Glide Speed

[Grod_The_Giant]

Say a hadozee (or other race with a Glide speed) teleports 100ft in the air as a move action. Now he begins to fall- but, thanks to the ability, he can glide instead. All well and good. But... What kind of action is it?


Hadozee can use their arm-flaps to glide, negating damage from a fall of any height and allowing them to travel 20 feet horizontally for every 5 feet of descent. A hadozee glides at a speed of 40 feet (average maneuverability).

It doesn't sound quite like a movement- it sounds more like a modification of falling, which is a free action. And if it does take an action to use, what happens if you don't? Is... is there any official word on this?

[DrMotives]

Sounds like you found another place where RAW didn't cover everything. My best guess is that you should require the glider to take at least 1 move action every round to allow gliding, otherwise they are assumed to fall for that round. But we're strictly in DM's call territory here.

[Troacctid]

I've looked into this before and haven't been able to find any rules outside of those specific abilities that provide you with a glide speed. Your guess is as good as anyone's.

[martixy]

I'm not aware of anything official and honestly it doesn't make sense anyway.

What I'm curious is where it says that falling is a free action - or any action at all.
"Action" implies choice. Can you choose not to take the "falling action"?

Falling/gliding sounds more like a condition - like Dazed, or Blown Away.
In this case a condition that'd cause the loss of function of a hadozee's arms.

[SangoProduction]

Personally, I would rule it as simply being a modification of falling. Maybe as a compromise, you could say that if they want to control the direction of a glide, it would take a move action, else they just glide "forward." Again, compromising, if they make a DC such and such Fly skill check, then it's only a swift action to change direction.

Think about it. If a hanglinder were securely fastened on to you as wings, then it really wouldn't take any action to just let it do its job. Controlling it might take more effort.

[XionUnborn01]

I would guess the RAI is that it's supposed to be their movement based only on the fact that their glide is listed under their speed in the stat block.

Depending on the DM, I could see an agreement for making the fall negation a non-action and having the glide be a move action. Basically they slow their fall naturally but to actually aim and control it requires a move action.

Either way, it's a flying monkey.

[DrMotives]

They're somebody's baby. They show up in Stormwrack because they were a 2e race in Spelljammer, and without porting Spelljammer itself into 3.x, most of the things in it fit best in something nautical. But before they were in 2e, they were in a much older TSR game called Star Frontiers as the Yazirian. Yazirian was a core PC race, and they had a rage racial ability, and a biological need to wear dark shades in daytime, probably because the designers thought that was really cool. Seriously, if you image search Yazirian you'll see glider monkeys with shaded goggles & blaster rifles instead of Stormwrack's leather harness & scimitar. Poor guys have fallen on hard times in modern editions.

[MisterKaws]

Gliding works like flight with restrictions and free, although compulsory, downward movement. Also, Gliding can never be used to hover, not that this no-hover rule was ever printed, just a rule of thumb.
As it works like flight and cannot be used to hover, a creature with gliding must maintain its minimum forward speed in a given round using its own move actions or fall, and I doubt any glider will be higher than 150ft frequently.

[Darrin]

My inclination is to treat falling as a non-action that just happens automatically. By RAW... I think the hadozee glides 400' to the ground. Have the hadozee pick a direction to be facing when they finish the teleport, and then they glide 400' in that direction. They don't get to turn or make any other decisions about their glide because they aren't "moving" with a move action at that point.

However, in your example... they still have a standard action left, so they could use that to move, in which case they can use the aerial movement rules and make turns, dives, etc., so long as they continue to move at least 5' down for every 20' traveled.

Here's an odd thought... traveling 400 ft in 6 seconds works out to be about 45 miles per hour. If the rules didn't say something about "negating damage", that could be a pretty rough landing.

The other odd thing about this is creatures who naturally have wings don't automatically glide. If they try this same trick (without the standard action left)... they automatically fall 150' the first round and have to attempt to recover from the stall, because they aren't maintaining minimum forward speed. It's kinda odd that natural flyers can still take falling damage, but gliders (which are supposed to be worse at flying) just don't take any falling damage at all.

