Rocket Horse
There is something inherently hilarious about ludicrous speed. From the 100,000 mph speedsters of Mutants & Masterminds to the celestial pizza delivery boys (cross Creation in 10 minutes or less!) of Exalted, optimizing for a Flash impersonation can yield some obscene results. However, I find that it’s the unexpected speed bursts that are my favorite. Ima tell two stories today, both from real games, and both delving a bit into the mechanics. The first hails from 1e Pathfinder, and the second from 5e D&D.
PATHFINDER: Appropriately enough for a Horsepower strip, it was Laurel’s vigilante PC that discovered these shenanigans. She was a cabalist, meaning she had access to a limited number of spells. The two that matter for our purposes were cheetah’s sprint and urban grace. Relying on the clause in the Acrobatics skill which reads, “Creatures with a base land speed above 30 feet receive a +4 racial bonus on Acrobatics checks made to jump for every 10 feet of their speed above 30 feet,” we arrived at the following scenario.
Defender of the city Blackbird needed to catch a fleeing criminal. It was a rooftop chase, so the full power of urban grace applied. After climbing up to a belfry, lining up the trajectory, and giving it his best Spider-Man leap, Blackbird wound up applying the following logic. Since cheetah’s sprint explicitly says that it affects your jumping distance, and since speed affects jumping distance through the Acrobatics rule we quoted above, we had to do a little math. With a base movement speed of 40 ft. (thanks urban grace!), Blackbird could usually charge 80 ft. That becomes 400 ft. under the effects of cheetah’s sprint. Since a charge is effectively two move actions strung together, we figured that his effective base speed for the purposes of jump calculation was 200 ft. That works out to +68 to Acrobatics checks made to jump. Dude sailed 1d20 + Acrobatics + 68 ft. through the air to land on the back of his opponent. We had to pause the game for a giggle break.
5E: This is admittedly a pretty common scenario, but it was the first time my group had encountered it. We found ourselves in the tomb of a dead god. The BBEG caster stood on a raised platform at the far end of the chamber, while a veritable army of enemy mooks stood between us. Happily, I happened to be a rogue. Even better, since an allied NPC had cast haste on me, my movement speed was doubled. And since I was wearing my handy-dandy boots of striding and springing, skele-bro there in the picture proved to be a useful springboard. Dash action brought me to 120 ft., cunning action dash action brought me to 240 ft., and hasted dash action brought me all the way up to 480 ft. (Note that this isn’t how it actually works. It is however the ruling we used at the table.) I was all up in that BBEG’s business on round 1, and once again we had to pause the game for a giggle break over 55 mph rogues.
So what about the rest of you guys? Going from “move speed 30 ft.” to “move speed ROFL” is one of my favorite things, and I’m hoping that you guys have some good stories to share. So let’s hear your tales of ludicrous speed down in the comments!
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I love this hobby
Our party is going to be in one next week!
Me too. 🙂
This was in the same level 20 one-shot where my sorcerer dealt a total of 1300 damage via teleports.
One person went and played a monk, and we came across an army of one thousand cultists. My sorcerer won initiative and cast quickened haste on the monk. The monk then said,
“I start running over the head of the cultists”.
The monks reasoning was that unarmed strikes were any body part, so he should be able to unarmed strike with his feet. The DM came up with some home-brew rules on the spot, and then it was up to us to figure out how far the monk could run.
Base speed 30+30 from monk+30 from boon of speed. Haste increased that to 180, hasted action increased it to 360, and step of the wind increased it to 720. With each cultist taking up a 5-foot square the monk was squishing 144 heads a round as he blurred around the battlefield.
Yeesh… How did he get 144 attacks? Or did you just rule that running over someone’s head Mario Brothers style counted as an attack?
More importantly, did he have 137 extra lives by the time he stopped?
Back during my 3.5 days, they also had the rule about jumping distance being increased by move speed.
I spent a ton of skill points on the jump skill, and most of my money potions of jump, as well as other magic items and potions to increase my speed. I spent much of my time flying over my enemies heads while pelting them from above.
Who needs a fly speed when you’ve got ki? Sounds like a fun build to play.
The rogue calculation sounds wonky – taking the dash action does not double your movement, it lets you take your movement again; so movement + dash + bonus dash + haste dash is actually just four times your base movement, so it should have “just” been 240ft per round.
