D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base

[Ahnehnois]

I think one of the reasons these issues arise is because of how initiative works in 5E - the turn-based "stop-motion" combat that I'm not very fond of. I can see how a trained fighter might be able to realize that a specific shot is a deadly/dangerous one, but since that choice comes outside of your "turn", you have to wonder - what else can I do when it's not my "turn"? Why can I raise my shield or knock an arrow to the ground but not take a step?

I would rather that they either drop the abstraction of combat or go back to AD&D or B/X-style abstraction.

Last night I was playing D&D with a guy who has done some medieval martial arts. It was his third session of D&D ever. He was face-to-face with a smallish dragon (Medium size, D&D 3.5) and he dropped his Greataxe to use his Longsword in a specific way. It was a pity that how he described his attack had no importance, since it was obvious he was into the whole thing. I'd rather that each combat round was obviously abstract - so I could say, "What are you trying to do over the next 15 seconds/one minute?"

I certainly won't defend D&D combat as a whole (only that the base CS mechanic is better than the base AEDU mechanic); there is a lot of broad conceptual room for improvement. Personally, being in the biomedical field I don't much care about the techniques of martial arts, but representing injury is rather important to me.

 

[Hussar]

No one's saying his attack didn't hit, they're saying that it hit and did no damage.
That happens with DR all the time, even on crits. Again, there's no retcon. The hit on the attack roll indicates the attack was successfully targeted and physically contacted the target, and the damage roll, taking into account the CS reduction, indicated that it did no damage. All of that happened at once. No one went back in time and changed anything.

But, it hit and did MAXIMUM damage. It says so right there in the rules. A critical hit does max damage. But, despite all that, suddenly the player turns around and says, no, that hit did no damage to me. The character can't do anything here.

After all, in the absence of the CS mechanics, that hit would do max damage. Did the fighter suddenly, magically gain DR? After all, DR is a magical ability in 3e. Why isn't this a problem?

Note, the damage is rolled BEFORE CS dice, not after. The player knows EXACTLY how much damage he's going to take before declaring that he will use a CS die. If he chooses, he can allow any attack to deal regular damage, or he can retcon the damage with CS dice. How can the character choose this?

It get's even wonkier with more dice. Fighter hits bad guy. Decides to toss in one extra die of damage. The extra die doesn't kill the bad guy. The player then decides to toss in another CS die and adds a trip effect to the damage. Note, none of this has to be declared before the attack. It can't be actually, since the player needs to know if he hits before applying CS dice.

On and on. The player can, one at a time, continue to pile on effects after the fact, so long as he has CS dice.

Or, if you want to get REALLY dissociated, put two fighters against each other. Fighter A bumps damage, Fighter B reduces damage, Fighter A spends a die to Push Fighter B back 10 feet. Note, this was all done on a SINGLE attack. What, now we enter Bullet Time from Matrix whenever two fighters fight? We have to telescope time beyond a single round to resolve all the actions for these two characters? How is this not dissociated? After all, this would never occure between two different characters.

If the CS dice gave you a bump in AC before the attack came, I'd see your point about no retcon. But it doesn't. It comes AFTER the attack is resolved. There is no way that this is not dissociated. It's time travel rewrites of things that have occurred in the game. The player is making decisions all the way along that the character cannot possibly make.

I think what this example illustrates, more than anything else, is people's willingness to ignore dissociation is directly related to whether or not they like the mechanic. IOW, dissociated claims are nothing more than claims of preference and not an actual reflection of the mechanics themselves.

 

[Hussar]

I certainly won't defend D&D combat as a whole (only that the base CS mechanic is better than the base AEDU mechanic); there is a lot of broad conceptual room for improvement. Personally, being in the biomedical field I don't much care about the techniques of martial arts, but representing injury is rather important to me.

This is what really gives me hope for 5e to be honest. I look at the CS mechanics and see how they are pretty much identical to an Essentials fighter. Bit different during creation, but, in play? Oh yeah, pretty much identical. You have your at-will powers that you use every round to cause effects on the battlefield. As you gain levels, you gain more effects that you can use.

CS and AEDU are both dissociated. I'm honestly not sure I could write a more dissociated mechanic than CS. But, since it's written in a particular way, it's totally flying under the radar of the verisimilitude/immersion crowd and will become an integral part of 5e. Win win. You're happy because your immersion isn't being broken. I'm happy because I get lots of tactical choice and I don't have to worry about fiddly details. Woot!

 

[Ahnehnois]

After all, in the absence of the CS mechanics, that hit would do max damage. Did the fighter suddenly, magically gain DR? After all, DR is a magical ability in 3e. Why isn't this a problem?

DR is not a magical ability. Barbarians get DR. Adamantine armor grants DR. In Trailblazer, any character with a couple of points of BAB can block similarly to this ability, except that they have to declare it before damage is calculated.

