D&D 5E No cover rules, just dis/adv, what breaks?

Juriel said:

Yeah, I found it after 'shooting into melee' didn't bring up anything.

'a target has half cover if an obstacle blocks at least half of its body. The obstacle might be...a creature, whether that creature is an enemy or a friend'

Which isn't an overall 'shooting into melee' penalty, it only seems to apply if the cover-to-be is directly between the shooter and the target.

Which requires a grid and minis to keep track of, so you know.

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While minis on a map or terrain would make it easier, I don't think they are required. In TotM, a lot of the time you can assume that the PCs are on one side and the enemies on the other. A shooter in the back could then assume the enemies have a half cover. The player could then state they move to get a clear shot. This might require leaving their on cover. In other cases, the DM or player could state that they are cutting off the target from the shooter. This could be a situation where one or more orcs try to surround or cut off a PC from the rest of the group. The shooter then can fire freely because the target orc is on their side of their ally.

As a side note, using minis and a map or terrain does not require a grid. I make a lot of my own terrain, and it does not have a grid. We use measuring sticks marked in 5s at 1" intervals on the stick. The last session, nobody even asked for one of the measuring sticks. Everything was eyeballed.

Tormyr said:

As a side note, using minis and a map or terrain does not require a grid. I make a lot of my own terrain, and it does not have a grid. We use measuring sticks marked in 5s at 1" intervals on the stick. The last session, nobody even asked for one of the measuring sticks. Everything was eyeballed.

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I love this.

...I just cannot tell if it's serious or not...

Juriel said:

Okay, it requires a constant game of 'GM may I?', which is annoying as hell.

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But constant player assumption can also be annoying.

If I tell a player that he can see a guy, I also tell him what he's hiding behind. It's describing the action. I've used minis since I first started in the 80's, but when a player asks what he sees, I don't simply point to the minis. I don't like playing D&D like a board game.

Juriel said:

I love this.

...I just cannot tell if it's serious or not...

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Totally serious. If I get a chance, I will set some of it up tonight and take a picture. After a few months of playing this way, everyone knows about how much 6"/30' is, and the last session was mostly close combat.

Juriel said:

Okay, it requires a constant game of 'GM may I?', which is annoying as hell.

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This.

I cannot understand my wife via normal conversation half of the time. Doing a "theater of the mind" with her in a game would be a disaster and is one of the strangest concepts that I can think of for D&D. It is a lot more intuitive for everyone at the table if they can see miniatures and where they are located on a map than if a DM just describes stuff. Heck, I could even be in the bathroom for a moment and miss out on a bunch of changing factors.

jrowland said:

One way to think about it: Adv/Dis is a shorthand for active combat modifiers, ie stuff that people do (sneak, cast a spell, rage, etc). The +/- for cover is a passive combat modifier, ie stuff that just happens.

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This is the most sensible distillation offered so far, I believe. Thank you!

Juriel said:

I love this.

...I just cannot tell if it's serious or not...

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As promised...

This is a recreation from two weeks ago. the party was assaulting an underground temple of Hextor. They had not fallen for the trap of following the retreating enemies into the arena (the room with the 20 ft. high walls), but they had failed to break through the barricaded side door on the right. So the majority of them came up to the double doors of the arena while the wizard tried to burn down the door with repeated castings of fire bolt. After some fruitless parlay between the party and the clerics of Hextor (the clerics wanted them to come in so they could lock the doors behind them, the party was not falling for it), the half-gnoll paladin of Heironeous walks into the middle of the arena and pees on the statue of Hextor. The half-orc cleric of Hextor would not stand for this, and the battle was joined.

I am honestly not super great at this yet, but I am getting better. I need to work on more dungeon dressing. Most of the party is in the center of the picture. The half-gnoll is in the center of the arena next to the statue of Hextor. The clerics are in the back, and their Tiefling guards are manning the walls. There are some troglodyte zombies in the very back right, the the halfling monk/rogue stumbled upon as she wandered off on her own after the battle was won.

