Move - Attack - Move

[slobo777]

is exactly why an AO should take your next action, if you wish to take advantage of it. I completely agree, it's silly to gain extra actions the more...well, action there is around you.

But you should be able to guard a square or a person as a readied action, with a certain trigger. And it shouldn't change your initiative though. If I take the AO for the kobold running by, and miss him, I should be able to at least move on my regular initiative that's coming up, not lose it entirely or wait a whole extra round to be able to move.

That would work.

Basically the rules resolution for combat is for: Character A wants to do something, Character B wants to do stop them or do the opposite, what happens?

When the thing that A wants to do is get past B to some objective, and the thing that B wants to do is prevent them, there should be a rule for it, because it happens a lot in combat and conflicts. The current rule in D&D Next is that you automatically could prevent someone trying to move through your space. Anything else is DM arbitration. I think the core rules should have a standard mechanism for this common situation.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

I for one am severely glad for this. The nonsensical restriction on moving in melee combat was one of the biggest and least justified nerfs to the melee classes in D&D 3.X, and I hope it's dead forever.

Instead of provoking attacks of opportunity-- which are a horrible mechanic-- I much prefer the idea that doing something stupid in melee range grants attackers advantage for that round, just like being in melee range grants disadvantage to ranged attacks.

 

[tlantl]

I don't have a big problem with this movement strategy. I can imagine several ways to discourage mages from hit and run attacks, The easiest is for the creature to hold his action until the little bastard moves in to make his attack then pound the hells out of him.

The same can be done to those little peskies your DM torments you with.

I always target the missile guys first since they are getting free shots at me if I don't. The same goes for the guy that wants to play hit and run. No freebies against me. Of course that can be mitigated by the guy with the hammer doing a 2d6+7 on a whack, though.

Then again if you got a monster fighting one against five and it's not looking good for the monster, I think it might really try to escape. I have big problems believing any living creature is willing to give up it's life for anything short of saving the lives of his family, friends, or it's species. There might be some special cases, though.

The move attack move rule seems to be the easiest way to give charges and pass through assaults space in the game without having to make specific rules for them.

 

[tbk409]

Just for the record, by my figuring move-attack-move and no OA/AoO allows 56 attacks from the Kobold Karousel on a solitary medium creature, assuming a movement of 30'. With 3e/4e rules this number is 16.

 

[slobo777]

Well, I've been DM-ing for 30+ years, and DM-ed B2 more than once, way back in 1982 (-ish) with D&D Basic rules.

I've been thinking back to how did this then. Movement was simpler, but there was the same lack of rules for defending your allies.

Mostly we played "theatre of the mind" style, and if combats got complicated we'd scribble a diagram (not a battleboard, just an explanation from the DM so the players could make sensible decisions).

About 90% of the time, combats worked in one of two ways

1) Locked down in a corridor or choke point, with one or two melee PCs at the front, and ranged attacks/spell support from the back. The fact that no-one could move through each others space, and there were no rules for pushing past or controlling enemies made this a solid, simple defence. The most vulnerable thing was fear effects or save-or-dies that broke the front line - however these were usually associated with solo monsters

2) Open melee, anything could attack anything. Always bad for the smallest group. Fun when there was a solo monster and the thief finally got to run around the back and use their backstab (this got used way less in basic editions as I recall, the thief wasn't really a major combat character).

In general, as the active explorers, the players got to try and instigate the setup that suited them best. So they would get into the entrance, form a phalanx and bash their way through as many bad guys as they could handle moving down a corridor, and holding doorways as choke points. If outnumbered in a room, they'd back up into a corner to get defence against numbers. If they outnumbered a monster, they'd pile in, and try to ensure everyone got an attack.

It was very static. The only time differences in speed/movement came into play was in chase scenes. Occasionally the thief would climb up and over to attack the back at a key moment. Sometimes there would be a way for monsters to move around and attack the rear of the party.

In terms of years playing different styles, I have probably played this style more than any other. I have to say it works, it's probably much more realistic than the dynamic always-moving battles that 4e encourages. But after a while I did find it a bit simplistic and boring. Moving to the battleboard felt "right" to me. So I'm looking forward to seeing what the grid play extensions to the core will do for this.

 

[zlorf]

move attack move - sometimes

Hi,
I haven't trialed the dndnext open play test rules as yet. But i was thinking instead of being able to move attack move all the time, maybe the only time that it can be used is when you kill/knock unconscious your enemy, then you can choose to continue with the rest of your move.

Cheers
Z
===

The thing is that the rules specifically allow the splitting of movement before and after other actions: "You can break up your movement to move both before and after your action". So this is something deliberate in the rules.

I personally think that movement should be before <i>or</i> after actions, not 'around' them.

 

[Abraxas]

nevermind

 

[Libramarian]

This initiative system is a weird fit with TotM. It feels like you're playing on a grid mentally.

One of the advantages of TotM (this is kind of a silly abbreviation) is you can move all the pieces at once, so you should have some kind of initiative system where everyone is moving at once.

Maybe something super simple like Tunnels & Trolls where you just add up both sides combat power, smash the two groups together in melee and find the difference.