D&D General D&D Combat is fictionless

[Voadam]

Then the archer attacks at disadvantage?

Decision point on how you handle things.

You could generally say the shot goes off before the fighter closes so no disadvantage or that due to abstract simultanaeity the fighter has closed the distance when the archer is attacking so disadvantage.

Preferably this decision choice would be consistent in all fights and situations.

B/X had an order of operations on movement, ranged, melee, and magic going off which handled such questions but also does not represent true simultanaeity.

 

[FrogReaver]

That would depend on how defined the declaration of action would have to be. I move and attack him is more narrative than I move 30 feet then use the attack action with my axe.

You could completely require full specifics but then movement can wreck a lot of creature and monster actions as a consequence. In such situations in past editions targeting ranged attacks is usually at a target, not a target in a specific square and this would probably favor ranged attacks and magic.

Being more narrative on declarations requires knowledge of the rules options to apply the narrative description into the grid space by the rules as the multifactored simultaneous action happens. DMs often do this now when a PC says I run up and attack him but the enemy turns out to be out of reach of a single move. DMs often respond by either having the character dash to get up to threaten, move 30' and lose the rest of their action, or stop and ask the Player what he wants to do instead because he can't move and attack.

In B/X and AD&D when declarative intiative was used there were also different balance points and consequences for being next to someone in melee when trying to cast spells or use ranged weapons.

My problem is that under 5e rules you've presented a situation that can't possibly happen the way you describe it.

If the Fighter and Archer start 30 ft away then the only way the Fighter can attack is if he moves up 30ft and attacks before the archer moves. In this scenario if the Archer moved there would be an OA.

If the Fighter and Archer start 30 ft away and the archer moves at all before or at the same time as the fighter moves then the fighter would not be able to attack the archer (but possibly could dash to close the distance). It's not clear if that dash would put make the archers attack be at disadvantage or not.

1. Neither of those outcomes feel particularly balanced for 5e.

2. It's really unclear how the system you are talking about would handle such nuances- not that they couldn't be handled, but you've given me nothing explaining how.

 

[FrogReaver]

Decision point on how you handle things.

You could generally say the shot goes off before the fighter closes so no disadvantage or that due to abstract simultanaeity the fighter has closed the distance when the archer is attacking so disadvantage.

Preferably this decision choice would be consistent in all fights and situations.

B/X had an order of operations on movement, ranged, melee, and magic going off which handled such questions but also does not represent true simultanaeity.

Sure. But at that point I think we are back to focusing on the system and making our decisions around the system and not around the fiction.

 

[Steampunkette]

Then you'll have to elaborate more on that system than to just claim it's 5e but turns happen simultaneously.

Dude... It's been a part of D&D for the entire time D&D has been a thing. It's just a different way of handling how actions are resolved is all.

And while you could do the whole blow-by blow map-setup, @Voadam, it's just a lot easier to do it Theater of the Mind style so people don't retroactively try to maximize their action economy.

As to "Elaborating" rather than just "Claiming" I'm gonna humor you this time. But you should to be careful about phrasings like that which can become incredibly contentious and shut down conversation swiftly.

1) Roll initiative normally for the players. Do not bother rolling NPC initiatives.
2) DM Declares the NPCs Actions and Intentions, makes all their rolls and writes down the results. This gives the players a small tactical advantage.
3) Go down the initiative order to get the intended actions of your players.
4) Make any appropriate rolls for attack/damage/whatever.
5) DM writes down the results.
6) DM spends the next however long describing how everyone's actions work out in a scrum rather than a specific order.
7) Repeat.

 

[pemerton]

A part of this depends what you think "fiction" and "the system" are. For me, for example, the battlemap showing how things are laid out is a part of the fiction. And again I'm going to mention 4e here and how, thanks to how common forced movement is, it makes other versions of D&D feel like acting against a green screen rather than on location because you actively throw people into/onto/over/off the stuff.

I'm a big fan of 4e D&D, and I think combat in 4e feels pretty dynamic.

But some of the issues that @FrogReaver mentions - where the cyclical/stop-motion approach to resolution means that resolution is not truly simultaneous - can come up. The greater number of off-turn actions in 4e reduces this a bit, but it's still there.

Just to given an example: suppose the PCs are defending a tower against an assault from a flying dragon, which is approaching from beneath the battlements. The fighter wants to leap onto the back of the dragon. In 4e, how that resolution is to be handled depends on whether the dragon ends its turn adjacent to the battlements, which means the fighter's player can use a move action to have their PC leap onto the dragon's back; or if instead the dragon moves past the battlements to end its turn some distance away, in which case the player of the fighter has to establish some sort of off-turn ability to perform the leap (eg via a readied action, which in 4e is a standard action).

