How does combat in the air work? Does it follow the same rules as ground combat? How would one make rolls if they are shooting from the ground to the air?
There is no particular rule for combat in air. It works the same way as on the ground. I guess it is just a bit more annoying to keep track of the distances.
Basically everything works the same. You can assume that the ranges work the same going into the air as they do on the ground. It's really the same combat in a third dimension making the world a cube.
This is where mini's and height tools can really help.
... That seems rather inconvenient. Like ... what's the ruling for opponents who are one atop the other? Like, there's literally five feet of difference between me and my opponent, and I fly under him and can just hit him? No increase in AC for him, no disadvantage because feet? No reduction in how much damage I actually do??
If you're in TOTM you've never had a problem with this topic I suspect just ad hoc these issues anyway, but for grid players who aren't sure how to handle aerial combat you're going to need to decide something crucial up front. The first thing we need to know is going to be whether or not your battlefield grid is 2D or 3D 5' squares. Squares or cubes. You're going to need to decide. Either way has pros and cons.
3D cubes makes things fast and straightforward, but sacrifices believably. Questions arise like how is he 400lb 7.5' tall Goliath inside a 5' cube exactly? Does he fight hunched over? But, as weird as all that is, it is fast. People have their normal weapon reach but just in all directions from whatever cube they're in.
2D squares but with a measured vertical axis has some additional notekeeping required but keeps a little extra realism. That 7.5' tall goliath is in his 5' 2D square but in it all the way to 7.5' high. You'll wanna be sure you know the rules for vertical reach here: "You can extend your arms half your height above yourself during the jump. Thus, you can reach above you a distance equal to the height of the jump plus 1 1/2 times your height." This means how far up someone can reach will depend very directly on their height and you'll be doing some mid-combat maths.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
How does combat in the air work? Does it follow the same rules as ground combat? How would one make rolls if they are shooting from the ground to the air?
Not much difference between aerial and ground combat. Some things give different results for flying creature though, notably when a flying creature is knocked prone, has its speed reduced to 0, or is otherwise deprived of the ability to move, the creature falls, unless it has the ability to hover or it is being held aloft by magic, such as by the fly spell.
2D squares but with a measured vertical axis has some additional notekeeping required but keeps a little extra realism. That 7.5' tall goliath is in his 5' 2D square but in it all the way to 7.5' high. You'll wanna be sure you know the rules for vertical reach here: "You can extend your arms half your height above yourself during the jump. Thus, you can reach above you a distance equal to the height of the jump plus 1 1/2 times your height." This means how far up someone can reach will depend very directly on their height and you'll be doing some mid-combat maths.
This rule is for grip reach rather than attack, as the rules for what you can reach when attacking is based on your weapon, usually 5 or 10 feet, regardless of your height or arms lenght.
2D squares but with a measured vertical axis has some additional notekeeping required but keeps a little extra realism. That 7.5' tall goliath is in his 5' 2D square but in it all the way to 7.5' high. You'll wanna be sure you know the rules for vertical reach here: "You can extend your arms half your height above yourself during the jump. Thus, you can reach above you a distance equal to the height of the jump plus 1 1/2 times your height." This means how far up someone can reach will depend very directly on their height and you'll be doing some mid-combat maths.
This rule is for grip reach rather than attack, as the rules for what you can reach when attacking is based on your weapon, usually 5 or 10 feet, regardless of your height or arms lenght.
This is the answer for 3D combat grid cubes. The part you clipped off of my reply.
This answer doesn't make any sense if you decided combat grid is 2D. There is no such thing as 5' up from your square if your square is a 2D square. You must necessarily adopt a reach-from-character-height approach.
It also must necessarily be based on their height how high they can reach vertically, too. A 6' man would have 6+3' vertical reach. If something was flying at 10' up he couldn't physically touch them. Yet, you expect he could punch them in combat? Or that they'd even provoke opportunity attacks? If you've gone to all the trouble of ignoring the simplified 3D cube method to gain the realism of the 2D + vertical measurements options why are you now throwing out the realism but also keeping the extra steps??
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
This answer doesn't make any sense if you decided combat grid is 2D. There is no such thing as 5' up from your square if your square is a 2D square. You must necessarily adopt a reach-from-character-height approach.
