D&D (2024) Is Combat Tedious on Purpose?

[Voadam]

For the people who don't like combats that just go: I attack, I hit, roll damage, I wonder how you all would feel about this kind of system if each attack might be lethal. I mean most modern fire fights are just people shooting at each other until someone gets hit. It doesn't sound all that exciting but I'm guessing (I've never been in a live fire fight) the people involved are pretty stressed about it.

I think that raises a different problem.

Some games have a lot of one shot death potential and they make combat much more tense with big consequences. Low level D&D particularly older D&D, lots of save or die in old D&D or potential rocket tag in high level 3e, WFRP unless you are designed as a really tough armored skill focus warrior, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, etc.

For many this takes a bunch of the fun out of combat and makes it something you want to avoid unless you are doing a big ambush or you know you really outclass your foes.

Tastes vary and some love this. I started with B/X and 1e and low level was easy to die through die rolls even doing everything in a skilled play fashion. Just check out the samples of play in Moldvay Basic and see how many of the party dies. Same in the 1e DMG with the gnome and ghouls.

Some love the Dungeon Crawl Classics 0-level funnels though where each player starts with four peasants and ends up with one first level character.

Others like me want to play action hero fantasy where combat is like a martial arts movie, engaging and exciting and fun with back and forth momentum without a significant risk of random death for a protagonist that ends the story prematurely.

 

[Stalker0]

I have not found 5E combat tedious and rarely, if ever, have I run into the issue of it being a slog.

Yeah I do think we have to get our terms straight in these discussions.


To me, tedious is the notion that a round of combat is going very slowly. Therefore I as a player have to wait a long time to my next turn, but the fight itself is still intense or impactful.

I think of a slog as....there is no point to this fight anymore. The enemy no longer provides any credible threat, the fight is basically already over its just going through the motions.


Slogs can often be resolved through DM resolutions (the minions abandon the boss, a surrender, etc). Tedium is either more a mechanics scenario (just takes that long to make a decision and execute that decision in the mechanics) or a player concern (everyone has that player that is just slow as dirt no matter how simple the system is).

I will also say that the feeling of tedium is going to be heavily impacted by the number of players in your group. If you have 3-4 players in a combat, they go quite a bit faster than if you have 5 or 6 players. And 7....god help you, I will never run 7 players again its just so slow.

 

[Umbran]

For the people who don't like combats that just go: I attack, I hit, roll damage, I wonder how you all would feel about this kind of system if each attack might be lethal.

For me, the lethality isn't the issue. The repetition is the issue, as repetition does not call for meaningful input or decisions by the player. Making it lethal makes that... worse, really. Now it is a risk that the character faces, but which the player is just waiting to see the resolution without meaningful input.

That "real life" sometimes falls out this way does not make it interesting at the game table.

D&D, and other games, can tend to fall into "basic attack, roll damage" repetition when that basic attack is pretty much the optimal choice. If other choices don't exist, have perceived poor chances of changing the situation in the player's favor, or require too high an investment of resources for the perceived gain, the incentive becomes the uninteresting "lather, rinse, repeat" combat mode.

And incentivizing a mode that doesn't engage the player isn't great.

 

[tetrasodium]

For the people who don't like combats that just go: I attack, I hit, roll damage, I wonder how you all would feel about this kind of system if each attack might be lethal. I mean most modern fire fights are just people shooting at each other until someone gets hit. It doesn't sound all that exciting but I'm guessing (I've never been in a live fire fight) the people involved are pretty stressed about it.

Dcc , many osr games snd I think shadowdark∆ have that as one of their core tenants. The focus on play tends to be on how the journey/dungeon crawl gets cracked. Combat tends to be a totally different but of creative problem solving that sits nowhere near 5e style trading blows in those.

∆ only played it once for a low level one shot

 

[Quickleaf]

Yeah I do think we have to get our terms straight in these discussions.


To me, tedious is the notion that a round of combat is going very slowly. Therefore I as a player have to wait a long time to my next turn, but the fight itself is still intense or impactful.

I think of a slog as....there is no point to this fight anymore. The enemy no longer provides any credible threat, the fight is basically already over its just going through the motions.


Slogs can often be resolved through DM resolutions (the minions abandon the boss, a surrender, etc). Tedium is either more a mechanics scenario (just takes that long to make a decision and execute that decision in the mechanics) or a player concern (everyone has that player that is just slow as dirt no matter how simple the system is).

I will also say that the feeling of tedium is going to be heavily impacted by the number of players in your group. If you have 3-4 players in a combat, they go quite a bit faster than if you have 5 or 6 players. And 7....god help you, I will never run 7 players again its just so slow.

My experience is D&D's initiative system fails to scale up well for larger groups – even if there's inevitable increase in handling time with more players, the initiative system really exacerbates that.

My read is that the more an initiative system is about individual thinking (as opposed to team thinking) & the more that system actively thwarts teamwork & the more that system is obsessed with rolling for every creature individually & the more that system gets interrupted by reactions... then the more that tedium is exacerbated.

Side initiative CAN work to mitigate, but it won't necessarily work without GM action...and can create its own problems.

Examples of tricks I've used that have mitigated that exacerbation (not prevented it entirely), while still maintaining individual initiative rolls, include...

