I mean, if you ask where something is and someone says "its at the other end of the building," are you going to check a different floor, or assume they mean its located at the other side of the building that you can reach horizontally?
If someone asks you where the copier is, and you know its 5 floors down, are you going to point down and say "its at that end of the building"?
No, in both these examples, "end" implies a horizontal orientation, because we exist in a spatial environment with a gravitation up and down. And that is locked into our brains to a silly extreme, like how we impose a "right side up" on pictures of Earth from space.
But again, it is still vague, and not really worth more than a fun debate.
But again, it is still vague, and not really worth more than a fun debate.
This part is true. Being able to debate what it means is interesting due to the general issues with the English Language or with how WoTC worded it.
However, your 'end' of the floor is only one example and a very narrow interpretation of what end stands for. If we go with your building analogy, you could say that the Top Floor of the building is the End of the vertical height of said building. Now, do we generally refer to it as the Top of the building? Sure, but thats not the only way to describe it. So you're cherry picking one specific example where a common term makes your whole argument, which is not true.
If we start to refer to, say building a house or something and you have a piece of wood. The end of that piece is the end, regardless of whether or not its laying on its side or standing up. In this case, you could lay the board as a footer or as a vertical support, and if your boss told you to place a bracket on the 'End' of that piece, you'd look for 1 of the 2 ends of that piece. Sure, its quicker to say top or bottom, or left or right, but all of the prior terms for that board are still correct.
If you are a monk in D&D and you run up a cliff from the bottom to the top, you are at the End of that cliff face. Sure its also the Top coming from the Bottom, but its still an end point. Just because we also use arbitrary terms like up and down, top and bottom, doesn't mean things don't have a start and end, regardless of orientation.
That works for something small, like what you can hold in your hands and can manipulate. But for anything we would designate "a wall", spatial terms come into play. That is why I applied it to directions in a building, which is what is happening with the monk "running along a wall."
We could refer to the top or bottom of a wall as the "end" of the wall in a really abstract sense, but that just isn't the convention in English. Where the wall ends horizontally is the end.
Yeah, I disagree with your convention. I have seen nothing that indicates the "end" of something indicates anything horizontal. I think this is just a narrow interpretation based upon a narrow opinion.
Yeah, I disagree with your convention. I have seen nothing that indicates the "end" of something indicates anything horizontal. I think this is just a narrow interpretation based upon a narrow opinion.
I agree with this completely. Just because its the convention where you are and in your mind, doesn't mean that its universally true throughout the English Speaking populace. I mean, take the Coke, Soda, Pop argument. There are so many different ways of ordering a soda/carbonated drink across the US that if you walk into a place to ask for a Coke, you're either going to get a Coke, or you're going to get asked for what kind.
Besides, there are enough people in this thread talking about how End doesn't have to mean horizontal, to prove that your way is likely more narrow than you're making it out to be. And to be clear, you're not really wrong for thinking that, just misguided(?) in picking this particular hill to die on (so to speak).
Odd. I was just looking under Sources >Source books>Players handbook and monk abilities go right from 7th level to 10th level with no 9th level ability to move on vertical or liquid surfaces
Look under Unarmored Movement within the Players under the Monk section, it comes under there.
As to another movie of with such movement of monks running up the walls, Mulan, the attackers attacking that trading post on the Silk Road are described as Shadow Warriors, you see both Deflect Missile get used, which then gets fired back over the wall by the one that caught it. Then you see them leap from the horses they are on and then run up the wall to the top to attack. No, I dont apologize for spoilers :P
Yeah, I disagree with your convention. I have seen nothing that indicates the "end" of something indicates anything horizontal. I think this is just a narrow interpretation based upon a narrow opinion.
I agree with this completely. Just because its the convention where you are and in your mind, doesn't mean that its universally true throughout the English Speaking populace. I mean, take the Coke, Soda, Pop argument. There are so many different ways of ordering a soda/carbonated drink across the US that if you walk into a place to ask for a Coke, you're either going to get a Coke, or you're going to get asked for what kind.
Besides, there are enough people in this thread talking about how End doesn't have to mean horizontal, to prove that your way is likely more narrow than you're making it out to be. And to be clear, you're not really wrong for thinking that, just misguided(?) in picking this particular hill to die on (so to speak).
I'm going to have to second this agreement and add in something further of my own.
