D&D General Fixing the Offense Tunnel Vision problem

[Zardnaar]

Each one provides 1 Unstoppable charge every round.

Ah gotcha. We just usually chew through unstoppable 12 and parlyze her.

 

[Sorinth]

Ah gotcha. We just usually chew through unstoppable 12 and parlyze her.

It's BG3 so yeah you can just power through, magic missile especially is powerful for this. But if everyone has focused on DPR and you can't chew through all the charges easily it can be either very hard or even impossible task to just go for the boss. It's the principle, minions who are relative weak but make the boss much tougher will make it tactically smarter to take out the minions first.

For example, if a minion has 20 HP and has cast Stoneskin on the boss who has 100 HP and the party mostly is doing BPS. You will take more of the bosses effective HP by killing that minion first, deal 20 damage to the minion and effectively remove 100 HP from the boss.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Totally. When I did B&B 2e a few months back, I gave BBEG's special powers and traits that also helps address the issue. Particulary the traits that impact its minions and alllies.

View attachment 426845

Another trait/limited ability idea:
A Sacrifice I am willing to make
When the BBEG is attacked, as a reaction, the attack is instead directed against a minion adjacent to the BBEG or the attacker.
Optional (Recharge 5-6): Treat any hits as critical hits, but until the end of the attacker's turn, all of the attacker's attacks on the BBEG are directed against that minion, even if the minion is defeated by one of these attacks.

Inspire Sacrifice
When the BBEG is targeted by an area effect, one adjacent minion can spend their reaction to reduce the damage to the BBEG by half. In turn, the minion takes half that damage, even if they were target of the attack already. If the area effect has additional effects other than damage, and the minion was not originally target of the effect, any additional effects are also applied to the minion instead of the BBEG.

 

[Sorinth]

Another trait/limited ability idea:
A Sacrifice I am willing to make
When the BBEG is attacked, as a reaction, the attack is instead directed against a minion adjacent to the BBEG or the attacker.
Optional (Recharge 5-6): Treat any hits as critical hits, but until the end of the attacker's turn, all of the attacker's attacks on the BBEG are directed against that minion, even if the minion is defeated by one of these attacks.

Inspire Sacrifice
When the BBEG is targeted by an area effect, one adjacent minion can spend their reaction to reduce the damage to the BBEG by half. In turn, the minion takes half that damage, even if they were target of the attack already. If the area effect has additional effects other than damage, and the minion was not originally target of the effect, any additional effects are also applied to the minion instead of the BBEG.

Krenko from the Ravinica book had a redirect attacks to a minion ability, though I think his was flavoured as grabbing a minions and shoving them into harms way to save himself.

A few guards with the Protection or Interception fighting styles could similarly help protect the boss.

 

[Zardnaar]

Krenko from the Ravinica book had a redirect attacks to a minion ability, though I think his was flavoured as grabbing a minions and shoving them into harms way to save himself.

A few guards with the Protection or Interception fighting styles could similarly help protect the boss.

Some low level critter has a ignore damage as a reaction ability on Sunday. I forget what one it was. Negated a smiting crit with it.

 

[GrimCo]

People focus on offense in d&d because focusing on defense is usually just prolonging the fight and stalling. For martials, there are no real benefits in going defensive. Sure, you can buff AC (which is passive) but sooner or later, that nat 20 is gonna hit you. And that's autocrit which usually hurts. And in most combats, you still need to switch to offense at some point to actually win the fight. There are no really good active defensive mechanics that give you edge in combat. For instance, CoS bard and defensive flourish, but in reverse, you roll bardic dice, this round you get bonus to ac, next round bonus to damage. Only it's not tied to finite resource but regular "at will" mechanic for martial characters.

Unfortunatley, best course of action, for martials, is straight up just attack for as much damage as you can. Grapple is useless, disarming works sometimes but uses superiority dice and effect isn't that great, pushing is terrain dependent (cool option if you can push someone over the ledge).

I'll contrast D&D with nWoD (WW one). In WoD, health is low, wounds heal slow (or not at all sometimes), you get penalties when wounded. In that game, if it comes to combat, alpha strike is also best option. Hit first, hit hard, focus fire and try to end opponent before it gets his turn. Why? Because- health is low, wounds heal slow. Best defense is overwhelming offence. Can't hurt you if it's dead.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

The problem you have encountered is, simply put, bad incentive design. Defending simply delays the inevitable--which means it gives the enemy two turns while you only take one. Defending has to advance your interests in some way, or it will never be a preferable pick outside of bespoke need (e.g. "if I don't reduce my incoming damage this turn, I'll almost surely die").

Which is just not universally true.

There are always situations where one person sacrificing damage for defense or control is a net positive for the action economy.

Granting disadvantage to an enemy is quite often more reliable than giving advantage.
If they attack you with +7 against AC 19, their chance to hit goes from 40% down to 16%. Which more than doubles your effective HP and reduces crits from 1 in 20 to 1 in 400.

So even if your statement was true, that an enemy gets two turns for one turn of yours, you easily mktigate enough damage.

There needs to be proactive value in the other decisions. Without that, you have...well, I already said it. Defense and the weaker forms of crowd control do not solve problems, they simply delay or slow down the final result. Sufficiently strong crowd control will out-compete damage, but only because it's functionally ending the conflict sooner, not later.

You can address this by changing the goals (e.g. "winning" the fight isn't always the most important thing), by giving resources which are only generated by the passage of time (e.g. 13th Age's Escalation Die, Eberron/4e's Action Points), by providing additional rewards for choosing these oft-ignored options (e.g. "if you take the Full Defense action, you get a number of Opportunity Attacks equal to the ability modifier you're using to make those attacks"), or by altering the calculation so that you dampen the value of pumping out as much damage as fast as possible (e.g. a damage cap, where a creature cannot take more than N damage from any single source, or a threat which can only be defeated after certain objectives have been met).