So I played tonight...

[grimslade]

No OAs was a tough thing to grasp in the first combat we ran too. I found it liberating and combat became much more free form without them. No OAs and using facing would be a frustration though. Try reinstating OAs. PCs get one reaction per turn, let them have a basic attack to anyone leaving a threatened distance from the PC. It might be a dissuader to the spring attack Orc chargers. Maybe only threaten front face weapon hand quadrant?

The tackle I would resolve as a contest. If you want to add some complexity, add an initial attack vs AC to initiate the tackle and then a contest. Success means the PC is prone. Fail means PC stands their ground.

This initial playtest is incomplete. We are missing a lot of customization options so house ruling is pretty freewheeling and judge by feel.

 

[WizarDru]

What a difference a decade makes. I remember that AoOs were so confusing to players that this guy, Eric Noah, created a 3E news web site (a World, if you will) where people discussed and explained this new confusing rule, among others.

Now the LACK of AoOs is blowing people's minds. Who woulda thunk it?

 

[LostSoul]

Specifically, Facing introduces a whole host of game slowing, grid dependent elements. Charging and flanking were also added elements. Adding in an ongoing disadvantage for all your NPCs also involves a lot more die rolling.

I think this is interesting, because I think that assuming facing doesn't exist is a pretty big leap. Maybe it's not worth Advantage, but that's a DM call. Charging is the same thing; of course a character can try to charge another. Not that it affected action resolution except for the orc ability.

edit: By "charge" I mean running up to the guy and hitting, not Hustling + Attacking. I didn't allow a Hustle + an Attack, even for the orcs. I just described 30' of movement + an attack as a "charge".

The "light Disadvantage" was a pretty major thing, but eh. It was a good choice to make for a playtest, I think: I got the chance to see what such a ruling can do to the game. Rolling another die didn't take much more time, I rolled both dice at the same time and read the lower result.

Ok, you've already made the decision to kill ordered initiative from D&D. Now, you say playing with it is weird... Isn't that like saying:

"I've removed community chest and chance cards from Monoploy. I found that when I played monoploy on the ipad that community chest and chance cards appearance were weird and threw me"... I mean, you already made the choice to remove them... so you must have already known how it played...

It's been a year or two? since I changed initiative, so it was strange to go back and DM a game with turn-based initiative. Though I play 3E once and a while, I haven't DMed that way for a long time, and I found it to be a bigger change than I realized.

The interesting thing was how I felt like I had to change the way I made decisions for the NPCs.

I think that you are really overthinking the turn based initiative. Characters are not stuck in freezeframe during the time it's not their turn. This isn't a JRPG where the sides kind of stand there and occasionally take an unopposed swing as the clock allows.

During the round your characters and monsters are assumed to be moving, turning, defending and weaving as the action calls for. That is, in part, what your dex bonus to AC represents. The turn-based initiative is an abstraction to simplyify play, not a hard coded facet of the physics of the game world.

So it is perfectly logical to assume that when a character is grappled, he wrestles back and you make an opposed strength contest. The rules do not forbid it, nor do they suggest thats not exactly what would happen.

That would probably work better, though there are some strange features. What a character can do in 6 or so seconds is pretty well-defined, but it seems like it changes based on what the other characters are doing. (Schrodinger's initiative? ) If can can get into 10 or more wrestling matches, why do I only get to make one or two thrusts of my dagger?

If the combat round was longer - 15 seconds or more - then I could see that it's supposed to be abstract; but at 6 seconds I don't get the feeling that it is. Though I know it is... anyway, I find it strange.

Maybe I should just say that all actions in combat are supposed to be dissociated mechanics and not worry about it.

 

[pemerton]

The interesting thing was how I felt like I had to change the way I made decisions for the NPCs.

<snip>

Maybe I should just say that all actions in combat are supposed to be dissociated mechanics and not worry about it.

Cute!

 

[Sir Brennen]

I think this is interesting, because I think that assuming facing doesn't exist is a pretty big leap.

Facing hasn't existed for the last two editions and it's not indicated in the play test rules, so how is it a big leap?

 

[Campbell]

I don't think facing interacts well with cyclical initiative even given rules like opportunity attacks because being able to attack from the rear becomes entirely too easy when one can be certain they can loop around to a target's back without repercussion.

 

[VannATLC]

I think WotC are pretty bad at writing advice on how to play their games, and these documents live up to that legacy!

The contest issue is a good example. As LostSoul notes, a contest requires an action opposed by another action (per the 1st para under the heading on p1 of the DM's guidelines). Which means that, in a stop motion combat, contest can't occur unless someone has readied an action to act at the same time as someone else..

Yeah. in 4E and 3.5, there were lots of conflating uses of the same terms.

I do not believe the action/opposing action wording of contests is intended be synonymous with the action resource.

Anybody can trigger a contest, using an action, is how I read it.

 

[Walker N. Waistz]

All in all... eh. It was okay.

Okay, so you made up a game loosely based on the playtest rules, and you were underwhelmed by testing it, mostly because of its differences from another game you made up loosely based on the 4E rules. Got it.

 

[LostSoul]

Facing hasn't existed for the last two editions and it's not indicatedin the play test rules, so how is it a big leap?

I think that facing is something that most people who haven't played the last two editions of the game would assume. That may not be the case, but it's my opinion.

Okay, so you made up a game loosely based on the playtest rules, and you were underwhelmed by testing it, mostly because of its differences from another game you made up loosely based on the 4E rules. Got it.

Cool. I find your response interesting, because I didn't feel that I deviated that much from the playtest rules (the orc Disadvantage being the major one). I felt like I made a lot of rulings in DMing the game, but I don't feel like that's not supported by the rules. Which is a big factor for me. I would have liked a little more leeway in making rulings, actually.

Let me clarify my feelings on the game I DMed: it was fun, but I'm not sure I'd want to play the playtest rules over any other edition of the game. There are a lot of things I like better in this version of the game, and there were some things I'm not sure about. However, I don't see why I'd play this over any other edition - simply because those other editions are finished games, while this isn't. I recognize that it's a playtest, and that's fine, but we're not playtesting a full game - just some of the mechanics in that game. It's hard for me to get excited about that.

edited to add:

I don't think facing interacts well with cyclical initiative even given rules like opportunity attacks because being able to attack from the rear becomes entirely too easy when one can be certain they can loop around to a target's back without repercussion.

Yeah, that's a good call. I was approaching the game from a different perspective, and I think that caused me a lot of problems. (Well, not "a lot" of problems - since it was okay - but it would have run smoother for me if I had a different frame of mind.)

 

[B.T.]

Okay, so you made up a game loosely based on the playtest rules, and you were underwhelmed by testing it, mostly because of its differences from another game you made up loosely based on the 4E rules. Got it.

Basically. It sounds like D&D isn't for LS since he doesn't actually like the rules to it.