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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9834972" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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").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).</blockquote>

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