B/X Monsters A to Z: Horse

 Horses are one of those entries in the B/X bestiary that exists not because they're interesting as monsters, but because they're creatures that are useful to characters. They're essentially living pieces of equipment, but as such, they need stats like monsters.

The book breaks them down into three broad categories: riding, draft, and war. All three have a base AC of 7, which is pretty standard for most animals with no predatory inclinations or particular affinity for combat. Everything else is different among them.

Riding horses are the standard we're most familiar with in our modern world. Their purpose is to be sat on and take their riders places. They're capable of a very brisk pace of 240' (80'), or twice the speed of an unencumbered human, and can maintain that speed while carrying up to 3,000 coin weight (300 pounds), including the rider. They can carry up to 600 pounds at half speed, which is still a very respectable 120' (40'). (More on this later.) The riding horse has 2 HD, which honestly seems a bit flimsy to me. A wolf, a much smaller and lighter creature, has 2+2 HD. A thousand pounds of horse seems that it should be able to absorb more punishment than 100 pounds of wolf. On the other hand, the horse gets two attacks for 1-4 damage each, outstripping the predator's single 1-6 point attack. The riding horse's morale is decent at 7. According to the entry, wild horses use riding horse stats, and can be trained as riding horses if captured and tamed.

War horses are bigger, stronger, fiercer, and trained for mounted combat. Their base movement rate is the same as an unencumbered human, 120' (40'), and they can bear up to 4,000 cn at full movement or 8,000 at half. The war horse has 3 Hit Dice, which again seems a bit flimsy for what it's supposed to be; a wild boar also has 3 HD, and it's significantly smaller. It has two hoof attacks for 1-6 each, i.e. a potential total of 2-12 damage. A rider wielding a lance in a charge attack does double damage (1d10 x 2 if using the variable weapon damage rules) but the horse itself cannot attack when doing so. This means, rather absurdly, that the charge attack is actually a slightly less efficient way of dealing damage than for the horse and rider to both attack in normal combat, for a total of around 2d6 for the hooves plus 1d8 for the rider's sword. The war horse has a hearty morale score of 9.

Draft horses are very large, plodding beasts bred for carrying and pulling heavy weights, and for docility of temperament. (You don't want your gigantic draft horse getting uppity with you when you hitch the plow to it!) Once again, the 3 HD seems too low, but there we are. No attacks are listed for the draft horse; if attacked, it will attempt to flee. On the plus side, it can carry as much as 4,500 cn at full speed, though that's a sluggish 90' (30'), and up to 9,000 at half speed, a glacial 45' (15'). The fact that the horse will automatically attempt to flee if attacked renders its morale score of 6 almost moot. 

As you've probably already gathered, I'm not too enamored with these stats. The horses should have another Hit Die or even two. I'd say you could easily give riding horses 3, war horses 5, and draft horses 4 without breaking anything important. The separate attacks for each hoof also strike me as silly; let's just give riding and war horses a single attack, for 1d4 and 1d8 damage, respectively, and call it good. I don't think the horse should be doing more damage than the sword-wielding knight riding it!

Where things get really weird, though, is in the carrying capacities. Strictly by the numbers, the riding horse is almost always the superior choice for bearing burdens. You can load it to 6,000 coins and it will still match your unencumbered party members on foot, and still outpaces even an unencumbered draft horse. The warhorse under 6,000 cn of encumbrance is slowed to 60' (20') and the mighty draft horse plods along at 45' (15')! Sure, those other two can keep going at somewhat higher encumbrance totals, but you could just bring along a couple more riding horses to carry extra gear and treasure, and keep up the pace. 

It seems to me that the movement rates ought to be adjusted, for a start. Warhorses should get a rate of 150' (50') and draft horses 120' (40'). Additionally, the draft horse's capacity ought to be dramatically increased when pulling rather than carrying. In the section on wagons in the equipment chapter, the rules state that two draft horses may pull a load of 15,000 COINS in a wagon, and four may pull a load of 25,000. According to the Perplexity search engine, though, a single real world draft horse can pull around 8,000 POUNDS (not mere coin-weights!) comfortably and efficiently over long distances in a wheeled cart or wagon, and two together can pull as much as 20,000 pounds, rendering the official game numbers a ridiculous joke. Taking those revised numbers as maximum (i.e. half speed) we can set the full speed pulling capacity at 40,000 coins for a single horse, or 50,000 per horse for a team. So, while a draft horse might not be much utility for carrying loads on its back, if you need to haul wagonloads of supplies or spoils on roads or over fairly gentle terrain, they're worth serious consideration. 

It's also worth noting that riding horses can be used in mounted combat, just not for making lance attacks. The Plains tribes of Native Americans were famous for their mounted warriors, and those emphatically were not European warhorses they were riding. The same could probably be said of famous mounted warriors like the Mongol hordes, too. So yeah, they may not be as fearless or as fierce in fighting on their own behalf as a warhorse, but riding horses absolutely can be taken into battle by mounted archers and light cavalry.