It also must necessarily be based on their height how high they can reach vertically, too. A 6' man would have 6+3' vertical reach. If something was flying at 10' up he couldn't physically touch them. Yet, you expect he could punch them in combat? Or that they'd even provoke opportunity attacks? If you've gone to all the trouble of ignoring the simplified 3D cube method to gain the realism of the 2D + vertical measurements options why are you now throwing out the realism but also keeping the extra steps??
The rules for reach in an attack are the same wether you use 2D, 3D, ToTM or Grid Play. A creature has a reach of 5 feet can attack creatures within 5 feet of it, this regardless of a creature's height. So if a creature is flying 10 feet up, any medium size creature with a reach of 5 feet can attack it and it provoke Opportunity when leaving its reach.
The rules are not necessarily realistic, but it's how they're written.
There is no such thing as 5' up from your square if your square is a 2D square.
Wether you use 2D map or not, there is space up. Creatures can fly, object exist above one's head etc... 2D maps have different elevations even in printed product.
There is no such thing as 5' up from your square if your square is a 2D square.
Wether you use 2D map or not, there is space up. Creatures can a fly, object exist above one's ehad etc... 2D maps have different elevations even in printed product.
5' from... what?
If you're on a 2D grid, with 5' squares. Where are you measuring the 5' reach... from? The ground?? A 6' tall guy can't touch his own face?
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
There is no such thing as 5' up from your square if your square is a 2D square.
Wether you use 2D map or not, there is space up. Creatures can a fly, object exist above one's ehad etc... 2D maps have different elevations even in printed product.
5' from... what?
If you're on a 2D grid, with 5' squares. Where are you measuring the 5' reach... from? The ground?? A 6' tall guy can't touch his own face?
No. You MUST measure from their height.
From you. Not from your height + arms lenght, simply from you. In the same vein, a 7.5 tall goliath that lying prone on its back can still reach only creature within 5 feet of it.
The prone condition also doesn't change the reach of your attacks.
You are taking the height reference out of context, from jumping rules, trying to apply them to attacks. No where does the Combat chapter refers to creatures height to establish the reach of its attacks.
There is no such thing as 5' up from your square if your square is a 2D square.
Wether you use 2D map or not, there is space up. Creatures can a fly, object exist above one's ehad etc... 2D maps have different elevations even in printed product.
5' from... what?
If you're on a 2D grid, with 5' squares. Where are you measuring the 5' reach... from? The ground?? A 6' tall guy can't touch his own face?
No. You MUST measure from their height.
From you. Not from your height + arms lenght, simply from you. In the same vein, a 7.5 tall goliath that lying prone on its back can still reach only creature within 5 feet of it.
The prone condition also doesn't change the reach of your attacks.
You are taking the height reference out of context, from jumping rules, trying to apply them to attacks. No where does the Combat chapter refers to creatures height to establish the reach of its attacks.
... Please, just take a moment and think this through and listen to what we are talking about. 5' reach...from... what?
From "you"? Ok. Sure. Fine. Where are youexactly in the Z axis? We know in the X and the Y axis you're inside your 2D square.
But where are you in the Z axis? The up/down dimension?
If not your height... then what?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
All the rules use is from you or your space. On 2D maps, its from your space as described in Grid Play rules. Those rules makes no mention of height neighter on page 192.
All the rules use is from you or your space. On 2D maps, its from your space as described in Grid Play rules. Those rules makes no mention of height neighter on page 192.
So you measure from, the ground?
As in, you can't hit something if they're flying in your face 5' off the ground??
Your answer has no Z axis coordinate defined. Where are "you" in the Z axis?
Are "you" a fixed point at ground level?
Are "you" an range of Z-axis from ground level to your height?
Are "you" a 5' height cube occupier?
Define your Z axis. Where are "you", vertically, in a 2D square?
Unless you're arguing that 2D grid play means there simply is no Z axis and therefore how high up something is doesn't matter. A flying creature 200' up can still be melee'd by a normal sized human on the ground level by walking up to an adjacent square and attacking them, since their 2D square is now within 5' of their 2D square. If THIS is what you're arguing... no one plays this way. No one.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Due to the way distance calculations are done when using minis/tokens on a grid (like point to like), the actual delineation of your Z-axis is actually moot. You always measure from congruent points on whatever you use to represent a game entity; the center of one token to the center of another, the top left corner of one token to the top left corner of another, etc.
When you project this into 3d, you get the same results regardless of if you're using 3d 5ft cubes/spheres, or 2d 'slices'
In the second image, all three tokens are 10ft above the ground, but due to the fact the point of measurement is consistent between each token pair, the definition of the z-axis is irrelevant. How 'you' is defined is moot as long as how you measure between 'you' and your target is consistent.
