If my character has a burrow speed that works even on solid stone, Cat Fall, and Legendary Proficiency in Acrobatics, can they dive off a cliff and glide harmlessly into the earth as easily as a diver dives into a swimming pool?
How might you deal with such a request if you were GM?
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What's the source of the speed? How fast is it? Is the player the sort to try and weasle an a power game-y precedent out of this, or are they just trying to do something cool?
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Since you have Cat Fall and Legendary proficiency, I'm not seeing much other ruling than:
1-action to jump off of the cliff or bell tower or whatever.
Fall whatever distance to the ground and take no damage because of Cat Fall.
1-action to burrow through the ground up to your burrow speed.
If you want to narratively describe that as doing a swan dive off the tower and into the dirt without making a splash, I'm all for it. You don't need to describe your character landing on their feet on the ground first before burrowing, even if that is what is happening according to the game mechanics.
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If you didn't have Cat Fall or didn't have the proficiency up all the way to Legendary, then there may be more of a question.
At that point, I would be looking at the rules for falling into soft substances and arguing that the dirt or rock that the character has a burrow speed for would qualify as 'soft' for this purpose.
if you fall into water, snow, or another relatively soft substance, you can treat the fall as though it were 20 feet shorter, or 30 feet shorter if you intentionally dove in.
It wouldn't allow arbitrarily high dives into the ground. But that should also alleviate some of the legitimate concerns about power gaming that Squark rightly brings up.
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I agree with Finoan if they have everything to mechanically make it happen, then letting it happen narratively is fine.
But burrowing, even at a fast rate doesn’t happen instantly and divers jumping into water still have to worry about breaking the surface tension of the water before they hit it when they are high enough, so I would not assume having a burrow speed equals treating rocks generally as water. The player probably doesn’t want to have to swim all the time either on rock surfaces.
You could also use the rules for falling into soft materials as a starting point for negotiations.
So perhaps half of the distance for water - 10 feet for falling to the ground or 15 if you intentionally dive in.
Or have it based on your burrow speed. You can reduce the damage by half your burrow speed if you fall, or your full burrow speed if you intentionally dive.
You might also want to assess the action cost. The 'fall' into the ground distance may be moot if you require spending an action on Burrow at the end of the fall. They wouldn't be able to spend that action if they are shoved off of the tower during an enemy's turn and fall.
But legendary athletics does mean you can already do the impossible, so yeah, why not.
Exactly.
And especially when we consider that this is a setting with magic. Characters aren't limited to burrowing manually like moles.
Arguably, any creature that can burrow fast enough to have a listed burrow speed is burrowing faster than would be possible with purely mundane digging. Especially if they don't leave a tunnel behind them in the process.