Poll: Drover Skill

[Nuada99]

We recently merged the Ride skill with the Profession skill, Drover, to create a skill called Drover, a new Strength-based skill. Here's the writeup for Drover.

Profession (Drover) was an Int-based skill which represented the ability to pilot a vehicle, which could be anything from a mule-drawn wagon to a sleek, magic-powered, island-sized flying fortress. This skill is being used in the Vehicle Combat rules for the piloting station in a vehicle, but would also be useful in general "make sure the wagon doesn't get stuck in a pothole" checks.

We recently improved Ride (formerly Dex-based) to define what mounted combat does. In general, mounted combat (assuming your mount is combat-trained) grants a damage bonus to the rider for all of their attacks made while mounted, equal to the CR of the mount. This encourages players to keep their mounts upgraded, which is great, but might be too big of a buff at the top end. Hard to say without some playtesting. Also, mounts give a +1 higher ground bonus, if they are at least the same size as the creature their rider is attacking. Mounts cannot make attacks on their own, and basically do nothing if they don't have a rider. These rules make mounts quite nice, but also very simple, and keep them from ever becoming a second player character that doubles the length of a mounted player's turn each round.