[RPG] still make an opportunity attack against a creature I have previously disengaged from

actionsdnd-5emovementopportunity-attack

Let's say that I am in melee with an enemy. On my turn, for one reason or another, I take the Disengage action but do not move out of melee range.

In the same round, the enemy starts their turn by moving out of my reach.

The PHB says [emphasis mine]:

If you take the Disengage action, your movement doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks for the rest of the turn.

The phrase "the turn" is ambiguous as to whether it is only my turn.

According to RAW, does the Disengage action negate my ability to take an Opportunity Attack? Should I get an Opportunity Attack in this situation?

Best Answer

Yes, disengage does not prevent you from making opportunity attacks, only provoking them.

If you take the Disengage action, your movement doesn’t provoke Opportunity Attacks for the rest of the turn.

Only your movement doesn't provoke Opportunity Attacks. Everybody else's movement provokes as normal.

Since the enemy's movement still provokes an opportunity attack, they provoke one from you which you can take just like normal.

What is a turn?

Even though it doesn't matter for your case here, a turn is the time when your character can move and/or take actions. When they are done with doing those things their turn is done. A round is the series of every character's turn from the first person to the last. After the last person's turn ends, the round ends and then begins anew.

In this case, you take the Disengage action on your turn and then you end it by an enemy. At this point, Disengage no longer has any effect since your turn is done. Your enemy's turn starts and they move away from you, provoking an Opportunity Attack from you according to the normal rules.

Related Solutions

[RPG] Can you grapple a creature as an opportunity attack

As Miniman's answer points out, you cannot grapple as an opportunity attack because an opportunity attack does not give you an Attack action. However, your situation doesn't actually call for an opportunity attack. Instead, it sounds like you had readied an action. From Basic Rules page 72:

Sometimes you want to get the jump on a foe or wait for a particular circumstance before you act. To do so, you can take the Ready action on your turn so that you can act later in the round using your reaction.

First, you decide what perceivable circumstance will trigger your reaction. Then, you choose the action you will take in response to that trigger, or you choose to move up to your speed in response to it...

When the trigger occurs, you can either take your reaction right after the trigger finishes or ignore the trigger. Remember that you can take only one reaction per round.

When you ready an action, you declare that you intend to do something out of your turn in response to something specific happening. For example, you can ready an action by saying "If an enemy comes through that door, I will fire an arrow at them." If an enemy does come through the door, you can then immediately use the readied action and shoot them.

Therefore, if you state on your turn, "I want to grapple the gnome if he tries to get past me," and you have not taken another action on your turn, you would be able to grapple the gnome as he moves past you. If the gnome doesn't try to get by you, the action is wasted. You can also choose to ignore the trigger and take an attack of opportunity as your reaction instead.

Keep in mind that you must declare a Ready action on your turn. Ready actions are actions, like attacks or casting spells. If your turn had already passed when you declared you'd grapple the gnome, your DM would be right in ruling that you can only make an attack. However, if you declared it on your turn, and hadn't already attacked or acted, your DM should have allowed you to grab the gnome.

[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.