Prone: standing up and attacker distance
Prone affects your movement and attacks, while incoming attacks depend on the attacker’s distance. Record Speed before pricing the movement needed to stand.
Use it at the table
- Move by crawling, or spend half your Speed, rounded down, to right yourself. You cannot right yourself if Speed is zero.
- Apply Disadvantage to your attack rolls.
- An incoming attack has Advantage if its attacker is within five feet; otherwise it has Disadvantage.
Make the call
A Prone character has Speed zero because they are also Grappled. Can they spend half of zero feet and stand for free?
The ruling
No; Prone explicitly prevents righting yourself when Speed is zero.
The zero-Speed restriction directly prevents that shortcut. End or otherwise resolve the effect holding Speed at zero before using the normal standing option. With Speed 30 and no such restriction, standing would cost 15 feet of movement. The amount of movement left on the turn is not the same thing as the Speed value used to calculate this cost.
Watch for this mistake
Do not classify the incoming-attack adjustment solely as melee versus ranged. The condition uses attacker distance. Other attack rules still apply and may add their own Advantage or Disadvantage.
Ask the table
What is current Speed, and how far away is this particular attacker?
The source rule
SRD 5.2.1, page 186. Read the official PDF.
While you have the Prone condition, you experience the following effects. Restricted Movement. Your only movement options are to crawl or to spend an amount of movement equal to half your Speed (round down) to right yourself and thereby end the condition. If your Speed is 0, you can’t right yourself. Attacks Affected. You have Disadvantage on attack rolls. An attack roll against you has Advantage if the attacker is within 5 feet of you. Otherwise, that attack roll has Disadvantage.
Source and reuse
This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 (“SRD 5.2.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
The explanation, example and table prompt are Table Ready adaptations; source text has been reflowed and tables reformatted. This guide and its printable card are available under the same CC BY 4.0 license. Independent reference; no official affiliation. These rules are optional for our system-neutral adventures.