I really don't like messing with the rules. This tends to have unforeseen consequences. Something I have noticed. The old "Run" action does move 120 feet in older editions, and the Dash action only gets you to 60, but what nobody seems to have mentioned yet, is that you can take two of them, that's a sprint, and you go 120 feet with it.
Running and charging are in the game. One dash action makes you run, but only 60 feet, if you have the Charger feat, you can take a swing at your target. If you've really got to cover some ground, you use two Dash actions and you're up to 120 feet. It makes sense to me that you'd arrive a little winded, so the Charger feat isn't any use at that point. If you just have to take an attack at the end of a sprint, a second level Fighter can use Action Surge.
If you want extra detailed, "tactical" combat that includes things like extra fast running, charge attacks, different AC values for being flat footed or when targeted with a touch attack, and grappling rules that resemble their own separate system that adjudicates what's basically an MMA fight with knives, then play 3.5 rules. It has all of those things and still exists along with plenty of supplementary materials that include extra feats, prestige classes, task specific weapons, armor, etc, and all the rules you could need to get extra "realistic" in your combats.
5e doesn't have those things because it's intended from the ground up to be simpler and more streamlined by intentionally not having all those extraneous special rules for every conceivable action a character might take. The extra rules take longer to learn and take longer to play out and factor all of the modifiers and calculations that inevitably come along as a result, which slows combats and takes much longer to play any given encounter. Charge attacks are intentionally not included in 5e. It's not a design flaw, it's a deliberately planned feature.
I really don't like messing with the rules. This tends to have unforeseen consequences. Something I have noticed. The old "Run" action does move 120 feet in older editions, and the Dash action only gets you to 60, but what nobody seems to have mentioned yet, is that you can take two of them, that's a sprint, and you go 120 feet with it.
Not unless you have a special feature that allows it. Dash is an action, and by default you only get one action per turn.
A Fighter can use Action Surge to Dash again. A rogue can use Cunning Action to Dash as a bonus action. And a Monk can use Step of the Wind to Dash as a bonus action.
However, Dash does not mean move 60 feet. It means move your movement speed (30 feet for most characters). Most characters can move 60 feet in a turn by using their movement to go 30 feet and Dash to go 30 more. Those classes that can Dash as an extra action or a bonus action can do one more Dash, which is 30 more feet, and go 90 feet in a turn.
Monks get extra movement speed as they level up. At level 18, their base movement speed is 60 feet for most races. So with Step of the Wind, they can move 180 feet in a turn.
I'm sure there are ways to boost it even more with spells and items, etc. That's why there was the allusion to monks going the speed of sound.
Is it? Is it really? Because my experience points to it being quite important to have at least one STR character in the party.
A lot of the time this can be circumvented by using items or magic or a pack mount or a bit of creativity. The DM can contrive circumstances where it becomes necessary for a PC to use their own physical strength, sure, but I wouldn't say that makes it important. Every PC will always have some weakness or other the DM can target, that's pretty much unavoidable.
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Is it? Is it really? Because my experience points to it being quite important to have at least one STR character in the party.
A lot of the time this can be circumvented by using items or magic or a pack mount or a bit of creativity. The DM can contrive circumstances where it becomes necessary for a PC to use their own physical strength, sure, but I wouldn't say that makes it important. Every PC will always have some weakness or other the DM can target, that's pretty much unavoidable.
Grapples, similar spell effects (entangle, web), etc.
Strength may be greatly diminished in utility over prior editions but not something that should be completely neglected in a party.
I mean, it's great of those things happen to target a character with decent to great strength but if they go after Flop the Permanently Infirm it doesn't really help his weak ass that Big Hoss is flexing his guns 20 ft over.
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Is it? Is it really? Because my experience points to it being quite important to have at least one STR character in the party.
A lot of the time this can be circumvented by using items or magic or a pack mount or a bit of creativity. The DM can contrive circumstances where it becomes necessary for a PC to use their own physical strength, sure, but I wouldn't say that makes it important. Every PC will always have some weakness or other the DM can target, that's pretty much unavoidable.
Grapples, similar spell effects (entangle, web), etc.
Strength may be greatly diminished in utility over prior editions but not something that should be completely neglected in a party.
I mean, it's great of those things happen to target a character with decent to great strength but if they go after Flop the Permanently Infirm it doesn't really help his weak ass that Big Hoss is flexing his guns 20 ft over.
PC's can actually help each other in combat, including free each other from things like webs, nets, snares, etc
Absolutely, by casting Freedom of Movement or Dispel Magic or by shooting the grappler. That's if you can spare the action needed to free someone up in combat in the first place, rather than doing something that might actually finish the fight sooner. I'm being pedantic, I know, but the point is that this gets pretty circumstantial.
