Dismounted
You guys remember Viigar the raven familiar? Sure you do. We met him in the same comic where we introduced Skitters. While horses are ever so slightly heartier than hollow-boned avians, the same issue applies. Namely, they tend to get oops-I’m-dead’d at the first sign of serious combat. Is it time for a tale from the table? You bet your bag of everlasting dung it is!
So no shit there we were, riding up to the dwarven city of Glimmerhold in style. It was a Pathfinder 1e mythic game, and we were well on our way to invincibility. Our wizard knew literally every spell. Our paladin could smite for infinity. The crit-fishing fighter didn’t even bother with a lance anymore. Her greatsword straight up ended encounters, so what was the point? Well let me tell ya, the point found us on the road into town.
As we were crossing the great causeway into Glimmerhold, our GM launched into this Godzilla-esque description. The lake water boiled around us. A reptilian head broke the surface. Then another. Then five more. And by the time the flavor text was finished, a homebrew mythic hydra was perched on the bridge before us.
“Steady, Captain!” says the fighter to her horse. “It would appear that we have the initiative. An extra sugar cube with your supper if you manage some trample damage. CHARGE!”
And she charged. Only she didn’t. Because mythic hydras have slightly more reach than human fighters with greatswords.
“Attack of opportunity!” says the GM.
“Bring it.”
And the “it” was summarily brought. Because our GM was sick any tired of our demigod asses roflstomping through the bestiary. And this custom homebrew mythic hydra was all about attacks of opp.
“Alright,” says the fighter. “That’s barely a quarter of my hp. Now as I complete my charge, I bellow a fearsome—”
But she bellowed nothing. For the GM was rolling to-hit on the second attack of opportunity. And then the third.
“How many AoOs does this thing get?” we cried.
“How many heads does a seven-headed hydra have?” he replied.
Suffice it to say that the encounter was mildly overtuned. By the time attack #6 did its thing, even our GM was getting worried.
“How many hp do you have left?” he asked. (Which is never a good sign.) And upon hearing the shockingly low number: “Yeah look, what do you say I just attack Captain with the last bite? He’s still at full health. He can eat one little hydra strike, right?”
Notes were consulted. Calculations were calculated. And our poor fighter could only give us her best Morpheus impression. Because even after six hydra hits, she still had a better chance of surviving than her friggin’ horse.
Several sessions and one resurrection later, we managed to upgrade Captain. Our solution involved questing for a magic pool that could turn him into a dragon horse, after which we mostly referred to him as “rocket horse.” (Mythic haste + 120′ fly speed = lol.) What about the rest of you guys though? How do you manage to keep your valiant steeds from exploding on contact with their first fireball? Sound of in the comments with all your best horse protection strats and insurance policies!
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I should like to return those words to you, you bad mare.
Paladin is being thoughtless. You tried to have someone relatively innocent assassinated!
I’m pretty sure Snowflake is just suffering what is known as ‘well deserved karmic retribution’.
Then again, Paladin is a bit of a oblivious, holier-than-thou rear-end of a horse himself.
But Snowflake is just pursuing true love! That’s virtuous and stuff, right?
why would anyone call a black horse „snowflake“?
irony?
/sarcasm
Reminds me of “Snowball” the cat from Disney’s Hercules.
You made me recall my Goblin Wizard’s wolf steed.
The party bought mounts in Riddleport, only Goblins will not ride dogs or horses in PF 1E. So I got a wolf. (Riddleport has everything.)
We survived a hobgoblin ambush, but then we ran into a pack of forest drakes… and suffice it to say we had to walk the rest of the way. My Goblin eulogized his poor wolf mount, recalling fondly how it had devoured most of a dead hobgoblin…
My favorite fantasy wolves come from “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.” Their howls are just the voice actors doing their best, and it cracks my shit up every time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUC_DALwtOM&t=121s
Firstly this was a homebrewed Mythic Hydra, it might very well have a special power that get around this, so take the following in that context.