[SangoProduction]

My inclination is to treat falling as a non-action that just happens automatically. By RAW... I think the hadozee glides 400' to the ground. Have the hadozee pick a direction to be facing when they finish the teleport, and then they glide 400' in that direction. They don't get to turn or make any other decisions about their glide because they aren't "moving" with a move action at that point.

However, in your example... they still have a standard action left, so they could use that to move, in which case they can use the aerial movement rules and make turns, dives, etc., so long as they continue to move at least 5' down for every 20' traveled.

Here's an odd thought... traveling 400 ft in 6 seconds works out to be about 45 miles per hour. If the rules didn't say something about "negating damage", that could be a pretty rough landing.

The other odd thing about this is creatures who naturally have wings don't automatically glide. If they try this same trick (without the standard action left)... they automatically fall 150' the first round and have to attempt to recover from the stall, because they aren't maintaining minimum forward speed. It's kinda odd that natural flyers can still take falling damage, but gliders (which are supposed to be worse at flying) just don't take any falling damage at all.

They aren't technically worse flyers, as you pointed out. They simply aren't active flyers. Gliding is very much a passive thing. You're not flapping your wings, you're just letting the air catch underneath them. How one gets a 400 ft glide speed is beyond me, though as you don't even free fall that fast.

A normal winged creature must continue to flap its wings to stay airborne. There are a few particularly long-traveling birds that have adapted such that they can also glide for periods so they can just coast along on the air currents, because it saves energy and kinda lets them rest while still going where they need to.

[MisterKaws]

My inclination is to treat falling as a non-action that just happens automatically. By RAW... I think the hadozee glides 400' to the ground. Have the hadozee pick a direction to be facing when they finish the teleport, and then they glide 400' in that direction. They don't get to turn or make any other decisions about their glide because they aren't "moving" with a move action at that point.

However, in your example... they still have a standard action left, so they could use that to move, in which case they can use the aerial movement rules and make turns, dives, etc., so long as they continue to move at least 5' down for every 20' traveled.

Here's an odd thought... traveling 400 ft in 6 seconds works out to be about 45 miles per hour. If the rules didn't say something about "negating damage", that could be a pretty rough landing.

The other odd thing about this is creatures who naturally have wings don't automatically glide. If they try this same trick (without the standard action left)... they automatically fall 150' the first round and have to attempt to recover from the stall, because they aren't maintaining minimum forward speed. It's kinda odd that natural flyers can still take falling damage, but gliders (which are supposed to be worse at flying) just don't take any falling damage at all.

You should really consult the other gliding descriptions, our little monkey got its version cut off. The Raptoran/etc gliding description specifically mentions that they can't hover, this means that they're SUPPOSED to take move actions to glide, that's why it's a gliding SPEED.

[Darrin]

How one gets a 400 ft glide speed is beyond me, though as you don't even free fall that fast.


That's not the silly part. If a glider teleports up to 500', they drop 150' on the first round, and glide turns that into 600' of horizontal movement. The next round, they fall 300' down, and glide 1200' horizontally. Over 6 seconds, that's 136 miles per hour. Oddly enough, this isn't too far outside of normal physics, as terminal velocity for a human is about 120 miles per hour.

If a hadozee wanted to control their glide, then they could double-move for up to 80'. Maybe double that for flying downward, but I'm not sure gliders can use that rule... by RAW: "A flying creature can fly down at twice its normal flying speed", and gliders are not a flying creature. If they could, then they could stretch out a double move to 160'. If they use "run", they could get up to 320'.


You should really consult the other gliding descriptions, our little monkey got its version cut off. The Raptoran/etc gliding description specifically mentions that they can't hover, this means that they're SUPPOSED to take move actions to glide, that's why it's a gliding SPEED.

