In Runequest a lance attack uses the horses damage adjustment due to STR+SIZ. If you mount a pole arm against a charging horse that same horses adjustment applies to the horse or rider. I always thought this was sensible.

D6 system does everything differently, moves, actions, attacks, etc, from what you may be used to but I find mounted combat seems to work fine there. There is a blurb in the D6 fantasy monster book on horse entry about adding the mounts strength damage dice to the players on a mounted attack but this is not found, by me at least, in the core rules...still, i've always sort of done that as a house rule anyway.

Part of the reason mounted works in D6 is the turn resolution structure; you will never take your second action before everyone else takes their first for example, unlike dnd where your turn happens in full on your turn. In dnd you move and cast a spell on your turn, in D6 you move OR cast as first action, everyone else gets their first action, then you take the second. Thus a man may be unhorsed in the attempt far easier than in dnd.

The Mounted Combat rules I adapted for my take on classic D&D.

Mounted Combat
Mounted Combat is an important aspect of fighting outside the dungeon. A mounted warrior has greatly enhanced mobility, speed, and strength compared to the foot soldier. As the centuries roll on techniques will be developed by massed troops to effectively counter the mounted warrior but in the interim, the fighting man on the horse is the lord of the battlefield.


When fighting from horseback the following rules are in effect.
•   When the mounted fighting man moves more than ½ move towards his target he is considered charging.
•   Automatically wins initiative if charging. If charging mounted fighting men are present on both sides initiative is diced first among those charging followed by everyone else.
•   Gains a advantaged attack roll to hit any target on foot
•   Any target on foot is disadvantaged on his attack roll to hit the horseman.
•   If charging the mounted fighting man gets to +2 to his damage on a successful hit on any weapon.
•   If the weapon is a lance and the wielder attacks while charging he has the option of doubling the lance's damage to 4d4+2. When this option is used the lance has to make a saving throw of 15 or better or it be shattered. Knights will do 8d4+2 damage.
•   On a charge, the rider may opt to do a knockdown. The horse will slam into the target instead of a rider's weapon attack. If successful the target is knocked prone and must make a advantaged roll for his saving throw versus paralyzation or be knocked unconscious. Damage is 1d10.

The horse can attack separately from the mounted fighting man.
•   The horse may not attack if charging. Note the charging knockdown attack is an exception.
•   The horse can only attack a target on foot.
•   If a person on foot attacks the horse on the rider's shield side then the horse gains the rider's shield bonus.
•   If you track rations a horse requires rations equal to that of an individual character. The referee may rule that if the party is in a fertile region with grass then horse requires only half of the rations an individual needs.

If I ever play traditional D&D, then it will probably be the game called Basic Fantasy. 

I bring that up here because there is a 5-page combat supplement/options PDF.  It includes mounted combat and jousting.

Quote from: Opaopajr on April 29, 2022, 07:46:22 AM
I ran a campaign that focused on the grassy steppes of the Moonsea (literally called the Sea of Grass). It was kinda eye-opening running mounted combat rules (both ranged and melee) from the DMG and CH:F. It was easier than I expected and harder to convey the immediate advantage to new players.

I mean, you can move 1/2 and shoot but at a far larger distance! And you can strafe without engaging! But because AD&D is based on whiffing as a defense there was enough early negative feedback in their missed shots that my players shut down early. So we did not get to see as much due to timidity and frustration.

As for hard bank turns, well that's where Sprinting Optional Rules helped. Just get creative with Dex, Str, and Con checks. Perfect? No. Sufficient? Yes. Hard. Nah. (Was it used much? No, bad to-hit dice rolls and negative modifiers really clammed up player experimentation -- a pity.)

The advantage of determining engagement range (always staying away from slower on-foot opponents) was overwhelming. It was more a matter of whether the dice would let the players hit and end the experience quickly or not. Outside of the rare lucky ranged weapon against a mounted strafe (and as GM I could figure out the system mechanics how to "delay/ready" an action against a mount approaching. but there was no guarantee that the far moving mount would choose to engage close enough those rounds) there was no real threat against my PCs.

Behind the scenes mechanical knowledge, with a few non-player observers also noticing the same, it was a resounding advantage -- and a surprisingly fast implementation of rules. With more experienced players it really ups the party threat level, if they can coordinate. I would gladly use it again, a lot cleaner in practice than one would think upon a first read. At this point I am tempted to toy with the jousting rules, too.

I never got around to running a Horde campaign in Ta'an, or a camel-based one for Calimshan, Ta'an, Mulhorand, or Anauroch. On my to-do list.

This sounds like what I would like to do.  Did you use a mat, and if so was there any trouble with going off the edge, and what did you do?

Also, were you able to make adjustments to make encounters a reasonable challenge when the party was mounted and the enemies weren't?  If so, how?

