D&D General D&D Combat is fictionless

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Those aren't the only two options.

Even though this is the Internet, I hoped for good faith interpretations of my extreme example. I was wrong.

Still pemerton, I don't se any "solutions" in this thread that doesn't lean toward my first option. Actually, lots of arguments in this thread feel kind of weird to me, for example moving away from turn based combat. That has been one of the core system mechanisms in D&D for 40+ years. So why play D&D if one doesn't like the core system? There are lots of both old and new games that has different mechanical premises and solutions.

 

[FrogReaver]

I would point out a few things here, the first is an argument against your case. The fiction can be there, it is highly (maybe too much so) on the ability of the DM and/or player to narrate the actions. Your example of a fighter is fictional combat. The fighter, in his experience, knows a goblin's movement, and adjusts his accordingly. In fiction it would sound a bit like the passage when we first met Artemis Entreri in the Icewind Dale series. He was killing those dwarves, using their movement and heavy swings against them. There are DMs out there (and players) that can weave "right proper" fiction" with their abilities and choices in combat - even turn based. But, in my experience, it is very difficult to do, and even harder to make it sound as great as any book passage. (Where the author writes and writes and edits and edits).

IMO. That you can generate fiction after a combat turn is resolved that ties everything that happened in that turn together isn't really relevant to the criticism though. The fictionlessness comes during that turn before that fiction has been created that weaves everything together.

An argument for you is definitely eliminating turn based combat. I have played around with it quite a bit. The main difficulty arises in movement, not actions. Movement on a board, and not being able to adjust movement based off others becomes even more fictionless. Always looking for ideas though.

Right now I'm trying to iron out the details of a 2 initiative system.

Perception Initiative - this defines action declaration order. The Highest value would go last (as last would be an advantage here).
Dexterity Initiative - this defines action speed

So the Lowest Perception Initiative declares what they want to do first. The DM then asks if anyone that hasn't acted yet wishes to do something that could affect the acting character or anyone that has acted in response to him. This process gets repeated for all players NPC's that want to act. If so they get a turn simultaneously with him. Dexterity Initiative heavily modified by fictional concerns (primarily distance but can also be other factors) is going to be rolled to determine whose action takes effect first and will use the resulting dice roles and already established fiction to determine positioning. If someone action would fail or be severely complicated they may change course of action after the resolution of that complication.

A couple of basic examples of this would probably help.

Example 1:
Fighter rolls a percption initiative of 20. Goblin rolls a perception initiative of one. Fighter and goblin are 30 ft apart. The goblin goes first due to lower perception initiative. Wants to move up to be able to attack the fighter. Fighter wants to do something that will affect the goblin. So he declares he wants to move up and attack the goblin. Dexterity initiative is rolled (no modifiers due to similar action affecting each other). Fighter rolls 20, goblin rolls 1. The fighter one the dexterity initiative contest. DM describes the fighter and goblin running toward each other and meeting in the middle. He asks the fighter to perform his attack action as if it was on his turn. The fighter rolls a 20. He hits and does enough damage to kill the goblin. The goblin never gets an attack off.

Example 2:
Orc walks into the room. Fighter is 30ft away from him. There is a door 10ft from the fighter. Perception initiative is rolled. The fighter wins that contest. The Orc Declares he will go and attack the fighter. The fighter declares he wishes to move out of the door and close it behind him. Dexterity initiative is rolled. The fighter will get a large bonus due to the door being so close to him. But not as big of a bonus if he was fighting a creature with a slower speed. Dexterity Initiative is rolled and the fighter wins. He goes out the door and closes it behind him. The Orc doesn't lose his turn though. Instead the orc charges the door slamming his great axe into it, destroying the door.

 

[FrogReaver]

It seems to me that some people want the mechanics to create the fiction for them. And the only way to do that imho is to have really detailed simulationist mechanics, where the mechanics are simulationist in a sense that they simulate and create details for the games stated and explicit fiction. The result is most probably very long battles that are far away from the D&D tradition - hello old FGU games.

Or we can have what 5e gives us - way more rough non-detailed mechanics, made for both reasonably short battles and a moderate amount of tactical options, that gives us (imho) enough meat and potatoes to build our own combat fiction from.

Yes, there is no mechanical difference between a fighter that skips and a fighter that walks. But there sure is a roleplaying difference, if you want it to be.

Maybe I'm just blessed with players that don't have a problem to keep roleplaying in combat and create fiction out of die rolls and limited mechanics.

I would suggest more abstract mechanics are likely to work better to resolve this situation than more simulationist ones.

This is why games that resolve combat by a single 'Warfare' check don't run into this kind of issue. Everything is abstracted out,. The only fictional question for the player in such a game is whether you engage that guy in combat. The DM takes the check result and determines the outcome - filling it in with some nice fictional fluff, but the outcome is what the players next decisions will be based on.

