Quote Originally Posted by PHB p. 195
Moving a Grappled Creature. When you move, you can drag or carry the grappled creature with you, but your speed is halved, unless the creature is two or more sizes smaller than you.
These rules seem simple enough, but there's a lot they don't tell you. Can you move around a grappled creature while holding them in place? Can you move a grappled creature around you while you stand still? How much movement do these cost, if any? Can you hold a grappled creature to one side to drag them through Spike Growth? Can you hold them in front of you to push them into traps?

I propose a new rule that removes this ambiguity:

Moving a Grappled Creature. You can move a grappled creature anywhere within your reach, including dragging them with you as you move. You must spend your own movement to move a grappled creature, unless the creature is two or more sizes smaller than you.

What's interesting is that in casual play, not much actually changes. If you grab a creature and run off, you're paying movement for the both of you, which has the same result as cutting your speed in half. Where the differences really start to show is in the edge cases. You can move around a creature while holding them still, only spending movement for yourself. You can move a creature around yourself while you stand still, spending movement only for that creature. You can move while dragging a creature in front of you or to the side, so long as you spend movement to position them properly first. This also closes an "exploit" where you could grab a creature, move half your speed, drop them, and move the other half of your speed, since the speed reduction ends once you're no longer grappling.

This does also have an effect on how environmental hazards will be used. Fortunately, most such hazards, such as Create Bonfire or Wall of Fire, only do damage the first time the creature enters the hazard on a turn. Spike Growth is a notable standout, doing damage for every 5 feet the creature moves through the spikes. With the new rule, the optimal strategy is to stand still and furiously waggle the enemy in the spikes, only spending movement to move the grappled creature. If you drag the enemy through the spikes, you're wasting movement moving yourself. At first, this might seem like it doubles the damage, since you can spend all your movement moving the creature, but Spike Growth is also difficult terrain, so you actually spend double the movement to drag a creature through it. This means the damage should end up the same, the major difference being standing still instead of moving along the edge of the effect.

It's possible an effect like Spike Growth exists that deals damage depending on the distance you move through it, but isn't difficult terrain. In that case, it would double the damage to simply waggle the enemy in that effect, rather than dragging them through it. This isn't necessarily bad, it just makes the hazard more dangerous. If it does become an issue, an easy fix would be to find a middle ground between effects like Wall of Fire and effects like Spike Growth, where each square only deals damage the first time the creature enters, but you can move them through multiple squares to deal additional damage.

One last change this will have is that if you grapple two or more enemies, you'll have to spend movement for all of them. Though it could be argued that the RAW says you speed is halved per grappled enemy, so grappling two enemies would cut your speed to a quarter, whereas with this new rule is would be more like a third.

The only downside is that I do think it's actually more interesting tactically if you have to drag the enemy along the edge of the spikes, instead of standing still and waggling them. Though to be fair, the waggle tactic still works RAW (if you allow sideways dragging), you're just moving back and forth between the same two squares instead of standing perfectly still.