D&D General D&D Combat is fictionless

[Lyxen]

This is my biggest complaint about the game for as long as I can remember.

We can spend an entire gaming session deeply immersed in the story and the setting, vibing off of each other in character, telling an awesome story of betrayal and revenge, dragons and sorcery...

...and all that carefully-crafted suspense and tension goes right out the window as soon as we roll for initiative. Now we hard-shift from storytelling to some weird board game, where everyone argues over minutiae, complains about (Dis)Advantage, and counts squares on a battle mat over and over again for a solid hour.

I played exactly the same way you did with BECMI and A&D for Decades and never had much problem because with a bit of mental flexibility, TotM combat can really be a prolongation of storytelling, although a bit more formal. And I also enjoyed 3e when it came out, because at least with had consistent rules that covered many cases. But we also realised the same thing that you did, that it took too much of our storytelling/roleplaying time.

Please, don't take this as a criticism of people who like the more (board)gaming part of the game, it's fine to like it, it's just that out preferences run elsewhere.

Anyway, after 3e and pathfinder, 4e was probably the worst for us, because the formalism was extreme and the world limited in possibilities. But 5e brought us back full circle to what we could do before, and now we are really happy, as we have the rules more consistent than before 3e and still tons of freedom to continue the story even while fighting, without spending hours on each fight.

It's gotten better since 5th Edition came out (Pathfinder was the worst I'd seen), but it's still a bit too board-gamey for my tastes. I'm always on the hunt for ways to streamline the "combat mini-game" so that it doesn't pull so much focus.

For us, it's all about limiting the players' involvement in someone else's turn, works really well.

 

[Maxperson]

So, with cyclical initiative, to have initiative on Round 2, the orcs also had it on Round 1. Which means the fighter could have left in Round 1, but chose not to. In the fiction, then, he is already purposefully delaying his exit, which explains why he can't get away now - he waited too long.

Round 1 would have been a surprise round with the entering orcs not expecting the fighter to be there, nor the fighter expecting the orcs to walk in. Both sides surprised due to not being aware of the danger of the other side. Stealth is not the only way for surprise to happen. You just have to be unaware of the danger.

 

[Maxperson]

I thought the point was that this was happening on round 1?

Either it was round 1 or round 1 was surprise for both sides. Either way...

 

[pemerton]

I don't se any "solutions" in this thread that doesn't lean toward my first option.

I think that more than one posters has mentioned Dungeon World.

Actually, lots of arguments in this thread feel kind of weird to me, for example moving away from turn based combat. That has been one of the core system mechanisms in D&D for 40+ years. So why play D&D if one doesn't like the core system? There are lots of both old and new games that has different mechanical premises and solutions.

D&D has not always had turn-by-turn initiative in the 3E fashion; and has not always used the sort of precision-of-positioning that is at the heart of some of @FrogReavers's concerns.

Classic D&D "side"-based initiative, where characters who are in melee have extreme limitations on their ability to move, helps reduce some of the issues. (Not all of them - I think a version of @Maxperson's Orc-door-swarm might still happen, depending on how a particular table interprets the always under-defined rules for being engaged in melee.) In AD&D, the only way to close and attack in the same round is via a charge, which then triggers weapon-length rule, which makes it a bit clearer what happens if a fighter wants to close and attack a goblin archer.

A variant initiative system for Classic D&D, developed from Swords & Spells, can be found here: https://www.grey-elf.com/philotomy.pdf. It might solve some of FrogReaver's problems, but I don't know if it's workable for 5e D&D.

what are the best systems that really handle combat in very abstract ways in very few rolls? Those may be worth looking into for a change of pace.

Two of the systems I'm actively playing do this: Prince Valiant and Burning Wheel. (Burning Wheel has a variety of options for resoling interpersonal violence, depending on the degree of detail of resolution desired by the game participants; in this way it resembles the simple/extended contest framework of HeroWars/Quest. In this post I'm referring to the Bloody Versus subsystem.)

Both use opposed checks. Bloody Versus is a single opposed check. There are rules for modifying the check based on gear and circumstances. BW also has robust rules for augments (eg increasing my Sword skill, when fighting an opponent in a castle, with my Castle-wise skill, reflecting my character's familiarity with the twists and turns of castles). Roughly speaking, whoever wins the check inflicts an injury on their opponent that depends on the degree of success, and also has the loser at their mercy. (That last bit is a special instance of the general principle in Burning Wheel that resolution should be final.)

Prince Valiant permits resolution of a fight in a similar fashion, and this is its canonical procedure for resolving a joust. But for something less like a formal duel or contest and more like an all-in-brawl or a fight to the death, it has an extended procedure: the margin of victory on the first check is a penalty to the loser's dice pool; then another round is resolved; and this continues until the fight is resolved. Attempts to do things other than fight - eg use tricky swordplay, or dive for cover, run away, etc - are resolved ad hoc by setting an appropriate difficulty for the appropriate check (normally either Agility or Dexterity). There is no action economy: the GM calls for checks as the fiction and the momentum of play dictate.