From you, or your space. There is no 3D rules. There is still spaces above you with range though. In ToTM, reach/range is calculated from you or your space. In Grid Play, from your square.
A flying creature 200 feet high cannot be attacked if it's out of your melee reach of 5 feet. A creature flying 5 feet high can though as it's within your reach.
What people typically do for flying or elevated position on 2D map is assign a number or die to the miniature, representing how high it is from the ground because it is not in the space on the ground. There's only one axis needed until you must deal with different elevations, at which point you must keep track of those various positions. But all of this doesn't change how reach or range is calculated.
All the rules use is from you or your space. On 2D maps, its from your space as described in Grid Play rules. Those rules makes no mention of height neighter on page 192.
So you measure from, the ground?
As in, you can't hit something if they're flying in your face 5' off the ground??
Your answer has no Z axis coordinate defined. Where are "you" in the Z axis?
Are "you" a fixed point at ground level?
Are "you" an range of Z-axis from ground level to your height?
Are "you" a 5' height cube occupier?
Define your Z axis. Where are "you", vertically, in a 2D square?
I'll point out the space rules in the PHBdon't assert axis orientation or even Cartesian coordinates. Axis orientation doesn't matter if we assume this is 2 dimensional - labels are arbitrary, so we could define Z as the third dimension, regardless of whether that's up, forward, or left - but coordinate system does. If you read the space rules in polar coordinates, they're three dimensional, because polar coordinates only provide two dimensions measured in distance units - the third is measured in angular units (degrees or radians, typically). If we're not using the square grid or hex grid rules - both of which are variants - the core PHB rules make consistent sense if all spaces are cylindrical and occupy all angles at once, meaning e.g. a Medium space is by definition a solid cylinder 5 feet high with a 5 foot diameter. Under that reading, anyone taller than 5 feet has to duck to avoid occupying a second space above them, of course.
In fact, I chose cylinders arbitrarily - they need 2 linear dimensions to fully define 3 spatial ones (by assuming all angles), and the table for spaces provides 2 linear dimensions. But the rules for spaces just say "wide", and all given spaces are two dimensions which are always the same. If we assume the table is shorthand for explaining the text - which defines a Medium space as a 5 foot wide space - that implies a Medium space is a sphere, the only space possible that can be defined with nothing but "5 feet wide" (it's once again polar, not Cartesian - you assume all angles, and then you assume both linear dimensions are the same). Cylinders are weird because they're a hybrid of polar and Cartesian - spheres would be more consistent, and entirely polar.
It's not particularly material if Medium spaces are 5-foot diameter spheres (again, that's what a 5 foot wide space is), 5-foot diameter and height cylinders, or 5-foot wide cubes, in terms of other rules interactions. But it's a strong leap in logic insisting they're rectangles whose third dimension is not 5 (which would violate the 5 foot wide rule).
Remember, 5E doesn't happen in a space remotely similar to our Euclidean universe if you use a square grid - without applying the variant diagonal rules to the already-variant grid, the grid uses Chebyshev distance, which is why spheres and cubes are the same shape. The Chebyshev distance rules presumably apply in all directions, of course.
What this collapses back to is that if you're using a grid, you need the third dimension to be the same grid tessellated vertically, or the rules for measuring distances will break down. You can change the labels of the grid if it makes you more comfortable, but it's what you need to do. Hexes only tessellate in two directions, so if you're on a Hex map, you need to do the same thing as the grid, only it'll look funky, because your directions are now (assuming north is a valid direction) north, northeast, southeast, south, southwest, and northwest horizontally and up and down vertically (so up-north and up-northeast are both valid directions) - each cell has 20 cells adjacent to it, whereas in a grid each cell has 26 cells adjacent to it. If you're on neither, just using minis on a tabletop, you can pick any of the examples I just gave (cylinders, spheres, or cubes), but I can tell you from experience with minis, you'll have a much easier time with the cylinders. And in all circumstances, you'll need to compress a Medium creature that's more than 5 feet tall into a 5-foot space, because the rules say you do.
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How does combat in the air work? Does it follow the same rules as ground combat? How would one make rolls if they are shooting from the ground to the air?
New player so any info would be a massive help
There is no particular rule for combat in air. It works the same way as on the ground. I guess it is just a bit more annoying to keep track of the distances.
