D&D General Mounted Archers

[David Howery]

mounted archers, like blocks of pikemen, are one of those historical things that are great to read about, but not so translatable into a D&D campaign. Unless your campaign is set outdoors a lot and deals with mass combat a lot, it's hard to get much use out of them. Individual PCs and NPCs could certainly be mounted archers (or pikemen), but both are problematic in a dungeon.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

even the Longbow has trouble penetrating a fully plated warrior

You see the development of armor piercing designs for arrowheads during that period, no one would have bothered if traditional arrowheads had been effective!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Mounted combat (ranged or melee) in D&D is great right up until someone lobs a fireball at your 7th level party and all the 19hp horses die and then suddenly you're not a mounted party after all. Ask my 12th level paladin how often his steed lasts past the first round of combat some time.

Hit point inflation from PCs, and static hit points on mounts, kills the concept dead from a RAW mechanical perspective. I'm sure there's third party sourcebooks etc that grapple with the issue, but from a core rules point of view it just doesn't work.

Mental image of cartoon horses being reduced to charred skeletons, that collapse leaving the party sitting in mid air.

But there are official rules that can be used for scaling mount hp - the warrior sidekick rules in Tasha’s.

 

[GrimCo]

Mounted archers - but instead, it's Warlocks with EB, eldricht spear invocation and spell sniper feat. 600 feet range, ignore half and 3/4 cover.

That aside, mounted combat in general is aftertought in 5e. Mounted archers were good at big open plains. In heavy forests, they loose 3 main advantages - speed, maneuverability and ability to engage from safe distance. Not only forests, narrow mountain passes and swamps also aren't mounted archer friendly.

Mounted combat is more of mass combat / warfare domain or in some cases, light skirmishers (but that's also more for warfare centered campaigns). In typical campaigns, not so much. Too many closed spaces.