D&D General Didn’t Mike Mearls propose a one-roll combat encounter?

[Shiroiken]

I’d rather there be something worth the time investment happen. Combat as foregone conclusion isn’t worth the time or energy. You shouldn’t bother with the full combat rules unless your chances are way less than 95%. Something like 50-60% as the max worth bothering sounds about right. Then your round to round decisions actually matter. Resources actually matter. Movement and positioning actually matter.

Just checking... you're good with the party having to retreat/surrender/tpk about every other combat? That's what a 50-60% victory chance would create, and I doubt even a 5E deadly combat is as low as a 95% victory chance (for the party, not individual PCs). This will create a "combat as war" mentality, where the PCs will try to win or avoid combat without ever rolling initiative. I'm not personally opposed to such a thing, but IME back in AD&D this made tactics fairly irrelevant.

 

[Deset Gled]

Hit dice say hello.

Hello?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

For fights where the players are going to overwhelm the opposition but "have" to happen for narrative/verisimilitude reasons we basically do exactly that. Each player says how they approach the combat, then they each make one attack roll and if they succeed then they lose no resources and if they fail they lose some resources (in D&D 5e usually hit dice or a spell slot, in 4e it was healing surges or a daily power). Then we'll just narrate it out and move on.

So if the 10th level PCs pick a fight with a bunch of goblins who are just there for color, we'll just do a montage like that and move on narratively (it also has the benefit of causing my players to ... not view every encounter as a potential combat encounter. Which is a great side effect.)

Yeah this.

If I've got an assassin that's high level and somewhat optimized, and there are mooks they want to murder, I just ask for a stealth check to determine how quietly they're able to do the job.

 

[overgeeked]

Just checking... you're good with the party having to retreat/surrender/tpk about every other combat?

Yes, absolutely. That's infinitely more interesting than chucking dice for an hour to finally get to an inevitable "you win".

That's what a 50-60% victory chance would create, and I doubt even a 5E deadly combat is as low as a 95% victory chance (for the party, not individual PCs).

Yeah. Even deadly combat is wildly imbalanced in favor of the PCs. Use the adventuring day as more of a guide. Something like 2-3 deadly encounters worth of monsters in one combat is about what the game's balanced around. 2-3 fights, short rest, 2-3 fights, short rest, 2-3 harder fights, long rest. So we should start with those 2-3 fights, or those 2-3 harder fights as the baseline.

This will create a "combat as war" mentality, where the PCs will try to win or avoid combat without ever rolling initiative.

Perfect. Then maybe the players would be more engaged and thinking instead of mindlessly charging the next set of pushover monsters standing in their way. I'd much rather they spend 20 minutes coming up with a devastating plan that will avoid a fight or cripple their enemies, and playing through that than even one more slog of pointlessly throwing dice for a combat the PCs basically cannot lose unless they do something dramatically stupid.

I'm not personally opposed to such a thing, but IME back in AD&D this made tactics fairly irrelevant.

I think we're defining tactics differently then. A strategy is your plan, your goal whereas tactics are the specific things you do, or actions you take to achieve your goal. Tactics are not limited to after initiative is rolled. They can happen before initiative is rolled. And if they're good tactics, they can prevent initiative from being rolled. To me, that's perfect. I want that. I'd much rather thinking and engaged players being smart to avoid combat than have them endlessly, mindlessly charging into the next combat as if they're immortal...which they effectively are because of the default assumption of 5E. Combat as sport is boring and dull; combat as war is much more engaging and fun.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Ummm, dude.

FYI, starting a post like this does nothing really to encourage a response. Frankly, I wonder where you got the rest of your post from or why you directed it at me. But... since you did:

You're seemingly mad about one of the fundamental principles of 5E's design (and 4E, and probably 3E and so on).

I am not mad (as in angry or crazy over...) concerning anything about what you are discussing.

Combat isn't about winning/losing in modern D&D designs. The PCs almost never lose. I'm sure that's true in your games too. I very strongly imagine that even the PCs in your game have an at least "on points" win ratio of like 100:1, because otherwise you'd have parties getting TPK'd or at least TPK-but-DM-fiat-says-they-keep-you-alive'd like, pretty often. I mean, how many fights do you have a session?

The ratio is closer to 10:1, FWIW. And we typically have anywhere from just a couple to as many as 8-10 depending on the nature of the session and how long it goes.

