However, if you look at a monster such as the beholder-Speed 0 ft., fly 20 ft. (hover)-if it were to be knocked prone it wouldn't fall out of the air-as the rules clearly state under flying movement-but the rules also just as clearly state that a creature with the prone condition cannot stand up and thereby remove the condition at all if it has 0 speed. Meaning that, RAW once a beholder has fallen it can't ever get up and I really don't think this was intentional.
Anything with perfect flight doesn't get knocked out of the air when knocked prone. Nothing says you cannot crawl while flying.
I think here the simple and only answer is that the game designers never considered these kinds of circumstances and therefore the rules (written, intended, or otherwise) just don't actually cover it.
If you consider Pantagrual666's example, the rules state that a prone character's only option for movement, unless they stand up, is to crawl-a special form of normal movement-meaning that no matter how look at it, standing will require half of your normal movement. However, if you look at a monster such as the beholder-Speed 0 ft., fly 20 ft. (hover)-if it were to be knocked prone it wouldn't fall out of the air-as the rules clearly state under flying movement-but the rules also just as clearly state that a creature with the prone condition cannot stand up and thereby remove the condition at all if it has 0 speed. Meaning that, RAW once a beholder has fallen it can't ever get up and I really don't think this was intentional.
A beholder does not have 0 speed. It has a 20 ft flying speed that it can use to "stand up" from being prone. Thank you for citing a concrete example that demonstrates the flaw in "your speed is the one you're 'currently using'" position, though.
Actually yes, it's speed is 0. I copy and pasted that directly from the Monster Manual stat block. It still has movement which it uses to move up to its fly speed while flying but its actual speed stat is 0 despite what type of movement is currently in use.
However, if you look at a monster such as the beholder-Speed 0 ft., fly 20 ft. (hover)-if it were to be knocked prone it wouldn't fall out of the air-as the rules clearly state under flying movement-but the rules also just as clearly state that a creature with the prone condition cannot stand up and thereby remove the condition at all if it has 0 speed. Meaning that, RAW once a beholder has fallen it can't ever get up and I really don't think this was intentional.
Anything with perfect flight doesn't get knocked out of the air when knocked prone. Nothing says you cannot crawl while flying.
Except for the part about difficult terrain which implies movement across actual terrain. Regardless, my point was that the rules are flawed and incomplete when people attempt to apply them this way. The concept behind the different movement speeds was that you could, for example, walk at a speed of 30 FpT (feet per turn) and fly at 60 FpT so if you spend 33% of the turn walking (10 ft.) you should only have 67% of the turn left in which to fly (40 ft.) but for the sake of keeping the game simple and not requiring everyone to do complicated math they tried create something simple and quick that breaks once characters start trying to use more than two kinds of movement/actions that spend movement/modifiers to movement/or any combination thereof.
I was play-testing a dungeon in Tomb of Annihilation. I thought with a Tabaxi could climb the walls, he could avoid all 6 traps in the dungeon easily, then with mountaineering gear make it so everyone can bypass everything. Reasonably, while Tabaxi claws could certainly be sharp, it's probably not enough to pierce concrete in this case. I do think any surface that a person can climb, certainly a tabaxi can do better, easily and without a skill check. Just my thoughts.
A beholder does not have 0 speed. It has a 20 ft flying speed that it can use to "stand up" from being prone. Thank you for citing a concrete example that demonstrates the flaw in "your speed is the one you're 'currently using'" position, though.
Actually yes, it's speed is 0. I copy and pasted that directly from the Monster Manual stat block. It still has movement which it uses to move up to its fly speed while flying but its actual speed stat is 0 despite what type of movement is currently in use.
Huh? A beholder has speed 20. It says so in the rulebook.
If a beholder starts its turn prone, it has a couple of options. Note that it is still flying at this point, since it has the hover feature.
First, it can "stand up" (or to put it another way, unprone itself) then move. Standing up costs it half its speed, so 10. After standing up it can move up to 10 feet.
Second, it can crawl. Using its speed of 20 it can move up to 10 feet. It is still prone at the end of this movement.