There is a reason in Convention that most often we actually use qualifiers with words like End to clarify what end we are talking about. They could be "left or right", "top or bottom", "that" or several other qualifiers. It's something that we often use with words like end and several others. Now in common practice we might actually drop the word end off of the spoken part of it but it is most usually implied when we are speaking of such things. Top End is a common concept we are used to and tends to come to mind when talking about most objects and actually implies even when we don't realize it to many others that we use such things.
That wall that is mentioned for example. When your doing something along that wall and you say end. Left end, Right End, That end (with a nonverbal indicator as to what you mean often used), top end, and bottom end are all things that can be used and are relatively common place. Some of which we will drop the word end off of if it's easily implied to another without actually having to say it. "Hang it at the top of the wall" Implies that you want to hang whatever object 'it' is as high up and as close to the end of the wall signified as the top position as likely possible. Conversally "Set that at the bottom of the wall." Not only tends to imply which end of the wall you want it at, but in many respects tends to either imply there is either only one wall or to get to the bottom of it your going to have to change your own elevation to match it.
So this is something that comes up regularly in english convention that we don't really think about and involves much more than simply horizontal position.
For the TLDR. It just reiterates ways that moving across a wall can be more than just right and left so your free to ignore this.
The "top end of a wall" is only a meaningful phrase when referring to a wall going up a slope, and refers to the end of the wall which is higher. If you have a wall of constant height in level ground and tell a reasonably literate native English speaker to go to the top end (or the bottom end for that matter) of the wall, you're just going to get a confused look (unless they think it's some sort of riddle, perhaps, as with the "corner" of a cylindrical room).
Likewise "along" only refers to one direction (and its reverse), being the longer horizontal direction (which is where we get "a-long" from ... well, "andlang" if you want to be pedantic, but it's a referenceto length, any how), which holds for vertical surfaces just as it does in every other context - you can move along or across a road, along or across a river (or up and down in it), along through or up and down a wall. If you say a wall is 40 feet long, that's (a) never referring to it's height, and (b) actually synonymous with saying the wall is "40 feet along", though that's a somewhat archaic turn of phrase. If someone is climbing a wall and you tell them to move along the wall, that's a horizontal motion, not up or down. Just like if someone was swimming and you tell them to go along the river - there's zero chance they'll interpret that as an instruction to dive to the bottom or swim towards the shore, as "along" is a specific direction. If someone was swimming in a perfectly circular lake, "along" would be meaningless (it doesn't have "a long" direction), but certainly wouldn't mean diving down... the only applicable way to use the word there would be "along the surface" (the solitary case where you can take a 90 degree turn and still be moving "along" something). Likewise someone climbing a vertical ladder cannot move "along" it (unless it's quite wide) and Santa doesn't climb along your chimney (existence of Santa and complex Victorian era chimney systems notwithstanding). This all correlates with the idea of "length width and height", in which something can be a certain distance "long", a certain distance "wide" or "across", and a certain distance "high" or "deep" (a 10 foot long ditch, again, never applies to a vertical measurement). The one exception where "long" can apply vertically is when talking about a long movable object like a pole - a pole can be 20 feet long regardless of orientation, though if solidly fixed in a vertical position you'd say it was a "20 foot high pole" anyhow (as with flag poles). But the phrases "she scrambled along the pole" vs "she scrambled down the pole" do actually tell you the orientation of the pole. Interestingly this one point of ambiguity also never holds for rooms, the "long" direction is never vertical even if the height is much longer, as in the interior of a tower with no internal floors or stairs - probably because rooms unlike poles always have fixed orientations, so far as the language is concerned.
So "along" isn't ambiguous at all... but all that said I much prefer the interpretation where you can run up a wall just as well as along it, which if it wasn't RAI, most certainly ought to have been (in any not-super-gritty setting, anyhow) :P ... a monk can dash across the width of an Olympic swimming pool without falling in (and then shadow step 60 ft on top of that if they're a shadow monk), running up a wall isn't all that remarkable in context, even without it being a ninja movie trope.
The "top end of a wall" is only a meaningful phrase when referring to a wall going up a slope, and refers to the end of the wall which is higher. If you have a wall of constant height in level ground and tell a reasonably literate native English speaker to go to the top end (or the bottom end for that matter) of the wall, you're just going to get a confused look (unless they think it's some sort of riddle, perhaps, as with the "corner" of a cylindrical room).