Did you know, there’s a frequently overlooked rule that you only get to make one attack of opportunity per enemy from them moving out of your threatened area each round, no matter how many AoO’s you are allowed to make and how many such spaces they move out of.
The fragile horse problem is a thing I’m pretty familiar with in pathfinder. I don’t really have a good solution though. Mostly people here get around it by only having people with animal companions (or equivalent) ride mounts so they increase in hit points as the player levels up.
In our mythic game, where that might not be enough hit points to really help, the mounted player also had something that allowed the mount to use his saves, I’m not quite sure whether that was a mythic power/feat or something from his paladin archetype though.
The mounted combat feat works pretty well for the first non-save attack since skill checks can be raised a lot more than attack bonuses even. That can often discourage enemies from attempting to attack the mount at all.
I’m familiar with the rule. I’m not certain that my GM was.
It’s been a few years, but I think that what I’m calling “homebrew” might have been a weird reading of the mythic combat reflexes feat:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/mythic/mythic-feats/combat-reflexes-mythic/
Still, given the crazy damage output that party could dish out, I suspect the AoO ruling was an effort to actually challenge us rather than a screw-up.
“Now they have to figure out how to defeat this hydra without incurring too many attacks of opportunity.”
“I charge the hydra!”
“You’ll get a bunch of AoO’s…”
“Well, what else am I going to do?”
“…oh no.”
Communicating intent is hard. :/
I am currently playing in a 5th ed D&D monster-party underdark campaign. My Dragonborn Conquest Paladin is designated party tank and all round hit-soaker. When I got Find Steed, we figured a horse wasn’t really in-theme, so my faithful mount is a Giant Lizard (which means I get to use a really cool Games Workshop mounted Saurus mini for my character), which has the benefit that the Giant Lizard has a climb speed. This has led to a couple of really cool cinematic moments where I have charged up walls or along a tunnel roof to get to particularly elusive enemies. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in a number of embarrassing falls whenever my made-of-paper steed is shot out from under me, which due to my general tankiness, is becoming the go-to strategy for enemies. Fortunately there is a 5th ed Feat that will eventually negate that (as it allows me to choose which of us takes a hit) but I am still a few levels off that, so will be dropping unceremoniously out of the sky for a few encounters yet!
While writing this comic, I noticed something interesting about that feat. I’m looking at the pseudo-evasion ability:
http://dnd5ed.wikidot.com/feat:mounted-combatant
The average 5e fireball deals 28 damage. The average warhorse…
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Warhorse#content
…Has 19 hp. I can’t help but think that they’re deliberately trying to hit the breaking point on that horse hp, making sure that one fireball won’t kill your mount so long as you invest in the feat.
My Ratfolk wizard, early in his career at level 3, bought a dire rat mount (reflavored to be an adorable jerboa), as a combination of combat ride (free mobility on a squishy/ranged caster class), pack mule, downtime speedy transportation and fluff (it was adorable).
It featured in only a single fight at level 3 as an actual combat mount. Every other scene, it was stabled or not present at all. If I kept it around, it would have inevitably died horribly to one of the many AOE’s present in a AP suitable from levels 1 to 20.
It became wholly obsolete in its duty when we got a Handy Haversack / Bag of Holding (for carry limits), Overland Flight (for personal combat mobility) and Phantom Chariot (for group transportation over large distances).
We even made a joke out of it a few times, describing it as being fatter due to lack of exercise, or eating all the food out of a room in our absence. I even made sure to give it exercise walks between adventures.
Heh. Continuity gags are the best. It’s always nice to feel like your actions have consequences, even when they’re minor and just played for laughs.
Huh, Lumberjack Explosion sure look different than I remember him to!
Oh… Wait… That’s just Snowflake (unwillingly) cosplaying as her horsebando. Apart from the horn and mane conditioner, they’re practically indistinguishable, though!
Hmm… Perhaps she could pull some disguise shenanigans with this fact later…
For a moment, I thought Paladin had decided to reform a Nightmare instead of continuing with Snowflake.
