5e combat system too simple / boring?

[Celtavian]

This hasn't been my experience. Time sensitive quests and incentivizing pushing onward, plus solid design of challenges, is both easy and fun.

The person you responded to was wanting the players to feel the risk of death. It's not easy to get that feel in 5E, at least past the early levels in my experience. Then again we've had this back and forth many times, the players in my group optimize in nearly every way more often than yours because you have stated you feel that level of optimization harms the play experience for your group. That is likely why our experiences differ greatly.

My point being that the rules say being dropped to 0, for example, isn't anything necessarily gruesome. People are describing things in gruesome ways and then getting a disconnect when the PC is back up and at it fairly quickly after a rest. The issue is describing things in that fashion, which is easily corrected.

And even if the DM wants to implement broken limbs or the like, this is also handled by the basic rules (or the optional rules in the DMG). If a character with a broken arm tries to do something that would normally be successful, it enters the realm of the uncertain or the impossible. For the former, we have ability checks, perhaps with disadvantage, or higher DCs.

The poster you responded to wants that feel. D&D has never had it without optional rules. Changing descriptions to make them less graphic does not solve his problem.

 

[iserith]

While I think that describing and narrating well is a good skill to have, I think the design of the challenge is far more important. In my view, you can't expect to grab a handful of creatures out of the Monster Manual and have it turn into a compelling, engaging scene on its own. Though sometimes that can be enough, the environment, the stakes, opportunities, trade-offs, and the ties between the characters and the scene all need to be considered and designed well to make the challenging interesting. The system just helps you resolve uncertainty as the players engage with that challenge.

 

[iserith]

The person you responded to was wanting the players to feel the risk of death. It's not easy to get that feel in 5E, at least past the early levels in my experience. Then again we've had this back and forth many times, the players in my group optimize in nearly every way more often than yours because you have stated you feel that level of optimization harms the play experience for your group. That is likely why our experiences differ greatly.

I have groups that optimize. I have groups that don't. I've had no issue with either. The DM controls the difficulty of the challenge. Increase the difficulty to increase the risk of death.

The poster you responded to wants that feel. D&D has never had it without optional rules. Changing descriptions to make them less graphic does not solve his problem.

I disagree. I think all of this is easily handled under the basic rules. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers actions, sometimes calling for checks when the result is uncertain. It's trivial to do so while keeping in mind that a character has a broken leg or whatever.

 

[Reinhart]

Just to chime in again. 4e gets a lot of flack for grinding to a halt in later levels. And while that is very much my experience too, looking into the underlying system math revealed that the reason for this isn't purely about complex game mechanics. No, there were just a number of math errors that gradually made every PC and monster require more and more attacks just to get the job done.

The way 4e was set up, Monster and PC HP scaled proportionate to each other. Monster and PC damage scaled somewhat proportionate to each other too. While this meant that the on level fights stayed at about the same difficulty, it creates some bad system design implications down the road. Instead, expected Monster HP should have scaled proportionately to PC damage, and Monster damage should have scaled proportionately with expected PC hp. That didn't happen. HP for both sides grew at a rate that gradually dwarfed damage. As a result, you could survive more rounds of damage before being endangered, but you needed more and more rounds to deal with any given monster. Unfortunately, the main way players chose to counter this deficit was to exploit the off-turn attacks and complex power interactions that slowed down turns.

The point being that game mechanics do have an influence in the pacing of combat, but complexity can sometimes be a bit of a red-herring. Anyway, 5e isn't immune to proportional scaling problems either, but since it erred on simplicity and higher damage you can expect that regardless of how combat resolves, it'll probably be over pretty quickly.

 

[Celtavian]

I have groups that optimize. I have groups that don't. I've had no issue with either. The DM controls the difficulty of the challenge. Increase the difficulty to increase the risk of death.

It's more difficult in 5E than past editions that had more potent killing spells and critical hits. If you're coming from 4E, maybe you don't see it. I have no idea what edition you just came from. Coming from 3E/Pathfinder, it was a lot easier to die and lot more risky than 5E has proven to be at any point. This is by design.

I disagree. I think all of this is easily handled under the basic rules. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers actions, sometimes calling for checks when the result is uncertain. It's trivial to do so while keeping in mind that a character has a broken leg or whatever.

If I were doing a broken leg in 5E, especially a compound fracture, it would be something that affected them all the time. Movement slowed to a crawl. Disadvantage on attack rolls and advantage on attack rolls against. It wouldn't be pretty. D&D has never been built for this type of gritty play in a group environment. It slows down the group and the game. That's why rules covering this type of material have been optional in every edition.

 

[iserith]

It's more difficult in 5E than past editions that had more potent killing spells and critical hits. If you're coming from 4E, maybe you don't see it. I have no idea what edition you just came from. Coming from 3E/Pathfinder, it was a lot easier to die and lot more risky than 5E has proven to be at any point. This is by design.

I played D&D 3.Xe for 8 years, followed by 7 years of D&D 4e. (I still play the latter on occasion.) Now I chiefly play D&D 5e. I've killed my fair share of 5e characters, including higher-level ones. My 11th-level campaign ended with the death of two PCs. (It ended because it was done, not because they died.) I'd say my body count is consistent across editions.

If I were doing a broken leg in 5E, especially a compound fracture, it would be something that affected them all the time. Movement slowed to a crawl. Disadvantage on attack rolls and advantage on attack rolls against. It wouldn't be pretty. D&D has never been built for this type of gritty play in a group environment. It slows down the group and the game. That's why rules covering this type of material have been optional in every edition.

I don't deny that a broken leg would hamper the party. I'm just saying this can be handled by the basic rules. No optional rules or subsystems are required in my view. The DM need only take it into account when narrating the result of the adventurer's actions.

