mounting up and free hands

[pavaan]

So this came up in my groups game. the set up, the paladin has two hands on his lance and he wanted to mount up on his horse. One person pointed out that how can he do that without using at least one hand to grab the saddle. Another person thought that they could mount up without using arms in just a few tries in real life. In the end the gm let the paladin do so to move the game along.

My question is what are your thoughts. Should you be able to mount up with no hands, or require one hand or even both hands? All of this also assumes that a character is at the same level as the mount, no step mounting block or something like it.

[Pirate Rob]

Mount Action

No hands are required.

[pavaan]

you are right. but i posed this question in advice not in rules to get peoples thoughts.

[Megistone]

While I agree that jumping to land on a horse's back looks silly, some trained animals can probably help the rider get on them by crouching down a bit.
In general I'm ok with handwaving it, also because you can probably use your hands to push yourself up well enough even if you are holding something.

[thenobledrake]

My advice, summed up: stick with the rules.

To expand upon that if you feel like reading more: Simulating reality isn't often a goal of the game, and can quickly get in the way of the game being playable.

Specifically, it's realistic that a character would need both hands unoccupied to facilitate positioning themselves into a saddle... but when you talk about the game requiring a character to spend 1 action to sling their shield, 1 action to sheath their weapon, and then 1 action to mount only to then spend another 2 actions readying shield and weapon again before finally spending 1 action to command the mount... that's when you get a player saying "never mind, I won't use a mount then."

And while sometimes that it is 'the point' to create that hesitance (equipment stored in a backpack not feeling like it's ready for combat use, as an example) you generally want to have the rule enable doing 'cool stuff' rather than make it feel like a punishment if you attempt anything other than the most efficient usage of actions.

[Castilliano]

Also note the genre, heroic fantasy. Being able to do normal things abnormally is the norm. Look at how awesome John Wick was with a horse, not due to any background development, but more due to him being the protagonist in his film's genre.

So of course a horse-themed hero can mount w/ their hands occupied. Whether it's a whistle or pat to make the horse kneel, a practiced backward maneuver to wiggle up, or an outright leap, that hero knows his horses. It could be funny at the early levels to mess with this trope, but not when it actually matters, much like Gimli complaining about running yet keeping pace for days (!) w/ Aragorn & Legolas.

That said there's still the sidebar for rules that make one too incredulous perhaps needing a GM's adjudication. That bar will vary by person and campaign, yet for heroic fantasy, it should be higher than such mundane tasks.