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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9387483" data-attributes="member: 6877472">D&D is built around characters having a few options to choose from at any given moment.  And as the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.For example, I'm engaged in an experiment to see if I can make damage types matter a bit more.  So I've been playing around more with resistances and especially vulnerabilities.  Of course, even if the players know they are fighting enemies that are resistant to fire and vulnerable to cold, their ability to take advantage of that fact is very limited.  The Fighter can do nothing but attack with his weapons.  The Cleric doesn't have cold spells in his arsenal.  The Sorcerer can do nothing to change his limited spell selection.  So the only character who can even remotely take advantage of that is the Druid- and the Sorcerer has to avoid his fire spells, which, of course, are some of the most efficient damage spells in the game.Simply put, the game doesn't really support a character being a Swiss Army Knife.  They will then tend to use a single strategy that works in most situations and if they actually encounter a situation where that doesn't work, they flounder.And even if you try to place things into the scenario that they can exploit, like cover or terrain hazards or whatnot, they won't think to use alternative methods because they likely don't understand how effective they are.There's a fight in Conan the Destroyer where everyone's favorite sword-wielding side of beef has to fight a monster in a room full of mirrors.  To win, he has to attack the mirrors, but being Conan, he spends quite a bit of time directly attacking with the creature- only by accident does he encounter his weakness.  Players tend to feel the same way- they employ the tactics they know usually work (or worse, are the tactics they personally want to use, having built their characters around them) and will rarely be optimized to "shatter mirrors quickly"- and if they happen to be, well, that probably won't be much fun to sit through, lol.What D&D would need, I think, is a system where actions had cool downs, or that you have "set up" moves.  I used to have a Ranger in 4e who got hefty bonuses from hitting prone enemies, so my first attack would slow an enemy, then I had a feat that said whenever I hit a slowed enemy I proned them, which generally meant my third attack would be the haymaker.  Of course even with that, I kept using the same handful of abilities in most fights.So what's really needed are more situational tactics, where everyone has a move to use against a certain kind of foe- everyone has a disarm or a finisher they can use on a foe with the right status ailment, be it prone or bloodied or stunned.Everyone should have an anti-flying move or a high mobility move to get around a cluttered battlefield quickly.  But this adds complexity to the combat- you have to keep track of more things as a player, and of course, the bad guys will need moves of their own, or counters to them.Which can make the game more fun on a tactical level, but can also make fights drag out or feel tedious.</blockquote>

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