Setting Up the Charge
With a killer character design in our back pocket, we knew that our next hero would be an oread named Cavalier. The only problem was that we had no idea what her mount should be. Happily, the good people of Handbook-World had our back, and they were kind enough to make their wishes known in our latest Patreon Poll. Thus, I hope you will all join us in welcoming Brick the giant snapping turtle to the comic (better luck next time Axe Beak, Dire Bat, and Tiger).
Let’s not give all the love to the animal companion though, because he’s really only half the equation. When it comes to the cavaliers, mounted paladins, and equestrian fighters of 3.X, it’s all about that sweet, sweet charge. Anyone that’s ever done the simple math of lance + spirited charge = Eomer face knows just how amazing it can feel. The business end of a lance is the tactical nuke of the battlefield, resulting in chunky salsa whenever it strikes home. Of course, as our own Cavalier is discovering today, setting up the charge can be a bit of a headache.
So just to review and makes sure we’re all on the same page: If you want to perform a mounted charge, you must first get Mount A into Dungeon B. We all know how difficulty that can be. Next you’ve got to move at least 10 feet. You have to go directly towards the opponent. There can’t be any obstacles in your path: no difficult terrain, low walls, open pits, or poorly-positioned allies. You must then check for caltrops. Make sure your enemies haven’t readied any actions to disrupt you. Cross-reference the Geneva Convention. Ask your mount if it has mixed feelings about charging a barghest on a day that ends in “y.” Enter an existential crisis as a free action, consider changing your name from Cavalier to Champion, rediscover purpose in the midst of your internal struggle, and then settle on the exact wording of your anime battle cry.
It’s honestly a wonder that any charge ever happens. If it actually comes together though? Oh baby is it ever worth it.
So for today’s discussion question, what do you say we talk about those glorious moments when the warhorn sounds, the thunder of hooves rises, and the perfect charge actually comes together? Today, it’s a chance to share war stories that would make Theoden King proud. Tell us all about your best frontal assaults, valiant advances, and daring leaps to the fore down in the comments!
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opportunity to Mounted Charge is right next to Tarrasque.
I know it’s in the books, but I have never seen one in game.
Huh. It occurs to me that my players at getting to be pretty high level….
The only charge I have witnessed a mounted charge in a tabletop game between 1989 and now was done by the GM directly into my prepared flashbang in Rifts. They were using powered armor and nightvision, and we were in a dark cave. Hilarity ensued.
You know why it happened? Because Palladium ‘just lets you do things that make sense.’ Do you have a path you could conceivably charge your target on? GREAT! I have plenty of critiques of Palladium’s system, but the more free and loose play with the rules lets you actually play your character. You just require a stronger GM at the wheel.
“Just do it.”
— Palladium
Summon Monster VII + worshiping Gorum + Evolved Summoned Monster feat + Mount evolution = riding to battle on top of a Behir. If you don’t like the religious requirement you can always go with an elephant-sized, demon-eating spider. Chained Summoner is so OP even his feats are broken.
Also, it would seem that we’re only missing the Air Genasi/Sylph and we’re going to have a full elemental set! Unless you count the Suli. But come on, noone likes the Suli.
The best part about riding a behir is that “Low Rider” starts playing automatically every time you mount up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mFxUIH5IaE
Todays comic is sponsored by Highbury!
As far as chargers go, our current Mummy’s Mask Samurai is a polearm user who grabbed Spring Attack. She doesn’t charge so much as jump and leap through combat like Xena (and doing devestating x3 crits when she rolls high), along with feinting to make them flatfooted in the process.
For Highbury!
Valorous ways to enter combat? How about shooting a gun?
My gunslinger did this twice so far in Mummy’s Mask, being a arrogant and overconfident Kobold who quickly recognized when his team’s efforts to avoid bloodshed are about to fail. Minor spoilers below.
The first time he did it when a bunch of bad guy cultists threatened us for the upteenth time. His shot managed to crit their leader and almost kill him.
The second time was when faced with a dragon who demanded our valuables for intruding into their lair (by accident). The Kobold didn’t crit this time, but he still took advantage of the surprise shot, as his archetype of Thronewarden lets him turn surprise rounds into full rounds for himself, and later, his party. This one was more notable for the sheer gall of his assault, as he’s got a fixation on dragons.
Cultists are like that. Though we don’t usually wait for them to threaten us… if we hear occult chanting, the problem tends to be solved with a hail of gunfire from the shadows. Because we all know what happens if you let the chanting continue…
Chanting is the magical girl transformation of cultists:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/waiting-your-turn
Exactly, but with more tentacles, and nobody wants that.