That's a difference of technical and tactical decision-making, which can significantly affect the outcome. But what does it correspond to in the fiction? Nothing at all.

Contrast, say, Dungeon World, where leaping onto the back of the dragon would (most naturally, I think) be resolved as Defy Danger, and that doesn't depend in any sense on a turn order or technical movement rules. Or contrast Burning Wheel (Revised, not Gold - I'm not across the changes that Gold made to combat positioning), where the dragon's attempt to flyby and breathe would be an attempt to Maintain while the fighter is attempting to Close to the Inside. This is a contested check on Speed (or perhaps Speed vs Power if we adjudicate the fighter's move as a Tackle), and again we don't get the strangeness that FrogReaver is pointing to.

Certainly simultaneous action is not a narrative that follows naturally from the events that occur in D&D combat, because D&D combat is turn-based, not simultaneous. Of course, the turn-based structure of D&D combat is an abstraction, used to allow for simple, orderly action resolution, but meant to represent simultaneous action. And it is entirely possible to derive a narrative of simultaneous action from the events that occur in D&D combat, it just has to be done post-hoc.

Right. Which is the whole point - the tactical decision-making takes place primarily within a purely rules-bound space, with the shared fiction being an output of, but not an input into, that decision-making.

Another consequence, which @FrogReaver might also have in mind, is not about the decision-making process but about outcomes. My experience of this is mostly from Rolemaster. RM has about a billion variant initiative systems in print, and in our game we used one of my devising that grafted aspects of 2nd ed and RMC onto aspects of RMSS. Within a round, resolution was largely simultaneous which avoided a lot of stop-motion issues. But round boundaries were still a thing, and occasionally an outcome would reflect not anything that made sense in the fiction, but there mere fact that a round boundary had been hit (so eg moving 50%, new round, moving 50%, attacking) might produce a different outcome from (moving 100%, new round, attacking) because of how attack/parry splits get redeclared at the beginning of each round, although in the fiction it's not really clear why it should.

It's probably true that all wargame-style, structured resolution systems can produce some oddities vis-a-vis the fiction, but I think hard round boundaries, and modern D&D's turn-by-turn resolution, can contribute to them.

 

[Umbran]

You seem to be really pushing the idea that we can take combat and imagine some fiction that corresponds or coorelates to what happened during the 6 second combat rounds. I've no doubt we can.

It's not enough that some fiction can be established after a 6 second combat round, because if that's all that's happening then that means there's no fiction being established that a player can use to base his decisions on during the combat round.

You can establish a fiction. But the player... can't use that fiction? Why can't they?

Round 1 - some stuff happens, you establish the fiction. Players make their choices for round 2, based on that fiction.

Unless you mean that the player cannot use the fiction in Round 2 to make decisions in Round 2? But that would be nonsensical - if the actions are all simultaneous, there's been no new events since Round 1 - there is no new fiction. All the Round 2 fiction occurs at once - you cannot use that which hasn't yet happened.

 

[FrogReaver]

You can establish a fiction. But the player... can't use that fiction? Why can't they?

Round 1 - some stuff happens, you establish the fiction. Players make their choices for round 2, based on that fiction.

Maybe the first player in initiative for round 2 can - I'm still a bit undecided there. Anyways, see the example below.

Unless you mean that the player cannot use the fiction in Round 2 to make decisions in Round 2? But that would be nonsensical - if the actions are all simultaneous, there's been no new events since Round 1 - there is no new fiction. All the Round 2 fiction occurs at once - you cannot use that which hasn't yet happened.

Let's say in the turn structure for Round 1 goes something like:
PC 1 attacks. PC 2 casts bless.

We then establish the fiction for that round.

Then Round 2 goes like this:
PC 1 falls to 0 hp. PC 2 casts healing word.

And here we can see PC 2's healing word action being based on something that hasn't fictionally happened yet. That is, we've just established that there was no fictional basis for his healing word at the moment the player chose to have the character use it.

How exactly is having the expectation that players should declare actions based on the established fiction nonsensical?

 

[clearstream]

D&D Combat is fictionless. But Frogreaver, "What does that even mean?" It means that D&D combat is incapable of representing combat fiction the way we want to imagine it. The turn structure gets in the way. Instead of having the goblin and fighter charge each other and meet in the middle. Instead we have the fighter carefully plotting out his turn and being careful to only use enough movement so that the goblin in question will need to use it's action to dash to get to him. A wise tactical decision! But that tactical decision has no basis in the actual fiction. The fiction is just that the fighter and goblin charge each other and engage each other in melee combat - I mean no one imagines the fighter advances and then stops, and then the goblin advances and then stops... right? So this wise tactical decision is solely a reflection of 'metagaming the combat turns'. That bugs me. And it's probably going to continue to bug me as I don't really see a possible solution. But it would be really nice if for my combat decisions to be wise and tactical they could be based on the fiction instead of the turn structure.

