 This video is sponsored by Dice Dungeons. Stick around after the show for a special offer. Has the following tragedy ever happened to you? You've attempted to look up how to grapple somebody just like... once. Ever. Well that's unlucky for you because in Pathfinder... there's an awful lot of rules for that. Figuring out how the rules for grapple work in Pathfinder is legendarily difficult. We've even made jokes about it in our own sketches. I'll find the grappling rules. No, no, no, never mind. Maybe you've tried looking up resources or how to do it elsewhere on the internet and found these confusing web-like flowcharts. Like these from D20PFSRD.com, or as I affectionately call it, the PIFSRD. And those are good and thorough, but they take some getting through. Today I'm hoping to A. Give an easy to follow rundown of how it all works. And B. Present an alternative and much simpler reference guide in the form of my handy dandy grappling grid. If that's all you're here for, you can skip to right here. Or you can just check the description below for a link to the finished image. So let's get into it. How does grappling work? As a super simple initial overview, the process looks like this. An attacking creature tries to grab a defending one. If they succeed, the defender gets to try to escape. If the defender cannot, the attacker has to maintain the hold. And then they can either move, damage, or pin the defender. The defender gets another shot at escaping, but if they fail a second time, they either get walloped again or, most likely, tied up and done in like last night's takeout. At least that's how I eat takeout. Anyway, let's break down each of those parts into actual rules. A grapple is, like many other attack-like things in Pathfinder, a combat maneuver. And like many other thing-like things in Pathfinder, combat maneuvers really need a couple of feats to start working how you want them to. Specifically, things like trip, disarm, sunder, and yes, grapple, will provoke attacks of opportunity unless you have the improved blank feet. Now, unlike many other combat maneuvers, improved grapple does not require combat expertise. So that's nice. But it does require improved arm strike, when some lose some. Anyway, aside from the fee tax, how do these things work? The basics are simple enough. Every character has a combat maneuver bonus, CMB, and combat maneuver defense, CMD. Your CMB is equal to your base attack bonus, plus your strength mod, or if you have the agile maneuver's feet, your dex, and you add it to a D20 roll, just like an attack mod. Instead of comparing it to an opponent's AC, though, you target their CMD, which is equal to 10, plus both a creature's strength and dex. As a fun lesser-known fact, if you happen to be getting any circumstance, deflection, dodge, insight, luck, morale, profane, or sacred bonuses to your AC, you add those to your CMD too. You see how fun that was? Lastly, both of these numbers get a plus one if you're large and a minus one if you're small. Sorry, halflings, limbs are rules. All right, but chances are you knew most of that. What about the grappling? Okay, okay, here we go. There are two creatures involved in a grapple. An attacker, who is in control of the grapple, and a defender, who is not. To start off, the attacker rolls their CMB versus the defender's CMD. First hitch, if the attacker doesn't have improved grapple, this provokes an attack of opportunity. If that attack hits, the attacker takes a penalty to their grapple check equal to the damage they take here. If the grapple check fails, then hey, congratulations! You're done here! But presumably, of course, it doesn't, right? If the grapple check succeeds, both creatures, the attacker and the defender, gain the grappled condition. That means that they both take a minus four to their dexterity, which means a minus two to their dex bonus. Note that this also decreases their CMD. They both take a minus two to their attacks that don't deal with escaping or maintaining the grapple. And neither can move, take attacks of opportunity, or do anything that takes two hands. So you, you clever person, may wonder, does that mean I can do things that don't take two hands? Yep, if it doesn't involve moving or two hands, it's fair game. As long as you happen to have components at hand, you can even cast a spell, though you'll need to make a concentration check versus 10 plus the attacker's CMD plus the spell level. But yeah, you got one hand and a light weapon? Go ahead and make a full attack while you've got the chance if you like. But you probably will not like, because whether you're the attacker or the defender, you've got some new opportunities here. If you've just been grappled, you can take a standard action to make either a combat maneuver or escape artist check versus the attacker's CMD. On a success, you can escape, in which case no one has the grappled condition any longer. Or you can decide to take control of the grapple instead and become the attacker. Meanwhile, if you're the attacker, at the start of any turn in which you control a grapple, you must maintain that grapple by making a new combat maneuver check as a standard action. The good news is that you get a plus five bonus to that check, so you should have a good chance at keeping hold. Then, once you've maintained your grapple, you get to add a free additional effect as part of that same standard action, for which you get three, count them, one, two, three options. One, inflict damage. Yep, just roll damage as if you would hit with a single one-handed melee attack. Two, move yourself and the defender up to half your speed. Note that if you want to do this so you can put your opponent somewhere dangerous, like off a cliff, they get a new check to try and escape at plus four. Or three, and here's the real kicker, advance the defender from the grapple condition to the pinned condition. A pinned creature has all the same restrictions as a grappled one, except that instead of a minus four to dex, they're simply denied their dexterity bonus altogether. Plus, they take an extra minus four to their AC. If you're the one who's just been pinned, you still need to make the same combat maneuver or escape artist check as before. But you don't need to escape being pinned and then escape grappled after that. One success gets you free of both. If you're the attacker, that is the one doing the pinning, you still only have the grappled condition, but you do also lose your dex to your AC. At the top of your turn, you once again need to make a