Shove in D&D 5e: The Attack Most Tables Get Wrong

Shove 5e is one of the shortest combat options in the Player's Handbook, and it still manages to get misplayed two different ways at the same table in the same session. Half the players don't know it exists, so it never comes up. The other half know it exists and run it like it eats their entire turn, so they save it for "emergencies" that never quite justify burning a whole round on a no-damage attack.

Neither group is wrong to be cautious. They're just wrong about what shove 5e actually costs. It's not a special action. It's not a spell. It's one melee attack, the same currency you're already spending to swing a sword, and once that clicks, it stops being a last resort and starts being a tool you reach for constantly.

What Shove 5e Actually Lets You Do

Here's the whole rule, stripped down. When you take the Attack action on your turn, you can use one of your attacks to make a special melee attack: a shove. Instead of an attack roll, you make a Strength (Athletics) check contested by the target's Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, and the target picks which one to use. If you win the contest, you choose one result: push the target 5 feet directly away from you, or knock it prone.

That's the entire mechanic. No damage roll. No weapon required. No spell slot spent. Shove 5e is a contest, a choice of two outcomes, and it's over.

Two limits matter and get skipped almost as often as the rule itself:

• Size. You can only shove a creature that's no more than one size larger than you. A Medium adventurer can shove a Large ogre. Nobody's shoving a Huge giant off a cliff with this.
• Reach. You have to be able to reach the target, same as any melee attack. Shove 5e isn't ranged, and it isn't magic; it's you, physically, pushing or tripping something within your weapon's reach.

The Mistake Almost Every Table Makes

The single biggest misplay is treating shove 5e as if it consumes your whole turn. It doesn't. It consumes one melee attack, the same slot a regular weapon swing would use. If your character only gets one attack per turn, then yes, choosing to shove means you don't also get to swing that round, and that trade-off is real. But if you have Extra Attack, you're not choosing between shoving and attacking. You're choosing to spend one of your two (or three, or four) attacks on a shove and using the rest normally.

That single fact changes how the option should be used. A fifth-level fighter with Extra Attack can shove a spellcaster prone with the first attack, then swing at it with advantage on the second, because melee attacks against a prone target get advantage. The shove didn't cost a turn. It set up the rest of the same turn.

The second most common mistake is assuming shoving requires a free hand, the way some tables house-rule grappling. It doesn't. There's no rule anywhere in 5e requiring an empty hand to shove, and Wizards of the Coast has confirmed this directly in official rulings. A barbarian gripping a greataxe with both hands can still shove instead of one of their attacks. If your table has been holding characters back from shoving because "they don't have a free hand," that's a house rule nobody voted on, quietly costing the party a tactical option every single fight.

Push or Prone: Why the Choice Is Bigger Than It Looks

Most players default to knocking a creature prone because it grants advantage on melee attacks against it, and that's usually the right call in a straight melee fight. But the push option gets undervalued constantly, and it's often the stronger play.

Pushing 5 feet away is forced movement, which means it doesn't provoke an opportunity attack from you or anyone else, and it's directional: straight away from you, every time. That makes shove 5e one of the cleanest tools in the game for battlefield control. Push a melee brute off a narrow bridge. Push an enemy caster out of spell range of your backline. Push something into the fire your wizard just conjured, or off a ledge, where 5 feet of forced movement can end a fight that ten rounds of regular damage wouldn't.

Knocking prone helps the whole party's next round of melee attacks. Pushing can end the encounter outright if there's terrain to exploit. Tables that only ever pick "prone" because it's the option they remember are leaving the more interesting half of shove 5e on the table.

The Feats That Change Shove 5e

A few character options make shove 5e worth building around instead of reaching for occasionally.

Tavern Brawler lets you add your Strength modifier to unarmed strike damage and gives you proficiency with unarmed strikes, but its real value for this discussion is the line letting you shove a creature as a bonus action immediately after hitting it with an unarmed strike or improvised weapon. That's a shove that doesn't cost one of your attacks at all, stacked on top of whatever else you did that turn.

Grappler doesn't touch shoving directly, but tables often conflate it with shove 5e because both are Strength-contest melee options. Grappler is specifically about grappling (restraining a creature so it can't move away), which is a separate action from shoving with its own rule. Don't let the two blur together; a character built around one doesn't automatically get better at the other.

None of these need to be memorized to use shove 5e correctly. They matter because a Tavern Brawler character at the table can shove far more often than the base rule suggests, and forgetting that turns a genuinely strong build into a mediocre one.

Why Shove 5e Gets Skipped at the Table

If the rule is this short, why does it disappear from so many sessions? A few reasons keep showing up:

• Damage is the default mental model. Most of combat is "roll to hit, roll damage," and shove 5e breaks that pattern entirely. Players scanning their character sheet for options default to the attacks that deal damage, because that's the shape combat usually takes.
• It reads as a DM-only trick. A lot of tables only ever see monsters shove player characters off ledges or into hazards, and never flip that expectation around onto the players' own turns.
• Nobody explains the size and reach limits clearly, so newer players assume it's more restricted than it is, or worse, that it's simply not worth the mental overhead of checking eligibility mid-round.

None of that is a knowledge failure so much as a habit failure. Shove 5e sits outside the normal rhythm of a combat round, and options outside the normal rhythm are the first things chaotic tables forget they have.

Where an AI Game Master Helps With Shove 5e

This is exactly the kind of option StoryRoll surfaces instead of leaving buried. When a fight starts, the system already knows every creature's size, position, and remaining reach, so a shove that would knock an enemy off a cliff edge or push it out of a spellcaster's face isn't something a player has to remember to ask about. It's an option that's actually on the table, described in the moment terrain and positioning make it relevant, instead of a rule quietly gathering dust because nobody at the table thought to check it.

That doesn't turn combat automatic. A player still decides whether pushing or knocking prone serves the fight better, same as always. What changes is that the choice gets offered when the fiction supports it, rather than depending on someone at the table happening to remember a one-paragraph rule buried in the Player's Handbook three months after character creation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Shove 5e use your whole action?

No. Shove 5e replaces one melee attack within the Attack action, not the entire action. A character with only one attack spends their whole Attack action shoving instead of swinging, but a character with Extra Attack can shove with one attack and still swing a weapon with the other.

Do you need a free hand to Shove 5e?

No. Shoving doesn't require a weapon or an empty hand. It's a Strength (Athletics) check contested by the target's Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics), and you can attempt it while holding a weapon in both hands.

Can you Shove 5e a creature bigger than you?

Only if it's no more than one size category larger than you. A Medium fighter can shove a Large creature, but not a Huge one, regardless of how the contest roll turns out.

What are your options when a Shove 5e succeeds?

You choose one of two results: push the target 5 feet directly away from you, or knock it prone. You don't get both, and you have to decide before you know how the rest of the round plays out.

Can you Shove 5e more than once in a turn?

Yes, if you have a feature like Extra Attack that gives you more than one attack on your turn. Each shove still costs one of those attacks and still requires its own Strength (Athletics) contest.

Does Shove 5e provoke an opportunity attack when you push someone away?

No. The movement from a successful shove is forced movement, not movement the target chooses to take, so it doesn't provoke an opportunity attack from anyone else nearby.

If you want to see how the rest of 5e's melee options hold up under the same scrutiny, grappling, opportunity attacks, flanking, and cover rules all share the same pattern: short rules on paper, constant slippage at a live table.