Swimming -- even light armor is dangerous

[Len]

No prob, silentspace.

I should mention, the last time a heavily armored fighter fell into water in our campaign, he just sat on the bottom until we dropped him a rope with a grappling hook. We had to bang it off his armor a couple of times before he made his spot check.

And the time before that, my character went under a couple of times while trying to save an NPC, and another PC got swept downstream and nearly drowned. I took my armor off before going in, but the current was too strong for me to do anything on a 10.

Yeah, DMs love water.

 

[CombatWombat51]

How exactly would you handle rescuing a swimming character? Aid another to give them +2? If you just say the rescuer takes the rescuee as weight, that will pretty much sink both characters.

I'd say that first the rescue swimmer would have to make a successful melee touch attack, and then a successful grapple check (though I wouldn't require the swimmer to deal damage to the victim).

I'd require a successful grapple because nearly all people in fear of drowning are a pain in the ass to rescue. They like to use your head, arms, or whatever to pull themselves up, and generally make things difficult. A trained rescue swimmer has ways of dealing with that, but I wouldn't think that such skills would be common to D&D, let alone adventurers.

Perhaps skilled swimmers (5+ ranks) wouldn't require a successful grapple check since they should know better. Of course, those are the types to not generally need rescuing. Or possibly a high DC Diplomacy check to get the victim to calm down and not resist.

Maybe also a Swim check with a penalty (-5 or so) for staying afloat if you're within reach of the victim.

Then either Swim checks at half normal swimming speed with maybe a -10 penalty. Maybe a base of -5, plus their size modifier (to Hide: -4 Large, -8 Huge, etc.), plus any penalties they're suffering due to armor or encumberance.

Unlike a normal grapple, once you got a hold, the victim wouldn't resist you, so you should be able to automatically maintain your grapple until you reach your destination.

Or you could say screw all that and say "Make a Swim check at -5," and be done with it