Now imagine if your rogue would have been a tabaxi, who can double their movement speed for one round; with the Mobile feat… add a couple levels of Monk or Barbarian – heck, take only monk, Step of the Wind is cheap. If you really want to go insane, add two levels of Fighter for the action surge…
Who are you going to believe? Mike Mearles or the Handbook of Heroes guy?
https://www.sageadvice.eu/2014/09/01/the-fastest-rogue/
I’ll edit in a “we fucked up” caveat.
This actually isn’t true. The dash action increases your speed by your move speed.
It’s why you can’t give a creature “dash” as a legendary action
There’s an argument to be made that the speed increase is based on your starting move speed, not your current move speed, but that leads to wonky interactions with haste stacking.
Just saw the update. Ignore me…
RAW:
Dash: You gain extra movement equal to your speed (plus any modifiers) for the current turn.
Nah, Colin’s original post is right. I hate to say this, but unless it has been errata’d since the new DM screen, Mike Mearls is wrong.
Extra movement, not extra speed.
Mike Mearls is correct.
Apparently you use different 5E dash rules than we do. RAW, Dash says “you gain extra movement equal to your speed”, i.e. Dash doesn’t modify your speed, but only your movement for this turn. So, when dashing multiple times, your total movement grows linearly, not exponentially, since each Dash doesn’t double your movement, but adds your base speed. So, under that interpretation of the rules, you would’ve only had 240 feet of movement, not 480. Still faster than Usain Bolt though.
However, if, instead of a rogue, you were a monk (level 18 or higher), you would’ve had a base speed of 60, so 120 with haste, and 480 with the three dashes. Also, you could’ve run that distance across liquids and walls. Monks are OP.
See my comment to ThinkEdem.
My monk’s jump checks (with a Ki point spent) currently have a +42 modifier (at level 8), but I’d missed that line about extra base speed. Just off to seek GM approval to turn that into a +50 due to monk speed bonus, thanks for the tip!
Even with my measly +42 now though I have great fun with jump checks allowing me to near enough fly over impossible gaps or to jump into the fray from the rearguard. All this in a campaign where magical flight is heavily nerfed as well, it makes for some fun moments.
Don’t forget that you’ll get another +12 when you’re hasted!
In a game that has a habit of locking down into full-attack-until-dead fights, there’s nothing better than an extremely mobile character. I badly want to try a dimensional dervish build myself. It’s just such a chore getting properly qualified!
Ooo, yes, I tried that once. Eladrin (1/short rest minor teleport) horizon walker (can teleport 10 before each attack, has misty step as a spell) with a home-brewed magic item that lets me cast misty step 1/day. I was nightcrawlers, teleporting in and out of cages and around the room.
That tears it. I’m making it official. I’M throwing this one into my list of awesome characters I don’t have time to play.
Thanks for the reminder! I need to make more use of haste now.
Dimensional dervish sounds like a fantastic character design. I will say that my highly mobile character is loads of fun when faced with a really spread out group of opponents. Otherwise it tends to be a case of immediately engage the enemy, full attack the group until dead (them or me, it’s come close a few times) or until the party eventually catch up. Because as much fun as hit and run is, a full attack for a level 8 monk is 5 chances to hit and do damage that you just can’t pass up.
Also on the subject of speed, here’s a recent conversation between my DM and me (same monk character):
“You’ve killed the beast, but the ship these things arrived on is getting away,”
“How far is it?”
“Too far already,”
“But how far?”
“I don’t know, like 500ft?”
“I can move 200ft per round, and I’ve got freedom of movement so I can do that in water. I doubt the ship can move that fast from a standing start. I can easily catch it.”
“Ok, but I’m not going to let you because it would be very boring for everyone else spend the next two hours waiting for you to finish your solo mission trying to capture the ship.”
“Ah, fair enough”.
Do you still leave a wake if you’ve got freedom of movement on? Let us ponder the mysteries.
Spaaace unicorn, soaring through the stars! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17o1OlroNSE
Some fun theorycrafting I did for 5E speed:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/7quhdy/the_fastest_possible_movement/
*rocks out*
I was playing a Brawler (PF1), and the enemy caster decided to avoid me and my buddies by flying up to the ceiling. I’ve had Haste and a few more speed-enhancing buffs that I don’t recall, so I decided to jump. And rolled a 19, which with all my bonuses was 60+ (15+ ft vertical jump) – just enough to grab his ankles. The brawler was a half-earth elemental, so while I didn’t know his exact weight, it was well over the limit for this guy. That was fun.
