# How far can a Barlgura jump?

The Player's Handbook states that:

1. a running long jump equals your Strength score in feet and,
2. each foot of movement of such a jump is just that, 1 foot of your move, and

I ran an encounter using Barlgura demons (MM p. 56). Their speed is 30 feet. They have an ability called "Running Leap" that states that their running long jump is 40 feet. Also I assume that the "running start" mentioned is at least 10 feet of movement, getting a minimum of 50 feet, 20 more than their speed allows.

An explanation of how this works would be appreciated, since I have a 20 Strength paladin now getting crazy ideas in that same campaign.

• Welcome to the site! Take the tour! It appears jumping is a frequent point of contention in 5e, so you might want to run a quick search like this one to see if your question's already been at least partially answered. Also, I must ask about your game's totally swole paladin: is he a bar-lgura demon? If not, what makes him think he has the running leap ability? ;-) Anyway, thank you for participating and have fun. – Hey I Can Chan May 8 '17 at 3:32
• Thanks! lots of info in here im loving it! i did search but found the rules i alreay have in the book, I assumed that a specific rule like running leap feature would over rule a general. So i took advantage of their lack of darkvision (my plaeyers love human variant feat option) and blitz them with a surprise ambush of invisible barlgura's leaping from afar! the paladin still took one out in one round though! but he went down once! he has great weapon fighting style and feat,and alos the heavy armor master feat which took his str to 20 – Piero May 8 '17 at 3:54

The Barlgura has the same option as anyone else who wants more movement: It can take the Dash action.

When you take the Dash action, you gain extra movement for the current turn. The increase equals your speed, after applying any modifiers. With a speed of 30 feet, for example, you can move up to 60 feet on your turn if you dash.

So the Barlgura, with its speed of 30 feet, gains an extra 30 feet if it takes a Dash action. This brings it up to 60 feet, which is enough to run 10 feet, use its full 40 foot jump, and have a little left over to position itself properly at either end of the jump.

In your Paladin's case, he has a Str score of 20, and no special ability that lets him jump farther than normal, and could therefore only jump 20 feet, regardless of how much movement he might have.

• mmm... the Barlgura has a speed of 30 feet, with dash action he can get to 60 feet, the thing is that the feature it has called "running leap" is not under his actions, so it seems that its just a special movement type of ability. In the session i ruled that its a specific rule for that monster, so it takes precedence over general rules that players do have to respect, unless a spell or something else allows them as well. What do you think? – Piero May 8 '17 at 3:41
• @PieroManavella Yep, that's how it works. Jump distance = Str score for everyone, the barlgura has the special ability that overrides that and makes jump distance = 40. – Miniman May 8 '17 at 3:44
• ok thanks! just wanted to be sure, i like to think i am a just Master to my players and since they are all pretty experienced players naturally they had some arguments when i started bashing and bitting their heads with my demons! – Piero May 8 '17 at 4:00