This one strikes close to home. It was an argument between my swordsman player and me, and I’m still not sure I made the right call. That’s because I’m a writer, and we were stuck inside a word problem straight out of geometry class.
“You’re in a 20 ft. high chamber,” I told the swordsman. “The ogre mage you’re fighting has fly active, so he takes up a 10 ft. cube right up at the top of the chamber. Meanwhile, you are standing in your 5 ft. cube at the bottom of the chamber. There is 5 ft. of open air between the two of you.”
“So… I attack him?”
“He’s out of your reach.”
“No he isn’t! I’m over six feet tall! I have a sword! Are you saying I couldn’t reach 10 ft. high with extended arms and a sword?”
“Imagine that you’re in a Rubik’s Cube,” I told him for some reason. “There’s a cube between you and your enemy. It’s like being non-adjacent on a 2D map.”
“I’m taller than I am wide though.”
“Well I mean as long as we’re bending the rules, suppose he tucks in his feet in to avoid you?”
This was not a mature response on my part. To be fair though, he was arguing with the GM. To be even fairer, it was a ridiculous Monty Python-esque situation.
“Couldn’t I jump?” he asked.
“No! Jumping is right out!”
We ultimately decided that he was allowed to leap and smite. However, since this was a PF1e game, he couldn’t get his full iterative attacks. Jumping counted as movement after all, so all those bonus smites were out the window.
Neither one of us was satisfied with the interaction. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect this was one of those situations where the GM is supposed to call the weird situation in the player’s favor. What do you guys think though? Are you willing to bend the rules when the game goes 3D? Or do you try to stick to your guns and try to run RAW? Should Fighter be smiting that crossbow kenku? Give us all your hottest hot takes down in the comments!
JOIN THE HANDBOOK OF HEROES DISCORD! Do you want a place to game with your fellow Heroes? How about a magical land where you can post your dankest nerd memes, behold the finest in gamer dog and geek cats, or speculate baselessly on Handbook of Heroes plot developments? Then have I got a Discord Invite for you!
In a situation like this I’d default to sticking to the rules unless it seemed to really be upsetting the players. And if it did, they’d I’d ask them if they were sure they wanted it to work that way in the future when enemies could use it on them when they’re flying or up on walls or such. The important thing is to keep the rules fair (because fairness helps ensure fun), not really that I use the rules exactly as written in the book.
Well yes, you can touch someone with the tip of your sword, arm extended, leaping.
But where’s the force behind your attack then? You’re telegraphing your attack so hard as well.
“Could I jump?”
Yes. There are rules for jumping. Acrobatics, five feet (about 1 and a half metres) is DC 20, DC 40 if you try it without a jumping start. No action, is just part of movement, if you fail to make the check by more than 5 you would fall prone. This is… Very harch.
The game is also not really designed with 3D combat in mind. Creatures occupy a XxX square. This is by design 2D, and doesn’t really take high into consideration.
Medium creatures can be from 4′-8′ feet tall, so they don’t really ocupy a 5x5x5 cube, but a 5x5x10 cube. The same is true with other sizes except Small, a Large creature is between 8′ to 16′ feet tall or long, they fit inside a 10×10 square in 2D, but in 3D they would occupy a 10x10X15 cube. And don’t get me started with the 32′ to 64′ foot long Gargantuan creatures and their 20×20 squares.
In the end, I would had just left behind the “real” sizes and have told the player that multiple of 5 feets is just the way to refer to squares in the board in a narrative way. The sealing is 8 squares high, the Ogre Magi ocupies a 2x2x2 squares cube and they ocupy 1 square and can hit the adjacent ones. I would ask for forgiveness if my description led them to believe otherwise, but this is the state of this encounter.
Is it gammey? Yes. Completely. But is not unfair. Long creatures also ocupy the same space than tall creatures instead of 5×10 feet for Medium and 10×15 for Large, so this is how it is.
Sorry
*”The sealing is 4 squares high…”
These are basically all of my rulings on 3D combat in one spot. While the game isn’t really made for it, it sadly comes up quite a bit. I’ve had to come up with my own rules for it as a result, and the jumping thing is often the fix for hitting the opponent, as very few of my players actually goes to the trouble of having a ranged weapon a lot of the time
“The game is also not really designed with 3D combat in mind.”
That doesn’t actually matter. It’s because teh game uses abstracts for combat measurement. That means that even if your PC is 7′ tall, they fit into a 5’x5’x5′ cube just as easily as a 4′ tall person does. It also means your reach is no greater than the 4′ tall person’s reach.
