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Eldariel
2009-04-14, 05:29 PM
I think it's a surprise to absolutely nobody that 5' steps are one of the biggest reasons why controlling what your opponents can and can't do is so hard and why stopping spellcasters from casting is so hard and overall, why having a guy with a sword next to you when all you've got is a wooden stick just isn't as frightening as it should be.

WoTC announced that the intent of 5' steps was to allow closing in on reach monsters without having to provoke an AoO after they hammered you while closing in. This is a worthy point - being smaller/having less reach in melee is already a big enough disadvantage without having to deal with AoOs just 'cause you wanted to use a non-reach weapon for a change.


So, 5' steps as we know 'em are there to fix a problem. Unfortunately, they also create a bunch. As it stands, I don't think they're worth it to have in game - weapons just matter too little when anyone can just hop off and do whatever the hell they please.

I think there's a really simple solution though:
Make (at least non-provoking) 5' steps only possible during full attack actions. That's what they're intended for, after all. Further, to avoid stupid abuse, let's limit them to being made only before an attack (if you have multiples, you can make them before any attack).

This way you can hit a guy and move to hit another guy, or move in to hit a guy, but you can't full attack a guy and move out to force him to provoke yet again (at least not without giving up an attack - to make this matter more, one should of course make all iteratives happen at -5 or full attack bonus instead of making 'em -infinite Never Gonna Hits).


So yeah, at least I'm gonna play with 5' steps as follows:
"As a part of a full attack action before your last attack, you may adjust your position 5' as a free action. This adjustment doesn't provoke an attack of opportunity. You may only do this if making solely melee attacks during this attack action."

Oh yeah, and it would be relatively easy to make the description of the various polearms (reach weapons that don't threaten adjacent) state that "if an opponent is within your reach, 5' step provokes", just to make the "can't threaten adjacent" more of a drawback - at the present, nobody really cares unless you get cornered.


EDIT#1: Limited 5' steps to melee characters.

Chronos
2009-04-14, 05:59 PM
WoTC announced that the intent of 5' steps was to allow closing in on reach monsters without having to provoke an AoO after they hammered you while closing in. This is a worthy point - being smaller/having less reach in melee is already a big enough disadvantage without having to deal with AoOs just 'cause you wanted to use a non-reach weapon for a change.The feel I always got for their purpose was so a warrior could drop one creature during a full attack, and then close with another creature to finish off his attack routine. But your fix allows that, too, so I have no problem with that.

You might also want to decide whether to make it any attacks, or just melee attacks-- Archers use the five-foot-step similarly to wizards, to step back before taking their provoking action so they don't get opportunized. On the one hand, this probably wasn't intended by the rules, but on the other hand, archers tend to lag a bit behind balance-wise, so it might not be bad to throw them a bone.

Eldariel
2009-04-14, 06:05 PM
The feel I always got for their purpose was so a warrior could drop one creature during a full attack, and then close with another creature to finish off his attack routine. But your fix allows that, too, so I have no problem with that.

You might also want to decide whether to make it any attacks, or just melee attacks-- Archers use the five-foot-step similarly to wizards, to step back before taking their provoking action so they don't get opportunized. On the one hand, this probably wasn't intended by the rules, but on the other hand, archers tend to lag a bit behind balance-wise, so it might not be bad to throw them a bone.

Point - I think letting archers avoid 5' steps isn't the way to give them a power boost. Rather, fixing the feat structure they require (seriously, they need 3 feats just for basic competence and have nothing that enhances their attack capabilities - that's just wrong) is probably the way to go. I'll edit the word "melee" into the rule.

Reaper_Monkey
2009-04-14, 07:59 PM
"As a part of a full attack action before your last attack, you may adjust your position 5' as a free action. This adjustment doesn't provoke an attack of opportunity. You may only do this if making solely melee attacks during this attack action."

