D&D 5E Helping melee combat to be more competitive to ranged.

FormerlyHemlock · Jan 4, 2017

Ashkelon said:
Here is the official ruling about crossbow expert and the hand crossbow. It does in fact allow you to fire the same hand crossbow up to 5 times per turn (9 with action surge).

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/sageadvice_feats/

As to the combo only being available to high level characters, that simply isn't true. A human can have 18 Dex, crossbow expert, and sharpshooter by level 6. In a game with rolled stats any +2 Dex race can also have that at a relatively low level as well. The greatsword fighter needs great weapon master so at most he can get a 20 in his prime stat two levels earlier than the archer.

For those who don't care about Sage Advice tweets (like me), it's also worth noting that Crossbow Expert has also been changed in alter versions of the PHB and the errata: http://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/PH-Errata.pdf

The feat no longer calls out the need for a "loaded" crossbow.

FormerlyHemlock · Jan 4, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
though, you may lose some of the gain in figuringoutwhateveryonejustshoutedatyouallatonce time.

You can offload that on one of the players. There's no reason for the roles "monster advocate" and "referee" to be bundled with "combat tracker". Now you're telling him what actions the monsters are declaring, and if one of the monsters is declaring an action from a position where it can't be observed, you do the same thing a player would and hand the combat tracker a folded-up note with the action written inside.

I don't always do it that way but when I'm feeling overloaded I do.

Tony Vargas · Jan 4, 2017

"Monster Advocate..." ;D

Seriously, though, I don't see that as an issue with cyclical initiative, because you can only engage with & resolve one player & his characters actions at a time, anyway. (OK, I can only do one at a time.) Cyclical initiative's as good as anything else I can think of to structure the order in which you do so, and less complicated than most of the alternatives I've seen, in the end.

You could have everyone roll at once, and then go through and adjudicate the results, of course, but you could let them roll when 'on deck' (next in the cyclical initiative line), too.

:shrug:

FormerlyHemlock · Jan 4, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
"Monster Advocate..." ;D

Seriously, though, I don't see that as an issue with cyclical initiative, because you can only engage with & resolve one player & his characters actions at a time, anyway. (OK, I can only do one at a time.) Cyclical initiative's as good as anything else I can think of to structure the order in which you do so, and less complicated than most of the alternatives I've seen, in the end.

You could have everyone roll at once, and then go through and adjudicate the results, of course, but you could let them roll when 'on deck' (next in the cyclical initiative line), too.

:shrug:

Yes, if you think that rolling is the bottleneck, you could certainly apply this insight to cyclic initiative and have players roll their dice in advance there, just as easily as you can in simultaneous initiative. (I'm fine with it--I don't consider it my duty to babysit die-rolling to prevent cheating. My only concern is that decision-making should come before resolution, so I ask players not to announce their die rolls until everyone has declared.)

I find that decision-making is a bigger bottleneck than die-rolling speed; and it's also good to encourage players to interact with each other as well as with the DM in the course of their decision-making. I don't like how cyclic initiative forces concurrent decision-making to become sequential decision-making; as well as creating other problems like complicating surprise/ambush adjudication. So for me, simply allowing concurrent die-rolling on a cyclic initiative chassis wouldn't be enough to give a fun experience.

But if letting players roll dice in advance works for you, hey, it works for you. Optimize the parts that you find slow. (Amdahl's Law.)

Tony Vargas · Jan 4, 2017

Hemlock said:
I find that decision-making is a bigger bottleneck than die-rolling speed; and it's also good to encourage players to interact with each other as well as with the DM in the course of their decision-making.

My point was that simultaneous die-rolling is the only practical time-savings in having everyone go at once instead of using some sort of individual initiative (cyclical or otherwise).

I don't like how cyclic initiative forces concurrent decision-making to become sequential decision-making;

It is an oversimplification, that way. Which is why it doesn't strike me as what's 'slowing down' 5e (really, basic 5e combat seems plenty fast, it only slows to a crawl when spells or the like or other rule questions are brought out, and snap rulings can usually head that off).

as well as creating other problems like complicating surprise/ambush adjudication.

Surprise doesn't seem that big an issue.

I actually rather like initiative, because I can use it to 'frame' a combat encounter in a simple, mechanical way.

Rhenny · Jan 4, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
I actually rather like initiative, because I can use it to 'frame' a combat encounter in a simple, mechanical way.

I feel this way too. Sometimes, I even run turn based segments outside of combat because it can get unruly when a number of players declares action all at once. Also, at some tables, if I don't mechanically give each player a turn, the quiet ones get overshadowed.

FormerlyHemlock · Jan 4, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
My point was that simultaneous die-rolling is the only practical time-savings in having everyone go at once instead of using some sort of individual initiative (cyclical or otherwise).

