Sitting on a saddle (on the floor) gives a YAFM if you have sufficient skill in riding rather than the standard “It’s not very comfortable…”

You should be able to jump to the location of a saddled pet, which causes you to attempt to mount it. If you fail the mount check, you fall off to a random adjacent square and may take extra damage on top of the normal amount for failing to mount a steed.

When riding, a lance will count for much less weight than it will normally, because your saddle is presumed to have its own stirrup for the lance. When wielding the lance, it reverts to its full weight.

When you are riding and get engulfed, you should be “ripped from your mount”, because currently this behaves weirdly - you end up still riding your mount inside the engulfer, your steed is not adversely affected, and if you dismount you “float down” and the steed magically pops outside the engulfer. The size of your steed also doesn’t matter, so it also doesn’t make much sense if it’s something huge like a dragon.

A sentient and always-peaceful monster that you can recruit as a powerful steed, but you need to pay it a large amount of money to ride on it.

You can use #monster while riding a steed with a breath weapon to make it use its breath weapon. You get prompted for the direction.

You should be able to #loot your steed while riding it to get an item it picked up (or any item in its inventory besides items it has equipped such as its saddle). This requires you to have at least Basic riding skill.

Barbarians do not require a saddle to ride tame monsters.

Some way to make riding effective in the endgame (mainly addressing the problem that no steed can wear an amulet of reflection and usually dies to too much HP damage from ray attacks). This could be an artifact saddle that either gives your steed reflection or makes monsters focus only on the rider, or simply have the player’s reflection extend to their steed similar to how magic resistance does.

Tourists can get Basic skill in club due to having played baseball and being familiar with bats, and Skilled in riding because riding is a popular tourist attraction.

Any effect from a worn amulet applies also to your steed.

Kicking a dragon while you are riding it as a steed makes it use its breath weapon (if it is currently able to, with its cooldown over). This is still subject to possible tameness penalties and other side effects of kicking a steed. It’s not defined whether the player should control the direction it breathes in or whether it will select a target itself.

You can’t ride clinging monsters (how would you get onto them, or stay on them?).

Unicorns can only be tamed/ridden if you have never consorted with a foocubus.

When riding a non-flying, non-swimming steed, give a warning by making the steed stop and “shy away” before riding into water. Only allow this if you use the m command or the steed has already shied away once. But it’s not very fair or realistic to have the steed instadrown under you.

Add some mechanic that allows you to pay for training to unrestrict a skill and bring it to Basic. Players of any role are also able to get riding training.

A mechanism for checking the health of your steed that isn’t as specialized as a stethoscope. Possibly chatting downward at it gives you a clue.

When riding, your steed may randomly go in a different direction than you intended. Higher riding skill decreases this, and expert blocks it entirely. Possibly, the steed will use this ability to shy away from water or other known hazards.

Long worms and pythons can be saddled and ridden as steeds, but only if you are a small monster.

Jousting should be affected by riding skill, not just lance skill.

Knights start mounted, or else are trained enough to mount their horse from turn 1.

Saddlebags, a rarely generated container that can be applied to a saddled mount and then have gear put into it, allowing the player to offload some of their weight onto the mount. While they are as nonmagical as a sack, they have a higher base cost and weight. You can loot it on an adjacent mount by using the directional #loot command. Knights may start with one.