Likewise "along" only refers to one direction (and its reverse), being the longer horizontal direction (which is where we get "a-long" from ... well, "andlang" if you want to be pedantic, but it's a referenceto length, any how), which holds for vertical surfaces just as it does in every other context - you can move along or across a road, along or across a river (or up and down in it), along through or up and down a wall. If you say a wall is 40 feet long, that's (a) never referring to it's height, and (b) actually synonymous with saying the wall is "40 feet along", though that's a somewhat archaic turn of phrase. If someone is climbing a wall and you tell them to move along the wall, that's a horizontal motion, not up or down. Just like if someone was swimming and you tell them to go along the river - there's zero chance they'll interpret that as an instruction to dive to the bottom or swim towards the shore, as "along" is a specific direction. If someone was swimming in a perfectly circular lake, "along" would be meaningless (it doesn't have "a long" direction), but certainly wouldn't mean diving down... the only applicable way to use the word there would be "along the surface" (the solitary case where you can take a 90 degree turn and still be moving "along" something). Likewise someone climbing a vertical ladder cannot move "along" it (unless it's quite wide) and Santa doesn't climb along your chimney (existence of Santa and complex Victorian era chimney systems notwithstanding). This all correlates with the idea of "length width and height", in which something can be a certain distance "long", a certain distance "wide" or "across", and a certain distance "high" or "deep" (a 10 foot long ditch, again, never applies to a vertical measurement). The one exception where "long" can apply vertically is when talking about a long movable object like a pole - a pole can be 20 feet long regardless of orientation, though if solidly fixed in a vertical position you'd say it was a "20 foot high pole" anyhow (as with flag poles). But the phrases "she scrambled along the pole" vs "she scrambled down the pole" do actually tell you the orientation of the pole. Interestingly this one point of ambiguity also never holds for rooms, the "long" direction is never vertical even if the height is much longer, as in the interior of a tower with no internal floors or stairs - probably because rooms unlike poles always have fixed orientations, so far as the language is concerned.
So "along" isn't ambiguous at all... but all that said I much prefer the interpretation where you can run up a wall just as well as along it, which if it wasn't RAI, most certainly ought to have been (in any not-super-gritty setting, anyhow) :P ... a monk can dash across the width of an Olympic swimming pool without falling in (and then shadow step 60 ft on top of that if they're a shadow monk), running up a wall isn't all that remarkable in context, even without it being a ninja movie trope.
While Along and Long come from a similar root wording. One actually prescribes to describing an amount of distance. The other actually moves through space. They are not interchangably linked as you described. Even if people used to used a common phrasing that suggested such. Common Phrasing does not always actually follow proper definition of words which is why they tend to be cultural.
Along merely means to move on a constantant direction on, any semblence of a particular direction is actually forced upon it by our assumptions and forcing of phrasing. Even though the words come from a similar place this difference is important that your ignoring. Your actually forcing the implication that Along has to be horizontal, it actually does not.
Forcing the Non-ambiguity just because some people use along interchangably as part of their cultural way of speaking does not actually make the issue at hand unambiguous.
I don't know if it's a good idea to go into the etymology of the word "along" as it's even more vague than the current form; a quick search gave me various translations as both "lengthwise" and "onward".
Even if you go by lengthwise (as in longest side) then while a town wall might be wider than it is tall, a tower wall will be taller than it is wide, so lengthwise can be either horizontally or vertically, but a DM could choose to limit a Monk to the direction of the wall's longest side if they wanted to. You also mention top end of a wall, but if you simply use top the meaning is unambiguous, likewise if you only say end, it suddenly means something else (end usually being understood to mean where there is no more wall to block your path), but neither is what the rule states.
I think ultimately the fact is that the wording chosen for the rule is imperfect, and for whatever reason Wizards of the Coast have never chosen to correct it or clarify it in any way, even though they must surely be aware of how people (maybe mis-)interpret it.
This suggests they've left it intentionally vague, so it's ultimately up to the DM either way. And honestly I think that's fine; when the Monk in your group says for the first time "I want to run up the side of the building" it will either feel right to the DM, or it won't, and at that moment the meaning becomes unambiguous for your group. 😄
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I'm not eager to bang my head against this particular wall, but this reasoning has been used a couple times and it's not sound. "Up" denotes a specific direction in the exact way you guys are asserting that "along" does. If you can think of a better word than "along" that means "in any direction as long as you stay adjacent," please feel free to submit it WotC. I don't think anyone is arguing the RAI here.
Even if you go by lengthwise (as in longest side) then while a town wall might be wider than it is tall, a tower wall will be taller than it is wide, so lengthwise can be either horizontally or vertically,
Well no, a wall ten feet long and a hundred feet high is still only ten feet long. You can't make a wall longer by increasing its height, that doesn't make a lick of sense.
