In a recent game session, the party found themselves crossing a very high, narrow bridge during high winds. A powerful gust of wind blew two of the player characters to the very edge of the bridge (failed Strength saving throws). With the certainty of an impending fall, one of the imperiled heroes was saved by a friendly application of grapple.
Normally one PC grappling another could be considered player-vs-player action but this was specifically and explicitly with the intent to help, so we accepted this tactic and allowed the PC to proceed with a (successful) Unarmed Strike to make the grapple. The falling character consented to the life-saving grapple, so the saving throw to escape the grapple was waived and this character was saved from falling a couple thousand feet to their (presumed) death.
What about the other PC, though - the second one that also failed to save against the high winds? Let’s call him “Curd” - because that’s totally, absolutely, actually the character’s name and there’s not really any need to obscure it. Curd, and the party, were given a split second to save him from the (almost certainly) lethal fall.
Curd’s player initially signaled to the rest of the party that he wanted to try getting out of the danger on his own, so the others held off for a moment. Curd is a Paladin, Oath of Devotion, and he has prepared the spell Find Steed. He proposed casting that spell and calling forth a fey mount so that its Fey Step ability could safely teleport the two of them back to the relative, tenuous safety of the bridge.
Friends, I honestly didn’t know what to do at that moment. I have some little experience playing a Paladin, but I’ve never used mounted combat or the Find Steed spell. I’ve done a fair bit of reading and analysis of the 2024/5.5e revisions, so I knew that the spell had been streamlined and constrained from the relatively wide-open “any beast larger than you” (yes, I know I’m over-simplifying that) of the original, 2014 5e publication.
In 5.5e (golly, I just can’t get over what a terrible name that is), the mounts summoned by Find Steed all share a common stat block but may vary in their player-selected creature type. Each of the different creature types (Celestial, Fey, or Fiend) have a different once-per-long-rest special ability. These are the things that I knew, but a good ruling demanded more information.
Let me digress for a moment, since I have no interest in making this (more of) an “online recipe” post that’s just some pointless anecdote to scroll through. The other players talked Curd into accepting their help and they threw him a (literal) life-line to stop his fall and hoist him back onto the bridge. Maybe that’s anticlimactic, but it was the first scene in the second session of a new campaign (and only Curd’s first session in the campaign!) - cut us all some slack and be glad that ginger minotaur made it through. The other players bailed both of us (Curd and myself) out with their actions, but it’s an interesting situation to examine more closely.
Back to the recipe novella…
In reflecting on the circumstances, I identified a few rules elements that I needed to sharpen up on: mounted combat, the behavior and action economy of “summons”, and the particulars of falling in 5e D&D.
Let’s start with the particulars of Find Steed. This spell is listed on page 272 of the 2024 Players Handbook (I’m fully converted to using 5.5e rules and I’m not going back. If you feel differently: good for you, play what you want, just be clear about what you’re doing). I’ve already specified the stat block and creature type selection. The spell description states that the steed is an ally and, in combat, is treated as a “controlled mount” while being ridden. There is also a bit about what happens when the rider has the Incapacitated condition, but that isn’t relevant to the current situation.
The Find Steed text points strongly at the “mounted combat” (uh-oh, I need a page number but am referencing the D&D Beyond version right now) section in Chapter 1 of the PHB. That section lays out rules that mounting and dismounting each take half the character’s Speed in movement, that a mount can be either “controlled” or “independent”, and the difference between the two states of control.
I’ll be honest, I don’t find the mounted combat rules sufficiently articulated for full use, but there is (just) enough here to formulate some scenarios. There is a very specific circumstance with the general rule and Find Steed that requires some careful reading to tease apart: controlled mounts only have Dash, Disengage, and Dodge available as actions, but Find Steed enumerates special abilities unique to each of the mount types. The key to unwinding this lies in the specifics of the action economy. It’s true that the controlled mount is limited to Dash, Disengage, or Dodge for an action, but its special ability - like Fey Step - is a Bonus Action available to the player to activate at will.
So far it seems like Curd’s plan to summon a mount and Fey Step to safety might just work. At this point, I’m still curious about how D&D 5e (and 5.5e) handles falling, mechanically. The PHB is painfully unhelpful in this regard, listing only the damage inflicted by the landing at speed that terminates the falling. I already know that every 10 feet of falling results in 1d6 of damage and that it is unlikely, even if every die came up a 1, that Curd has sufficient hit points to walk away from 200d6 (2000’ up, rounded down, divided by 10) bludgeoning damage.