Okay, although I wouldn't have quite phrased it like that... I was under the assumption that's this is how the 5 foot step worked anyway. So either I've been playing it wrong or theirs just a loophole that allows people do to more with it that I've never noticed?

Which ever, this seems perfectly fine with me as that's kinda as it should be.

Siosilvar
2009-04-14, 09:07 PM
Reaper Monkey:

Currently, a 5' step may be taken at any time during your turn, once per turn, as a free action, except in between attacks in a full attack, so long as you haven't moved already and don't move again.

Eldariel
2009-04-14, 09:51 PM
Okay, although I wouldn't have quite phrased it like that... I was under the assumption that's this is how the 5 foot step worked anyway. So either I've been playing it wrong or theirs just a loophole that allows people do to more with it that I've never noticed?

Which ever, this seems perfectly fine with me as that's kinda as it should be.

What is included is less important than what is excluded. Right now, the biggest uses for 5' steps are casters and archers taking 5' step away from threatening opponents allowing them to ignore the attacks of opportunity they should normally incur for those actions, or in general, taking 5' step away from a melee threat to perform an action that normally provokes unhindered.

The second is of course approaching an opponent who has reach advantage on you and continuing full attack/cleave after an opponent is downed, but those are the functionalities that it's meant to facilitate and thus this section is maintained by this change.

Another_Poet
2009-04-15, 02:09 PM
Personally, I feel the rule is fine as-is. It works both in terms of gameplay (reasons below) and in terms of believability (because in an actual melee situation people definitely move 5' or more one way of the other without dropping their guard, and that is different from turning you back on someone and fleeing, which exposes you to attack).

By "works in terms of gameplay" I mean it does fix the problem WotC meant for it to fix, but it does not create any extra problems like you suggest. Weapons don't become meaningless; they do the same damage, and the attacker can step forwad 5' to catch up with a defender who stepped away 5'. You really can't run away with a 5' step because all creatures, including the one you run from, can take 5' steps and come right back into range on their turn. You might argue that this allows casters to step, cast without provoking, and not get "caught up with" until the next round. Good. That's the way it should be, because in an actual melee situation you can get a brief 1-2 second respite by backing away slightly, and it does allow you to do things you wouldn't want to do while in your opponent's face (such as draw a weapon or wipe sweat out of your eyes in real life, or cast a spell in D&D).

Ultimately, 5' step has very little game impact oputside of the "creature with reach" situation that it fixes. The game impact it does have is to add an element of strategy.

That said, if you really don't like it, and think it nerfs melee types, then I would consider making a feat (with a BAB or Dex prereq, or CombatRflexes as a prereq) that allows characters to treat enemy 5' steps as move actions that provoke AoOs, but (at least) gives the enemy a +4 dodge bonus against that one AoO. So essentially the feat would let you attack 5' steppers with a -4 to hit.

This would seem far more fair than arbitrarily deciding which classes can make 5' steps, or limiting them to "before attacking, niot after" which is hard to suspend disbelief over.

However, even better than adding feats or changing the rules, I would sugest that the problems you raise can be best fixed by adjusting the encounters the PCs face. Melee opponents and enemy casters should use the same 5' step tactics as the PCs, which makes the battlefield more interesting. Enemy groups should also routinely bring ranged comabatants to focus on PC casters so that casters can't feel safejust because they 5' step every round. Once your enemies decide the caster is a pincushion the rules seem a lot more balanced.

ap

lesser_minion
2009-04-15, 04:00 PM
Another method could be to rule that a 5ft step provokes if you move in such a way that you no longer threaten your opponent.

That would give you:

If you do not make any other move during a turn, then once per turn you may make a single move of 5ft. Such a move does not provoke attacks of opportunity from an opponent that you threaten at the start of the move, and still threaten at the end of the move.


Or "if an opponent you threaten makes a 5ft step out of your threatened area, you may immediately make a 5ft step such that you continue to threaten the opponent".

