Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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The rules for mounted combat (https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/br-2024/playing-the-game#FallingOff) tell us that if the mount is moved, you have to save or fall off. However, this still leaves some things unspecified:
Is there an official rule elsewhere?
As to #1, the rules you've linked to provide the answer. You have to succeed on a saving throw or you fall off and land Prone. If you succeed, neither of those things happens, so you move with the mount.
pronouns: he/she/they
The rules don't seem to explicitly give these answers for this scenario. I would rule that if you are forcibly moved then you follow the rules of the forced movement and if that results in you being located 5 or more feet away from the mount then you are no longer riding it.
For the question about moving the mount -- it seems like there might be a wording loophole where you could just say that your mount is willing and then you won't fall off. That sort of thing should probably just be overruled by DM fiat.
My understanding was always that the save is to keep your balance is your mount is moved, but if you are moved and not your mount, there's no save.
Having a mount doesn't glue your character to it... If you're mounting a Large creature, and you're pushed away from it, you're immediately separated from it, and you fall a distance equal to the height of the creature's size, which would be 10ft, and you take the corresponding fall damage and knocked prone.
Do you? It never says so. It actually never says that your mount moving causes you to move at all, though I think RAI is obvious there.
Number 2 can get really tricky to adjudicate, since your mount is large (at least if you’re medium). And my understanding is that you kind of occupy all four squares while you are riding it. At least, you can attack and be attacked as if you are in any of the 4. So if you get pushed 5’, would that push you off, or 1/2 off, or move you from one side to the other for no real change?
But if you rule it moves you off, I’d probably look to grapple rules. If you get moved out of reach, you’re not grappled anymore, so if you get moved off the mount, you’re not mounted anymore. Maybe give a dex save to land on your feet.
If you succeed, you don't fall off; falling off is tied to failing the save just as much as landing Prone is. If you don't fall off, you're still on your mount. Your mount has moved, and you're still on it. That can hardly happen if you don't also move, can it?
I think he meant in general. Nothing states in the mounting rules that when your mount moves, you move along with it, across the same distance and in the same direction.
It's just heavily implied by the term "mounting", and all that it entails.
Ah, perhaps.
To that I'll say; not every single little thing needs to be spelled out in the rules. Words already have definitions, and the rulebooks are not dictionaries; they would need to be significantly longer, and in turn be far less accessible, if they were. The rules for mounted combat say you "mount" and "ride" the mounted creature. Those words have clear meanings, and that should be more than enough.
I love me some pedantry, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere.
When a mount moves, you move with it is the only official ruling i can find besides the rulebooks.
Nothing on how to resolve when the rider is pushed, pulled or forced to move otherwise.
What about when there is more than one person on the mount?
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If you're using a combat saddle (as I would expect anyone fighting mounted would be), the cantle is designed to lock you in place on the mount and resist being pushed off (at least backwards, because, you know, how lances and physics actually work).
So what happens when you get pushed into a wall? You don't move. The cantle is basically a 'wall' at your back. At the very least you should get a save to avoid the push. The saddle is literally designed to stop this.
And this is where I note that a Lance has Topple as its mastery rather than Push (although you would expect the latter, typically), so I would probably treat any Push against a mounted character as a Topple instead.
Any impact actually capable of pushing someone 10' back is more than adequate to also remove them from a combat saddle. Mastery properties do not appear particularly correlated with any real world concern.
Getting hit by a lance is more than capable of knocking someone 10' back.
The whole point of a combat saddle is to make the horse and rider one entity for absorbing and inflicting force.
I mean, if you want mounted combat to be incredibly silly and basically unplayable, by all means let pushes just remove characters from mounts willy-nilly. You're basically removing mounted combat from the game.
Like: the BBEG flies overhead riding a dragon. Warlock: I eldritch blast him, and knock him off the dragon. How much falling damage is that again?
No save. No legendary resistance. Nothing you can do if you get pushed.
There is literally a magic item for this.
My man, why are you so determined to turn this game into a realistic real world simulation?
An uncommon magic item does not give you armies with mounted knights using lances and fighting from horseback. We want to see those in the world, right? And you shouldn't see that at all if push just hard counters being mounted automatically. We're talking about a ridiculous common counter available to any first level character with a weapon mastery.
The magic item would still be an upgrade from a nonmagic item which merely made pushes into topples (and thus gave you a save), as the magic item just stops you from being dismounted entirely, no save needed. And if literally every mounted NPC in your campaign requires a particular uncommon magic item to even be functional, then we've got a magic factory somewhere pumping these things out, and that's... not the kind of fantasy world most people are expecting to play in. (And it's not going to look anything like you think a fantasy world should look like once you propagate all the changes through the system).
The game should, to the degree practical, approximate real world outcomes. It's called versimillitude. If the mechanics lead to ridiculous outcomes, the mechanics are a problem.
I don't expect a physics simulator. I expect something that gets it vaguely in the ballpark so the players don't look at each other and go 'that doesn't make any sense'.
It's almost like this system is designed around the premise of small group battles leaning heavily into action tropes rather than large scale simulationist combat experiences...
This assumes 1st level characters are also common. They are not. Those knights are likely riding down a bunch of cr 1/2 foot soldiers who barely know which end of a spear to use.
And armies like this also aren’t common in D&D. It’s too easy for a fireball, or spike growth, or any number of AoE spells, to kill the horses (which is the more likely counter to mounted combatants, anyway).
Your small scale group battles don't fare so well either with mounted combat unless one specific magic item is a mandatory prerequisite for engaging in it.
The game should, to the degree practical, approximate cinematic fantasy. Approximating real world outcomes is laughable, because real world outcome for any higher CR monster attacking a human is "okay, you die".