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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I will at least agree that an outcome shouldn't look so cartoonish that it feels like it's from an episode of Wile E. Coyote.
I must have missed the cinematic fantasy story where everyone got knocked off their mounts at the drop of a hat and took fall damage.
You've never seen Men in Tights?
Usually in cinematic fantasy they get off the horse before the fight begins.
I wouldn't typically include comedy in cinematic fantasy.
Lord of the Rings has several mounted combat scenes (both the novels and the films). Getting dismounted is a significant event, not routine.
It's hardly the only one. Although mounted combat scenes are rarer than dismounted scenes, because horses are expensive. But we had mounted mass combat in Game of Thrones. We've had mounted combat in movies like Gladiator. Braveheart had cavalry charges. And D+D, unlike movies, doesn't require real mounts, and all the expense that entails.
Further, I would expect D+D to take inspiration from written works as well, and there's tons of examples, from historical epics like the Song of Roland, to entire fantasy series focused on a special bond between rider and mount. (Anne McCaffrey's Pern comes to mind, or Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books, or Kristen Britain's Green Rider books, and so on).
I'm ignoring all the movies and TV shows with jousting as major scenes, which is definitely a significant element of cinematic fantasy, and which requires the lance be the weapon of choice for a mounted warrior, making the guy who mounts the horse with a pike (!) and just dominates everyone a real genre-killer.
So, getting dismounted is a thing. What mechanic would you expect to do that, if not movement effects? Grapple and pull should 100% remove creatures from horses. The problem is mostly with push mastery.
I would treat dismounting attempts as Topples, as I said. The lance lends mechanical support to this idea. That includes any push, pull, etc... Forcibly dislodging a properly mounted character should be difficult and not automatic.
Grapples: I would not allow the grapple of a mounted individual by any creature smaller than the mount (regardless of the size of the rider) without a specialized weapon (not that mancatchers exist in 5e). A person on the ground cannot (from the ground) grapple a person mounted on a horse. It's just not possible. Even same size as the mount would be difficult. Successfully grappling the mount should allow you to attempt to dismount the rider in some way. Now, a large enough creature could simply pluck the character off the mount, so those grapples are fine.
(In more exotic circumstances, I'd allow an acrobatics check to jump up and attempt a grapple of the opponent on the mount, but that involves both characters ending up on the mount. From there I'd probably allow something to throw the grappled target off the mount, although it probably amounts to something like a topple in the end. Hijacking someone's mount through an acrobatic grapple is definitely cinematic, so that seems like something that should be allowed).
All that said, it is kind of ridiculous that not only can a man-sized creature grapple a horse in D+D, but has a pretty good shot at doing so successfully... Even a level 1 wizard with 8 str has a 1 in 5 chance of successfully grappling a warhorse. Do not try this at home!
At a mechanical level, a grapple at least involves a save DC, unlike pushes and pulls, so that makes it less offensive than how pushes and pulls tend to work, even if you did decide to let them work all the time.
There is zero reason within the rules for that. It's often impractical due to reach (a mounted character is at an indeterminate location within the space of the mount) but if for any reason that's not a problem (long limbs, flying, etc) riding is simply not a defense, either in reality or in game.
Bounded RNG systems pretty much always have unrealistic elements like this- as people have repeatedly pointed out to you, the point of D&D is to have a simple and accessible RPG system, not to perfectly recreate all of the mechanical nuances of real life. And, on top of that, mounted combat is extremely niche in 5e, so I don't know why you think it needs more crunch applied to it than a typical 3.5 system.
Look, if you want your game to run that way, that's fine. Power to you. In that case, take your opinions to the Dungeon Masters or Homebrew & House Rules forum. This is the Rules & Game Mechanics forum, and your opinion on how you think things should work doesn't belong here. It'd be one thing if you came at these discussions with genuine "in my opinion" energy, but I keep seeing you come at these conversations with an air of "um, actually, this is how things are," while being completely incorrect and/or making bad faith arguments in regards to the actual rules of the game, which is what's being discussed in this forum.
Now, that said, if you think a magic canon of eldritch energy knocking someone off a mount doesn't make "sense"... Bruh.
Mechanically, you can't get pushed through a wall. We agree on that, right?
A medieval combat saddle has a little wall on the back (and that fits snugly around the back a little ways), the cantle. So, strictly mechanically, a push just fails because there's a wall there whose entire purpose is to stop such a push.
And I'm sure you're going to say that's just my opinion, but a combat saddle is an actual thing in the world. It has a particular design. That's not my opinion. That's what a combat saddle is.
Similarly, if you were driving a carriage while sitting on a bench at the front of the carriage, a push would fail because the bench would stop the push, as it is effectively a wall.
That's my game mechanic argument, which I made (more briefly) in my first response.
(And Eldritch Blast is not a cannon. It's equivalent to a heavy crossbow.)
I honestly feel like there's a problem with understanding what a push is in the game. It is forcing your opponent to step back. It is not generally blasting them backwards (as it does not knock them prone nor generally into things). A mounted character cannot step back.
The rules only give the mount getting pushed and the rider or mount getting knocked prone as ways to dismount a character. They do not say anything else will do so.
You also didn't ask what the rules said in the post I was responding to, you asked what mechanic I expected to work. If you want only official rules, then those above that mounted combat explicitly covers and nothing else without DM fiat.