During a pitched battle, heroes and monsters are in constant motion. The thief skirts the melee, looking for a chance to set up a deadly flanking attack. The black mage keeps a distance from the enemy and tries to find a position to make the best use of area attacks, while goblin archers move to get clear shots with their bows. You can increase your effectiveness in battle by learning how to use movement and position to your advantage.
Creature Size and Space
Each creature falls into one of six size categories, which correspond to the number of squares a creature occupies on the battle grid. A creature’s space is an expression of the number of squares it occupies. Creatures smaller than Small or larger than Medium have special rules relating to position and attacking.
✦ Tiny: Four individual Tiny creatures can fit in a square, but a swarm of Tiny creatures might consist of hundreds, or even thousands, of them in a square. Most Tiny creatures can’t attack, and if they can, they can’t attack adjacent targets. They can attack only targets in the space they occupy. They can enter and end their turn in a larger creature’s space.
✦ Small: Small creatures occupy the same amount of space as Medium creatures. However, Small creatures cannot use two-handed weapons. If a one-handed weapon can be used two-handed for extra damage, a Small creature must use it two-handed and doesn’t extra damage by doing so.
✦ Large, Huge, and Gargantuan: Very large creatures take up more than 1 square. For example, an ogre takes up a space 2 squares by 2 squares. Most Large and larger creatures have melee reach greater than 1 square—that is, they can make melee attacks against creatures that aren’t adjacent to them. A creature’s basic body shape usually determines its reach—a Large ogre has a reach of 2, but a Large horse has a reach of 1.
Speed
Your speed is measured in squares on the battle grid, with each 1-inch square representing a 5-foot square in the game world. A character who has a speed of 6 can move up to 6 squares (or 30 feet) on the battle grid by using a move action. Your speed is determined by your race and the armor you wear. Determine your speed as follows:
✦ Start with your race’s speed.
✦ Take your armor’s speed penalty, if applicable.
✦ Add any bonuses that apply.
Your speed is your base walking speed, in contrast to your speed while swimming or, if you’re affected by a power, flying.
Tactical Movement
During your turn, you can use a move action to move some distance across the battlefield and still use a standard action to launch an attack. All move actions are governed by the following rules.
Diagonal Movement: Moving diagonally works the same as other movement, except you can’t cross the corner of a wall or another obstacle that fills the corner between the square you’re in and the square you want to move to. You can move diagonally past most creatures, since they don’t completely fill their squares.
Occupied Squares: A creature is considered to occupy the square or squares within its space.
✦ Ally: You can move through a square occupied by an ally.
✦ Enemy: You normally can’t move through an enemy’s space unless that enemy is helpless or two size categories larger or smaller than you. Moving into a non-helpless enemy’s space provokes an opportunity attack from that enemy, because you left a square adjacent to the enemy. (Some powers let you move through an enemy’s square without provoking an opportunity attack.)
✦ Ending Movement: You can end your movement in an ally’s square only if the ally is prone. You can end your movement in an enemy’s square only if the enemy is helpless. However, Tiny creatures can end their movement in a larger creature’s square. If you don’t have enough movement remaining to reach a square you are allowed to be in, your move ends in the last square you could occupy.
✦ Standing Up: If you’re prone and in the same square as another creature.
Terrain and Obstacles
Most battles don’t take place in bare rooms or plains. Adventurers fight in boulder-strewn caverns, briar-choked forests, and steep staircases. Each battleground offers its own combination of cover, concealment, and poor footing. This section explains how terrain affects movement. For information about how it affects vision and defense.
Difficult Terrain: Rubble, undergrowth, shallow bogs, steep stairs, and all sorts of other impediments are difficult terrain that hampers movement.
✦ Costs 1 Extra Square: Each square of difficult terrain you enter costs 1 extra square of movement.
✦ Large, Huge, and Gargantuan Creatures: If such a creature enters two or more squares with different types of terrain, count that square of movement according to the most difficult terrain. Count only squares it is entering for the first time, not squares it already occupies.
✦ Ending Movement: If you don’t have enough movement remaining to enter a square of difficult terrain, you can’t enter it.
✦ Flying: Creatures are not hampered by difficult terrain when flying.
✦ Terrain Walk: Some creatures have a special ability to ignore difficult terrain in specific kinds of environments.
Obstacles: Like difficult terrain, obstacles can hamper movement.
✦ Obstacles Filling Squares: An obstacle such as a large tree, a pillar, or a floor-to-ceiling wall blocks a square entirely by completely filling it. You can’t enter a square that is filled by an obstacle.
Corners: When an obstacle fills a square, you can’t move diagonally across the corner of that square.
✦ Obstacles Between Squares: Some obstacles run along the edges of squares instead of through squares. An obstacle such as a low wall between two squares makes moving from one square to the other just like entering a square of difficult terrain, even if the squares on each side of the wall are not difficult.
Double Move: On your turn, you can move twice if you take a move action instead of a standard action. If you take the same move action twice in a row—two walks, two runs, two shifts, two crawls—you’re taking a double move.
✦ Same Move Action: To double move, you have to take the same move action twice in a row on the same turn.