…
It would have been an upgrade, as far as I’m concerned.
That, or Snowflakes evil deeds are slowly creeping up on her. Or she’s actively acquiring a fiendish/corruption template for power.
You joke, but that mess happened to my unicorn familiar once upon a time. Friggin’ council of evil unicorns… She came out of that arc a piebald!
I seem to recall you telling us so…
Didn’t you persuade her to really explore her new dark side by betraying the evil horses that corrupted her?
I stand by my strategy!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/sudden-but-inevitable
Well, of course. If it works, it works!
Hmm, is it just me, or is that ruin/desert one we’ve seen before, again in the context of ‘adventurers getting exploded by AOEs’? Is that just a (super)natural phenomenon there, or are they fighting some beastie in the background?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dodgy
Good catch! It might have something to do with the fact that, as far as I can tell, the scorch mark is exactly the same in both comics—continuity!!! 😛
The DM that’s running the campaign for ‘the Heroes’ must be re-using the same map artwor-I mean, campaign module, for the Anti-Party players.
Which, given the DM complained about forever-DMing in a recent strip, makes me think the DM for the Handbook-verse is the same for all of the PC groups (Heroes, Anti-Party, Evil Party, Bounty Hunter). With possible exception for Dragon Party, who might be DM’d by Jeremy.
The Ruins of Swarming Meteors are a very dangerous place.
In a Ravenloft game I never got to actually play, I built a halfling paladin. The lass was built around the charge mechanic and that meant a mount was needed. The GM briefly talked about gold over time and that we would need to budget for what we’d want. Everyone discussed the amazing Cloak of Resistance and how cost efficient it was. Then I explained I likely couldn’t buy it right away; I would need to budget for my war ponies that would inevitably die over and over again.
If that game ever actually happened, I would have planned to spend 1000s of gold on replacing ponies. And I would have named everyone of them to see how long it would take before the GM stopped using AoEs on me.
I’m half convinced the reason Captain survived as long as he did was because of GM guilt. That and the fact that the dude’s wife (and our party rogue) was an animal lover. The disapproving looks that woman could give when animals got harmed… Oof.
80% of our 3.X players follow the Kleenex model of horse ownership. I defiantly named my lightly-toasted pony “Barbecue” and refused to move from the spot until the Sorcerer apologized for the friendly-fire AoE and the Cleric healed the animal to full. Other notable exceptions include the mounted combat Druid (“a cavalry veteran”), whose horse companion Oatus is tougher than some party members, and the former steeds of the four horsemen.
–Another DM once had us face manifestations of the Four Horsemen: our reward included golden bridles that could summon (and command) their steeds. War’s sorrel horse (“Strax”) was a heavy warhorse (as far as we ever learned), Pestilence rode a champion pegasus (nicknamed “Iolaus” by the new owner), and Famine rode a nightmare (“Krueger”). (The rider of Death’s pale-green horse retired from the group before we learned its special properties, if any).
With two or three characters with the rough equivalent of a paladin’s warhorse (dismissable/summonable, intelligent, sometimes belligerent), the players who cared about such things rarely had to worry about the safety of their mounts. When I would DM, I’d often have the talking pegasus utter a few words of profanity and vanish if asked to perform menial labor or serve under obviously hazardous conditions.
We were playing Pathfinder long enough that the fighter in question regretted her class choice. Laurel says she’d have gone cavalier if that were an option when we started. That increasing hit die is kind of necessary.
In 5e, the Mounted Combatant feat is a must have if you want to be a rider. It gives your mount evasion and lets you make enemies target you instead.
Or just play your character as mounted infantry.
Kind of a bummer that it’s pseudo-mandatory.
Related, something I’ve been wondering lately is how our sorcerer’s mouse companion manages to survive everything the sorcerer’s been through without being squished. My only guess is that it’s because it was in her pocket the entire time, and thus occupies the same indestructible meta-space as the rest of her inventory. As everyone knows, you can rush into combat with an entire backpack of Fabergé eggs and not have to worry about them getting broken as long as they’re tucked away in your inventory.
