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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7143214" data-attributes="member: 996">You can certainly do that.  5e isn't written in legalese, so sometimes it's trying to say something fairly straightforward (dropping prone to avoid arrows, good, dropping prone to avoid an axe, bad) and it gets hung up in the gap between natural language and rules jargon.  Obviously it makes no sense that a character 10' away from a 20' tall giant with 15' reach should drop prone to avoid being pounded into the ground, while dropping prone should be an obvious thing to do when a unit of crossbowmen are shooting at you. However cogently you stated such a rule, though, there'd always be some corner case that messed it up.  Like elevation, if someone's making a ranged attack against you from the top of a wall you're standing at the foot of, dropping prone would give him a /better/ target.  5e's solution is to dash off rules without worrying too much about it and empower the DM to iron out any issues. Which is exactly what you'd be doing with that ruling....by the same token, you could rule that way in some instances, but not all... So if a player - maybe one accustomed to 3.x where you could make a 'Tumble' check to avoid AoOs - declared an action like "I run up to the pikeman, tuck and roll under his guard and stand up right in front of him to stab him with my dagger," rather than declaring blah-technicality-actions like 'dropping prone' and 'crawling?'Personally, I didn't much care for the 3.x tumble check, because AoOs added something to the game and tumble checks and concentration checks and the like to negate them just took that something right back out again.</blockquote>

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