Dodgy
Longtime readers know how much I enjoy inventing my own headcanon. Whenever I look at the rules, scratch my head, and try to make things make sense within the fiction of the game, my own personal Imagination Land becomes that little bit richer. And way back in the day when I rolled up my first goblin rogue, it was the evasion ability that got me thinking:
A rogue can avoid even magical and unusual attacks with great agility. If she makes a successful Reflex saving throw against an attack that normally deals half damage on a successful save, she instead takes no damage.
The default explanation is right there in the ability text: “great agility.” You dodge nimbly out of the way of the effect. However, that never quite fit the picture in my head. Leaping away from explosions and action-rolling like Indy are perfectly cromulent, but both maneuvers require you to actually move. The rogues of the world dodge in place, taking not so much as a 5′ step to get clear of danger. It’s like the end of Duck Dodgers, with world-shaking fireballs conveniently missing the plucky protagonist. “How can this be?” I wondered.
- Rogues have mastered the art of hiding in extradimensional space. They dodge so hard that they briefly enter the Ethereal Plane.
- Magical fire is full of holes. If it misses you, it’s because you went full-on Catherine-Zeta-laser-scene.
- There’s good reason to own a portable hole (besides your dumped Strength score). Just use it like a hula-hoop jump rope and blink out of existence.
- You guys ever read the Xanth books? Evasion is an expression of Bink’s talent.
- Rogues are skinny. Turn sideways and stand directly between the dragon’s nostrils. You’ll be perfectly safe!
I’ll be the first to admit that my list of unnecessarily complicated evasion explanations creates solutions to a non-problem. Evasion has been a rock-solid mechanic since it was invented. For most gamers the only explanation required is a quick die-roll and a handwave. But like Thief sitting there at ground zero with nary a scratch, I can’t help but wonder bemusedly why my buddies didn’t dodge.
What do the rest of you guys think? Do you have any headcanon explanations for evasion? Sound off with your own personal version of dodgy rogues down in the comments!
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I tend to imagine it as dodging straight up. Like, you jump so high up over the fireball (doing the requisite triple flip along the way) to avoid the damage.
What if you’re crawling through a narrow passage?
Then you hold your allies in front of the blast, thus you know know why they didn’t dodge and how your thief got away without a scratch.
Fighter-butts are famously useful cover….
Yes, I have read the Xanth books. But Bink’s talent wouldn’t be that much help on an adventure where there are non-magical traps. You take a Mundane (pun intended) dagger, he’s gonna get stabbed with it.
To be fair, evasion wouldn’t help much with mundane dagger. Now if we’re talking about a hail of daggers flung by some kind of cockamamie trap….
It’s fun to think that there’s some magical reason the rogue can avoid damage without moving, but that’s thinking in purely game terms. If we imagine it happening in real time, we would assume that the rogue is already moving (either to cover or to their next position). (Also ignore the time I dodged an acid splash that covered the entire room I was in).
I like to imagine that it was your own acid splash. And that the somatic component was a sneeze.
I have never really struggled with this. Explosions don’t bloom in exact multiples of 5 x 5 cubes, and I have never subscribed to hp being ‘meat points’, so a good deal of the damage in my head is concussion from the blast, sprains or bruises from being knocked down hard, and disoreintation after the impact.
So damage mitigation is partly being that little bit faster (maybe the Dragons breath covers everything above 2′, and the Rogue is the only one fast enough to throw himself completely prone so it passes over the top), better combat awareness (he’s sees the hit coming earlier so is able to better shield vulnerable body parts like eyes and utilise what tiny cover exist like other characters to reduce the force of the hit) and being more able to roll with the punches (as everyone is knocked sprawling, he’s the one able to tuck and roll to mitigate the worst bumps and scrapes).
Once you accept hit points as more of an obstraction, it becomes more easy to accept how a character could be in the middle of that fireball and come out “unscathed”.
So there was this time we were playing pathfinder, and I had a dexmunchkin high charisma changeling bard/rogue. Someone threw a fireball at the party. Due to my high dex save, evasion, and hero points, I only needed to roll a dex save to check if I need to spend a hero point to reroll a natural 1 (although even with a natural 1, my dex save total would have been like, 5 points above the DC). Of course I rolled above 15. The rest of the party had different successes.
