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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ECMO3" data-source="post: 9588573" data-attributes="member: 7030563">"A Frightened creature takes the Dash action and moves away from you by the safest route on each of its turns unless there is nowhere to move. "I and every DM I have played with interprets that as:  The creature must take the Dash action [regardless of situation] and moves away from you unless there is nowhere to move.It is perfectly legit to interpret it as:  The creature must take the dash action [unless there is nowhere to move] and moves away from you unless there is nowhere to move.I agree that 2nd interpretation is valid, however it hardly changes the power of the spell in play.  All the caster has to do is move slightly to give the affected creatures somewhere else to run that is further away.I am in 30x30 room with one door in the center of the south wall, I am in the doorway.  I cast fear and the enemy takes the dash action and runs to the northeast corner as far away as possible.  On my turn I simply move to the southeast corner, now the bad guy has "somewhere to run" - the northwest corner.  So they take the dash action and run there.  Then next turn I move to the southwest corner.  This ends up working like a washing machine, with them moving back and forth but does not change the overall effect of the spell unless I play not smart.The difference between the first and second interpretation is I have to move in a dead end situation, which is not generally significant, especially when you have party members that can do things like block enemy movement paths.IME most do not play it that way, but it is a valid interpretation, although not one I have seen.But they need to be actually cornered as far away as they can possibly get from the caster at the start of their turn and that should never be the case unless the caster is not smart or there is some other highly situational effect in play.There are some corner cases where this might happen; like if the caster gets grappled or restrained.  Even in this case though they still can't move any closer to the caster, so unless they have ranged attacks/abilities they are useless and even if they do have ranged attacks those are at disadvantage.With an Arcane Trickster multiclass I once hit enemies with Fear in a rather large room with exits on both ends.  They dashed away from me and I used action dash and bonus action dash to run past them and make them turn around and run the other way and did this for several turns in a row while my allies stood in the middle and made ranged attacks and AOOs on them as they ran past (and I got AOOs too), and that works with either interpretation.</blockquote>

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