In some cases, 'speed' refers to the speed in your current movement type, in other cases, it refers to your ground movement, and the rules don't do a great job distinguishing the two.
"The rule on standing up from prone fails to account for you having multiple speeds. Here's the intent: if you have multiple speeds and stand up, expend an amount of movement equal to half your highest speed."
So you have 30 walking, 60 flying, and are prone. You get up. You have 30 walking, 30 flying. If you move full 30 flying, you can no longer walk, and vice versa. You can still move 15, and then fly 15, etc. That's it.
A beholder does not have 0 speed. It has a 20 ft flying speed that it can use to "stand up" from being prone. Thank you for citing a concrete example that demonstrates the flaw in "your speed is the one you're 'currently using'" position, though.
Actually yes, it's speed is 0. I copy and pasted that directly from the Monster Manual stat block. It still has movement which it uses to move up to its fly speed while flying but its actual speed stat is 0 despite what type of movement is currently in use.
Huh? A beholder has speed 20. It says so in the rulebook.
If a beholder starts its turn prone, it has a couple of options. Note that it is still flying at this point, since it has the hover feature.
First, it can "stand up" (or to put it another way, unprone itself) then move. Standing up costs it half its speed, so 10. After standing up it can move up to 10 feet.
Second, it can crawl. Using its speed of 20 it can move up to 10 feet. It is still prone at the end of this movement.
Beholders and most creatures with the hover trait are immune to prone, especially if they have 0 normal movement
"The rule on standing up from prone fails to account for you having multiple speeds. Here's the intent: if you have multiple speeds and stand up, expend an amount of movement equal to half your highest speed."
So you have 30 walking, 60 flying, and are prone. You get up. You have 30 walking, 30 flying. If you move full 30 flying, you can no longer walk, and vice versa. You can still move 15, and then fly 15, etc. That's it.
*drops mic*
I had missed the immunity part when I was looking for an example to make my case and while I did find other valid examples, I'm more inclined to believe they're just oversights in the rules and should also be immune since it doesn't make sense to be able to knock a magically hovering creature prone. However, your excellently discovered link should put all of our arguing to rest as it provides an official ruling from Jeremy Crawford for what were incomplete rules to begin with.
Although, I would argue that your interpretation is wrong in your example. Crawford stated that you "expend an amount of movement"—or as the Player's Handbook puts it "doing so costs an amount of movement equal to half your speed"—not that you halve your highest speed. So, in your example you would instead treat it as if you have already moved 30 feet that turn in order to stand up, which meets or exceeds your walking speed for the turn leaving you only the option to fly with the rest of your movement. Though, I can't really imagine any reasonable DM would ever deny you the option to walk instead of flying if you truly wanted to for whatever reason.
A monster that has a climbing speed can use all or part of its movement to move on vertical surfaces. The monster doesn’t need to spend extra movement to climb.
Ive always seen it pretty simply, and this is what i use at my tables. The getting up from prone 1/2 speed is applied as part of figuring out the remaining speed, not as a '15 ft of my walking speed' but as a '-50%'.. so if you got up from prone and walked 5 feet, then decided to use your fly speed.. to figure what you had you would use this: remaining fly speed = 60 -50% -5 walked =25. But, if you decided after 5 feet flying that you changed your mind.. now you would be at: remaining walk speed= 30 -50% -5 walk -5 fly = 5 feet left. which if you did, would leave you with another 15ft fly speed, but your legs cant take you further. While the Sage advice is technically official... it actually ends up penalizing someone if their friendly wizard buddy casts fly on them, as their normal stand up use would be 15ft to their walk speed, but having fly cast on them suddenly would take up 30ft to stand up for some reason. (assuming fly gives you a 60ft fly speed)
Since this thread has gotten dredged back up recently I decided to look into what the new 2024 PHB has to say about all of this since the WotC team put in a lot of effort to clarify and better organize the rules for their new books.
One of the best changes made is that any keywords in the 2024 PHB are now capitalized including any reference to a character's Speed. It also makes it much more clear that Speed is essentially "Walking Speed" and any other special speeds are related but separate character stats.