Come to think of it, my reference to the "longer horizontal direction" isn't technically correct - you can have a street thirty feet wide and twenty feet long. Even a sword (which doesn't have a horizontal direction) could be a foot long and two feet wide, funny looking sword to be sure but "length" doesn't suddenly change direction. And you could certainly cut a one inch length from a two inch thick rope - again it's a pretty useless piece of rope, but the length remains the same direction. A complete definition of "long / along" would probably refer to the direction which is typically longest for that class of object (e.g. river, wall, road, sword, ship, etc.). It seems some definitions refer to "in the direction or parallel to the direction of" which assumes the speaker and listener have some contextual knowledge of the type of object involved (i.e. does is have a "direction"?).
In any case, the upshot is that "long" and similarly "along" refer to a specific direction (which happens to be the same direction), and not some other direction at right angles to it.
The mention of the "top end of a wall" was in response to a previous comment that claimed that that could refer to the top of a wall - which I was pointing out was a clumsy construction that would only be used if you were being intentionally obscure, as in a riddle. In normal usage, a wall has two ends (whether you can walk around the end or it abuts another object, etc.), hence the "top end of a wall" refers to one of those, and is an incoherent phrase if both ends are the same height. Unless, of course, it's a riddle and you're intentionally twisting the meanings of words to hide your intent.
I'm not eager to bang my head against this particular wall, but this reasoning has been used a couple times and it's not sound. "Up" denotes a specific direction in the exact way you guys are asserting that "along" does. If you can think of a better word than "along" that means "in any direction as long as you stay adjacent," please feel free to submit it WotC. I don't think anyone is arguing the RAI here.
Well, WotC already know how to use their words to explicitly include all the directions, as we can see in the description of the spell "Spider Climb":
Until the spell ends, one willing creature you touch gains the ability to move up, down, and across vertical surfaces and upside down along ceilings, while leaving its hands free. The target also gains a climbing speed equal to its walking speed.
So, Spider Climb allows you to move "up, down, and across vertical surfaces", while monk unarmored mobility allows you to move "along vertical surfaces", which on the face of it implies they aren't equivalent there.
However, (and this is a pretty big however) with a little digging I found that this wording (along) is used in official D&D 3.5e material, specifically the alternative monk class features in the Dungeonscape supplement:
Alternative Class Feature: Wall Walker You have the uncanny ability to travel along vertical surfaces for a short time. [...] as a move action, you can run up or down a vertical surface a total distance of 20 feet without making a Climb check. [...] (various limitations and increases with level are also discussed)
given that a previous version of the monk class used the same wording of "along" in the description of more-or-less the same ability while explicitly saying "up or down" in the detailed explanation, I think you could even go so far as to say that including "up or down" is RAW (regardless of what the English language definition is, the writers clearly think of it as including that), and by omitting the phrase "up or down" that was in the dungeonscape rule they just made the ability less restricted.
[...] Spider Climb allows you to move "up, down, and across vertical surfaces", while monk unarmored mobility allows you to move "along vertical surfaces", which on the face of it implies they aren't equivalent there [...]
Right, the language of Spider Climb is always what I use as evidence that Monks can run up walls, personally. Spider Climb makes it explicit that the preposition used for horizontal traverse of vertical surfaces is "across".
Therefore, if Unarmored Movement said "you gain the ability to move across vertical surfaces and liquids" then I would assume that it means horizontal movement only.
By RAW, across =/= along, otherwise they'd use the two interchangeably. The fact that Spider Climb uses "across" while Unarmored Movement uses both prepositions implies that the two have different meanings. And Spider Climb clarifies what "across" means in the context of moving on a wall; therefore "along" must mean something else, and the only logical conclusion to me is that "along" means "up, down, or across".
ETA: FWIW, the discussion of "end" meaning only a horizontal terminus is silly at best. When you are reading a book and you reach the end of the page, does that mean the horizontal edge, or the vertical edge?
ETA: FWIW, the discussion of "end" meaning only a horizontal terminus is silly at best. When you are reading a book and you reach the end of the page, does that mean the horizontal edge, or the vertical edge?
The end of the page is the "last" word, punctuation mark, symbol or picture on it, regardless of which direction it happens to be laid out... pages have inherent direction to them (just like walls ;) ). If the text were written in a spiral starting at the outside, the end of the page would be dead center.