combat maneuver check at plus five to maintain. And if you succeed, you once again get to add one of those same additional grapple effects to that standard action. However, if you happen to have some rope on hand, your options for that effect get spicier. If you don't have any rope on hand, pause this video right now, schedule a session, and have your character go buy some rope. Go, go do it. I'll wait, I will. Don't ever not have rope. Okay, so now that you've got some rope, if you've maintained a grapple against a pinned defender, instead of advancing them to pinned, which they already are, you can tie them up and have them helpless. And what does helpless mean? Essentially, the only thing they'll be able to do is spend a full minute trying to escape the ropes. That's going to be a CMB or escape artist check versus a DC of 20 plus your CMB. Note that that means that if your CMB is higher than theirs, they just cannot escape. Even if they roll a natural 20. Additionally, their deck score is treated as zero, which brings their deck's bonus down to minus five, and melee attacks get a plus four against them. Most temptingly, they are now susceptible to a Kudugra. And I mean, there are actual rules for how to proceed with the Kudugra, but the gist of it is, you just get to kill them. The end. Want one more sneaky extra tip? I mean, probably. Yeah, you do, because otherwise, why would you be here watching me talk about all this for so long? Is it the hair? It's probably the hair. Anyways, you can actually skip over pinned entirely and go straight from grapple to helpless if you make a second combat maneuver check after the one you used to maintain your grapple at a minus 10. Likely? No, absolutely not. But hey, dream big, right? You catch all that? Just to make sure, and to reinforce a little, let's run through a sample grappling sequence starring our two totally normal combatants, Grappelina and Git Godorax. To start, Grappelina does what she does best and attempts to initiate a grapple as a standard action. Since she has the improved grapple feat, this does not provoke an attack of opportunity from Git Godorax. Grappelina's d20 roll plus her combat maneuver bonus is higher than Git Godorax's combat maneuver defense, so she succeeds, giving both herself and Git Godorax the grapple condition. Next, at the top of Git Godorax's turn, he's going to attempt to make a combat maneuver check of his own to escape. However, the result of this check does not beat Grappelina's CMD, so he's still caught. Next, for her standard action on her turn, Grappelina makes a combat maneuver check to maintain her grapple. Since she succeeds, she gets to attack an additional effect onto that action. Instead of moving him around or dealing damage to him straight, Grappelina chooses to advance to Git Godorax to the pinned condition. Git Godorax himself will, on his turn, once again take a standard action to try and escape. He has just remembered that he's got a pretty good escape artist bonus, so he'll try that this time. And this time, his check is higher than Grappelina's CMD, so he's free. What a trooper. Let's give him a hand, huh? Had he not escaped and had Grappelina maintain her grapple for one more turn, she would have been able to tie him up with all of the rope she obviously has on hand, giving him the helpless condition. And let's be honest, that probably would have been the end of poor poor Git Godorax. Okay, so we've heard how it's all supposed to work, and we've seen how it's all supposed to flow, but does that help when we're 16 turns into a combat that was supposed to be three turns long? No, it does not. So after losing my place in the middle of a flowchart for the fourth time, I decided to try and configure some new fangled kind of reference document. Here, low and behold, the grappling grid. Here's how it works. We've got four columns starting with It's My Turn And, where you go down the rows to find the current situation you're dealing with. Either somebody has just started a grapple, or someone has the grappled, pinned, or helpless condition. Then you just go over to the column for if you are the attacker or defender, and boom, a rundown on what steps you can take. Then, far this right, we've got a column that reminds you what each condition in question does for you. The grid doesn't cover every situation by any means, but hopefully it's organized in a way that makes it usable for a decent number of basic proceedings. If you'd like to keep a copy of it around, there's a link to download from our website in the description. Alright, well, that seems like it's enough for today, doesn't it? Until next time, if you find yourself having trouble with complicated combat maneuver rules, just get a grip. Ta-da! Hey guys, we'd just like to take a moment to give a shout out to our sponsor for this video, DiceDungeons.com. They've got a bunch of cool stuff. I got these little tokens from their website. These are my Paladin tokens I use in Killspark. I throw them at Ricky when he annoys me. They've also got these super, super awesome rosewood dice chests. Magnetic lids. Hold all seven of your dice. They're super awesome. You can also get these dice on that website. And yeah, go check them out. This is a bit at the end of the thing. Hey guys, this is the part of the video where I talk about last week, last time's video thing. It's the Disney Princess fifth edition video. And y'all had a great, a bunch of great suggestions on how to make that one better. People mentioned that Bard gets a wish at the end, which means you're saying you can just literally make reality happen. That's great. A few people you just mentioned, not using the Revised Ranger, which has apparently fallen out of favor with some people, and instead using player handbook variants. I don't know that much about those. I just were looking at the Revised Ranger and thinking it was cool and better. But yeah, that sounds great too. Somebody mentioned dipping into Archfey Warlock because that gives you a great easy way to talk to animals. And I think a familiar companion. That's a great idea. Lots of you noticed a little audio blip that was about two minutes in the video. Matlock has a, who edits these, says, Yeah, that was my bad. I had it sped up to like 500% instead of doing a jump cut, but didn't hear the audio fall out at cause. In my defense, I was on a lot of drugs. Don't, that last part is probably not true. Matlock, don't say that. Thanks for watching. And we'll be back to discuss everything I got wrong about grappling next week.