Note, the damage is rolled BEFORE CS dice, not after.

Note my post above, which I'll reiterate.

The player knows EXACTLY how much damage he's going to take before declaring that he will use a CS die.

That is not entirely clear from the very minimal rules text I see (which I believe forum rules prohibit me from copying).

Regardless, as I posted above, being able to declare this or any reaction after the action has been resolved is a retcon; one that I didn't notice earlier and assumed was not there. I would place that on the level of 3.0 Whirlwind Attack: if some fighter said they were dropping a bag of rats, I'd say no. Same with declaring a reaction too late. Why the rule is written this way is beyond me, but you have indeed pointed out that there was something in it I missed. I would never even consider allowing parry to work as written. I bet I'm not the only one that read right over that (especially those of us that like Trailblazer and intuitively thought this worked the same way as TB does, see below).

I am now using my ability to non-retroactively change my mind about this specific playtest rule example, now that I see the problem.

Block
If you are engaged in melee, you may use your combat reaction to block your
opponent’s melee attack. On the opponent’s turn, before he makes his attack
roll against you, announce your intention to use your combat reaction to Block.
Against that single attack, you gain DR against that attack equal to ½ your
BAB. If you are blocking with a buckler or shield, add the shield’s AC bonus
(including any enhancement bonus) to the amount of DR. If you have DR from
another source, the DR from block stacks with your highest applicable DR.

I think what this example illustrates, more than anything else, is people's willingness to ignore dissociation is directly related to whether or not they like the mechanic. IOW, dissociated claims are nothing more than claims of preference and not an actual reflection of the mechanics themselves.

Who's ignoring it? (See bolded text above).

Also, all this stuff above is really missing the point. You example is about one CS ability, not about CS. The relevant comparison is this:
Is giving a fighter X amount of dice to spend each round on various combat tricks as dissociative as giving the fighter one trick that can be used perfectly once and then cannot be used for another day and another completely separate trick with an unrelated recharge time? The answer to that question is no.

This specific CS maneuver example is pretty sketchy, but talking about that is like talking about one spell (say, polymorph), and then concluding that wizards are unbalanced. Similarly, there is a 3.5 feat (Goad), that forces opponents to attack you. This doesn't mean that feats break immersion because they grant mind control, it means that one specific feat does. Conversely, there are probably some examples of relatively non-dissociative fighter powers, but the power system itself is hopelessly disconnected from the game reality. The CS mechanic itself is fine (except that we haven't seen it applied to other martial classes yet), the parry maneuver needs a fix (as do several of them).

I'm honestly not sure I could write a more dissociated mechanic than CS.

What if you said a character gained d6's, d8's, and d10's, the d6's refreshed each round, the d8's refreshed after the DM said the battle was over and you rested a bit, and the d10's refreshed after a whole night of rest. Then let's say you could spend a d10 to force an enemy to attack you instead of the defenseless wizard. That would be more dissociated.

*(Note to 5e designers: please do not copy this purposefully stupid example).

 

[billd91]

CS and AEDU are both dissociated. I'm honestly not sure I could write a more dissociated mechanic than CS. But, since it's written in a particular way, it's totally flying under the radar of the verisimilitude/immersion crowd and will become an integral part of 5e. Win win. You're happy because your immersion isn't being broken. I'm happy because I get lots of tactical choice and I don't have to worry about fiddly details. Woot!

Of course you could write up a more dissociated mechanic than CS, you could arbitrarily make the PC only do each move once a day and have part of the AEDU mechanics.
Yes, there are some dissociated elements of the CS dice, yet the worse dissociated elements of the AEDU system are gone. Situation improved.

 

[pemerton]

I think the player of the Thief/Rogue can say exactly that - if you're using Find/Remove Trap rolls or Disable Device checks.

How is this different from a miss against the Fighter's AC from his shield? That is, how does the character in the game world know the difference? The Fighter is trying to stop the attack using his shield, with or without Parry from Combat Superiority.

The player needs to know that the arrow hits before he uses Parry. How does the character know that the arrow is going to hit - that is, how does he know that it's going to hit if he doesn't use Combat Superiority? And why, from first level, is the Fighter never incorrect about this assumption?

I think one of the reasons these issues arise is because of how initiative works in 5E - the turn-based "stop-motion" combat that I'm not very fond of. I can see how a trained fighter might be able to realize that a specific shot is a deadly/dangerous one, but since that choice comes outside of your "turn", you have to wonder - what else can I do when it's not my "turn"? Why can I raise my shield or knock an arrow to the ground but not take a step?

These are all excellent (rhetorical) questions which I can't XP at present. (Though I think we have different play preferences when it comes to the desirability or otherwise of these abstract mechanics.)

