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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GX.Sigma" data-source="post: 7029363" data-attributes="member: 6690511">The difference between those two scenarios (emphasis mine) is that the former is strategy, and the latter is rules mastery. For an optimizer, there's no reason to declare an attack rather than a charge in that situation. It's not even a decision; that player is never going to just say "attack" if "charge" is better. A newer or more casual player, who doesn't know to do stuff like that, will be subtly less effective than the experienced player, and may not even know why. And it's not because the newbie isn't as smart as the optimizer, it's just because the optimizer understands the rules more deeply. I do not want a character's effectiveness to be determined by the player's knowledge of the rules. It's a barrier. I want to remove barriers.My newbie roleplayers don't care about the difference between "charge" and "attack," and if I penalized them for not being specific about it, they'd be annoyed. They don't want to learn the rules to that level of detail. Therefore, I don't want to implement a system that rewards detailed knowledge of the rules.For a whole group of optimizers under tournament-like conditions, I can see the strategic value in forcing each player to be very specific when declaring actions (maybe with a hard limit on conditions, e.g. your declaration can only have one "if"). But realistically, I'd rather just have everyone say generally what they want to do, and I'll figure out how to apply the rules. That's my GMing style in a nutshell.Well, let's ignore friendly fire for now (a pet houserule of mine, not for everyone). And let's agree to disagree on the subject of declaring conditions vs. altering actions during resolution (different means to the same end). And let's agree to agree that melee attacks should get more leeway than ranged attacks. I'll rewrite those rules to be less controversial.But on the subject of overkill: You imply in this here quoted paragraph that a melee attacker can declare "if my target is dead, I'll attack someone else." Therefore, to anyone with the requisite rules mastery, melee overkill never happens. I don't know if I like that. Surely, if we're trying to make combat feel more chaotic, melee overkill should happen some of the time (?) I can imagine the following situation:(Two PCs are fighting against a mummy lord and a few zombies.) DM: The zombies will attack you indiscriminately. What do you do? Barbarian: Forget the zombies. I'll keep axing the mummy. Fighter: You're right, we need to kill that bastard. I'll stab it with my sword. DM: The mummy lord will attack the barbarian. Roll 'em. (mummy lord has 8 hp remaining) (Barbarian hits, rolls 12 damage) (Fighter hits, rolls 10 damage) (mummy lord loses initiative) DM: You kill the mummy. (zombies, unharmed, attack the PCs)That feels like good game design to me, but I can't really explain why.</blockquote>

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