But then breaking away from abstracts means everyone’s reach has to be calculated, power-gaming those inches of distance become the new combat meta. It’s better for all concerned (at least until AI and VR are good enough to take over) that we stay strictly abstract for these things.
There’s a thin line between customising reach and giving fireball a volume of 32000 cubic feet rather than a radius of 20ft
this is where 11 foot poles come into play.
more to the point, focusing on melee so much as to neglect your ranged attacks is just asking to be taken down from afar…
It was the right call for the wrong reason.
He can reach 10ft high with his sword, but the enemy starts at the lower end of the 15ft square.
Can you jump?
Sure, but you forgo your DEX bonus to AC if you attack jumping.
This is one of those area’s of ambiguity in Pathfinder 1.
Often people choose to treat 3d combat as being made up of 5x5x5 ft. cubes, that’s one reasonable way to run it, but strictly speaking the rules didn’t actually say that.
The rules where vague enough that you could run height based on actual height and let tall people reach higher, while shorter ones might not need to duck in lowish tunnels.
I have done that a few times, through it was some extra work.
The 5ft-sided cube version is easier and simpler through, and in that case your player wouldn’t be able to reach the flying ogre without jumping.
This would indeed represent the fact that the ogre doesn’t actually fill it’s entire cube and it can just move around inside its squares to stay out of reach (The same sort of movement that makes your AC higher under normal circumstances than if you got paralyzed, not the sort that takes any actions).
To be honest, realistic swordfighting makes it seem perfectly plausible to hit someone more than 5′ away with most weapons, and I personally would be inclined to bend the rules to allow common sense to take hold.
I’ve run a few encounters with flying or otherwise out-of-reach enemies, and usually I can keep them away and safe. But if the PCs find some clever, sensible way to get their sword into the wyvern, I’d usually let it happen. Maybe at a penalty
Flying ogres are not gelatinous cubes and (much like the players) do not fill their space. They *threaten* the space as they have easy reach inside, but they do not fill it; and for example that’s why friendly creatures can walk or shoot through their spaces.
I would probably say in a similar case, that theoretically he can reach into the edge of the cube and swoosh, but since the ogre is not a 10x10x10 cube, practically he would just swoosh at the air. With a jump he could get close enough to actually have a chance to hit the ogre himself.
And if it would be a creature that actually fills its space, like aforementioned cube, then they could hurt at the edge as well.
I would agree it was the right call. In my game when the GM did that to us, I laughed and grabbed the +1 Spear (10 ft reach) I’d been holding on to for a while and stabbed them cause they expected the poor non-flying dwarf to have trouble.
Then again, I consider a reach/ranged weapon to be an essential part of the adventurer’s tool kit. I don’t include silver or cold iron reach weapons worth adding though.
Fighter vs. Kenku? Nope. If Hawkeye can parkour all over the place, flinging arrows and this guy can pull off similar feats (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEG-ly9tQGk), then that’s a pretty good example of why your mini needs to wind up ADJACENT to an archer to actually have a chance of landing a melee hit.
Smite vs. flying ogre? Up to you, but my call would also be nope. RAW the hero’s max jump-reach as a Medium creature is 8 feet. Add to that the average length of a longsword’s blade (3′), and he has –at best– a chance to lightly slap the flying ogre with up to 12″ of the sword’s tip. Also note that (like the archer example) everyone is assumed to wriggle within their assigned space as a function of not-wanting-to-be-hit. The ogre is not a floating pinata of hit points, and he has the ability to move his toes aside without wasting any movement. If this were a *touch attack* to deliver a spell effect then –maybe– but as a smite bonus to a regular attack, I’d say no.
Okay, I did forget to add the result of an Acrobatics (Jump) check. The PC is unlikely to get more than 4 feet in the jump as a part of his movement and will not permanently occupy the space above him that he passed through as he popped up and then down again (unless he has Levitate), and so cannot make an attack from it during his attack phase (unless he has Spring Attack). He will jump up into and then out of a threatened square, drawing an Attack of Opportunity from the ogre, then land prone for failing to grab hold of something at the height of his jump. Lebron James or Michael Jordan could make such a shot, but only unarmored and if the hoop wasn’t actively trying to evade them.
That said, I’ll modify my original judgement to add that if it were a critical moment in the adventure/campaign and the player offered to spend an Action Point to let Rule of Cool apply, I’d let him attempt it as long as he understood the potential consequences of failure.
This is why I generally like to build in 3D spaces and use maps, because while theater of the mind is great for many things, logistics is usually not one of them.