Well, unless your taste in magical girl transformations runs that way, I suppose.
Kobold gunslinger? Sounds like a good partner for a certain halfling I know….
That would work indeed! Halflings make excellent slaves for Kobolds.
Mount? What mount?
There is an alternative to the Paladin mount in the Player’s Handbook 2 of D&D 3.5, the Charging Smite.
Instead of getting a charger, you get to charge on foot, all by yourself. With a Smite Evil added to the mix The Smite comes from your daily allotment. Although, if you miss your charge, the Smite is not wasted.
The effect of the Smite is tripled (+2 damage per Pal level, on top of the usual Smite effect). My Paladin is known for occasionally defeating big nasty critters in a single-stroke duel.
Huh. I thought you had to be a centaur to solo-mounted charge. Neat!
About the only good non-flavour use of the Beastmaster Ranger archetype in D&D 5E is to abuse the mounted combat rules as a Small character without relying on the GM actually selling you a vaguely cool mount. Game collapsed before I ever got to try it, but I made up a Halfling as an eagle-riding airborne cavalryman with a lance and sling with aims to take the Mounted Combatant feat at level 4 in order to tank for the sadly CR1/4 bird.
I so badly wanted to make at least one flyby charge with that lance, diving from out of the light of the rising sun to smite a goblin patrolman clean off the back of his wolf and escaping back into the sky before his comrades could even turn to stare, but alas, DM schedule conflicts are the one enemy no lance can smite.
The gnomish knight in my own game has a riding gecko. “Straight towards” the enemy is a lot easier when you can charge a spiral path down a hallway!
Well, as I play Pendragon, charges by player characters, them all being knights on warhorses with lances, are a dime a dozen. Even spectular ones. So I’ll give you a diferent one. I was the GM, and this group was traveling through the wilderness, and came across a wyvern. One of the group was this pictish warrior, who was a great hunter, and who was kind of a knight, but not quit yet. And he was on foot. Mostly the character was played as a barbarian, with poor impulse control. So the pict sees this wyvern, and starts charging in its general direction, on foot. All the others knights are first stunned, and then realise that charing a wyvern, on foot, with just a (great)spear is not the most intelligent option, they decide to aid their travelling companion. So theyu charge the wyvern, and, charging horsed being faster than people on foot, thunder past the pict. And then get soundly beaten, and almost killed, by the wyvern! Which prompts the pict to come to his senses, and decide to look for cover, until the wyvern flies away. And then he calmly walks to the wounded knights, fixes them up with first aid, all the wile berating them for their stupidity in charging this dangerous and deadly beast. Stunned silence at the gaming table.
I’m guessing “the dungeon” is less of a thing in Pendragon than “the countryside.” That kind of campaign style seems necessary when you’re trying to set up cool moments on horseback.
Also of note, having played a headstrong Pict once upon a time myself, my heart swells with pride at the clever use of “tactics.”
I ran a Warhammer game once where the villain set up a dramatic ‘welcoming committee’ for the PCs – right as the mansion doors opened, they could see him seated at the head of a long feasting table, with a big squad of henchmen seated on either side.
The Bretonnian knight in the party charged him on his horse across the table. 🙂
YES!!!
The difficulty in lining up a mounted charge is a large part of what have made halflings the premier mounted combatants at my tables.
Being small and thus capable of riding on a medium mount really count for a lot. Suddenly your needed charge lines become a lot smaller (less than half even when you aren’t charging in one of the four cardinal directions due to how that works on a grid), so it all ends up as easy as it is for a typical infantry fighter/barbarian to get their own charges off. They will not have to be denied merely because some ally stepped forward to make their own attack and now fill a space.
At the same time it is as easy to get your dog/wolf/dinosaur-if-you-are-in-Eberron mount into the dungeon as it is for the druid to get their dog/wolf/dinosaur animal companion with them. (which is to say sometimes it might be a slight hassle but mostly you can depend on being able to do it).
All this and more for the low, low price of -2 str, which is more than compensated for by the power of the charge.
Like I said a little further up the thread, the gnomish knight in my own game has a riding gecko. “Straight towards” the enemy is a lot easier when you can charge a spiral path down a hallway!
That does sound cool, but I think it’d run afoul of the spirit of “directly towards” and the implication of needing to go to the very closest square you can attack from. (It’d also go against the RAW of no line from your starting square towards the ending square passing through a square with an obstacle/ally/difficult terrain, but that’d be silly to go with if that’s not the route taken.)
