D&D 5E 5e--combats are too "same-y"?

[Psikerlord#]

The most important part of the fun in combat for me is the roleplaying. I find it great fun to describe my PC's attacks and the wounds he causes, talk/taunt the NPCs, yell at other PCs, etc.

If the game is just "I hit 17, 14 damage. Ah that's it for me" that gets woefully boring very quickly. Not saying it doesn't happen some rounds. It does. But if you make an effort to describe what's happening, I find other players/DM do too, and the game goes to another level.

PS - I have no issue with describing bloody and brutal wounds etc. We treat HP flexibly as meat and/or a more vague "capacity to continue fighting". We use slow healing and injury options from DMG. So say my rogue takes a gash to the ribs and also her arm. After the combat we short rest and bandage up, spending HD and she heals back to full. Her wounds do not magically disappear. The rogue is still bloodied and sore, but she's bandaged up good, and is capable of further fighting as reflected in her HP.

 

[Chocolategravy]

Try harder fights. They're less samey if sometimes they win and sometimes they go unconscious and sometimes they die.

 

[JackOfAllTirades]

Try harder fights. They're less samey if sometimes they win and sometimes they go unconscious and sometimes they die.

Or even if they just have to run away to avoid dying.

We've all been there, even if we don't like talking about it.

Because running away from kobolds is embarrassing.

But that made it even more EPIC when we patched ourselves up and went after them again!

 

[Jester David]

At the risk of coming off edition warry... I always found the combats of 4e to be a crutch. The base combat was more fun so it was easier to slack off and not include things like terrain or interesting features in the room.
If you look at earlier adventures, many rooms had an interesting feature or hook. Because combats were not inherently interesting. There was something else going on, even if that involved roleplaying.

Being creative with encounter areas is a skill that's atrophied in the last couple editions, as monsters have gotten more interesting. But the the designs are not exclusive. Even in 3e and 4e, making encounter areas dynamic and interesting made the fights more fun and memorable.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Don't expect much in the way of tactics at level 3.

Levels 1-2 are the "starter levels" to introduce new people to their classes and the basics of the game. Level 3 is where you actually get to start making some decisions about your character and it increases from there.

There were a lot of complaints about 4E being too much of a "tactical miniatures wargame" then, well, whatever those people thought D&D should have been, so a lot of that was cut out from 5e (powers, measurements in squares, etc..).

The fact that 5E is also rules light also makes it less tactical.

So you're experiencing a conflagration of problems: Early levels have the least tactical elements. 5E was designed to be a much less tactical game, especially in comparison to 4E and 5E simply doesn't have the amount of rules necessary to support highly tactical play.

Solutions include: Don't play low-levels. Use a lot of the optional rules. Make overt attempts to be tactical with your party and ask the DM to play the enemies more tactically too.

I sometimes find that low-level play is the most tactical, especially first level play, because extremely tactical play happens when the PCs are desperate for any advantage. When you're twelfth level and you meet a small squad of hobgoblins, you don't mess around with caltrops and lighting and stealth--you just kill them and move on. But a first-level PC meeting that hobgoblin squad on his own will be extremely tactical, trying to find the right place to engage them where he is surrounded by difficult terrain and has a retreat corridor open and a clear field of fire and 3/4 cover or better from which to shoot and a chokepoint seeded with caltrops...

If you feel that 5E combats are samey, I advise you to:

1.) Vary the difficulty,
2.) In different ways.

Four potential ways to make combats hard are:

1.) The conflict takes place in unfriendly environment (e.g. Phase spiders fighting in webbing as per DMG 105, or fighting orcs on the edge of a 180' cliff drop).
2.) The conflict is against foes who are personally much stronger than the PCs.
3.) The conflict is against foes who are much more numerous than the PCs.
4.) The PCs have a goal in this conflict which cannot be feasibly satisfied purely by inflicting violence (e.g. get the snatched purse back without using deadly weapons and going to jail; prevent any of the civilians from being killed by the bandits).
5.) The conflict is against foes who have a wide range of tactical options (due to magic or other special abilities like webbing or nets).

You can also vary encounters by making some of them not have to devolve into combat, but that's a separate topic.

So anyway, mix and match from the various options for difficulty. That could mean a tribe of kobolds who Help each other try to shove PCs off 180' cliffs in the mountains; or a werebear who is really a necromancer Magic Jarred into a werebear's body, who shadows the PCs until they are already in the middle of a tough fight and then summons an Air Elemental and attacks the rear; or an entire battalion of 200 centaurs who claim you are trespassing, but will grant you safe passage off their land if one of the PCs can defeat their champion in a fistfight (no weapons allowed). Or a horseshoe contest that doesn't involve combat at all.

One underappreciated aspect of 5E's ruleset, I think, is that large quantities of foes still work really well at high level. If you as a DM know techniques for running a fight with 50 hobgoblins efficiently (i.e. pace stays fast, more time spent on player decisions than die-rolling and arithmetic) you open up a whole new category of epic 5E. You're not limited to dragons and liches, 5E characters are weak enough that a mere handful of Nycaloths or Stygian Skeletons (anyone with good mobility or ranged combat) can provide a stiff challenge for 20th level parties... which means that you don't have to abandon your campaign at 16th level! I can't wait until one of my PCs hits 20th level--I have a whole shipful of 50 Oni mercs from the Trading Company for them to lock horns with, only in 5E there aren't any AD&D-style spells like Mass Charm that can trivialize a platoon of Onis, so even 20th level PCs will have to fight smart and be tactical, or they will die horribly in Oni stomachs. Actually I won't wait for them to hit 20th level before I hit them with this, but at 20th level they might actually engage the foe instead of fleeing...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

This can lead to issues in any edition past AD&D, if you describe any damage in a manner that can't be recovered with a little bit of rest. Bob probably didn't firebolt the ogre's eye, unless you're using Lingering Wounds, and that happened to be the result.