Combat in D&D hinges on some concrete parameters that players are going to base their next decisions on, and that fiction doesn't get generated till the end of the round in the best case. In the worst case it's generated by turn, which I guess can preserve the presence of fiction and fictional decision points, but at this point we've just changed the fiction to be 'turn based fiction', which isn't really any better than fictionless IMO.

 

[Maxperson]

Two fighters set out on one turn of movement. One walks 30'. The other skips (but does not dash). How far many feet can the second go? Or are the barred from skipping unless they dash? The specifics of narration seem to me in good part up to what is accepted at each table. A group might feel that initiative represents an inner readiness - akin to zanshin - in which case they might say that even though the player aimed not to waffle, their character did indeed, internally, waffle.

Movement itself is just another place where the mechanics don't make sense. When I was in junior high I ran 100 yards(300 feet) on grass in 10 seconds flat. The idea that the fastest you can get out of dodge in combat is 60 feet in 6 seconds is ludicrous.

Wizard: "The dragon is turning around! Everyone fast walk out of here!"

The fictional reality of the stumble is suggested by the fact that as player I rolled a low initiative. If I wanted the die to narrate my preconceived narrative (that my character neither hesitated nor stumbled) I should have put it down with the number I wanted face up: rolling it was a noob error Alternatively, I could prefer to make initiative inexplicable: resisting any in-world explanation as to how my fighter happened to be slower. If I do, am I saying that all ability checks should be inexplicable? My rogue picks the lock... but not through doing anything observable in-fiction.

I think I'm just framing initiative as a Dexterity (Initiative) ability check, and narrating it along those lines.

As I pointed out, though, if you have multiple PCs and some are slower than the one who stumbled, you have to get progressively longer and longer reasons for why the PC didn't act in time to keep the enemy from moving 60 feet before being able to act. It gets out of hand fairly quickly and turns 6 seconds into much longer.

 

[Maxperson]

It seems to me that some people want the mechanics to create the fiction for them. And the only way to do that imho is to have really detailed simulationist mechanics, where the mechanics are simulationist in a sense that they simulate and create details for the games stated and explicit fiction. The result is most probably very long battles that are far away from the D&D tradition - hello old FGU games.

I don't want the mechanics to create fiction. I'd be satisfied for mechanics that didn't drag the fiction behind a barn, beat it savagely with a bat, and then leave it for dead. I just don't see a way to change it without making the game worse, so I accept it as a necessary evil in order to have fun playing D&D.

 

[Maxperson]

Even though this is the Internet, I hoped for good faith interpretations of my extreme example. I was wrong.

Still pemerton, I don't se any "solutions" in this thread that doesn't lean toward my first option. Actually, lots of arguments in this thread feel kind of weird to me, for example moving away from turn based combat. That has been one of the core system mechanisms in D&D for 40+ years. So why play D&D if one doesn't like the core system? There are lots of both old and new games that has different mechanical premises and solutions.

The solution is to ignore it and have fun. The fiction just cannot match the mechanics for combat and trying to change it make the problem worse. I gave an idea a few pages back that I was toying with, but it would slow down combat by quite a bit and complicate it too much.

 

[FrogReaver]

The solution is to ignore it and have fun. The fiction just cannot match the mechanics for combat and trying to change it make the problem worse. I gave an idea a few pages back that I was toying with, but it would slow down combat by quite a bit and complicate it too much.

Yea. I keep toying with ideas hoping to find something better for fictional that doesn't cause combat to move super slow. But yea, I doubt there is anything that doesn't simply resolve combat in a single dice roll (which while it helps the fiction that hasn't been the kind of game I've really been into playing).

Though I suppose it bears asking to all, what are the best systems that really handle combat in very abstract ways in very few rolls? Those may be worth looking into for a change of pace.

 

[Umbran]

The orcs entering the room from the other side and ending up 30 feet from the fighter and 60 feet from the door the fighter wants to leave out of, was one of the possibilities.

So, with cyclical initiative, to have initiative on Round 2, the orcs also had it on Round 1. Which means the fighter could have left in Round 1, but chose not to. In the fiction, then, he is already purposefully delaying his exit, which explains why he can't get away now - he waited too long.

 

[FrogReaver]

So, with cyclical initiative, to have initiative on Round 2, the orcs also had it on Round 1. Which means the fighter could have left in Round 1, but chose not to. In the fiction, then, he is already purposefully delaying his exit, which explains why he can't get away now - he waited too long.

I thought the point was that this was happening on round 1?

 

[Lyxen]

AUGH! Can we stop with the thinly veiled elitism about people who use grids over the "Theatre of the Mind" (GAWD that term is so bloody pretentious! I swear! I only use it because people know about it). Some of us are just not as good as visual stuff as others okay! I like to know what the heck I'm supposed to be looking at, and I'm not my character!

Heck, some people are outright incapable of visualizing things even!

Wow, first, there is no elitism, and second, you can very well play with a lot of visualisation enhancement without using a grid, including some precise mapping without going through the formalisation of forcing exact positions on a grid. Any VTT does this today, and we played for decades using that kind of system before 3e came out and sort of forced grids.