 Do any of the following sound like you? You believe that the best defense is a good defense. You suffer from debilitatingly intense claustrophobia. You live in a world that has suddenly been overcome by an inescapably encroaching and prolifically contagious plague that requires you to maintain a distance of greater than five feet from any and all living beings to ensure the safety of yourself and others. You have arms that are a few inches longer than average. If any of those remind you of yourself, you're in luck. Because in Pathfinder, there's rules for that. Today, on a very special episode of Terrific, we'll explore how to be a responsible member of society without totally screwing over your party's action economy. That's right, it's time for social distancing through reach weapons. To kick things off, let's just figure out what we're talking about when we say the word reach, because there are two kinds that we'll need to work with. The first refers to a creature's natural reach in combat, which is simply all the different spaces on the combat grid that that creature can make melee attacks into. For example, since your typical small or medium creature has a natural reach of five feet, they can make melee attacks up to five feet away. That is, into the squares immediately adjacent to them. But ah, you say, that's not social distancing. The area within five feet of me is very exactly the place that I do not want to have anybody being in. Is there no way for me to be an effective tool of violence for my teammates without breaking local city ordinances? And there is. It is our second kind of reach. Some weapons have a special quality called reach that doubles the range of a creature's natural reach. So our same creature that used to attack five feet out into adjacent squares can now attack enemies that are 10 feet, two squares away. This does however, commit a cost. Because these are usually long, unwieldy things like spears or glaives, reach weapons cannot be used to attack enemies closer than their new extended range. This results in an oasis of safety for attackers if they can get into the spaces directly adjacent to you. A kind of donut of death. So let's see what we can do to make that a really, really big if. Tactic A. We try and bump our natural reach even higher, so we have as much space as possible to take out on-comers before they can get inside this proverbial bagel of beatings. As some of you might recall from my very first rules video, one way we can get a bigger natural reach is just by becoming a bigger creature. Large characters threaten enemies both one and two squares away to start with, and reach weapons affect that range proportionally, for better and for worse. With something like a glaive, a large character threatens enemies 15 and 20 feet away in exchange for turning their original range of one and two surrounding squares into a vulnerable fruit loop of free loot. Still, that's not only a chance to strike down foes while they're twice as far away, it's twice as wide of a space to do it in. We also have options that will at least temporarily expand our natural reach without increasing the size of the not-so-cheery-o. The most straightforward way is with the spell Longarm, which, you guessed it, gives your character a chance to reflect thoughtfully on Thomas Hobbes' philosophical treatise Leviathan, in the role of the individual in promoting societal safety through compliance with it. No, it makes your dumb arms long. Specifically, you add another 5 feet to your natural reach for a minute per level. The combat feat Lunge does the same thing if only for your attacks on your turn. On the equipment side of things, we have the Longarm Bracers in Pliant Gloves, both of which once again add 5 feet of range for a certain number of rounds per day, this time with a tradeoff penalty to your attacks. A quick note on how all of this math works. It may seem daunting to try and keep track of so many different kinds of increases and how they multiply or add and in which order, but luckily Paizo put out a clarification that gives us a very clear sequence. First, take note of your natural reach as determined by your size, enlarged or not. Second, factor in your reach weapon to double that and set up your lifesaver of life ending this. And then last, add whichever and however many of the static plus 5 increases to the outside of your range as you like. Alright, so now that we've got a huge and well-defined personal bubble, what do we do with it? Obviously, of course, we can just enjoy the honest work of picking creatures in that range and hitting them with pointy things for damage, but let's stream bigger. For one thing, we are in prime position to make use of some interesting area denial feats. Combat Patrol is a feat that lets us trade attacking or moving on our turn for establishing an even more massive attack range during everyone else's turn. The idea here is to set up attacks of opportunity against enemies who otherwise thought they were safe. You can interrupt a caster, skulking off to the side by forcing a spell check, or since you can always choose to attempt a trip, disarm or sundry in place of a melee attack, we can keep incoming melee fighters defenseless and at a distance. We can even move as part of the action, setting us up for next round's traps. A good late addition to this strategy is the feat Pen Down, which gives us a chance to halt the movement of enemies trying to use withdrawal or a 5-foot step to avoid provoking attacks of opportunity. We can even make use of our vulnerable adjacent squares by stacking them with friends instead. Bodyguard lets you expend an attack of opportunity to aid an adjacent allies A-C when they're being hit. And if you're going all in on attack range, why not live the dream and shoot for capping out with whirlwind attacks someday? Imagine, standing surrounded in the middle of a cobalt encampment and in 6 seconds of legendary violence, cauterizing an entire grove of family trees. Your neutral good alignment may take a hit, but I mean, come on, right? Live a little, jeez. Tying all of this together as a single package doesn't take much more work from there. This is obviously a very feat intensive build. Along with all the stuff we've already gone over, there's a number of notable utility and prereq feats to consider. Combat reflexes is a must since we need every attack of opportunity we can get our hands on. Mobility is needed for combat patrol, plus all kinds of things really, and the recipe for a whirlwind attack is notoriously long all on its own. We also almost certainly want to pick up phalanx formation to help our buddies from becoming burdens. Anyway, all that is to say, we are 100% picking fighter as our class. Plus, that lets us take the polar master archetype, which is chock full of little quality of life improvements for using pull arms and spears. Being human gives us flexibility not only with our feats, but also with our stats. We'll want to be pretty heavy on both strength and dex, with the goal of getting to the annoying 13 int we need for combat expertise by level 6, either with a headband or our single stat point boost at level 4. And there you have it folks, the perfect way to let everyone within 35 to 40 feet know that social distancing is not just a helpful suggestion, it is a promise. Until next time, keep your friends far and your enemies even farther. And this is the part of the episode where I talk about the last episode, which was our Ziya and Rakan rules show. Y'all had a bunch of great comments on that, a lot of them were asking for other League of Legends characters, and I'm sure we'll get around to that. A few things that y'all had suggestions for, everybody had good ideas on what race they should be. I ended up picking variant human because feats are good. But it kind of worked, I kind of made the lower fit, and then the same thing Rakan was in else because it just happened to fit that rule real fast, but consensus seemed to be that they should be, um, ericocra, because they are bird people, and I think that checks out, they're bird people. Other things people said, somebody mentioned switcher, I don't know anything about switchers, shifters, shifters. My line producer is telling me that it's shifters, so that's why I don't know anything about switchers, it's because they don't exist. Other things people said, I saw a lot of you talking about how you didn't even necessarily like D&D, but you were here and you liked the content because it related to what you did know, that's awesome. I bet you there's a bunch of people out there that didn't know anything about League of Legends who watched it and maybe enjoyed it. I was one of them because I knew nothing about League of Legends, so this helped me learn some of that. And then Ricky made me play it, I'm terrible. I'm really bad. Last thing, somebody mentioned, they would really like to see more graphs and bars and like informational content in the graphics. I will be doing more of that because I think it's very helpful. Anything fun you see in the editing, that's all Matlock. He does the cool stuff. I do the charts. Anyway, if you were looking to actually watch some D&D, you can watch AlterD, it goes right here on Door Monster. We have two episodes up, we have a third one filmed, we'll be getting that up when we can, and you can check out Ricky's fifth edition podcast, Kilnspark over on our podcast channel. We have a bunch of those episodes up, they're all great, they're a super blast of film and playing and you'll like listening to them, so go check them out. Go, go on, shoot.