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Bactrian or Dromedary?
Seriously, the rules are a little funky here, because if following the exact rules on page 191, a camel can travel a speed of 35 if carrying a total of 16 bulk or less, and a speed of 25 if carrying 26 bulk or less. Assuming your average adventurer is around 20 bulk including carrying their own gear, and Saddlebags and riding tack are considered “light” to the camel (pg 191 rules for larger creatures) then a camel and 1 rider and tack encumber the camel, making them move 25.
On the down side, this means that there’s not a lot of point riding a bunch of camels versus just leading them and loading them down with a ton of gear, because travel on foot by itself is not fatiguing.
In our playtest for chapter 2, we assumed the camels were not encumbered, since the point for receiving them was to speed up the journey, and they traveled 28 miles per day.
This seems to suggest that medium characters are 8 bulk and small characters are 4.
This still puts a lot of characters dangerously close to encumbering their camels. If you've got 1 bulk for tack, 8 bulk for a medium character, that leaves you only another 8 bulk before the camel is encumbered. And a lot of 18 strength characters will be carrying 8 bulk worth of stuff.
This is probably more noteworthy for combat-trained animals, however. Heavy barding (which you absolutely need unless you want a dead horse) for a large creature is 8 bulk, and if the rider is 8 bulk, then unless you're buck naked the animal companion is encumbered. This is a bit problematic since you're already paying a move speed penalty for barding.
Assuming your average adventurer is around 20 bulk...
We do have bulk values for characters. 4 for Small and 8 for Medium. They can be found in the Petrified condition, of all places. :o
Edit: Ninjaed.
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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Assuming your average adventurer is around 20 bulk...We do have bulk values for characters. 4 for Small and 8 for Medium. They can be found in the Petrified condition, of all places. :o
Edit: Ninjaed.
Wow, talk about burying the lead. If PF2 is forcing bulk upon us, this should definitely be addressed in the updates and final version of the game - to explicitly indicate how much bulk creatures of different sizes are. Should be under the rules for bulk themselves, as well as creating a character when talking about other characteristics (where most rule books would talk about height and weight), and probably in the bestiary under Size.
Assuming your average adventurer is around 20 bulk including carrying their own gearI'm not sure this is a good assumption.
From the Playtest Rulebook p323
This seems to suggest that medium characters are 8 bulk and small characters are 4.
PETRIFIED
You have been turned to stone. You can’t act and you have the blinded and deafened conditions. You become an object with a Bulk equal to twice your normal Bulk (typically 16 for a petrified Medium creature or 8 for a petrified Small creature)
Good catch! Everyone I saw before was going off of the "10 pounds per 1 bulk" assumption from pg. 191. So, with 8 bulk, only really strong characters carrying a ton of stuff will encumber the camel.
Now, the interesting part -- if you buy some saddlebags, and take most of the stuff you are carrying, and put it in saddlebags, all of your equipment that falls under the "negligible bulk" rule for larger creatures (on pg. 191) would barely encumber the camel, even if it were 10 bulk or so by iself! Interestingly, this makes realistic sense, as weight distributed over the creature is easier to bear than being concentrated in one place (like on a backpack on your back with you in the saddle.)
So, without getting too far into it, if a person is average 8 bulk, and stows their gear properly, the camel has nothing to worry about.
Now, CAN WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT GODAWFUL 2-BULK ALCHEMY KIT, please??? ;-)
Yeah, this does enable "Fireman's Carry," which, under the assumption for 1 bulk=10 pounds, you just could not do.
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That sounds entirely reasonable. If you want heavy armour for man and horse, you should expect not to be able to go as fast.
The problem is that they're being triple-penalized. They take a -10 penalty for barding, then a -10 penalty for being encumbered, and as minions they only get two actions per turn to begin with. Your horse at full gallop is only moving 60 ft per round. This is about 7 miles per hour, putting its full gallop about the speed of a jogger. Slower than an unarmored horse makes perfect sense, but slower than a human runner is just senseless.
Secondly, I want to make something very clear: if you are not putting heavy armor on your horse, it will have the life expectancy of wet tissue paper. For instance at 5th level your horse will have only 17 AC and 48 hit points. That AC is low enough to give it a very high chance of suffering critical hits, and its HP total is low enough that many monsters have a better than even chance to take a horse from full to zero in one round. Wearing armor is non-negotiable, you need that AC if you want them to survive.
Only items that are 2 bulk or greater are treated as full bulk. Items of 1 bulk count as a light bulk. So your 8 bulk character carrying 8 bulk of stuff may only feel like 14 bulk to the camel (8 for the character, 2 for armor, 2 for 2-H weapon, everything else is a light bulk to the camel)
And Bulk is supposed to be a simplified system over just counting weight? :D
Having thought on this for a day, it occurs to me that the problem may just be that horses are much too slow to begin with. 40 ft move speed as minions means that they're only moving 80 ft per round. With a gallop that increases to 100 ft per round. That's about 18 kilometers per hour, a little under half the speed of a realistic galloping horse.
PF1 horses taking a run action were actually very close to the realistic speed of a galloping horse (40 km/h, which works out to 220 ft per round. A horse taking a run action moves 250 ft). PF2 horses are nowhere close. So perhaps it's not armor that's the problem, but rather that horses just need to be faster in general.