DM Rant About Caravan Rules

One of the unique facets of the Jade Regent Adventure Path is something called “caravan rules”. These are a special set of rules that describe how to build, use, and fight in caravans designed for cross-country trade and travel. When I first heard about caravan rules, I thought that sounded like a cool twist that would provide some diversity from the standard D&D play we’ve all done for years. But after reading the actual rules, and reading the experiences of other DMs in the on-line forums, I’ve decided not to use them. Actually, we should have been using caravan rules for some encounters ever since the party left Sandpoint, but this is the first you’re hearing about them (unless you’ve snuck a peek at the Jade Regent Player’s Guide). However, the next portion of the AP, where you’re trekking across the Crown of the World, is dominated by caravan encounters, and I felt it was worth a short digression to explain why I’m going a different route (no pun intended) than the AP designers intended.

Here are the three main reasons I’ve elected to forgo caravan rules:

1. They’re Complex

This may sound like a strange quibble in a game where the “core” rulebook alone is 575 pages long. But there’s a lot of stuff to consider when building and running a caravan. There are seven different wagon types, each with its own carrying capacity, role in the caravan, speed, upkeep requirements, etc. There are thirteen different types of hirelings you can hire to drive your wagons, cook your food, hunt for food, guard you from danger, etc. Each wagon has a cost, and each hireling has a different wage scale. You have to keep track of how much cargo you’re carrying, how much food your hirelings and horses are eating, allocate space for cargo vs food, keep track of when you trade for goods and how much you make. Once you’ve created your caravan, it is like its own character, with stats for things like offense, defense, speed, resolve, security, HP, capacity, etc. As the caravan goes up in level, it can earn feats that modify its stats or what it can do.

Don’t get me wrong – this could potentially make for a very fun game in and of itself. Kind of a “Pathfinder Rails”. Some DMs report that their players got more interested in trying to get rich off their caravans than in the actual adventure itself. It’s just not the game I want to run.

2. It’s Boring

Once you’ve created your caravan and are happily rolling along, you occasionally (or frequently, depending on what part of the AP you’re in) have “caravan encounters”. When that happens, the PCs and NPCs effectively cease to exist. The caravan is the only character, and everything is the caravan vs the “encounter”. Usually the encounter is something that’s attacking the caravan, although sometimes it’s some sort of obstacle or challenge (a flooded river, a bad storm, etc.). There are no decisions or tactics involved; the DM rolls some dice, one of the players rolls for the caravan, and you compare the numbers to see who won and how much damage you took (or in the case of an obstacle, how long it takes you to get around it). That’s it. Other than the one person rolling for the caravan, everyone else in the party just sits around until the encounter is resolved. Yawn.

3. Caravan Combat is Broken

When you read the Paizo on-line forums where DMs can share experiences with running the Jade Regent AP, here’s how a typical entry about caravan rules might start: “I’ve been trying to use the caravan rules, but my party gets wiped out. Every. Single. Time.”

The AP authors admit they didn’t playtest the caravan rules before the AP was published, and they made a fundamental and fatal mistake. When you design encounters, you try to match the party’s level with the Challenge Rating (CR) of the encounter. When you have a caravan, the caravan’s level is the same as the highest-level character in the party, so a group of 8^th level PCs would be in an 8^th level caravan, and the encounters in the AP would likely be anywhere from CR8 – CR11 (~4800-12800 XP worth of enemies).

But when the party is fighting an encounter, there are assumed to be at least four PCs, with four (or more) attacks per round and a pool of HP that’s ~4X what any one character would have. Unfortunately, the caravan fights as just one character. It’s totally outclassed by almost anything it comes up against. It’s not unusual to see TCK (Total Caravan Kill) in the first or second round. Destroying the caravan doesn’t technically mean the PCs are killed. They’re assumed to have fled (yeah, right) and survived. But all the wagons are destroyed and all the horses and hirelings are killed. If this happens in the middle of the arctic, a thousand miles from the nearest settlement, then the PCs might as well be dead.

People have proposed all kinds of tweaks to the caravan rules to get around this basic problem, and I looked hard at them to figure out what to use for our game. But in the end, I just felt like caravan rules were more likely to make the game less fun rather than more fun, so I tossed them aside. I’ve converted all the “attack” type caravan encounters into standard party encounters. I’ve ignored most of the other type of encounters, although I’ve left a few in where I felt they added color to the journey. I have the ongoing struggle with balance, made greater here because these encounters are more "from scratch" than most. In addition, all the NPCs are more likely to be around during a caravan encounter, which further skews the balance. Once we finish this chapter, we can look back and see how well it went.