D&D General D&D Combat is fictionless

[Garthanos]

My main regret, honestly, is that there are few differences between tank and striker in 5e. As a side thinking, it's one thing that technically 4e did well, in 5e all fighters are a mix of capabilities. I guess it goes with the flexibility of the game, but I love tanks/defenders as a concept.

That mix could have been an opportunity instead of a limit, is actually what I meant. I have some elements that would improve flexibility of the core fighter but not necessarily increase raw power just sometimes situational. For instance collapse the Purple Dragon Knight into the fighter and parts of Cavalier too (like expanding opportunity attacks to match your extra attacks ), allow BM maneuvers that protect self to alternately protect allies on your choice too. You might allow the Battlemaster to do more special tricks like Inspiring or Protecting or whatever by allowing them to sacrifice an attack to scan for openings (this makes being striker an option instead of always 2/3 ). Basically make the maneuvers less locked down for instance A maneuvering strike should definitely affect self too. Making sure they have enough maneuvers so that they are on the fly role flexible could also be an ingredient.

(5e could potentially have a better Warlord than 4e to be honest but that takes even more to explain involves more maneuvers that affect enemies for instance).

 

[Garthanos]

(5e could potentially have a better Warlord than 4e to be honest but that takes even more to explain involves more maneuvers that affect enemies for instance).

I guess by this I mean a 6e

 

[Lyxen]

I guess by this I mean a 6e

I'll sign with a great warlord for 5e, but honestly, I don't think 6e is going to happen any time soon, so can I please have my great warlord for 5e ? Pretty please ?

 

[Garthanos]

I'll sign with a great warlord for 5e, but honestly, I don't think 6e is going to happen any time soon, so can I please have my great warlord for 5e ? Pretty please ?

There are alot of 3pp attempts I haven't found them to work well for my tastes (there is however a swordmage I have seen structured like the Warlock that I could be tempted with.

 

[Garthanos]

I'll sign with a great warlord for 5e, but honestly, I don't think 6e is going to happen any time soon, so can I please have my great warlord for 5e ? Pretty please ?

I will say Mike Mearles made an interesting video stab at it (his focus zone seems to be an elaboration of a similar 4e power) and I haven't examined the LevelUp warlord in detail yet but they had an interesting idea that flashes back to AD&D in it.

 

[Krachek]

Sorry, just because the publisher says the game is something, doesn't mean it actually is.

No matter how you turn, the fact remains:

The game offers you actions that reward acting game-like ("I stop just short of the goblin forcing it to move on its turn").

Not fiction-like ("I rush the goblin"). By that I mean saying that might be its own reward, but the game does not reward you for it.

Now let's stop debating exactly what he means by fictionless. Let's instead discuss this statement of mine:If you want characters to act more like "in the movies" you need a ruleset that rewards such behavior.

Why give a mechanical reward to a fiction move, since the player won’t care or won’t use it, preferring another more fictional move?
So the DM Just give a fictional reward, that is totally situational, base on table game style, and surely won’t be defined by the rules!

 

[tomBitonti]

There is no accounting for what will get stuck in someone's craw in a game design. But we also have to question how huge a flaw this really is when millions of players over decades haven't had all that much of a problem with it.

It seems to me that games that take different approaches to time, conflict resolution mechanics, and the resulting fiction arise not from a real issue putting together a fiction off of a turn-based, round-by-round method, but from different overall approaches to conflict resolution that don't really call for that traditional style.

Though ... folks can forget or may have never been aware of what a game is like when grids are erased, or when more simultaneous action resolution is used. There is a very big difference! I built a small gaming board using foamcore, flock, and plaster rocks, painted, and with plastic trees from the aquarium section of a local pet store. I found this to be much much more immersive. That there was no grid really changed how I conceived of the encounter space.

That being said, some players didn't like it. They preferred to have a grid, which seemed to provide a conceptual framework for them to base their decisions. (The 40K player in the group was fine with the change. The more solely D&D players had more difficulty.)

