Artoomis said:
1. Let's assume that you are right, and you can take 2 "5-foot steps" in one round with haste.
2. Per pg. 117 neither one avoids an AoO because you've moved more than 5 feet in a round. Right?
No.
According to the definition of 5-foot step in the glossary, you made two 5 foot positional adjustments. You did not move 10 feet.
Either you use all of the words in the glossary definition (i.e. 5-foot step does not count as a move and does not provoke an AoO), or you use none of them.
Artoomis said:
3. Recall that the definition of a "5-foot move" is that it does not provoke an AoO from movement.
And, here is the nuts and bolts of your AoO argument. The glossary states “A small positional adjustment that does not count as a move in combat. … This movement does not provoke an AoO.”
However, page 122 states: “If your entire move for the round is 5 feet (a 5-foot step), enemies do not get attacks of opportunity for your moving.” Page 117 states this as well.
But, do these rules (on page 117 and 122) apply to 5-foot steps when hasted? There are two counter arguments:
1) Parenthesis in the English language can mean either i.e. or e.g. So, the rules on page 117 and 122 might explicitly be talking about a non-hasted round. Why? Well, part of the definition of a 5-foot step is that it does not provoke AoOs. So, according to your logic, there is only one protection from AoO per round for moving 5 feet in a round. 5-foot steps always prevent AoOs. Hence, if you can only get the protection once per round, you can only take one 5-foot step per round and hence, two 5-foot steps are not allowed. And, this is a reasonable position to take.
But, the counter argument that you can have multiple 5-foot steps per round, but this rule only applies when you take one of them is also tenable. The multiple 5-foot steps still protect you from AoOs, they just do not do it because of the AoO rules on page 117 and 122. They do it based on the glossary definition (just like dropping a weapon when stunned is based SOLELY on the glossary definition). In other words, the AoO rules (on page 117 and 122) discuss the specific case of one 5-foot step per round, but do not take into account and do not apply to the case of two 5-foot steps per round (i.e. they are a subset rule, not a superset rule).
2) Does the 5-foot step count as a move? The glossary states that it does not count as a move, but is rather a positional adjustment. The AoO rule implies that the 5-foot step is movement and part of “your entire move for the round’. So, if you take 2 5-foot steps in a round, is your entire move for the round 10 feet? Well, not according to the glossary definition of 5-foot steps. You moved 0 feet. You positionally adjusted 10 feet. According to the AoO rule, it is moving 10 feet.
Granted, this second one is an extremely nit point. But, that’s what rules lawyering is all about: taking the literal words and using them as is to prove your point literally.
Note: Given the positional adjustment definition of a 5-foot step argument (#2 above), the MEA rule only applies to real combat movement as well. In a standard round, you can MEA, take a 5-foot step, MEA again, and take another 5-foot step since neither of the 5-foot steps are actual move, they are just positional adjustments according to the glossary definition of 5-foot step.
In all seriousness here, the real problem here is that the designers did not take into account Haste. They basically made the assumption in the rules that a round generally consists of either a standard action or a full round action (and hence used the phrase per round and per turn a lot).
However, I still believe that the reason they wrote them the way they did is that they did not take Haste into account, merely because you have to really dig into the rules in order to illustrate your point. YMMV.
Artoomis said:
If you can logically make an argument for 2 5-foot steps in a round that both meets the definition of 5-foot steps and does not violate the pg. 117 rule, I'd be convinced. I haven't seen anything like that yet - I look forward to it - I'd love to be wrong on this one, it would help my character.
The best I could do is illustrate that the rules on page 117 and 122 might not apply. In other words, if you can do multiple 5-foot steps per round, then these rules are specific only to the case when you can only do one.
Btw, your AoO argument, as presented this time, is quite compelling (it was less clear, at least to me, on other occasions, maybe I did not read it carefully enough). In fact, it is compelling enough that I concede that one 5-foot step per round is what is literally meant by the rules as written (although I still had to come up with a counter position, just to shake your tree
).