Elephant ponderings

[Spacehamster]

Anyone have any clue why it’s so extremely easy to resist getting proned by an elephant charge? I mean a 12 STR save to resist a 22 STR huge beasts stampeding at you seems kinda silly does it not? O_o

[Christew]

The triceratops knows.

[Chronos]

That is odd. Usually, the DC for a monster ability would be 8+proficiency bonus+relevant ability mod. An elephant would have a +2 proficiency bonus, and one would expect that the relevant ability would be Str, for a total of 16. I suppose that they could be considering some other ability to be the relevant one, but an elephant doesn't get a +2 in any of its scores.

[Damon_Tor]

probably a kneejerk nerf because they put elephants in the equipment section as mounts. So they felt they had to balance them as something a player with 200gp might expect to be able to buy. Meanwhile Giant Elks, Rhinoceroses, tigers and dire wolves all have higher DCs on their prone attacks despite having much lower CR.

[Spacehamster]

probably a kneejerk nerf because they put elephants in the equipment section as mounts. So they felt they had to balance them as something a player with 200gp might expect to be able to buy. Meanwhile Giant Elks, Rhinoceroses, tigers and dire wolves all have higher DCs on their prone attacks despite having much lower CR.

Thats my thought as well, should be two diff elephants, one with 200 cost and one with 1000-2000 cost that is trained for war and has better abilities. :)

On that thought, anyone built a mounted char that had bought an elephant mount? Sounds fun, be a druid for free feeding it with goodberry. :)

[Damon_Tor]

Thats my thought as well, should be two diff elephants, one with 200 cost and one with 1000-2000 cost that is trained for war and has better abilities. :)

On that thought, anyone built a mounted char that had bought an elephant mount? Sounds fun, be a druid for free feeding it with goodberry. :)

Some of the fiddly mounted rules that your DM doesn't usually have to think about too hard become more of an issue the bigger your mount is. For example "which of the mount's spaces if any do you occupy". For example, is a reach weapon basically mandatory with an elephant mount? If you are in the middle, topmost space of the elephant (or in a space directly above the elephant's) it kind of would have to be. And that would be the reality of performing melee combat from the back of an elephant in real life: a African bull elephant is about 13 feet tall at the shoulders, how you going to sit on its back and hit a guy on the ground with a sword?

Now, if the DM rules that way that's fine, it makes an elephant rider the perfect lance build, just saying it's something that should be thought about.

[da newt]

Mounted Combatant would open up some crit fishing too.

The mammoth prone DC seems to support the mount nerfing hypothesis.

[Pildion]

probably a kneejerk nerf because they put elephants in the equipment section as mounts. So they felt they had to balance them as something a player with 200gp might expect to be able to buy. Meanwhile Giant Elks, Rhinoceroses, tigers and dire wolves all have higher DCs on their prone attacks despite having much lower CR.

Seems likely, but a DM can just make 2 different stat blocks, one for the Creature, another for the mount? If your players try to get an Elephant at all that is.

[Notafish]

Seems likely, but a DM can just make 2 different stat blocks, one for the Creature, another for the mount? If your players try to get an Elephant at all that is.

Really, I'd rather just strike elephants from the "normal" equipment list and think of them as exotic mounts like griffins or whatnot (and give the creature better stats). At the very least, if you are thinking about adding an elephant to the party, you ought to have to budget more than 5sp/day for stabling. 200gp for an elephant that can take a rider (even one that panics in combat) also seems like quite a value, if you are thinking about what that would mean in the narrative (rather than the stat block).

[elyktsorb]

Anyone have any clue why it’s so extremely easy to resist getting proned by an elephant charge? I mean a 12 STR save to resist a 22 STR huge beasts stampeding at you seems kinda silly does it not? O_o

Even more silly when you consider a Dire Wolf, with a 17 STR has a prone rider on their attack that has a 13 STR save. Which also has the benefit of you not having to move 20ft straight towards a creature in order to make it happen.

[Chronos]

Yeah, the root of the problem, I think, is that an elephant is cheaper than a warhorse. If that were true, every army in history would have used elephant cavalry. OK, an elephant can sometimes panic in battle. You know what else panics in battle? Absolutely anything that's trying to go up against a whole herd of elephants.

[Imbalance]

An elephant bred and trained as a beast of burden has been specifically taught to not trample and knock things down.