D&D 5E De-emphasizing Combat (+)

[overgeeked]

How would you propose handling such a system?

The vast majority of combats in D&D are there simply to expend the PCs' resources before getting to the "big fights". The suggested 6-8 fights in a day with two short rests spread between them...yeah, maybe...maybe 1-2 of those fights are going to be important. The rest are filler.

I have two ideas for handling this.

First, you could borrow from The One Ring and Adventures in Middle Earth journey rules and have the filler combats work as a skill challenge that reduces the PCs' resources and dumps them into the first round of meaningful combat. This would have the effect of reducing the amount of actual combat you have to play through while also maintaining the resource depletion and management that's meant to go along with all that fighting...and still have the 1-2 meaningful fights. The longer the filler before the main event to more successes you’d need...and the more resources you'd expend getting there.

Second, run everything as skill challenges. Though you’d want a far looser and more free-flowing version than found in 4E.

Either way, combat as a skill challenge is fairly easy to do. Depending on how granular you want to go, you can either assign a number of successful checks it takes to remove a single combatant (this goblin takes 1 success, that orc takes 2, that gnoll takes 4, etc), or assign a number of successes for the whole fight (you're fighting 16 successes worth of orcs, go). Once that number has been reached, either the combatant is defeated or the combat is won (or lost).

Treat crits or near max damage rolls as 2 successes. And run it just like the 3-step play loop presented for the rest of the game. The DM describes the environment, the players announce intended actions, and the DM narrates the outcome.

Let the PCs burn resources for automatic successes, to succeed at cost, or to avoid the consequences of a failure. Examples. The wizard doesn't want to deal with the mass of goblins to burns 3rd-level slot to fireball a group to auto succeed, and eliminate several goblins. The rogue fails their pick locks check but wants to succeed so they burn the resource of their lock picks to succeed at cost. Avoiding the consequence of failure is the old notion of splintered shields. You would otherwise take a nasty hit so you destroy your shield to negate that hit. Consequences for failing rolls is resources (as above), hit points, hit dice, and increasing the number of successes required to beat the skill challenge, i.e. the situation gets worse, reinforcements come, the enemy leader casts a healing spell, whatever makes sense in the fiction.

 

[Charlaquin]

Seems like we are on the same page about getting rid of a detailed system

Edit: hope @Stormonu can read it, now that I quoted you

They can’t, the ignore feature hides quotes too. Thanks for trying though

 

[Umbran]

How would you propose handling such a system?

If you mean that in general, then this isn't really a D&D question. I'd handle it in the way that other systems that already do - by putting combat within the same mechanical framework as they do any other challenge, instead of making it a separate minigame. Cortex Prime and Fate are reasonable examples.

How would I hack 5e to do it? That's a much tougher question.

There is a very basic question I'd want answered first - do you want ALL combats to be no more than such skill challenges, or do you want to enable some combats to be handled this way, but retain the full tactical mode for when it is desired?

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

If I were doing it -- and using D&D5e -- I would utilize the proficiency system to create "descriptors" that encompass some aspect about the character and their skills: "smells like an ox", "master of the Run Away school of martial arts", etc. When I want to solve a situation, the player and GM would roll opposed d20s, adding their proficiency bonus if they have an applicable descriptor, and the loser takes a "token". After accumulating a certain number of tokens (perhaps decided by the type/severity of conflict), an individual is "out" of whatever kind of conflict it is. You can even run non-person situations as conflicts against groups of NPCs representing the different parts of the challenge.

Whether or not this would replace the existing skill/weapon/tool proficiency system, I don't care.