How I understand it from reading over the rules is you don't "use" your Speed to move, what you do is track the distance you move and compare it to your Speed to determine if you can continue to move. When using special movements—climbing, swimming, or crawling—your movement spent in that way is increased (each foot costs 1 extra foot) unless you have a special speed (Burrow Speed, Climb Speed, Fly Speed, or Swim Speed) for that movement type, in which case you compare that speed to the distance you have moved to determine if you can continue to move with it.
Special Speeds. Some creatures have special speeds, such as a Burrow Speed, Climb Speed, Fly Speed, or Swim Speed [...]. Whenever you switch, subtract the distance already moved from the new speed. The result determines how much farther you can move. If the result is 0 or less, you can't use the new speed during the current move. [...]
Changes to Your Speeds. If an effect increases or decreases your Speed for a time, any special speed you have increases or decreases by an equal amount for the same duration.
PHB 2024 | Appendix C, p. 374
The only part that doesn't seem to make sense is the Dash action. Which states that you "gain extra movement for the current turn", but, rules-as-written this wouldn't do anything since you don't have a "pool of movement" to spend and you shouldn't be able to move farther than your Speed, which doesn't get changed.
Dash [Action] When you take the Dash action, you gain extra movement for the current turn. The increase equals your Speed after applying any modifiers. With a Speed of 30 feet, for example, you can move up to 60 feet on your turn if you Dash. If your Speed of 30 feet is reduced to 15 feet, you can move up to 30 feet this turn if you Dash.
If you have a special speed, such as a Fly Speed or Swim Speed, you can use that speed instead of your Speed when you take this action. You choose which speed to use each time you take it. See also "Speed."
The description for the Dash action, however, seems to be largely copy-pasted from the 2014 rules and I believe the following change would achieve the rules-as-intended result.
Dash [Action] When you take the Dash action, every two feet of movement costs 1 fewer feet for the current turn. For example, moving 10 feet while dashing costs 5 feet of movement.
When is comes to standing up, as long as you keep in mind that Speed means base Speed or "Walking" Speed, it should be pretty unambiguous. I would even say you could argue that someone who already used their 30 feet of Speed to crawl could switch to a 60 foot Fly Speed, spend 15 feet to right themselves, and still be able to fly another 15 feet because nothing specifies that standing up has to be done with your Walking Speed.
While you have the Prone condition, you experience the following effects.
Restricted Movement. Your only movement options are to crawl or to spend an amount of movement equal to half your [Walking] Speed (round down) to right yourself and thereby end the condition. If your Speed is 0, you can't right yourself.
PHB 2024 | Appendix C, p. 372
As for the 2014 PHB, the rules actually seem to be the same when compared, but as I mentioned, the 2024 rules are much better organized and easier to follow. Also, I never found anything similar to the "Changes to Your Speeds" section in the 2014 rules and the way the Dash action is written may have be responsible for a lot of confusion.
If you have more than one speed, such as your walking speed and a flying speed, you can switch back and forth between your speeds during your move. Whenever you switch, subtract the distance you've already moved from the new speed. The result determines how much farther you can move. If the result is 0 or less, you can't use the new speed during the current move.
PHB 2014 | Chapter 9, p. 190
Standing up takes more effort; doing so costs an amount of movement equal to half your [walking] speed. For example, if your speed is 30 feet, you must spend 15 feet of movement to stand up. You can't stand up if you don't have enough movement left or if your speed is 0.
The only part that doesn't seem to make sense is the Dash action. Which states that you "gain extra movement for the current turn", but, rules-as-written this wouldn't do anything since you don't have a "pool of movement" to spend and you shouldn't be able to move farther than your Speed, which doesn't get changed.
Dash [Action] When you take the Dash action, you gain extra movement for the current turn. The increase equals your Speed after applying any modifiers. With a Speed of 30 feet, for example, you can move up to 60 feet on your turn if you Dash. If your Speed of 30 feet is reduced to 15 feet, you can move up to 30 feet this turn if you Dash.