That’s a somewhat different matter than a horse, though, which is harder to fit in your pocket. My players rarely use mounts, but they have had several encounters in which the horses that pull their wagon found themselves closest to the fray. They quickly realized that tame horses are not automatically combat-trained and would much rather panic and run away than fight. Wagon still attached, of course.
I always appreciated that the “Attended Item” saving rules try to cover this:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/damaging-objects/#TOC-Saving-Throws
Of course, my group has mostly opted for this silly thing:
https://www.aonprd.com/EquipmentMiscDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Familiar%20satchel
the easiest way to keep ye olde mounts out of combat is… not to have them!
Our group has been somewhat lucky in that regard. We used mounts once, didn’t even have to buy them (or rent them), they were given to us as part of the mission we were on.
After that mission, we were on foot for awhile, then in a couple flying castles (well, one was “just” a tower, but still, it flew!), and then by the time we were back on foot, we determined that we did not need a mount anymore because our speed and the mount speed was comparable.
My character is a monk, so I was already moving pretty fast at a fairly early level. Similarly, our barbarian had gained some speed. Our druid had enough uses of Wildshape to become something “mounty” for a few hours and with a short rest between, our travel time wouldn’t be affected. And our wizard had a flying broom and was light enough with our elf cleric to ride together. It only left one person “out” in our party, but since I am really strong, I could carry them (we even had a harness made for me so they could ride and dismount me… horse sounds).
All together at the slowest persons speed, we moved at about 20 miles per day, which was only ten miles slower than the horses would take us!
Screw a mount, just GET FAST! 😀
And now, as mentioned above, we have access to Wind Walk which means we travel WAY faster than any mount in a day! Yeah, it burns a spell slot to do it, but who cares… WE FAST!
I tend to fall in the “more trouble than they’re worth” camp as well. Of course, if a player really wants to pull off the high medieval thing, finding a way to make it work becomes the GM’s onus.
In my current megadungeon game, the gnome knight with the riding gecko as a way to sidestep weird dungeon-based restrictions. I doubt that charging a spiral down the walls, floor, and ceiling of a hall is technically legal, but damned if it doesn’t look cool in my head.
Yeah, but then you have to carry your own luggage and dirty your boots.
And on a more serious note, an assortment of magic weirdos running across the wilderness alongside their buddies riding pillion on a broom and another friend pretending to be a wolf isn’t quite as majestic as a team of heroes riding into the sunset.
Don’t have to worry about losing a steed if it’s just an animated skeleton that’s easily replaced.
points at forehead
I adopted a similar strategy with my occultist’s familiar.
Soulbound Puppet…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/occult-adventures/occult-classes/occultist/occultist-implements/#Soulbound_Puppet_Su
…Plus a little judicious wood shape…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/w/wood-shape
Means you have access to every familiar in the book. I named mine Sebastian, no matter what shape he happened to be that day. Or… ya know… How destroyed he was yesterday.
Now you just need to get a jet chicken to complete the set
https://aqua-teen-hunger-force.fandom.com/wiki/Rocket_Horse_%26_Jet_Chicken
Goddamn culture is weird.
„How do you manage to keep your valiant steeds from exploding on contact with their first fireball?“
I don’t, sadly.
or rather: sheer luck in case of Shadow Companion vs. Red Dragon as area energy effect does full damage on a „half of char HP“ companion. Got destroyed by full attack from barbarian kobold.
Tiger Companion got chewed down by goblin swarm before the Barghest behind them got a good bite out of him. The long term plan was protection by template plus a spell to transfer the damage to the self healing Hunter (archer style).
Doesn’t shadow companion reform eventually?
yeah, eventually:
30 days in game
18 months during a pandemic
Several eons in subjective time:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/post-session
eons of subjective time either way:
I‘ve played in campaigns that didn’t last 30 days in game.
I guess we’re lucky there is no Wizard in the group, most of those 30 days will be chewed up by travel time.
