Neonchameleon
Legend
I've three points of disagreement, one of which is petty: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. The turn structure gets in the way. Instead of having the goblin and fighter charge each other and meet in the middle. Instead we have the fighter carefully plotting out his turn and being careful to only use enough movement so that the goblin in question will need to use it's action to dash to get to him. A wise tactical decision! But that tactical decision has no basis in the actual fiction. The fiction is just that the fighter and goblin charge each other and engage each other in melee combat - I mean no one imagines the fighter advances and then stops, and then the goblin advances and then stops... right? So this wise tactical decision is solely a reflection of 'metagaming the combat turns'. That bugs me. And it's probably going to continue to bug me as I don't really see a possible solution. But it would be really nice if for my combat decisions to be wise and tactical they could be based on the fiction instead of the turn structure.
- Just because it doesn't have the fiction you (or I or anyone else) wants it doesn't make it fictionless - just not the fiction you want
- The OODA loop is a thing - as are movements and phrases (I don't have the technical vocabulary) in fight scene choreography and if D&D was trying for realism hit points wouldn't be a thing
- 4e was an exception because it imagined one style of combat extremely well.
2 on the other hand - depending on what type of combat you have there are near stop-motion phrases where the combatants break to reassess before the next exchange. It's not so common in one on one brawls which end up generally as rolling around on the floor. But it definitely is in cinematic combat, and in sport combat - and the only reason it isn't so common in real armed fights is because they tend to be fast and brutal as in war you don't have a pool of near-consequence-free hit points. Sure there's more flow in systems using real bodies - but if we look at a perfectly good fight scene from The Witcher there are pretty clear breaks in it.
3 is one of the many reasons I miss 4e. "Slow combat" was in part because there were a lot of opportunity and interrupt actions which had the effect of showing that everyone competent was continually moving in response to each other. And the other part is that the story of 4e combat frequently involves using the environment almost as much as any Jackie Chan film as well as teamwork and rescuing each other.