I just embrace HP as a physical reality: if you stab a 5E character in the kidney, it really hurts, but it gets better after you have lunch and rest for a while.

One way my players know that something is dead is that its limbs start coming off: I've told them that due to the nature of D&D physics, it is very, very difficult to actually sever the limbs of anything that is still living. So if you manage to cut the arm off something, either it's dead or there's something very unusual in play (troll special abilities, Sword of Sharpness, etc.).

 

[Charles Wright]

Back "in the day" (tm) we described combat.

It wasn't — "dice rattle" you hit for "dice rattle" 2 points of damage.

It was — "dice rattle" "dice rattle" The orc notices you coming at him with your dagger and manages to block most of the strike. Your blade skitters across his hardened leather armor and gashes him rather badly in the leg.... you deal 2 points of damage.

Was that every strike in combat? Nah. There was plenty of "Both orcs go down screaming in flames" and high-fives around the table for how awesome a fireball can be. Tactics were done on the fly instead of being baked into the game. It was very much descriptive play instead of a giant list of maneuvers. 5E has gone back to that. I'm not sure if that's spelled out in the DMG or not, but narrative combat has always made fighting interesting in my games.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I've been playing one game and running another. Both parties are quite martial in nature (barbarian, ranger, fighter, warlock and barbarian, rogue, warlock, monk) and I'm finding that the fights seem to fall into a pretty standard pattern. Most have been a lot of fun, but at some point, everyone has no decisions to make, just dice to roll. Both parties are level 3.

One thing I liked about 4e was the tactical choices. The really long combats I liked a lot less. 3e was somewhere in between. I've not hit the same problems in other systems quite as much (Hero, GURPs, etc.)

I suspect it's just the martial-heavy theme that's driving this. Plus the game I'm running had "bags of hit points" that were just too big of bags (poor planning on my part).

I'm just curious if others have hit this in 5e and how to avoid it.

One question I'd ask is whether you guys are playing with a grid and minis or theater-of-the-mind?

I personally have found that the times when I have used minis-and-grid for 5E, there *has* been less apparent tactics involved in the combats. I suspect it's because that when the players are looking at the grid and looking at their minis and seeing positions of their friends and enemies... their focus (logically) is right there-- at the Real World items on the game table. And their concerns are more about getting little piece of plastic A over to square B, avoiding squares C, D & E, so that little piece of plastic X doesn't move to Y to attack little piece of plastic Z.

All of the "atmosphere" of the narrated scenario falls away. The terrain doesn't matter unless there are Difficult Terrain markers on the grid, the objects found in the area don't matter because the icons for barrels and crates printed on the tiles or grids are seen merely as flavor to the printed tiles to make them "look pretty", and not as actual things to possibly use.

BUT... when playing theater-of-the-mind... when everything is inside the player's heads... they find themselves less concerned and focused on fictional positioning, and more about just moving naturally around the imaginary environment-- using or manipulating objects within the imaginary environment because those things have been described. And on top of that... without knowing *exactly* where things are down to 5 foot spaces, there's a lot more fudging of distances to provide for more interesting possible activities giving more interesting results.

Case in point-- in my game last night the players found themselves in a tower with an otyugh hiding in a pit in the floor and a bunch of guard drakes outside the tower just milling around the courtyard (this is Castle Naerytar in HofDQ). Had I drawn the whole area out on my gridboard... taking into account the large size of the map... the guard drakes would probably have been like 8 to 12 squares away from the tower they were in, and thus the party would have felt compelled to check the ranges on any spells they had, worrying about their positioning in the tower to avoid spooking the otyugh, wondering where the otyugh was and thus how far its tentacles could reach... etc. etc. etc. As opposed to what actually happened, which was one player asking "Can I use Dancing Lights to try and create a form that the drakes might see and hopefully follow here into the tower so that they otyugh might grab them?" And I said "Great!" and made them roll a couple checks. I didn't care where the drakes actually were, and whether Dancing Lights could reach them from where the magic-user was hiding, and how close she was to the otyugh or any of that. She had a great tactical idea just from what she was visualizing in her head, and I went with it. And thus several of the drakes were eliminated from the fight by the otyugh, and the party rushed out of the tower with the otyugh distracted, charging the remaining drakes and taking them out with several swift attacks.

The whole encounter was swift and it was visually and tactically interesting because they were imagining the drakes moving into the tower and then getting grabbed by the otyugh, then all of them making a break for it themselves, and then cruising across the courtyard to go after the other ones as fast and as silently as possible to attract no attention. And this was entirely because they were coming up with a cool tactical plan in their heads, and not concerned with which miniature moves where and which space the spell has to be cast and is that drake too many squares away to be effective and how many spaces can each character move out of the tower and how long will it take for them to reach the far side by moving and Dashing and so on.

The bottom line is that 4E's grid combat WAS more tactically interesting and diverse, because they were focused on making the grid combat mechanics (the "board game" if you want to be a little crass) more fun. But 5E doesn't have nearly as much of that. The game's more concerned with giving rules that make the combat in your head much more fun.

 

[Chocolategravy]

Or even if they just have to run away to avoid dying.

Most DMs dream of being so lucky to have players who have fleeing in their repertoire.

 

[abirdcall]

Most DMs dream of being so lucky to have players who have fleeing in their repertoire.

Easy enough problem to solve.

They will start getting it after their 5th or 6th character.