The end of the page is the "last" word, punctuation mark, symbol or picture on it, regardless of which direction it happens to be laid out... pages have inherent direction to them (just like walls ;) ). If the text were written in a spiral starting at the outside, the end of the page would be dead center.
So the point stands, the "end" is not necessarily the horizontal edge.
[...] Spider Climb allows you to move "up, down, and across vertical surfaces", while monk unarmored mobility allows you to move "along vertical surfaces", which on the face of it implies they aren't equivalent there [...]
Right, the language of Spider Climb is always what I use as evidence that Monks can run up walls, personally. Spider Climb makes it explicit that the preposition used for horizontal traverse of vertical surfaces is "across".
Therefore, if Unarmored Movement said "you gain the ability to move across vertical surfaces and liquids" then I would assume that it means horizontal movement only.
By RAW, across =/= along, otherwise they'd use the two interchangeably. The fact that Spider Climb uses "across" while Unarmored Movement uses both prepositions implies that the two have different meanings. And Spider Climb clarifies what "across" means in the context of moving on a wall; therefore "along" must mean something else, and the only logical conclusion to me is that "along" means "up, down, or across".
ETA: FWIW, the discussion of "end" meaning only a horizontal terminus is silly at best. When you are reading a book and you reach the end of the page, does that mean the horizontal edge, or the vertical edge?
To Add onto what NVCoach stated here and that I believe I said previously in this particular thread by bringing up Spider Climb. The biggest difference between Spider Climb and the monk ability is that Spider climb lets you freely change direction while you are moving. There is nothing to imply this is the case in the monks base ability however. They seem to basically pick a direction and more or less move in that direction while they are doing it. They may be capable of veering left or right on that path but lack the ability to reverse course or Take a 90 degree turn in a new direction and things like that. This is where the Monks ability to move along walls and spider Climbs Ability to move across walls seems to really be different.
The end of the page is the "last" word, punctuation mark, symbol or picture on it, regardless of which direction it happens to be laid out... pages have inherent direction to them (just like walls ;) ). If the text were written in a spiral starting at the outside, the end of the page would be dead center.
So the point stands, the "end" is not necessarily the horizontal edge.
Exactly right - for a book page. But not for a wall, a road, a river, a cliff, a boat, a bridge, a hallway etc. The subtle point that you seem to have missed being that those aren't book pages. Not that it particularly matters for the original question, but the precise meaning of words can differ slightly in different contexts, and this is all covered above anyhow.
The end of the page is the "last" word, punctuation mark, symbol or picture on it, regardless of which direction it happens to be laid out... pages have inherent direction to them (just like walls ;) ). If the text were written in a spiral starting at the outside, the end of the page would be dead center.
So the point stands, the "end" is not necessarily the horizontal edge.
Exactly right - for a book page. But not for a wall, a road, a river, a cliff, a boat, a bridge, a hallway etc. The subtle point that you seem to have missed being that those aren't book pages. Not that it particularly matters for the original question, but the precise meaning of words can differ slightly in different contexts, and this is all covered above anyhow.
This is actually based in bad assumptions...
The end of a river is not strictly horrizontal in any means. The end of a river in common parlance is the point where the river meets some other body of water such as a lake or the sea. That has various levels of verticality to it because Most rivers are actually not strictly traveling horizontally but they actually travel in a somewhat downward angle that ranges from slight to practically straight down throughout it's journey.
the common Parlance of "off the end of a cliff" which is the closest to it being used pretty much universally means off of some point at it's upper most side with the entent that you would end up somewhere near the bottom.
And others that can come up for several of those other items either in commonality or in unique circumstances.
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I mean, if you ask where something is and someone says "its at the other end of the building," are you going to check a different floor, or assume they mean its located at the other side of the building that you can reach horizontally?
If someone asks you where the copier is, and you know its 5 floors down, are you going to point down and say "its at that end of the building"?
No, in both these examples, "end" implies a horizontal orientation, because we exist in a spatial environment with a gravitation up and down. And that is locked into our brains to a silly extreme, like how we impose a "right side up" on pictures of Earth from space.
But again, it is still vague, and not really worth more than a fun debate.
This part is true. Being able to debate what it means is interesting due to the general issues with the English Language or with how WoTC worded it.
However, your 'end' of the floor is only one example and a very narrow interpretation of what end stands for. If we go with your building analogy, you could say that the Top Floor of the building is the End of the vertical height of said building. Now, do we generally refer to it as the Top of the building? Sure, but thats not the only way to describe it. So you're cherry picking one specific example where a common term makes your whole argument, which is not true.