• Change the needlessly complex 5e surprise rules (where initiative is tracked during "surprise round" such that someone might no longer be surprised if their initiative comes up before an ambusher's initiative)
• Players can opt to combine multiple PCs under single initiative roll (e.g. if they already have a plan in mind)
• Clustering player groups when PCs have no monsters between them – and being willing to intermingle "player turns" when they are clustered together (e.g. fighter rushes away, wizard fireballs, fighter shoots bow)
• Display initiative (visible to all players) showing PC clusters & use color/indents to clearly denote PCs vs monsters
• 1-minute football huddle among players to devise team strategy after initiative is rolled, but before combat starts
• Players always win initiative ties
• Devising "mob" methods of handling/rolling for large groups of monsters
• Saving monsters with Reactions for special combats (and in large groups of monsters either outright removing monster Reactions OR consolidating them into a Group Reaction)
• Limiting opportunity attacks to certain PCs/monster types – NOT a universal ability for all creatures

 

[Micah Sweet]

By this standard, 5e's honeymoon ended shortly after it was published.

Personally, I consider the "honeymoon phase" to be the period where discussion is almost totally dominated by effusive praise. For 5e, that period lasted about six years. Because, let me tell you, as a critic of 5e? That period was almost unbearable. For a while we couldn't go two months without someone posting yet another "golly gee willikers, I just can't get over how amazeballs perfect 5e is, let's talk about it!" Toward the end of that 6-year period, it did taper off a bit, but then you had people basically reacting to that tapering off by being all "suddenly folks aren't showering 5e with every praise-word known to man and some unknown to us, let's fix that!", but that period was (thankfully) short-lived.

Once Tasha's came out, it became possible to criticize 5e at all, without getting dogpiled by the people insisting how utterly amazing every part of it was. Once the (as always, incredibly stupidly-named) "One D&D" playtest was revealed to the world, it actually became possible to engage people on that criticism. I distinctly remember, sometime around 2018-2019, having discussions on this very forum where folks INSISTED that the 5e DMG was one of the greatest DMGs ever written, and moreover that anyone who said otherwise had an "agenda" or something ridiculous like that. Like literally casting aspersions at the very thought of criticizing it.

Now? Oh, now we get folks using what I've heard called the "slow breakup" technique, where things near-instantly flipped from "there are no problems" to "ugggggh can we PLEASE stop talking about those problems that everyone has always recognized???" In other words, we skip from denying there is any problem at all, to rejecting further discussion because it's pointless, without passing through that crucial (but, for fans, unpleasant) middle step of ever actually talking about the problems.

You know I have no problem criticizing something I feel is worth criticizing, but at this point, as far as getting WotC to make changes to their game, it kinda is pointless in my estimation. The corporation made its choice. At least there's enough disunity among those interested in discussing 5.5 now that you're unlikely to get another round of "2024 5e is so perfect we will allow no dissent".

 

[Micah Sweet]

D&D is a role playing game. Characters are playing characters in a story. The story has to be told well to keep it interesting - and that requires controlling things like tempo in the narrative.

I would argue against your claim that D&D is about playing characters in a story. Rather, I've always seen the game as playing characters in a setting, interacting with each other and the world through their PC's thoughts and actions. Story may or may not come out of that interaction looking back.

 

[Zardnaar]

Those of you who have played a lot of 2024e, how badly does the Topple mastery slow down the game? Forcing a saving throw on every hit seems like a recipe for trouble. I've only played a bit of the new rules and only at low levels, so I haven't seen it be a problem, but I can imagine it starting to really gum up the works once fighters start getting 3 or 4 attacks per round.

I suspect it's build dependent. Barbarian has it and it's not firing that often due to death.

That's level 3 though. With hee via gwm and extra attack at 5th......

He got a 52 hp crit the other day (10d6+5 damage).

Level 12 test game we had to have multiple stats for attack vs hew vs cleave.

 

[Umbran]

You know I have no problem criticizing something I feel is worth criticizing, but at this point, as far as getting WotC to make changes to their game, it kinda is pointless in my estimation.

I agree. This is a thing with every edition of the game that has ever been published - really, any edition of any game that has ever been published in print form.

By the time you have the book, it is too late for criticism looking for substantive change. The publishing timeline is just too darned long and expensive to expect them to change the game as printed.

Like, just above, someone's noting how initiative doesn't scale well. And they may have a point. But there is zero chance that, even if they hear you and kind of agree, they are going to rewrite the entire action economy at this point to handle that issue. It is what it is.

Criticism of the books expecting them to change the game is kind of like criticizing a movie, expecting them to re-shoot and re-edit it and put a new version into theaters. It isn't happening.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is a thing with every edition of the game that has ever been published - really, any edition of any game that has ever been published in print form.

By the time you have the book, it is too late for criticism looking for substantive change. The publishing timeline is just too darned long and expensive to expect them to change the game as printed.

Like, just above, someone's noting how initiative doesn't scale well. And they may have a point. But there is zero chance that, even if they hear you and kind of agree, they are going to rewrite the entire action economy at this point to handle that issue. It is what it is.

Criticism of the books expecting them to change the game is kind of like criticizing a movie, expecting them to re-shoot and re-edit it and put a new version into theaters. It isn't happening.

I quite agree, but it can be worthwhile if alternatives to the official rules are available, be they 3pp material, homebrew, or different but similar games (or all three). The issue IMO is when there are complaints, but only official changes are acceptable to the complaining party. In that situation I see the argument as pointless outside of venting (which not everyone doing this says is their reason).