Balance (Dex; Armor Check Penalty)

You can keep your balance while walking on a tightrope, a narrow beam, a slippery ledge, or an uneven floor.

Check: You can walk on a precarious surface. A successful check lets you move at half your speed along the surface for 1 round. A failure by 4 or less means you can’t move for 1 round. A failure by 5 or more means you fall. The difficulty varies with the surface, as follows:

Being Attacked while Balancing: You are considered flat-footed while balancing, since you can’t move to avoid a blow, and thus you lose your Dexterity bonus to AC (if any). If you have 5 or more ranks in Balance, you aren’t considered flat-footed while balancing. If you take damage while balancing, you must make another Balance check against the same DC to remain standing.

Accelerated Movement: You can try to walk across a precarious surface more quickly than normal. If you accept a –5 penalty, you can move your full speed as a move action. (Moving twice your speed in a round requires two Balance checks, one for each move action used.) You may also accept this penalty in order to charge across a precarious surface; charging requires one Balance check for each multiple of your speed (or fraction thereof ) that you charge.

Action: None. A Balance check doesn’t require an action; it is made as part of another action or as a reaction to a situation.

Special: If you have the Agile feat, you get a +2 bonus on Balance checks.

Synergy: If you have 5 or more ranks in Tumble, you get a +2 bonus on Balance checks.

Source: Player’s Handbook (version 3.5), page 67.

Additional Uses

Shipboard Balance {Sto 83}

Boats and ships offer clumsy characters a variety of ways to fall. Many characters who spend time on or around boats pick up a rank or two in Balance, simply because you never know when your life could depend on it.

Difficult Surfaces: Some of the more common difficult surfaces found in seafaring environments include the following:

Green Water: A ship’s deck that is washed by a violent wave that covers the deck to a depth of 1 foot or more.

Heeling Deck: A ship that is heeling over (the deck is sloped sharply due to the way it’s running with the wind or the ship’s maneuvers) is the same as a sloped floor; see above.

Roll, Heavy: A ship that is violently rolling from side to side, as opposed to simply heeling in one direction and staying there.

Sargasso: Floating mats of seaweed come in two varieties: light and heavy (see page 19). Only those who are truly light of foot can remain standing on light mat sargasso, but heavy mat sargasso is thick enough to support anyone walking with a little care.

Surf: Moving water between 1 foot (light surf) and 4 feet deep (heavy surf); see page 17.

Yardarm: The horizontal spar suspended from a ship’s mast. Deckhands taking in or setting sails generally stand on sturdy lines below the yardarm and lean into the yardarm for support; walking on top of a yardarm is a real stunt, since there isn’t anything to brace against.

Difficulty Modifiers: Wet decks and icy decks are treated just as lightly slippery and severely slippery surfaces, as described above.

Underwater: Characters attempting to balance on things while completely submerged have a much smaller chance of falling off, simply because water resistance gives one an opportunity to correct for a mistake.

Check Modifiers: Characters can reduce their odds of losing their footing by bracing themselves with their hands or body. For example, characters reefing a sail often have to edge out on the yardarm while standing on a rope, a DC 20 Balance check. However, the character can brace herself with both hands while sliding along the rope, gaining a +10 bonus on the Balance check.

Epic Balance Use

*Includes any other surface that couldn’t support the character’s weight, such as a fragile branch.