If you have a special speed, such as a Fly Speed or Swim Speed, you can use that speed instead of your Speed when you take this action. You choose which speed to use each time you take it. See also "Speed."
Let's say you have a walking Speed of 30 and a fly Speed of 60. With no other modifiers, taking the Dash Action gives you a walking Speed of 60 (30+30) and a fly Speed of 120 (60+60)
If you got hit with a Slow attack, you subtract 10 from your Speeds before modifying it due to Dash. Your speeds are now 20/50 normally and 40/100 Dashing.
If something halved your speed, you would resolve that before applying the effects of Dash. Your speeds are now 15/30 normally and 30/60 Dashing.
Standing Up from Prone is special. Technically you are spending movement equal to half your speed. You can interpret this in two ways.
You can choose the movement form to spend half your movement from and reduce any other speeds by the result. With 30/60, spending half from your walking movement would become 15/45 and Dashing would become 30/90.
You "spend" movement from all forms of movement and proceed from there. With 30/60 speeds, spending half your Speed would become 15/30 and Dashing would become 30/60.
Dashing seems perfectly clear to me, but I have some doubts about Standing Up from Prone. If you want to discuss it further, let's start a new a thread.
Anything with perfect flight doesn't get knocked out of the air when knocked prone. Nothing says you cannot crawl while flying.
Actually yes, it's speed is 0. I copy and pasted that directly from the Monster Manual stat block. It still has movement which it uses to move up to its fly speed while flying but its actual speed stat is 0 despite what type of movement is currently in use.
Except for the part about difficult terrain which implies movement across actual terrain. Regardless, my point was that the rules are flawed and incomplete when people attempt to apply them this way. The concept behind the different movement speeds was that you could, for example, walk at a speed of 30 FpT (feet per turn) and fly at 60 FpT so if you spend 33% of the turn walking (10 ft.) you should only have 67% of the turn left in which to fly (40 ft.) but for the sake of keeping the game simple and not requiring everyone to do complicated math they tried create something simple and quick that breaks once characters start trying to use more than two kinds of movement/actions that spend movement/modifiers to movement/or any combination thereof.
I was play-testing a dungeon in Tomb of Annihilation. I thought with a Tabaxi could climb the walls, he could avoid all 6 traps in the dungeon easily, then with mountaineering gear make it so everyone can bypass everything. Reasonably, while Tabaxi claws could certainly be sharp, it's probably not enough to pierce concrete in this case. I do think any surface that a person can climb, certainly a tabaxi can do better, easily and without a skill check. Just my thoughts.
Huh? A beholder has speed 20. It says so in the rulebook.
If a beholder starts its turn prone, it has a couple of options. Note that it is still flying at this point, since it has the hover feature.
First, it can "stand up" (or to put it another way, unprone itself) then move. Standing up costs it half its speed, so 10. After standing up it can move up to 10 feet.
Second, it can crawl. Using its speed of 20 it can move up to 10 feet. It is still prone at the end of this movement.
The beholder does have 0 speed - but it also has 20 ft flying speed (with hover). It says so on the tooltip you linked.
So it can't crawl. It can only fly.
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In some cases, 'speed' refers to the speed in your current movement type, in other cases, it refers to your ground movement, and the rules don't do a great job distinguishing the two.
As far as the beholder thing goes, you all are missing an important part:
Beholders and most creatures with the hover trait are immune to prone, especially if they have 0 normal movement
I had missed the immunity part when I was looking for an example to make my case and while I did find other valid examples, I'm more inclined to believe they're just oversights in the rules and should also be immune since it doesn't make sense to be able to knock a magically hovering creature prone. However, your excellently discovered link should put all of our arguing to rest as it provides an official ruling from Jeremy Crawford for what were incomplete rules to begin with.
Although, I would argue that your interpretation is wrong in your example. Crawford stated that you "expend an amount of movement"—or as the Player's Handbook puts it "doing so costs an amount of movement equal to half your speed"—not that you halve your highest speed. So, in your example you would instead treat it as if you have already moved 30 feet that turn in order to stand up, which meets or exceeds your walking speed for the turn leaving you only the option to fly with the rest of your movement. Though, I can't really imagine any reasonable DM would ever deny you the option to walk instead of flying if you truly wanted to for whatever reason.