If we start to refer to, say building a house or something and you have a piece of wood. The end of that piece is the end, regardless of whether or not its laying on its side or standing up. In this case, you could lay the board as a footer or as a vertical support, and if your boss told you to place a bracket on the 'End' of that piece, you'd look for 1 of the 2 ends of that piece. Sure, its quicker to say top or bottom, or left or right, but all of the prior terms for that board are still correct.
If you are a monk in D&D and you run up a cliff from the bottom to the top, you are at the End of that cliff face. Sure its also the Top coming from the Bottom, but its still an end point. Just because we also use arbitrary terms like up and down, top and bottom, doesn't mean things don't have a start and end, regardless of orientation.
That works for something small, like what you can hold in your hands and can manipulate. But for anything we would designate "a wall", spatial terms come into play. That is why I applied it to directions in a building, which is what is happening with the monk "running along a wall."
We could refer to the top or bottom of a wall as the "end" of the wall in a really abstract sense, but that just isn't the convention in English. Where the wall ends horizontally is the end.
Yeah, I disagree with your convention. I have seen nothing that indicates the "end" of something indicates anything horizontal. I think this is just a narrow interpretation based upon a narrow opinion.
I agree with this completely. Just because its the convention where you are and in your mind, doesn't mean that its universally true throughout the English Speaking populace. I mean, take the Coke, Soda, Pop argument. There are so many different ways of ordering a soda/carbonated drink across the US that if you walk into a place to ask for a Coke, you're either going to get a Coke, or you're going to get asked for what kind.
Besides, there are enough people in this thread talking about how End doesn't have to mean horizontal, to prove that your way is likely more narrow than you're making it out to be. And to be clear, you're not really wrong for thinking that, just misguided(?) in picking this particular hill to die on (so to speak).
Look under Unarmored Movement within the Players under the Monk section, it comes under there.
As to another movie of with such movement of monks running up the walls, Mulan, the attackers attacking that trading post on the Silk Road are described as Shadow Warriors, you see both Deflect Missile get used, which then gets fired back over the wall by the one that caught it. Then you see them leap from the horses they are on and then run up the wall to the top to attack. No, I dont apologize for spoilers :P
I'm going to have to second this agreement and add in something further of my own.
There is a reason in Convention that most often we actually use qualifiers with words like End to clarify what end we are talking about. They could be "left or right", "top or bottom", "that" or several other qualifiers. It's something that we often use with words like end and several others. Now in common practice we might actually drop the word end off of the spoken part of it but it is most usually implied when we are speaking of such things. Top End is a common concept we are used to and tends to come to mind when talking about most objects and actually implies even when we don't realize it to many others that we use such things.
That wall that is mentioned for example. When your doing something along that wall and you say end. Left end, Right End, That end (with a nonverbal indicator as to what you mean often used), top end, and bottom end are all things that can be used and are relatively common place. Some of which we will drop the word end off of if it's easily implied to another without actually having to say it. "Hang it at the top of the wall" Implies that you want to hang whatever object 'it' is as high up and as close to the end of the wall signified as the top position as likely possible. Conversally "Set that at the bottom of the wall." Not only tends to imply which end of the wall you want it at, but in many respects tends to either imply there is either only one wall or to get to the bottom of it your going to have to change your own elevation to match it.
So this is something that comes up regularly in english convention that we don't really think about and involves much more than simply horizontal position.
For the TLDR. It just reiterates ways that moving across a wall can be more than just right and left so your free to ignore this.
I mean, "along" means "along". It's horizontal for running across the walls over pits and things. Otherwise it'd say "up" walls.
But it's not a big deal. That's just been my interpretation. Doesn't really break anything.
The "top end of a wall" is only a meaningful phrase when referring to a wall going up a slope, and refers to the end of the wall which is higher. If you have a wall of constant height in level ground and tell a reasonably literate native English speaker to go to the top end (or the bottom end for that matter) of the wall, you're just going to get a confused look (unless they think it's some sort of riddle, perhaps, as with the "corner" of a cylindrical room).