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Back in 3e, normal movement speed was 30' (same as current edition), but you could move up to 120' in a straight line by taking the Run action (which caused you to be flat-footed), or up to 60' while still making a melee attack (which gave a bonus to attack but a penalty to defense). This made it a lot more practical for melee combatants to close, which I've noticed being a major challenge in 5e. Should some variant of those be brought back? 120' in 6 seconds is 13.6 mph, which is hardly unreasonable for an adventurer.
Since Strength is an underpowered stat, I've been toying with the idea of letting high Strength characters have higher movement, and punishing low-Strength characters with slower movement. I haven't come up with a solution I consider satisfying yet, but my best so far does allow any sufficiently strong Rogue or Monk to go 120': convert racial walking speed to a modifier relative to 30 - so 25 is -5 and 35 is +5, for example - and then convert walking speed to 15 + 5*ceiling(Strength/5) + modifier. So Strength 6-10 is Speed 25 for most races, 11-15 is 30, and 16-20 is 35. 21-25 is 40, which is enough for 120 by Dashing twice and moving once.
Still a work in progress, but it seemed on-topic to share.
I honestly like this, but I have this Tortle tank character that would be zipping around like nobody's business with this houserule. Any notions of armor having an impact on this?
I wasn't intending to nerf or buff how armor affects movement, but you could apply similar logic to what I used to have the size of the speed penalty the armor inflicts scale with relative weakness, instead of being flat. You could choose to buff being slightly too weak or not, and could choose to nerf being much too weak or not, and you could combine both.
Is it? Is it really? Because my experience points to it being quite important to have at least one STR character in the party.
Yes, it really is. It being important to have a STR character in the party or not doesn't impact my statement, because my statement was relative, not absolute. The single most underpowered stat in general is Intelligence, and it's usually quite important to have an INT character in the party.
PC's can actually help each other in combat, including free each other from things like webs, nets, snares, etc
Absolutely, by casting Freedom of Movement or Dispel Magic or by shooting the grappler. That's if you can spare the action needed to free someone up in combat in the first place, rather than doing something that might actually finish the fight sooner. I'm being pedantic, I know, but the point is that this gets pretty circumstantial.
All three your alternative solutions also use actions, two of them use spell slots and the third is not guaranteed to work. If it is a non-magical grapple, there is no concentration to break and the caster may have cover and be not so easily targeted. Or may simply retain concentration. It may not even be clear who the caster was.
All true, but besides the point. All actions taken in combat that don't really advance winning it are circumspect, it doesn't matter what they are - that's part of my point, helping someone out in combat is often quite suboptimal. In such cases, having a high Str character to help is not important as they'll likely be doing something else anyway. Trying to pull someone out of an entanglement or helping them get out of a non-magical grapple isn't guaranteed to work either, but shooting and eventually killing the grappler will while also bringing the fight to a close sooner.
I don't disagree that having a high Str character is sometimes useful. Any quality can be made useful if circumstances call for it. What I'm saying is that in the case of Str, the frequency with which a high Str character not only is useful but also can't be replaced with another solution isn't high enough to make having at least one of them in the party quite important.
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Back in 3e, normal movement speed was 30' (same as current edition), but you could move up to 120' in a straight line by taking the Run action (which caused you to be flat-footed), or up to 60' while still making a melee attack (which gave a bonus to attack but a penalty to defense). This made it a lot more practical for melee combatants to close, which I've noticed being a major challenge in 5e. Should some variant of those be brought back? 120' in 6 seconds is 13.6 mph, which is hardly unreasonable for an adventurer.
13.6 mph is almost exactly the speed of an olympic marathon runner. Are you seriously saying that someone with armor and many pounds of equipment should be anywhere close to that? The short answer is, yes, it is totally unreasonable for an adventurer to reach that speed, even for a short burst.
13.6 mph is almost exactly the speed of an olympic marathon runner. Are you seriously saying that someone with armor and many pounds of equipment should be anywhere close to that?
That's the rate they're keeping up for 26 miles, which is completely different from combat sprinting. 6 seconds to dash 40 yards is competent but not noteworthy.
13.6 mph is almost exactly the speed of an olympic marathon runner. Are you seriously saying that someone with armor and many pounds of equipment should be anywhere close to that?
That's the rate they're keeping up for 26 miles, which is completely different from combat sprinting. 6 seconds to dash 40 yards is competent but not noteworthy.