I agree with the player in that situation entirely. There isn’t a single logistic situation where the space you described is big enough for flight to matter especially when dealing with a huge opponent.
I think one thing to always try and consider when designing an encounter is the physical space.
A similar situation occurred between a DM that believed that the “DM is always right” and when he described the room (a 20 by 20 room… those are the ones that will get you!) he placed an object we were very much meant to interact with to probably set off a trap in the direct middle of the room.
One of the players said he used his 10 foot pole to poke the object and a logistics argument ensued that ended with the DM saying the room was “actually 25 feet by 25 feet” (which didn’t help any, because overall that only adds another 2.5 feet to the equation and you can imagine a “stretched arm” argument next) and eventually flat out saying to us “You have to go into the room to touch the thing!”
It was a bad design that led to a bad argument and a bad time for everyone involved (especially since most of the table agreed with the player with the ten foot pole).
Essentially, when you are trying to build out your world, keep in mind a few simple mechanical concepts (mage hand being one of them – the replacement for the classic ten foot pole and with more reach!), and if you think a space is big enough in your head for the encounter you are imagining, maybe double that space just to be sure 🙂
Gah! I hate that sort of DM. If you set up a clever situation, and the players figure out a clever way to avoid it, congratulate them on their clever solution and takes notes for things to do differently in the future.
Retconning the size of the room because the PCs figured out how to reach the center without entering is just bad DMing, and very much sets up a DM vs Players mentality.
Probably preaching to the choir, here, I’ll admit.
I think it comes down to dm intent. If you intended for the encounter to use fly to make melee combat a challenge, then I’d stick to it. I would probably allow the jump attack, and a lot of other creative solutions, but certainly not allow any extra reach. And if not, why even make a deal of it?
See this is why I don’t use grid combat for my usual stuff. Theater of the mind, baby!
I recently learned about a hilarious reach interaction in 3.5 (and maybe Pathfinder?). A halfling with a longspear has a reach of 10ft. So far so good. But they foolishly set the longspear down, and you seize your opportunity to cast… *enlarge person* on them?
No really. When they pick the now incorrectly-sized longspear, despite being twice as big as they were a round ago, their reach is halved down to 5ft.
I’m guessing that’s using the variant rule of weapon equivalencies (I don’t recall what that option was called), and ruling that the small longspear was equivalent to a medium shortspear, instead of the default size rules where the now medium halfling would just get -2 to hit due to the weapon being to small for them, but otherwise retain their reach (but on the plus side they could wield it in one hand)
That would also get this result, but this happens even with the default rules. Weapons that are too small for you don’t grant reach; normally this is fairly common sense (a weapon half your size isn’t letting you reach very far, no matter how long it is for someone also half your size), but it interacts weirdly with the transition between Small and Medium, since those two sizes have the same reach.
So a medium longspear and a small longspear both have a reach of 10ft. However, a small longspear wielded by a medium character loses the reach property and can only hit foes 5ft away by strict RAW. Just like a medium longspear wielded by a large character would only have a 10ft reach.
You’re running a 1970s army game on a person scale. Let the man swat.
I think the call was good, and that like most people above going from 2D to 3D by taking X*X to X*X*X just makes sense. I would further that by saying that Fighter’s argument above is NOT reasonable, even just in 2D and disregarding the ‘nacessary abstractions for the rules’ argument. The reason being that he’s not trying to touch the kenku, he’s trying to attack it.
One assumes that the kenku (and the ogre) has been in a fight before, and so will avoid obvious attacks easily. Similarly, he’s probably wearing armor, or at least clothes, so to even scratch him requires hitting with a bit of force. Fighter is going to be neither forceful nor quick if reaching just as far out as he can. Boxers don’t stand halfway across the ring and throw haymakers all day, it doesn’t work. They get in close, where they have speed and leverage. Similarly, try picking up a stick and swinging at a spot four feet above your head, it won’t be pretty. The rules aren’t intended to be accurate models here, but they’re actually pretty good.
Map with 5″ hexes. Homebrew where certain weapons have a two hex reach. Weapon doesn’t have that listed, you can’t hit the other hex. You CAN throw your weapon though and depending on it’s weight and your strength, can do a fair amount of damage on a successful hit. Many a player in my game has done that in a desperate situation and successfully saved their ass.
And of course there’s also the reverse situation. There’s no way you reasonably should ever be able to score a critical hit on a really big giant or a great wyrm dragon because you’re just hacking at their ankles
That’s why I have a critical hit chart called “Knees and below” in my homebrew 🙂
Man I don’t really know. I myself don’t really enjoy running encounters. I don’t really like telling action stories.