Likewise "along" only refers to one direction (and its reverse), being the longer horizontal direction (which is where we get "a-long" from ... well, "andlang" if you want to be pedantic, but it's a referenceto length, any how), which holds for vertical surfaces just as it does in every other context - you can move along or across a road, along or across a river (or up and down in it), along through or up and down a wall. If you say a wall is 40 feet long, that's (a) never referring to it's height, and (b) actually synonymous with saying the wall is "40 feet along", though that's a somewhat archaic turn of phrase. If someone is climbing a wall and you tell them to move along the wall, that's a horizontal motion, not up or down. Just like if someone was swimming and you tell them to go along the river - there's zero chance they'll interpret that as an instruction to dive to the bottom or swim towards the shore, as "along" is a specific direction. If someone was swimming in a perfectly circular lake, "along" would be meaningless (it doesn't have "a long" direction), but certainly wouldn't mean diving down... the only applicable way to use the word there would be "along the surface" (the solitary case where you can take a 90 degree turn and still be moving "along" something). Likewise someone climbing a vertical ladder cannot move "along" it (unless it's quite wide) and Santa doesn't climb along your chimney (existence of Santa and complex Victorian era chimney systems notwithstanding). This all correlates with the idea of "length width and height", in which something can be a certain distance "long", a certain distance "wide" or "across", and a certain distance "high" or "deep" (a 10 foot long ditch, again, never applies to a vertical measurement). The one exception where "long" can apply vertically is when talking about a long movable object like a pole - a pole can be 20 feet long regardless of orientation, though if solidly fixed in a vertical position you'd say it was a "20 foot high pole" anyhow (as with flag poles). But the phrases "she scrambled along the pole" vs "she scrambled down the pole" do actually tell you the orientation of the pole. Interestingly this one point of ambiguity also never holds for rooms, the "long" direction is never vertical even if the height is much longer, as in the interior of a tower with no internal floors or stairs - probably because rooms unlike poles always have fixed orientations, so far as the language is concerned.
So "along" isn't ambiguous at all... but all that said I much prefer the interpretation where you can run up a wall just as well as along it, which if it wasn't RAI, most certainly ought to have been (in any not-super-gritty setting, anyhow) :P ... a monk can dash across the width of an Olympic swimming pool without falling in (and then shadow step 60 ft on top of that if they're a shadow monk), running up a wall isn't all that remarkable in context, even without it being a ninja movie trope.
While Along and Long come from a similar root wording. One actually prescribes to describing an amount of distance. The other actually moves through space. They are not interchangably linked as you described. Even if people used to used a common phrasing that suggested such. Common Phrasing does not always actually follow proper definition of words which is why they tend to be cultural.
Along merely means to move on a constantant direction on, any semblence of a particular direction is actually forced upon it by our assumptions and forcing of phrasing. Even though the words come from a similar place this difference is important that your ignoring. Your actually forcing the implication that Along has to be horizontal, it actually does not.
Forcing the Non-ambiguity just because some people use along interchangably as part of their cultural way of speaking does not actually make the issue at hand unambiguous.
I don't know if it's a good idea to go into the etymology of the word "along" as it's even more vague than the current form; a quick search gave me various translations as both "lengthwise" and "onward".
Even if you go by lengthwise (as in longest side) then while a town wall might be wider than it is tall, a tower wall will be taller than it is wide, so lengthwise can be either horizontally or vertically, but a DM could choose to limit a Monk to the direction of the wall's longest side if they wanted to. You also mention top end of a wall, but if you simply use top the meaning is unambiguous, likewise if you only say end, it suddenly means something else (end usually being understood to mean where there is no more wall to block your path), but neither is what the rule states.
I think ultimately the fact is that the wording chosen for the rule is imperfect, and for whatever reason Wizards of the Coast have never chosen to correct it or clarify it in any way, even though they must surely be aware of how people (maybe mis-)interpret it.
This suggests they've left it intentionally vague, so it's ultimately up to the DM either way. And honestly I think that's fine; when the Monk in your group says for the first time "I want to run up the side of the building" it will either feel right to the DM, or it won't, and at that moment the meaning becomes unambiguous for your group. 😄
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I'm not eager to bang my head against this particular wall, but this reasoning has been used a couple times and it's not sound. "Up" denotes a specific direction in the exact way you guys are asserting that "along" does. If you can think of a better word than "along" that means "in any direction as long as you stay adjacent," please feel free to submit it WotC. I don't think anyone is arguing the RAI here.
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(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Well no, a wall ten feet long and a hundred feet high is still only ten feet long. You can't make a wall longer by increasing its height, that doesn't make a lick of sense.