As you can see, no grid. Movement and range are either eyeballed or measured. The terrain does make cover and distances easier to adjudicate. Right at the beginning of combat, another cleric of Hextor cast a scroll of silence around the statue of Hextor. That worked well until the party immediately retreated and the clerics gave chase. They ended up in the zone of silence for a round. Having stated where that zone of silence was made it easier to realize the clerics had stopped in it. In TotM that would have been easy to miss.

This happened last Wednesday.

The party subdued the head cleric of Hextor. After interrogating him, the wizard cast a suggestion spell that the cleric should lead them into the next temple and kill the shaman of Erythnul. I rolled a 20 in secret (almost all my dice rolls are out in the open). The party failed their insight checks to tell that he was playing them. He led them in to the caverns until they were surrounded by grimlocks and their krenshar pets. When the cleric was on the other side of the chasm on the left, he alerted the grimlocks to the danger of the party (depicted in this scene). This made him target number one for the party. They knocked him unconscious again before he could escape, and he fell 40 ft to the floor below. This gave him a death saving throw failure. While they were fighting the grimlocks, The cleric rolled a 20 on a death saving throw and got back up, but the party saw that. They were so incensed that he would not die that they, knocked him unconscious again and were burning inspiration points to overcome disadvantage from making ranged attacks against his unconscious form.

This map starts in the back left as a series of tunnels and rooms lead to a cliff edge depicted by the tile in the near right of the picture. The right edge corresponds to the left-most cliff. There are pitons in the cliff face, and you can place a mini on them to show them climbing. They also came in handy as the elf fighter decided to jump off the cliff to finish off the cleric, willing to take 40 ft. of damage. Unfortunately, she forgot she was wearing a ring of feather fall, and she floated serenely past a grimlock archer on the other side of the chasm. I could place the mini on the pitons to chart her progress.

The center section has two parts that you can take off to reveal tunnels at different elevations, and there is a rope bridge from the top tunnel to the far side.

While all of this could have been done in TotM, I find that stuff like this helps make sure that everyone is on the same page as to what was going on and who was where.

Thanks for posting. I like that you have the not-90-degree-turns corridors, too. And the pitons are wonderful.

jrowland said:

My personal feeling is I've used +/- modifiers for decades. I have used them in the case of cover. I am not annoyed/confused/cognitively disassociated from cover using modifiers vs adv/dis. So on that score, I'll keep them. Unifying mechanics for the sake of unifying mechanics is a bit silly, imo. Just be warned: using Adv/Dis gets rid of some of the granularity that +/- can bring. Effectively it gets rid of any minor penalties and major penalties (dis) can be negated by major bonuses (adv). Certainly simpler, faster, etc. But that is where the weird stuff comes in. If you're in the Gamist camp: Go for it. But if you're a simulationist at heart, use cover as is.

The cases where Adv cancels the Dis of Cover can occur more frequently than we might realize at first blush. Raging Barbarian, Sneak Attack, Faerie Fire, etc Using +/- ensures that cover is meaningful in all situations.

One way to think about it: Adv/Dis is a shorthand for active combat modifiers, ie stuff that people do (sneak, cast a spell, rage, etc). The +/- for cover is a passive combat modifier, ie stuff that just happens.

If a fight occurs on a swaying rope bridge and the DM wants to mimic the swaying in the wind hindering combat. He could use Adv/Dis, but again, it gets weird: My rage/sneak attack/Faerie Fire is canceled by the swaying? You could justify it by saying it is really windy and go for it, but I for one would prefer a -1 to -4 penalty depending on how much sway there was (perhaps a 1d4 at the beginning of each round representing the gusts).

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That is a nice way to distinguish the two type of modifiers, i.e. static involves passive or constant things that everyone can experience, like the environment, and advantage/disadvantage is based on what the character, NPC or monster does. To bad they did not carry through on that thought process if they are going to mix static modifiers with advantage/disadvantage (dice averaging).