Coursers and Poor Chargers

[YwainDigsLions]

In KAP 5.2, it says Coursers are battle-trained, but in BoE it says they are not? Which is true?

Also, do Poor Chargers have the same stats as regular Chargers except for the 5d6 damage?

[Morien]

11 minutes ago, YwainDigsLions said:

In KAP 5.2, it says Coursers are battle-trained, but in BoE it says they are not? Which is true?

Also, do Poor Chargers have the same stats as regular Chargers except for the 5d6 damage?

BotEnt is correct. Otherwise Coursers would be much cheaper and superior to poor chargers in every way. I would allow a battle and hunt trained Courser for double the price, so about the same as a charger: a bit less damage but better DEX, Move and CON.

Stat-wise, poor chargers are slightly smaller and weaker than a charger, to explain that drop in damage. I'd probably use courser stats for those (SIZ 30, STR 26), if it ever came up (it hasn't, thus far).

[Tizun Thane]

59 minutes ago, YwainDigsLions said:

KAP 5.2, it says Coursers are battle-trained, but in BoE it says they are not? Which is true?

Coursers are normally not trained for battle (except exceptionnal mounts), but are faster and give a +5 bonus to riding in forests.

1 hour ago, YwainDigsLions said:

Also, do Poor Chargers have the same stats as regular Chargers except for the 5d6 damage?

I never used  stats for poor Chargers, except their 5d6 damage. The suggestion of morien seems good to me.

[Uqbarian]

49 minutes ago, Morien said:

BotEnt is correct. Otherwise Coursers would be much cheaper and superior to poor chargers in every way. I would allow a battle and hunt trained Courser for double the price, so about the same as a charger: a bit less damage but better DEX, Move and CON.

Stat-wise, poor chargers are slightly smaller and weaker than a charger, to explain that drop in damage. I'd probably use courser stats for those (SIZ 30, STR 26), if it ever came up (it hasn't, thus far).

Would it be fair to assume that a starting courser is battle-trained, at least (e.g. for the Master of the Hunt pregen in the core book)?

[Morien]

8 minutes ago, Uqbarian said:

Would it be fair to assume that a starting courser is battle-trained, at least (e.g. for the Master of the Hunt pregen in the core book)?

I think that would be fair. The price would be the same as for a charger anyway. 

[Atgxtg]

I think part of the reason for the confusion in the KAP books is that Greg uses Coruser a bit differently than some others, with the coruser being a hunting horse, where many sources uses it interchangeably with charger, and call a hunting horse a hunter. 

I've been working on some horse rule that cover some of this and generally Coursers aren't battle trained, they are hunting horses. There are several reasons why. First off not all horses are suited to be war horses or hunting horses, so finding such a horse would be rare, and training one more difficult. Secondly is the training time. Most breeds of horse cannot be ridden regularly until they are about 4 years old, and then the training to be riding horse and warhorse takes up a couple of years.  So a typical warhorse is 5-6 years old to start, and training him to be a Courser too, just cuts into his productive years. So it's probably a rarity, only done for horses that are gifted to both roles.