Whenever I’m a non-Paladin I just buy a cart when everyone else is buying horses. It’s cheaper, can carry stuff, and you can nap in it.
As a Paladin you and your horse can act as a seamless unit, so I like to employ “Ancient Greek cavalry tactics” of riding up, hopping off once I’m in the fray, and having my horse run away. The horse is a heavy-infantry delivery-device, rather than being used for more medieval cavalry combat. Sanctuary is also on the oath list for real Paladins, and Redemption.
Dudes in the SCA referred to that tactic as “battle taxi.”
SCA?
Apparently that was the way ancient greek horse warfare worked though. Greece’s terrain was too rough for dragging a chariot in-combat. Fighting from horseback didn’t become a thing until the stirrup, before that it was chariots.
SCA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLX9SDJRggQ
That sounds like an incorrect reading of the rules to me. You can only take one AoO per target per trigger per round. So it might have 7 AoOs, but it seems like a rule issue to me. Then again, Mythic+Homebrew=???
Onto other matters, the situation where the noble steed is made of paper mache is basically why I discourage mounts. I also feel mounts are like having an undead PC (say, a vampire) in your campaign-you end up having to do a lot of extra planning for one PC.
I feel that mounts don’t work well in Pathfinder. Your noble steed you had with you since level 3… Pathfinder is practically written like you trade him out for a better, more exotic, and ideally nobler steed every couple levels. While I will run things as I damn well please, I think the book is explicit that mounts don’t gain even additional HD. Ultimately it feels like another 10-15 pages of information for everyone to get into fights about, so I forego it.
I wonder how the Handbook crew would respond to entire sections of book not being used in an adventure?
I went over this a little further up the thread, but the mythic combat reflexes messes with the rule you’re referencing:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/mythic/mythic-feats/combat-reflexes-mythic/
Homebrew messes with it more. It’s been a couple of years, but given the crazy damage output that party could dish out, I suspect the super-AoO hydra was a deliberate effort to challenge the party rather than a rules screw-up.
My solution? Handwave the mounted combat rules and let the cavalier do what they want. It’s not exactly the most optimized playstyle even when all cylinders are firing. If the riding gecko wants to charge up the wall, wheel 90 degrees and, then activate dragon style to charge through difficult terrain, I’m not going to stress too hard about it.
Dragon horse is cool and all, but we got Midnight.
Muscle is made of horse… I mean horse is made of muscle… eh, either way honestly.
My character actually stood under it to fight the first time we met it, thanks to the Close Quarters Training talent.
He’s a super smart war horse too.
Knows all kinds of tricks. Like stacking bodies out of the way after a fight.
Haaaaaates goblins though… had a nasty encounter with them before we met.
Is your character a halfling?
Nope.
He’s human.
I say “standing under” as fluff for “occupying the same space” really…
3.5 at least has a bunch of ways to make your mount scale: paladin mount, animal companion, familiar, the Wild Cohort feat… but none of them scale all that fast, so they’ll still be left behind eventually. The solution? Stack them! The classic “ubermount” build is the Devoted Tracker feat to combine your animal companion and paladin mount, and then the Halfling Outrider PrC to progress both at once, eventually giving you a mount much stronger and tougher than you.
Other tricks for 3.5: Natural Bond feat for animal companions, Prestige Paladin instead of Paladin if you can swing it, the Share Soulmelds feat if you’re using incarnum. The best/easiest though is the Warbeast template from MM II, which can be applied to your animal friend with a Handle Animal check to give them a significant boost to stats and durability, as well as making them proficient in armor (probably; the wording is a little unclear whether it’s an applied or inherited template).
One thing I appreciated about 4E is that it gave Beastmaster Rangers a cheap ritual to resurrect their animal companion. In 3.5 it was technically free to get a new animal companion, but it would be a brand new one, which is less than stellar from a roleplay standpoint.
And with 5E, I think you can just cast find steed again to get the same creature; I’m pretty sure summoned creatures are just returned to their home (plane) rather than killed. Could very well be wrong about that, though.