TomB

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Umbran, I'm not really following your posts.

@FrogReaver has identified a phenomenon, that the fiction of what happened in the round can't be established until after actions are declared and resolved, although some of those actions only make sense (in the fiction) as responses to what is happening in the fiction.

There are no doubt many D&D players, perhaps a large majority, who aren't bothered by this. When I played 4e D&D it didn't bother me, as I've posted upthread. But I don't think it's fair to say that someone who is bothered by it is doing something wrong or outside the specs (as would be the case for cooking in a dishwasher).

Eh, there are certainly differences between 4e and a game like DW where there isn't actually a 'combat system' per se, and you just toss dice in response to narrative descriptions of the PC's actions (either proactive or reactive). OTOH you have to toss dice in either one at some point to know what to narrate next. In 4e you get a turn where you declare actions, often to invoke powers. Then there's a clear mechanical path from there, so its proper to say that resolution in 4e can always be had without reference to the fiction, explicitly. So, technically you may NEVER narrate an action, just invoke 'Twin Strike' or whatever. In DW you MUST describe your actions in fictional terms, and there's no actual structure that maps that to the moves and die rolls, just conventions and principles of play. Still, I cannot narrate in DW what happens when I leap to intercept the orc warrior charging at the wizard, until I roll some dice, whereas if I were playing in 4e and invoked some interrupt or OA to smack down said warrior I only invoked the grid, the action rules, etc. but IF I WANTED to narrate, I'd still need to toss those dice before doing so, at least before finishing the paragraph, so to speak.

And, you know, my guess is you can kinda water down DW and play something that resembles D&D combat. It isn't 'correct' maybe, but then I can richly narrate my 4e actions too, and refrain from ever mentioning mechanics except in an aside. I think there's a sort of spectrum in real world play is what I'm saying.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Following my last, I think the concern might be expressed as follows

1. Given I have a view of the flow of interactions and information in the real world, that I label "time"
2. Given that view is my local, macroscopic view, at modest relative velocities - i.e. a humanistic view of time
3. Given I assume each participant in each 6-second slice ("round") of D&D combat starts their interactions at the beginning of the round and carries them out over the round, with information about those interactions obeying that same procession
4. Given I expect fair fidelity from D&D combat as model of reality
5. Then various inexplicable and suspension-of-disbelief jarring dissonances can be observed
   1. Information can seem to be obtained in disobedience to the time sequence, so a participant's decision in second-1 can be informed by what another participant completed in second-6
   2. Interactions can seem to occur in disobedience to the time sequence, such as one participant waiting on another to finish their whole 6-seconds of actions, before they start even their first second of actions
   3. Velocities follow unnatural paths, where one participant can have effectively a velocity of zero over 6-seconds because another somehow 'already' enjoyed their full expected velocity

In background to this, it's worth considering what time is? One view is that the arrow of time is informed by the arrow of entropy, and underlining that perhaps the simplest thing to say about time is that it is the relative ordering of interactions and information whatever that ordering is from the point of view of an observer. Orderings in time are not the same for differing observers. Time and causality are often seen as connected, when they are more accurately described as related. An event can appear a-causal from the point of view of some observers (it might even be that some events are a-causal.) Whatever, I hold the view that there is no causality in fiction, albeit there can be causality (as we usually mean it) in what is going on in our brains with regard to that fiction... and that is something that can differ between brains.

Anyway, the concern at heart isn't fictionlessness. It is that realistic features we might naturally expect and desire our fiction to have, can't subsist on the D&D combat mechanism grasped plainly without glossing or eliding.