The only other related story I have is how my monk (5e), too fast for his own good, ended up waaaay into the enemy territory and dead, but it’s not that fun. Nah, it was still fun.
“You can fly!?”
“No. Jump good.”
I was going for something exactly like that)
Movement speed in Shadowrun 5e is really broken – for this comment I quickly attempted to make the fastest non-magic character I could think of that is char-gen legal. I can easily reach 20 m/s while sprinting on average (72 km/h).
This is probably nowhere near as ridiculous it could get, since I only used a core race and no magic. Canine shapeshifter adepts.
My brother once managed to get one that could go Mach 0.25 in SR4.
I suspect that Shadowrun actually has mechanics for the force multiplier of high speeds. Could be shenanigans.
SR5e
Ki Adept: 11 Agility
Ghost Force 6, running Multiplier = 4+6= 10
198 kp/h or 128 mp/h.
Today we will have a Car Chase and i am actual playing me Ki Adept/Mage.
…The best part of this is that when Horsepower uses all of those speed-boosting powers to strike an enemy with an ultimate punch of ultimateness from across the city, he still only does 1d3+STR damage. Maybe 2d8 if he uses the unicorn’s Powerful Charge (gore) ability, instead of an unarmed strike.
Also, yah! Elf Princess is back! And definitely not Druid!
Peasant railgun is like Tinkerbell: it only works if you believe in it in your heart.
My first character after I got back into tabletop RPGs was built to be as fast as possible, with no outside help. Just because I felt it’d be fun.
She was multiclassed all the way to hell to nab all the untyped bonuses I could get my hands on, and in the end she had a 80ft BASE movement speed. Without any buff on.
With buffs on the table, it got ridiculous. She could cast Expeditious Retreat to get to 110ft. Then, thanks to some homebrew boots the DM didn’t think hard enough about before giving them to me, she could double it, with no upper limit, reaching 220 ft base speed. She could also move up to her speed as a swift action. And she had the run feat.
So, in a single turn, she could cover 1320 ft. Google tells me it’s a quarter mile, and I feel like I should mention it because it sounds impressive.
Oh and thanks to a particularly powerful wish, she had permanent flight. So that was flight speed.
I’m sure it could have gotten even more ridiculous with the proper buffs, but our party didn’t have powerful casters.
In retrospect, that was completely useless. But damn did I have fun doing it.
Assuming a six-second round, we’re talking about 150 mph. Let’s hope you were wearing a helmet!
It would depend on game system, but i can see some uses to a stupidly high speed PC. If not, there is some obvious others even though they require the DM to accept them first:
– The guy moves so fast that the enemies don’t know if he attacked from the front, back or side, granting him flat-footed on enemies on any attack, or that the state works for the entire round as the enemy is confused at the blur.
– The guy moves so fast that an AoO will only hit on a natural 20.
– The guy moves so fast that pretty much gets a surprise round on every encounter save if he got ambushed himself.
– The guy moves so fast that pretty much is achieving the same as a a very high Stealth char and with no rolls. With high enough STR he could even carry one or two others PC and do the same. The enemies would know something happened but are not sure what and in which direction and even if they know, at the speed he is going are powerless to stop it. Distracting them with something first or by adding a loud enough noise he could achieve perfect Stealth with no rolls.
So make him a specialist in guerrilla warfare.
I have a friend that runs gestalt games for me and his wife, one of the character’s I theorycrafted for it was a Warrior Poet Samurai Gestalted with a Courser Swashbuckler, gaining a bunch of extra movement from both ends. Slap on Spring Heeled Style and Spring Heeled Sprint and the character would be Spring Attacking over 120 feet before any movement buffs, eventually vital striking two targets along the way. It was super anime and I loved it. I wound up doing something focused on high jumps instead using Wind Leaper conduit feat and the Ninja Trick rogue talents for extra acrobatics steroids, for casual 40 foot leaps and between Sneak attack from scout rogue and Branch Pounce I was tossing an extra 7 or 8 d6 on charge attacks
Hell yeah spring-heeled style! I forgot about those feets. They always looked like fun build-arounds. Too bad it doesn’t interact with sword saint’s iaijutus strike. It was the first thing I thought about when you mentioned the samurai half of your build, and I had to double check. 😛
So the Aerokineticist in PF1E can extend the range of their at-will Blast to 480 ft at no Burn cost. They also have the ability to double the range of their Blast, again, at no Burn cost.