Note that a 5ft step is more than merely 'backing away'. Characters can quite easily be out of practical reach of each other while still being considered to be in melee in mechanical terms - actions which require no more than "a brief respite" such as wiping your eyes or drawing a weapon don't provoke an attack of opportunity for this reason - a spell or a ranged attack is somewhat more involved than that.

It might be worth increasing the threatened area to "anywhere within 10ft" and allowing a character to 5ft-step in response to another character provoking.

KillianHawkeye
2009-04-15, 04:27 PM
I agree with Another_Poet.

First of all, casters don't even need to take 5' steps, because any caster worth his salt has enough ranks in Concentration to be able to cast defensively all the time. So this rule change doesn't actually prevent spellcasters from casting spells with a hostile meatshield in their face. It really only hurts archers who have very few ways to gain the ability to avoid AoOs when firing ranged attacks in melee.

Also, I don't find it particularly unbelievable that any character who is trained to function in combat is able to two steps without totally dropping their guard or taking their eyes off the enemy.

Although 1-square adjusts were removed from the latest edition of Star Wars RPG. And of course, they became the move action "shift 1 square" in D&D 4E. So I guess the developers can't make up their minds on this, either. :smallwink:

Another_Poet
2009-04-15, 05:32 PM
First of all, casters don't even need to take 5' steps, because any caster worth his salt has enough ranks in Concentration to be able to cast defensively all the time. So this rule change doesn't actually prevent spellcasters from casting spells with a hostile meatshield in their face.

This.

Lesser_Minion's proposed fix makes reach weapons uber powerful. Reach weapon wielders could move 5' without provoking nearly 100% of the time while all other Medium combatants would lose the 5' step almost 100% of the time.

Also, saying that casting a spell takes longer than wiping sweat out of your eyes is pretty much a subjective judgement call, because we don't really know how long a "standard action" casting time takes. What we do know is that you can run 30 feet and still have time to do the "standard action" before 6 seconds is up. So I think it is reasonable to picture is as being nothing more than a single 1 or 2 syllable word and pointing at the target with a special hand gesture. Basically the Hadouken from Street Fighter 2.

Since the above interpretation preserves believability, is consistent with the length of other standard actions and doesn't prompt people to rewrite one of the most basic combat rules of 3.x, it seems like a good one.

lesser_minion
2009-04-16, 04:36 AM
I still think that you can tell quite a lot from whether or not an action provokes, however - drawing a sword doesn't provoke, partly because you aren't taking your concentration off of your opponent, partly because you can move "to the back" of the space that you occupy and gain just enough time to pull off the most dangerous part, and partly because the characters are assumed to have sufficient combat experience to be able to draw a sword reasonably quickly.

A standard action in melee allows a number of exchanges which form a credible attempt to strike an opponent, NOT just one sword blow. This is the whole fluff justification for attacks of opportunity in the first place. While two characters are in melee, any mistakes made will be punished.

In the very least, you can almost guarantee that you are able to swing your sword in a shorter time than someone casts a spell (in general, casting forces your character to stop defending himself effectively), and you can also guarantee that a warrior will be able to move with his opponent - at best, you can back away to gain the brief respite you would need to turn around and run for dear life.

How would offering a free 5ft step back into melee whenever an opponent 5ft steps out of melee with you work? That blocks the "5ft step then provoke" issue which is the focus of this thread, but also prevents reach weapons being ridiculously powerful and avoids gimping them at the same time. Alternatively, just "you may not 5ft step out of melee with an opponent".

As for Casting Defensively, I think that needs to be the topic of another fix, really.


we don't really know how long a "standard action" casting time takes. What we do know is that you can run 30 feet and still have time to do the "standard action" before 6 seconds is up. So I think it is reasonable to picture is as being nothing more than a single 1 or 2 syllable word and pointing at the target with a special hand gesture. Basically the Hadouken from Street Fighter 2.

Actually, that's a quickened spell - the DMG's sample description for casting a quickened spell is "With a single word and a flick of his hand..."

