Summary
While having a mount isn’t mandatory inDungeons & Dragons, these creatures can aid your players greatly and make encounters more complex, some having abilities beyond carrying the party around. Mounts can allow for access to unreachable places and, at times, force players to think in more than just grounded combat.
Yet they can be a lot to handle, with some parties having trouble even remembering they’re around and sometimes feeling like they’re a chore to take care of. If you want your mounts to be a core part of your experience and for players to form a bond with them, follow these tips and ride on.
8Don’t Use Mounts Just For Transportation
They’re More Than That
Having a mount should be as exciting for all players as it is forRangers when they get their Companion. If all you want mounts for is to make travel easier, having the players travel with merchant carts or the like fits way better.
If you give players a set of tools that you don’t fully understand, they might end up unbalancing your whole campaign or derailing it in search of a better saddle. There’s nothing wrong with not having mounts in a campaign, so if you don’t feel like committing to them, you might as well not have them.
Here are some sample scenarios and how they change with mounts:
7Make The Mounted Combatant Feat Baseline
Everyone Is Going To Get It Anyway
For those unaware, the Mounted Combatant Feat givescertain bonuses when a character is mounted, like advantage against creatures smaller than your mount and defensive measures for it to survive higher levels. It’s a must-have Feat for players looking to use mounts, so much so that if everyone has a mount, everyone will get it.
If you’re planning a campaign where everyone has a mount, this Feat ends up hurting more than it helps since anyone not taking it will feel left behind. Making it baseline for everyone allows players to bring their own builds into the game while still being great mounted combatants.
6Keep Track Of Their Items
What They Left On The Mount Stays On The Mount
One hard-to-solve issue when dealing with mounts is inventory management. Even if you’re someone with relaxed rules when it comes to weight limits and arrow counting, some key items are still important to keep track of, and players rarely do so.
A mount is a great way to keep all your equipment with you without needing a massive backpack, but if a player left the key to the vault on their horse, it shouldn’t magically appear on their hand once the heist is underway. It can be a bit of a chore, but if you don’t keep track of it, players certainly won’t.
These Hooves Were Made For Running
Walking Castle Ledcaru via Wizards Of The Coast
Once you have all your playersoutfitted with some mounts, you can start preparing encounters that make the most out of them. Not every printed adventure has moments that make the most out of them, so you’ll likely have to come up with it yourself.
There are plenty of ways Mounts can be useful, even key to an encounter, so here are some ideas to get you started:
4Give Mounts Personality
A mount can mean more to the party than any treasure they find, but only if they build a relationship with it. You’d be surprised at how little roleplay is needed for players to be so attached to their camel that they’d risk their lives for it.
This attachment works best if you’re not planning on having them change their mounts for better ones throughout the adventure since, at that point, they’ll treat the creatures just like any other piece of equipment. If you want some exotic creatures to be in the hands of your players, it’s better to give them to them sooner rather than later.
3Force Players Off Their Mounts
You Don’t Want Them On Their Mounts All The Time
When players are getting too comfortable with any gameplay mechanic, it’s good practice to take it off their hands from time to time to keep them on their toes, if nothing else. If players havemounts with particularly useful abilities, it’s ideal to force them off them sometimes, like with rickety bridges or small entrances.
Social gatherings are another way to get players off the saddle since those rarely involve being on horseback. This will make them think twice before defaulting to violence, or at least give them a hard time getting away once things inevitably go wrong.
2Be Careful With Flying Mounts
It’s Best When Players Are Grounded
Flying mounts are a big deal in Dungeons & Dragons since any encounter they’re in now needs to account for altitude on top of everything else. While it might not seem like that big of a deal, in TTRPGs, it can get hard to keep track of where everyone is, particularly when gauging distance for ranged attacks.
Beyond that, there’s also the freedom they give to players, something that might entice them to explore too far from the beaten path. While this is great if you want to encourage exploration, having players wander too far off can also bring complications, especially if they start splitting the party while airborne.
Now, if your party is already filled with flying creatures, you’ll have to condition your campaign to account for that. The best bosses for these situations are gargantuan enemies that can attack at different altitudes; this way, you’re able to still have combat happen on a “flat” surface since how high your players are only matters when considering falling damage.
For everyday encounters, you may use a die next to a unit to determine how high that creature is. So, even when two creatures are next to each other, you can still see at a glance how high one is compared to the other and if they’re adjacent or not.
1Use Underwater Mounts For Travel Only
No One Wants To Be Sunk For Too Long
You might think that underwater mounts would behave just like flying ones, but each biome works fairly differently. When characters are underwater, certain rules work differently than on land, requiring far more preparation than when taking flight.
If you want your players to experience these underwater segments, avoid mounts since otherwise, they’d be tempted to skip most of the exploration. If, instead, you just want them to get to a given island quickly, then mounts like Sharks and Seahorses are great for skipping the trip, maybe adding a single encounter along the way.
