You might scoff at the realistic comment, but it's actually far more grounded in a realistic presentation than many people give it credit for... these are made by someone who goes by the moniker 'David the Arrow Bard', and they're actually pretty neat little clips. I smiled, I hope others do to. In particular, they pay attention to distance and timing – such as 5 foot squares and what you can do in six seconds. There isn't one on shoving specifically, unfortunately, but it does show off several other aspects of the game which are often criticised as being unrealistic, but which actually are a lot more so than people think.


You may argue that taking Battlemaster's ability to perform specialised combat actions and still do damage as well, and giving portions of that to everyone to use for free, without giving Battlemasters anything in return is not taking away from their class identity.... but it is. Maybe not a lot, but it's still taking away, no matter how dismissively you choose to talk about it... and it shouldn't be done.
You are right that, generally speaking, the new weapon arts are a bigger concern right now... In one current play through, my Fighter is an eldritch knight, and Astarion is a thief and between the various weapons we all have, and the extra shoving, Lae'zel's old battlemaster self is more or less obsoleted, and easily so – I don't take her, and she would add little to nothing to what we're already doing, at this point. That's the problem, and shove's current implementation is definitely a part of it.

If you're really set on character carry weight affecting shove, then I'd suggest that you start a thread here in the suggestion forums for yourself, formalise it, hammer out the details of how you feel it should be implemented, and then see how much traction for the idea you can get from others.

As it is, the game rules DO account for carry weight. That's what the encumbrance system IS – how much you can carry without being impeded and having your capabilities hampered. It has a variant rule that is slightly more graded, but it's generally not liked by most people and rarely used by anyone in actual PnP games. The 5e system as it is also accounts for size category, as explained. It also accounts for mistakes and fumbles, as explained. It sounds like you'd like it to do it in a more complicated, granular way; what I'm attempting to explain is that doing so would run against the system's design philosophy, to do it at the level you seem to want to suggest.

In the example, Mike is a fictional, non-existent character meant to represent the idea that a fairly strong and capable person cannot realistically shove even a 40lbs person more (or much more) than 5 feet away from themselves. This is simply, real world, factually true. Hefting and throwing that weight is a different matter – but shoving it without having a good hand on it and without carrying it first; that's indelicate. An individual might travel further than five feet if they stumble, fall and roll over a lot, but that's not what we're talking about here – we're talking about someone who is shoved by a force, staggers, and remains upright; they might move five feet, they might move a little more than that, they'll probably move much less than that, but they definitely will not move ten feet, and so a single five foot square is more than adequate for realism.

In 5e, you can comfortably carry 15 times your strength score without being impeded. You physically cannot carry more than that, and function. If you use variant encumbrance, you can carry 5 times your strength score, after which you begin to suffer penalties for being lightly, and then heavily encumbered. The rules for what you can manage to lift, as a dedicated act are more lenient – as an individual act, you can lift off the ground twice your carry capacity.

Larger creatures get to multiply these values, doubling up for each size category above medium they are. Smaller creatures halve the values. Realistically, “Small” creatures should be halving those values too, not just Tiny creatures... but it was decided that, since player characters could be small, it wasn't a fair restriction to place on players, for balance and fun, and so the halving was pushed back to 'tiny' creatures only.

One confession I'll make here: In one of my home games I DO play with variant encumbrance and my own small character halves her capacities as though the rule applied to smalls – I like the extra realism. With her eight strength she can carry 9kg (20lb) before becoming partially encumbered. I enjoy the press of playing that way, with her... but it's never a rule I would try to put onto other players, because I know most do not like that level of book-keeping or restriction.

The issue with shoving and incapacitated targets may have been something that was a problem in a previous patch. I don't know, but on reflection I know you're right, as of patch 6 right now, because I've seen how much the AI likes to shove sleeping targets to wake them up. I'm not sure what I was remembering on that score, so I'm sorry there.

The last point (the halfling line was a joke, since we were talking about shoving big creatures and small creatures and you likened it to kicking walls and balls... if the joke didn't translate, that's on me) is this:

I'm saying that the double check system as you first proposed it will cause characters to fail very often because it will: You are setting the rolling character at Disadvantage every time, just to Make the check in the first place. They have to roll twice, and if Either check fails, then they fail in totality. You are making them roll at disadvantage for the check, by definition. You are also asking them to roll two different ability scores, and a specific two such that virtually no character will have invested in both of them. On an average roll, with normal dice, they are going to roll below average on At Least One Die 75% of the time. This makes the likelihood of them failing at least one of the checks, and thus failing the entire action in totality, extremely high.

So, yes, they will fail very often; this is not conjecture - this is just math. They will fail so often in attempting this action that it will be considered a non-starter in nearly every case. If I'm not explaining this well enough, and you're not understanding it, then I apologise; I'm trying to be as clear and transparent about it as I can.