In full kit? Which for a typical adventurer is much more bulky than modern full kit? And there is no exhaustion penalty in 5e for maintaining a full sprint
There not being any negative effects for maintaining a full sprint cuts both ways: on the one hand, yes, that means you implausibly get to run full tilt while shouldering the load of potentially a rather heavy getup; on the other hand, your regular movement isn’t equally implausibly treated as if you’ve already ran a 10k uphill while dragging a grand piano behind you and are about to do the second leg. Always getting to run as if you’re fresh, unburdened and ready and won’t be running far despite none of that being true seems silly, but the opposite - always having to run as if you’re carrying a heavy load, already had two hours of serious exercise and anticipate having to run a really long distance - would be arguably be a lot worse if you’re supposed to be a protagonist in a heroic fantasy. Not having penalties for maintaining a sprint is a problem (insofar as it is a problem) with having no such penalties, not with armor.
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13.6 mph is almost exactly the speed of an olympic marathon runner. Are you seriously saying that someone with armor and many pounds of equipment should be anywhere close to that?
That's the rate they're keeping up for 26 miles, which is completely different from combat sprinting. 6 seconds to dash 40 yards is competent but not noteworthy.
In full kit? Which for a typical adventurer is much more bulky than modern full kit? And there is no exhaustion penalty in 5e for maintaining a full sprint
There not being any negative effects for maintaining a full sprint cuts both ways: on the one hand, yes, that means you implausibly get to run full tilt while shouldering the load of potentially a rather heavy getup; on the other hand, your regular movement isn’t equally implausibly treated as if you’ve already ran a 10k uphill while dragging a grand piano behind you and are about to do the second leg. Always getting to run as if you’re fresh, unburdened and ready and won’t be running far despite none of that being true seems silly, but the opposite - always having to run as if you’re carrying a heavy load, already had two hours of serious exercise and anticipate having to run a really long distance - would be arguably be a lot worse if you’re supposed to be a protagonist in a heroic fantasy. Not having penalties for maintaining a sprint is a problem (insofar as it is a problem) with having no such penalties, not with armor.
I did not mean to imply it was specific to armor, although, in context, I can see how that could be assumed. You are running with a full pack and likely at least a weapon or two strapped to your hip and in something resembling hiking boots (at best) rather than track shoes, even if wearing no armour at all.
Yes, but that's an issue with the system not differentiating (much) between running completely unburdened and running in your adventuring kit - it's not an issue with your default running speed. Forty yards in 6 seconds, by itself, is perfectly ok.
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"Forty yards in 6 seconds, by itself, is perfectly ok."
The very top NFL players can run 40 yards in ~4.5 seconds. Without any weight or equipment. You think 40 yards in armor and equipment in 6 seconds is not noteworthy?!
"Forty yards in 6 seconds, by itself, is perfectly ok."
The very top NFL players can run 40 yards in ~4.5 seconds. Without any weight or equipment. You think 40 yards in armor and equipment in 6 seconds is not noteworthy?!
Would like to hear your basis for that.
Again, the system doesn't differentiate between armor or no armor. That speed applies as much to a barbarian in a loincloth as to a paladin in full plate. Should it make a distinction? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that it doesn't and we're getting the movement speed that is plausible in a no armor context in both cases. You want to bring back movement penalties for armor, be my guest. More power to you. But absent such penalties, it's fine. Really.
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5e does have rules for not being able to maintain a sprint.
Firstly there are the chase rules, which make you make a Con check after you've Dashed a limited number of times, gaining exhaustion when you fail. After gaining two levels of exhaustiom, your speed is halved.
Second there are the long-distance travel rates, which are about equivalent to non-dashing speed.
I think a simple house rule if you want to allow variation in running speed would be to incorporate an Athletics check into the Dash action. The roll is at disadvantage if you're wearing heavy armor. Add a modifier to your movement speed depending on your roll to determine how far you can dash.
5 or less: -5
6 - 10: 0
11 - 15: +5
16 - 20: +10
20 - 24: +20
25 - 30: +30
30 or more: +60
So yeah, if you have expertise in Athletics and are Guidanced or inspired, you can hit Olympic pace some of the time.
"Forty yards in 6 seconds, by itself, is perfectly ok."
The very top NFL players can run 40 yards in ~4.5 seconds. Without any weight or equipment. You think 40 yards in armor and equipment in 6 seconds is not noteworthy?!
Would like to hear your basis for that.