I distinctly remember one of my players telling me off once for only running one encounter per arc, because it meant that there was very little room for mechanical progression.
I feel it’s the right call. Of course, it could be decided that for all manners of 3D combat, creatures occupy a 5x5x10 space… But there isn’t that much reason for it. 5x5x5 is easier to convey. And it was never about the size of the creatures – players aren’t 5 ft wide. Heck, dwarves have the same reach as humans, but they probable can’t reach as high.
It should be understood once you read the rules book that abstraction have to be accepted, and that “real world” rules don’t trump the game rules. However, if you really want a justification : the enemy is somewhere in a grid cube, not everywhere in it; so what you need to reach isn’t the near side, it’s the middle and/or the opposite side. You can reach anywhere between 5-10ft high, probably not between 10-15ft high.
It’s a bit of a shame that the rules for aerial combat in Pathfinder aren’t more developed. Because to answer the question : it’s not a “weird situation”, it’s actually a very common one that comes up all the time past a certain level. If the rule is that creatures (characters and enemies) take a 5x5x5 cube and can attack adjacent cubes, that should be what is enforced consistently, there is no ad-hoc ruling that has to be done.
The swordsman absolutely should be able to reach into the 10′ cube the ogre occupies. I’m a bit over 6′, and I can touch an 8′ ceiling with my fingertips while standing flat on the ground. Add a 3′ sword and I don’t even have to jump to be swinging into the space 10′ above me.
However the flying ogre doesn’t have to be “standing” flat on the bottom of his 10′ cube. If he was, sure, I could cut his feet up all nasty like. (And there might be a legitimate call to check whether a normally land-bound creature can orient itself to avoid that weakness.) But what if he’s floating horizontally, face down? It’s like taking the space a normal person on the ground would occupy and rotating it. There’s a fair bit of empty space around the target.
Having a 5′ reach doesn’t mean you can barely reach into the square you’re adjacent to. It means you can reasonably attack anywhere within that adjacent space. If you just stand in the center of your square and reach out your hand, maybe with a dagger, you won’t hit someone in an adjacent 5′ square. You’re essentially lunging partially into that square in order to hit that target as it moves around within its space. (And you don’t have to lunge to get into the 5′ space above you, since you already partially occupy it.)
Now, for a medium creature vs a large creature (5′ square vs 10′ square), the medium creature can still hit the large creature even if the large creature could technically be located primarily outside of the area the medium creature can reach. Your medium creature doesn’t have to reach across the entire 10′ square, just a reasonably large chunk of it (5′).
So your medium fighter can reach into the 10′ space the ogre occupies, but cannot reasonably reach sufficient amounts of that space to threaten the ogre. Essentially, the fighter has to be able to reach roughly 15′ high to be able to legitimately threaten the ogre.
If you can jump high enough to dunk a basketball while swinging a 3′ sword, you’re *still* not high enough to reach that 15′ mark. If you can get a 4′ acrobatics jump, though, that should be enough to qualify.
Sure, if the ogre were vertical, he may be within reach, but the ogre has turned 90 degrees and is facing down with his back nearly pressed against the ceiling. After all, if you are going to fight someone below you while under the power of magical flight, you would likely orient yourself so the enemy was in front of you, not below.
As others have said, you made the right call. If the ogre mage had been one square lower, the PC could have full attacked. If the ogre mage had been one square higher, the PC could not have conceivably reached him with a jump. So it makes perfect sense to limit the PC to one attack with a successful jump check.
Remember, the rules say that a gnome a third his height with a dagger can still threaten the square above him. If we were to pull out the same calculations, the gnome wouldn’t even reach outside of the top of his square. The rules are an abstraction of what this combat would look like in real life. We follow them to keep the game fair.
I think your player was out of line. Regardless of sense, he agreed on the basic rules of the game when he agreed to join your table. The idea of a homebrew campaign to test the idea of this specified reach rule could be cool though. Makes size more important. But that’s a session 0 kind of thing.
Unfortunately for D&D players like myself specifically, WOTC seems very intent on keeping the game as simple as possible, even at the cost of sense.
‘“Well I mean as long as we’re bending the rules, suppose he tucks in his feet in to avoid you?”
This was not a mature response on my part.”
That was a perfectly fine answer. Whenever I have a Player asking to ‘bend’ the rules for “realism’s sake” I always ask if they’re okay if I bend them in favor of their foes as well.
That usually shuts down any such nonsense immediately.
