The Ride skill includes this potentially divisive capability.
Cover: You can react instantly to drop down and hang alongside your mount, using it as cover. You can't attack or cast spells while using your mount as cover. If you fail your Ride check, you don't get the cover benefit. Using this option is an immediate action, but recovering from this position is a move action (no check required).
Since the Ride check is made as an immediate action I'm pretty confident that you can choose to make it when an enemy attacks you on their turn. I'd assume that the cover you gain is soft cover since it is being provided by another creature (your mount). This often leads to the question of whether an attack aimed at you which misses because of this soft cover should hit the mount instead or at least be resolved against the mount's AC. It seems to me that the RAW are silent on whether there's a chance for an attack which misses because of soft cover to hit the cover instead (barring some specific circumstances such as the Body Shield feat). Would folks agree that by RAW there's no chance of the mount getting hit by the attack instead of the rider?
Of course the enemy could direct any further attacks at the mount, and since using Mounted Combat to protect the mount is also an immediate action using one would usually preclude the other. In this manner at least there's some potential "cost" to using the Cover option beyond the Move action you have to spend to get back to normal (which itself can be a pretty big cost)
I'm primarily interested in making sure the RAW work the way I think though I'd also be interested in knowing how people feel about the Cover trick in general.
By RAW you're correct the mount won't get hit when providing cover. I've only ever seen the cover trick used against ranged attacks rather than in melee.
It sounds like by RAW there should be no chance of an attack hitting the mount because it was used as cover. I don't think that gaining a +4 AC as an immediate action is overpowered considering the limitations
Did the old 3.5 rule cause the attack to hit the cover automatically, or did the attack still need to hit the cover's AC? I'd think it should need to hit the target's AC (if such a house rule were implemented in Pathfinder)
The Ride skill includes this potentially divisive capability.
Cover: You can react instantly to drop down and hang alongside your mount, using it as cover. You can't attack or cast spells while using your mount as cover. If you fail your Ride check, you don't get the cover benefit. Using this option is an immediate action, but recovering from this position is a move action (no check required).Since the Ride check is made as an immediate action I'm pretty confident that you can choose to make it when an enemy attacks you on their turn. I'd assume that the cover you gain is soft cover since it is being provided by another creature (your mount). This often leads to the question of whether an attack aimed at you which misses because of this soft cover should hit the mount instead or at least be resolved against the mount's AC. It seems to me that the RAW are silent on whether there's a chance for an attack which misses because of soft cover to hit the cover instead (barring some specific circumstances such as the Body Shield feat). Would folks agree that by RAW there's no chance of the mount getting hit by the attack instead of the rider?
There's nothing in the Pathfinder rules that says the creature providing cover gets hit by the attack if it misses. Since at least one feat specifically calls out that the creature providing cover takes the attack, I'd rule that this means it doesn't normally happen (because if it did, there is no reason to include that language in the feat).
Also remember that any ruling along this line applies to the bad guys, too. If the GM rules the your mount gets hit because he's providing cover, then any ranged attack or reach attack that missed because of soft cover must also hit whatever bad guy is providing cover to your target.
I too felt that the Body Shield feat specifically calling out the chance for the cover to be hit by the attack implied that no such chance normally exists. I've seen the rules point out useless or redundant information before.
I feel that even if a "hitting the cover" rule was implemented via FAQ or as a house rule the attack should need to hit the cover's AC to count as a hit against the cover. I'm not the one who would be making such a ruling, but some questions did arise in a recent session where another player's PC took cover using the Ride skill and the DM seemed surprised.
We haven't really had a chance to discuss the issue in further detail yet, but I figured I should make sure I have the RAW straight before any such discussion. As things stand I'd say there's a reasonable chance that the DM in question will make a house rule allowing the attack to hit the cover, but at least I can make sure he's aware it is a house rule rather than an official one.