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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7656522" data-attributes="member: 42582">Fairly recently in my game the invoker/wizard (+30-something Nature) took control of a tamed giant Frosthawk (like a roc, but able to breathe cold). But being 4e, it only gave him enhanced movement (ie a fly speed) but otherwise - per the mount rules - didn't give him any bonus actions.I was also able to just deduct the value of a 24th level mount from the treasure allocation for that level.Parts of 4e are loose, though - such as taking control of the enemy's animals in battle, for instance, which has happened twice in my game (the frosthawk just mentioned, and at early paragon the ranger-cleric took control of the hobgoblins' dinosaur). And various other p 42/skill challenge-y stuff.In my mental framing of 4e, adjudicating these sorts of things is a three-stage process. There is the fictional positioning component: is this action feasible for this PC? - in this situation, relative to global considerations of flavour, genre etc as well as more local considerations of capability, equipment, opposition, etc.And then, if the player gets a tick at the first stage, there is the DC allocation stage. This is done via the DC-by-level charts.The final stage happens if the player succeeds on the check: the GM has to narrate the results. If the first stage was handled well, this should be relatively automatic, because the consequence of success will have been determined as part of that original framing of what is happening in the fiction.At that first stage, I think the GM is first among equals, as you suggested upthread. But the players also have an important role to play. While they have a standing temptation to push a bit too far in pursuit of advantage, each player should also should have a better handle on what his/her PC is capable of than anyone else at the table. And there is also the fun factor - if a player thinks it would be fun for his/her PC to take control of a giant frosthawk, and the rules of the game make it easy to accommodate this without breaking (which, in 4e, they do), then that tells strongly in favour of saying "yes" at the first stage and moving onto the second stage of setting a DC.I hadn't foreseen that the PC would take control of the steed on either occasion. In both cases it took the encounter in a slightly different direction from what I had anticipated. That's a big part of what I enjoy about RPGing.</blockquote>

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