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Message: <blockquote data-quote="osarusan" data-source="post: 7107794" data-attributes="member: 13950">OP? That sounds amazing!! You have some brilliant players there to come up with such an amazing scheme. I love it!I honestly don't think that sounds OP though. They all used some resources, and a hell of a dose of ingenuity to overcome a powerful foe. That's some amazing teamwork, but I don't know that you can say grapple was the deciding factor. Every one of those spells *plus* grapple was required. Without even one of those magic spells to back it up, the encounter could have gone south and turned into a TPK. And on a really poor roll (I've seen someone roll two 1's on advantage) it could have ended poorly for the bard. So I think they took a very calculated risk, and it paid off beautifully.I don't know if there is a better way to handle grappling though. Removing it from combat and making it skill-based seems to me to be the exact right thing to do. Adding maneuvers to it would make it so granular that the system would kind of break down. I mean, a sword does d8 damage no matter what you do with it; thrust, slash, stab, whatever -- it's that same die, and the same attack bonus. It has to be abstracted that way for combat to flow. Shouldn't grapple be the same?Now don't get me wrong, I do love me some Hackmaster, where you use different damage dice, weapon speeds, and attack rolls depending on the maneuver and position you're in... but that requires some wicked fast mental math and a team of players who love that crunch. 5e sloughed all of that from earlier editions as is better off for it. Not that such abstraction is always the best way to go, but in 5e it works really well, and I would be hesitant to add something that complicates that.Whenever I think about adding/changing 5e rules, I tend to overcomplicate things. I love adding crunch, and coming up with new fun things to roll for. But that often turns into me falling down the rabbit hole and ending up with something that either a) is so complex it would bog down the game flow, or b) requires reworking the entire system (including every single monster) so that it no longer is D&D, but something that merely looks like it. Then I usually end up scrapping it and going with the simplest possible solution; a skill roll with advantage or disadvantage.To me that's where grappling lies in 5e. I can't think of anything better to do with it. Adding more maneuvers -- how would you do that? A different skill roll? All the appropriate skills are pretty much covered under Strength and Dex. And the difference in skill that character A has between a roundhouse kick and a full nelson is not going to be mathematically significant enough that it could amount to any sort of numerical bonus going by the power scale that 5e uses. The closest thing I can envision is a system that works kind of like the fighter's combat superiority dice, but if you add that to a grappling system it makes the fighter's ability less significant and feels like nerfing one of the coolest fighter abilities. Advantage/disadvantage is 5e's killer mechanic. It's graceful and elegant, and you can add it on the fly without any extra work. That and swapping out ability scores based on a clever player's idea are about the only two variations that I can think of that work smoothly for grappling.In designing a mental magic combat system that works similar to grappling, I'm not sure what you could add or change that wouldn't overcomplicate things in the way that the above ideas would break the regular grappling system. I kind of feel like the only way you could do it smoothly would be to make it like grappling is now -- opposed skill checks with occasional advantage. Maybe saving throws at the beginning to resist.Part of me is imagining something like Inception, where you have the dream crafter designing layer upon layer of dream within a mind that is actively fighting back. It's almost like making an opposed Intelligence vs Wisdom roll every round. The art lies in describing it the right way. Same goes for a sort of domination/puppetry situation: you could make it Charisma vs Charisma, or Charisma vs Strength. Some combinations are going to be better against some classes than others. Cha vs Str will obviously work better against wizards, while Cha vs Cha would work better against fighters. Like your grappling example, which worked so well because he was using a buffed up Str vs a weakly wizard, this system would allow players to choose the best tools to overcome the situation, and then resolve them in a familiar manner with skill checks.The point where it becomes OP is when you can too easily adjust on the fly what saving throw or opposed skill you force the opponent to use. Since most enemies have no intelligence save bonus, if you can just customize every spell to be my INT vs your INT, it becomes way too easy for the wizard to dominate any opponent. Like in your grappling example, a buffed up stat roll vs a character's weak stat ends up being almost laughably easy. So there would have to be either MP cost variations for different effects depending on which ability scores are involved, or special lists/secrets that have to be learned (and thus take up part of a character's learned list maximum) to avoid turning every encounter into something like what happened to that archmage.(Thanks for the XP by the way!)</blockquote>

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