D&D General D&D Combat is fictionless

[FrogReaver]

The scenario you presented is that the fighter moves less than his full movement so the goblin will have to dash to reach him on the first turn. I proposed a narrative that matches this, which is that the fighter advances at less than full speed, hoping to lure the goblin in and get the first strike while the goblin is still running. You responded to this by asking, what if the goblin sees that and decides to slow his advance as well, to which I answered that he should not dash into the fighter’s range if he wants to do that. You’re the one who’s proposing a change to the scenario, I’m just saying how to execute that change.

My response was about a change in The fiction and not a change in the turn. How many times must I repeat that? You misunderstood. I probably could have been more clear.

 

[Krachek]

Adding more rules is the easy solution. Even if we build a more cinematic friendly system, there will always some bugs. A clever idea from a player, a new book, a new movie, will shake the rules to ruin.

Stepping toward Fiction require DM fiat, some black box, some imbalance, to not use dice, and break some actual rules without making permanent exception.

 

[Dausuul]

Setting aside the specific case of fighter and goblin, this sort of thing is inevitable. The rules of D&D must balance verisimilitude with fun gameplay and ease of use. That balancing act will sometimes mean that verisimilitude takes a hit. In this case, the culprit is turn-based combat--a source of countless verisimilitude breaks, but I have trouble seeing how you could do a non-turn-based system that wouldn't wreak even greater havoc on ease of use.

In other cases (hit points, leveling up), verisimilitude is sacrificed for fun gameplay. Your PC doesn't die arbitrarily, and you get a sense of tangible progress through the campaign, and if that means people walking away from 100-foot falls or going from apprentice to archmage in the space of six months, we live with that.

And in still other cases, gameplay and ease of use are asked to make sacrifices for verisimilitude. This is why a bunch of 4E mechanics got the axe.

Ideally, of course, one looks for mechanics that naturally support all three elements. But there will always be some tradeoffs.

 

[FrogReaver]

Setting aside the specific case of fighter and goblin, this sort of thing is inevitable. The rules of D&D must balance verisimilitude with fun gameplay and ease of use. That balancing act will sometimes mean that verisimilitude takes a hit. In this case, the culprit is turn-based combat--a source of countless verisimilitude breaks, but I have trouble seeing how you could do a non-turn-based system that wouldn't wreak even greater havoc on ease of use.

In other cases (hit points, leveling up), verisimilitude is sacrificed for fun gameplay. Your PC doesn't die arbitrarily, and you get a sense of tangible progress through the campaign, and if that means people walking away from 100-foot falls or going from apprentice to archmage in the space of six months, we live with that.

And in still other cases, gameplay and ease of use are asked to make sacrifices for verisimilitude. This is why a bunch of 4E mechanics got the axe.

Ideally, of course, one looks for mechanics that naturally support all three elements. But there will always be some tradeoffs.

Fully agree. I think for me it’s that I didn’t really realize just how divorced the in turn combat stuff is from the fiction till now.

 

[Charlaquin]

My response was about a change in The fiction and not a change in the turn. How many times must I repeat that? You misunderstood. I probably could have been more clear.

If you change the fiction without changing what happened in the turn, the discrepancy between what happened in the turn and what happened in the fiction is of your own making.

 

[Mallus]

The closest I've seen to what you're describing in tabletop games -- as others have pointed out -- is the "action and consequence string generator" mechanics in PbtA games like Dungeon World.

But honestly what your describing sounds more like The Witcher or Dark Souls or Zelda. I don't know close you can get to that level of verisimilitude using a map grid or TotM. Or, rather, you can always get there with TotM so long as your conformable with a lot of abstraction.

 

[el-remmen]

I don't know that D&D is meant to emulate fiction. Or if so, only obliquely or after the fact.

When I was writing my story hours I never had trouble translating turn-based combat into a fictionalized version of it by accepting that the game's combat is a way to emulate the results of a combat in a fun way throughout an encounter, not necessarily emulate every step or moment of a combat at any given time.

I just keep in mind that that fighter and goblin that are running towards each other aren't necessarily moving and stopping, but may be moving all along - it is just as far as they've moved up to that point.

 

[jgsugden]

You can abstract away from what happens on the battlemap to tell the story you want to tell. You can also frame your tory around what plays out on the battlemap. Both can be combined to tell a good story and hold the mechanical aspects as controlling of the game, but allowing the game to tweak around the edges to tell a good story.

Examples from Critical Role are the countless "How do you want to do this?" moments. The PCs describe a kill in a way that has nothing to do with the mechanics of the fight.

For a specific example (taken from my game where someone was a Black Widow fan): A PC may roll a hit, deal 8 damage and finish off the warlord ... but they describe it as leaping up and wrapping their legs around the neck of the enemy, using their body weight to flip the enemy and dropping them onto the dagger they pulled out as they flipped, driving the dagger deep into the fallen enemy skull. As a DM, I say, "Cool! You end up prone after the maneuver - do you want to stand up?"

ALTERNATIVELY: If you really need the mechanics to tell a more dynamic (and less turn based) story, you need to eliminate the 6 second round. That is too much time for players and monsters to act without interacting. If you watch a good fight scene in a movie, you'll find that 3 seconds is about right for the back and forth of combat. Each combatant takes about a second and a half to engage their attack, while their enemy responds in about a second and a half. This is not universally true, but it is is what I noticed in the combats I've seen. This takes some pretty significant revamping of the rules to do well, but I've had systems for it in prior editions (unless you go with the simplest version - rounds are 3 seconds and movement is cut in half, but everything else remains the same). You can also go with a truly dynamic segmented system where time is not broken up into rounds at all, but we instead have actions take time and just move from action to action.

 

[Umbran]

D&D Combat is fictionless. But Frogreaver, "What does that even mean?" It means that D&D combat is incapable of representing combat fiction the way we want to imagine it.

I'm sorry, but "it isn't how I want" does not mean "it doesn't exist at all". There's a fiction, you just don't like it.

The extention of "the way I want to imagine" to some undefined general "we" is not supported.

 

[BookTenTiger]

ALTERNATIVELY: If you really need the mechanics to tell a more dynamic (and less turn based) story, you need to eliminate the 6 second round. That is too much time for players and monsters to act without interacting. If you watch a good fight scene in a movie, you'll find that 3 seconds is about right for the back and forth of combat. Each combatant takes about a second and a half to engage their attack, while their enemy responds in about a second and a half. This is not universally true, but it is is what I noticed in the combats I've seen. This takes some pretty significant revamping of the rules to do well, but I've had systems for it in prior editions (unless you go with the simplest version - rounds are 3 seconds and movement is cut in half, but everything else remains the same). You can also go with a truly dynamic segmented system where time is not broken up into rounds at all, but we instead have actions take time and just move from action to action.

I wonder if eliminating passive rolls would help with this? For example, the knight attacks the goblin, rolls an attack roll, and the goblin rolls an "armor class roll?"

Although that would drag out combat, so that might break narrative even more.

In my own group, we do enjoy describing what happens in combat a lot in order to build up a narrative. However, we have also found that when we limit descriptions of every action and get through rounds faster, we find it builds a more satisfying whole-combat narration.