The players don't have to co-ordinate; but they often choose to. That said, realism dictates that not every plan or co-ordinated move is going to come off right, and yes - sometimes the front line are gonna get fireballed if they rush in too soon.
As for the DM controlling the whole team - most of the time my dumber monsters don't co-ordinate much at all; more intelligent opponents sometimes co-ordinate and sometimes don't, depending on a host of factors. About the only times I use party-level co-ordination or better is if a) the opponents have any sort of hive mind (e.g. are all psionically linked or are all operating as puppets run by a single controller) or b) the opponents are in fact another adventuring party.
I agree not every set of moves is going to go right or in the right order, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean by coordination on the monster side.
I think part of it is that the majority of my thoughts of what constitutes some failed coordination involve the death of the target, and generally monsters rush in and get killed while players are still standing. But, to look at fireball, do you often have the orc shaman fireballing the majority of his squad?
They are rare situations that I can think of that qualify for the type of thing I’m talking about. I’m not talking tactics, or even things like focus fire. It’s more how often do you frustrate yourself by doing something that prevents you from doing what you wanted to do?
And just writing that sentence makes so very little sense, but for players it is “How often does someone else do something to frustrate you by preventing you from doing what you wanted to do?” Those types of scenarios happen more often when you need to lock in your actions beforehand and I’ve never found that to be a fun experience.
Wizard says she's casting fireball. Fighter says she's running in. Wizard doesn't target until resolution, and as spells by RAW always go right where they're targeted to go then if the Fighter gets hit that's on the Wizard.
That was kind of my point, but I may have not made it clear what issue I was thinking about.
Whenever I hear people say “We will all declare our actions at the beginning and not coordinate” the idea seems to be that they will all yell out their chosen course of action simultaneously. However, that’s dumb because then no one can understand each other and the DM is going to have to have them repeat what they said one by one anyways.
So you pick a person and go around the table, which means you have an order things will go in. Now, this is not a scenario that plays out in the Greyhawk Initiative, because Mearls specifically chooses to let players decide their exact course of action on their turn, they simply roll for the types of actions, this more applies to further variants people are talking about.
So, the Fighter declares they will rush the Orc Shaman. It is a solid tactical choice, let’s say to break it’s concentration. Then down the line the wizard declares they are fireballing the Orc Shaman.
Well, now the Fighter wants to change their actions to not get blasted, but they are locked in and can’t change but because of the order of actions this isn’t “Melee rushed in to soon and got hit, that’s something that could happen in a real fight” instead what it looks like to me and the fighter is “The wizard chose to blast me after they already knew I was in the area”
This can happen with cyclic initiative but a) the Fighter doesn’t feel like they are running into a blast zone on their turn, b) the situation might change enough the wizard chooses a different course of actions and the biggie for me c) it is a lot more blatant if the wizard is trying to cause problems at the table.
There is this idea when we say “everyone will declare their actions” that somehow everyone will choose what they are going to do, tell the DM, and somehow the other players aren’t going to become aware of it. That isn’t going to happen, because someone will declare and they will be followed by someone else, and they are going to take those actions into consideration when they choose their own actions for the round. So maybe the fighter rushes in after the wizard calls out fireball or maybe the wizard chooses to unleash it after the fighter declares their charge, but unless you have everyone write down their declared actions in secret and pass them in you will never have a situation where those two declare their actions at the exact same time and ignorant of the other person’s choice.