The only particularly important rule for flying is that if your speed is set to 0, or you are knocked prone you fall unless you have the hover trait.
Basically everything works the same. You can assume that the ranges work the same going into the air as they do on the ground. It's really the same combat in a third dimension making the world a cube.
This is where mini's and height tools can really help.
... That seems rather inconvenient. Like ... what's the ruling for opponents who are one atop the other? Like, there's literally five feet of difference between me and my opponent, and I fly under him and can just hit him? No increase in AC for him, no disadvantage because feet? No reduction in how much damage I actually do??
If you're in TOTM you've never had a problem with this topic I suspect just ad hoc these issues anyway, but for grid players who aren't sure how to handle aerial combat you're going to need to decide something crucial up front. The first thing we need to know is going to be whether or not your battlefield grid is 2D or 3D 5' squares. Squares or cubes. You're going to need to decide. Either way has pros and cons.
3D cubes makes things fast and straightforward, but sacrifices believably. Questions arise like how is he 400lb 7.5' tall Goliath inside a 5' cube exactly? Does he fight hunched over? But, as weird as all that is, it is fast. People have their normal weapon reach but just in all directions from whatever cube they're in.
2D squares but with a measured vertical axis has some additional notekeeping required but keeps a little extra realism. That 7.5' tall goliath is in his 5' 2D square but in it all the way to 7.5' high. You'll wanna be sure you know the rules for vertical reach here: "You can extend your arms half your height above yourself during the jump. Thus, you can reach above you a distance equal to the height of the jump plus 1 1/2 times your height." This means how far up someone can reach will depend very directly on their height and you'll be doing some mid-combat maths.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Not much difference between aerial and ground combat. Some things give different results for flying creature though, notably when a flying creature is knocked prone, has its speed reduced to 0, or is otherwise deprived of the ability to move, the creature falls, unless it has the ability to hover or it is being held aloft by magic, such as by the fly spell.
This rule is for grip reach rather than attack, as the rules for what you can reach when attacking is based on your weapon, usually 5 or 10 feet, regardless of your height or arms lenght.
This is the answer for 3D combat grid cubes. The part you clipped off of my reply.
This answer doesn't make any sense if you decided combat grid is 2D. There is no such thing as 5' up from your square if your square is a 2D square. You must necessarily adopt a reach-from-character-height approach.
It also must necessarily be based on their height how high they can reach vertically, too. A 6' man would have 6+3' vertical reach. If something was flying at 10' up he couldn't physically touch them. Yet, you expect he could punch them in combat? Or that they'd even provoke opportunity attacks? If you've gone to all the trouble of ignoring the simplified 3D cube method to gain the realism of the 2D + vertical measurements options why are you now throwing out the realism but also keeping the extra steps??
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
The rules for reach in an attack are the same wether you use 2D, 3D, ToTM or Grid Play. A creature has a reach of 5 feet can attack creatures within 5 feet of it, this regardless of a creature's height. So if a creature is flying 10 feet up, any medium size creature with a reach of 5 feet can attack it and it provoke Opportunity when leaving its reach.
The rules are not necessarily realistic, but it's how they're written.
Wether you use 2D map or not, there is space up. Creatures can fly, object exist above one's head etc... 2D maps have different elevations even in printed product.
5' from... what?
If you're on a 2D grid, with 5' squares. Where are you measuring the 5' reach... from? The ground?? A 6' tall guy can't touch his own face?
No. You MUST measure from their height.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
From you. Not from your height + arms lenght, simply from you. In the same vein, a 7.5 tall goliath that lying prone on its back can still reach only creature within 5 feet of it.
The prone condition also doesn't change the reach of your attacks.
You are taking the height reference out of context, from jumping rules, trying to apply them to attacks. No where does the Combat chapter refers to creatures height to establish the reach of its attacks.
... Please, just take a moment and think this through and listen to what we are talking about. 5' reach...from... what?
From "you"? Ok. Sure. Fine. Where are you exactly in the Z axis? We know in the X and the Y axis you're inside your 2D square.
But where are you in the Z axis? The up/down dimension?
If not your height... then what?
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
All the rules use is from you or your space. On 2D maps, its from your space as described in Grid Play rules. Those rules makes no mention of height neighter on page 192.
So you measure from, the ground?
As in, you can't hit something if they're flying in your face 5' off the ground??
Your answer has no Z axis coordinate defined. Where are "you" in the Z axis?
Define your Z axis. Where are "you", vertically, in a 2D square?