Casting a spell is described as "He motions with his hands in a deliberate manner and speaks words that sound more like an invocation than a sentence".

You can do a lot more than speak a single one or two syllable word in the space of three seconds - that quote is actually a little longer than the incantation that would be spoken - actually, a single sword blow takes about as long as a quickened spell.

Eldariel
2009-04-16, 05:17 AM
I agree with Another_Poet.

First of all, casters don't even need to take 5' steps, because any caster worth his salt has enough ranks in Concentration to be able to cast defensively all the time. So this rule change doesn't actually prevent spellcasters from casting spells with a hostile meatshield in their face. It really only hurts archers who have very few ways to gain the ability to avoid AoOs when firing ranged attacks in melee.

There's this feat called "Mage Slayer". Right now, to be able to utilize it, you need to be using a reach weapon (well, to be honest, Spiked Chain) which just doesn't make sense. The reason? 5' steps.

That said, I personally simply abolish defensive casting. Casters kick enough ass as is - they don't need to be immune to melee threats. Casting a spell in game terms takes ~3-4 seconds, plenty of time for a trained warrior to intercede. Really, there's no need for the mechanic - take the AoO, roll concentration and do what you will.


Also, I don't find it particularly unbelievable that any character who is trained to function in combat is able to two steps without totally dropping their guard or taking their eyes off the enemy.

Oh, definitely, but the operation of casting a spell pretty much by default takes your concentration off your enemy, and even if it didn't, the fact that you have to be waving your arms around like a madman might make defending yourself a tad difficult. As it should be to be honest - a swordsman next to you when you're unprotected should hinder you.

Another_Poet
2009-04-16, 11:31 AM
the fact that you have to be waving your arms around like a madman might make defending yourself a tad difficult. As it should be to be honest - a swordsman next to you when you're unprotected should hinder you.

Agreed, and it already does in the RAW. Placing yourself in melee makes it prudent to have armour and/or a shield. These impose a failure chance on every spell. Plus, reliably casting a spell despite the warrior in your grill requires ranks in concentration and/or a feat. Those ranks could be spent on spellcraft, hide or spot and that feat could be spent on metamagic.

All the above are the hindrances that a melee combatant places on a mage. They already address the problem.

They don't balance the classes, true, but the classes are better balanced by giving cooler martial abilities to melee-types. Instead, the proposed rule treats mages as drooling morons who can't block with one hand while making a ritual gesture with the other, or who don't know to back up from a guy with a friggin' greataxe.

To me, it seems like you are attempting to fix a class imbalance by reducing tactical options. Obviously that's your call, and if it works for your group, then great. But I presume you put it up on the homebrew boards for a reason, and I'd say that for the majority of groups it will make the game more fun to give melee guys more options rather than to limit how people can move on a battlefield.

Just my two cents... I'll leave your thread alone with my negativity now :)

ap

Eldariel
2009-04-16, 12:10 PM
*snip due to length*

Well, I'll just say this: if breaking from combat is supposed to be that easy, we should remove attacks of opportunity entirely. If it's possible to gain distance for 1-2 seconds, I'll just say it takes longer than that to cast a spell (Standard Action presents "majority" of your turn so 3-4 seconds of the 6 should be spent on that action) and by all accounts requires both your hands and a bunch of arcane babbling - not exactly a situation where you can be blocking hits with your...uhh, what does a Mage block that sword with again especially without any real weapon training? Hand? Shouldn't he be handless after the AoO then? More importantly, game balance-wise, there's no reason why casting shouldn't provoke. Casters are already better - they can take it.

So right now, getting the melee to the caster is rather pointless unless you can knock the caster out in a turn (not impossible, but highly unlikely). Furthermore, it weakens feats like Mage Slayer and more importantly, shoehorns Warriors into the reach fighter-role if they want a chance at stopping others' actions, something all melee weapons should be able to do handily.