Finally, they have an ability they can take called Ride the Blast, where the Kineticist appears at the target of their Blast. Thus, an Aerokineticist should be able to travel 960 feet in one Standard Action (at will). If they also use the Wings of Air talent (why wouldn’t they), they can then fly 60 feet further at the end of their turn with a move action, making the distance traveled every 6 seconds 1020 feet.
This all assumes the GM will allow you to target an unoccupied space in the distance, but you could use this as a fast-travel option. A friend and I considered making a pair of Aerokineticist assassins that would use this ability to show up at the target from 1000 feet away, and then blast skyward the next round, presumably having killed the target with the two bursts of damage.
I will say that I’ve played a tauric race before (a Bariaur), and on all of them, Horseshoes of Speed have been a must-have item to buy (Goat-shoes I guess, they’d be different in form from Horseshoes), given the +30 ft speed they give. In full plate armor, he had 50 foot speed. With Swift Expeditious Retreat, it increased to 80 feet, and with a Run action, he moved 320 feet in one round. This helped get the team out of a bad situation with three high-level demons: A Balor and two Molydeus. One PC had been imploded by the Balor, another had been Vorpal-decapitated by a Molydeus, and another was petrified.
I waded into the thick of the battle, picking up the allies I could reach (easily being able to carry them due to an immensely high carrying capacity (Strength 25 with a x3 multiplier from a feat and quadruped nature)). Once I had everyone, I turned and fled the battle at max speed; the demons did not give chase. Our monk held the vanguard, cutting off a finger and handing it to me before the departure so we could Ressurect him.
Now that you mention in, I suspect Laurel’s vigilante is building towards this trick. It is a gestalt game after all.
Why using speed? Teleportation and portals are a lot better. I am more of a teleport person. In any case you don’t need to be more faster than a rogue, you only need for him to be slower than your magic. I don’t know if at that velocity you can outrun magic, but in any case no rogue will escape my deadly knock spell.
The lols, man. For the lols.
Speed is not funny. Flash can accelerate until one punch of him is like a car crashing, in D&D you only get going from here to there in an instant. you can get a 20d20 mega-punch. Meanwhile my wizard can make a man’s head explode without saving throw with a 2-level spell. You see Magic is the greatest power. Like one of my wizards once said:
“Knell before me, thou heathens and rabble, knell before my power and magic, knell before Von Doz, and give me a clean room and bring me a good wine”
-Gilfred Von Doz, requesting a dinner on an inn.
He was that kind of wizard.
I assume that this guy was some kind of animated bell.
o_o
O_O
Sorry, inglesh is butt mi cecond langushe. 😉
In any case you understand what i try, and fail, to say.
No worries. My second language is pedantry. I’m fluent, but for some reason still unpopular. 😛
My party does in fact, have a character built for speed. He’s primarily a Bloodrager of the Elemental bloodine, specifically fire. This gives him a +30 typeless boost to speed while raging. He is a Catfolk, so he gets +10 racial bonus to speed when using charge, run or withdraw. He can cast Expeditious Retreat on himself for a +30 enhancement bonus (it’s not a Bloodrager spell, but he got it through the Urban Bloodrager’s ability to pick up Magus and Bard spells). And then, of course, there is Cheetah’s Sprint (10 times your base land speed on a charge or run action). At one point, we considered giving him levels of the Swashbuckler archetype Courser (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/hybrid-classes/swashbuckler/archetypes/paizo-swashbuckler-archetypes/courser-swashbuckler/), which would give him the power to run up walls. Our math concluded that using this, he could run 124 mph or straight up the side of a 25-story building. (Unfortunately, the Courser loses Opportune Parry and Riposte, so we went with regular Swashbuckler instead.)
Now, what do we actually DO with all this speed? That is a question that, admittedly, we hadn’t initially thought about. Eventually, we settled on Spring Attack augmented by Spring-Heeled Style, allowing the character to dash into the fray, strike and return to the back lines in a single turn. In effect, this melee-only character is actually a ranged unit. A boomerang with legs, as it were. A flaming boomerang with legs.