We agreed with the DM to describe the event as some of my companions managed to jump and roll away, some managed to jump into the epicentre, and all of them had varius coverage of soot and smoke, while I was standing valiantly in front of the explosion, grinning, as a lock of my hair were gently moved by the breeze.
Now you can translate it as I was calling a bluff and didn’t jump when the villain expected me to move into the target area to avoid being hit where I stood, but being a showoff bard I think I simply just knew where to stand to have that action hero BAMF effect.
Guess Rogue finally gets some good luck on her side for a change! Unless her surviving the blast means she gets exclusively targeted by something much less pleasant.
Well, that may be because Warrior died to the Shocker Lizard the other day…
I’m pretty sure I’ve read a 3E source, maybe the DMG for 3.0 or 3.5, which says that yes, magical fire is full of holes, and there are ways to twist and maneuver to mitigate or avoid the damage from such a blast, without even moving from a particular 5′ cube.
It never really bothered me. As it happens, I did some computational simulation work at university, and one of our exercises was to compute the overpressure profile of a nuclear explosion. The funny thing was that if the explosion went off at ground level, there were distinct nodes and antinodes in the overpressure (which is basically “damage”). In an idealized explosion, there were places you could stand where you wouldn’t experience any wind or pressure variation at all. So that’s the sort of thing that makes me think evasion can work.
I did read the Xanth novels at about the same time, too! I think I stopped when I realised that puns aren’t jokes and women aren’t objects.
I appreciate a good pun, but Piers Anthony’s attitude toward woman is more than a little objectionable.
Uhm, what? Most women significant to the story in Piers Anthony’s books have agency. They may be sexualised in one manner or the other, and the in-story male characters might roll their eyes while sighing “women, amiright?”, but the women get to contribute to the resolving the story all the same.
It’s not the most “Yaaas, Queen, slay!” representation of women to be sure, but that in itself isn’t a bad thing. The puns do get a bit old though.
Every 5 foot cube (medium spacing) contains an 8 foot sphere (largest medium creature).
I basically gave up on dodge/evasion hedacannon after the rogue dodged a fireball (I think) while unconcious and bleeding out.
We’re still chuckling about that fight to this day
Can you max a dex save if you’re unconscious? Because if you don’t get a save evasion wouldn’t apply.
…although it is much funnier to let it happen.
It took a few minutes of rules checking, but yes, by RAW you get a check even when unconcious. No idea how, but hey, it saved his life and he’s still kicking at now nearly the end of the campaign
Strictly speaking, while you can make a reflex save while unconscious (somehow), evasion doesn’t work when you are helpless including when you are unconscious, at least in 3.5/pathfinder.
In 5e you just straight up fail all dex (and also str) saves while unconsious (page 292 of the players handbook)
So in the 5e RAW, I guess if you have evasion you actually take half damage in this scenario? Because the spell allows a dex save, auto-failing by being unconscious is still a failed dex save for evasion purposes.
Good to know for Pathfinder, I’ll be making use of that one I’m sure.
In 5E you automatically fail Strength and Dexterity checks and saving throws while Incapacitated. Unconscious includes Incapacitated. See the Conditions section.
This was Pathfinder, so making the save was fine. And since this was about a year ago, I’m only reasonably sure evasion didn’t matter in this case. Nat20 on the reflex save was good enough to not die.
Well my answer to this is a bit more boring than your suggestions; no-one is ever really stationary in combat.
Think about it, we model combat as being turn based, with each character taking a number of various actions, but the characters aren’t actually standing their going “I run to this point and fire my crossbow. Now I’ll stand perfectly still whilst everyone else does something.”. All of those turns are happening simultaneously, so when that fireball goes off your rogue could actually be mid-run, or ducking and weaving around someone in melee. The mini on the map denotes how far they’ve run in 6 seconds, but it doesn’t mean they’ve stopped.
Tie this in with Glorthindel’s comments above about hit points being an abstraction, and it all starts to look a lot less silly.
I generally explain it as either a) the character doing some acrobatic breakdancing maneuver that literally forms a protective bubble around them and their gear, or b) mundanely passing into and out of the shadow (or ethereal) plane.