Again, the system doesn't differentiate between armor or no armor. That speed applies as much to a barbarian in a loincloth as to a paladin in full plate. Should it make a distinction? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that it doesn't and we're getting the movement speed that is plausible in a no armor context in both cases. You want to bring back movement penalties for armor, be my guest. More power to you. But absent such penalties, it's fine. Really.
Well, it is not fine, IMHO. You're going to have monsters (rules have to work for them too) running at characters from long distance with no chance for a bowshot or spell in many cases. Players should be rightly upset that they did not reasonably get to use their abilities and everything just turns into a melee fight.
I have experience here. 35 years in the U.S. Army and my armor, helmet, pistol and all the ammo weighed 42 pounds, not counting my M-4. To ask a soldier to do a 40 yard dash in record time is plain ridiculous. It has no verisimilitude to it and seems to just be a way for fighters to get into melee without suffering spells or bowfire.
"Forty yards in 6 seconds, by itself, is perfectly ok."
The very top NFL players can run 40 yards in ~4.5 seconds. Without any weight or equipment. You think 40 yards in armor and equipment in 6 seconds is not noteworthy?!
Would like to hear your basis for that.
A 25% reduction in speed is a lot, your average high school athlete will come in comfortably under six seconds. There's an argument for having it based on your Athletics skill, something like 100' + 10' * check bonus (which lets high level fighters achieve superhuman speed, but meh).
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I really don't like messing with the rules. This tends to have unforeseen consequences. Something I have noticed. The old "Run" action does move 120 feet in older editions, and the Dash action only gets you to 60, but what nobody seems to have mentioned yet, is that you can take two of them, that's a sprint, and you go 120 feet with it.
Running and charging are in the game. One dash action makes you run, but only 60 feet, if you have the Charger feat, you can take a swing at your target. If you've really got to cover some ground, you use two Dash actions and you're up to 120 feet. It makes sense to me that you'd arrive a little winded, so the Charger feat isn't any use at that point. If you just have to take an attack at the end of a sprint, a second level Fighter can use Action Surge.
<Insert clever signature here>
If you want extra detailed, "tactical" combat that includes things like extra fast running, charge attacks, different AC values for being flat footed or when targeted with a touch attack, and grappling rules that resemble their own separate system that adjudicates what's basically an MMA fight with knives, then play 3.5 rules. It has all of those things and still exists along with plenty of supplementary materials that include extra feats, prestige classes, task specific weapons, armor, etc, and all the rules you could need to get extra "realistic" in your combats.
5e doesn't have those things because it's intended from the ground up to be simpler and more streamlined by intentionally not having all those extraneous special rules for every conceivable action a character might take. The extra rules take longer to learn and take longer to play out and factor all of the modifiers and calculations that inevitably come along as a result, which slows combats and takes much longer to play any given encounter. Charge attacks are intentionally not included in 5e. It's not a design flaw, it's a deliberately planned feature.
Is it? Is it really? Because my experience points to it being quite important to have at least one STR character in the party.
Not unless you have a special feature that allows it. Dash is an action, and by default you only get one action per turn.
A Fighter can use Action Surge to Dash again. A rogue can use Cunning Action to Dash as a bonus action. And a Monk can use Step of the Wind to Dash as a bonus action.
However, Dash does not mean move 60 feet. It means move your movement speed (30 feet for most characters). Most characters can move 60 feet in a turn by using their movement to go 30 feet and Dash to go 30 more. Those classes that can Dash as an extra action or a bonus action can do one more Dash, which is 30 more feet, and go 90 feet in a turn.
Monks get extra movement speed as they level up. At level 18, their base movement speed is 60 feet for most races. So with Step of the Wind, they can move 180 feet in a turn.
I'm sure there are ways to boost it even more with spells and items, etc. That's why there was the allusion to monks going the speed of sound.
A lot of the time this can be circumvented by using items or magic or a pack mount or a bit of creativity. The DM can contrive circumstances where it becomes necessary for a PC to use their own physical strength, sure, but I wouldn't say that makes it important. Every PC will always have some weakness or other the DM can target, that's pretty much unavoidable.
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I mean, it's great of those things happen to target a character with decent to great strength but if they go after Flop the Permanently Infirm it doesn't really help his weak ass that Big Hoss is flexing his guns 20 ft over.
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Absolutely, by casting Freedom of Movement or Dispel Magic or by shooting the grappler. That's if you can spare the action needed to free someone up in combat in the first place, rather than doing something that might actually finish the fight sooner. I'm being pedantic, I know, but the point is that this gets pretty circumstantial.
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I wasn't intending to nerf or buff how armor affects movement, but you could apply similar logic to what I used to have the size of the speed penalty the armor inflicts scale with relative weakness, instead of being flat. You could choose to buff being slightly too weak or not, and could choose to nerf being much too weak or not, and you could combine both.