Come to think of it, my reference to the "longer horizontal direction" isn't technically correct - you can have a street thirty feet wide and twenty feet long. Even a sword (which doesn't have a horizontal direction) could be a foot long and two feet wide, funny looking sword to be sure but "length" doesn't suddenly change direction. And you could certainly cut a one inch length from a two inch thick rope - again it's a pretty useless piece of rope, but the length remains the same direction. A complete definition of "long / along" would probably refer to the direction which is typically longest for that class of object (e.g. river, wall, road, sword, ship, etc.). It seems some definitions refer to "in the direction or parallel to the direction of" which assumes the speaker and listener have some contextual knowledge of the type of object involved (i.e. does is have a "direction"?).
In any case, the upshot is that "long" and similarly "along" refer to a specific direction (which happens to be the same direction), and not some other direction at right angles to it.
The mention of the "top end of a wall" was in response to a previous comment that claimed that that could refer to the top of a wall - which I was pointing out was a clumsy construction that would only be used if you were being intentionally obscure, as in a riddle. In normal usage, a wall has two ends (whether you can walk around the end or it abuts another object, etc.), hence the "top end of a wall" refers to one of those, and is an incoherent phrase if both ends are the same height. Unless, of course, it's a riddle and you're intentionally twisting the meanings of words to hide your intent.
Well, WotC already know how to use their words to explicitly include all the directions, as we can see in the description of the spell "Spider Climb":
So, Spider Climb allows you to move "up, down, and across vertical surfaces", while monk unarmored mobility allows you to move "along vertical surfaces", which on the face of it implies they aren't equivalent there.
However, (and this is a pretty big however) with a little digging I found that this wording (along) is used in official D&D 3.5e material, specifically the alternative monk class features in the Dungeonscape supplement:
given that a previous version of the monk class used the same wording of "along" in the description of more-or-less the same ability while explicitly saying "up or down" in the detailed explanation, I think you could even go so far as to say that including "up or down" is RAW (regardless of what the English language definition is, the writers clearly think of it as including that), and by omitting the phrase "up or down" that was in the dungeonscape rule they just made the ability less restricted.
Right, the language of Spider Climb is always what I use as evidence that Monks can run up walls, personally. Spider Climb makes it explicit that the preposition used for horizontal traverse of vertical surfaces is "across".
Therefore, if Unarmored Movement said "you gain the ability to move across vertical surfaces and liquids" then I would assume that it means horizontal movement only.
By RAW, across =/= along, otherwise they'd use the two interchangeably. The fact that Spider Climb uses "across" while Unarmored Movement uses both prepositions implies that the two have different meanings. And Spider Climb clarifies what "across" means in the context of moving on a wall; therefore "along" must mean something else, and the only logical conclusion to me is that "along" means "up, down, or across".
ETA: FWIW, the discussion of "end" meaning only a horizontal terminus is silly at best. When you are reading a book and you reach the end of the page, does that mean the horizontal edge, or the vertical edge?
The end of the page is the "last" word, punctuation mark, symbol or picture on it, regardless of which direction it happens to be laid out... pages have inherent direction to them (just like walls ;) ). If the text were written in a spiral starting at the outside, the end of the page would be dead center.
So the point stands, the "end" is not necessarily the horizontal edge.
To Add onto what NVCoach stated here and that I believe I said previously in this particular thread by bringing up Spider Climb. The biggest difference between Spider Climb and the monk ability is that Spider climb lets you freely change direction while you are moving. There is nothing to imply this is the case in the monks base ability however. They seem to basically pick a direction and more or less move in that direction while they are doing it. They may be capable of veering left or right on that path but lack the ability to reverse course or Take a 90 degree turn in a new direction and things like that. This is where the Monks ability to move along walls and spider Climbs Ability to move across walls seems to really be different.
Exactly right - for a book page. But not for a wall, a road, a river, a cliff, a boat, a bridge, a hallway etc. The subtle point that you seem to have missed being that those aren't book pages. Not that it particularly matters for the original question, but the precise meaning of words can differ slightly in different contexts, and this is all covered above anyhow.
This is actually based in bad assumptions...
The end of a river is not strictly horrizontal in any means. The end of a river in common parlance is the point where the river meets some other body of water such as a lake or the sea. That has various levels of verticality to it because Most rivers are actually not strictly traveling horizontally but they actually travel in a somewhat downward angle that ranges from slight to practically straight down throughout it's journey.
the common Parlance of "off the end of a cliff" which is the closest to it being used pretty much universally means off of some point at it's upper most side with the entent that you would end up somewhere near the bottom.
And others that can come up for several of those other items either in commonality or in unique circumstances.