There was once a battle inside of a large barn where the Superspeed Bloodrager was at low health and suffering permanent blindness before the battle even started. As a result, he mainly stayed at the back with an NPC and tried to avoid attracting attention. Near the end of the battle, when things were clearly under control and we were basically down to one elite-ish enemy holed up in the back of the barn, the Bloodrager’s player decided that it was finally time for him to do something, since things were in the bag. He succeeded in a Perception check to locate the square with the elite-ish enemy, then thew on Cheetah’s Sprint and rocketed across the entire map. His attack at the enemy had a 50% miss chance from total concealment, but it didn’t matter – the Bloodrager rolled a 2. As a result, the GM ruled that he missed entirely, kept going for several more yards and smashed into the back wall of the barn. The enemy guy freaked out at the unidentified flaming, screaming thing that had just hurtled past him while everyone else laughed.
A less amusing (at the time) incident happened when the Superspeed Bloodrager was hit with the spell Suggestion, and ordered to go outside of the building we were in and introduce himself to the enemy guards there. The Bloodrager immediately goes to comply, so our mindf**k Sorcerer knocks him out with Deep Slumber. Then she throws him down a hole with Create Pit, and he spends the rest of the fight helplessly scratching at the walls of the pit and making sad cat noises. At the end of the fight, my Magus goes over to the pit and tells the Bloodrager that we’re going to help him get outside, but first he needs to deactivate his Mirror Image spell. He does so, the pit expires and the Sorcerer immediately knocks him out again, after which we tie him up and carry him. This worked until we ran into the next group of enemies and had to put him down, and he spent every turn making Escape Artist checks against the rope until he finally escaped, ran past us, cartwheeled over the enemies and ran outside, where he found a bunch of ogre guards on a wall and said hi. Then the Suggestion spell ended, he came back to his senses, kicked on Cheetah’s Sprint and ran screaming back towards the party.
In summary, yes, ludicrous speed is HILARIOUS.
A buddy of mine likes to talk about a goofy superhero game where this was the main tactic of one of the party members. The dude had super speed and invulnerability, but not at the same time. He was called “Battering Ram.”
Why wasn’t he called “Uncertainty Principle”?
Or, failing that, “Ambiguous Puzuma”.
He came in like a wrecking ball..
Damn, that would have been a better name…. >_>
A good creature to base a speed based build would be an Ekolid demon from Fiendish Codex 1 (3.5e). They get an entire extra move action each round and have a base fly speed of 60 feet, so they could theoretically move 240-300 feet in one round with a run action and still be able to attack
I don’t know the monster, but how does it get a full-round run action and then attack with its remaining move action?
I suppose it’s a matter of interpretation. I interpreted run as two move actions here. Usually you’d have to trade your standard action for the second move action and exhaust your actions for the turn, but the ekolod gets a second move standard. It can probably be interpreted lots of different ways though since the rules are unclear because it doesn’t really come up anywhere else.
The monster’s from the 3.5e Fiendish Codex 1: Hordes of the Abyss. It’s a primeval bug monster. It looks a little bit like this:
https://i.postimg.cc/WbhsHbCM/Who_s_this_Abomination_-Sized.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/L6hmRNX1/What_s_A_Human.png
https://i.postimg.cc/DySvXpcq/002–Formicid–TCHP–Xtra_Tentacles–Crop-.png
https://i.postimg.cc/bNdwYRLM/TRICK_OR_TREAT_f_ORMICID_5.jpg
Oops. I guess the forum can’t parse links with dashes in them 🙁
I’m sure everyone by now knows of the crazyness like you mentioned above is tons of fun.
And maybe some people have given some thought into the insanity of a 5e Monk’s ability at high levels to just jump off of the top of towers or cliffs to catch up to foes at the bottom without taking any damage.
But here’s a fun one from a less widely known system and my current favorite, Blades in the Dark.
The Hound Playbook gets a trained hunting pet as one of their items. There is no specification of what this animal can or should be, rather intentionally as far as I’m aware. In one case I had chosen a salt water crocodile, but you could just as easily pick a dog, a sloth, an elephant, or a penguin.
One of the Hound Special Abilities has the following option.
“Arrow-swift allows the pet to move extremely quickly, out-pacing any other creature or vehicle.”
