Ride-By attack question

[nexos10]

does Ride-By attack allow you to keeping moving through a foe's space, say if we were in the same 5 ft. column?

or would I have to be an adjacent column to be able to charge and then keeping moving?

or would I be forced to stop since I cant do an overrun while charging? would I be shunted to a different space?

[John Campbell]

Ride-By Attack, as written, doesn't grant any special ability to move through an opponent's space, and the line of a charge has to be directly towards your opponent, which if continued will go through your opponent's space, so, yeah, assuming you don't drop your target, Ride-By is rendered useless by basic geometry.

Both Ride-By Attack and Spirited Charge are, RAW, useless anyway, because they're both triggered by "when you are mounted and use the charge action", and if you read the actual mounted combat rules, that's not how mounted charges work. In a mounted charge, it's your mount using the charge action, not you. You merely have the option of making an attack at the end of your mount's charge.

The 3.x mounted combat rules are completely broken - they're internally inconsistent, do not work as obviously intended, and clearly no one ever thought through anything beyond the simplest scenarios. (For example, what is the Trample feat supposed to do if your mount isn't a horse? As written, it grants a hoof attack regardless of whether your mount has hooves.) I suspect that various pieces of them were written by different people, who weren't actually reading the parts that the other(s) had written. At one point, WotC produced a mounted combat FAQ, but it had so little relation to anything the rules actually said as to amount to a new and different set of incompatible and incomplete rules.

For a long while, I played a half-orc ranger who rode his dire wolf animal companion, and I ran into all kinds of places where the mounted combat rules just didn't work, especially because I was riding a mount that wasn't a horse, had its own feats (and not just the worthless ones typical animals get saddled with), and was a respectable combatant in its own right, even without me riding it. The DM and I ended up hammering out between us a How Riding Is Maybe Supposed To Work, which included things like pretending that Ride-By and Spirited Charge aren't carefully worded so that they never do anything at all, and allowing the line of mounted charges to be along the side of the target instead of directly into it so that you can actually Ride By.

We never did resolve the Trample question, but my wolf and I had better things to do with our feats anyway.