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Our party is about to have a water battle next session and we plan to cast Fly and Freedom of Movement on a few of our party members to deal with a Blue Dragon attacking the ship.

My question is whether someone affected by both spells is able to use their Fly speed Underwater since the effects of Freedom of Movement states that being underwater imposes no penalties to movement and attacks while benefiting from the spell.

I can't find anything that says I can or can't so I'm wondering which way to lean on this. Any advice is appreciated.

Zevram
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1 Answers1

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You cannot fly underwater

A character's speed is defined in the Speed section of the movement rules:

Every character and monster has a speed, which is the distance in feet that the character or monster can walk in 1 round.

A creature can have various special speeds such as "swim speed", "climb speed", "burrow speed", etc.

Swim and climb speed can be used for:

Each foot of movement costs 1 extra foot (2 extra feet in difficult terrain) when you’re climbing, swimming, or crawling. You ignore this extra cost if you have a climbing speed and use it to climb or a swimming speed and use it to swim.

Burrow and fly speed are defined in the monsters section:

A monster that has a burrowing speed can use that speed to move through sand, earth, mud, or ice.

...

A monster that has a flying speed can use all or part of its movement to fly.

You cannot use your swimming speed to climb, you cannot use your burrow speed to fly, you cannot use your flying speed to swim.

Community
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user-781943
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    Interesting (fun fact) that this means you can kill a creature with only a fly speed by casting wall of water and running away – Exempt-Medic Dec 10 '19 at 10:41