D&D 3E/3.5 3.5 Charge - How to Fix it, and why it's important.

[Hypersmurf]

No, you can't. You can't overrun more that one creature a round. Overrunning requires a standard action.

Which actually means that it's potentially harder to overrun with a heavy warhorse, because if two people are standing side by side in a ten foot wide corridor, you are actually prohibited from overrunning either of them. If you were on foot, you could overrun one or the other.

-Hyp.

 

[Artoomis]

Which actually means that it's potentially harder to overrun with a heavy warhorse, because if two people are standing side by side in a ten foot wide corridor, you are actually prohibited from overrunning either of them. If you were on foot, you could overrun one or the other.

-Hyp.

How odd. I hadn't thought of that, but that means that the Trample feat became much weaker. Weird - you should be ,more effective in those situaions when mounted.

 

[Norfleet]

At what point do you simply throw up your hands and go, "This is silly!"? When you read into the rules at the lawyerish level, clearly, it becomes obvious that the rules become self-contradictory or lead to incredibly silly and unrealistic conclusions. At what point do you declare that this is simply absurd, and file it away with the old 3.0E Bag of Rats?

 

[Fredrik Svanberg]

Which actually means that it's potentially harder to overrun with a heavy warhorse, because if two people are standing side by side in a ten foot wide corridor, you are actually prohibited from overrunning either of them. If you were on foot, you could overrun one or the other.

-Hyp.

You can still overrun one, and squeeze past the other, as per the standard rules for large creatures moving through small areas.

 

[Hypersmurf]

You can still overrun one, and squeeze past the other, as per the standard rules for large creatures moving through small areas.

Ooh! Or, if your Mount can manage a DC25 Tumble check, he could Overrun one, and Tumble through the space occupied by the other!

-Hyp.

 

[Norfleet]

Lovely. Tumbling, acrobat mounts. What's the Ride Check DC for staying *ON* a tumbling, acrobatic mount?

 

[Hypersmurf]

What's the Ride Check DC for staying *ON* a tumbling, acrobatic mount?

15.

-Hyp.

 

[Seule]

I have a mounted combat specialist character. The problems I see with mounted combat are 2:

1) Overrrun and Trample:
The erratta nerfed overrun so that you couldn't do it as part of a charge, which absolutely killed Trample dead. It was a marginal feat anyway, and without being able to Trample on the charge, it's almost completely useless. The reason they changed Overrun was to stop people charging through their allies, which makes a certain sense to me, but the proper fix was to say that an overrun attempt was a standard action whether your terget tried to avoid it or not, rather than to make it impossible. Both ways you can't effectively charge past your friends and attack, but my way you can still try to overrun enemies, as is only sensible. Overrunning on a charge makes so much sense that before the erratta you actually had a bonus to it.
However, they are unlikely to change the erratta back, as they'd have to admit their mistake. The bandaid fix would be to add text to Trample allowing it as part of a charge. You still can't use it on your friends to bypass them, as avoidance isn't an option with Trample.

2) Ride-By Attack and Charging:
As others have pointed out, you can't ride past someone with ride-by attack, because you have to charge, and thus you have to move straight towards them. Yet, you can't overrun them, because you are charging. And while the feat avoids AoO from movement, it still doesn't allow movement through an opponent's area, which requires either 3+ sizes difference (not likely) or a Tumble check DC 25. Not many mounts can pull off the latter. Basically, Ride-By Attack also needs additional text that clarifies exactly how it works, as currently on a standard horse (no tumble ranks) it's not possible. Again: Ride-By Attack requires completely illegal actions, and can't work. It requires a fix. At least Trample can be used, if only without a charge, Ride-By Attack simply can't be used at all by 99.999% of characters who have it.
I can't emphasize that enough.
It needs to either allow movement through the target's square, or (more preferably) an exception to the charging rules to allow non-straight-on charges.

Obviously, when the charging and overrunning rules were rewritten for 3.5 and then the erratta, nobody actually looked at the mounted feats. They are broken, and not in the good way.

--Seule

 

[Jin]

Ride-By Attack

Just a quick thought...

Why not treat ride-by attack in a similar fashion to spring attack? The differences being that you must be mounted to make the attack & you have to charge a target square next to your target.

So, as with spring attack, you can move your mount, then attack, & then finish by moving up to your mount’s allotted movement. Your movement path would of course be limited by that fact that you are charging.

It’s not even a new mechanic really…

 

[Seule]

Why not treat ride-by attack in a similar fashion to spring attack?...

That's pretty much how it worked in 3.0, with the caveat that you must also continue in a straight line. That'd be fine in 3.5. Really, anything that was possible to pull off without your mount having to have a whole lot of Tumble would be better than the current impossibility.

--Seule