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Mithridates 03-25-05, 07:17 PM

I'm working on a campaign set in the bronze age, at a time when riding horses had not yet superseded charioteering as the primary means to get somewhere fast and trample infantry. I'm having some problems, however, getting together some reliable rules for chariots, especially with regards to overrun attacks. For purposes of this thread, the chariot in question is pulled by two horses and occupied by one man, who is the driver. It seems like, viewed from above, it would look like this: Hh Hh CC Where horses are H and h, respectively, and CC is the chariot itself. With 3.5 rules, however, I gather that this would take up a 15' square on the battlefield, making it effectively Huge. With that in mind, here's a step-by step analysis of overrunning with chariots. Note that this is entirely divined from the core books on my part; if there is a supplement I don't have that details this, or if I'm just flat wrong, please enlighten me here. 1) First, you move into the opponent's space. It's helpful to note here that a chariot is big. If three gnolls are standing next to each other, and you overrun the middle one, you're going to be occupying the spaces of the other two as well. It doesn't make sense to have each of them make separate checks; that would create the odd possibility of some of them succeeding and some failing, and what happens then? The best way I can see handling it is to have the strongest one make the opposed check, and perhaps letting the others contribute +2 each for aiding another. The gnolls should logically all get an AoO, however, directed against the horses. After all, the rider is a good 10' back when the horses enter the squares occupied by the gnolls. 2) The opponent may choose to avoid. If a solitary gnoll is standing directly in front of the chariot, both the spaces to either side of him are also about to be filled to the brim with chariot. Can he still avoid? I'm tempted to say yes, not because it makes sense, but because otherwise that would mean that you couldn't try to avoid overrun attempts made by, say, a Huge giant. 3) If the opponent doesn't avoid, he blocks, which leads to a trip attempt. You make a strength check, which in this case means the horse makes a strength check. Normally a horse gets a +4 size modifier, which begs the question of whether a horse should use its own size, or the size of the chariot (Huge). I'm going to go with using the Huge rating (+8), because it seems like a big chariot pulled by two horses is simply going to have the momentum of more than just one horse. Then there's the +4 bonus for stability. A horse gets this by virtue of having four legs. According to the core books, that bonus doesn't increase for more legs, even though in this case we have eight horse legs and two wheels touching the ground. I'd be tempted to give them another +4 as a house rule, but that's not canon, and it seems too overpowering in light of the +8 that the chariot is already getting for size. If you fail, the chariot stops dead; I assume that if the target then trips you, well, the chariot is tripped. I'm not even going to go into what happens then; a "tripped" chariot most likely ends up in a tangle of horses, men, and chariot that probably is the closest to an auto accident you'll see in D&D. Rest assured in my games the charioteer is going to take more than just the standard 1d6 for falling off a horse. That seems about right, but please commence the critique; I'm especially interested to know if this is covered in supplements.