D&D 5E Boy, that escalated quickly...

[FormerlyHemlock]

How do you "slam them prone" without some significant investment? Knocking people prone isn't something you can do without a feat, a special effect (e.g. wild shape), or a spell, as far as I was aware. Even with that taken care of, both of those things are contested vs. the target's choice of Dex(Acro) or Str(Athl)--unless every character is proficient with Athletics and pumping Str, they're not going to be able to keep up with monster stats (since most monsters have a good score in *at least* one of those once you get to mid/high level).

You don't need a feat or anything. It's built into every character. Review PHB 195. DMG has additional variants that make Disarming built into every character too.

Monsters are not generally proficient in Athletics (Stone Giants and Fire Giants are an exception) so even a Str 12 Dex 20 archer will be halfway decent at grappling if he wants to (+5 to Athletics at 8th level, and his two attacks are basically equivalent to advantage) and e.g. a Str 16 Cha 20 Paladin will be quite good. I speak from experience. I have a Str 16 Cha 20 Paladin who was in no way built for grappling, but sort of stumbled into it as a good strategy maybe 20% of the time (fights against one to three not-Huge creatures when ranged support PCs are present) and despite having only +7 to Athletics and two attacks, it works pretty reliably. You don't always get to grapple them and slam them prone in the same turn, but you can do one or the other about 75% of the time, which means about a 75% chance of removing one enemy from the fight. That's better than most spells can do, and it's completely free except for the HP you lose, which are easy to heal.

 

[Blue]

[...reinforcements to an encounter...]

I'm not sure why 4e discouraged this for your group.

4e discouraged this because it balanced encounters around use of Encounter powers. If your encounter powers were used up and you had an additional fight before a short rest, two things happened. First, it used up a lot more resources, either Daily powers filling in for Encounters or HPs because it went on longer, but more importantly if done often it got BORING. Each class had two-at-will powers which were nothing "cool", just work-a-day attacks to fill in, and having to fight through an encounter using predominantly them was just a grind.

Essentials wasn't nearly as prone to this as the other classes.

 

[BryonD]

How do you "slam them prone" without some significant investment? Knocking people prone isn't something you can do without a feat, a special effect (e.g. wild shape), or a spell, as far as I was aware. Even with that taken care of, both of those things are contested vs. the target's choice of Dex(Acro) or Str(Athl)--unless every character is proficient with Athletics and pumping Str, they're not going to be able to keep up with monster stats (since most monsters have a good score in *at least* one of those once you get to mid/high level).

This view has frustrated me since at least the early 3E days. A rule that provides a means of achieving an end does not prohibit all other means of achieving that end.

Power attack is a good example from the 3E days. It was a common complaint that anyone without this feat could not hit something "with all their might", which is obviously stupid. Anything a character can obviously try is something that they can try.... Obviously. Power Attack makes the character particularly good at this approach, so someone without the feat should not gain the same advantage or trade off, but that doesn't mean they can't do it.

It doesn't mean a character not built with the intent of doing something will succeed. But they can try with zero investment.

 

[Shasarak]

One of the things I'm REALLY fond of in 5e is that it has much less of an "encounter" focus than 3e or 4e.

One of the things this makes viable is NPC's running to get reinforcements.

One of the things I'm noticing with one of my groups is a tendency to not really stop that.

My group tends to never let anyone get away and if they do it is only so that they can funnel more enemies into a kill zone.

But then again we have honed our tactics during the 1e era so modern games are a lot easier.

 

[Rhenny]

There seems to be a big difference between early D&D players and later players. The earlier players may be trained to adventure more carefully and conserve resources in case all hell breaks loose. My older players and I certainly "look before we leap," try to keep combats from spilling over and we avoid combat when possible. In order to encourage this type of play, I foreground story xp rewards and milestones over individual encounter xp.

Ironically, in the old days story awards didn't really exist but there were rewards for collecting treasure and other class based actions (in some of the earlier editions). I think story and rp awards go a long way towards modernizing D&D.

 

[ExploderWizard]

There seems to be a big difference between early D&D players and later players. The earlier players may be trained to adventure more carefully and conserve resources in case all hell breaks loose. My older players and I certainly "look before we leap," try to keep combats from spilling over and we avoid combat when possible. In order to encourage this type of play, I foreground story xp rewards and milestones over individual encounter xp.

Ironically, in the old days story awards didn't really exist but there were rewards for collecting treasure and other class based actions (in some of the earlier editions). I think story and rp awards go a long way towards modernizing D&D.

The way the actual players (not the characters) approach things can be heavily influenced by the XP system in use. If the players learn from experience that only by beating up large numbers of enemies will they earn a good haul of XP then they will naturally try to kick as much butt as they can handle, perhaps even a bit more if they are feeling greedy.

Whenever you start wondering about how the players are behaving, think about the actual results that behavior is getting. If the party has been doing X and it has been working really well for them, why would they stop?

If it hasn't been working so well and they keep doing the same thing- is there anyone home inside Their heads?