✦ One Speed: When you double move, add the speeds of the two move actions together and then move.
✦ Occupied Squares: When you double move, your first move action can end in an ally’s space, because you’re not stopping. Your second move action can’t end in an ally’s space, as normal.
✦ Difficult Terrain: When you double move, you can sometimes move over more squares of difficult terrain than normal, because you add the speeds of the two move actions together and then move.
Falling: Some kinds of terrain present a unique danger: a precipitous drop. When you fall at least 10 feet, you take damage.
✦ Falling Damage: You take 1d10 damage for each 10 feet you fall.
Fast Alternative: If you fall more than 50 feet, take 25 damage per 50 feet, plus 1d10 per 10 extra feet.
✦ Prone: You fall prone when you land, unless you take no damage from the fall.
✦ Jumping Down: If you are trained in Acrobatics, you can make a check to reduce the amount of damage you take from a fall.
✦ Catching Yourself: If a power or a bull rush forces you over a precipice or into a pit, you can immediately make a saving throw to avoid going over the edge. This saving throw works just like a normal saving throw, except you make it as soon as you reach the edge, not at the end of your turn.
Lower than 10: Failure. You fall over the edge.
10 or higher: Success. You fall prone at the edge, in the last square you occupied before you would have fallen. The forced movement ends.
✦ Large, Huge, and Gargantuan Creatures: If only part of a creature’s space is over a pit or a precipice, the creature doesn’t fall.
Flanking: One of the simplest combat tactics is for you and an ally to move to flanking positions adjacent to an enemy.
✦ Combat Advantage: You have combat advantage against an enemy you flank.
✦ Opposite Sides: To flank an enemy, you and an ally must be adjacent to the enemy and on opposite sides or corners of the enemy’s space. When in doubt about whether two characters
flank an enemy, trace an imaginary line between the centers of the characters’ squares. If the line passes through opposite sides or corners of the enemy’s space, the enemy is flanked.
✦ Must Be Able to Attack: You and your ally must be able to attack the enemy, whether you’re armed or unarmed. If there’s no line of effect between your enemy and either you or your ally, you don’t flank. If you’re affected by an effect that prevents you from taking opportunity actions, you don’t flank.
✦ Large, Huge, and Gargantuan Creatures: If a flanking creature’s space takes up more than 1 square, the creature gains combat advantage if any square it occupies counts for flanking.
Pull, Push, and Slide: Certain powers and effects allow you to pull, push, or slide a target.
✦ Pull: When you pull a creature, each square you move it must bring it nearer to you.
✦ Push: When you push a creature, each square you move it must place it farther away from you.
✦ Slide: When you slide a creature, there’s no restriction on the direction you can move it. Whether you’re pulling, pushing, or sliding a target, certain rules govern all forced movement.
Force Movement
✦ Line of Effect: You must have line of effect to any square you pull, push, or slide a creature into.
✦ Distance in Squares: The power you’re using specifies how many squares you can move a target. You can choose to move the target fewer squares or not to move it at all. You can’t move the target vertically.
✦ Specific Destination: Some powers don’t specify a distance in squares but instead specify a destination, such as “adjacent” (a square adjacent to you).
✦ No Opportunity Attacks: Forced movement does not provoke opportunity attacks or other opportunity actions.
✦ Ignore Difficult Terrain: Forced movement isn’t hindered by difficult terrain.
✦ Not a Move: Forced movement doesn’t count against a target’s ability to move on its turn. A target’s speed is irrelevant to the distance you move it.
✦ Clear Path: Forced movement can’t move a target into a space it couldn’t enter by walking. The target can’t be forced into an obstacle or made to squeeze into a space.
✦ Catching Yourself: If you’re forced over a precipice or a pit, you can try to catch yourself before you fall.
✦ Swapping Places: Some powers let you swap places with a target. You slide the target so that its space overlaps your space, and then you shift so your space includes at least one square that the target just left.
Teleportation: Many powers and rituals allow you to teleport—to move instantaneously from one point to another. Unless a power or a ritual specifies otherwise, teleportation follows these rules.
✦ Line of Sight: You have to be able to see your destination.
✦ No Line of Effect: You can teleport to a place you can see even if you don’t have line of effect to it.
✦ No Opportunity Attacks: Your movement doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks.
✦ Destination: Your destination must be a space you can occupy without squeezing.
✦ Instantaneous: When you teleport, you disappear from the space you occupy and immediately appear in a new space you choose. Creatures, objects, and terrain between you and your destination don’t hinder your movement in any way.
✦ Immobilized: Being immobilized doesn’t prevent you from teleporting. If you were immobilized because of a physical effect, such as a creature grabbing you, you can teleport away and are no longer immobilized or restrained, if applicable. If you were immobilized because of an effect on your mind or body, teleporting does not end that effect; you’re still immobilized when you reach your destination.
Phasing: Some creatures, such as shadow snakes, have a special ability called phasing, and some powers allow you to phase. When you are phasing, you ignore difficult terrain, and you can move through obstacles and other creatures but must end your movement in an unoccupied space.