Is that a mount in your pocket?

I was driving home yesterday when the question suddenly occurred to me how does my toon carry around all those mounts? At last count my priest has 50+ mounts. That’s a small herd of land and flying mounts following her around waiting to be called in. Not to mention that the slower mounts are always left in the dust by their faster counter parts.

 

Now the obvious answer (for those of us not role-playing) is that they’re not in our inventory but on a separate screen and we summon them so they’re not there until then. And that works if all you’re wanting to do is play the game and really think about things like that. Leaving plenty of time to scope out the entire Uluar loot table.

 

But since I had asked the question, there was no getting it out of my head until I worked out the problem. I initially came up with the idea that they were being stabled at the various places I went and I only used them when I was in that area. Like when I’m back in the Eastern Kingdoms were I can’t use my flying mount. The wall I then hit (not with my head) was that depending on where I am in Northrend, I may use any one of several mounts. I’ve got a macro that will summon one of my drakes if I’m in a fly zone, or one of my mammoths or bears if I’m in a no-fly zone. Not mention that I have access to all mounts at any given time. So I was still left wondering how that could be. If I was actually running around with access to all those mounts that can be summoned at a moment’s notice. I’d have to have some way of summoning them, if they weren’t following my every footstep.

 

My girlfriend had brought up the excellent point that we summon them. Ok, but how? Are we carrying around all those reins, whistles and what not as a material component to summon our mounts? If so, that’s a lot of stuff to be hauling around. Plus, since the reins probably all look a like, how would you know which one you were summoning? It’d be like the guy with the huge key ring in the movies where it’s takes him forever to find the one for the current lock. Now, you could just use whichever one you happened to summon at that time but what if you were wanting to ride your armored brown bear?

 

So now I’d managed to punch holes in both of my “clever” ideas. I took my question to an actual role-player. Arrens just happens to be a role-player and was on twitter so I asked him. After bating a few ideas around he left me with “this is a game mechanic thing that's simply understood to be there. Some things just can't be explained easily via RP.”

 

And with that I decided to just leave it at that. As he was after all right. :)

 

Thanks Arrens!