D&D General D&D Combat is fictionless

[Maxperson]

Well poop.

I was having fun and now see it is only a damn game.

what’s next? Magic is not real?

 

[Maxperson]

Well poop.

I was having fun and now see it is only a damn game.

what’s next? Magic is not real?

Meh. I still have fun. As I said in my first post, it's a necessary thing and I just ignore it, because it's not really changeable in D&D and I want to just have fun playing. Trying to fix it will just make game combats unplayable(as in takes several hours for even a simple combat).

 

[jasper]

Please tell me Horton is a Loxodon.

Who ???? Not a Halfling. Which is unusual for the player.

 

[Charlaquin]

This misses the points. Yes, assume same movement rate. It doesn't matter if some move a bit faster. They aren't going to be moving at more than twice the speed, such that they will move a full 60 feet before fighter can take 1 step.
Even something moving somewhat faster at the same speed rate of 30 will not be able to cross 30 feet before the fighter can begin moving.

I mean, the fighter’s player is free to move towards the door if they want to. It’s just that by the time it’s their turn, they already know the orcs are there, so they aren’t forced to waste their movement on doing so. We can assume the fighter saw the speed with which the orcs were moving and realized immediately that they would get to the door before him.

Let's say that they can move 5-10 feet due to that non-existent in the rules speed difference you are trying to use here. Even with that, the fighter is still now moving towards the exit while that orc is 20 feet away from him and 50 feet from the door. It cannot get to that door before the fighter does.

It’s entirely possible for someone to move twice as quickly as someone else. Since the action is simultaneous in the fiction the orcs must have moved twice as quickly as the fighter in this particular 6 seconds - perhaps due to a burst of adrenaline or something - in order to get to the door first. If the fighter’s player chooses not to move towards the door on their turn, the fighter must have realized the orcs would reach the door before him and decided to do something else.

This explanation is entirely plausible, it’s just post-hoc. Which is how the narrative of D&D combat must be constructed in order to reconcile it with the turn-based rule structure.

There's a reason why the OP says D&D combat and not real life combat. In D&D combat there are rules and the RULES say that both move at the exact same rate of speed. There is no "some move faster" in D&D.

The rules are an abstraction, so there will necessarily be some instances where they are not perfectly reflective of the fiction they abstractly model. It’s entirely possible for the orcs to have moved faster in the narrative despite having the same value in the stat called “speed”, just as it’s possible for a character to narrowly avoid a weapon being swung at them in the narrative, despite the game action called an “attack” having resulted in the game state called a “hit”.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I am just being silly! I love playing and never give a lot of thought to the artificial. I always know th is is very deeply abstracted. Hit points, AC, wounds, turns, rounds….just there to make it manageable and consistent. A game.

that said, I kind of like things that add to uncertainty. Writing down actions secretly and then acting in initiative order would be something I would like to try.

maybe have a mid point where you either continue or write down an amendment or new directive with everyone else?

it’s all good if it’s fun…and I do have fun with it RAW, RAI or optional.

 

[jasper]

I don't like when the game reality has to shift in order to explain things. When the fighter walked into the room(or when the orcs began entering the room from the other side), he would have seen the orcs and if any had been 30 feet in, he wouldn't have just walked up to them all by himself. The positioning of the orcs would have been described to him. He must have seen them farther back. Had he won initiative, what he saw is true and the orcs are farther back, but if he loses suddenly there were orcs close by and able to pass him before he could move.

I don't like when the GAME has to shift to explain your fiction. You remind me of the Brian of the Knights of the Dinner Table who is TRYING hard to force the BOOK FICTION into Game Mechanics. But fiction wise.
Jasper was down to his last torch. Oofta the wise had been eating just three minutes ago by a gelationus cube. His last words were, "I hate Jello!". He turn the knob on the final door.
Oscar the orc and his Seameme gang of orcs had heard something about Jello that woke them from their slumber. He was hungry and had eaten Snickers the Thief twelve hours ago. He notice the knob to the barracks turning.
Jasper opens the door and sees thousands of orc.
Narrator of you beloved narrator voice. "Actually it was only 30 hungry orcs."
Jasper paused and his life past in front of him. Oscar charged and yelled "Charge" As he pass the dumbstruck meal.
The orcs ate well.
See fiction where the orcs get initiative and lunch.

 

[Maxperson]

I mean, the fighter’s player is free to move towards the door if they want to. It’s just that by the time it’s their turn, they already know the orcs are there, so they aren’t forced to waste their movement on doing so.

Yes. I'm aware of how the incredibly unrealistic rules work.

