D&D General Breaking Out of "Default Actions"

[Dausuul]

The thing is... often when players do this kind of thing, it's bad tactics and accomplishes little. You would be better off to just swing your sword again. And knowing when to change it up and when to swing your sword again is not easy and requires a level of system mastery. For players without that level of mastery, hack and hack again is the wisest and most reliable course of action.

DMs can alter this, somewhat, by allowing special benefits to improvised actions. But this, again, requires a level of mastery for the DM; you can get yourself in a lot of trouble by making an improvised action so good that players start using it as their new default.

 

[MNblockhead]

Design and run diverse encounters and challenges that requires players to come up with other solutions.

 

[Iry]

All those martial characters falling into the trap of making normal weapon attacks.

 

[Shiroiken]

When you want to have player consider non-standard actions, you have to make them worthwhile. In one adventure, the party was fighting in a torture chamber. I had fully described the room before combat began, and one of the players remembered me mentioning an Iron Maiden. He pushed the torturer into the Iron Maiden, then shut the door. I ruled an amount of damage that was maybe slightly higher than normal. The next player in the initiative went up to the Iron Maiden, opened it and then slammed it shut again. This repeated by each PC, and the torture was quickly slain without spending resources.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

When you want to have player consider non-standard actions, you have to make them worthwhile. In one adventure, the party was fighting in a torture chamber. I had fully described the room before combat began, and one of the players remembered me mentioning an Iron Maiden. He pushed the torturer into the Iron Maiden, then shut the door. I ruled an amount of damage that was maybe slightly higher than normal. The next player in the initiative went up to the Iron Maiden, opened it and then slammed it shut again. This repeated by each PC, and the torture was quickly slain without spending resources.

I love this. Using the aspects of the scenery isn't usually encouraged or rewarded often enough.

To me, this is where the 'help' action can shine a bit: "I push the bookshelf over onto the enemy" is a nice description for a 'help' action. No roll needed - unless, of course, there's some kind of interesting consequence for failure. But that chance of failure often discourages players from being creative.

 

[Umbran]

These are not optimal actions--the thing your build is built for--but they are sometimes the smarter play.

With respect - optimal actions are not "the thing your build is built for". They are the thing that is best to do at the time. Very frequently in a fight, you have some particular shtick that works well, and may be optimized for damage per round or whatnot. But that doesn't say that doing damage is the smarter play.

However, as a GM, you should not expect your players to come up with a smarter play without proper information and opportunity. Yes, players default to those things they built a character to do - and they use that because that's the action about which they have the most information about the likely results.

Why is it a better play for the fighter to break the machine than punch the minotaur? Did you tell the players about it?

 

[BookBarbarian]

I think if you provide a variety of combat scenarios especially some where victory is not contingent on reducing the other side to 0hp then you'll see a variety of tactics and actions.

In a session last week my oath of the ancients Paladin didn't have his steed summoned and I was facing a foe that could hover 15 feet above me in wide terrain. I wanted to just smite everything since it was my first combat with this character, but since I couldn't Ended up casting Moon beam and moving it to wherever the floating monster went. I even used restraining strike and threw my warhammer at it (since I couldn't stow my hammer and draw a handaxe and throw in the same turn) to try and pin it down.

I never thought I'd be reliant on offensive ranged spells and throwing my melee weapon with this character but there I was.

 

[Fauchard1520]

I never thought I'd be reliant on offensive ranged spells and throwing my melee weapon with this character but there I was.

This is more or less what I'm talking about. In this scenario, the "normal weapon attack" is ineffective. I've seen too many players throw up their hands in a "well I guess I can't do anything" sort of attitude and just delay their action. It's these cases where I think doing the normally-sub-optimal-thing (throwing your melee weapon) is infinitely better than doing nothing.

 

[jayoungr]

When the situation change you’ve got to think on your feet. The warlock can blow an action pulling his buddies out of black tentacles.

I can hear my players' comment now: "It's a better use of my action to spend my action damaging the caster of those black tentacles. I might make him fail his concentration check and drop them. Or I might kill him outright. If the tentacles don't go away, I can drag my buddies out when the whole party isn't in the middle of being attacked." And it's hard to find a flaw with that.

The barbarian can break the mechanism rather than punch the minotaur. v

Depends on the situation. If the barbarian is already in melee with the minotaur, it's hard to get out. If the mechanism doesn't have to be broken within the next 30 seconds, he can break it at his leisure once the minotaur is down.

The bard can stop singing for five seconds and help man the walls.

Reminder that 5E bards aren't presumed to be singing all the time during a battle. (My players play a LOT of bards.)

 

[Fauchard1520]

I can hear my players' comment now: "It's a better use of my action to spend my action damaging the caster of those black tentacles. I might make him fail his concentration check and drop them. Or I might kill him outright. If the tentacles don't go away, I can drag my buddies out when the whole party isn't in the middle of being attacked." And it's hard to find a flaw with that.

I feel like folks are getting hung up on the examples. :/

In this case, it was a drow ambush. We were trapped inside a cave by darkness / black tentacles, and the enemy casters were on the far side. The options were "hit low level mooks," "try your luck charging through the black tentacles," or "prevent your buddy from getting strangled to death."

My point is that defaulting to the best case scenario can often be a mistake in strategic thinking.