IP, but I think you'll be more than pleased with how it foreshadows Chapter Two. I really believe it could enrich your Chapter One experience.