 

[Voadam]

No. He's absolutely correct. There's no way to reconcile the following with any sort of fiction.

Two sides stand ready. Neither is surprised. A lone fighter stands 30 feet from the lone exit from the room. 60 feet further into the room are 30 orcs.

This seems the point of time where initiative is rolled.

He has decided to run and didn't spend any time waffling on that decision. Unfortunately for the fighter, he lost initiative to the orcs by 1. All 30 not only move 30 feet before the ready fighter can move, but they dash for a total of 60 feet of movement, cutting him off from the exit before he can take 1 step. In a realistic fictional combat, that's just not possible.

This seems to be imposing intent over the randomness of determining initiative. I might rephrase the fiction here to be "He has decided to run and didn't spend any time waffling on that decision. Unfortunately for the fighter, the orcs moved quicker and surrounded him before he put his decision into action."

No. No they weren't. Like at all. They move at exactly the same rate as the fighter and were 60 feet from the door. The fighter who was ready to move immediately was 30 feet from the door. All 30 orcs could not be faster than the fighter at reaching that door. It's not possible. It's simply an absurdity of turn based combat that is necessary so that combats can run relatively smoothly.

If they all reacted and moved simultaneously at the same rate of speed it does not seem like the orcs could get past him.

If they did not all react and act simultaneously it is a different situation. A hesitation in acting, someone reacting slower is not an absurdity for the fiction.

I don't like when the game reality has to shift in order to explain things. When the fighter walked into the room(or when the orcs began entering the room from the other side), he would have seen the orcs and if any had been 30 feet in, he wouldn't have just walked up to them all by himself. The positioning of the orcs would have been described to him. He must have seen them farther back. Had he won initiative, what he saw is true and the orcs are farther back, but if he loses suddenly there were orcs close by and able to pass him before he could move.

Backtracking and changing position retroactively seems unnecessary here.

The fighter is 30 feet in a room and there are a bunch of orcs 30 feet farther in. Everybody sees everybody, so no surprise. Things go south and initiative is rolled. So everybody then reacts to either flee out the door or cut off that escape. Initiative seems to match up to who reacts quicker to things turning bad and effecting that into action.

You can reasonably quibble about orcs moving 60 feet before the fighter reacts being farther than you would expect in this fictional scenario, but I think it is only a quibble about specifics of distance and speed.

 

[clearstream]

I don't like when the game reality has to shift in order to explain things. When the fighter walked into the room(or when the orcs began entering the room from the other side), he would have seen the orcs and if any had been 30 feet in, he wouldn't have just walked up to them all by himself. The positioning of the orcs would have been described to him. He must have seen them farther back. Had he won initiative, what he saw is true and the orcs are farther back, but if he loses suddenly there were orcs close by and able to pass him before he could move.

1. As we make choices and roll dice, we discover more about how things are. The fighter aimed not to waffle, but he really did roll lower initiative. Of the possible worlds he might have found himself in, he turned out to be in one in which the orcs were faster.

2. No one at the table knew which world the fighter would be in, prior to that d20 hitting the table, but they could have known which worlds were possible. They could have used class features like Mantle of Inspiration or Maneuvering Attack. Using those features might have been justified upon considering more about the game state.

3. Games as mechanisms yield phase spaces. We can feel vexed that our fighter in that square located so very close to the door couldn't make it there before the orcs, but the phase space included other dimensions. They play a part in our narrative, too.

I'm not sure if that is clear! In a way, our complaint is that initiative shouldn't trump grid, and we are vexed because initiative does sometimes trump grid. If we said that our picture of the world includes both grid (precise, definite) and initiative (uncertain), then we may be open to any fiction that emerges. As I think you alluded to, we might have to gloss over some rough edges, but our brain does that for us all the time. It's part of why suspension of disbelief is so important. A viable way to solve @FrogReaver's problem may be simply to adjust our expectations so that we don't feel jarred out of SoD by initiative telling us something different, than grid alone.

 

[Maxperson]

This seems to be imposing intent over the randomness of determining initiative. I might rephrase the fiction here to be "He has decided to run and didn't spend any time waffling on that decision. Unfortunately for the fighter, the orcs moved quicker and surrounded him before he put his decision into action."

This here is the entire problem. It's IMPOSSIBLE under those circumstances for that to happen in any sort of realistic combat system. D&D combat rules are borked, but necessary. Yes the highly unrealistic situation where the orcs win initiative and all run 60 feet before the fighter can move one foot forward is allowed by the D&D combat rules. We get that.