"If a creature is within 5 feet of two hostile creatures of its size or larger, it is flanked. A flanked creature has disadvantage when attacking a target that is not also flanked."
My conceptual justification is that flanked creatures would need to invest more effort in being defensive and, therefore, have more difficulty attacking. My hope, mechanically, is that it makes positioning more meaningful but not overpowering.
Do you like the rule and, if not, what rule do you use instead and why is it preferable?
I personally do not like messing with Advantage or Disadvantage in the game more than it has already been done. I also feel like the designers leaned on it far too heavily as an easy crutch. My personal Flanking house rule is that if two allies are diametrically on either side on an enemy, if they hit, they do +1 damage. This scales with character tier to do more damage. So if a 1st level character were surrounded by 8 goblins and every goblin hit, the character would take +8 damage. Of course, that PC would be dead even without the flanking damage.
What if “flanked” was the inverse of cover? You are flanked if there are at least two hostile creatures within 5 feet of you and suffer -2 to AC and Dex saves. You are surrounded if there is a hostile creature in each space within 5 feet of you and you suffer -5 to AC and Dex saves.
I notice that each of the three ideas above make flanked creatures take more damage or get hit more often. I recognize that makes intuitive sense, which is why it's also what the DMG option does.
I like flanking as a debuff to the target's outgoing attacks for two reasons, though.
1.) Focus fire is already an optimal strategy, I don't think I need to add a rule that makes it better.
2.) Since it's more likely that PCs will be outnumbered than that monsters will, flanking has the potential to be more of a danger to PCs than a benefit. I think it's more interesting to encourage PCs to move proactively than it is to deal more damage to them.
"If a creature is within 5 feet of two hostile creatures of its size or larger, it is flanked. A flanked creature has disadvantage when attacking a target that is not also flanked."
My conceptual justification is that flanked creatures would need to invest more effort in being defensive and, therefore, have more difficulty attacking. My hope, mechanically, is that it makes positioning more meaningful but not overpowering.
Do you like the rule and, if not, what rule do you use instead and why is it preferable?
Is this in addition to, or instead of Flanking giving advantage to attackers?
I've found that while fighting two people in front of you is hard, fighting two people, one on each side of you, is much harder.
I'd suggest changing the size restriction. Being flanked by halflings or goblins is still a threat, and still makes defending yourself/fighting back harder.
I'm generally not a fan of the flanking rules since 3E. The problem is that it often creates a chain of creatures, each trying to flank an opponent. I personally feel that the action economy is punishment enough when outnumbered, but if you want to show extra threat by being swarmed by enemies, you could grant creatures +2 to attack if at least 2 allies are also adjacent to the creature (possibly even +5 if at least 5 allies are also adjacent).
I'm generally not a fan of the flanking rules since 3E. The problem is that it often creates a chain of creatures, each trying to flank an opponent. I personally feel that the action economy is punishment enough when outnumbered, but if you want to show extra threat by being swarmed by enemies, you could grant creatures +2 to attack if at least 2 allies are also adjacent to the creature (possibly even +5 if at least 5 allies are also adjacent).
@squibbles Your idea would probably work fine if your goal is to make your players dramatically harder to hit.The problem with flanking in 5e is that flanking is just one piece of a whole to tactical combat & it leaves out the other pieces. Take
In the example we have randy the red knight, Scott the sneak, Beth the blue knight, A fire giant with a 10 foot reach, & blue guardwolf, orange guardwolf, & green guardwolf. For purpose of example, all of these creatures have the sentinel ability that sets the target's speed to zero when they make an opportunity attack.
Scott walks up to blue guardwolf & passes through four adjacent squares with no reaction from rhe wolf plus two adjacent squares immediately in front of the fire giant who stands there watching passively.
Beth walks through 5 5 foot squares within the fire giant's reach all five of those squares adjacent to the green guardwolf who like the firegiant could attack someone in any of those squares.