Still rule of cool can easily justify overruling the RAI/RAW for the right group.
My thinking is that a gecko could charge from floor to ceiling to get at a giant spider. Why not just extend that logic a bit?
Know thy campaign. You can get more mounted charges in an outdoors setting (which makes it easier to circle around enemies/the entire melee) than in any dungeon.
Which hasn’t stopped players from being inventive to make cavaliers work. My personal favorite example being a time a player convinced me to let a construct they were inside of counted as a mount. (Buying the construct and the Construct Armor upgrade cost basically all their starting cash, so it seemed fair. And the character didn’t exactly last long…)
Yo… What level did you start at? Isn’t construct armor crazy expensive?
Oh, right, ways to enter combat. My group tends not to prefer rushing into combat, so I don’t have many of that kind of story. (There’s one time the idiot character tried to talk his way into the enemy fortress, because his player went for a Springtime-for-Hitler gambit so we wouldn’t waste an hour figuring out how to infiltrate the place…but he succeeded, so we spent an hour figuring out how the rest of us should infiltrate.)
We’ve been playing Shadowrun lately (all our D&D and Pathfinder games are on hiatus for health reasons), and last session we had an excellent way to enter battle:
1. My magician (who can sustain a good number of spells) cast invisibility on himself, the street samurai, and the mystic adept before turning into a rat (or other small animal, I never really decided).
2. The mystic adept levitated himself and the street samurai, with rat-me on his shoulder (so I didn’t break line of sight).
3. Once we got over the target building, the street samurai broke out his new chemical weaponry, incapacitating the roof guard before he could react.
4. While the mystic adept left to fetch the rest of the party (and also my clothes—they don’t get transformed), the street samurai poured the last dregs of a whisky bottle down the guard’s throat and on his face before chucking it into a corner on the roof.
5. Once everyone is present and clothed, we went into the roof entrance.
The facility had astral bacteria in the walls, cameras that the NPC decker hacked before we got in, and basically nothing else for defenses. Okay, a couple of guards, but that’s it.
Levitation and invisibility are potent if the enemy isn’t prepared.
lol. Friggin’ Shadowrun. There’s no better feeling than when you flawlessly execute your plan. In my experience, there’s also no moment less likely to happen.
I’m guessing you guys set off alarms like two seconds later.
So we had a good ole 3.5 knight and his trusty heavy warhorse, dubbed Amazing. Yes, look at his horse. His horse is Amazing. . . Anyways, he indeed did not get many chances to charge with it. He also had a propensity for either rolling a 19 or a 1 with his lance. If he was on horse back I would usually just have him fall off on a fumble. One time, however, I had a full on dragon skeleton and a few other skeletal minions land in front of them courtesy of a local angry necromancer.
I see a fire light in the knight’s eyes. “So do I have a clear path to the dragon?”
“Yeah?”
“Cool. Taking a -6 on my power attack spirited charge ride-by-attack.” Rolls, hits, and nukes well over half its total health. It gets one attack in before the knight rinses and repeats.
The necro never once fought in an open area again.
Your meme is old. And so am I. Therefore, bravo says I!
But for real, when you put all your eggs into that one-big-attack basket, the importance of that one big die roll is magnified like whoa. One-shotting the boss or completely whiffing comes with the territory, and it’s memorable no matter which way it goes.
I have no good Calvary stories, only bad ones. I’ll talk about it anyway.
I frequent this one freeform roleplaying forum/wiki, so I once tried to run pseudo-D&D there because nobody there played real D&D. I wrote up a brief wilderness adventure against a united monster race force, the Pact of Seven.
So the local elven wilderness rangers were all calvary. We got some riding horses for the party, too. Eventually, they were traveling by night and arrived at a large valley. I had prepared a phalanx of hobgoblins to ambush them, but I had purposely made them a bit stronger than the combined party, it was meant as a show of strength for the new Pact of Seven militia.
The Calvary rushed against the phalanx, and almost all immediately got speared to death. The party was all casters because the site mostly consisted of anime freaks, so they started trying to chuck fireballs and lightning.
But I had prepared for casters! I had some alchemist hobgoblins with throwing feats that chucked a ton of tanglefoot bags and thunder stones at the casters. I rolled privately and told them the results.
