Talk:Knockback (5e Variant Rule)

The last sentence is a bit vague.

Poison, psychic, necrotic, radiant, fire, cold and lightning damage would not cause knockback.

Thunder might cause knockback, but it's often accompanied by effects that push creatures anyway (such as thunderwave). What happens, do you push with the spell, or do the knockback, or both?

That leaves bludgeoning, slashing and piercing.

How does this work in practice? First of all the DM needs to pre-calculate, or work out on-the-fly the mass values of all the monsters that might be encountered. Then with every attack, check to see how much it exceeds that value. Then divide it by 5. Then look up the distance on a chart and make a saving throw.

It seems a bit complicated to be doing potentially multiple times per turn - and definitely be doing multiple times per turn from about 8th level onwards. Let's take a battle with that frost giant. If a PC's mass rating is 15 then on average the giant is pushing everything it hits 10 feet.

Curiously the one thing that Strength saving throws do - resist being forced to move - is not used in this system at all. Marasmusine (talk) 15:58, 10 February 2019 (MST)

Those are all valid points. With the example given above (thunderwave), I'd say the best way for it to work would be for the KB to add on to the push effect. I decided not to use Strength saving throws because I see a creature's mass as, being Strength-based, a kind of "passive" saving throw, much like hit points are for effects such as power word kill. That is, either you're sturdy enough to not be knocked back, or you, well, aren't. To be honest I didn't think at all about the complexity problem, and I'm not sure how to fix it. Oh well. I guess I'll have to rewrite a lot of this page. Quincy (talk) 16:08, 10 February 2019 (MST)