That has nothing to do with what the RAW says happens in a fall. As per the raptoran text:

"A raptoran can use her wings to glide, negating damage from a fall of any height and allowing 20 feet of forward travel for every 5 feet of descent."

Nothing in there about move actions. If a raptoran falls 100', they get to move 400' forward.

The 40' fly speed and average maneuverability describes what happens when they deliberately decide to glide on their turn and use their move actions to do so.

[Grod_The_Giant]

That's not the silly part. If a glider teleports up to 500', they drop 150' on the first round, and glide turns that into 600' of horizontal movement. The next round, they fall 300' down, and glide 1200' horizontally. Over 6 seconds, that's 136 miles per hour. Oddly enough, this isn't too far outside of normal physics, as terminal velocity for a human is about 120 miles per hour.
I'm pretty sure that the 40ft speed limit turns this into "fall 10ft down and 40ft horizontally a turn."

[SangoProduction]

I'm pretty sure that the 40ft speed limit turns this into "fall 10ft down and 40ft horizontally a turn."

Yeah. I don't know where he got those numbers.

[MisterKaws]

Straight from the Hadozee's stat block:


Speed: 30 ft. (6 squares), glide 40 feet (poor)

This means he can, as a move action, fall up to 10ft to move 40ft horizontally. He can also fall faster if he wants, as per the normal movement rules, but he must have a minimum forward movement of 20ft in any given round or fall to the ground, because his maneuverability is poor.

[John Longarrow]

DMG page 20. Gliding is flight that has a mandatory downward speed as outlined in the creatures description. Otherwise look under their maneuverability (a value ONLY used with flight) of Poor (or average if using the racial traits?) for more specifics on what they are limited to doing. If they do not use a move action to fly (glide) they fall 150 feet.

[Troacctid]

DMG page 20. Gliding is flight that has a mandatory downward speed as outlined in the creatures description. Otherwise look under their maneuverability (a value ONLY used with flight) of Poor (or average if using the racial traits?) for more specifics on what they are limited to doing. If they do not use a move action to fly (glide) they fall 150 feet.

That section of the DMG doesn't mention gliding, and the rules for minimum forward speed specifically refer to a flying creature, not any airborne creature.

[MisterKaws]

That section of the DMG doesn't mention gliding, and the rules for minimum forward speed specifically refer to a flying creature, not any airborne creature.

Minimum Forward Speed is a property of average or lower maneuverability.

[Troacctid]

Yeah, but so is up angle. Does your glide speed have one of those too?

[John Longarrow]

Glide speed explicitly says it doesn't... Hence going with the general (Nothing besides flight has maneuverability) along with what is specified under the entry. Doing otherwise would allow you to justify having a glide speed would allow you to move through solid materials as nothing under glide says you can't. :smallsmile:

[MisterKaws]

Yeah, but so is up angle. Does your glide speed have one of those too?

General vs specific, unless the feature says something is different, it is not. Gliding says you go down, therefore you don't go up.

[Troacctid]

As Grod points out in the OP, gliding also specifically says you can move X feet forward for every Y feet you fall, so if it does come with a minimum forward speed, then failing to move the minimum speed would cause you to fall...which you could then turn into a glide.

Anyway, as I said, the general rule for minimum forward speed only applies to flying. The properties of maneuverability that are NOT specific to flying are hover, move backward, turn, turn in place, maximum turn, up angle, up speed, and down angle.

[MisterKaws]

As Grod points out in the OP, gliding also specifically says you can move X feet forward for every Y feet you fall, so if it does come with a minimum forward speed, then failing to move the minimum speed would cause you to fall...which you could then turn into a glide.

Anyway, as I said, the general rule for minimum forward speed only applies to flying. The properties of maneuverability that are NOT specific to flying are hover, move backward, turn, turn in place, maximum turn, up angle, up speed, and down angle.

Yup, you can move x feet for y fall, but if you don't, you just fall down, which means your actions are restricted while gliding, which is pretty logical.