As per the introduction to the monster manual
Climb
A monster that has a climbing speed can use all or part of its movement to move on vertical surfaces. The monster doesn’t need to spend extra movement to climb.
According to new book yes Tabaxi seems to have lost the climbing speed . Hopefully they will return it to the species soon.
Tabaxi have a THIRTY (30) foot climb speed.
Not when I originally answered this question they didn't. The Volo's Tabaxi only had a climb speed of 20'.
Ive always seen it pretty simply, and this is what i use at my tables. The getting up from prone 1/2 speed is applied as part of figuring out the remaining speed, not as a '15 ft of my walking speed' but as a '-50%'.. so if you got up from prone and walked 5 feet, then decided to use your fly speed.. to figure what you had you would use this: remaining fly speed = 60 -50% -5 walked =25. But, if you decided after 5 feet flying that you changed your mind.. now you would be at: remaining walk speed= 30 -50% -5 walk -5 fly = 5 feet left. which if you did, would leave you with another 15ft fly speed, but your legs cant take you further. While the Sage advice is technically official... it actually ends up penalizing someone if their friendly wizard buddy casts fly on them, as their normal stand up use would be 15ft to their walk speed, but having fly cast on them suddenly would take up 30ft to stand up for some reason. (assuming fly gives you a 60ft fly speed)
Since this thread has gotten dredged back up recently I decided to look into what the new 2024 PHB has to say about all of this since the WotC team put in a lot of effort to clarify and better organize the rules for their new books.
One of the best changes made is that any keywords in the 2024 PHB are now capitalized including any reference to a character's Speed. It also makes it much more clear that Speed is essentially "Walking Speed" and any other special speeds are related but separate character stats.
How I understand it from reading over the rules is you don't "use" your Speed to move, what you do is track the distance you move and compare it to your Speed to determine if you can continue to move. When using special movements—climbing, swimming, or crawling—your movement spent in that way is increased (each foot costs 1 extra foot) unless you have a special speed (Burrow Speed, Climb Speed, Fly Speed, or Swim Speed) for that movement type, in which case you compare that speed to the distance you have moved to determine if you can continue to move with it.
The only part that doesn't seem to make sense is the Dash action. Which states that you "gain extra movement for the current turn", but, rules-as-written this wouldn't do anything since you don't have a "pool of movement" to spend and you shouldn't be able to move farther than your Speed, which doesn't get changed.
The description for the Dash action, however, seems to be largely copy-pasted from the 2014 rules and I believe the following change would achieve the rules-as-intended result.
When is comes to standing up, as long as you keep in mind that Speed means base Speed or "Walking" Speed, it should be pretty unambiguous. I would even say you could argue that someone who already used their 30 feet of Speed to crawl could switch to a 60 foot Fly Speed, spend 15 feet to right themselves, and still be able to fly another 15 feet because nothing specifies that standing up has to be done with your Walking Speed.
As for the 2014 PHB,
the rules actually seem to be the same when compared, but as I mentioned, the 2024 rules are much better organized and easier to follow. Also, I never found anything similar to the "Changes to Your Speeds" section in the 2014 rules and the way the Dash action is written may have be responsible for a lot of confusion.
Let's say you have a walking Speed of 30 and a fly Speed of 60. With no other modifiers, taking the Dash Action gives you a walking Speed of 60 (30+30) and a fly Speed of 120 (60+60)
If you got hit with a Slow attack, you subtract 10 from your Speeds before modifying it due to Dash. Your speeds are now 20/50 normally and 40/100 Dashing.
If something halved your speed, you would resolve that before applying the effects of Dash. Your speeds are now 15/30 normally and 30/60 Dashing.
Standing Up from Prone is special. Technically you are spending movement equal to half your speed. You can interpret this in two ways.
Dashing seems perfectly clear to me, but I have some doubts about Standing Up from Prone. If you want to discuss it further, let's start a new a thread.
How to add Tooltips.