Tactics of the boardgame sort aren't relevant in either of these resolution systems, but tactics of the Napoleonic sort can be relevant in that they can be the basis for the granting of bonuses or the infliction of penalties.

 

[Charlaquin]

Round 1 would have been a surprise round with the entering orcs not expecting the fighter to be there, nor the fighter expecting the orcs to walk in. Both sides surprised due to not being aware of the danger of the other side. Stealth is not the only way for surprise to happen. You just have to be unaware of the danger.

A creature is surprised if it isn’t aware that combat is happening. And no, stealth isn’t the only way to achieve that, but if neither side is aware combat is happening… then combat just actually isn’t happening yet. You roll initiative when at least one party initiates hostile action, which can’t happen if neither side is aware of the other.

 

[Maxperson]

A creature is surprised if it isn’t aware that combat is happening. And no, stealth isn’t the only way to achieve that, but if neither side is aware combat is happening… then combat just actually isn’t happening yet. You roll initiative when at least one party initiates hostile action, which can’t happen if neither side is aware of the other.

Combat is not required. Threat is.

"Any character or monster that doesn't notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter."

Neither side noticed the other until the monsters entered the room. The combat, since the sides are hostile, would involve initiative rolls as soon as the monsters entered the room. If the monsters win initiative, the situation I described could occur.

 

[Charlaquin]

Combat is not required. Threat is.

"Any character or monster that doesn't notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter."

You aren’t threatened by another party that isn’t aware of you yet.

Neither side noticed the other until the monsters entered the room. The combat, since the sides are hostile, would involve initiative rolls as soon as the monsters entered the room.

Just because both sides are hostile towards each other doesn’t automatically mean initiative needs to be rolled. Someone still needs to initiate hostile action.

If the monsters win initiative, the situation I described could occur.

I don’t deny that your situation could occur if the monsters win initiative, just that a round would pass first where both parties are surprised. Though I suppose it makes little practical difference whether it’s round 1 and no one was surprised or it’s round 2 after a round 1 where everyone was surprised.

 

[Maxperson]

You aren’t threatened by another party that isn’t aware of you yet.

You think monsters that walk into a room with a fighter aren't aware of him and vice versa?

Just because both sides are hostile towards each other doesn’t automatically mean initiative needs to be rolled. Someone still needs to initiate hostile action.

No. No it doesn't require a hostile action. Just the threat of one. If it pans out, there's a fight. If they decide to talk through the threat, there might not be. But by RAW the only requirement is a threat, not a hostile action.

I don’t deny that your situation could occur if the monsters win initiative, just that a round would pass first where both parties are surprised. Though I suppose it makes little practical difference whether it’s round 1 and no one was surprised or it’s round 2 after a round 1 where everyone was surprised.

Which is why I responded to Frogreaver that "either way..."

 

[Mordhau]

Turn based combat does tend to create weird situations.

Rogue on his turn dashes around the corner and hides.
Monster on it's turn pursues the rogue and runs around the same corner and can't find the rogue, because the rogue resolved it's entire turn at once when in reality the rogue fleeing and the monster pursuing would have been happening pretty much simultaneously.

My experience is that this kind of thing tends to break down along two lines.

The first group will overrule things in the name of the fiction when the abstractions of the rules do not make sense.

The second group will ignore the fiction because the rules and the rules (and they like the minigame of combat for it's own sake, and possibly even the fact that is provides a break from thinking about the fiction)

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Turn based combat does tend to create weird situations.

Rogue on his turn dashes around the corner and hides.
Monster on it's turn pursues the rogue and runs around the same corner and can't find the rogue, because the rogue resolved it's entire turn at once when in reality the rogue fleeing and the monster pursuing would have been happening pretty much simultaneously.

My experience is that this kind of thing tends to break down along two lines.

The first group will overrule things in the name of the fiction when the abstractions of the rules do not make sense.

The second group will ignore the fiction because the rules and the rules (and they like the minigame of combat for it's own sake, and possibly even the fact that is provides a break from thinking about the fiction)

I would suggest a third line, which is how it works at my table: The players continue the roleplaying and fiction out of the premisses of D&D mechanics. The mechanics is part of the D&D fiction. Your example with the rogue doesn't break suspension of disbelief, since that is part of the premisses for how a story is told in D&D.

When my players talk about a session, they make no difference about non-combat and combat scenes. A fun dialogue with an interesting npc, exploring the creepy temple or that the rogue has just enough movement to get around that corner and hide are no different in a fictional sense - it is all part of the fiction or narrative that is specific to D&D.