Randy is a bit lbetter, he only passes through 4 squares within reach of both orange guardwolf & the firegiant.
If this were football, doctors would be called in to examine the defensive line wondering why they watched in stunned silence as the offensive line proceeded to all tackle the quarterback at the same time.
Just like the defensive line during a football game all four of those baddies would react to the PCs In 3.5. They would do that by making an opportunity attack when the PC moves from one square within reach to a second square within their reach (Threatened squares) At least one time during the time those PC's are moving. I say at least because with combat reflexes that could be as many opportunity attacks as those baddies have for a dex mod.
In 4e there would be a similar set of attacks when moving like that.
so 5e has no opportunity attacks? is that bad?...
Fire giant decides that Scott the sneak is the biggest easiest to hit threat and should be prioritized so gives the command to paste him while doing just that. The giant, Orange guardwolf & blue guardwolf are already within reach of Scott so proceed to attack him. Green guardwolf moves to attack Scott allowing Beth to immediately hits it with a the first opportunity attack of the combat.
A round or two later, scott is really hurting & wants to dig that rare potion of superior healing (dmg188 8d4+8) out of his backpack where it has been for the last six months. The backpack is the one he started the game with & could not get more mundane
In 3.5 digging through any container other than heward's handy haversack, even a bag of holding was not that magical... By the way, now you know why the 5e dmg lists the uncommon dmg153 bag of holding as capable of holding 500 pounds but the dg174 rare handy haversack can only hold 80 pounds.. They forgot the part that made the haversack so much better. Back in 3.5 it took an action to dig that potion out, in 5e Scott just does it at no cost (honest, phb190 interacting with objects around you).
In 3.5 drinking that potion is an action just like in 5e, but unlike 5e it's an action that provokes an opportunity attack so all three wolves and the fire giant smack him for drinking a juicebox in front of them instead of paying attention to the fight. Because of this, scott would have disengaged or similar and been much more careful about getting himself trapped there but still needs to wait till next round to drink that potion he just got curbstomped by 4 baddies retrieving from his newbie backpack.... Oh there's a good chance he's gonna die too because all 4 will get a regular attack/multiattack action before he can provoke another round of opportunity attacks drinking that potion. Bacj in 3.5 Scott would have needed to
rather than spending those extra rounds engaging in attempting to dish out damage as fast and long as he could until he was looking like the black knight. Also if you look closely at withdraw, Scott is double screwed because any square he moves to is threatened by the giant & two wolves so would get one two or more opportunity attacks just spending a full round withdrawing from that braindead position. That's tramatically different than
He is protected from opportunity attacks for the rest of his turn so is at no risk to get away if there was some reason to bother with getting away.
In 5e Scott fearlessly charged up into a terribly dangrous position with no consequence in order to get a bonus and later after realizing his internal organs need to renain internal went on with no risk or action cost to pluck a potion from his crude burlap sack of a backpack possibly even while he was drinking it at that & did so at no risk in a single turn.
You might say "Wow it sounds like that was crazy complex to remember all the things that could trigger an opportunity attack! How did you manage back then?" well...
somehow we managed.
I'll let someone else like @Garthanos with more knowledge of 4e go into any needed details for how it worked in 4e, but the process was fairly similar on most of those points.
So why not just add that back in? That kinda thing is something that needs to be designed to begin with because it touches on too many spells & abilities. For example, I used this in my example
How could that possibly go wrong with sentinel?
Should be fine in 5e right?
I dunno
Lets compare it to the 3.5 version
That's a pretty dramatic increase in power to turn a third level 30foot cone spell into a 20 foot round lockdown and stun till death with all sorts of possible ripple effects. Because 5e was not designed to include tactical combat from the start there are no abilities that were created with consideration of how those abilities would interact in the presence of tactical combat & all of the spells abilities magic items & monster abilities would need consideration to how they might interact negatively and possibly get changed by simply adding the big missing chunk of a tactical combat system from an old editon.
