5-Foot Step in 5e

Recently I tried borrowing 3.5e’s 5-Foot Step rule for 5e combat and so far I really like it. The way I introduced it is: if you move no more than 5 feet on your turn, you don’t provoke attacks of opportunity.

My motivation came from a couple of places.

First, the primary two characters I play are a Ranger and a Wizard, both of whom like to have some space between them and anything they might be attacking. But combat often gets into close quarters, where the choice between doing everything at disadvantage or taking the AoO—especially for the Wizard at lower levels—can be brutal.

Second, building on top of that, is that while running combat encounters, I found it too easy to slip into tactically good-enough spots and for movement to cease if a battle goes on long enough, as the threat of AoOs becomes more meaningful. Then it turns into hit point attrition and gets less interesting. To be clear, part of this is on me to learn to avoid—to balance combat so it doesn’t last too long, to ensure there are reasons for PCs and NPCS both to keep moving around, etc. But I’ve seen lots of people get stuck in the “well if I move at all I’m going to get hit so I’ll stay” aspect of 5e combat, which doesn’t help.

This would let the Wizard avoid disadvantage on attack rolls, but need to keep moving to do it, possibly giving up good positioning, without letting her actually getting a meaningful distance from a melee attacker.

In the first session I tried this out, offering it to the players as something I thought was worth trying but we didn’t have to keep, both PCs and NPCs got good use out of it. I do think it kept things a little more fluid and dynamic. One NPC did have a Sneak Attack feature, but they died early, so I didn’t really get to see the impact of taking away some of their AoOs.

There are probably some nuances that will be worth working out over time. Is it really per turn, or per round? (Could I move 5 feet, then Ready a Dash action?) Is it really “move 5 no more than feet” or “use no more than 5 feet of movement”? (Should standing up in place, then moving 5 feet away, still count? What if I’m crawling or climbing?) Are there feats like Athlete or Mobile that need to be updated? But so far, none of that’s come up, so it’s tough to say!

Hello, Fantasy World

Hi! I’m James, I play tabletop RPGs and, in the words of a good friend “love to hear [myself] talk about rule systems.” (He was talking about both of us, and it’s fair.) So I figured I would start writing some of those down, rather than blathering endlessly at pals.

I’ve only been playing D&D 5e for around two years, and DMing for a little over a year, mostly 5e, but also Monster of the Week. And dabbling in some other systems as a player or DM/GM. I never played 4e, or 3.5e, or Pathfinder 1. I tend to enjoy things that are more narrative driven, and love homebrewing. So, you know, take anything I say here with a grain of salt. There’s going to be a very low bar for what I write about. Stuff that worked, but also stuff I’m interested in trying. Stuff that is theoretically interesting. Comparison to other systems or aspects that I think are worth stealing. Things from other DMs that I appreciated.

Credit where it’s due, here are some more-experienced people that have influenced me:

Outside of tabletop things, I’m a software engineer, engineering manager, open source maintainer, and some other things that don’t end in -er. More about that stuff is on my site or other blog.

“first psot!!1one”