 

[Hussar]

The thing is, I think some of my players, rather than getting creative or careful, are just getting annoyed. They're not really changing tactics, just getting irked when their usual behavior calls down the troops - and KEEPS doing it, over and over again. And I'm kind of annoyed tracking a dozen different enemy groups at once, too. That's part of why I'm looking to be a bit pro-active - I'd like them to consider these things a bit more, but I might need to do some "training" to shift the mindset a bit. I bet it's possible, it's just not something I figured I'd really need to do for a group of D&D veterans.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?478846-Boy-that-escalated-quickly/page2#ixzz40qqWigRd

There's another issue here as well though. How often do the player's plans go automatically south. How often do player's plans get shot down as well?

Look, I'm in this game, so, I have a somewhat different perspective, but, let's look at the issues here.

We try smoking the baddies out of their lair by stopping up the one chimney in the house. The baddies put out the fire, immediately and the plan fails. Turns out later that there are fires lit in every single room we go into, but, apparently, none of them smoke. So, we, go in the front door, and things chain together. Should we have maybe waited? Maybe. Personally, I think we should have staked out the lair for a couple of days and watched things. But, despite the fact that we information gathered - sending around a scout to check out the whole house netted us pretty much no information other than "cultists are here" - I really doubt that we would have gained much from waiting.

Next scene in the wizard's basement. Thief opens the chest and the ENTIRE dungeon animates and attacks us. I mean, good grief, we didn't actually do anything here that was out of line. We were trying to find out information and learning nothing. So, we poke open a chest and poof, massive encounter.

Next scene in the flying castle. The DM added an extra element based on one character's backstory. The character chased down that lead, as was 100% expected, and triggered a fight, which immediately spread throughout the entire keep. No confusion, no one running around asking what is going one. Just 100% mass reaction.

I mean, when you added in the character's backstory encounter, what did you expect was going to happen? Plus adding in the former bad guy from an earlier scenario meant we now had a huge time pressure to accomplish anything before we were discovered. Plus completely blocking any forward movement by the rest of the group with a honking big dragon. Let's not forget adding every spoken language to Mr. Dragon as well, completely blocking any possible chance of talking our way past the dragon.

Yeah, the group is about as subtle as a kick to the head. But, there's the other side of the coin. Every time we try to do something that isn't direct force, we wind up poncing about for a while, getting frustrated and then combat starts.

 

[Hussar]

You don't need a feat or anything. It's built into every character. Review PHB 195. DMG has additional variants that make Disarming built into every character too.

Monsters are not generally proficient in Athletics (Stone Giants and Fire Giants are an exception) so even a Str 12 Dex 20 archer will be halfway decent at grappling if he wants to (+5 to Athletics at 8th level, and his two attacks are basically equivalent to advantage) and e.g. a Str 16 Cha 20 Paladin will be quite good. I speak from experience. I have a Str 16 Cha 20 Paladin who was in no way built for grappling, but sort of stumbled into it as a good strategy maybe 20% of the time (fights against one to three not-Huge creatures when ranged support PCs are present) and despite having only +7 to Athletics and two attacks, it works pretty reliably. You don't always get to grapple them and slam them prone in the same turn, but you can do one or the other about 75% of the time, which means about a 75% chance of removing one enemy from the fight. That's better than most spells can do, and it's completely free except for the HP you lose, which are easy to heal.

I'm confused. How does grappling something and knocking it prone remove it from the fight? At worst, all you've done is impose disadvantage on the monster's attacks. It can still attack you while grabbed. Grabbed doesn't even impose disadvantage - only slows speed to 0.

I can see how this prevents something from running away, but, it's not like it can't eat your Paladin still.

Grappled creatures are not Restrained. Or am I missing something?

 

[77IM]

If a creature is trying to escape to warn its fellows, then reducing its speed to 0 is exactly what you want to do, to prevent it from sounding the alarm.

Obviously, killing a creature reduces its speed to 0, but sometimes grappling is the way to go if you won't be able to kill the creature fast enough before it gets away.

 

[Hussar]

Fair enough. I think I just misunderstood.

Part of the issue here though is that there is no lag time. Scenarios react instantly.

Example 1. After entering abandoned wizard's house we start poking around. Being careful and exploring. The party thief opens a chest in the bedroom and every single monster in the entire house reacts and attacks. Not just those in that encounter area but monsters in completely different area as well. We had no way of discovering the existence of these monsters and no way to know that opening a chest would have that result.

IOW, we were doing what normal parties would do and still chained the entire scenario.

Example 2. Despite scouting the lodge pretty thoroughly, we apparently miss the tracks from the three trolls and two giant lizards. In snow. We start a fight and an NPC runs to get the trolls who arrive in one round. There's no lag time, no chance for us to do anything. All reinforcements are 100% battle ready and react at a moments notice.

So it's not really a shock that we're chaining encounters. Every time we try to be subtle or gather more information we get caught and the encounters chain together. Really, it would be better if we just kicked in the door and killed everything in sight. Trying to do anything else nets us penalties.