Shattered Kingdoms

Why is a player who is wielding a ranking weapon while mounted unable to make a trip attempt? I understand being unable to initiate a standard trip as that commonly involves a great deal of clever footwork. However, it is obvious from the ability to trip through rank (specifically when using a ranking weapon) that the weapon and not the player's feet are being used to knock the enemy prone.

Probably because you can't reach the opponent's legs while mounted, and you cannot use the same tactics in mounted combat as you would be able to while fighting on foot.

Can't reach the opponents legs? If I am mounted and can aim lower, then I can hit their legs. The size variability of SK as far as races go completely dismisses that line of reasoning. A giant with immense reach would have no difficulty reaching anyone's legs from horseback even if we disregarded our ability to aim upper/mid/lower. A halfling on pony-back wouldn't have much difficulty hitting a giant's legs either. Maybe a medium sized race would have problems reaching small and tiny race's legs realistically, but we're not working with realism here.

I agree the tactics would be different, but the result would be the same. If I trip with fancy foot work, or sweep the legs with a long pole weapon, or coil a whip around the feet an pull, either way they're prone.

Wielding a polearm from horseback was not really done to begin with (exception: naginata). Yet we see it all the time in the magical realm of Shattered Kingdoms. Perhaps massive polearms not being capable of tripping from being mounted I could see. However, any non-massive ranking weapon would be perfectly capable at tripping from horseback.

ur overthinking it. trip is already better than bash in almost every situation. making it so u can trip while mounted would be overpowered as eff.

Reaching a target with your weapon, and applying a technique to disrupt their balance are two different things.

Please explain how. This isn't a sassy prove it, I'm genuinely curious. Is it because then the person tripping from rank would then be immune to trip (on account of being mounted?) Or is there more to it?

Yes, but those things are not mutually exclusive. You're not exactly trying to be careful when attempting to throw someone off balance with a massive polearm (trip does do some damage).

Finney's right in that trip is more powerful than bash, and that's primarily because trip has less lag both on a missed trip and on a successful trip compared to bash. As well, I personally get the feeling from anecdotal evidence that bash is more likely to critically fail and put you on the ground, although that's perhaps just confirmation bias.

Personally, I don't think trip should be allowed while mounted because it's just that good, even with the reflex-prone changes. You should be required to open yourself up to trip if you want to be able to trip.

Flying characters, natural or otherwise, are still capable of using the trip command whilst remaining immune to trip. Trip also has a critical failure where one trips themselves.

Well, fly comes with its own disadvantages now, including penalty to both accuracy and dodge, so melee classes that choose to be immune to trip are still taking a hit for it.

And yes, I know trip has its own critical failure, I just have a feeling that trip critically fails less often than bash. I might be wrong on that, perhaps it's just confirmation bias, I just get that feeling. Perhaps it's because trip has always had the "you fail to trip xxx" in addition to "You trip yourself" but a failed bash always knocked you prone.

Bash has as many status as trip as far as success and failure go.
Successful bash bringing the target to the ground.
Successful bash "hit" without the target going prone.
Miss and go prone.

Trip is very similar.
Successful trip- target goes prone.
Opponent leaps over your attempted trip!
Trip yourself.

The only difference as far as these three instances go is that the bash middle-ground does a small amount of damage(which is usually mitigated completely). I'm not disagreeing that in general trip is superior though.

And correct my noobishness if I'm wrong but do races with natural flight suffer the dodge and accuracy penalty for flying?

Edit: I would reiterate I'm not arguing for being able to trip while mounted, only that one be able to trip while mounted if they have a weapon capable of doing so (reaching weapons).