D&D General D&D Combat is fictionless

[Charlaquin]

For me, both make it worse. First, the fact that it's shared time will make it even harder to manage, people will contradict and make comments on each other's actions, etc. It's one of the reasons 5e is so streamlined, as only one person speaks during their turn, no-on interrupts, suggests or corrects.

Weird. In my experience players who are going to interrupt and critique other players’ actions are going to do that whether it’s their turn or not. Obviously it’s a behavior that should be discouraged, but I haven’t found a shared action declaration phase to exacerbate it. On the contrary, since you’re working with incomplete information, there is less to second-guess. You just have to pick something and go.

And second, with that level of detail during declaration, you will have a full process of thought in both phases, initially to decide what you might do in a fluid environment where nothing is certain, and when the time comes to implement it.

Not at all. You do the deciding (faster) during the declaration phase and then during your turn you’re just executing. When you’ve already decided you’re going to attack with your sword, it’s much faster and easier to just pick a target within 30 feet to do it to. When you’ve already decided you’re going to cast fireball, it’s much faster and easier to just decide where to place it. Etc.

Not to mention the additional time spent deciding the resolution order each round.

That takes very little time. Have each player roll initiative at the time they declare their action and either right the number down or just remember it for like a minute. Once all actions are declared, count down from 30, and the players jump in when you say their number. Quick, easy.

Honestly, even if I was allowed to dodge, I would find it EXTREMELY frustrating not to be able to act on a given round because the situation has evolved before my turn due to a bad dice roll on initiative. It's already frustrating to act after others, but if that invalidates the action totally, it's unacceptable.

That’s reasonable, and something that’s just part of simultaneous action declaration systems. You either learn to accept that as part of the system, or you could allow characters whose actions are no longer possible to instead Ready a different action. But this will increase the time spent, as now players are back to having their own turns on which to deliberate what they’re going to do. Though, in my experience it’s actually pretty uncommon for declared actions to become impossible. There’s usually at least one valid target in range to attack or target with your spell. It’s only when your action is dependent on things going your way on the turn that it’s at significant risk of being invalidated, and that’s a risk you consciously take by choosing such an action when you could take a more general one like attacking or casting a spell.

 

[Dausuul]

You know, as I've been thinking about it, it seems like 90% of the pain points of sequential initiative arise from movement.

Whether you consider it valid or not, the OP example of the fighter and the goblin is driven by movement concerns. Chase scenarios are another place where sequential initiative falls down; you would expect the distance between pursuer and prey to either remain constant or change slowly as one party outruns the other, but instead it yo-yos up and down, widening suddenly on the prey's turn only to narrow again when the pursuer goes.

Most of the things that combatants do are discrete events which would naturally occur in some kind of sequence anyway. It's a little weird that the sequence is so predictable, but not the end of the world. However, movement is a continuous activity, which everyone is doing all at once throughout combat. Slicing it up into freeze frames has very weird consequences.

I don't have any immediate solutions to this. (Myself, I find the current system works well enough for me, but that doesn't mean I can't speculate on whether other systems might work better.) Just making the observation.

 

[Umbran]

How exactly is having the expectation that players should declare actions based on the established fiction nonsensical?

It is nonsensical to have them declare actions based on fiction that hasn't happened yet.

Let's say in the turn structure for Round 1 goes something like:
PC 1 attacks. PC 2 casts bless.

We then establish the fiction for that round.

Then Round 2 goes like this:
PC 1 falls to 0 hp. PC 2 casts healing word.

And here we can see PC 2's healing word action being based on something that hasn't fictionally happened yet.

Yes. But now you are mixing methods. You are using action declaration not matched to how you've structured turns. Of course, PC2 would cast Healing Word in Round 3, and everything would be fine.

That is, we've just established that there was no fictional basis for his healing word at the moment the player chose to have the character use it.

As above - the damage hasn't happened to PC1 yet, so why would they make that choice?

Interestingly, using normal initiative and turn structure, rather than this contrived "everything is simultaneous", eliminates this problem - if PC 2 goes after PC1, they can react to the fiction of PC1 dropping. Admit that there's actually a time-ordering to events, and them people can react to the fiction established moment by moment.

If you don't like cyclical initiative, have players roll initiative each round.

 

[FrogReaver]

It is nonsensical to have them declare actions based on fiction that hasn't happened yet.


Yes. But now you are mixing methods. You are using action declaration not matched to how you've structured turns. Of course, PC2 would cast Healing Word in Round 3, and everything would be fine.



As above - the damage hasn't happened to PC1 yet, so why would they make that choice?

All I can figure is you’ve forgotten how 5e combat works.

 

[Umbran]

All I can figure is you’ve forgotten how 5e combat works.

