Tourneys and jousting

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by trooper6

Wouldn't the knockback rules be easier? If you get knocked back, you are off your horse.

If you fail to block, you get hit. Opponent does enough damage...you are knocked back.

If you succeed in blocking, but only by DB, then the damage goes to your shield...which will lead to knockback with enough damage.

While mostly true, actually the mounted combat rules assume that knockback doesn't lead to automatic unhorsing. You get a Riding check, at -4 per yard of knockback.

What concerns me is that from what I can gather in the riding rules, a +3 bonus against being unhorsed is a feature of war saddles. This means that it's really hard to unhorse even a knight of minimal skill (who presumably still has to meet a minimum of skill 12) and almost impossible to unhorse an expert without inflicting terrible damage (in order to knock a ST 14 man two yards back, it's necessary to do 24 points of damage). And tournament lances aren't supposed to do that much damage and break before it happens.

I hope that the revised Low-Tech will make it clear that any bonuses from riding gear only serve to remove penalties and never grant a net bonus. That alleviates the problem somewhat.