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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Artoomis" data-source="post: 3124031" data-attributes="member: 111">Can you give me a reason why one could not view flying underwater as "hampered movement?" (a core rule)"Difficult terrain, obstacles, or poor visibility can hamper movement. When movement is hampered, each square moved into usually counts as two squares, effectively reducing the distance that a character can cover in a move. "Granted, the hampered movement rules do not mention flight, but the same prinicpal applies and nothing.The MotP is a 3.0e book, true, but no update has invalidated that approach to flight and underwater movement. It seems to me that you can fly underwater as "hampered movement" at 1/2 speed - with the loss of one manueverability class making sense within the intent of the "hampered movement" rule and in line with the MotP precedent.It should also be clear that this is NOT the same as swimming.Finally, the rules do not address flight underwater (you cannot fly unrestricted underwater for sure, though).  The "hampered movement" rules only talk in detail about land movement, leaving open such interesting topics as underwater flight, or swimming through reeds (hampered movement, right?).  Such things need a DMs adjudication as the rules leave it open.To be very, very clear.1.  Flying is through the air (or other gas medium).2.  Flying underwater is, therfore, at a minimum NOT a normal means of locomotion underwater.3.  It seem to me that if one can physically fly somehow, that water only provides resistence to make it harder than normal - ultimately, from an aerodynamic point of view, air and water both act as fluids.4.   "Hampered Movement" rules seem to be a nice fit for how to handle underwater flight, but they are detailed only for land movement, leaving it up to the DM to figure out how to apply them for underwater flight or other non-land-based situations.  MotP gives a really good way to do this.P.S.  At a local pizza place (of all things) I just saw a video of some sea birds actually flying underwater.  Wild!  I could see their feathered wings moving in the same way as when flying through the air.  Very interesting stuff.  IN D&D terms, they would definitely have been moving slower than normally and with reduced manueverability - though 1/4 speed might be more  "realistic" that 1/2 after watching those birds.  Given the tremendously larger amount of resistence in water than air, 1/4 speed sounds good to me - but it's probably easier to just use 1/2.P.P.S.  Despite having a reduced manueverability, anyone can "hover" underwater because they can simply stop flying and choose to "swim" instead, with perfect maneuverability.  I personally would restrict changing modes of movement to each move - so you could, for example, fly for one move and swim for the second move in a round (or vice versa, of course).</blockquote>

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