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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8630755" data-attributes="member: 18">Ummm, dude.You're seemingly mad about one of the fundamental principles of 5E's design (and 4E, and probably 3E and so on).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?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.Anyway the principle is attrition.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).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).and2) 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.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.</blockquote>

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