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

[Minigiant]

See, this is extremely frustrating.

Because I did this. All throughout both the "D&D Next" and "One D&D" play tests. I voiced my criticisms, I pointed out issues, I correctly predicted many of the things that actually ended up happening.

I remember saying early in D&D Next that having Plate Armor be 18 AC and designing so a commoner can hit a level 20 fighter on a 16 grants no room to grow.

But I was drown out by "Yeah. Small numbers!"

And now, every turn of a PC past level 3 is long and drawn out unless the player or DM goes out their way to speed them up.

The numbers were too small.
We playtested low level too much and not mid and high level... AGAIN
And now it's tedious by accident .

 

[jgsugden]

Honestly I've never seen any part of my rpg playing as acting. Storytelling, maybe. Now from what I've seen when DMGs do try to add how to handle different types of players it has a tendency to fall into som half baked pseudo psychology. Your milage may of course vary.

But what if every combat is dragging? When the fifth ceiling has collapsed to end a combat the players might start wondering about the dungeons structural integrity.
...

If every combat is dragging and you're not seeing any part of your rpg playing as acting ... maybe there is a connection. If you, as a DM, are not infusing character into the combat and you're experiencing drag in every combat ... while many DMs I've worked with in 5E are not experiencing drag in 95% of combats and are adding personality to the enemies in the combat, I'd suggest you're not taking advantage of all anti-drag tools.

I have played many 5E games for a decade, and a decent number under 2024 rules, and I have not been experiencing drag as a player or DM except on rare occasion where a particular monster build and a particular PC design just result in a slap fight. That probably accounts for 2% of combats. If I'm not seeing it, despite a wide experience with many DMs, it must be an avoidable problem ... and seems unlikely to be the default state,

Regardless, 5E is designed to run about 10 to 13 combats per level if you follow the guidance in the books. Most DMs shrink that number by having tougher combats. If you run 20 levels with 12 combats per level, that is 240 combats. You can add tempo, environment, and other features to combats without repeating them in those 240 combats, especially as you get tools to be more diverse as players advance in abilities and gain the ability to adventure underwater, in the air, through the planes, etc...

...Because much of the tedium could from the game designers attempting to meet the aesthetic goals of themselves and their community. So actually play experience takes a hit.

I mean 5es tedium comes from

1. Bounded accuracy bloating HP
2. Bounded Accuracy forces PCs to grow heavily horizontally in combat (bonus actions, weapon mastery, feats,)
3. A rejection of statblock spells causing spells to be easy to forget complex blocks of text
4. Desire to make warriors interesting by giving them more stuff
5. Desire to keep warriors from being overshadowed by casters by giving them more stuff

I mean, if 5e AC went from 10 to 30 base instead of 10 to 20, you could speed up turns just by making warriors just more accurate and heavy and medium armor have higher AC.

If the monsters surviving longer is causing tedium, it could be that you're not making the encounters themselves interesting enough.

If it is the plethora of options that is slowing down combat, I'd suggest working with players to give them a more succinct view of their capabilities. I often provide players that struggle with analysis paralysis a succinct sheet of player that lists the core abilities of their PC without all the rules language embedded. It works for me.

If you needed to buy 5 base books to play D&D, I'd quit - and I think a lot of people would follow on that.

Hell, plenty of games systems get by with one book. We've gotten spoiled by the number of options that D&D has in its "core" rules, sometimes I think to the detriment of onboarding new folks.

You could put it in one $125 book or five $27 books. You could sell them in book sets to keep it at three purchases. The fear of five bindings, while perhaps a cool adventure title, is likely not as relevant as one might think. Separating them physically allows them to be used at the right time in the right way - allowing you to put training books to the side while you have only reference materials in books that get handled at the table.

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.

Characters in a setting are in a story. If you do not grow the story through crafting and effort, it is just a bad story. The story is what adds purpose to the game. That purpose, and the PC interaction with it, is what players tend to remember looking back decades later. They forget (most) of the critical hits, but they remember when they realized their long time ally was a vampire, that the MacGuffin that the paladin was seeking would make the paladin (despite a lack of preparedness) into royalty, that the ally that had been helping them from behind the scenes was not only a famous hero of old ... but one that had become a mind flayer.