Because if you start bending the rules for small things “here and there” soon enough the Players have advantage of all the “properly realistically” bent rules, but the NPCs all have to obey the rules no matter how realism should favor them.
I was with the DM until the veto’d jumping. Granted, I say jumping doesn’t really gel with multiattack.
A rule from 4E that makes 3D combat easier is that rather than applying pythagoras, if they’re above you, use the greater of the horizontal and vertical distances. If they’re below you, use the lower.
I often rule in favor of the players. Particularly if there’s reasonable room for doubt.
Having said that, for the flying ogre scenario, the rules are pretty clear. A medium size creature occupies a 5′ cube and can reach adjacent squares. The ogre was not occupying an adjacent square. So the swordsman wouldn’t even be able to clip the ogre’s toenails.
The rules are _clear_ — the problem is that they produce nonsensical results in some cases. The 5′ cube is a convenient simplification in most cases, but if my character is 7′ tall, it’s obvious that they don’t fit in their own cube, and that even unarmed, they can probably reach something 10′ up (and grab it by the ankles). If they’re carrying something like a spear or a greatsword, it’s a no-brainer that they should be able to at least attempt an attack on something well within their reach (if not their Reach).
I’d allow it with penalties (e.g. disadvantage in 5e). The rules are producing a situation that doesn’t make sense, and that’s not much fun… so disallowing it entirely is harsh.
But realistically, attacking something above you is hard… it’s not something you’re regularly training for, you’re wielding your weapon in an awkward manner, etc. So yes, you might be able to hit something by swinging your weapon vertically, or stabbing upwards… but it’s going to be a lot harder than fighting an opponent standing level with you.
I do actually play a flying character in our current campaign, and 3d combat being something the rules don’t support well, I’m fine with the GM being pretty loose around this kind of ruling. I make it clear when I’m deliberately positioning myself too high to reach — usually on rooftops — and if I decide to risk providing closer support, I’m not going to get upset if the enemy uses not-quite-by-the-rules tactics to do something about my presence.
As my current character in PF1 is a Sylph Wizard who invested in the perks to give myself a fly speed I’m usually trying to stay out of reach of ground-bound foes while also trying to keep near enough to provide haste or resistance spells as needed. So I appreciate not having rules bent too far to render my feat investments useless. I also keep a fly spell around for casting or party members who need access to airborne assailants. But there are other ways for a party to deal with an attacker other than get yourself to them. You can get under cover, or around a corner or doorway that requires them to move within reach to get at you, leave the room and set up a more favorable battlefield, throw smaller party members at them, throw rocks at them which even if you can’t smite them you might strip off ablative protections like mirror image to allow a specialized ranged attacker a better chance at landing actual damage.
If I am on the other side of the DM screen I am more inclined to rule in the players favor if they are being creative and cool rather than dragging real world physics and trigonometry into my fantasy game. Swing from the chandeliers, throw a grappling hook and climb up, or even make an epic jump check (or actually put to use that Ring of Jumping no one else wanted.) Most of my GMs have gone for “rule of cool” solutions much much easier than breaking out the actual rulers or rules lawyering.
I honestly think that you’d made the best call you could within the rules. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of situations like this where the rules aren’t quite precise enough to deal with it in a satisfactory manner. Anything that isn’t in a flat plane is definitely something that isn’t handled especially well, but it’s hard to do without getting a big tome of rules similar to 3.0/3.5 grappling rules.
I’ll be honest, I’d be calling Fighter out for using a 1.5 multiplier for his reach instead of a 0.5 multiplier.
‘Show me on the Vitruvian Man where your armspan is three times your height, and you can have your extra 6 feet of reaching. Unless you’re suggesting that you somehow pull off a perfect lunge while, let me see here, ‘prone and desperately scrabbling away from your foe’?’
As for the hypothetical person with feet 10′ above the floor where my 6′ body, 2.5′ arms, and 2′ sword are standing; to me that adds to ‘You can try to attack at disadvantage if you jump straight up, but you will have to make an Athletics check (also at disadvantage) to avoid stumbling and falling prone when you land.’
If they’re expending any resource by jumping give them the +5ft reach at least. Fighter is being sneaky by using the reach above you rules to add his height to his reach. 3’2″ arm reach(deduced from the reach above you rule)+2’11” Blade length=his reach is 6’1″ which we’d round down to 5ft minimum of 5ft.
Fun fact: two groups of 4 tiny creatures in adjacent squares cannot fight. They have a reach of 0, so they can’t attack into another square. They can’t move into range, because there is a maximum of 4 tiny creatures per square.