All the love and respect for the Xanth reference~
Bink is one of the most underrated, overpowered characters to have ever been written. His talent is the perfect embodiment of the Plot Armor and Xanathos Gambit tropes, and I love it~
silly to ask where Thief hid behind, when there are two splots of gone cover on the ground.
equally silly to ask why they didn’t make the dodge. They simply didn’t make the dodge, but they sure made excellent cover – for a moment at least. :-p
Time to meet Fighter #42.
Personally I often imagine it as turning swiftly and using ones cloak for cover, then moving it fast enough that the fire doesn’t catch on the cloak. (almost everyone wears a cloak, often of resistance).
Alternatively some combo of the attacks not actually covering their entire area (just a lot of it) jumping above/below the attack/behind cover and pc’s not standing still with the turn order only being an abstraction.
Gear having evasion (and stalwart) would help explain why they only take damage when you roll a natural 1. (Assuming you don’t use what in my experience is the single most common house-rule that they don’t do that even then).
I don’t know about mortal rogues but the god of rogues in the Greyhawk setting, Olidammara, is vaguely armadillo themed and presumably rolls into a ball
Oh, and there’s this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6prK716ssM
Honestly it always felt flimsy to me. I can maybe see a justification for some classes having the Constitution/Wisdom equivalent for the Evasion feature, but no. If you’re standing in the center of an AoE you take the brunt. Then again I’m of the opinion that most AoEs should be Con saves rather than Dex for the above reasoning.
I could maybe see Evasion working as advertised if it were a lot more complicated.
Evasion: “When you succeed on a Dexterity Saving Throw against an area of effect, you can use your reaction to move up to your speed to an area outside of the effect. If this moves you outside of the area of effect, you take no damage.”
The above is wordy and unwieldy, but I feel represents what Evasion should be realistically.
As a side note, the party’s gear likely survived because those pieces are artifacts, and artifacts are not destroyed so easily.
A level 3 npc squaring off against the party, one of the players unleashes a bolt of lightning striking his allies but this son of a gun is a boxer with an evasion ability and nails his rolls so I roleplayed that as it was coming at him he leapt into the air and did a classic superhero landing looking like an absolute beast. The party which was level 5 came to instantly fear this guy that was two levels below him.
He later actually got the first party kill with a killer uppercut.
Once my Daybreak Exalted was about to besiege a city. He asked them to surrender their weapons, lives, souls, bodies and saltshakers. Their response was a barrage of arrows that my Abyssal dodge by simply turning sideways and lowering his head so all his body was on the only place that was not going to be covered in arrows. That way he dodge an arrow barrage that covered all else in the field in arrows.
But allow me to play the Technocracy Advocate, there is something called “Quantum Immortality” and that may in fact be a reasonable reason of the dodge-in-place-unharmed phenomenon. Here the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality . Basically there is a device that measure the spin of an atom, depending of which a pistol can be fired killing a man. Now the interesting thing is that according to the Many Worlds Interpretation there is at least one universe in which the person never ever dies. So the dodge feat actually creates a low-level reality warping, or non spontaneous quantum fluctuation speaking scientifically, that enables the survival of the dodger rogue against all the posible odds, while technically sentencing him on other universe to die. That way the seeming imposible dodge feats can allow a rogue to survive. Science resolves another mystery!!! 🙂
As far as the magic items are concerned, I think in some edition of D&D or maybe elsewhere I once read that all magical items were almost immune to harm unless very specific and deliberate and difficult attempts to damage them were done. Ever since that’s my default headcannon on magic items.
As far as Evasion goes…. well the character is written on a sheet of paper. So obviously they just turn sideways and go the extra 0.05 mm to being fully two dimensional so they just effectively don’t exist where the effect is taking place. =P
Personally, I believe that the Rogue archetype, being all about ‘living on their wits rather then their brawn’, simply gets very good at whatever they set their mind to getting good at, with or without magic.
As far as evasion goes, at least D&D 3.x/Pathfinder ect. describe HP as a combination of your health, vitality and combat prowess. A character taking a ‘hit’ from a weapon only suffers superficial injuries and exhaustion, right until the hit that drops him to or below 0. That is the one where they get actually impaled or cut or have their ribs crushed etc.
