Dealing with mounted characters in combat

[Phystus]

I'm running a D&D 3.5 campaign using the d20_JPG 1.3.1 ruleset. We do a lot of outdoor adventures, and the party is typically on horseback when we start an encounter. I haven't found a good way to deal with the 10' space, 5' reach of a character fighting from horseback. Any suggestions?

~P

[Griogre]

You could just dial up the size of the PCs to a 10 foot square on the combat tracker, since in 3.5, PCs fill the horses square. I didn't do alot of mounted combat when I ran 3.5 so I just horse sized PC tokens when they were mounted. If they were on horse back I would make the PCs tokens large with a 5' reach. If they dismounted I would change the tokens back to medium sized.

From your description it seems like you PCs are the opposite of mine, in that they are almost always mounted so I would probably just make 10'x10' PC tokens for when they are on horseback, and dial the tokens back to 5x5 when they aren't on a horse.

It depends on the level of the party whether you want to bother putting the horses on the tracker, but even if you did I woudn't bother putting them on the map when they are being ridden. At any level other than the lower ones, horses die so fast they tend to just be either alive or dead. The only time I would add riding dogs, mules or horses to the tracker was when I had a wounded one.

[Phystus]

I actually tried that two different ways: I tried scrolling the size of the token in the combat tracker (click the picture, roll the mouse wheel), and by dropping a horse token onto the picture in the CT. Both ways exhibit the same behavior, when you move the mouse pointer over the token it shows the green square as being the lower right square of the 4 occupied by the large character, and the threatened area as the 8 squares around the green one.

Not a huge problem, just an inconvenience. It would also be a problem for anyone using an enlarge person spell.

Not sure if it's fixed in the latest release of d20_JPG either, I've wanted to spare my players the download time so I haven't upgraded.

Thanks for the thought, I was just hoping someone had a better idea.

~P

[Griogre]

Ah, you need to scroll the size up of the square up from 5 to 10 in on the combat tracker next to the "square" and before the wiper. That controls the area the creature takes up on the map. The other is the reach of the area.

[Phystus]

That worked! Awesome, thank you Griogre!

~P