This is a main difference between BG3 and other 'RPG' video games. The storytelling is masterful compared to rivals, with great acting, significant impacts from the choices of PCs, and meaningful progression through a narrative that culminates at the end of the campaign ... and then breathes with epilogue to slowly release that connection that grew throughout the game.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't mind it if only because "I attack, I hit, roll damage" takes (or bloody well should take!) a trivial amount of time, meaning the rounds go by fast and the whole combat doesn't take long....unless everyone has bags of hit points you have to chop through.

Spending five minutes doing something incredibly boring is only "better" than spending half an hour doing something incredibly boring if you aren't repeating that five minutes on the regular.

But then in old school playstyles, every fight with three goblins in a corridor is that. Combat becomes a dull chore, not an exciting event.

That's the beauty of early-TSR-era D&D: at low-mid level it's easy to get through three or four or five small-ish combats in a typical session, should that be the situation they're in. Even at very low level, 3e combats took longer; and it quickly got worse as the levels advanced. From what I've read on these forums plus some tales from friends, I'm going to guess things haven't improved much in the editions since.

Well, at least for 4e, the idea was you don't do the "three goblins in a corridor" things as fights. Fights that are meant to be over in a couple minutes are simply too small; there's nothing to sink your teeth into, no set-piece, just another tiny bit of whittled away resources, and then another tiny bit, and then another tiny bit, over and over. Instead, one way to do them that is faster per fight is to collect many of them together as a Skill Challenge, where one of the possible results of failure is needing to get into a nasty brawl with a larger, more dangerous number of foes, especially because this allows grades of success, e.g. each successful step in the SC reduces the enemy forces, meaning narrow failure vs narrow success is a small gap, not a huge one. This means the Skill Challenge is still more involved than what any one or even three of those combats would be, but you're resolving half a dozen of them sequentially in that time, so there is still comparative time savings.

Now, I have learned with time that this solution is simply inadequate and unacceptable for fans of old school play. That's why I have been working (very, very slowly...) on my concept of "Skirmish" rules. Skirmishes are, more or less, "little" combats. You may know that 5th edition has rules for "group skill checks"--they aren't full Skill Challenges like 4e would've done, but they're clearly more than just a single check too. That's more or less the space I'm aiming for, just applied to combats rather than skill checks. A "Skirmish" should be resolved in at most two rounds, because the whole point is to make them fast, snappy, a way to give teeth to the "whittling away resources" element of old-school playstyles that has kind of fallen by the wayside even in 5e.

In my hypothetical "6e that more or less rebuilds 4e by taking lessons from 5e and OSR games", Skirmishes would be the bread-and-butter of a game run primarily focused on OSR play with only rare usage of "proper" combats, and generally uncommon or even quite rare in a more 4e-style game. Other editions' styles would probably involve a mix of both. You could spend a resource (a limited-uses ability, a consumable item, an NPC ally, etc.) to improve your Skirmish Roll, and there might be rare incidental benefits that make you better at Skirmishes (I imagine Fighters being particularly good at them, for example), but by and large they're a one- or two-roll per player affair, and then you move on.

Again, the whole idea with my hypothetical 6e is that it develops actual, functional, good rules that are directly helpful for implementing multiple different playstyles, but which can still be integrated together if the table desires that experience. It's not quite the "modularity" that the "D&D Next" playtest promised, but it's a damn sight closer than the 5e we actually got. Think of it less like rule "modules" and more like rule...."branches." All of the branches are part of the tree. All of them get proportionate resources and attention. None of them are neglected or ghettoized or dismissed as second-rate. In theory, a single campaign could try to use all of them, but it probably would be unwieldy to attempt this without great care.

 

[Retros_x]

In my experience if combat is tedious or not depends more on my encounter design and my narration/moderation skills. I try always to run them under the premise of "roleplay doesn't stop after initiative gets rolled" and I hate the notion that combat is a mini game, different game than the rest. Its just a more granular version of the usual resolution system. Time goes into slow-mo in combat. But its still important to provide the players opportunities for meaningful decisions (roleplay) that have do be done in split-seconds and matter over life and death. Thats the exciting part of combat.

The rules of D&D feel to me like a good mix out of still being open for improvisation and roleplay but also delivering this more granular crunch. 2024 went in some directions that ease up the flow but in some other directions that slow it down. It feels relatively even to me, but I can imagine that it will feel good if we are more fluent with the new rules.

