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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5860538" data-attributes="member: 22779">Heh, in the interests of making Umbran happy, I'm going to present my case and let you pick it apart.Why I find 3e combat too static1.  Movement is penalized.  This is perhaps the biggest one, but, moving, particularly at higher levels, is almost always a poor choice.  You lose your iterative attacks if you move.  It is very rare that moving more than a 5 foot step is worth losing half or two thirds of your potential damage.2.  Monsters are doubly penalized by movement.  Monsters don't have iterative attacks, but, even low level monsters as early as CR1 have multiple attacks.  The standard claw/claw/bite routine for most monsters.  And, because of the way monsters are made, their extra attacks are not as penalized as a PC's iterative attacks, meaning that their multiple attacks are more likely to hit.  It's a fairly rare monster that gets one big whammy (although not unheard of).  Most get multiple little whammys that add up in a hurry.  But, if the creature moves, it drops its damage output massively - going from 3 chances to hit down to 1.3.  There are rarely any advantages to moving.  Beyond shifting to flank, why would a character move?  He's already engaged the enemy, so, presumably, it's better to kill this one first than try to move on to something else.  And, "protect the caster" doesn't really work.  There's nothing the fighter can do to stop the baddy from just walking around him, if the DM wants to munch down on caster stew.4.  Most 3e encounters feature very small numbers of opponents.  I base this on multiple modules including nearly a hundred Dungeon adventures.  The overwhelming majority (about 80 % IIRC) of encounters feature 1-3 opponents.  Moving around doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you only have one opponent - where are you moving to?  5.  It is almost always better to gang up on a single target than damage multiple targets.  There are exceptions to this, but, focus fire is almost always the best tactic to use.  Half killing two ogres is far less effective than killing one and leaving one fresh.  So, again, why move?  You get into contact with one baddy and you stick with him until he's no longer breathing.  Shifting targets by moving is most often a poor tactical choice.So, there it is.  There are my 5 reasons why I think 3e combat tends to be static.  Can you get around these issues?  Quite possibly.  If you use a lot of humanoids (no worries about losing multiple attacks until fairly high level), and large numbers of them at a time, you can likely get a more mobile encounter.  Not my personal preferred solution since I like monsters too much.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  But, it should go a long way.</blockquote>

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