Lets talk about horsemanship, or lack thereof

[Suzume Chikahisa 313]

So, I was prepping a session for the weekend when I realized there seem to be 0 rules for horsmanship or any kind of Animal Handling/Riding.

How are Unicorn players dealing with that? I'm assuming they are using fitness or Labor, but the lack of a Horsemanship skill kind of stick out when you have Seafaring as it's onw skill and you have armed and unarmed combat forked.

As a patch I'm tempted to replace Martial Arts (unarmed) with a Riding skill.

 

 

[jmoschner 161]

1 hour ago, Suzume Chikahisa said:

So, I was prepping a session for the weekend when I realized there seem to be 0 rules for horsmanship or any kind of Animal Handling/Riding.

How are Unicorn players dealing with that? I'm assuming they are using fitness or Labor, but the lack of a Horsemanship skill kind of stick out when you have Seafaring as it's onw skill and you have armed and unarmed combat forked.

As a patch I'm tempted to replace Martial Arts (unarmed) with a Riding skill.

 

 

Survival is the riding/animal handling the skill. When riding you use survival in place of fitness. This mostly ends up being for movement rolls and reducing the severity of crits.

There does need to be more on riding and handling animals in the book. Questions we've been compiling for once the beta got to that section:

• Does the mount and the rider each take their own stance?
• How does movement from a stance work with a mount?
• How can you attack with the mount (i.e. have it kick or trample someone) ?
• Also need to figure out how movement stacks.
• When does the mount act of its own accord?
• Who chooses the type of outburst the mount has since it doesn't have to the typical outburst?
• Guidelines for using powers/techniques/spells/etc. on mounts/animals would be nice.
• Guidelines for what is and isn't honorable in combat with a mount.
• How much faster does spurning on the animal make it go?
• Can you spend your xp on your mount?
• Should mounts or animal bonds get xp so they don't die right away at level play?
•  

For the most part, we have handled it narratively outside of combat and often even in combat as fit the situation. The rules say that a horse doesn't take actions of its own when ridden, but assists with some things and provides bonus successes to movement checks. In combat we have treated it as the mount and rider can each have a different stance and movement from the stance for the rider is basically them shifting around on the horse. We treated rider and mount as a separate targets. So you could target the horse but not the rider(s) and vice versa. Before for some things we were just saying yes or no based on the situation, like being able to ride by and grab an object. Will probably consider the take extra (non-rolling) action from water stance as a way to do the things the rules don't really cover. 

Survival mentions a TN1 check to spur on an animal. So went with TN1 for getting a trained animal to do something, tn2 for untrained animals or tasks animals don't normally do, and if it was an animal bond, then not requiring a roll at all for most things. Typically we didn't roll and went with common sense. This also had the benefit of helping to avoid the strife bookkeeping, especially for those with animal bond, where every roll/interaction meant reduced strife.

Social approaches seem to be a better fit narratively in a lot of circumstances with animals verses the trade approaches. Another reason they need to decouple the approaches from skill groups.  We just use whatever ring and approach works for the situation and ruled some social benefits/drawbacks applied to animals as well. We also allowed using social opportunities when dealing with animals. We also allowed using martial opportunities and such when using survival in place of fitness.

 

[Suzume Chikahisa 313]

36 minutes ago, jmoschner said:

Social approaches seem to be a better fit narratively in a lot of circumstances with animals verses the trade approaches. Another reason they need to decouple the approaches from skill groups.  We just use whatever ring and approach works for the situation and ruled some social benefits/drawbacks applied to animals as well. We also allowed using social opportunities when dealing with animals. We also allowed using martial opportunities and such when using survival in place of fitness.

 

Good call. In my group at least approaches proved to be far more interesting than the skills as well.

[Yandia 354]

I would say treat the horses as equipment which makes you faster and give some extra opporunites like trampling over enemies etc.

[Magnus Grendel 11,673]

6 hours ago, jmoschner said:

How can you attack with the mount (i.e. have it kick or trample someone) ?

I've assumed this is included in the assistance with Martial Arts (melee) checks - i.e. unless the horse is fighting on its own you don't need to roll its own attacks.

At the same time, attacking the horse directly certainly makes sense.

[jmoschner 161]

2 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I've assumed this is included in the assistance with Martial Arts (melee) checks - i.e. unless the horse is fighting on its own you don't need to roll its own attacks.

At the same time, attacking the horse directly certainly makes sense.

I figured the assistance on melee checks was more the benefit of striking from higher up and  utilizing the momentum of the mount. We have house ruled the rider makes an attack check with the survival skill, then using the damage listed for the horse's attack.Basically they pull the reigns or give the command word to get the horse to kick. We were using the horse's damage for charge attacks if the horse was trampling someone, but now charging is maneuvering and doesn't offer any damage options.

Also while on the mount stuff, should the pony be treated as a minion?

Also not sure why all the animals have ranks in Nature which is an optional sub-skill, and they have it lower than their Survival rank. Probably should be fitness or martial instead for some or removed for others.