Tell me about it.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/loyal-steeds
Who cares? You just get a new one like with viigar 😀
That is the fun of necromancy. You can just keep summoning undead minions 🙂
I thought the fun of necromancy was all the maniacal laughter?
What about the deadly silence? 🙂
Necromancy got so much good things 🙂
In my Curse of Strahd group, my (Oathbreaker) paladin’s summoned fiendish steed Appledash dies basically every other day. When headed down from the Amber Temple, we ran into a particularly tough monster that one-shot the poor thing. It’s more inconvenient than anything, but there’s not much we can do about it outside of GM fiat. In my Curse of the Crimson Throne group (which should end one way or another next week), Majenko the house drake has survived by staying out of the way.
On the whole, unless your steed has absolutely ridiculous amounts of hit points or you’re able to avoid letting it get attacked using ride-by attack, the only way it’s gonna survive is if the GM has an agreement with players to not attack their various animal companions without reason (like using it in combat).
My theory is that the figurines of power exist for exactly this reason.
That makes way too much sense for it not to be the case. Plus it avoids the DM having to give the players a creature that very well may outshine them. By making it a creature that can be resummoned/activated each day, it avoids the necessity of making it particularly powerful.
If you think about it, figurines of wondrous power are weirdly similar to the latest edition’s “find familiar” and “find steed” spells.
The game I’m playing a paladin in is an extended escort quest. Essentially we’re taking fantasy Marco Polo and three of his adult children to fantasy China, and getting distracted by every side quest in fantasy Asia on the way. ‘Marco’ is a retired adventurer, but his kids are basically on their first adventure.
So, when Painful Things are about to go down, Rilinda dismounts, and poor fiendish-looking Freefell gets sent to be babysitter. (The paladin’s a tiefling, so she has an infernal steed just to mess with people’s heads.) Visually it’s really impressive to have them guarded by a ‘nightmare’, and so far no enemy has figured out that the horse is NOT actually a creature of hell.
So like… what is the horse mechanically? Just infernal templated?
Snowflake there would be the Celestial version of Summon Steed, in 5e. But you can freely choose from Celestial, Fey, and Fiend versions, with no stat changes, just visual differences. So she summoned Freefell as the fiend version just to mess with people. She’s also a fan of looming formidably over NPCs before using Lay On Hands just to watch the cycle of expressions they go through before they realize they’ve been cured. Nobody said Good can’t have some harmless fun.
Yeah I run into this issue all the time. I’d like to have mounts, but past like level 2 it’s just not feasible to even consider building a character around them unless you’ve got Find Greater Steed or something going on since just regular AoE will take them out incidentally.
If I ever wanted PCs to have mounts in a game I’d probably give them some magic item that made the mounts gain like 6 hp per the character’s level or something like that AND lets them be re-summoned like a familiar. Also it would probably have to buff saves to prevent them constantly auto-failing everything.
Makes me wonder what systems out there are able to do “flesh and blood horse companion” without running into this problem.
Probably any PbtA thing where “harm the horse” would be a deliberate choice on the part of the GM or player. Or other systems that might handle it in similar ways.
That’s why every player knight in Pendragon has several horses, and a horseherd at home. Also: because HPs in KAP are not super high (most horses have more HP than most PCs), this is less of a problem. However, if some dishonourable knave is targeting the horse, those horses are big and strong (and even have some natural armour on account of thick pelt, and some dex) but they are also “brittle”. This means that, when they are hit, and take a wound, their CON stat is usually low, so they have trouble recuperating from those wounds. So, eventually, knights start putting barding (horse armour) on them, to enhance their survivability. Which is a tradeoff between having a swift and nimble horse, or a strong and armoured one.
I feel like Pendragon puts a bit more thought into this element than D&D. Dungeon delvers tend to want their one badass horse that stays with them as a companion from 1-20, but maybe that expectation is the real problem.