Quote from: Ruprecht on May 01, 2022, 11:38:02 AM
... * Rider uses the worst between weapon and ride skill for all ride/attack rolls ...

That's exactly what I'm doing.  How well did it work?  On the face of it, it seems to be both intuitive and elegant.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 29, 2022, 10:19:17 AM
Hobbit is a novel, while most dungeons are big in games. If the Hobbit were put into a game, a lot of that travel would be quickly resolved and the time would focus on the encounters (often combats) instead. While not always indoors/underground, encounters usually have a limited area involved, and nothing limits that area easier than a dungeon.

I'm actually trying really hard to get away from the "skip travel and go straight to the encounter" paradigm.  The trick, I think, is to provide mechanics that are fun and engaging for the travel part of the story.  So far I have navigation/getting lost, foraging/survival, and environmental effects. 

Quote from: Effete on May 01, 2022, 07:35:56 PM
As far as using mounts on a tabletop, I've gotten to the point where I don't care so much about verisimilitude or "realism" as much as I care about narrative cohesion. Does it really matter if a mounted unit turns on a dime or needs to move X hexes beforehand? Nope! At least not to me. I'm perfectly capable of abstracting movement in these cases, or applying a penalty to the attack roll if the maneuver sounds a little too daring. Maybe I'm just getting lazier in my old age, but I'd rather slim down the number of specialty rules I need to remember. I just want to have fun, not solve a calculus problem.

Do what's fun for your group of course, but that approach is not going to work for me.  The idea of a horse galloping while zigzagging like a bunny is weird enough to take my head right out of the game.  Constraints also requires players to make hard choices, adding tactical depth.  As always, the rules should be a simple as possible to produce the desired effect, but no simpler.

Quote from: estar on May 02, 2022, 08:31:23 AM
The Mounted Combat rules I adapted for my take on classic D&D.

Mounted Combat
Mounted Combat is an important aspect of fighting outside the dungeon. A mounted warrior has greatly enhanced mobility, speed, and strength compared to the foot soldier. As the centuries roll on techniques will be developed by massed troops to effectively counter the mounted warrior but in the interim, the fighting man on the horse is the lord of the battlefield.


When fighting from horseback the following rules are in effect.
•   When the mounted fighting man moves more than ½ move towards his target he is considered charging.
•   Automatically wins initiative if charging. If charging mounted fighting men are present on both sides initiative is diced first among those charging followed by everyone else.
•   Gains a advantaged attack roll to hit any target on foot
•   Any target on foot is disadvantaged on his attack roll to hit the horseman.
•   If charging the mounted fighting man gets to +2 to his damage on a successful hit on any weapon.
•   If the weapon is a lance and the wielder attacks while charging he has the option of doubling the lance's damage to 4d4+2. When this option is used the lance has to make a saving throw of 15 or better or it be shattered. Knights will do 8d4+2 damage.
•   On a charge, the rider may opt to do a knockdown. The horse will slam into the target instead of a rider's weapon attack. If successful the target is knocked prone and must make a advantaged roll for his saving throw versus paralyzation or be knocked unconscious. Damage is 1d10.

The horse can attack separately from the mounted fighting man.
•   The horse may not attack if charging. Note the charging knockdown attack is an exception.
•   The horse can only attack a target on foot.
•   If a person on foot attacks the horse on the rider's shield side then the horse gains the rider's shield bonus.
•   If you track rations a horse requires rations equal to that of an individual character. The referee may rule that if the party is in a fertile region with grass then horse requires only half of the rations an individual needs.

Thanks, that highlighted some tweaking I need to do in my rules.  I didn't cover horse fodder, which is important because I do have detailed rules for foraging/survival.  And I think my charge rules need a bit of work.

Quote from: Mishihari on May 03, 2022, 05:48:03 AM
This sounds like what I would like to do.  Did you use a mat, and if so was there any trouble with going off the edge, and what did you do?

Also, were you able to make adjustments to make encounters a reasonable challenge when the party was mounted and the enemies weren't?  If so, how?

Good question! You know, this was one of the first times I was fleshing out my own version of that region's (The Grass Sea of the Moonsea) hex map. Pool of Radiance adventure has a map in 2 mile hexes with broad generalities mapped out of the northern shore. But all those hexes needed filling, which brought me (through someone else bringing it up on another forum) to the AD&D 1e DMG's method for filling those hexes. It's just a random table that readjusts from previous generated content, and you can adjust its table values to suit your expectations (I had to because I was getting too many sudden mountains and swamps in the grassy plain).

