D&D 5E When a Paladin is Mounted

[Li Shenron]

When a paladin is mounted on a large creature (warhorse, elk, who really cares), where does their Aura originate from?


As I understand mounted combat, you are occupying the space of your mount, and for a lot of basic stuff with a large mount, you are considered to just be in that large area somewhere. However, extending the paladin's aura while ok in the short term, might lead to problems if the paladin is mounted on huge creature, such as a dragon or something.

However, just picking a hex could lead to the paladin's mount taking up more of the aura than strictly necessary and weakening the aura by allowing fewer opportunities for other players to benefit.

I think the aura's range is simply counted from the original Paladin's medium-sized occupied space.

If you use squares/hexes you probably just pick one of them and count from that. I don't use them, so I just measure the distance with a ruler.

A gigantic mount can possibly cover your whole aura, so what? You have a gigantic mount!! Your friends might actually want to jump on it too sometimes, in which case they will probably benefit again from your aura.

 

[Chaosmancer]

As to the OP issue, for me I think it would depend on the tone of the campaign. If I were running something epic-ish, or we were tending toward don't-care-about-wacky-cheesy-as-long-as-it's-cool, I'd let the aura extend from the mount. Otherwise, the rules clearly are stated in terms of distance from the paladin, and the mounted combat rules make no exception, so if others can't get close enough to take advantage of your aura, well, choices have consequences.

Crawford has weighed in on this (in his usual somewhat oblique fashion).

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2018/01/1...ere-do-your-attacks-auras-etc-originate-from/

Thank you for the link. I didn't find the answers terribly helpful, but it is good to know what the official answer was.

It looks like it is really an issue of ease of use. I could specify which space the paladin is in, keep track of that exact spot on the three hexes the horse is occupying, force them to care about facing which we never have cared about before, and run into reach issues with melee combat especially for enemies.

OR I could just let the aura be slightly bigger and call it a day.



I do love how Craword's one answer in that thread responded to "wait do you move within the mounts space" which I see as moving from one of the indicated squares or hexes of the mount to another with "yes, you use normal movement while mounted" and now I have to imagine horseback riders moving 5 ft down or over on their horse.

 

[Chaosmancer]

A gigantic mount can possibly cover your whole aura, so what? You have a gigantic mount!! Your friends might actually want to jump on it too sometimes, in which case they will probably benefit again from your aura.

Yeah, I was just trying to think through the problems of ruling "the paladin's aura extends from the mount"

Frankly, riding a creature of huge or larger size into battle seems to cause so so many potential problems with reach and spacing issues. Hopefully that never comes up in my games, the more I think about it the more of a headache it seems

 

[Oofta]

I figured that was probably the official rule as well, but I admit to not being a Sage Advice expert so there could be something surprising

In 4E I would have known the answer - the paladin is assumed to be occupying all spaces of the mount. It works well enough for my game and as others have said it doesn't really make that much of a difference. There's nothing in the official sage advice column (which hasn't been updated for a year now) and I don't follow twitter so I could be missing something.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Guest 6801328]

Personally, I am a big fan of mounting paladins!

View attachment 101787

Well, parts of them, at least.

I saw the title and thought "Lowkey is going to have a field day with this one."

Admittedly, I was imagining something with a higher ESRB rating.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Shiroiken]

Just don't tell @lowkey13...he'll just see it as a plot to make more paladins.

I actually figured it was [MENTION=6799753]lowkey13[/MENTION] discussing taxidermy