 

[Retros_x]

But then in old school playstyles, every fight with three goblins in a corridor is that. Combat becomes a dull chore, not an exciting event.

Only if you played hack n slash. Even in old school playstyles there exist good and bad games. Good old school IMO don't just let you fight boring encounters repeatedly.

 

[KYRON45]

I don't like seafood. I don't go to seafood restaurants....order seafood and then complain about all the seafood that I've forced myself to eat.
Why are there so many people playing games they don't really like? (rhetorical question in 3..2..) Why do those people spend time in a dedicated thread voicing complaints about what they don't like?
There are like a kajillion* other options. Let some joy into your life and play games that you might like. Then after you play those games spend time in dedicated forums espousing the greatness of those games. No one is ever going to convince D&D players not to play D&D by complaining about it. How do i know? There are people complaining about how bad it is AND playing it at the same time. If they haven't stopped...

D&D combat is what it is. It's a pretty big part of the fabric of the game. If you don't like D&D combat and you play D&D that's like eating a Snickers with an exposed cavity....there will be pain.

*this number may or may not exist.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ditto*, only from quite likely the complete opposite direction to you**. We probably just cancelled each other out.

* - except the predictions piece, I got those all wrong.
** - as in, I expect you'd generally want the design to be more 4e-like where I'd prefer it move much farther away from 4e than it did.

As noted above: I would want it to support both 4e-like play and OSR-like play. I believe this result is perfectly achievable, with the (re)introduction of various rules branches: novice levels, incremental advances, "Skirmishes", Skill Challenges, etc.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Only if you played hack n slash. Even in old school playstyles there exist good and bad games. Good old school IMO don't just let you fight boring encounters repeatedly.

But the explicit description above was that there was nothing more to combat than "I attack, I hit, I deal damage" (or, naturally, "I attack, I miss"), and then immediately moving on to the next player. I was very specifically responding to a description that was nothing more than, as you say, "hack and slash."

However, I am quite willing to engage on other things, because it's always useful to learn about playstyles I don't play, even if they aren't for me. What are the mechanics that make it so that "Good old school [won't] just let you fight boring encounters repeatedly"?

 

[Minigiant]

If every combat is dragging and you're not seeing any part of your rpg playing as acting ... maybe there is a connection. If you, as a DM, are not infusing character into the combat and you're experiencing drag in every combat ... while many DMs I've worked with in 5E are not experiencing drag in 95% of combats and are adding personality to the enemies in the combat, I'd suggest you're not taking advantage of all anti-drag tools.

I have played many 5E games for a decade, and a decent number under 2024 rules, and I have not been experiencing drag as a player or DM except on rare occasion where a particular monster build and a particular PC design just result in a slap fight. That probably accounts for 2% of combats. If I'm not seeing it, despite a wide experience with many DMs, it must be an avoidable problem ... and seems unlikely to be the default state,

Regardless, 5E is designed to run about 10 to 13 combats per level if you follow the guidance in the books. Most DMs shrink that number by having tougher combats. If you run 20 levels with 12 combats per level, that is 240 combats. You can add tempo, environment, and other features to combats without repeating them in those 240 combats, especially as you get tools to be more diverse as players advance in abilities and gain the ability to adventure underwater, in the air, through the planes, etc

I didn't say the game drags.

I said the game is tedious.

The game is tedious because unless your players power game, they are whacking at huge chunks of HP. past level 3.

Then it becomes the onus of the DM to spice up every fight or artificially boost PCs with magic items.

A 2024 Hill giant still has over 100 HP.

5E had a lot of distinct goals. However some of the important aspects of the game that weren't directly linked to one of those goals but link to something else which had a goal suffered.

Are players supposed to power game or get magic items? Or is the DM supposed to "handle it"?

 

[Minigiant]

D&D combat is what it is. It's a pretty big part of the fabric of the game. If you don't like D&D combat and you play D&D that's like eating a Snickers with an exposed cavity....there will be pain.

The issue is that D&D fans have seen some issues with D&D combat for decades.

However...

They don't like "the look" the fixes if you show them.

Other games tend to adapt one or two of these wishes and keep all the unwanted stuff.

So we have this ecosystem of 10 or so popular games with the same 20 or so houserules floating around each table in sets of 3-5.