D&D 5E "Charge Up" Mechanic: A problem for D&D

[Staffan]

The new edition of Exalted has a variant of this mechanic. Or, well, two variants.

One is straight-up magic points. When you're in combat, you get 5 "motes" of Essence each round, whereas you normally recover them at a similar hourly rate. But that's just a convenience so the Exalted can power their cool tricks in battle.

The other is Initiative. Most attacks are Withering attacks, which "steal" initiative from your opponent. You're still trying to kill them, but mechanically the effect is that you maneuver them into a worse position where they're unable to defend themselves properly - at least until they steal the initiative back from you. But when you feel you have a big enough advantage in Initiative, you can instead make a Decisive attack that inflicts real damage, and resets your initiative (assuming it's still relevant). The damage of a Decisive attack depends solely on initiative - armor, weapons, and all that stuff matter for withering attacks, but not for decisive ones (which is a little weird, but there it is). Alternately, there are a number of Gambits you can perform instead of a Decisive attack - if you want to push someone around, or grapple them, or disarm them, that requires a Gambit.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't know that I'd say 3e tried to implement video game mechanics. With the exception of switching from THAC0 to ascending AC, there really wasn't all that much different in the core mechanics from previous editions.

The idea that D&D has ever been remotely 'video game' like is a little backwards. D&D inspired some early video games (and MMOs outright copied it), and things like limited-use abilities, hit points/health bars, treasure drops and 'extra lives' and the like can thus be found in both.

3e was accused of being bad for RP, and horribly 'grid dependent' and push-button-like with combat options as well as with spells (which had always been video-game-like in that tenuous sense). It wasn't any more or less valid than any other such complaints before or since. D&D is the premier RPG, it attracts the most criticism.

It was still pretty much based on a per day economy

Per day is still a limited-use/push-button paradigm.

and not every class had a similar number of "powers"

Nothing innately video-game about that. Innately better-balanced, sure, but still nothing that RPGs hadn't done long before video games.

Even if a mechanical innovation, like a cool-down or warm-up /were/ done first by a video game, that shouldn't remove it from consideration - it might still be adapted to TT as a good mechanic.

(Perhaps the most interesting example is 'Aggro.' In classic D&D, it was common for the fighters to hold a sort of front line. Because that's what infantry did in wargames, maybe, or because it wasn't fun to have every magic user die in the first fight of the campaign, or whatever. It was a sort of unwritten rule that most melee type monsters would mostly melee their opposite numbers among the PCs. The mechanics didn't back it up, but DMs tended to run it that way. When MMOs tried to adapt D&D, the lack of a DM created a need to formalize that, and 'aggro' was born. Later generations of D&Ders even complained that D&D "didn't have aggro" in the sense of a mechanic, yet it had always had it, in the way DMs ran their monsters.)

See rogues in 13th age. They have a mechanic called momentum, which keeps building on each hit they do, until they get hit. easily controllable that way

And there's the escalation die. That could be effortless adapted to D&D.

 

[Lanliss]

Has anyone played with the simple "gain a resource on a hit, cannot gain a resource from an attack where you spend one" yet? That might be the most enticing idea here, and I have not gotten a chance to test it myself yet.