In practice, this doesn't seem to be the case. I see other DMs on here occasionally venting about how combat slows down when player A isn't paying attention during player B's turn and has to be brought up to speed once player A's turn arrives; other posts about how players take too long to make decisions, and you need to control how long they are allowed to take to make their decisions, etc.

By making decisions concurrently during combat (declare-in-order-of-Int can still allow concurrent declarations, just by letting the high-Int guy change his mind after he declares if the low-Int guy does something he wasn't expecting), you avoid this kind of slowdown. Or at least, that's my hypothesis for why I've never had any kind of problem with those sorts of slowdowns. Typically in complex fights, the bottleneck is me, hence the need for a separate person to play combat-tracker sometimes while I focus on monster roleplaying.

It is an oversimplification, that way. Which is why it doesn't strike me as what's 'slowing down' 5e (really, basic 5e combat seems plenty fast, it only slows to a crawl when spells or the like or other rule questions are brought out, and snap rulings can usually head that off).

Surprise doesn't seem that big an issue.

I actually rather like initiative, because I can use it to 'frame' a combat encounter in a simple, mechanical way.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If cyclic initiative is working for you, then great! Keep using it.

Ashkelon · Jan 4, 2017

This is getting very off topic, but I really like the way savage worlds does initiative. I find it keeps players engaged more and also leads to faster gameplay overall. On the rare occurrence where a player is completely indecisive about the action they should take, they can simply go on hold.

CapnZapp · Jan 4, 2017

seebs said:
You're not including base damage, and I think that makes the numbers useless to compare.

Apologies if it wasn't obvious - we're talking hand crossbow bolts with Dexterity 20. 1d6+5 dmg without the +10 damage bonus or 1d6+15 with it.

It may not have been tested in higher-level play. At lower levels, when to-hit bonuses are significantly lower, it doesn't seem like it's nearly as appealing.

Agreed completely.

This problem manifests itself at level 11 or thereabouts, when the character can make four attacks.

(Actually, if you read my other threads you'll find that I have a problem with a character being able to deal out 20+ damage with a single attack even at first level. But that is for completely different reasons than what we're talking about here)

And yeah, it seems like the -5/+10 is probably better than it should be.

Thank you.

And just to be on the safe side: again, it is not the -5/+10 mechanism in itself (studied in isolation) that is at fault, but the way +10 adds ten more damage into the equation than what would otherwise be possible - the problem is the damage potential in adds to the game in the hands of an optimizer: it is the base mechanism which enables advantage etc to become a very strong (too strong IMO) tactic.

Without +10 damage, the choice between granting advantage or doing something else is much more interesting. The choice between taking Precision Attack and other maneuvers become much more interesting. For instance, without +10 damage, you might consider a maneuver that grants you your superiority dice as bonus damage. But with +10 damage, you will always pick Precision Attack, since your superiority dice now gets loaded down with ten more damage, which is far better than just a 1d10 (twice as good, in fact).

Everything in the game (as far as I can see) works fairly well and is balanced against each other until you add +10 damage. At this point the reward for hitting outshines every other option.

As I've said, this is especially problematic when it comes to weapon selection, which is never discussed in these DPR calculating discussions. At least to me it is a huge plus if a knife, shortsword or hammer remains plausible weapons. And to remain plausible the player can't be asked to choose between 1d6+5 and 1d12+15: that's simply FAR too much of a difference.

CapnZapp · Jan 4, 2017

pemerton said:
That would be a pity.

Agreed. Especially since Hemlock was the one to bring up the very serious (and interesting) objection, at least to my attention, that +10 damage is needed or sorlocks & Co will replace martial builds.

pemerton said:
I agree that CapnZapp is, to some extent, missing the wood for the trees, but it's still an interesting thread with some worthwhile ideas being tossed around.

Rather than looking at nerfing the -5/+10 (and thereby nerfing fighter damage into irrelevance) the focus could be on making melee more viable - this also has the benefit of helping make the non-GW/SS options for fighter viable (eg if melee is more of a thing, than melee-range battlefield control becomes relatively more important).

The first that strikes me is the sadness of seeing the possibility that somebody (not saying this is you P) has resigned himself to the notion that any fighter NOT using a greatweapon (or crossbow) is irrelevant, or at least does irrelevant amounts of damage, which amounts to pretty much the same thing.

Retaining the +10 damage for some, but not all weapons, feels to me to throw out the baby (the relevance of other weapons and combos such as Drizzt or Zorro) with the bathwater (allowing martials to keep up with cantrip-based "weaponry").

Not to mention how it (again to me) would feel like a huge usability win for the Monster Manual if player damage was kept from GWM levels (whether thru that feat or cantrip alternatives).

D&D 5E Helping melee combat to be more competitive to ranged.

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