Mounts

1. For the most part, mounts provide a large speed bonus in combat. However, many mounts will also have an attack of their own, though it might be weaker than your own. They cannot be used to learn skills, spells, or runes for you, nor can they craft things, even if they have hands of their own.

However, it is possible to put runes on mounts, and they can then cast them. For runes on mounts, however, they may only have runes for the places that those runes can go. This means that nearly any mount can get back runes and head runes, however, if the mount has four legs, and not any arms, then they cannot get any arm runes, but instead can get double the amount of leg runes. The same goes for all parts of the body of the mount.

2. Mounts can be killed, and each one has its own amount of hit points. However, mounts cannot fall unconscious, unlike characters. Upon reaching 0 or below hit points, the mount dies. However, because of this, mounts can also be affected normally by healing spells and skills. 

3. When creating a mount, please be realistic. You cannot ride a dog or squirrel into combat, even if you are smaller than usual. There will be some "dire" animals, which are simply over-sized beasts, such as a wolf as large as a horse, however, this will not apply to anything smaller than a dog. I'm sorry, but you cannot ride a bear sized chipmunk into combat. 

4. For the most part, mounts cannot talk or interact socially. Normal horses cannot speak, so yours should not either. However, this can be changed if you create a unique mount, of which there is only one. For these mounts, however, they cannot be bought or simply found, and must be acquired on a quest. 

5. Unless the mount is bought, it will need to be trained before you can ride it. The word count required to train your mount will be listed on the mounts page. 

6. Mounts only have 4 attributes, unlike characters. These are health, strength, dexterity, and endurance. This is because they cannot learn or use spells, eliminating the need for patience or memory, and as already mentioned, they cannot craft.  However, because they can use runes which you inscribe on them, they do have endurance.

7. If a mount dies, you cannot move its body to a different area in order for it to be resurrected. If you want to bring it back to life, it has to occur within the topic that it died in, and someone must know the resurrection spell in order to do this. Otherwise, the mount is dead forever. 

8. You may not have more than one mount at a time. If you wish to switch to a different mount while you still have one, you must set your current mount free before getting the new one.

9. NOTE: When attacking while mounted, you will recieve a -1 on your weapons scaling. This means if you are attacking with a weapon that has high scaling while you are mounted, the scaling damage will only be 3, instead of the full 4 of a high scaling rank. When attacking with a weapon that has scaling in multiple attributes, lets say medium in dex and low in strength, the highest scaling will have the penalty, meaning that the medium scaling will be brought down to 1 rather than 2, but the low scaling remains unaffected. If the scalings for the weapon are the same (both at low scaling), then you get to choose which gets the penalty, and which remains unaffected.

10. Mounts can wear armor, however, it must be made specifically for them, and the general rule about weight and movement while in armor still apply. 

11. A mounts strength does not affect its maximum speed, however, it does affect the weight of armor it can wear, as mentioned above. However, the mount will also be weighed down by any armor that you wear, and their strength will determine how much it does slow them. This is expanded more in rule 14.

12. Mounts cannot level up or gain attributes. This being said, all mounts will only have a base damage for their attacks, and not have scaling for that attack.

13. In order to dodge a ranged attack while mounted, you must already be moving somewhat. You and your mount cannot suddenly make enough of a move to dodge a ranged attack if you are stationary while the attack is launched.

14. When you are wearing armor, the armor weighs a significant amount, and therefore, every set of armor has a weight scaling that determine how they affect your mount's movement speed. For these move speeds, look at the requirement The weight scaling's are as follow:

Immobile: The armor weighs too much for you to actually move at all.
Slow: Your mount's move speed is cut in half.
Medium: Your mount moves 20 feet per second slower than normal (unless this slows you by half or more, in which case, your mount's move speed is still half.)
Fast: Your mount moves at 10 feet per second slower than normal.
Unaffected: Your move speed is not reduced at all.