The casters all eventually got stuck and the meatbags started jumping off their horses because it was simply more efficient to try other methods. I repeatedly suggested that maybe the party retreat, but they just ignored me and carried on. So… that’s why I don’t do freeform D&D anymore. Apparently without numbers showing up people automatically assume they have to win every encounter.
By the way, what happened to the Hypertellurians partnership?
Believe me, I know the feeling: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/boss-monster
We had one last hurrah over on the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy and then parted ways amicably. Perhaps we shall meet again one day. 🙂
My Paladin’s go-to in mounted combat was to have his horse charge in, and then he’d immediately hop off the horse and have it run back. Warhorses only have 19~ HP if I recall, and resummoning him was a pain. The horse would then do things like ride over to non-combatants and taxi them out. This horse was however good enough at dressage (Horse ballet. It’s an olympic sport. Yes, really) to win a dance-off in the fey courts.
When I play non-Paladins I avoid mounts. I’ll just buy a cart rather than a horse and relax in there. My Goblin Kensei (Think Boros Samurai Jack, with also a bit of Jack Kirby thrown in) would just sit in the back of the cart napping/smoking.
I’ve played a Cavalier Fighter in a couple of one-shots. 5E’s cavalier has very little to do with actually being mounted though, other than one ribbon-feature, and one charging feature that works unmounted too. X Machina has never ridden a horse.
The fragility of mounts really ought to be a comic. Last time Laurel tried to take a mounted fighter into high-level combat, we had to bend over backwards finding ways to help it survive even basic AoE attacks.
Snowflake is gonna get poof’d isn’t she? Poor Snowflake.
One solution I’ve run across is to give special mounts Sidekick levels to boost their survivability. The other is to make steeds from Find Steed have hit-dice equal to your Paladin level. Xanathar’s fixed it a little with Find Greater Steed. A Pegasus-tier steed has 60~ HP.
The problem is that 5E has bounded accuracy, but damage continues to scale upward. In terms of designing encounter it just means more Kobolds which are still able to hit. This doesn’t work as well when it comes to things like players getting mounts.
This is why getting a Medium mount with a Small cavalier is key to success.
If it mechanically makes sense, it must make sense in world. Which is why the Corgi Riders of the halfling lands are the most feared warriors in the world.
I always liked corgi mounts for the IRL lore reasons: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87683/ancient-connection-between-corgis-and-fairies
Mounts have to be one size larger than you. Mastiffs are medium, but Corgis are small. You’d need “Dire corgis” sometimes called “Wargis”
It wouldn’t make Theoden proud or jealous to watch, but my mid-life crisis Cavalier was a thing of beauty.
After having an empty nest, he left home to make a fortune and a name for himself. Once mounted, he bought paints to draw flames on its flanks. He mounted his banner on the back of the saddle and mounted it so that when he charged it would ripple in the wind and make noise. He also got a gem-studded saddle so it would like shinier.
The character really wanted to seem young and cool. He retired from the campaign (RiseOTR) because he was the only frontliner, which resulted in him dropping to 0 or lower enough times for him to feel his mortality. It was an in-character reason to leave, which worked well enough in the end.
But for a couple fights, he was the most badass-looking charger on that side of Golarion.
Low-level Pathfinder is enough to make any frontliner feeling mortal. Our poor paladin was practically a bop back clown at level 1.
The last time I played a mount-based character, I realized that using the party shapeshifter actually solved alot of my issues. It also allowed me to give the shapeshifted player some sweet bonuses while mounted. Ofcourse, there are some drawbacks to using another player character as your mount, namely, there is no way of describing your actions in a way that isn’t a double entendre.
Of course, using the part shapeshifter brings its own HR issues: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/beast-of-burden
In one game an army of sentient communist underwear try to charge at us mounting the White House. We switch teleport with Uncle Sam, so that he got the hit while that give us time to reach the Bill of Rights and destroy it. That allowed Benedict Arnold time to summon the Union Jack Sun and use its light to destroy Uncle Sam and return the Colonies back to the British Empire. A good try from the DM but as the Simpsons say: “You try your best and failed miserably. The lesson here? Never try”. That is why we don’t use charge at all. Too much setup, too much execution, too little reward. More or less, try to charge and you will end up like this: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/claiming-the-throne-part-4-5-spotlight-moments 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P7muwuQeZk
Our game has a lot more military surface-action than most, I suspect, so the opportunity for a mounted charge has been around a lot more. We had a good charge of two units of very elite cavalry into each other last game, but that has – oddly – been the only one with PCs really involved. The other time a cavalry-based character could have led one, he retreated instead and spent a week freezing his troops to death crossing an ice sheet before being bombed on the land.
