[RPG] Does changing your reach provoke opportunity attacks

dnd-5emysticopportunity-attackreachunearthed-arcana

If a Mystic focusing on Giant Growth changes their reach, does it provoke opportunity attacks?

Relevant rules

PHB p195

You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature that you
can see moves out of your reach.

PHB 190

A reaction is an instant response to a trigger of some kind, which can occur on your turn or on someone else's.

This implies that you can make opportunity attacks on your turn.

For the UA Mystic (V3) class, the discipline Giant Growth states:

While focused on this discipline, your reach increases by 5 feet.

And the class feature Psychic Focus says:

You can focus psionic energy on one of your psionic disciplines to draw ongoing benefits from it. As a bonus action, you can choose one of your psionic disciplines to gain its psychic focus benefit, which is detailed in that discipline's description. The benefit lasts until you are incapacitated or until you use another bonus action to choose a different focus benefit.

Question

My understanding of this is that, assuming I am focusing on Giant Growth and have a reach of 10', if I use my bonus action to focus on something else, my reach reduces to 5' and all creatures that are further than 5' away from me and less than 10' provoke opportunity attacks. Is there any reason that this would not be the case?

Best Answer

As you also quote:

You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach.

None of the creatures have moved if your reach changes, therefore they do not provoke Opportunity Attacks.

This reading is also supported by the rest of the OA rules that state that forced movement does not provoke. The target has to use his movevement.

Related Solutions

[RPG] What does Psionic Mastery actually do

As Unearthed Arcana rules, this writing is a bit unpolished. Here's how I understand it:

You spend your action and gain the psi points; that's all you get from that action (the rule says you gain points that you "can" spend, not that you gain points and spend them). Those psi points are tracked separately from your normal pool.

Whenever you use a discipline later to create an effect, you choose whether to spend your normal psi points or your special psi points on that effect. You can't mix and match for a single use of an effect, but I see no rule that prohibits spending special psi points on one effect and then spending normal psi points on an effect from the same discipline.

If one were to interpret the rules to say that using special points locked a discipline from being available via normal points, there would need to be some rule that explained when that lock expired. Since there isn't such a rule, the rule against mixing point types must only apply to a single use of an effect.

[RPG] Does the Goblin Boss’s Redirect Attack provoke an opportunity attack

Yes, if the second Goblin is not within the Reach of the thing making the opportunity attack

It seems a bit weird, however the criteria for triggering an opportunity attack are:

You are moving out of the reach of a hostile creature
This movement is from one of your Actions, Bonus Actions, Movement or Reaction
You have not taken the Disengage action
You are not Teleporting

For this question we can discount Point 4, as the Goblin Boss can't teleport.

We'll also ignore Disengaging for now.

For Point 2, the movement is by the Goblin Boss' Reaction, which fulfills that criteria

For Point 1, if the swapping with the second Goblin does not cause the Goblin Boss to leave the Reach of any hostile creature, it will not trigger an Opportunity attack. In the diagrams below, the first set of movement will not trigger an opportunity attack, while the second set will.

EG    ->    EB
B           G


EBG   ->    EGB

E - Enemy; 
G - Goblin; 
B - Goblin Boss

Note that wherever the second Goblin is moved from, it does not trigger an Opportunity attack from anything as its movement is forced by the Goblin Boss.

As for using Disengage (via Nimble Escape), it only stops OAs for the rest of your Turn, not the entire Round.

So, if someone had Readied an action to hit the Goblin Boss when the Boss did a specific thing, then the Goblin Boss did that thing on the Boss' turn, and in Reaction the Boss used Redirect Attack, that would not trigger an OA, wherever it moved, as it is still the Boss' Turn so Disengage is still in effect. But normally, Disengage would not help for this.

Related Topic