This isn't a full solution to a problem - it's just a part of the whole. Just I think with the way 5' steps are implemented right now, they remove tactical options - teleporting the Warrior-type next to the enemy caster and trying to block opponent from doing the same, for example, is fairly trivial 'cause neither caster is heavily inconvenienced by the Warrior unless the said Warrior is a Spiked Chain Mage Slayer. Not only do 5' steps make Warriors less dangerous, they also imbalance weapons - due to them, you need a reach weapon to truly control opponents who should be ****ed when you get up to the skin.

I'd like to think this fix more of treating "blocking hits while casting spells impossible" rather than "treating mages as drooling morons". Of course, same would apply to Clerics & Druids, but I can live with that. Characters that gain Arcane Armored Casting could of course be granted some manner of Defensive Casting-ability limited to that class's spell list as claiming that a Duskblade's extensive training in combining magic and weapons allows him to cast a spell defensively isn't unplausible.


All the hindrances you mentioned just aren't that relevant in actual play. Sure, they might hurt you for the first few levels, but as nobody sane plays on level 1 ("lol, he crit you, new character!"), that window is rather small - level 1, you can have ~50-60% chance at casting defensively without Combat Casting/Skill Focus: Concentration. Level 8 sees you at 80%-90% without a feat for your highest level slots. If you burn that feat, you can "almost certain" on level 4-5.

Yakk
2009-04-16, 04:56 PM
You may attempt a 5' step once during your turn as a free action so long as you have not moved in this turn.

If you make a 5' step, you may not move later in this turn. (Note that if your 5' step fails, this does not apply).

The 5' step does not provoke an OA from anyone you would threaten in the square you are moving to. Conversely, you provoke an OA from anyone whom you would not be threatening in the square you are moving to.

If you are hit by an OA due to taking a 5' step, the 5' step fails. You cannot attempt to do another 5' step this turn.

---

When casting a spell, make a concentration check with a penalty equal to the spell's level to cast defensively. Your effective AC for purposes of OAs provoked by casting the spell is the higher of your AC and your concentration check result.

---

Between the two above, taking a 5' step out of range of an attack becomes dangerous, while taking a 5' step to attack someone becomes relatively easy. Taking a 5' step away from the last goblin in range during a full attack is safe.

Someone with 15' reach, and you have 5' reach, is a serious threat -- as you cannot 5' step closer without provoking. But that was true before (as the 15' reach person could just step back 5' every time you stepped forward 5').

Fizban
2009-04-17, 03:12 AM
That said, if you really don't like it, and think it nerfs melee types, then I would consider making a feat (with a BAB or Dex prereq, or CombatRflexes as a prereq) that allows characters to treat enemy 5' steps as move actions that provoke AoOs, but (at least) gives the enemy a +4 dodge bonus against that one AoO. So essentially the feat would let you attack 5' steppers with a -4 to hit.

I'm pretty sure there's already a ToB stance that specifically makes *all* movement provoke AoOs, meant to prevent people from 5' stepping about, so you can already do it with 2 feats, and the prerequisite feat wouldn't suck either.

In any case, I'm on the side of leaving 5' steps as is. You drop your guard while casting the spell but you're dropping your guard while out of reach because you're moving away from a single opponent, which shouldn't be that hard.Now if you get cornered or surrounded, the 5' step won't save you because you can't get out of reach, and that makes sense. But then you just bust out the impossible to fail concentration check and ignore the AoO anyway.

I'd be fine with getting rid of casting defensively altogether since now that I think about it the 5' step method makes more sense anyway. As for casting times: just as a standard action attack isn't one swing but rather an "attack pass", a standard action spell probably isn't "stop in your tracks and start chanting for 3 seconds", but rather "gather energies, aim, chant+finger waggle and hold aim while spell flies". A quickened spell is then the literal one word+flip the bird and forget casting.

Besides, you know you love the image of a caster doing the double tap hopping backstep out of range before swinging his arms into the hadoken.