D&D: Gotta Go Fast – Five Ways To Boost Your Movement Speed To Ridiculous Heights
Just how fast can your D&D character go? How far you can get in a round, sticking to the rules as written? Here are five ways to make your DM go “wait…”
Mobility is one of the underrated stats in D&D. If you’ve ever played a monk, you know how satisfying it can be to be able to always reach the squishy casters, no matter how safe they think they are. But monks and Rogues with boots of speed are only scratching the surface. If you’ve got the need–the need for speed, read on to see just how fast you can go.
Be a Tabaxi
First things first, you’ve gotta get a little furry. This is because we all know that fur is sleeker and more aerodynamic than a smooth surface like metal or skin. Just look at Sonic the Hedgehog.
Or Sanic the Hotdog.
They can outrun robots. And in D&D, if you’re one of these catfolk, you gain the ability to double your speed until the end of your turn. This is where most of our shenanigans start. So far, we’re at 60 feet for one round. And we can do that every other round, basically.
Multiclass
In life, there’s a lot of value in being a well-rounded individual, at least that’s what all my liberal arts professors said. And the same is true in D&D. If you want to reach excessive heights, you’ve got to multiclass to stack up as many movement speed increases we can get. You might think Monk is the fastest class, with their eventual +30 feet to movement and ability to dash as a bonus action. But we can get a lot more out of multiclassing. We really only need 10 or so levels of monk. That gets us +20 feet of movement speed, and access to a feat. Obviously we’ll pick Mobile (for another +10 feet of movement speed).
Adding in five levels of Barbarian gets us an extra +10 feet of movement speed, and if we’re an Elk Totem Barbarian (out of the Storm Coast Adventurer’s Guide), we can get +15 feet of movement speed when raging.
And adding in two levels of Fighter gets us Action Surge, which is usually used for multiple attacks or spells–but we’re going to use it for an extra dash.
But so far that’s a lot of physicality–if we really want to be well-rounded, we need some magical classes. How about Bladesinger wizard (also out of the SCAG)? That gets us an extra 10 feet of movement speed while using Bladesong. And because we’re a wizard, we also get access to Longstrider, for an extra ten feet of movement.
As of right now, our base speed is 70 feet per round. And that’s before we do anything. If we’re raging, using Bladesong, and under the effects of Longstrider, this goes to 105 feet per round. We use our movement to go that far, then we can dash as a bonus action because we’re a monk, we can use our action to dash, and with Action Surge we can use another action to dash. Meaning we can move 420 feet in a round. Nice.
But we’re a tabaxi, so all of that doubles, meaning you can move 880 feet on your turn. We’re just getting started.
Get your friends to help
They say if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with friends. But that’s provably false because you can go fast AND far with friends as we’re about to see. First things first, we’ll want an Artificer friend, and preferably one who is an Alchemist. They’re able to brew an Elixir of Swiftness, which increases our movement speed by 10 feet for an hour, and they’re able to cast Haste on us, which doubles our speed and grants us an additional Hasted action (which we’ll use to Dash).
But we’ll want more friends than that. A Transmuter Wizard with a transmuter’s stone can grant a boon to someone who holds it, and as you might have guessed, one of those boons is an extra 10 feet of movement speed.
Now things start to get tricky because we’re doubling our speed. So now, with all of our stuff in play, we can move 125 feet, doubled twice, for a total of 500 feet of base movement speed. And now we’re getting four dashes, thanks to Haste, which gets us up to 2,500 feet per round.
Have the right tools for the job
If real life has taught us anything, technology changes everything–and in D&D, technology is also magic items. In this case, a pair of Boots of Speed, which, as a bonus action, let us double our walking speed for ten minutes.
If you look at Epic Boons as a kind of tool, then one more level of Monk puts us at level 20 and qualifies us for an Epic Boon out of the DMG, which gives us an extra thirty feet of movement speed.
And since we’re that high level, we might as well grab a pair of Artifacts–because one of the properties of those powerful magic items is a +10 bonus to walking speed–and the Hand and Eye of Vecna both have those, so you don’t even have to roll the dice to get the properties you want. Sure you’re neutral evil now, and probably a pawn in Vecna’s schemes, but we prefer to think of it as making Vecna a pawn in your scheme.
Now we’re attuned to as many magic items as the rules allow. And so far our base walking speed is 185 per round. We double our speed for feline agility. Then again for boots of speed. Then again for haste which brings our base movement speed to 1480 feet. Now we’re dashing four times, so this means we move 7400 feet per round. We’ve shot past a mile. In fact, the speed of sound in D&D terms is 6752 (rounded up). So we’ve not only broken all land speed records, we’ve broken the sound barrier.
Be Prepared.
If you really want to squeeze every last drop of speed out of the game, you’ve got to be prepared. Prepared in this case, means having access to 9th level spell scrolls, so we can get the Shapechange spell, which we can cast, technically, being a Wizard. Sure we’ll have to make a DC 19 Intelligence check or waste the scroll, but we’ll get there eventually. That lets us turn into a Quickling out of Volo’s Guide to Monsters, which has a base movement speed of 120 feet–sure we lose the Elk Totem Barbarian’s movement speed, but thanks to Shapechange, we keep fast movement and all our other abilities.
So where does that end up? A base walking speed of 250 feet. Doubled from being a Tabaxi, then again from boots of speed, then again from Haste. Which means our base walking speed is 2000 feet. Now we dash four times and move 10,000 feet in a round.
12,000 if we’re really prepared and before this, we readied an action to dash as soon as someone says “go” at the start of our turn.
That’s pretty fast…