And in RQG (RuneQuest in Glorantha) there is the infamous Black Horse Troop, with its black horses, that are demon steeds from Hell, eat human flesh, and have cat’s claws. They also choose their rider, and are usually bigger, stronger, more intelligent, and meaner than the people that ride them. If you fight them, you really are gunning for the mounts, as those are more dangerous than their riders
Oh man… How do you impress one of those horses? They sound like they’re worth the effort to partner up with.
Questions like these are really starting to make me think that if you want a truly satisfying, internally consistent and mechanically balanced experience with mounts, it really needs to be built into the system at a fundamental level.
Which is to say, the game needs to be designed with the understanding that everybody will be mounted on something, because balancing characters with mounts and characters without mounts is really hard and somebody always ends up unhappy. There’s the basic problem of “one player gets to have two miniatures on the battle mat”, which results in balance issues such as the Pathfinder 1E Summoner on one end and the D&D 5E Beast Master on the other end. Then there’s the issue of how much mobility said mounts grant (where having a riding horse in D&D 5E is like having Cunning Action and a 60′ walking speed, and enemy goblins become literal speed bumps). And then there’s the issue discussed in this comic, about the survivability of the mount, and thus how powerful it’s allowed to be, again leading to the problem of one player controlling two powerful creatures.
You know what does handle this problem nicely, though? Actual wargames. Warhammer Fantasy treats a soldier and their mount as a single creature with a faster movement rate, and an improved armour save to represent that sometimes attacks will hit the mount and just not do anything, more so if the mount has barding. That’s a wargame, not a roleplaying game, but it’s food for thought for how to make this work consistently.
Wargames are more satisfying mechanically for sure. But the problem is that you lose out on the feel of having a companion when your steed is just an extension of your own stats. I’m not sure how to make that work in an RPG context.
The trick is to have someone cast Awaken on your mount of choice, then convince your now-sapient mount to take class levels.
That’s how you wind up losing your horse to a rewarding career in forensic accounting.
I have a couple of characters with either animals or companions. I only played one in an actual game so far – Irlana and Mick. I bought Mick armor and upgraded it to protect him. I also bought him a Belt of Con to up his HP.
Sounds like you really focused on making Mick hearty enough to survive combat. Most baseline fighters who want to do the knight thing don’t have that option.
Seems silly not to give your battle buddy some armor to protect it. I’m about to play a kitsune warpriest hunter with a fox companion. (Actually a cat since foxes can only be a familiar in Pathfinder, but I call it a fox for the theme.) I plan to buy it armor as soon as it gets the growth to Medium at level 4.
That’s a fair cop. I occurs to me to wonder if part of this problem isn’t just gamers expecting their mount to survive without the proper care and maintenance.
Probably. I started to play my warpriest hunter a few days ago. I just bought the fox an Agile Amulet of Mighty Fists. (We started at level 3 so I had a bit of spare gold.) Since my fox is mechanically a small cat, it has 21 Dex. It’s going to be a nice little melee terror. (Although I’ll need to buy a Belt since the Dex will drop to 19 when it get bigger.)
I’ll be rooting for its survival.
My goto transportation method is to get Phantom Steed as soon as possible. (along with Unseen Servant for driving, if I don’t have another party member to cover that) From there the only difficult part is getting either a folding cart variant of a folding boat, a summon-able cart, or a portable hole with a cart compact enough to fit inside it.
The only method I’ve used so far is to develop a spell designed to allow items to be turned into patches for adding to a robe of useful items, but it worked surprisingly well. 20 minutes for the first 2 steeds to be summoned, drop a patch, head on out. Cycle out steeds as the cart is moving, then once you arrive, either leave the cart, or if you might take a while, do the spell to turn the carriage back into a patch again.
It’s weird to me that we have to do all these workarounds to have a mount. I wonder if “lucky horse” or “smart enough to survive being tied up outside the dungeon” is a subsystem that needs to exist.
By 6th level my Warlock’s familiar was named Owl X. Nuff said.
Life expectancy is crazy low for familiars. Poor things.
I just ride a winged Tyrant lizard, it survives just about everything, to my ST’s eternal regret.