Various physicists rest uneasy in their graves tonight, but I still think that your point is interesting. I've always seen something like 3/4/5e's sequential turn order mechanics as something of a subjective description of the action, not an absolute and cogent causally coherent one. The becomes especially true with things like 4e's out-of-turn actions, the various 'repositioning' abilities of leaders, etc. In other words, I actually see some of the things that, for instance a 4e bard or warlord can do as RETCONS! In other words, you move the orc 2 squares with a power, that isn't (necessarily) the orc being moved back, it could be the orc NEVER MOVED FORWARD, or the Warlord called out that possibility to his ally the fighter and forestalled it from ever happening.

More generally, a character sees another character do something in their turn and reacts. Yes, technically they are 'in the same round' (though 4e in particular doesn't define rounds this way) so you might ask why is he seeing something that happens and then acting on it before it takes place? Well, obviously that isn't what happened! He's really a bit behind. Being back in the turn order is "being behind the curve" and thus being more reactive and less proactive, at least in the start of the fight. Those orcs got good init rolls, they got the jump on you! Its possible something that happens in the round will play out fictionally as everyone trying to do stuff at once, but maybe it won't! Maybe your torch threw a spark just as the orcs leapt out and you got caught flat footed. There's plenty of ways to spin whatever happens in a round.

I mean, maybe there's a cool way to work all this into a more fiction-first kind of a format, like you can be that jumpy hair-trigger guy that leaps in ahead of others, but sometimes that isn't going to work for you. Maybe it puts you at the head of the order, but also maybe that's not the place to be all the time, and if the fiction is used in a creative way by the GM (how to help this happen) you can really play all this up. Sure, go first Joe, but you're going to have to act blindly!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The other issue my OP touched on was the aspect of D&D combat where it's not able to produce common fictional tropes in many situations like the fighter and orc charging each other at the same time and meeting in the middle (this is the concept of 'fiction that we want' that keeps getting thrown up). And while that's said as a criticism, really why the heck wouldn't we want that to be possible? Ultimately though, I think the conversation has really moved past this point and really has been focused around 'fictionless decisions' for quite some time.

Hmmmm, not sure I understand this one... Looking at 4e's rules there are a VARIETY of ways that "the orc and the fighter meet in the middle" can take place. One would be simply that the combat starts when the two sides are, say, 10 squares apart. If the fighter moves forward 6 squares and activates some power, or even just uses the Ready action, then the orc will move forward and they will meet -roughly- in the middle. This seems reasonable, and for whatever tactical reasons it could happen at almost any starting distance of more than 4 squares or so. Likewise the orc could move forward and ready an attack, or even a charge. There could be an off-turn power which could trigger too and allow one side to preempt some of the other's turn. The start of the fight could simply be NARRATED this way (4e fights could be initiated from any state), so the GM could simply say, the orcs see you and move forward in a RUSH! The PCs get good init rolls and leap forward, meeting them in combat (IE the GM simply positions the orcs roughly 3-10 squares in front of the PCs with the fiction being they are running forward).

I really don't think there's any significant issue there. Obviously tactical considerations and available options at any given time may preclude or militate against a particular sort of action taking place. I guess I wonder why this is a problem? Something will happen! If the GM was dead set on a particular outcome, maybe that's more an issue with GM expectations vs what the game actually delivers. I mean, most sorts of tactical scenarios will eventually be thrown up in 4e combats, particularly if you play a pretty open-ended and dynamic style.

I can agree though that, particularly MM1 monsters, often didn't pull off a 'shtick' very well. The mechanical representation of whatever their ability was just either didn't really work on the grid, or it was easily and obviously countered in a way that didn't seem super interesting or fictionally relevant. A lot of that kind of stuff was fixed with more polished monster design. So, for example a lot of MM1 lurkers kinda bite, but their MV rebuilds or replacements work like a charm!

Finally, I think at least with 4e in particular, the game is really MEANT to be tactical, so that agenda might clash sometimes with 'big damn heroes' or whatever. Certain tactics just WORK, and that transcends the game too, like concentrating your attacks on one opponent, that's a universal tactic even in the real world.