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I've successfully grappled a creature. What are the mechanics for someone else attacking said creature?

  • Do they get advantage on the attack?
  • Is there a higher chance that they hit me?
  • Or do I just simply reduce the creature's speed to zero, and no other changes to attacks against the creature by others?

Like are we rolling on the ground, or do I have him in a head lock?

V2Blast
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Trevor Dangberg
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2 Answers2

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The Grappled condition only reduces speed to 0.

The grappled condition states:

  • A grappled creature's speed becomes 0, and it can't benefit from any bonus to its speed.

The other two bullet points are the end conditions for Grappled. So nothing changes for a creature attacking a grappled creature. I quite often have seen players get Grappled mixed up with the Restrained condition, which does have some additional effects:

  • A restrained creature's speed becomes 0, and it can't benefit from any bonus to its speed.
  • Attack rolls against the creature have advantage, and the creature's attack rolls have disadvantage.
  • The creature has disadvantage on Dexterity saving throws.

Restrained is a significantly more debilitating condition than Grappled. The idea here is that with grappling, two combatants are locked into position, but are otherwise still able to fight. With Restrained however, the victim's use of their limbs is actually impaired in some way.

The Grappler feat improves a character's grappling abilities:

  • You have advantage on attack rolls against a creature you are grappling.
  • You can use your action to try to pin a creature grappled by you. To do so, make another grapple check. If you succeed, you and the creature are both restrained until the grapple ends.

With the Grappler feat, you can actually impose the Restrained condition on a creature you have grappled, which would then allow an ally to attack the grappled creature with advantage.

Thomas Markov
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0

Regular attack

Grappling a creature is simply trying to hold them in place. It requires one free hand (in the case of a player character; monsters may have special attacks that inflict grapple with different conditions) and while grappled the following things happen:

The Grappler must keep a free hand attached to the creature. They can move at half speed dragging the creature.

The Target has speed 0 and can use an Action to try and free, unless they have a specific feat that modifies this. This mean that dashing and things like that don't grant any movement. However, they still attack and are attacked as usual. You can imagine that someone holding you with one hand isn't all that constricting.

I like to narrate this as the grappler pulling at clothes, sweeping legs, jumping on headlocks. Not something static, it's always something they are doing to prevent movement, but not something overly restricting and during the target turn it's essentially when they finally got a small break to do their actions.

Glorfindel
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Lucas MiraB
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  • Hi Lucas! This is a good summary of how Grappling works. While you touch on it briefly on your third paragraph, I think this answer might be improved a little if you were to focus on the original question which is asking specifically about other creatures not involved with the grapple making attacks on the grappled creature. Specifically, I think it would be good to quote the rules you used to state the grappled creature "still attack and are attacked as usual". – Rykara Apr 21 '22 at 15:58