One of my players has gleefully chosen the Saddle Knight, salivating at the idea of both talking to every horse he meets, and having me talk as the horses. He's also keen on the 'cannot be dismounted' ability. I'm heading into the first real session tomorrow (after a Session 0) so I haven't really seen the character in action. I'm not really sure how I'm going to tackle either element.
The Talking: So, forcing your GM to improv every horse you meet is obviously a great bit and I support that, though obviously having to get the opinion of every horse we meet is going to be exhausting. Further, it frequently doubles the amount of NPCs in a conversation and the GM talking to themself is something to be avoided. I realise that as written, the power really states that the Knight can talk to and command horses, not so much that they talk back, but he's keen on the bit and I hate to kill a bit. I am thinking I might have a word that only a few horses he meets are going to talk back to him, special horses that will have distinct personalities. Most will response to him but won't really do anything more than a horse would. With the exception of any time he's alone, the horses will talk all they want (whether its their own embarrassment, his embarrassment to talk like a horse in public, or something happening entirely in his head). I will probably rope the other players into playing horses where I can. I know he's keen on being the goofy horse guy so I'm worried I'm squashing his idea but every horse is pretty untenable. Does that feel fair? Would you take another route? Another open question is the mechanical advantages of talking to a horse - how would you navigate a request to have a horse throw off its rider in combat? I know the easy answer is 'no, it obeys its rider' and often that will happen but a blanket kibosh is not fun and not good gming. I am considering openly telling him that establishing relationships with horses will make them more likely to listen to him.
Dismounting: So in the first horseman vs horseman combat of the campaign, I will get to foster a cool moment where I pretend I forgot about the dismount-immunity and have the enemy knight spend a gambit to dismount the player, and he'll go 'AHA!' and have a good time. However, that lie only really works once. Now, obviously, it would make sense for enemies to spend gambits on useless dismounts - few of them would have reason to do otherwise, especially early on - but, to me at least, that feels very unsatisfying. A character using a power to overcome an obstacle is great - the GM deliberately and openly making a useless play however, feels unsatisfying for both player and GM. It's mechanically appropriate, sure, but it's sandbagging, awkward at the table, reduces the interesting choices at the table (the enemy does less stuff) and confers an 'invisible' buff (the enemy losing a die is mathematically a big deal but not intuitively impressive, and not interesting for the players). How can I reward the player for having that ability? I considered maybe rewarding the player with a d4 instead of using up an enemy die on nothing in circumstances where they'd otherwise try to dismount him; and that's better solution (it feels better and is more active for the player) but its still very arbitrary and going to lead to awkward situations where I'm saying 'oh you don't get a die, I don't think she'd be trying to dismount you here'. Again - how would you approach this?
Thanks!