Pretty cool right?
…
…….
This is a setting with trains.
Yuuuuuuuuuup. ;D
Become an inventor. Create hypersonic travel. Upgrade your crocodile.
Also, it may amuse you to know that I recently had a revelation. You know the scene at the end of Bill and Ted where our heroes are trying to out-remember the villain? (Okay. Remember to get the tape recorder. Set a timer on it for 2:13. Got it?) That’s a user manual for Blades in the Dark.
While I don’t think it was quite ‘Ludicrous Speed’, my favourite Antipaladin, Shade (a Large undead custom race) took the Mythic Path ability that gave him +30 to his base speed and wore medium Mithril armour so that it wouldn’t slow him down. 60 ft. as a normal action, 120 ft. on the charge and I was looking into ways to boost that more when the game ended.
Since we’re on the subject of ludicrous things, and since you mentioned mythic… What was the character’s big over the top trick?
I didn’t really have any one thing I favoured over others. If the game had lasted longer, he was going to get Divine Source and start granting spells to his army of orcs. Oh, I guess that was kind of his thing. Showing up to groups of bandits or the like, murdering their leader in single combat, and taking over. That and using undead as a cheap labour force. He would take his whole undead force (which was small, because he didn’t have other necromancers to help control it) on raids, raise a whole new one from the dead bodies, and leave the old one uncontrolled to cause problems and raise hell for everyone else.
I found the best build for speed in 4e back on the wizards forums. It was labelled f11, after the fighter jet. A normal move speed of about a mile per round made it impressive, but the best part was the “afterburners”.
The character was able to stand up as a free action if they fell and landed prone. A feat let them move 10 feet when they stood up. A magic item let them take that as a 10 foot teleport instead. Since 4e used treated diagonal distances as linear, this allowed the character to fall, land, stand up/teleport 10 feet forward and up, then fall again. By repeatedly falling on their face, they were able to travel at about mach 3.
Even better, this character was able to carry a companion on their shoulders. By utilizing a cleric with a readied action, they could ‘refuel’ mid-flight. By shoving the rest of the party into a bag of holding, they could go from over the horizon to inside the enemy fortress and dropping a nova before the enemies even saw them.
Has no one pointed out that this is basically Horsepower as Nyan Cat?
I must be old. Or sad. One of those.
Nyan cat: https://media.giphy.com/media/sIIhZliB2McAo/giphy.gif
I forget how we stumbled across it, but my group will to this day dissolve into fits of helpless giggles if you play NEIN CAT. Culture is strange.
One timr, our barbarian was drowning to death in sand after punching a blue dragon wyrm to death while we were a quarter of a mile away thanks to a dimension door used to keep everyone else from drowning in sand. To get to him quick, i had to think quick so i had our wizard cast haste on on our ranger while i cast fly, effectively giving him 360ft per second movement, i then grabbed his ankle with my bards 21 str and he shot off like a rocket as fast as he could. Once we got to the right place, i quickly transformed into a dire mole, whose stats we made up, and managed to dig up the barbarian despite him repeatedly attacking me thinking i was a enemy just in time.
My str was 21 due to a giants strength belt that out fighter and barbarian didnt want due to already having 20str, and our wizard and ranger already had 3 attuned items. Turns out if you use it right, 21 str is insanely useful even if str is useless for your build.
Wow… That’s a strong bard! You probably wouldn’t even be encumbered by the Tuba of Charm.
https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8174/7966776390_56f21d1ac0.jpg
While I have never gotten up to speed craziness in most Fantasy due to being rogues and mages usually (and the characters that were ended up falling by the wayside cause someone needed to be able to put people back together…), I do have this little story from Mutants and Masterminds.
I was playing Nova, who was a superhero take on a demi-god daughter of Apollo and an experiment into Dynamic Arrays. She was effectively a Flying Brick with a few utility powers that she could channel some of her divine strength into. One of those powers in the Dynamic Array was flight. This lead to a situation where we ended up trying to thwart a Speedster villian who was getting away. Nova, still inexperienced with her powers, declared “I’ll catch her!” and channeled all of her Divine power into trying to catch up, hitting a Flight rank of 20. The GM ruled that all of the windows in the surrounding buildings shattered as Nova blazed like the Sun and broke the sound barrier. Once I caught her, I then realized the second problem. i couldn’t keep up with her and use my Divine Strength. So, I declared that I just rammed her, given that my Divine Toughness was not in the Dynamic Array and always active. So…one bloody gouge in the concrete later, I had caught the villian. (Who lived, thank goodness they build their Mutants tough.) The rest of my team then referred to it as my “Human Cannonball” technique, and suggested it more than it was really required. x.x.