Note, the damage is rolled BEFORE CS dice, not after. The player knows EXACTLY how much damage he's going to take before declaring that he will use a CS die. If he chooses, he can allow any attack to deal regular damage, or he can retcon the damage with CS dice. How can the character choose this?

It get's even wonkier with more dice. Fighter hits bad guy. Decides to toss in one extra die of damage. The extra die doesn't kill the bad guy. The player then decides to toss in another CS die and adds a trip effect to the damage. Note, none of this has to be declared before the attack. It can't be actually, since the player needs to know if he hits before applying CS dice.

Combat Superiorit makes it clear - if it wasn't already - that D&D combat is very much fortune-in-the-middle.

For what it's worth, I think the difference between 1x/round and 1x/encounter is that - if you take the turn sequence as some sort of given - then with 1x/round I don't have to think it about between declaring actions for my PC, whereas with 1x/enc I have to think about the one declaration over multiple PC actions.

What puzzles me is people's ability to internalise the turn-by-turn initiative sequence - or even the classic D&D version, which still lacks continous action - as if it were somehow consistent with process simulation. LostSoul's example in the third of his posts that I quote brings out this point.

 

[Ahnehnois]

What puzzles me is people's ability to internalise the turn-by-turn initiative sequence - or even the classic D&D version, which still lacks continous action - as if it were somehow consistent with process simulation.

Turn-by-turn initiative requires some substantial suspension of disbelief, no doubt.

When this issue comes up, though, it's often in the context of "you accept X mechanic, which is dissociative, so why won't you accept Y mechanic?". Typically, the answer is because Y is more dissociative than X, or because Y adds dissociation to X, and because there is deemed to be no benefit to adding Y.

Many people have bought into the idea of stop-motion initiative and having specific, arbitrary limits on what you can do in a six-second round. That doesn't mean that this is a great mechanic, merely something we live with out of convenience, like hit points or armor class. Adding new and even more arbitrary limits over longer and sometimes vaguely defined time periods doesn't necessarily follow from acceptance of the turn system.

 

[pemerton]

Many people have bought into the idea of stop-motion initiative and having specific, arbitrary limits on what you can do in a six-second round. That doesn't mean that this is a great mechanic, merely something we live with out of convenience, like hit points or armor class. Adding new and even more arbitrary limits over longer and sometimes vaguely defined time periods doesn't necessarily follow from acceptance of the turn system.

No one said it did. But according to [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION] and others on this and other threads, the difference between hit points and turn-by-turn intitiative, on the one hand, and martial encounter and daily powers, on the other, is a difference of kind: "abstract" vs "dissociated".

Whereas, unless I misunderstood your post, you are saying this is merely a matter of degree as measured by preference, familiarity, and "which got there first".

 

[Ahnehnois]

No one said it did. But according to [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION] and others on this and other threads, the difference between hit points and turn-by-turn intitiative, on the one hand, and martial encounter and daily powers, on the other, is a difference of kind: "abstract" vs "dissociated".

The idea of abstract vs dissociated is separate to what I was talking about; if not completely unrelated. For example, D&D's conceit of referring to all humans as being of one race is abstract (as real humans are of many races), but not particularly dissociative. The ability to use rage once a day is dissociative, but not particularly abstract (it's quite discrete and well-defined).

Hit points, if you look at them strictly as physical injury, are extremely abstract, but not very dissociative, because they represent something in the game world. The more luck/skill/etc. you add to them, the more dissociative they become. Thus, healing surges ruffled some feathers, even in people who could live with hit points as meat.

And so on and so on.

 

[Hussar]

Of course you could write up a more dissociated mechanic than CS, you could arbitrarily make the PC only do each move once a day and have part of the AEDU mechanics.
Yes, there are some dissociated elements of the CS dice, yet the worse dissociated elements of the AEDU system are gone. Situation improved.

See, this gets to my point. "Some" dissociated elements in the CS dice? Are you kidding me? Ret-conning events every single round is less dissociated than insisting that a given power only works once per day?

To me, the only real difference here is you like one mechanic and don't like the other. Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with having a preference. But, pretending that that preference is grounded in dissociation is ridiculous. You simply don't find one dissociation objectionable. Therefore "dissociation" isn't the problem. Something else is.

If dissociation was the issue, then CS dice would be every bit as objectionable. Trying to pass it off as some sort of spectrum where AEDU is just more dissociated is easily shown as false. AEDU, by and large, doesn't come up EVERY SINGLE ROUND OF EVERY SINGLE COMBAT.

Heck, go even further. Fighter A attacks Fighter B. Fighter B negates Fighter A's damage. Fighter A spends a CS dice and knocks Fighter B prone after the damage has been negated.

Again, apparently, we have no problem with classes going into bullet time, but, only being able to pull off a superior critical once per day on command? Oh hell no, that's too dissociated.