Everybody has Spring Attack

[Connorsrpg]

[MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION]

Oh, I so need to edit my last post. I think we actually agree. I love the move and take action at any time.

I don't like the 'carousel'. When I meant 'no penalties' I was referring the the poster that mentioned the idea of move attack move should be made at penalty or with a check. No to that

And no to 'carousels'. I don't really want to go back to the days of declaring actions before hand and being locked into them. I think it just takes reasonable DMs to play the orcs (or whatever) as orcs. If the front line jump back and another rushes in then leave it at that. Even with orcs that might be too much. If they are 'furiously charging', I can't see them then backing off and co-ordinating such a thing.

DMs just play things out properly (even if that is side-by-side initiative in your head). I just don't see a need for more rules to curb this awesome rule. (Now to edit that last post a little).

 

[Gorgoroth]

the carousel

is clearly an unrealistic exploit. If my DM did that to one of us, we'd come back the next session (after re-rolling a new toon), with a completely twinked out exploit broken party.

This is the type of thing where the rules makers could take the feedback of these playtests, and say, hey, this is broken, here are in-game ways to fix it, without necesserily having to resort to kludgy hacks. I work in MMORPGs and deal with hacked clients and exploits all the time, but if you have a live DM you don't have an adversarial relationship with your players (ideally), where you each expect the other to abuse you (on one side for your money, and on the other side...for other people's money, or the company's, or just for mayhem's sake), you should be able to fix stuff with the "reasonableness" clause. I know...silly to expect people to be reasonable..huh

What I'm saying is I appreciate good game design that makes these types of broken corner cases impossible, but not at the expense of good hard + fast rules. That said, I'm a fan of AoOs, and the idea of charging down a 10' wide guarded corridor is lame-sauce to me. The DM should just say "the enemy sees your move and intercepts you to stop your advance". You can stop a charging enemy from reaching the end zone in a wide open field if you're fast + strong enough (or lucky, if they're also wily and fast+strong too), but if you're guarding a 10' wide corridor, there should be zero chance of the enemy being able to rush past you if they're trying to block you.

This is where a "guard", "defend", or "block" action should be defined in Core. Only if you are "guarding", say, can you focus on the task of preventing enemies from hitting/moving past/whatever target you specify.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

I do like the idea of using phased combat {ranged, moves, melee} and allowing to 'trade up' as additional tactical depth {what I mean by this is that a ranged attack normally occurs in the first phase, but the player could sacrifice their movement phase to fire after/during enemy movement... or trade even further up and fire in the melee portion after their melee buddy's attack is resolved}

With regard to the main issue, Ranger Wickett is onto something with the 'engaged' concept. The way I see this resolved into a mechanic would be:

Most humanoids can 'engage' 1 opponent in melee combat. An opponent becomes engaged when it moved adjacent and the enemy has less 'engaged' than it is capable of, or when the enemy attacks the opponent.

To remove the 'engaged' condition, you can either 'withdraw' at half your speed or provoke an attack from the creature that has you engaged.

Some monsters are nasty simply because they can engage more than one creature at a time.

Fighters could be granted the ability to 'engage' two enemies, making them effective 'front line' without adding any additional rules.



For non-grid combat, you can still use the 'engaged' condition as above.. reflecting the 'front line' even without the use of miniatures.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Could even grant a 4E-like 'marked' condition. And it could be an option. You either focus on this enemy for a bonus but gain no OAs vs other opponents.

And I like the idea of fighters having more. The 'Engaging idea is intriguing.