I always loved that about M&M. It’s a great model of Superman’s one and only power: make some shit up.
OK guys. I’m going to use my freeze breath.
But I thought your build was all about strength and flying…?
Don’t tell me what to do. FREEZE BREATH!
*Dragon Ball Z screaming*
My story was fittingly quick (and then I felt the need to embellish…). I was playing a paladin, and had been late to the session due to traffic, and when I joined the DM took me out of NPC protect friends mode and told me to save my party that had in the span of 10 minutes gotten the party split 4 ways. I had boots of striding and springing myself, and leapt into action to make up for the litany of poor decisions that led to my turn. After getting a sitrep, I knew I had to save our lone rogue, find our wizard who poofed to avoid a medusa, and still be back to back with the fighter and paladin who were fighting off all the Fomorians.
I knew I couldn’t do all that in just one turn, but that’s what allies are for! I leapt through the crowd of monsters diving to the aid of our fallen rogue and readying a spell. The other paladin seeing my heroism cast haste on me, and my plan adapted to be much more efficient. Casting dimension door and teleporting to the beginning of the dungeon, I dropped the unconscious rogue and began sprinting back to the aid of my allies at blistering speeds! on the way back I found our wizard fending off the Medusa. Lacking the ability to slow down in a timely manner, I slammed into one of the Fomorians, sending it tumbling, and killing it in the process. Back with my party, I then began to use my super-speed to flank and gain the upper hand on our enemy’s, almost single handedly turning the tide of battle! And then we all ran from the Medusa cause screw that!
Speed was 30 (base unencumbered) + 10 (boots) x2 (haste) x2 (Dash Action) x2 (Haste Action) = 320 (Yeah we messed up the ruling too) or almost 37 MPH
This fiasco led us to calculate a crazy monk, rogue with haste, boots of S&S, and all dash action… you go fast…
Throw in some fighter for that Action Surge that all the cool theory crafters love. 😛
Was the title here in any way inspired by the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode “Rocket Horse And Jet Chicken”?
Naw. It was inspired by Laurel’s trusty steed in our one and only mythic Pathfinder game. It drank from a magic pool, got infused with dragon magic, grew some wings, and went lol-zoom-zoom after that.
Shadowrun, 5th edition. Rigger driving a car, boosting speed by the rating of his rig. A powerful spirit, using movement power with an Edge boosted roll.
Thanks to the poorly thought out rules in the addendum book that actually attached a KPH value to the speed value we managed to work out that the car was traveling approximately ten times the speed of light.
I hope that you had a spoiler on that thing. 10c cars deserve a spoiler.
An Infernal can move rather fast…
One of the PCs is an Essence 6 Scourge who likes Kimbery.
Overland they can run at 115 m/s (10 Dex, 6 x Windborn Stride and Racing Vitaris.
Underwater, that is further multiplied by 6 with Mother Sea Mastery for a sedate 691 m/s, making them supersonic.
I haven’t given this PC much by way of artifacts to further increase their speeds because it’s already a bit of a headache. 😛
This is why I love playing speedsters in Mutants and Masterminds. The speedsters you can make with
Inside the Quickstart Character Generator that comes with the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook, the fastest speedster build it has can go as fast as 64,000 MPH.
However, I figured out how to make this build even FASTER by using the Removable flaw for all the speedster’s powers to shave off a few points (15 points to be exact) for the speedsters I’ve made in the past. With the points I didn’t put into Alternate Array effects or Quickness, I bumped up the Speed rank to 20, which made the character be able to run at 2 MILLION MPH!
To think that if I put all those points into Speed, I estimate that the character’s running speed would be around 2 or 4 BILLION MILES PER HOUR! And keep in mind this is for a Power Level 10 character build.
One of these days, I want to get around to make a character inspired by the movie Clockstoppers to make an EVEN FASTER PL 10 character. If my calculations are correct, if I can double the amount of points I can shave off, I might be able to make a speedster that run at around 64 TRILLION MILES PER HOUR!
