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What is up with Elephants in 4e

July 30, 2009 By

I was playing 4e last week with the local RPGA group and a player pointed out the carrying capacity of an elephant according to the adventurer’s vault page 11, was 312lbs for normal, 625lbs for heavy and 1562lbs to push, pull or drag something. Now if you google how much can an elephant carry, you get 1200lbs from wiki.answers.com. The 4e PHB page 222 says normal is 10 times your strength, being a quadraped, an elephant can carry 25% more. They gave the elephant a strength of 25 so times that by 12.5 and you get 312.5 that means my wife’s dragonborn paladin is almost too heavy to ride an elephant. I suppose they did not want to give an elephant a strength of 96 (1200/12.5=96) or 48 which is what you need for 600lbs.

relief at the Bayon-temple in Angkor, Cambodia

relief at the Bayon-temple in Angkor, Cambodia

Apparently the 4e carrying capacity math breaks easily. In alidor I just double the elephant values to settle the problem, but keep the strength set to game default. I mean come on a huge beast like an elephant unable to carry large player characters in armor. Why spend the extra 3,000plus gold when a heavy warhorse will do.

Hey what’s that up ahead? It looks like a great war elephant over burdened by a kobold in full plate.

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About shent_lodge

Shent_lodge, AKA Jon, started this website, in 2000, initially as a player's guide to his home game. He has run through, and run for hundreds of players of the Dungeons and Dragons game since 1980. These days he mostly plays the Pathfinder RPG at cons.

Comments

  1. Zachary says:
    July 31, 2009 at 12:13 am

    Guess 4e carrying capacity math is the elephant in the room no one’s talking about.

  2. DeadGod says:
    July 31, 2009 at 8:30 am

    Seems reasonable: Double the carry capacity for all quadrupeds. Two sets of legs means twice the carry capacity!

  3. Dave says:
    July 31, 2009 at 10:38 am

    I don’t know why they decided to change the carrying capacities in 4e. 3.5′s exponential carrying capacities seemed to work fine in my experience. If they were worried about characters with low Strength scores (8 to 10) not being able to carry their gear they could have just shifted everyone’s carrying capacity a couple of rows on the 3.5 table.

    If encumbrance or carrying capacity ever becomes in issue in my 4e campaign I’ll suggest using the 3.5 rules for that, and I doubt I’ll get any complaints.

  4. shent_lodge says:
    July 31, 2009 at 12:54 pm

    The math seems reasonable for flying mounts, but breaks for four legged beasts of burden and sea going mounts.