Lizardmen (or other races with tails) and riding horses?

[garhkal]

OK. So looking through most of the books i can find, lizardmen can't ride regular mounts (Horses) cause of THEIR tails, but can and often are seen as riding giant lizards.. BUT many of those lizard like mounts they ride are higher HD than what normal mounts are, and are rare if ever to find in general human controlled lands.
So what OTHER sort of mounts could you see allowing them to ride?

Could they be allowed to ride horses with specialized (IE Costlier) Saddles?

[Halaster-Blackcloak]

I'd say no. Horses will probably not be too eager to have a 7' tall lizardman crawl up on top of it. Horses are only size L, with Lizardmen being right at the border of size L (7'). Giant lizards are size H (15' +). So I'd say the lizardmen need both a larger mount, and one that won't be inherently spooked by a lizardman.

[garhkal]

How much food/water do you think a Giant lizard would need to eat, compared to a war horse?

[Halaster-Blackcloak]

Well, I just did a quick Google search. Gecko adult lizards need up to 20 crickets to eat every other day. So that comes out to 10 crickets a day. Adult geckos are 8" - 10" long. So if a giant lizard is 15' long, that's 15-20 times as big as a gecko. So say 150-200 crickets a day. Or the equivalent in mass from rodents, etc. Not much food really. It seems it would amount to a lot less than a horse would need to eat, and easier to find food fit for a lizard than for a horse, in the wilderness.

[Lyrwik]

Well, I just did a quick Google search. Gecko adult lizards need up to 20 crickets to eat every other day. So that comes out to 10 crickets a day. Adult geckos are 8" - 10" long. So if a giant lizard is 15' long, that's 15-20 times as big as a gecko. So say 150-200 crickets a day. Or the equivalent in mass from rodents, etc. Not much food really. It seems it would amount to a lot less than a horse would need to eat, and easier to find food fit for a lizard than for a horse, in the wilderness.

If you're doing a comparison on the mass of the creature, you'll also need to take into account increase in width and height. Assuming the proportions stay the same, a creature that is twice as long, will also be twice as wide and twice as tall, ie roughly 8 times the total size (displacement) and weight. On that basis, a giant lizard which is 15 times as long, would potentially be around 3375 times the overall size in terms of overall weight. Assuming an average cricket weighs about .3g, that would work out to roughly 10kg per day (based on scaling up from the gecko/cricket figures). That number seems intuitively reasonable to me, for a creature of that size.

However, rather than trying to do that, I'd just look at comparable real world animals. The closest I can think of would be a crocodile, which according to a few sources I found suggested as little as 1kg per day (of course that would still depend on the size of the creature), and crocodiles are also very efficient metabolically. However, I'd use that as a starting point, to suggest that an active giant lizard would require something in the order of 1 - 10kg per day. However, if you want to go further you could also allow it to not need to eat every day, since large reptiles are often capable of eating just one large meal periodically and don't need daily nourishment.

[garhkal]

Well, then they have a sure fire way to dispose of enemy humanoids killed in battle!!

[Halaster-Blackcloak]

Feeding them enemy combatants would be a perfect solution to the feeding problem!

Hell, the lizardman entry states that the lizardman king requires 2 humans a to eat. If he doesn't get them, they kill 2 of his bodyguards to eat. So why not also just feed wounded or dying lizardmen fighters to the giant lizards after combat?

[garhkal]

Well the Lizardman i am on about is a PC fighter, in a party of humans and elves.. In my home realm (as my CJ shows) i allow gnolls and lizard men as the only 2 non straight up races.. The player is LOVING his LM fighter..

[Halaster-Blackcloak]

I had a player playing a lizardman fighter in my long-lasting Taladas campaign. He loved the character too! As did the minotaur fighter player. It's fun having a few non-standard race PCs.

[garhkal]

You should see him go off, when crawling claws attack the party at night.. Chewing into them, clawing them, stopping them... Hell, he even uses his tail to try and 'golf smack' them away..

[Cole]

They can ride giant lizards (like giant iguana looking ones) I've seen pics with saddles on them where they stand rather than sit.

Same could be done with war elephants.