Patrol all cities by yourself, simultaneously!
D&D 3.5 / PF rules around speed and jumping did have a few issues. One of my favourite characters was a high-level lizard-folk variant barbarian (think Killer Croc, from DC comics) in a monsters game… base speed of 60 after factoring in bonuses from race, class, and items, and with ridiculous strength and a maxed out skill, his “jump” was practically flight.
In battle, he’d target the squishies hiding behind the front line, because he could basically charge over the defensive line. And squishies are tasty.
I always liked cheetah’s sprint…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/c/cheetah-s-sprint/
Plus urban grace:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/u/urban-grace
Congratulations. You’re Spider-Man.
I like how no one has mentioned the 3.5 build to go the speed of sound. I think there was even a way to break the speed of light. Though i think it got errata’d to the Nine Hells.
Have you go a handy link for the build? Not sure I know it.
Not one of my character ideas, and not a running speed. But in every version of the games, Monks get silly with movement speed. D&D 3.5 had a monster called “seawolf” that had a decent swim speed… Monk speed increase applies to every movement mode, we believed at the time. (Correct me if I’m wrong, anyone.) Short bit? The monk was faster than any ship could get to, in a seafaring idea that never got started.
Stupidly high speed characters can be fun and hilarious for sure, even if the DM begins to apply the damage a PC would get due to friction.
Following your examples, the 5e guy (i haven’t checked PF1 in a long time so i am not sure on some points) could be a VERY useful, hilarious or frightening guy with basic PhB rules.
– On 5e one can grab another and move with it and he is powerless to resist being moved till he breaks the grab on his turn. The PC can only move at half speed while grabbing but there are ways to circumvent that and with a high enough speed that won’t matter much.
This can be used in some ways:
1. Grab the guy and jump over a chasm or hazard and let him go even if the chasm were to be two encounters away or frigging long. A variation of this would be to make a vertical jump and release and the PC would need to grab somewhere to avoid falling, jumping to another level, having any fall damage avoidance, or with flight speed.
2. Scout ahead the party. Run to the guy, grab him, and take it to the rest of the party who will plummet him to death, put him under unconsciousness before he can tell who did it, or tie him with readied actions, to interrogate him, to rescue him, to kidnap him, or to go back to the rest and say/leave a note saying ”i have your important person, if you want him back …”, and the rest won’t be able to hear any of that due to distance to the rest of the party.
This can be the most interesting as it can be played as a prank or as a horror story too, leaving the enemies stupefied thinking they are being spirited or disintegrated away (add Prestidigitation or Illusion by a second PC to create a visual effect to make it more convincing) while they piss their pants. Leave some turns between each spiriting away to scare them further. Add some Prestidigitation or illusion spells for further scaring. If pilling enough enough scares the DM could rule they get to make a WILL save to not die out of pure fear, and the survivors will spread rumours and no one would dare approach again. Repeat two or three times at night and can scare a whole town or army to make them run away or to convince them to kill their boss to avoid the horror.
Do the same as a DM for a horror campaign, BBEG pranking or bullying, or to separate the PCs or NPCs for some narrative reason easily.
3. A variation of the previous: enter inside a castle, minor dungeon or mansion and grab the required person and exit in a single turn with him on tow. Better to do with flying speed or jumping to a window to avoid closed doors. In this case the DM could rule that at that speed is impossible to make so many and so tight turns and that the PC will hit a wall and be caught.
4. Grab the guy and leave him where he cannot leave or move (climb like arachnid, burrowing or flying speed or jumping over a hazard to achieve this) for the pacifist or Batman-alike PC.
5. Grab the guy, jump to water, and release when he is at a point where he cannot reach the surface before drowning. Alternatively it can be done with burrowing speed and collapse the tunnel with a bomb or spell to be sure he dies or stays there for eternity if undead.
All of this is not as overpowered as it seems as it can be countered/lessened even RAW with closed doors, multiple AoO, stratospheric Athletics or Acrobatics modifiers, some spells that attack automatically within range, or traps and snares. Well, it can be countered easily with RAW almost completely with all taking prepared actions, but that counter feels cheap as long as the speed is ridiculously high enough, and can be counter-countered mixing guerrilla ranged attacks from hidden positions in between or by saying that the enemy would need to tell on which direction is he going to prepare the reaction.