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

[Voadam]

To each their own, I suppose. To me, fumbles happen just like crits do. Why shouldn't both be modeled?

Crits show competence with occasional wild card spectacular competence, on both sides. Fumbles show occasional wild card incompetence on both sides.

If you want to show competent warriors fighting dangerous foes you use crits only. If you want fog of war friendly fire mishaps you use fumbles.

If you want to model Conan and the Gray Mouser you use crits only. If you want occasional random madcap comedy of errors black humor combat scenes you want fumbles.

 

[AlViking]

Then include a confirmation roll, so fumbles don't happen 5% of the time?

I did that for a while long ago by giving a saving throw based on level and class but it wasn't worth the overhead for me. If I were to do it in 5, the save would be based on number of attacks you can get in a round. To put it another way if a commoner has a 5% chance to fumble in any given round of combat a 20th level fighter should have a significantly lower chance. But even if I say they should only fumble on .25% of that .5% they're still going to fumble every 8 or so combats on average. For my games that's once every combat day or two which still feels far too often. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze for me so to speak. Missing is bad enough.

@Lanefan enjoys a very different style of game than I do, which is fine. The more the merrier. I've just never figured out a way to make fumbles add to the game without feeling like it's a penalty for not playing a spellcaster.

 

[Voadam]

I've just never figured out a way to make fumbles add to the game without feeling like it's a penalty for not playing a spellcaster.

4e uses attack rolls for all things that use saves in other D&D and so using fumbles there it is fairly even application across the board.

 

[Lanefan]

Isn't that a bit of a false dichotomy? You present it as a hard binary: either the game features dice and is pure gambling and nothing else, or it doesn't contain dice at all and thus can be some other kind of game. Why can't it include dice, and thus some randomness, without being exclusively a crapshoot?

Because the moment you introduce any randomness you're also introducing the possibility - no matter how small - of something extreme occurring as an outcome of that randomness.

And the existence of that possibility is why supposedly-foregone situations still need to be played out. Otherwise, you're fudging the outcome by denying the possibility of the extreme.

Okay...but if it's "either I lose, or the enemy is so stupid they flub a guaranteed win", I hope you can see how some people would look at that and say, "Alright, let's just wrap it up and move on." I know that hope springs eternal, but sometimes pragmatism, a thing I would think you'd appreciate given your emphasis on mercenary behavior from players, pushes toward...not doing that. Further, a lot of us just...don't really want to wait through that anymore. Maybe when I was half the age I am now, but not current me. Even getting to play the games I truly love is an incredibly rare treat, I don't want to waste that opportunity on something banal and mostly-pointless, whether that be an inevitable loss or an inexorable victory on my part.

Not sure how much you follow baseball, but...

Last season the Chicago White Sox were a bad team. Historically bad. If memory serves, no other team in MLB history has lost as many games in a season as they just did. There's every reason to expect they'll be just as bad this year.

At the same time, the LA Dodgers were a very good team last year; and have since if anything become significantly better.

By your logic here, were the White Sox and Dodgers scheduled to play each other during the coming season a Dodgers sweep would be a foregone conclusion, so why even bother playing those games?

It just don't work that way.

 

[Lanefan]

What sort of thing earns XP, and what doesn't?

Combat, exploration, doing something unique or significant - all earn xp.
Treasure does not, nor does anything out-of-game e.g. bringing snakcs or writing up a long backstory..

Hang on.
What rule is this?

Why would this not be allowed?

Because as written, as far as I can tell, 5e does not assign values to magic items thus making them valueless. Which means, you can give them away but you can't sell or trade them for anything of value.

I think its the concept that a competent, trained combatant, in only a couple of minutes of fighting, is likely to have stabbed the comrade that they are fighting alongside at least once tends to be somewhat jarring to me.

Even worse, a highly skilled warrior stabs their friends more often than a rank novice.

This is a fallacy.