I think your complaint gets at a fundamental tension we can observe in our grasp of RPG. Do we grasp game as game, and are satisfied that our fictional worlds are as emerges from that abstraction, or do we demand game to be simulation of whatever fictional worlds we have in mind? Most likely we adopt a bit of both.

In the first case, there is a complete fiction - in many ways the truest fiction we could have - which is whatever we read into the symbols forming the unfolding patterns of the game. In the second case, we've made a thorny path for ourselves because I can't think of a game that completely simulates whatever fictional world I have in mind. There are always omissions and the only question is whether those are important to me? Your complaint makes me think you have that second purpose in mind.

It sounds like you care about simultaneous movement. I like the fighter and archer example best. I think there are ways to translate what is represented into your desired fiction, but they are somewhat torturous. It makes sense to me that you'd like the natural reading of the unfolding game pattern to simulate the world you want to imagine. I would say that simultaneous action has been shown to be a difficult problem to solve for tabletop games (and by contrast, quite easy in computer games.) I would be the last person to say "Don't play D&D", but perhaps also try playing something like Dungeon World.

All simulations are necessarily incomplete: the only choice you really have is what trade-offs you find acceptable.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think your complaint gets at a fundamental tension we can observe in our grasp of RPG. Do we grasp game as game, and are satisfied that our fictional worlds are as emerges from that abstraction, or do we demand game to be simulation of whatever fictional worlds we have in mind? Most likely we adopt a bit of both.

In the first case, there is a complete fiction - in many ways the truest fiction we could have - which is whatever we read into the symbols forming the unfolding patterns of the game. In the second case, we've made a thorny path for ourselves because I can't think of a game that completely simulates whatever fictional world I have in mind. There are always omissions and the only question is whether those are important to me? Your complaint makes me think you have that second purpose in mind.

It sounds like you care about simultaneous movement. I like the fighter and archer example best. I think there are ways to translate what is represented into your desired fiction, but they are somewhat torturous. It makes sense to me that you'd like the natural reading of the unfolding game pattern to simulate the world you want to imagine. I would say that simultaneous action has been shown to be a difficult problem to solve for tabletop games (and by contrast, quite easy in computer games.) I would be the last person to say "Don't play D&D", but perhaps also try playing something like Dungeon World.

All simulations are necessarily incomplete: the only choice you really have is what trade-offs you find acceptable.

You've got me thinking that maybe I should separate my thoughts out into 2 distinct but related issues.
1. Basing decisions on something other than established fiction
2. Diverging outcomes based solely on turn order mechanics (presumption always being that combat is occurring simultaneously)

I don't think it really has much to do with simulation. I'm pretty anti-simulationist at heart.

I think the proper form of mechanic to solve these issues is going to look something like this

1. Everyone declares actions
2. Determine order the actions resolved (this part usually requires complex mechanics)
3. Resolve those actions in the determined order (this part actually establishes the fiction as you go)
4. (OPTIONAL) give characters whose actions failed some possibility of doing something else

The devil's in the details for whether this is a workable system that actually solves these issues, but I think it's a starting point.

Side note: I recall Dungeon World being mentioned a few times and I haven't played it but I did check it out once and it didn't seem to fit my tastes.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Maybe the first player in initiative for round 2 can - I'm still a bit undecided there. Anyways, see the example below.


Let's say in the turn structure for Round 1 goes something like:
PC 1 attacks. PC 2 casts bless.

We then establish the fiction for that round.

Then Round 2 goes like this:
PC 1 falls to 0 hp. PC 2 casts healing word.

And here we can see PC 2's healing word action being based on something that hasn't fictionally happened yet. That is, we've just established that there was no fictional basis for his healing word at the moment the player chose to have the character use it.

How exactly is having the expectation that players should declare actions based on the established fiction nonsensical?

Just because a round is six seconds long doesn't mean that each actor within the turn has the same six seconds.

If we assume that Initiative 30 starts on second 0 and ends on second 6 and Initiative 0 starts on second 5.95 and ends on second 11.95 then we have round 2

Second 8 (Initiative 15) the PC falls to 0 hp. Second 10 (Initiative 10) the PC casts healing word.

Where's the problem?