Yes, it really is. It being important to have a STR character in the party or not doesn't impact my statement, because my statement was relative, not absolute. The single most underpowered stat in general is Intelligence, and it's usually quite important to have an INT character in the party.
All true, but besides the point. All actions taken in combat that don't really advance winning it are circumspect, it doesn't matter what they are - that's part of my point, helping someone out in combat is often quite suboptimal. In such cases, having a high Str character to help is not important as they'll likely be doing something else anyway. Trying to pull someone out of an entanglement or helping them get out of a non-magical grapple isn't guaranteed to work either, but shooting and eventually killing the grappler will while also bringing the fight to a close sooner.
I don't disagree that having a high Str character is sometimes useful. Any quality can be made useful if circumstances call for it. What I'm saying is that in the case of Str, the frequency with which a high Str character not only is useful but also can't be replaced with another solution isn't high enough to make having at least one of them in the party quite important.
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13.6 mph is almost exactly the speed of an olympic marathon runner. Are you seriously saying that someone with armor and many pounds of equipment should be anywhere close to that? The short answer is, yes, it is totally unreasonable for an adventurer to reach that speed, even for a short burst.
That's the rate they're keeping up for 26 miles, which is completely different from combat sprinting. 6 seconds to dash 40 yards is competent but not noteworthy.
There not being any negative effects for maintaining a full sprint cuts both ways: on the one hand, yes, that means you implausibly get to run full tilt while shouldering the load of potentially a rather heavy getup; on the other hand, your regular movement isn’t equally implausibly treated as if you’ve already ran a 10k uphill while dragging a grand piano behind you and are about to do the second leg. Always getting to run as if you’re fresh, unburdened and ready and won’t be running far despite none of that being true seems silly, but the opposite - always having to run as if you’re carrying a heavy load, already had two hours of serious exercise and anticipate having to run a really long distance - would be arguably be a lot worse if you’re supposed to be a protagonist in a heroic fantasy. Not having penalties for maintaining a sprint is a problem (insofar as it is a problem) with having no such penalties, not with armor.
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Yes, but that's an issue with the system not differentiating (much) between running completely unburdened and running in your adventuring kit - it's not an issue with your default running speed. Forty yards in 6 seconds, by itself, is perfectly ok.
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"Forty yards in 6 seconds, by itself, is perfectly ok."
The very top NFL players can run 40 yards in ~4.5 seconds. Without any weight or equipment. You think 40 yards in armor and equipment in 6 seconds is not noteworthy?!
Would like to hear your basis for that.
Again, the system doesn't differentiate between armor or no armor. That speed applies as much to a barbarian in a loincloth as to a paladin in full plate. Should it make a distinction? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that it doesn't and we're getting the movement speed that is plausible in a no armor context in both cases. You want to bring back movement penalties for armor, be my guest. More power to you. But absent such penalties, it's fine. Really.
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5e does have rules for not being able to maintain a sprint.
Firstly there are the chase rules, which make you make a Con check after you've Dashed a limited number of times, gaining exhaustion when you fail. After gaining two levels of exhaustiom, your speed is halved.
Second there are the long-distance travel rates, which are about equivalent to non-dashing speed.
I think a simple house rule if you want to allow variation in running speed would be to incorporate an Athletics check into the Dash action. The roll is at disadvantage if you're wearing heavy armor. Add a modifier to your movement speed depending on your roll to determine how far you can dash.
5 or less: -5
6 - 10: 0
11 - 15: +5
16 - 20: +10
20 - 24: +20
25 - 30: +30
30 or more: +60
So yeah, if you have expertise in Athletics and are Guidanced or inspired, you can hit Olympic pace some of the time.
Well, it is not fine, IMHO. You're going to have monsters (rules have to work for them too) running at characters from long distance with no chance for a bowshot or spell in many cases. Players should be rightly upset that they did not reasonably get to use their abilities and everything just turns into a melee fight.
I have experience here. 35 years in the U.S. Army and my armor, helmet, pistol and all the ammo weighed 42 pounds, not counting my M-4. To ask a soldier to do a 40 yard dash in record time is plain ridiculous. It has no verisimilitude to it and seems to just be a way for fighters to get into melee without suffering spells or bowfire.
A 25% reduction in speed is a lot, your average high school athlete will come in comfortably under six seconds. There's an argument for having it based on your Athletics skill, something like 100' + 10' * check bonus (which lets high level fighters achieve superhuman speed, but meh).