We spent the beginning of one session describing the geography of the country as they knew it, using the big old Greyhawk boxed set map from the 1980′s. Then I gave them a HORSE CHARACTER SHEET and some crayons. It was a big hit and the lone magic user (gnome warlock) in the group has a somewhat aberrant magical horse that does things like munch on small mammals while grazing at night. The gnome is planning to go back to IUZ to find out what’s wrong with his “horse”.
http://lo-res.com/ftp/HorseCharacterSheet.pdf

I’ve now had the enemy attack their horses twice (lizardfolk, gnoll’s hyenas). Yes they have a rapport with their horse, but also walking sucks. I expect they’ll all spring for some barding to help their horse’s AC when they get back in town to see the blacksmith, or perhaps shell out some $ for warhorses somewhere down the line.

The other was a relatively simple mage (from Companion II for those who recall it) called Flying Disk. A simple circle of force that could carry a goodly weight for an hour or so. You could cast those Disks within frameworks and voila create flying “Diskcraft.” Both were fun and lead to hundreds of miles being consumed as the PCs flitted about across the continent and beyond.

I think the best way to get players excited about animals is to give them a lot of agency with the animal and a clear identity for the beast. The players can decide the name, the color and they get to roll the hp and maybe a quirk or special ability for the creature.

In D&D the stats should be easy to remember too – maybe just one line.
E.g. Murderhoof, AC 15, hp 13, hooves +5 (1d6+3), saves+2, horsery+5 is enough for a 3.x horse.

Some games do handle this well. I played many enjoyable sessions of The Fantasy Trip, for example, with Arthurian knights slaughtering highway bandits, ogres, giants, and each other with lance and sword from horseback. An excellent horse was one of a character’s most prized possessions, and you’d take great risks to preserve it. Characters would flee from enemies to save their warhorses before they’d flee to save themselves, even though the horses were seldom the ones in most danger.

Quick off-the-cuff rule: We know the many hit points of a high-level character are largely a measure of luck and divine favor. There is no reason this luck and favor can’t extend to the character’s mount (provided the mount is a normal animal – supernatural creatures like dragons have their own luck and favor). So if a 100hp fighter mounts up on a 15hp horse, the horse gains 100 temporary hit points. Same thing goes for saving throws; if the character makes it, so does the mount.

Quick in-game justification for this rule: We already know that a character’s hit points protect the character’s clothing. How do we know that? Consider this – if a low-damage spell like burning hands is enough to turn a normal peasant (including his shirt) into a pile of smoked sausage, shouldn’t a high-damage spell like fireball be even more destructive? Yet when was the last time a 10HD fireball left your high-level group naked? If an 80hp cleric can brush off a fireball spell, and if the cleric’s delicate less-than-one-hp silk mantle can brush off the fireball spell, then so can the cleric’s 15hp horse.

In 3.5 there was a way for someone to ride inside of a gelatinous cube and I took advantage of that as a GM. I added a template to the cube to make it tougher and put a sorcerer inside of it. The combination of potion effects and a spellcaster made the encounter overwhelming and the party almost didn’t make it.

I am currently playing a small sized witch, and his mount has allowed him to do so much more that I really, really want to find a way to keep the mount alive in higher levels. A medium sized mount can go into almost any part of a dungeon, and is strong enough to carry a large amount of gear.

There needs to be some way to easily make mounts tougher without causing a paladin’s or cavalier’s mount to be trivial. To be honest, just more HP would be a big step but special magical items just for mounts would also go a long way.

Ranged combat should get some more love since historically the Huns used cavalry charges to increase the range and damage of their arrows.