High Jump and attack

[Aulirophile]

It is covered under "stunts" but it is up to the DM. Technically an action has to be completely resolved before you take another action, so you could not jump (Move action) and attack, because part of resolving the jump is falling back down.

I allow my players to charge though. Situation it first came up in was Archer 15ft up in a tree. Goliath Warden charges 5 squares, jumps 1 square straight up (DC 25 athletics), and hits the archer with a Halberd (I decided the Archer had cover from the branches). He hit, so I made an acrobatics check to balance for the archer, which it failed. Fell out of the tree and died to the fall damage.

I'll never tell him it was a minion and dead anyway.

Anyone find it interesting that the rules assume you are 5ft tall no matter how tall you are? Barring the "grab a ledge" for vertical jump.

 

[Amaroq]

That's hilarious - so he killed the minion, what, several times over?

I think D&D "physics" get a little bit broken when you start playing in three dimensions - bursts wind up cubic instead of spherical; ranged weapons have a range much longer if fired to the diagonal and uphill than they do fired level but straight along the orientation of the battlemap; and a gnome and a goliath can have the same strength despite the vast difference in sizes.

Yes, I know its all abstraction to make things quicker, and in general I don't have a problem with it, it just bugs my inner math geek.

As for being 5' tall, it makes as little sense as being 5' wide. Seriously, I was measuring things with a tape measure for some housework recently, and found that the main hallway in my (older) house is something like 30" wide .. which is two and a half feet, of course. Since I'm over 6' tall and I can easily walk down that without bumping shoulders against it, I'd think two people could walk abreast in a 5' hallway - and certainly could stand back to back in a 5' x 5' square if pressed.

Fighting two abreast in a 5' hallway? That would be much harder ... but tactically, very much do-able if they fought legion-style: side by side, using short sword and shield; you use your shield to cover your ally as well as yourself, do a lot more piercing/stabbing attacks than sweeping side-to-side sword blows, and keep your sword strokes timed together so as not to interfere with each other. I could see it being really difficult to dislodge two determined fighters from a square like that .. (Inspiration from Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion, fantastic reading for a D&D player.) ..

.. in fact, ooh, maybe my players will encounter a regiment of short-sword fighters at some point ...

 

[chitzk0i]

Fighting two abreast in a 5' hallway? That would be much harder ... but tactically, very much do-able if they fought legion-style: side by side, using short sword and shield; you use your shield to cover your ally as well as yourself, do a lot more piercing/stabbing attacks than sweeping side-to-side sword blows, and keep your sword strokes timed together so as not to interfere with each other. I could see it being really difficult to dislodge two determined fighters from a square like that .. (Inspiration from Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion, fantastic reading for a D&D player.) ..

.. in fact, ooh, maybe my players will encounter a regiment of short-sword fighters at some point ...

Not just fighting, but dodging. Dodging is also important.

 

[Aulirophile]

I actually made a customer monster, Phalanx Solider, with a special ability, just to get around the whole "5 ft per person" thing during one particular encounter.

Phalanx Formation
"If Phalanx Soldier is squeezing in a square with another Phalanx Soldier, neither one grants CA from squeezing and they get a bonus to all defenses equal to the number of Phalanx Soldiers in their square and all adjacent squares. If a Phalanx Soldier is forced to exit the Phalanx Formation, he provokes an Opportunity Attack from all adjacent enemies after the first square of that movement."

They came equipped with shields, short swords, and spears. Back ranks used spears for reach, switched to short swords when the front rank died (I gave them reach with a normal spear as another special ability to make that all work... hehe).

 

[Mengu]

If you need to fit more people into a square, you could just use a swarm. That's currently my preferred method. It's almost like having 2 people in a square anyway since melee and ranged damage is halved. And they essentially get 2 (or more attacks) if you give them an aura attack. And they are more vulnerable to area attacks which makes sense since they are so close together and don't have much room to dodge.

 

[Nytmare]

Or, since it's all abstract anyway, you could just say that "about 5 feet wide" is closer to "about 3 feet wide."

Throw off the shackles of oppressive concrete game measurements!

iViva la revolucion!​