I flatly do not accept rules or guidance from non-official, third-party sources. If a situation, circumstance, or rule is not covered in sufficient elucidating detail within any of the hundreds of pages of WotC-published game materials, then the burden of error for resolving any related conflicts falls to me. Arguments and advice will be entertained and examined, but when I’m free to make my own mistakes it should be well-understood that I am fully capable of erring, often doing so guilt-free.
The evolution of D&D 5e into its current 5.5e state has led to a situation in which many published books have been labeled as “legacy” content: a moniker that indicates any rules or systems within that text are not valid for 5.5e for some number of reasons. So far, two notable texts have not only avoided the “legacy” deprecation but have actually had their contents incorporated into the PHB24 - they are Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and, more relevant to this context, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything.
Chapter 2 of Xanathar’s, titled “Dungeon Master’s Tools”, provides detailed game mechanics for falls and falling - especially for falls from such great heights that it might take the equivalent of several round of combat to reach bottom.
Xanathar’s sets a fixed per-round fall distance of 500 feet. When a character begins falling, they immediately travel 500 feet downward (or, you know, toward the dominant gravitational body), with another 500 feet of descent occurring at the end of each of their following turns as long as they continue falling. I think it’s important to remember that each of these 500 foot intervals is accomplished in full and at once until there is no more distance remaining to cover.
Let’s recap what we know so far. Once an entity begins falling, they immediately descend up to 500 feet and up to another 500 feet and the end of each of their subsequent turns. A mount summoned with the spell Find Steed is an ally and, while mounted by their summoner, a “controlled” mount. While a controlled mount has a limited selection of Actions, they also have a Bonus Action that the rider is able to invoke, independently of the limited set of Actions.
Evaluating each of these facts against our circumstances, we can see that:
- A fey mount summoned through Find Steed is able, assuming the summoning Paladin has done nothing else, to Fey Step and teleport up to 60 feet away.
- Anyone riding that fey steed will be teleported with them.
- The DM has provided a split-second of time between “teetering” and “falling” in which the other players have one final chance to save Curd from a fatal fall.
- The moment Curd begins “falling” he will have done so, by 500 feet.
- Mounting a steed will require available movement.
All of this is looking pretty good for Curd, and maybe things are going to work out for him to, independently of the rest of his party, save himself from a fatal fall.
Right now someone is - and has been - absolutely howling about how obvious the breakdown in this analysis is. It’s not me, and if it’s you then please just breathe. There is an incredibly important limitation on Find Steed that I failed to notice in my first couple readings. The steed, when summoned, appears in an unoccupied space of the caster’s choice. An. Unoccupied. Space.
It is not possible, by the wording of the spell, to summon the steed in a way that does not require the summoner to spend half their Speed to mount it. The summoned mount is not Torrent - you don’t, and can’t, summon them in media mounting res.
Take my fingerprints, photograph me, throw the Agatha Christie book at me; I’ve left out a critically important fact in my reporting. I, as GM, afforded the other players a split-second to react to their companions’ peril, essentially a bare reaction to save them from splattering across the desert floor a half-mile below. Maybe that was a wrong call. Maybe I failed, as I did in this telling, to sufficiently clarify that point early enough. I think it would be easy to justify that a failed saving throw ends with the full consequences of that failure and that I improperly afforded a “second chance” to avoid those consequences.
For what it’s worth, I accept that judgment and agree with it. Those two characters should have, upon failing their saving throws, been tossed off the edge of the bridge and instantly fallen 500 feet, without mercy or accommodation.
And yet I did make provision for a reaction to try pre-empting the fall, and I was generous with the latitude given to address the impending misadventure, well in excess of simply “what can you do as a reaction to this?”
Fortunately, all the characters made it through this trial, but the campaign I’m running is meant to be perilous and deadly. To achieve that part of the design, I need to toughen up, run a harder game, and let the consequences happen as they were meant to do. I can recognize my mistake and at the same time not regret my mistake, and I can do both of those things at the same time, regardless of the outcome. That’s the great thing about mistakes: they are both the indication and the motivation to improve.
There is one other thing that I’ve withheld about this situation. The party members who succeeded on their saving throws had all gotten to make theirs at Advantage, by virtue of tethering themselves to each other. The two who failed had declined that assistance and were committed to going it alone. That “lone wolf” thing only worked out for them because the GM - because I - made an error in judgment and gave them and their friends a chance to save them.
I didn’t mean to find a moral in this story, but it found me regardless. Put your trust in your friends, because you cannot do this alone.