The Cavalier Unseat feat has a rather high level requirement of 10. From a jousting tournament perspective, this seems excessive. Most medieval jousters were nobles that probably weren't the most experienced combatants. Taking the feat means burning a feat for a very specific type of encounter scenario. If you aren't fighting mounted combatants, you aren't using it.
That was the 'Advanced Players Guide', and years later, along comes the war lance in 'Lost Omens Knights of Lastwall' that has the Shove trait, which appears to allow exactly the same thing as Unseat, but with no level requirement and no feat cost. Shove appears to move the target off their mount with a single strike using an Athletics check against the target's Fortitude DC, same as Unseat. In fact, it appears better, because it potentially moves the target both off their mount and further than Unseat, up to 10' away.
Other than losing the Reach trait from the standard lance when you try to unseat a mounted target, are you actually losing anything by using a war lance to shove in place of taking Unseat?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The Shove trait allows you to use the Shove action with the weapon. Unseat allows you to strike with a jousting weapon and if you hit, you can make a MAP-less Athletics check to have the same effects as Shove with no additional action cost. Unseat is much stronger than the Shove trait.
If all you want to do is try to Shove someone off a saddle, then yeah there's not much difference. However, as Tiornys pointed out, Unseat lets you do quite a few more things:
- For one, it lets you hit the dude with the same action you're using.
- Because it doesn't specifically call for a Shove, but rather an Athletics check, it doesn't suffer from Multiple Attack Penalty.
- Also because of this, you're not limited to Shove's size limit of the target being up to 1 size larger than you, nor do you suffer any ill consequences from getting a Critical Failure.
As for your second point, regarding reach, keep in mind if you're on a Large or Huge mount then a weapon with Reach only attacks adjacent squares, same as a weapon withot Reach. You need 15ft of Reach to extend beyond that (which to be fair, you can do pretty easily with the Lunge feat, but then you can'tuse Unseat).
Like... how many time did you want to use it and you were not high level enough? Heck, how many time you wished you had a lance in general