RE: horsey stuff

[Lyle H Janney <lhjanney@adpc.purdue.edu>]

Absolutely, tumbling or default tumbling is very appropriate here.
Success means no damage and with a simple AGI roll you can
roll to your feet.  Failure would result in damage appropriate to
the terrain and horse movement as below:

soft, loamy earth (i.e., farmland)    1d3
grasslands    1d4
rocky    1d6
sharp and treacherous    1d8

Horse is walking (up to 1/4 movement)    no additional damage
Horse is trotting (up to 1/2 movement)    +1d3
Horse is cantering (up to 3/4 movement)    +1d6
Horse at full gallop (full movement)    +1d8

It is very rare that someone actually dies as a result of being
de-horsed (for whatever reason), but broken bones and worse
are not all that rare.  While Joe Shmoe accountant would likely
have only 6 DP, I would like to propose that horsemen and others
who regularly and for many years engage in physically challenging
activities would have a few more DP than that.  If you say that DP
is the ability to deal with damage and lessen the effects of blows
in combat based on your experience with combat, I'd say that it
is also the ability to deal with damage and lessen the effect of
impact from hitting the ground at 40 MPH based on having ridden
a horse for 5 years and being thrown a few times.

On a side note, I am involved in the SCA equestrian activities and
do have some personal experience with horses.  Why, just this last
weekend, a good friend and ex-Fantasy Club member, Shane
Stegmeier, had to deal with just this type of situation.  He was
competing in a tourney and his horse tripped at full gallop.  The
horse and Shane both rolled over their left shoulders, Shane coming
up on his feet and the horse taking a moment or two to come back
up.  Shane was undamaged and the horse had a bit of grass burn
on his nose, but was otherwise undamaged as well.  To boot, Shane
also managed to toss aside the sharp-pointed spear he was wielding
so that neither he nor the horse were endangered (holding on to it
would have been a bad thing).  So over all, Shane deftly made one
easy AGI check to ditch the spear safely, a tumbling check to take
no damage and a harder AGI check (he was really moving) to come
up on his feet.  The horse failed its tumbling check and lucked out
on damage, taking only one point.  This did bring up another point
though, tumbling with a weapon in your hand is very dangerous and
I'm not even sure I'd want to allow that to be honest.  Perhaps at a
greater difficulty; +2 dice to take no damage, failure indicates that
you not only failed to tumble, but you automatically take damage
commensurate with the weapon in question.  A simple (3d6) AGI
check should be given to toss the weapon aside far enough that
you are not in danger of receiving damage from it.

How does all that sound?

Lyle

-----Original Message-----
From:	Orion Furmanski [SMTP:thelaw@expert.cc.purdue.edu]
Sent:	Friday, September 25, 1998 12:11 PM
To:	Joel Gunderson
Cc:	Steve Ames; khelek@ns1.cioe.com; zodo@laf.cioe.com; gmlist@cioe.com
Subject:	Re: horsey stuff

	Hey folks, reighn it in here (pun intended). I have two female
friends who have owned and ridden horses. Niether is dead, and neither
have broken any bones from the falls. USUALLY you will NOT be killed by
falling off a horse, otherwise riding rodeo would not be such a popular
sport, to be sure.  Death occurs when one strikes the ground head-first,
or they get stepped on by the horse. Both events are extremely unlikely.
Defaulting tumbling is what my friends did, and they never walked away
from the wrecks with more than scrapes or the wind knocked out of them.
Put that in your pipes and smoke it.

Orion