Anyway, looking at horse travel speeds and sprinting rules (basically how any moving animal can move from base to x5 sprint) 2 mile hexes is a surprisingly useful secondary scope to zoom-out when play moves off a more zoomed-in map. Pushing your horse hard for a long time raises the risk of it just having a heart attack and dying from shock, so it makes you vary your choices. Further, because I had to randomize the 2 mile hexes I would get a nice mix of other terrains (e.g. depressions, badlands, roughs, scrubland, light forests) between swaths of plains. There you can just randomize or scribble out something interesting on the playmat for the zoomed-in hex.

Suddenly things like going prone and hiding amid different types of vegetation, minor deviations in terrain, and seasonal stuff became lifesavers (clumps of taller grasses, hard to immediately see divots or gulches, winter snowbanks). Having been through Kansas and Nebraska, especially during Rest Area pee breaks, I know that there is still deviations and cover enough that you see close up that you miss looking over while traveling fast. Plains and flatland are not like salt flats.

As for encounters, yes and no. Really, mounted versus grounded is hard to beat without terrain chokepoints, defensive positions, or high volume formations. Squad v. squad it's just gonna be a mad chase to Go Prone, HIDE, and luckily get close to a rider to dismount them... or bring your own mounts, or find better terrain in your favor. But it is great for mounted v mounted chases! There's a desperation about coordinating and finding any advantage to exploit or be picked off and die. Interestingly attacking mounts becomes useful and almost a strategic game of playing the land's terrain against each other (how much to risk your horse? where to rest your horse? how much distance can you put between without stressing your horse to death?)

Anyway, this is another instance where I recommend trying out the old TSR rules as is with some optional rules to support any judgments you may need to do. It played different than I read, in a good way. It doesn't communicate it immediately by word, but in practice all these bits of DMG advice actually does work, and faster than I thought it would. And in a way that its system recedes faster from awareness, feeling more natural(?).

Basically I think if I had to do it again I would not tell players HOW the mechanics work so they can make choices, I would ask players WHAT are their choices and then resolve the mechanics. Info dumping all their options up front seemed to overwhelm and shut down some players. I think that might be a topic for another discussion: How modern gaming expects player proficiency and engagement with the mechanics, whereas this older gaming expects player engagement with the fictive world and expects GM proficiency with the mechanics.

Pendragon and Runequest had rules which cap combat skill to your ride ability which was an interesting dynamic.

Remembering that NPCs can always just hit the horse is a good way of balancing out the advantages of the size, speed strength and height advantages a mounted warrior has.

I think movement only really becomes an issue if the character in question is actually attempting to take advantage of a horses speed in an individual combat. In reality in a bounded space horses don't really move much faster than someone on foot. If a player tries to build up speed then it probably means they are leaving the battle mat to wheel around for another charge.

Horses are kind of an evolutionary fuckup anyways.

Lemme post something I saw a while back:

---

So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb.

They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.

But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well.  Here's the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides.  Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM.  So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses.

The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.

When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of... stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it's guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn't fall out of sync.  But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates.  It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it's size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.

When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it's structure reflects that.  But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia.  Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I'm not sure how that's related but I am sure that's another Hot Mess they have to deal with.

ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier.  So if a horse breaks it's leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it's also having a hemorrhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.

ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of their evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for their already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental.  Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if denied the opportunity to ZOOM, it's options left are "Kill everyone and Then Yourself" or "The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die".  The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it's gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.

TL;DR: Horses don't have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.

---

I've talked to some folks and this seems to be more or less accurate.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 07, 2022, 04:48:49 PM
Horses are kind of an evolutionary fuckup anyways.

Lemme post something I saw a while back:

---

So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb.

They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.

But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well.  Here's the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides.  Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM.  So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses.

The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.

When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of... stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it's guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn't fall out of sync.  But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates.  It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it's size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.

When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it's structure reflects that.  But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia.  Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I'm not sure how that's related but I am sure that's another Hot Mess they have to deal with.

ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier.  So if a horse breaks it's leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it's also having a hemorrhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.

ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of their evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for their already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental.  Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if denied the opportunity to ZOOM, it's options left are "Kill everyone and Then Yourself" or "The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die".  The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it's gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.

TL;DR: Horses don't have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.

---

I've talked to some folks and this seems to be more or less accurate.

Greetings!

Goddamn, Ghostmaker!!! That's fucking *cool*. So many interesting little details about horses! I love it!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK on May 07, 2022, 05:48:27 PM

Greetings!

Goddamn, Ghostmaker!!! That's fucking *cool*. So many interesting little details about horses! I love it!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

It explains why horses seem so weirdly fragile compared to other quadrupedal creatures. I always wondered why, until I read that and got it confirmed.

Strikes me this could be taken up to 11 to create some pretty bizarre and rerrifying monsters. Though it does strike me the Mares of Diomedes in Greek myth were man eating so there is that.