Unless you're arguing that 2D grid play means there simply is no Z axis and therefore how high up something is doesn't matter. A flying creature 200' up can still be melee'd by a normal sized human on the ground level by walking up to an adjacent square and attacking them, since their 2D square is now within 5' of their 2D square. If THIS is what you're arguing... no one plays this way. No one.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Due to the way distance calculations are done when using minis/tokens on a grid (like point to like), the actual delineation of your Z-axis is actually moot. You always measure from congruent points on whatever you use to represent a game entity; the center of one token to the center of another, the top left corner of one token to the top left corner of another, etc.
When you project this into 3d, you get the same results regardless of if you're using 3d 5ft cubes/spheres, or 2d 'slices'
In the second image, all three tokens are 10ft above the ground, but due to the fact the point of measurement is consistent between each token pair, the definition of the z-axis is irrelevant. How 'you' is defined is moot as long as how you measure between 'you' and your target is consistent.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
From you, or your space. There is no 3D rules. There is still spaces above you with range though. In ToTM, reach/range is calculated from you or your space. In Grid Play, from your square.
A flying creature 200 feet high cannot be attacked if it's out of your melee reach of 5 feet. A creature flying 5 feet high can though as it's within your reach.
What people typically do for flying or elevated position on 2D map is assign a number or die to the miniature, representing how high it is from the ground because it is not in the space on the ground. There's only one axis needed until you must deal with different elevations, at which point you must keep track of those various positions. But all of this doesn't change how reach or range is calculated.
I'll point out the space rules in the PHB don't assert axis orientation or even Cartesian coordinates. Axis orientation doesn't matter if we assume this is 2 dimensional - labels are arbitrary, so we could define Z as the third dimension, regardless of whether that's up, forward, or left - but coordinate system does. If you read the space rules in polar coordinates, they're three dimensional, because polar coordinates only provide two dimensions measured in distance units - the third is measured in angular units (degrees or radians, typically). If we're not using the square grid or hex grid rules - both of which are variants - the core PHB rules make consistent sense if all spaces are cylindrical and occupy all angles at once, meaning e.g. a Medium space is by definition a solid cylinder 5 feet high with a 5 foot diameter. Under that reading, anyone taller than 5 feet has to duck to avoid occupying a second space above them, of course.
In fact, I chose cylinders arbitrarily - they need 2 linear dimensions to fully define 3 spatial ones (by assuming all angles), and the table for spaces provides 2 linear dimensions. But the rules for spaces just say "wide", and all given spaces are two dimensions which are always the same. If we assume the table is shorthand for explaining the text - which defines a Medium space as a 5 foot wide space - that implies a Medium space is a sphere, the only space possible that can be defined with nothing but "5 feet wide" (it's once again polar, not Cartesian - you assume all angles, and then you assume both linear dimensions are the same). Cylinders are weird because they're a hybrid of polar and Cartesian - spheres would be more consistent, and entirely polar.
It's not particularly material if Medium spaces are 5-foot diameter spheres (again, that's what a 5 foot wide space is), 5-foot diameter and height cylinders, or 5-foot wide cubes, in terms of other rules interactions. But it's a strong leap in logic insisting they're rectangles whose third dimension is not 5 (which would violate the 5 foot wide rule).
Remember, 5E doesn't happen in a space remotely similar to our Euclidean universe if you use a square grid - without applying the variant diagonal rules to the already-variant grid, the grid uses Chebyshev distance, which is why spheres and cubes are the same shape. The Chebyshev distance rules presumably apply in all directions, of course.
What this collapses back to is that if you're using a grid, you need the third dimension to be the same grid tessellated vertically, or the rules for measuring distances will break down. You can change the labels of the grid if it makes you more comfortable, but it's what you need to do. Hexes only tessellate in two directions, so if you're on a Hex map, you need to do the same thing as the grid, only it'll look funky, because your directions are now (assuming north is a valid direction) north, northeast, southeast, south, southwest, and northwest horizontally and up and down vertically (so up-north and up-northeast are both valid directions) - each cell has 20 cells adjacent to it, whereas in a grid each cell has 26 cells adjacent to it. If you're on neither, just using minis on a tabletop, you can pick any of the examples I just gave (cylinders, spheres, or cubes), but I can tell you from experience with minis, you'll have a much easier time with the cylinders. And in all circumstances, you'll need to compress a Medium creature that's more than 5 feet tall into a 5-foot space, because the rules say you do.