Full Defense and Tumble

[doktorstick]

Howdy.

I'm new to having a tumbling character. From my understanding, tumbling can be used in place of the move portion of your action (i.e., it isn't a standard action).

Full defense is a standard action. You can still move your movement (e.g., 30 ft.).

To me it seems that if you want to get by a whole bunch of characters, you can go into full defense and tumble your way past the entire mob. If you fail any tumble rolls you'll get the +6 AC (from 5 ranks of tumble). Is this accurate or am I patently wrong?

Thanks.
/ds

 

[Pielorinho]

As I understand it:

Total defense is a standard action (I can't get the SRD to come up -- check your book to make sure). If I'm right, you can do a single move while using the total defense option.

Tumbling isn't an action at all -- it's a method of movement. You can tumble up to 20' a round as part of a movement. If your speed is 30, you can tumble up to 20' and walk up to an additional 10' in a round in which you use the total defense option.

So if there's a whole gang of enemies that you need ot get past, you can do as you describe as long as you don't need to do more than 20' of tumbling to get past them.

Note that you can break your 20' of tumbling up into smaller segments if you want (at least, I'm pretty sure you can). So if the bad guys are in two groups, you can cartwheel, jog forward 10', and do another cartwheel to get to where you want.

In other words, I'm pretty sure you're right.

Daniel

 

[Stalker0]

Yep, that's right

 

[Christian]

And if you have the Mobility feat, that's +10 to AC.

I wish I'd thought of that strategy before my monk was slain. Not that it would have kept him alive, but it would have been yet another great way to irritate the DM with him ...