5e combat system too simple / boring?
- Thread starter Dom de Dom
- Start date
Zardnaar
Legend
Bit bored myself but that's a generic thing. Takes me around 5 years to get sick of an edition and it's coming up 8 years.
Lyxen
Great Old One
As we are always playing with new characters at new levels and actually have very few combats but in interesting specific circumstances, it's not boring at all, and it is still blindingly fast, which is a fantastic quality. I certainly don't want to inject anything that would slow it down.
clearstream
(He, Him)
I've found a few things make a large difference.
1) Mixed types of foes are far more interesting than all one type.
2) It is crucial to include foes that can impose conditions and similar effects, rather than just deal damage.
3) Foes must do more than stand and swing.
Essentially, you want to make full use of the many ways 5e offers for foes to collaborate and deal out meaningful consequences. As DM, it's up to you what types of foes are encountered and what their abilities are. For instance, 3x CR 1 Xvart Warlocks tweaked to have lance of lethargy for their eldritch blasts, working with 3x CR2 Orogs, is a Hard encounter for a typical level 5 party. The xvarts should have mage armor running, and pre-cast expeditious retreat if the situation allows it. Perhaps swap the Orog's great axes for shields and battleaxes. What will make this fight interesting is how you use lance. It can slow down retreats and advances. Pin fragile characters. And so on.
I think tailoring foes is intended, and doing it using features already in the game doesn't seem like house ruling to me. For example, a foe whose cry delivers levels of exhaustion? That's from a published adventure. Levels of exhaustion are very consequential. But if you want to avoid even tweaking, then it's a matter of choosing your foes carefully. A beholder with it's antimagic eye-ray, working with a bunch of drow scouts, for instance. The floating beholder suppresses party magic, and the scouts fire from levitated positions 100+ feet away. The goal isn't just to make deadly encounters, but to make interesting problems with consequential results. After the first PC goes down, the beholder gets around to telling the survivors what it wants from them.
Foes should be repositioning, reconsidering their options, hiding, fleeing, begging, threatening and so on, throughout the fight. A foe scoring a critical hit might offer a chance for the party to back down. One that finds themselves outnumbered might run for more help. DM says how the tides of battle matter. What happens because the paladin critted with smite and dealt a massive amount of damage? Most foes should not be unaffected by such things, even if they're not the one taking that damage.
clearstream
(He, Him)
For me that's probably the core fault in 5e combat. Whack-a-mole healing. In my campaign I'm using "grievous" weapons that prevent healing for a round, and inflict lingering injuries on crits. I'm also considering making healing word unavailable.
UngeheuerLich
Legend
Never experienced whack a mole. But making healing word depending on hit dice could help.
Lyxen
Great Old One
The thing is that there is a really good reason for this, and it's called having fun. It's all well and good to say that whack-a-mole healing is... s what exactly, it violates the verisimilitude that some DM want ? But in the end, when you are a player, sitting for hours and doing nothing because your character is unconscious is not fun at all. It's a game, and should be played mostly for fun.
And actually, at our tables, with very experienced players, there is not a lot of whack-a-mole healing, because it's very inefficient and leaves characters close to 0, and therefore in danger of being wiped out very quickly again, in particular at high level with AoE flying all over the place and damaging powers. So our groups use this to save people, but it's also a signal that something might turn badly in the encounter. And because we have few encounters, but usually on the very deadly side (we just narrate the small encounters with some resource impact), our groups almost always envision a change of tactics, including withdrawing / fleeing.
And in that context, healing word is really good, it does not allow to keep fighting forever, but it's really good at leaving no-one behind, which is a great purpose.
I perma*-killed 2 level 17 PCs last Tuesday (fight continues this afternoon), albeit the group did split the party and have all the casters fly up and meet the BBEG & his eldritch minions 200' up on the Tower of Evil's balcony, leaving all the party tanks down below....
*One PC burned to ash by lambent witchfyre, one PC killed by moon nymphs, then her body meteor-swarmed by the PC Wizard. The latter may be Reincarnated as an animal, though (player has erased her PC sheet so no coming back for the PC).
Jacob Lewis
Ye Olde GM
Due to recent internet discussions and the transitive property, we can now confirm that D&D is either 90% or 50% simple/boring, depending on who you ask.