So, how does a Rogue then avoid an AoE effect without being worse for the wear? Weeellll… taking the above into account, I think that Rogues simply learn to ‘roll with it’, thus mitigating any effect on their combat readyness. Oh sure, they may still be singed, their ears ringing from the blast etc., but they just shrug it off by, well sheer arrogance. Can’t touch this!
Allow me to explain: For warrior types (fortitude), it is a bit of masochism. “Bring the damage, I can take it and still vanquish you!” For caster types (will), it is about the resolve to not allow magic to alter their personal reality. But for roguish types, it is the conviction that they are just that good.
In a magical world, a strong will can make reality bend its way, it is just that different people manifest that in different ways.
how does evasion work?
well yesterday it didn’t for Shadow Dancer, nothing dramatic though and
everybody else made their saves, which is refreshing.
I’ve used a couple over my career of thievery. When I played my Shadowdancer, i actually described my evasion as falling into my own shadow for a moment, just long enough to let the effect pass. I once described an antagonist in a Sci Fi game who was fighting a Spartan (Halo) using two SMGs that sprayed bullets in an area effect as stepping between the guns and punching the Spartan in the faceplate when he did so. (Which got applause from the table.) I had a different rogue dodge a Cone of Cold by hiding behind the Half-Orc Druid, which turned horrible when the druid supplied that he then toppled over like a frozen statue, as he was at -24.
But my favorite was the Tiefling I had built around Evasion in Pathfinder, taking both Fiendish Resilience (If you are a Tiefling with resistance to an energy type and Evasion, gain +4 Competence on Reflex saves against that energy) and Without a Trace (Hide as an immediate action after using Evasion. ). The number of times I avoided fireballs and made the enemy wizard go “Huh…there were five people in that fireball…” and then immediately spend the next action doing something odd that was obviously meant to counter an invisible rogue was funny.
I am making my own RPG and have the same “issue” with evasion. So in my RPG there is a thing called “Agile Maneuver” in which you actually move. It essentially costs a finite resource per encounter, but you can use it to move a space when an attack is declared against you and if you’re no longer a legal target the attack fails.
It’s nice because it can pull you out of the radius of a fireball if it isn’t centered on you, or can also be used to evade say a giant swinging a big-damage weapon at your squishy rogue.
My favorite take on this trope comes from Flaming Crab games:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/paladin/archetypes/flaming-crab-games-paladin-archetypes/dashing-hero/
The “dashing rescue” ability allows you pick up your horse (or elephant) and carry it out of danger.
Unfortunately, pathfinders encumbrance makes this hard. Even if you were naked and had no weight on you already, you’d need a Str of 22 to even pick up the horse, and you would still only be allowed to move at a rate of 5ft and thus would immediately stop. All it does RaW is put you in the blast radius too!
Specific trumps general. Not even being facetious here.
Forget the horse. Think about moving a fighter out of harm’s way. That fighter, plus his gear, plus your gear, probably puts you over encumbrance limits. I submit that the listed ability specifically ignores encumbrance rules.
Fair. I submit that pathfinder in general ignores it’s own encumbrance rules.
^ Very fair. If it wasn’t for Hero Lab auto-calculating stuff, literally everyone would have Str 8.
Duck and cover!
*Laughs in bullet-time.
Exalted takes this to extremes (as usual) with perfect-dodge charms. I mean, it’s plausible enough in D&D that a rogue might evade a relatively-small fireball, if necessary by using fellow targets for cover. It’s less plausible when they’re dodging a magical nuke with a hundred-foot blast radius… because they’re just that good.
Alternatively, refrigerator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arib8uWMWsM
I don’t have any headcanon, but the first time I ever really got a chance to play a tabletop was d20 Modern. I picked a Fast Hero… and pretty much this exact scenario happened. Flash grenade landed at my feet, and I was completely unharmed. The Strong Hero that was half-behind the counter 15ft away, on the other hand, needed a medkit.
Do you remember how your GM described it? The responsibility of justifying this counter-intuitive malarkey often devolves to the guy behind the screen.