They stab their friends exactly as often as a rank novice, that being on average once per X attacks where X is a) a constant value and b) the same for everyone (assuming proficieny with the weapon in use at the time).

 

[Lanefan]

I dislike critical fumbles because it makes high level fighters look like incompetent clowns. Why is a 20th level fighter fumbling constantly at a rate of at least 4 times more often than a commoner?

Because they're attacking at 4 times the rate of a commoner. The actual rate of fumbles (and crits, for all that) is the same for both.

Why does the wizard never make a mistake?

Wizards (and other casters) shouldn't get this guarantee, and should be able to fumble their spells even if not very often.

 

[zakael19]

XP in "old school" style D&D play works great, because it's generally predominantly XP for treasure which is really a hidden way of saying "xp for creative problem solving" since the rewards are usually behind significant obstacles and you have to get it out of there. In a game focused around narratives, and a ruleset that biases XP towards combat encounters, you have to do some tweaks to fit the play style. Milestone seems to work well there, although you can ofc take the "encounter" rules and start testing the wind for what counts as what and go from there - but honestly that feels like chunked out milestone leveling at the end of the day (that is: unless it's player facing, it's still DM fiat for leveling isn't it).

4e got around this to a degree by the inclusion of the various player-fronted quests that gave clear markers for "when you accomplish this personal/group mission you will get a chunk" and also "SCs=encounters" so the core rules had solid ways for non-treasure non-combat XP (and of course combat remained the primary XP piñata because that's what the core system did best).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Crits show competence with occasional wild card spectacular competence, on both sides. Fumbles show occasional wild card incompetence on both sides.

If you want to show competent warriors fighting dangerous foes you use crits only. If you want fog of war friendly fire mishaps you use fumbles.

If you want to model Conan and the Gray Mouser you use crits only. If you want occasional random madcap comedy of errors black humor combat scenes you want fumbles.

I'm not modeling a particular piece of fiction. I'm modeling a fantasy world where lots of different things can happen.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I did that for a while long ago by giving a saving throw based on level and class but it wasn't worth the overhead for me. If I were to do it in 5, the save would be based on number of attacks you can get in a round. To put it another way if a commoner has a 5% chance to fumble in any given round of combat a 20th level fighter should have a significantly lower chance. But even if I say they should only fumble on .25% of that .5% they're still going to fumble every 8 or so combats on average. For my games that's once every combat day or two which still feels far too often. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze for me so to speak. Missing is bad enough.

@Lanefan enjoys a very different style of game than I do, which is fine. The more the merrier. I've just never figured out a way to make fumbles add to the game without feeling like it's a penalty for not playing a spellcaster.

Spellcasters should absolutely have fumbles too, for spellcasting or anything else that makes sense. I'm not leaving them out.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Because as written, as far as I can tell, 5e does not assign values to magic items thus making them valueless. Which means, you can give them away but you can't sell or trade them for anything of value.

Absence of rules* to adjudicate a specific situation is not the same as the existence of a rule that specifically prohibits it.

Denigrating something by making incorrect statements about it is behaviour that we could do with less of these days. Claiming that 5e would not allow two characters to pass magic items between themselves falls squarely into that category.

*There are rules about the values of magic items: they're in the DMG, for use if the DM wants to use magic shops etc. An actual process for selling and buying them is in Xanathar's think.

This is a fallacy.

They stab their friends exactly as often as a rank novice, that being on average once per X attacks where X is a) a constant value and b) the same for everyone (assuming proficieny with the weapon in use at the time).

Nope. No fallacy. What I said was consistent with observed reality.
Over a period of time, the supremely expert swordsman will make three times as many mistakes as the barely trained beginner. Both are spending those minutes parrying, striking, feinting thrusting etc.
The expert is going to find more openings and land more blows than the novice, but the novice isn't just swinging once every six seconds then stopping.

Think about how that would actually look, if you were watching the fight. This is the concept that I find jarring.