Can Aggressive Block move the enethe in any direction

combat-maneuverpathfinder-2e

This came up in game last night: the Fighter, with Aggressive Block, Shield Blocks an attack. The Fighter and their attacker are in a narrow corridor – here is what the map looks like, where the Fighter is F, and the attacker X:

| |
|X|
|F|
| |

The attacker chooses to be moved (per Aggressive Block). The Fighter, who gets to "choose the direction" (per Aggressive Block), wants to move them into one of the walls so that they instead become flat-footed. However, Shove only lets you push the target away from you. In session, we ruled that the Fighter couldn't push the attacked into the wall, forcing flat-footed; I imagined it was for something against larger enemies where the direction away might be a bit more ambiguous, such as the following map (the X's being one large enemy):

| | | | | |
+-+-+-+-+-+
| |X|X| | |
+-+-+-+-+-+
| |X|X| | |
+-+-+-+-+-+
| | |F| | |
+-+-+-+-+-+

Did we make the right ruling? Can Aggressive Block truly send an enemy in any direction, thereby always guaranteeing flat-footed if your attacker is adjacent to a wall (and the Fighter wants flat-footed)?

Best Answer

You can Shove as long as it's away from you

As you noted Shove can normally only push creatures away, but there are various directions that would be "away" from the creature pushing (including North-West and North-East in your example). This can be further extended to directly East or West if you consider that diagonal squares truly measure 1.5 squares of distance like this for a 5-ft/square grid:

| |    |   |    |    |
+-+----+---+----+----+
| |12.5|10.|12.5|15.0|
+-+----+---+----+----+
| |7.50|5.0|7.50|12.5|
+-+----+---+----+----+
| |5.00|F.0|5.00|10.0|
+-+----+---+----+----+

Considering distance this way gives more real-to-life results for a map, but the in-game rules for movement/spell areas (see this diagram of measurements) would have all of these values rounded down to the nearest multiple of 5 and allow for less possible directions of pushing if they happen to be directly North/South/East/West on the grid:

| |  |  |  |  |
+-+--+--+--+--+
| |10|10|10|15|
+-+--+--+--+--+
| |5.|5.|5.|10|
+-+--+--+--+--+
| |5.|F.|5.|10|
+-+--+--+--+--+

Regardless of measurement, a push to any square that is farther away from you follows the rules for Shove and would be legitimate.

I don't believe the line in Agressive Block "If it chooses to be moved, you choose the direction." means that you can ignore the result of Shove "You push a creature away from you". And even if it does allow you to ignore that stipulation, there still doesn't seem to be any rule preventing choosing a direction towards any adjacent wall/creature/etc to automatically give flat-footed if you desire.