5e Phantom Steed, Am I crazy?

[BerzerkerUnit]

Aloha, I’m sure this has been talked to death, but I couldn’t define a thread:

Shouldn’t PS clear 22 mph on open terrain? Are we assuming rough terrain most of the way to get that 13mph?

100 feet per 6 sec. 200 with a dash x 10 rds is 2000/min x 60 min = 120000 feet/5280 = 22.7 miles

Any insight is appreciated.

[Amnestic]

You can't Dash constantly without risking saves against exhaustion, which would still affect a phantom steed, despite being an illusiory horse - they use the Riding Steed statistics and don't have an explicit immunity to Exhaustion.

[Catullus64]

Yeah, the travel movement rules by default are not a straight multiplication of walking speeds. They're mostly centered around a 3 mile per hour walking speed as the central point of reference (3 miles being roughly a league, a unit defined as 'one hour's walking distance'.)

For mounts in particular, they allow you 1 hour of doubled movement speed (of a fast pace) if you gallop them.

Since default fast movement is 4 miles per hour, that means you go up to 8 miles in an hour on an ordinary horse. Phantom Steed is a huge boost.

For more detail, see PHB p. 182-183.

[nickl_2000]

It is interesting because you should be able to push a Phantom Steed harder than you would a traditional horse since they only last 1 hour. Considering that they are illusions you should be able to push them to the brink where a normal horse would be foaming at the mouth without the guilt or worry of pushing the horse to death from exhaustion. Then at the end of the hour you recast and you get a fresh horse.

That being said, it sounds like an abstraction that isn't fun or worth it to me. However, if your table wants to go into that level for travel go for it.

[Segev]

Phantom steed has a lot of problems. The more you abstract your game, the fewer there are, because a lot of them are things like, "Wait, how often are you stopping to let the wizard re-cast the spell? Is he casting while riding, and constantly casting to keep a all the party's steeds going?"

It should probably be 8 hours in duration, or have (a lot) more hp (if not be immune to damage).

This thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?643115-Examining-Phantom-Steed-better-in-a-fight-than-I-thought) has some interesting discussion on the spell in general, starting with me positing something that I think is ultimately established to be not actually how the spell works, sadly. Post 20 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25379904&postcount=20) in particular is one of mine, and I'm discussing what 3.5 phantom steed did. AT the end, I suggest a "At Higher Levels" thing for 5e's version that might make it better.

This thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?645094-Upgrading-Phantom-Steed) has a homebrew version of the spell that I think addresses all of my issues with it. It is a flat upgrade, increasing duration to 8 hours and giving it those upcasts, but I think it still is balanced. It just really doesn't work well as a 1 hour spell: it's too short to make non-abstracted travel practical and it's definitely too fragile in combat.

The first thread I linked talks about it possibly being good in combat because the fade-out time lets it keep operating, but it is likely intended that the horse stop moving when that happens, so...that doesn't work. Unless your DM says it does. In any event, not very good in combat, and impractical for long-distance travel.

Edit: One point in favor of its hour duration is that this means you can exploit the "gallop for up to an hour" rules, which explicitly note that availability of fresh steeds means you can keep galloping all day, would mean that you gallop for an hour, the spell ends, you spend 11 minutes recasting it as a ritual, and gallop for another hour, as long as you wish to go. That means the "fast travel" of 13 mph is actually 26 mph, in practice. Still not great for party travel (as 44 minutes of casting to get all four horses for a 4-man party going is going to leave you with 16 minutes to travel before you have to recast the first one...and it's questionable whether you can cast an 11-minute ritual while galloping at speed), but if you're on your own....

[greenstone]

Combat move speed doesn't relate to travel speed.

There is no such thing as "open ground". There are creeks and bumps and hillocks and copses and fences and ravines and so on, all of which drag your average speed down over the course of an hour or a day. In the worst case, one bad river crossing could cost you hours of travel.

Even for a fly speed, you can't multiply out. Headwinds and crosswinds exist, as do storms you might have to go around.

You also can't travel at max speed all day - you need bio breaks and nav stops and the like.

Additionally, on a combat map we generally don't charge extra speed for moving uphill, but over a day we should. 8 hours uphill is going to cover less horizontal distance than 8 hours on the flat, regardless of whether you are walking, riding or flying.

Three miles an hour is a good approximation, because it means 2 hours per hex and 4 hexes a day on the most common hex scale for wilderness maps.

[Chronos]

There is no such thing as "open ground". There are creeks and bumps and hillocks and copses and fences and ravines and so on, all of which drag your average speed down over the course of an hour or a day.
If only someone had anticipated this problem, and actively created strips of deliberately-open ground, free of all of those obstacles, between often-traveled destinations. Something that lots of people would be expected to ride over, and have already ridden over many times. We could call such a thing a "ridden", maybe, or a "rode"...

Nah, it'd never work.

[Polyphemus]

I think a cop-out I once gave to one NPC who'd always seem to appear on a Phantom Steed whenever the party encountered him was he could use it past the hour mark until he ever dismounted, at which point the horse disappears immediately.
I believe I was inspired by an ability you could get in a Skyrim DLC where you could summon a ghostly horse for a while, but it would last past that allotted while so long as you were still riding it, but would despawn once you got off it.

[nickl_2000]

I think a cop-out I once gave to one NPC who'd always seem to appear on a Phantom Steed whenever the party encountered him was he could use it past the hour mark until he ever dismounted, at which point the horse disappears immediately.
I believe I was inspired by an ability you could get in a Skyrim DLC where you could summon a ghostly horse for a while, but it would last past that allotted while so long as you were still riding it, but would despawn once you got off it.

