Shift vs 5foot step

[Kafana]

As far as I can see the shift is pretty much a 5ft step that's a move action. My group has been talking about house ruling the 5ft step to require a move action and I've been thinking about it and the only thing this affects is the non-caster classes, which is a bad thing.

Seeing as how the only thing this really does is prevent a character from doing a full round action, both the archers (when in melee range) and the melee characters will forfeit multiple attacks, while the casters still get to cast their spells with little trouble. As far as I can see, the shift from 4e only penalizes the classes which are already weaker to begin with. Thoughts?

[Waddacku]

Shift is good in 4e because you mainly use standard action attacks. Without altering the full-attack based gameplay of 3.x, yes, implementing it just screws weak classes over further and makes combat more boring.

[ThisIsZen]

The shift-as-move-action paradigm from 4e is designed around a completely different set of baseline rules assumptions. There is no such thing as a Full-Round Power - Standard Actions are capable of doing everything that a PC might want to do from their kit in a given game.

The five-foot step is already rather limited in combat - it explicitly cannot be followed up with a move action, meaning that using a five-foot step is trading away the majority of your mobility in a given turn. It's already got built-in tradeoffs and was obviously designed to allow some degree of risk-free battlefield repositioning while still giving every character a rough 'zone of control' that can prevent easy movement around them. Putting more penalties and restrictions on the five-foot step just means you're making it that much harder for anyone to move around the battlefield, while at the same time penalizing non-casters without affecting casters, as you said.

It also has the probably-unintended side-effect of buffing lockdown melee builds. Not only do they deny ease of movement to anything they stand beside, but now, unless anything they're near wants to hit them, they're also denying full attacks.

Why does your table want to add this houserule?

[Kafana]

Why does your table want to add this houserule?

Without sounding arrogant: Because they barely understand the system. They played a lot, but never really read anything. Only two members want to add this, and after thinking about it and consulting with you guys I'll explain the drawbacks of changing such a feature.

[Vhaidara]

Making 5ft steps move actions is crippling in 3.5 to the classes that are already weakest. Casters can still step out of melee and cast as a standard, but now mundanes are almost incapable of getting a full attack.