No. The "everything happens simultaneously" violates how 5e D&D combat works. The PHB is very clear that it uses initiative turn order, with action declaration made when your turn comes up, and cyclical initiative. In this form, you have continuous generation of fiction, turn by turn through the round. Each actor may react to the fiction when their turn comes up.

 

[TheSword]

One option @FrogReaver would be to split the round into three phases…

1. Movement: where everybody who wants to move before their action takes some or all of their movement.

2. Action: Where all combatants resolve their actions

3. Follow up: Where remaining movement after the action and additional actions (like follow up attacks) take place.

Each of these phases would be done in initiative order. It sounds complicated but the limited choices in each phase would make them faster. It breaks the cycle of one person getting to do everything. It also gives you chance to shoot at that person we moving out of cover without readying an attack.

Bonus actions can be made at any time as appropriate.

The idea came from the 40k war game, which was always far more interesting tactically than the fantasy version which used alternate turns.

 

[Nefermandias]

That is really horrible, and actually probably even more prone to metagaming because with a higher init, you can, in addition to what you would normally do, work on purpose to invalidate the actions of people with a lower init. I don't think that the fiction would gain much by this...

Vampire the Masquerade initiative system works like this, and the purpose is precisely to allow people with better reaction time (initiative) to counter whatever action the slower characters have declared. Of course, the system also includes the option to "split your dice pool" and perform multiple actions through the round, which must be stacked in a pile and resolved from bottom to top, almost like MtG stack resolution.

 

[Neonchameleon]

All I can figure is you’ve forgotten how 5e combat works.

I don't think it's Umbran who's forgotten how 5e combat works. Your turns happen in initiative order rather than being simultaneous.

 

[Garthanos]

Just be aware that this will more than double the amount of time that a combat takes. Every time you switch to another player, it takes more time, and by doing the above, you will invalidate some declarations when the first actions are resolved.

For me, it's one of the major progress done in recent editions, get rid of the extremely artificial "declaration + resolution" system, which honestly does not make the fiction more believable, because you are still slicing time in chunks of 6 seconds. So depending when the chunks pops in, you might have a better result (for example the fighter/goblin situation), but you might have a worse one, and in any case, I don't think that you will reduce the metagaming.

In general, the more technical your solution, the further you get from the fiction, and increasing the technical complexity by cutting it in two phases will only get you further from the fiction.

At the extreme end of the range, I have ran and played long campaigns of Amber Diceless RPG, where there are only 4 attributes, one being Warfare. Resolution is extremely simple, whoever has the highest warfare wins, you only have to describe (collectively) how. Fiction is absolutely at the center as only the DM knows the attributes and just checks whether the fiction and the description can inverse the warfare values if they are close. So Corwin will slaughter hundreds of Amber troops going up the Kolvir without breaking a sweat, but when duelling Eric, who is more or less his equal, Corwin using a fancy new little trick that he learned on an obscure shadow named earth gives him a short-lived victory until Eric goes fully defensive and Corwin has to flee because the guards are coming.

It's a lot of fun, almost totally fiction and description, but almost totally non-technical. But D&D is a fairly technical game, if you want more fiction, don't increase the technicality of the resolution.

A step forward perhaps : Go to theatrix where the winning condition is related to the plot with character ability ratings putting a flavor on how the situation occurs instead of determining it (Players have plot/luck token to allow them to change it if they dont like the current plot direction) ... for instance Corwin's fight is going slow but he would eventually win by the numbers (he has the highest endurance right) and the guards arrive to interfere because that it isn't time for that conclusion yet (the plot says so) or the floor blows out from under them or some other complication deprives Corwin of his win. The Player might decide he is tired of dancing with Eric and spends a token so the intervening circumstance actually helps him humiliate Eric properly... and the story moves on from there.

 

[TheSword]

One option @FrogReaver would be to split the round into three phases…

1. Movement: where everybody who wants to move before their action takes some or all of their movement.

2. Action: Where all combatants resolve their actions

3. Follow up: Where remaining movement after the action and additional actions (like follow up attacks) take place.

Each of these phases would be done in initiative order. It sounds complicated but the limited choices in each phase would make them faster. It breaks the cycle of one person getting to do everything. It also gives you chance to shoot at that person we moving out of cover without readying an attack.

Bonus actions can be made at any time as appropriate.

The idea came from the 40k war game, which was always far more interesting tactically than the fantasy version which used alternate turns.

To my knowledge this system wouldn’t break any existing rules. A rogues dash would simply taken at whatever point they chose to move. A characters disengaging would take place in the action round. So if they were fast enough they could disengage before being attacked, or not they would be attacked, then they could disengage, which I think gives @FrogReaver that fictional narrative where reaction speed, means something.