Kinematics
Hero
So, a recent thread praising the improvements in movement in 5E reminded me of a thing that has annoyed me about movement for a while. In the latest cycle of consideration, I came up with a couple extra "movement" actions that feel like they'd help alleviate things.
Hold Your Distance
Choose a creature that you can see that is outside of your reach. When that creature moves, you may use your reaction to move simultaneously with it, enabling you to maintain a constant distance away from it as it moves.
This acts as if you had used a readied action, allowing you to move up to your full speed, but without the requirement that you perform the entirety of the movement at once in response to the trigger.
Each 5' movement step is performed simultaneously, so at no point would either party get an opportunity attack against the other as long as distance can be maintained. Opportunity attacks by other creatures against either you or the target creature are still resolved normally, though.
If you are unable to maintain your distance from the creature (such as if you are backed into a corner), any remaining movement is lost, and Hold Your Distance ends.
Note: Handling of other types of movement (jump, tumbling, climbing, etc) while this is active can have potentially complicating issues. I don't have rules for resolving all of those yet.
~
The main purpose of Hold Your Distance is to allow more complicated scenes between characters, where lots of movement is allowed (and expected), but without triggering a cascade of opportunity attacks, or having to deal with the clumsiness of turn-based movement. For example, two opponents circling a table, or a chase scene around a store. Normal movement rules would be clunky and artificial.
Guard Stance
You may enter a Guard Stance as an action.
The Guard Stance ends if you are incapacitated, confused, charmed, frightened, move away from your guard position, choose to end it as a free action, or have maintained it for a number of minutes equal to your Constitution modifier. When your Guard Stance ends, you must complete at least one additional turn before you can re-activate the stance.
While you are in a Guard Stance, you gain the following benefits:
All spaces that you threaten with a melee weapon are treated as difficult terrain.
You may use a reaction to make an opportunity attack against a creature that enters a space that you threaten. Creatures provoke these opportunity attacks even if they have used the Disengage ability beforehand. If you hit, the creature's speed is reduced to 0 until the end of its turn.
If you reduce a creature's speed to 0 with an opportunity attack, you have advantage on grapple checks made against it until the end of your next turn.
~
This is sort of a reworking of the Sentinel feat. It shifts how opportunity attacks apply to creatures (more like Pathfinder), activating when entering a space you threaten, rather than leaving it. It removes the reaction attacks, and adds difficult terrain in your threat zone instead, along with advantage on grapples.
This makes it much more difficult to get past a guard line without needing an entire shield wall worth of enemies to prevent someone from advancing. At the same time, it leaves open lots of ways to get someone to drop their guard, whether by being frightened, seduced, tricked, stunned, etc, trying to draw the creature away from his guard position, or making more tactical use of Dodge. This allows for more interesting, creative tactics to overcome the obstacle.
~~~
Pretty much all problems I have with movement options boil down to one of the above scenarios — either the inability to have dynamic movement between two creatures because of the turn-based system, or the inability to lock down movement (and breaking through that lockdown). I'm curious about other people's thoughts on movement issues, and whether the above suggestions feel like they'd work satisfactorily.
Hold Your Distance
Choose a creature that you can see that is outside of your reach. When that creature moves, you may use your reaction to move simultaneously with it, enabling you to maintain a constant distance away from it as it moves.
This acts as if you had used a readied action, allowing you to move up to your full speed, but without the requirement that you perform the entirety of the movement at once in response to the trigger.
Each 5' movement step is performed simultaneously, so at no point would either party get an opportunity attack against the other as long as distance can be maintained. Opportunity attacks by other creatures against either you or the target creature are still resolved normally, though.
If you are unable to maintain your distance from the creature (such as if you are backed into a corner), any remaining movement is lost, and Hold Your Distance ends.
Note: Handling of other types of movement (jump, tumbling, climbing, etc) while this is active can have potentially complicating issues. I don't have rules for resolving all of those yet.
~
The main purpose of Hold Your Distance is to allow more complicated scenes between characters, where lots of movement is allowed (and expected), but without triggering a cascade of opportunity attacks, or having to deal with the clumsiness of turn-based movement. For example, two opponents circling a table, or a chase scene around a store. Normal movement rules would be clunky and artificial.
Guard Stance
You may enter a Guard Stance as an action.
The Guard Stance ends if you are incapacitated, confused, charmed, frightened, move away from your guard position, choose to end it as a free action, or have maintained it for a number of minutes equal to your Constitution modifier. When your Guard Stance ends, you must complete at least one additional turn before you can re-activate the stance.
While you are in a Guard Stance, you gain the following benefits:
All spaces that you threaten with a melee weapon are treated as difficult terrain.
You may use a reaction to make an opportunity attack against a creature that enters a space that you threaten. Creatures provoke these opportunity attacks even if they have used the Disengage ability beforehand. If you hit, the creature's speed is reduced to 0 until the end of its turn.
If you reduce a creature's speed to 0 with an opportunity attack, you have advantage on grapple checks made against it until the end of your next turn.
~
This is sort of a reworking of the Sentinel feat. It shifts how opportunity attacks apply to creatures (more like Pathfinder), activating when entering a space you threaten, rather than leaving it. It removes the reaction attacks, and adds difficult terrain in your threat zone instead, along with advantage on grapples.
This makes it much more difficult to get past a guard line without needing an entire shield wall worth of enemies to prevent someone from advancing. At the same time, it leaves open lots of ways to get someone to drop their guard, whether by being frightened, seduced, tricked, stunned, etc, trying to draw the creature away from his guard position, or making more tactical use of Dodge. This allows for more interesting, creative tactics to overcome the obstacle.
~~~
Pretty much all problems I have with movement options boil down to one of the above scenarios — either the inability to have dynamic movement between two creatures because of the turn-based system, or the inability to lock down movement (and breaking through that lockdown). I'm curious about other people's thoughts on movement issues, and whether the above suggestions feel like they'd work satisfactorily.