Part of an ongoing series of 5e (2014) Rules notes.  See the end of the post for notes on 5.5e (2024) rules.

This discussion has very little Rules-as-Written (RAW) basis; RAW really don’t address this.

This actually doesn’t come up very often, unless you have flying characters (insert cat hissing here). But sooner or later, at the very least you will encounter flying enemies — or else you’ll have people shooting down (or up) at you from a ledge in a big chamber, or things like that.

And inevitably the question will be asked: “How far away are you?”

D&D 5e has, as a design goal, relative simplicity, at least from older editions. It’s very easy to add a lot of complexity over a relatively niche cases, but this really does feel like something that we should be able to come up with a way to approach it. It strains (my) suspension of disbelief to ignore altitude differences, and it’s just the sort of thing that players will raise at the moment it becomes contentious that you probably don’t want to improv.

So let’s consider a couple of home-brew approaches, since the question of how to deal with it is, again, not addressed in RAW that I’ve been able to find.

How far away are you?

Let’s assume you are:

• shooting at something that is
• A feet away from you horizontally, and
• B feet above you (or below you) vertically.

For range purposes, what is the actual distance C you are firing/throwing?

1. Pythagoras

Huzzah for ancient Greek geometers! The actual distance C is the square root of (A² + B² ).

This is geometrically accurate, but also requires a pocket calculator (or an online right angle calculator).

2. Diagonals

This is actually a pretty clever workaround:  C = (A + (B/2)).

This “works” from extending the grid system and using the DMG 252 optional rules for diagonal movement (treat the first diagonal as 5 feet, the second as 10 feet, etc.).

In my games, we don’t use that style of movement because it’s a PitA and the basic grid rules on PHB 192 are fine enough — but for these purposes it makes for an easy head calculation.

But there’s a problem here we’re not talking about (yet)

This is all cool if you are just shooting lasers (or firing spells) — weapons that ignore gravity.

But a lot of these use cases are for when you twang with your bow, or throw something (often pointy).

Gravity is your enemy if you are twanging/throwing upward. It’s your friend, to a degree, when twanging/throwing downward.

Amusing memes aside, the high ground does carry an advantage.  But beyond that, aiming at things above you (or below you) isn’t something that most people train on.

So that brings us another suggestion:

3. Simple Math

If you are twanging/throwing at something higher than you, the effective distance C is (A + B).

If you are twanging/throwing at something lower than you, the effective distance C is the greater of A or B.

This takes into account that gravity is a bitch (harder uphill ranges), while keeping things easy and rewarding the high ground.

4. Just fudge something

We’ve focused on figuring out range. A lot of tables just ignore that aspect, count the horizontal squares/hexes/distance (to see how it fits into the weapon range factors), and then apply a modifier to the attack based on high ground or low ground. In 3.5e, height advantage provided a +1. Some tables, in 5e, just apply Advantage for being higher, or Disadvantage for being lower (a rather extreme  plus/minus, but 5e is about simplicity).

That’s a bit of a fudge that gives some feel and is easy to do, but it strikes me as a little too simple.

Let’s Test It

Target	1. Pythagoras	2. Diagonals	3. Simple Math
100 ft away, 30 ft up	104	115	130
30 ft away, 100 ft up	104	115	130
100 ft away, 80 ft up	128	140	180
100 ft away, 100 ft down	141	150	100

Which is “best”? Whichever one is easiest and feels right. My house rule inclination is to go with Option 3 for everything, or, if you are feeling a bit more adventuresome, use Option 3 for thrown/twanged attacks, Option 2 for magic attacks.

Note that this affects the Bad Guys as much as it does you.

So what do you do, Dave?

I’ve mostly adopted the Simple Math approach, with one add-on.

This hasn’t hit my campaign much, but I recently ran a combat where the players were going up against a flying dragon, and being able to quickly determine how far away they were, how far things would shoot, etc., was helpful.

Test Case: The target (destination) is 100 feet away and 30 feet higher/lower than you.

Case	Angle	Formula	Result from the test case
Ranged weapon or Flight	upward	sum of horizontal and vertical	100+30 = 130
Ranged weapon or Flight	downward	larger of horizontal or vertical	MAX(100,30) = 100
Ranged spell (no gravity)	either	sum of larger part + half smaller part	100 + 30/2 = 115

Note that in this example, the actual hypotenuse of a=100 and b=30 is c=104. So, esp. since we want to factor in gravity, that’s not bad.  The Ranged spell case uses the diagonals math from above, since gravity doesn’t affect it.

One added case or application I came up during that session.  It’s one thing to say, “Hey, that dragon is 40 feet away vertically and 50 feet in the air, so how far is that to shoot my bow?” (90 feet). It’s a bit different to day, “Hey, that dragon is 20 feet in the air and wants to zap that guy with his 60 foot ray attack — how close does he have to get?”

This works much the same, except you end up subtracting. Using the ranged spell formula, the 60 foot ray would extend (60 – 20/2) = 50 feet along the ground.

This gets a bit weirder when you get to cone attacks (sigh), since if your dragon has a 30 foot cone attack, what does that look like on the ground?  If it’s 20 feet up, then its 30 foot cone goes (30 – 20/2) = 20 feet along the ground — but since it’s still a cone, it’s still 30 feet wide at the end (which will give VTTs fits to portray) and, theoretically, the person in the first 10 feet of that cone is probably under it and not affected as it passes over their head.

Sorry, I’m outta shortcuts for that. The DM handwaves a call as to who’s in that cone, and we move on.

How about 5.5e?

The 5.5e (2024) rules really don’t change any of this. You can find plenty of discussion about house rules for this through your favorite search engine.