Before you talk about "oh but they might retreat!", well, that's extremely hard to do in 5E - in general the specific rules of 5E mean that unless DM fiat is involved, if you actually play out a retreat, the retreating party will usually die (or over 50% of them will). Against faster enemies it's pretty much always going to be TPK-on-retreat unless the right kind of magic is involved.

Well, whose fault it that? The designers of course.

And also, the whole "assuming you know what someone will say" is pretty arrogant.

Anyway the principle is attrition.

What, really, like people don't know that?!

That's what D&D combat is about. Resource management. You know this. I've seen your designs and they account for it. Fights in D&D are, typically a forgone conclusion - the PCs survive and move on. The question is, how much of their resources do they retain? Even a fairly easy fight (so "Hard" in 5E parlance) can quickly go downhill with some bad rolls on the PC side and good ones on the monster side. This rarely leads to TPK in 5E (or 4E) but often leads to resources being consumed that the party did not wish to be consumed (spells, consumables, long-rest abilities, HD spent in a short rest after combat, etc. etc.).

The final fight with the BBEG may well involve an actual risk of TPK, that's usually on the table, even if the odds are pretty low unless the PCs really screw up, but up until then, it's generally about resource attrition. There are RPGs where every fight is intended to be "life and death", every single one, but they're relatively rarer - earlier editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Call of Cthulhu, Millennium's End, etc. (not really Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020, whilst they technically can be there's a ton of mitigation, especially with stuff like Trauma Team).

Yep, all true. So, what does any of this have to do with my post???

So the questions I see are:

1) Why are we doing combat? The answer is generally "because it's fun and engaging".

I'd personally say 5E's combat is drastically less fun/engaging than 4E's was below level 11, and then after level 11 5E gradually pulls ahead simply because we lose the the chain of attack-reaction-interrupt to the reaction-immediate action etc. that often started happening in that and which ground 4E down. I know 6 out of 7 of the players in my "main" group agree with this (the other one doesn't really like combat in either edition but dislikes it less in 5E because it's quicker).

and

2) Can any "quick resolve" system appropriately reduce resources and would players feel okay with it.

I think anything that's just some dice rolls is going to be poorly received. But if you had players deciding they wanted to expend X resources on the combat, and then those resources influenced some dice-driven resolution mechanism, and the results would determine whether you lost any other resources, that might work better. An even better approach actually might be for players to "bet" X resources on the combat, and if the dice-based resolution went well maybe they don't lose many of them or even perhaps any, and obviously if it goes badly they lose those resources and perhaps then some, etc. etc. I'm pretty sure this could be figured out, but would people want to?

So then we have another question:

3) Why would we want to skip combat? And the answer is likely to be because it's Easy/Normal/Hard (rather than Deadly/Deadly+) combat that isn't likely to be terribly interesting, but is likely to take, say 30-60 minutes to resolve (combats involving large numbers of highly-mobile ranged combatants can particularly take forever in 5E), and the party would rather do something else, but that 5E requires resource attrition to function correctly. So assuming there was an alternative resource attrition mechanism that people were happy with, that would make sense to do.

You see this in videogames, for example, and in others I've certainly wished it existed (especially the first Pathfinder game). The Total War series has it for example. It's literally a game focused on these RtwP tactical battles, but it has autoresolve. And people use it a ton. Why? Because not every battle is equally interesting, but like D&D, attrition is one of the main mechanisms of the game. It's very unlikely you'll lose say a 20 units vs. 10 battle, like literally you could probably just walk away from the chair and win with a lot of armies, but it will take a while, and might be better autoresolved.

Whew...

That's a lot of words, I guess, but the TLDR is 5E is attrition-based, so combat attrition is necessary for correct functioning, but not every combat is worth playing out to every group so a mechanism for "autoresolving" Easy/Normal/Hard combats specifically (probably just ignore Deadly) would be worthwhile for those groups.

Yep, that was a lot of words which I hope you felt you got something out of.

My turn:

Regardless, you said it yourself. Combat is about attrition and still if 99% or more battles are won by the PCs, you don't even need a roll. The game becomes about story-telling (which is fine of course) where the players defeat X Y and Z. If you want to say that uses up resources A B and C, go for it.

After all, what is the point to just rolling to see what resources are lost? If you aren't interested in combat (again, no issues with that!) then why are you concerned with attrition? What does it impact to know resources A and C have been used but not B?