Still, as the campaign draws to its end I’m sure the time will come.
Shoulda charged, bro. smh
This charge ideal is where my love of flight first started at.
I had a raptoran fighter, simple thing, make a charger to strike from the heavens. And Raptorans get some unique feats racially and class wise. (The book of the wild was such a splatbook treat)
Oh my, he was a beauty, flying in perfect flight. Just a simple spear, full plate, and every hit would trip the save from death. Could almost match a dragon for speed, and perfect flight meant that I could precision strike anywhere on the battlefield with the spear, and then use my fly check to dodge the aoo.
I didnt get to play with him long sadly. But oh my was he a dream of mounted destruction without the mount issue.
Alaric used most of his time and aerial prowess dodging the paladins mount from huggy time. And the paladin too. Snuggles was not a one you wanted hugging you if you wanted to live.
lol
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/4/4c/Raptoran.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/350?cb=20161014035438
In my first-ever Pathfinder party, there was a Samurai, Hoshi, who had a mount. She never used it though, since it was killed when she was taken prisoner by the goblins (which was how she and the other new PCs were introduced to the regular party). The goblins had been keeping her around, since once a week a new horse would come wandering in to be her new mount, and the goblins would kill it (which they thought was great fun). After her rescue, she remained horseless as we explored the rest of the goblin’s fortress, but still functioned alright with her halberd. By the end of that, though, her player had gotten bored, and as soon as the party left the fortress, a horse appeared, Hoshi jumped on it and rode off into the sunset, never to be seen again. That player’s replacement character, Señor Bastonne the dwarf luchador who thinks he is an eagle, was a lot wackier than the serious, somewhat bland Hoshi, and he enjoyed playing him a lot more.
…Though that player eventually tired of Bastonne and the comical number of ways “grapple foe, then rip head off” could go wrong and subbed in Commander Eidelon (no relation to Summoners), halfling Cavalier/Paladin and his wolf Patsy. Eidelon was intentionally played as Lawful Stupid (“the only fun way to play a Paladin” in that player’s opinion), but that mostly meant he shouted about evildoers a lot. We actually ended up with pretty good teamwork for charges – since the lance had reach, in hallways we could have two regular melee fighters next to the enemy and have Eidelon charge and strike over our heads. Then, on his next turn, he’d make a regular attack with his reach and then move away, so he could charge again on the third turn. He also had the feat Radiant Charge, which meant that once a day he could do a pretty substantial amount of damage in one strike (usually about 75 damage at Level 8 or so). In the greatest battle of that campaign (and probably my Pathfinder career), he almost dropped the spellcasting boss before she got to do anything with a readied Radiant Charge, but a goon stepped in to block it, and another player’s attempt to kill that goon so the charge could go off before the spellcaster could cast was foiled by a nat 2 (a 3 would have succeeded). Eidelon did finish off the other (greatly weakened) boss of that fight with Radiant Charge, after which Eidelon immediately fell into one of the many Create Pit pits we tended to leave all over the place.
Not exactly charging, but that party also had a Spring Attack-er, Ranalf the speedster, whose ludicrous movement speed meant that he could dash in, strike a foe and dash out, making him effectively a ranged unit. All in all, the party had quite an effective composition for the two-square-wide hallways they spent most of the fights in – my tank Magus and the heavy armor Barbarian/Brawler were in front, blocking things, Eidelon and Ranalf would dash in and out for additional attacks over/through the blocking line, and the musket sniper and Sorcerer would toss attacks from a distance. So the right Cavalier with the right party can really be quite effective in a dungeon.
Or you could just follow the advice of Sal the Druid and Deeno the Amargasaurus and invest in the Trample special ability. No worries about setting up charge lines when you can run through creatures!
“I ready an action to fuck up your charge” is among the best uses for low-level mooks. And the most frustrating for a PC.
Brick looks a bit more like a tortoise than a turtle to me, but presumably Cavalier knows what she’s talking about.
I can totally understand the appeal of having a turtle mount, though. You can charge things very slowly on water! That kraken’s not going to know what hit it!
Hmm. Now that I look at Brick some more, that shell does look pretty streamlined. Maybe testudine feet just don’t translate super well to the Handbook art style.
In any case, I’m sure his charge is suitably fearsome. Once he gets around to it.
Just casually dropping a testudine in conversation like it ain’t no thang.
Irlana used Mick as her mount as soon as they reached level 4 and he became Medium size. We never charged, but that’s because we didn’t need to. Full attacks were far more useful to get off the endless AoOs.