That's okay, NPCs are allowed to cheat in their abilities and spells. There is a gigantic thread on how it's perfectly fine too.

[Segev]

That's okay, NPCs are allowed to cheat in their abilities and spells. There is a gigantic thread on how it's perfectly fine too.

The trouble is, it really isn't. If an NPC can do it, and the NPC is ostensibly a similar sort of creature to a PC, why can't the PC learn to do it, too?

You can make up justifications, but the trouble is that you'll be making justifications that inevitably change the nature of every NPC out there so that they are not, in fact, what they present as.

[Polyphemus]

The trouble is, it really isn't. If an NPC can do it, and the NPC is ostensibly a similar sort of creature to a PC, why can't the PC learn to do it, too?

You can make up justifications, but the trouble is that you'll be making justifications that inevitably change the nature of every NPC out there so that they are not, in fact, what they present as.

Point taken, though funnily enough nobody at my table has ever really taken Phantom Steed? Or really messed with mounts and mounted combat much at all, actually.
Mostly we've used (non-illusory) horses to get from Point A to Point B, where we hitch them off somewhere before entering the Actually Important Area.
I can't speak for the others at my table, but me personally I've never really grokked the mounted combat rules in 5e? Unless I'm reading it wrong it sounds like you can't really attack in tandem with your mount, if your mount gets to make an attack at all, and that sounds kind of lame?
That could just be a critical reading comprehension failure on my part, though. :P
In any event,


It should probably be 8 hours in duration, or have (a lot) more hp (if not be immune to damage).
I second this idea. You could even alleviate some of my own struggles with the mounted combat rules, by making it immune to damage but unable to attack itself, so you don't really have to worry about fiddling with managing its HP or possible attacks or whatnot and just get your bonuses from the Mounted Combatant feat or whatnot, the drawback being that your mount can't attack.
...Though again, this is coming from a guy who Doesn't Grok Mounted Combat, so that might be more or less of a hindrance than I'm imagining it being :P

[Jervis]

-snip-

The fact that phantom steed is an hour creates a lot of problems I don’t think the developers intended. RAW you can cast it while riding with no issues, with the exception that the DM can call for a DC 10 constitution save to see if the casting gets interrupted. Now the least charitable interpretation of that says you need to make that every round but with no autofails on 1 that just means you need a +9. If you have a Paladin in the party that’s not hard to do at level 5 assuming a passable con score and resilient con as a feat. (Or you’re a fighter who took ritual caster wizard, that’s also not unlikely) Problem is that the short duration of the spell means that for a typically sized party you’re casting it every single second of your ride. The horse also poofs out of existence if you get hit with any AOE, a problem all mounts face but this horse has it worse because it only takes 1 damage. Granted that whole “1 minute to dismount” clause confuses everything. That’s part of why I created a homebrew counterpart of the spell that just animates a vehicle like a wagon or a chariot or something similar for a homebrew class of mine, that way one casting can carry a full party or let you specifically ride around in a magically enchanted chariot. That said the existing spell should really have a 4th level “mass” counterpart or some way to make steeds for everyone just to remove the jank. As written its not useful for travel because casting it takes 11 minutes and if you want to use it for it’s intended purpose you need to cast it 4-5 times, meaning if you don’t cast it while moving it’s literally dysfunctional.

[Segev]

The rules for a controlled mount (which is what you're typically going to be using) are:

When you mount it, your mount's initiative changes to match your own.
It still has its own action and movement, but they happen simultaneously with, overlapping with, and interspersed with your turn, as you choose. So you can have it move, you can act, and then you can have it continue moving, for example.
It can move and act even on the turn you mount it, so it can use all of its movement and its action when you mount it, and on your initiative each following round.
The only actions the mount can take are Dash, Disengage, and Dodge.
This does mean it can move twice its movement speed by dashing while you take your normal actions.
Disengage is important because if you have it move up so you can attack, then have it move away, it does provoke OAs, though you don't since you're not technically moving.
Dodge is important because mounts are fragile, so all the defense you can give them is good.
In practice, you can treat the mount's movement as your own as long as you're mounted, and it can dash without using your action to double that movement.

Controlled mounts are pretty awesome, but have some major fragility issues that are mostly mitigated only by auxiliary rules, such as having the Mounted Combat feat (which still doesn't help against everything, but goes a long way) or convincing your DM to let your favorite mount be your Sidekick and taking Warrior levels to beef up its hp.

Uncontrolled mount rules are even simpler, though they complicate executing your own turn: You both act on your own initiatives, independently, and you move with your mount as it chooses to move. I recommend either a house rule, or a rules exploit. The house rule would be that the rider moves his initiative to the uncontrolled mount's initiative and acts overlapping the uncontrolled mount's turn, as above for the controlled mount moving to the rider's initiative. The exploit would be to mount the mount and name it "controlled" when you mount it, and then choose to stop controlling it immediately. Its initiative has moved to yours, and your turns now overlap as above, but being uncontrolled, it now can move and act on its own recognizance.

[Chronos]

Quoth Polyphemus:

Point taken, though funnily enough nobody at my table has ever really taken Phantom Steed?
Yeah, because, as written, it's pretty useless. Segev's houseruled version (8 hour duration and upcastable) is a straight upgrade in every way, but it really doesn't break anything; it just makes it usable enough to be a reasonable pick.