Balance (Dex)

Armor Check Penalty

You can keep your balance while walking on a tightrope, a narrow beam, a slippery ledge, or an uneven floor.
Check: You can walk on a precarious surface. A successful check lets you move at half your speed along the surface as a move action. A failure indicates that you spend your move action keeping your balance and does not move. A failure by 5 or more indicates that you fall. The difficulty varies with the conditions of the surface.

Being Attacked While Balancing: While balancing, you are flat-footed (you lose your Dexterity bonus to Defense, if you have one), unless the character has 5 or more ranks in Balance. If the character takes damage, he or she must make a Balance check again to remain standing.
Accelerated Movement: The character can try to cross a precarious surface more quickly than normal. The character can move his or her full speed, but the character takes a -5 penalty on his or her Balance check. (Moving twice the character’s speed in a round requires two checks, one for each move action.)
The character can attempt to charge across a precarious surface. Charging requires one Balance check at a -5 penalty for each multiple of the character’s speed (or fraction thereof) that the character charges.
Special: A character can take 10 when making a Balance check, but can’t take 20.
A character with the Focused feat gets a +2 bonus on all Balance checks.
Time: Balancing while moving one-half the character’s speed is a move action.
Accelerated movement, allowing the character to balance while moving his or her full speed, is also a move action.