Various thoughts on horses

[faylen]

It's always seemed a little awkward to me how your horse gets defeated and ends up at a stable, yet falls unconscious once you retrieve them. I asked on question if there was some kind of lore explanation for this, and a gm (Rias?) responded that no, and that they were leaning toward making horses perma-die.

I'm of a few minds on this. Realistically, it makes sense. The only lore explanation I could come up with for the current system is that our horses are so bonded to us that their spirits refuse to move on without us, and thus their reincarnation of sorts at stables, but even that's stretching it. Quite honestly, I'd be ok with the idea of horses dying for good. However, they are extremely expensive investments and it would really suck to lose a horse due to something like say, a certain character killing one just for fun.

For this reason I'd also like to suggest a couple potential trade offs to the no more reappearing horses. One is that the costs be lowered. Obviously they should still be expensive but especially for warhorses losing a 20k investment to someone with an attitude would just be harsh.

More importantly, I really think that horses should better defend themselves. Warhorses should fight back, whether or not they're being ridden. They're trained for combat, why would they just dodge and not bite the heck out of someone swinging or shooting at them? Regular horses run if attacked which is good, but perhaps they should run further and if freaked out enough even head to the nearest stable the way they do if left alone too long?

Lastly, I would really like to see the availability of horse armor for warhorses, and saddlebags. I saw saddlebags once and was told they were in testing but this was months ago. Can we get them, please please?

For that matter if horse armor and smarter horses were implemented I'd change my mind on the cost issue.

and lastly, something that would be a lot of fun would be wild, tameable horses. Not sure exactly how it would work, but I expect you'd need a high riding skill and it would take quite a bit of time but that would be so much fun.