Finally, I already suggested a model for quickly resolving combat in another thread (D&D General - SD&D: Simply D&D) where it comes down to (yes) a series of rolls. You could augment it as you suggest with concepts based on the resources you want to use, or just use it as is. But, frankly, regardless of how you do combat the PCs wins the vast majority of the time so the question that really matters is, again, why bother?

You said it yourself: either you enjoy combat or you don't. If you don't enjoy it, but you know the model is the PCs win nearly all the time, narrate it and move on.

We narrate simple encounters which will have little attrition and pose little threat all the time. On the other end of the spectrum, you would not want to just play out deadly potentially TPK encounters all the time, either because it would be exhausting to do! So, most groups run the range of encounters--playing some out, narrating others.

Other groups love combat, even the cakewalk stuff where they dominate, and are happy to gloss over the social or exploration pillars. To those groups, the why bother is in the other pillars...

 

[DND_Reborn]

If you want another system using a single die roll, here you go:

• Each player rolls a d20 for each character they have.
• The DC for the check is based on the encounter difficulty the DM sets: 2 = Easy, 3 = Moderate, 4 = Hard, 5 = Deadly.
• Each subsequent encounter before the PCs get in a short or long rest increases the base DC by 1 due to attrition.
• Spellcasters (Bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard) with no spell slots remaining have disadvantage on the roll.
• Non-spellcasters (Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue) with less than maximum HP for the encounter have disadvantage on the roll.

Results:

• Any PC who fails the roll is reduced to 0 HP by the encounter.
• The encounter is a TPK if all players fail the roll. (So, the larger your party, the more likely someone will survive.)
• PCs reduced to 0 HP must recover as normal (using features, magic, or resting).
• Any PC with the spellcasting trait who fails the roll loses their highest remaining spell slot. If they succeed in the roll, they lose their lowest available spell slot. (This affects what spells casters have access to for non-combat pillars.)

You can adjust the rolls and DC if you really want, like the players get +1 per PC level and the DC is increased by the average CR (or level) of the opponents. Personally, I wouldn't bother and just use the base mechanic above, but to each their own...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The ratio is closer to 10:1, FWIW. And we typically have anywhere from just a couple to as many as 8-10 depending on the nature of the session and how long it goes.

What happens 1 in 10 times, a TPK? And you often do 10 rounds a session, so like, you average a TPK every other session? Or what are you saying here?

 

[Shiroiken]

I think we're defining tactics differently then. A strategy is your plan, your goal whereas tactics are the specific things you do, or actions you take to achieve your goal.

Cool. I've heard from a military perspective that strategy as what you do outside of combat, and tactics what you do inside combat. Generally when people use "tactics" in RPGs they're referring to combat tactics, often referencing 4E's combats.

 

[DND_Reborn]

What happens 1 in 10 times, a TPK?

No, not a TPK...

Retreat (it can happen, despite what you think, even when others are DMing and not me...), capture, bargain/bribery, and sometimes...

And you often do 10 rounds a session, so like, you average a TPK every other session? Or what are you saying here?

I can safely say I am positive we do at least 10 rounds per session... I can't imagine not.

Now, 10 combats per session is excessively rare -- it ranges, as I said, often between 2-3 and up to 6-8 depending on the nature of the session and time spent playing.

But yeah, I would say about once every two sessions the PCs are forced to regroup and handle a combat encounter in some other fashion because otherwise they will lose.

I am not, personally, one of those DMs (or even as a player) who wants the game just handed to me on a platinum platter. I like it when it is actually a challenge.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I am not, personally, one of those DMs (or even as a player) who wants the game just handed to me on a platinum platter. I like it when it is actually a challenge.

I feel like this is a bit of a self-serving misrepresentation. To achieve what you're describing you're going to need to totally ignore encounter-building guidelines and just throw tons of "Deadly+" encounters at the PCs, like ones that they, on paper, definitely cannot handle (but in practice, they just about can), to achieve retreat/forced parlay/forced to buy their way out etc. as often as you're seeing it. Especially with a lower number of encounters/day. By your logic, the default design of D&D in 5E is very definitely a "platinum platter", which seems, well like a reach to me.

But I know you do a lot of stuff a bit differently to standard, rules-wise, so I guess it's not surprising.