But the blare of trumpets! The glory! The cool slow-mo shots!
I’ve been listening to the Glass Cannon Podcast’s playthrough of Giantslayer and it’s given me the impression that a cavalier is an incredibly situational class that needs a LOT of set up for any amount of payoff. All of what you’ve said is true and unless the cavalier is in the right position at the right time to be able to get a charge off, they’re like an inferior fighter. Sure, when they get the charge off and get that massive hit in, it’s absolutely amazing. But in the mean time, every other martial class has been doing as much or more damage without needing to get set up.
Yeah… Joe has a weird habit of playing and building characters sub-optimally, making the class appear even worse than it is.
But by the same token, you’re absolutely right that narrow charge lanes are an issue, compounded by difficult terrain, enemy ambushes, and low initiative roles on the PC side. I suspect that folks who don’t see this problem tend toward open-world play rather than dungeon-based play.
That is painfully true. Then it’s compounded by some of his baffling choices in combat and that their main spellcaster as of just before the break rarely applies Greater Invisibility to his already ineffective chained rogue when that would make his character drastically more effective.
It kind of makes me wonder how far a group should go to accommodate a PC that is so below par that it needs to be carried by the rest of the group.
The only time I’ve ever had a mount is when I’ve grabbed Find Steed as a Lore Bard. Usually this has been to the effect of BENDING the rules and getting a flying mount to stay way the heck out of enemy fire (Giant Owls are remarkably low CR)
Who needs a charge when you can just go “neener neener” while providing tactical support to the rest of the party?
Now for charging, that I’ve always done as a Dinobarian (Bearbearian build but with dino shapes) Deinonychus are already pretty terrifying (Jurassic Park’s inaccurately large Velociraptors) but when you give them Reckless Attacks, they are a paleontological blender come to life.
They have 40ft of movement, so setting up that 20ft pounce is always feasible, and if you hit with a claw attack(hard to miss while reckless) after a pounce, they can be knocked prone. If prone, the deinonychus gets an ADDITIONAL bonus action to bite, for a total of 4 reckless attacks.
The charge rules in Pathfinder as SO ONEROUS.
I long ago house ruled to allow charging to be possible as long as the character could get a straight line for the last part of their move before hitting the target. A 2 footed character needs at least 10 feet at the end of the move; a 4 (or more) legged character needs at least 20 feet. (This is because 4 legged critters need longer to get their legs coordinated. It’s true; joojel it.)
I’m also happy for low barriers (including rough terrain) to be hurdled without having any effect on the charge. An Acrobatics or Ride check is needed but usually this would be so low a DC that the character will likely succeed on a 1 or higher.
Oh! and I have a vague recollection that charging along diagonals is not allowed (at least in DnD 3.X.) Clearly something that stupid is ignored.
Despite this there’s still a dearth of good charging stories in my games. But I can relay one that a friend of mine did. I wasn’t there so please forgive some of the vagueness that follows.
This was near the end of DnD 3.5, in a Living Greyhawk campaign. IIRC there was a big, Greyhawk wide meta-game event, played at cons, to say farewell to Living Greyhawk. The mission – take out Iuz, the setting’s BBEG.
My friend was playing a mounted charging paladin. He was about 12th level or a little higher. The adventure was Epic (level 20+). The other players indulged my friend playing a “mere 12th level character” but basically told him to stay out of the way.
There they were in the final fight; fighting some Cthulu-esque thing that was Iuz’s true avatar. All the ducks have lined up for the paladin. The straight line. All the feats. Smiting. He even had an Epic lance from somewhere so he could by-pass the epic DR. After 12 levels of almost never getting to charge, Chargey McSmitesalot finally gets to do it. And against effing Iuz!
He rolls a crit. Does ridiculous amounts of damage. Takes Iuz from nearly full HP to down and out.
Cue flabbergasted looks from the entire table. Not the least because the rest of the players had been being patronising a-holes for 3 days of convention play. Next cue the bitching. The other players hated having their thunder stolen. “How can this be allowed? It’s only a 12th level character! Blah, blah, blah.” Seriously. So what does the GM do? Rules that, because the character isn’t 20+ level that the damage is halved. In case anyone is wondering – this is not a rule. Not for the adventure. Not for Living Greyhawk. Not for Dnd 3.5. It’s just the DM being a knob.
More than a decade later and my mate can still get angry about that.
(Wow. This post got a lot longer than I intended. )
Cheers.