 

[Azurewraith]

I have groups that optimize. I have groups that don't. I've had no issue with either. The DM controls the difficulty of the challenge. Increase the difficulty to increase the risk of death.

This isn't strictly true unless you go crazy over the top and throw say cr 10 at lvl 1 chars. The issue i find with death not being an issue is one lack of negative HP leading to the "wack-a-mole" style game play this can be fixed with adding injury's or some such. That and the fact you have to fail 3 death saves out of 6 with each roll being 50/50 unless of course your the kind of Dm that hits downed PCs (if i did that i would be DMing for myself very quickly) and in all that time no one throws you a single HP well then those are some cold pcs.

 

[iserith]

This isn't strictly true unless you go crazy over the top and throw say cr 10 at lvl 1 chars. The issue i find with death not being an issue is one lack of negative HP leading to the "wack-a-mole" style game play this can be fixed with adding injury's or some such. That and the fact you have to fail 3 death saves out of 6 with each roll being 50/50 unless of course your the kind of Dm that hits downed PCs (if i did that i would be DMing for myself very quickly) and in all that time no one throws you a single HP well then those are some cold pcs.

It is always strictly true that the DM controls the difficulty of the challenge. I see nothing "over the top" about a CR 10 monster versus 1st-level characters. In fact, I've just written a Planescapesque (that's a word) adventure where the primary antagonist is a Yochlol (CR 10) and the PCs are 1st level. The risk of death is serious and it can still be defeated. It just requires the players to go about it in clever ways of their own devising.

I also have no issue attacking unconscious PCs. I encourage my players to create backup characters so we're prepared for this sort of thing.

 

[Remathilis]

The DMG lists a few options:

Grid Combat with Flanking and Facing: adds tactical depth and requires better knowledge of the terrain. I also recommend using the 1-2-1-2 method of square counting diagonals to stop diagonal movement from outpacing straightline.

Roll Initiative Each Round (w/Speed Factor): Adds randomness and uncertainty to combat, and demands greater choices of action (since high-weapon damage and higher-level spells now trade of effect for speed).

Attack Options: The DMG gives rules for Marking (great with Sentinel feat, but good alone), Disarming, Climbing on Large Creatures, Tumbling, and other Actions the PCs can try.

Hitting Cover: Want to give Ranged weapons more penalty? Allow them to occasionally hit allies on a miss. Gives them incentive to move around more.

Injuries and/or Massive Damage: Combat gets sloggy when all you're doing is trading HP. Instituting a rule that can disable or even kill a foe on a massive attack or crit will force PCs to chose their combats more wisely and use more tactics to gain advantage.

Now, all of these things will slow down combat, add additional checks, and possibly derail story-based games (especially when a random encounter spirals out of control thanks to good initiative rolls and some lucky crit-injuries) but if you want more complex combat, there are some options you can use.

 

[Magil]

Relating back to the topic, I think the first step is addressing your player's concerns. There have been a lot of posts suggesting to focus more on roleplaying, or rather, that 5E is at its best when not focused wholly on combat, but I suspect that that advice will be of little use to you if your players want interesting tactical challenges. Not everyone is at the table to tell the story of Tom the righteous knight and his struggle with a dark past, some are there to play Tom the warlord who conquers the battlefield with tactical brilliance (interesting how 4E edition has a Warlord class and 5E does not. Not trying to revive any old debates here, but I think it's perhaps amusingly meaningful).

My advice to you? Keep running the system and try to get a feel for it. Once you feel you understand it well enough, start pushing its boundaries. If it seems like it's going to break, put some patches on it. Every table plays their own version of DnD. Maybe DnD 5E isn't the right system for you, maybe it is, but if you want to stick with it, chances are you can make something out of it that you and your players like. After playing 4th edition for about a year, I steadily became more and more confident in my ability to create custom monsters and challenges within the context of the rules in order to challenge the party. There were successes, failures, and varying degrees of both.

I'm not there yet in 5th edition (been playing a while, DMing a much shorter period), but I see enough hints of 4th edition design philosophy to be confident that there exists the possibility for some tactical depth to exist within the rules. It may take some doing, but I think the ability to provide a tactical challenge to your players is there. It will take small, simple steps, like ditching Theater of the Mind (which impedes your ability to provide any interesting tactical challenge, but is decent for running more narrative-focused combat) in favor of a proper grid, and larger, more ambitious steps, like home-brewing vicious boss monsters.

A short while ago I was in a party comprised of four characters of varying levels between 3 and 5, that fought a monstrosity homebrewed by the DM--a gigantic shambling mass of blood that dissolved into imps, literally throwing imps at us each turn. As it split into imps, its HP went down, disseminating into the imps. By the time it fully dissolved, it had made somewhere between 18 and 22ish imps. Going purely by EXP guidelines, that's a ridiculously deadly encounter for characters of that level, but because they came in waves and we wore down the creature with attacks along the way, and had good use of spells like Spirit Guardians, Hypnotic Pattern, Sleep, and Spiritual Weapon, along with battle-oriented characters capable of holding a melee line and slicing through things, we were able to overcome it, though not without difficulty--one player died, and another was briefly unconscious. Thankfully Revivify got the player back on their feet afterward, but it almost went very badly (if the cleric had been the one that died instead, that wouldn't have been an option, and it was about 1 round from that point when things were resolved).

Where I'm going with this is I have a lot of hope for 5E, and I think you can make some interesting combats with it, while thankfully avoiding some key issues that put me off of 4E and 3E (lots of small bonuses stacking making bookkeeping a hassle, buff-stacking, hilarious levels of class imbalance in 3rd).