D&D General Half Formed Thought On Martial Control

[Corinnguard]

As above, I think simpler is generally better, which is counterintuitive as I invested in an "advanced" version.

Which is why I helped back Level Up 2 years ago. I wanted a little more crunch in a 5e-like RPG

Cycling back to the OP, using movement would be tricky (are faster creatures better at maneuvers, or heavily armored beings worse in that they can do less, etc.),

And what if your character's race has an additional movement type such as an Aaracokra's ability to Fly? In earlier editions of D&D, Flight had things like maneuverability and several flight-related feats tied to it.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

TBF, 5e is bad at that sort of thing. 4e did lots of it, 3e did some, and depending on the DM, you might've gotten away with it in the TSR era.

Using movement to manage that in 5e is a good idea. 5e lets movement be freely broken up before and after your action or between attacks w/in an extra attack action, and already has the idea of spending movement on things other than strictly moving, like standing up.

Exactly my thinking.

Presumably there would be some sort of checks involved? The effect could be predicated on a hit or miss, an ability check (w/proficiency, depending - I'd warn against contested checks as I found, in 3e, they're very swingy, as we use the term, and 5e BA already showcases the d20s randomness), or even a save (like some BM maneuvers).

Probably rely on saving throws a lot, and effects that just work if you hit and they can make an ability check to try to get out of or around.

Like barring the path to your allies would just work. Your threatened area increases, you can move 5ft as part of a reaction until the start of your next turn, and enemies treat your threatened area as difficult terrain. An enemy can use acrobatics or athletics against your dc to circumvent.

I suppose some things would work best structured as a stance that you spend movement to enter, or it costs nothing to enter and you spend movement to do its active bits. It would require some hammering out, for sure.

Cycling back to the OP, using movement would be tricky (are faster creatures better at maneuvers, or heavily armored beings worse in that they can do less, etc.), but the idea of combat maneuvering is definitely worth it. As above, I think simpler is generally better, which is counterintuitive as I invested in an "advanced" version.

I do think that both Str and Dex should increase movement, or just strength and rogue get a similar move boost to monks.

I’d be down with giving fighter and Barbarian higher movement, as well, compared to the current baseline, but I also don’t want to have too much complexity in the system.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Oh, if you're going to make movement the currency of certain sorts of maneuvers, you should, of course, give martials in general, and fighters in particular, more of it. Perhaps with a proviso that they cannot actually move past their basic limit without the dashing. Thus if you lose movement to armor/encumbrance or a condition or effect, the distance you can moved is capped lower, but you could still use the rest of your movement to push an enemy around, or whatever...

I think there is something there, but we’d have to work at it a bit to get it to a fairly elegant state, since we are adding more individual bits of moving parts to PC turns.

Maybe some classes get extra movement that is just for maneuvering, and isn’t affected by lose of movement speed but is by being restrained.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

i don't dislike the idea, it has potential, but similar to something i said in one of the recent martial threads i think there needs to be more variance in movespeeds in the various classes, with more martials having higher movespeeds that would enable them to expend more of it in this area of their supposed strength, 'you can spend 5ft of movement when you make an attack, if it connects you can push the target 5ft, trip them or provide an opening for an ally, if you use this ability with multiple attacks the effects are applied together after damage'

I think I’d go with a “when you hit with an attack, XYZ” if tying it directly to attacks in order to happen. Some effects wouldn’t work that way, like defending an ally or space, but stuff like moving creatures around, lowering thier defenses, creating openings for allies to move through unhindered, etc, would.

If they make the monk work right with unarmed strikes’ non-damage uses, combining that with this would be absolutely killer. Especially if the monk can do some of this stuff that is normally strength only, using dexterity.

Also, yeah, making some uses require a saving throw with a dc based on your Strength would be a strong way to boost strength fighters, and discourage strength dumping even for rogues and such.


Now a good question may be, would this be too much in 2024 when rogues have cunning strike and every weapon user has some weapon masteries? Should it instead be something only Fighter and Monk have by default but others can get somehow, rather than a class agnostic part of the general combat rules? Could it fold into weapon masteries somehow?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

We can build a martial system that will be much more complex than actual spells and spell slots management. It should not be hard to make fighter turn twice as long as wizard turn because the player will have so many things to manage and evaluate.
Defensive stance, bait, feint, management of stress, anger, fear, pain.
use of different weapon size, speed, space, the martial process can be of infinite complexity.

I’d rather not increase complexity any more than, say, weapon masteries do.

 

[Composer99]

It is worth asking how granular/detailed we want combat to be.

E.g. 5e by default isn't very granular. A lot of the stuff referred to in the OP is abstracted away in the way that 5e handles movement and attacks. (In a sense, positional advantage over an opponent in the fiction is represented mechanically by wearing away their hit points until you can finally land a mortal blow.)

The other thing, of course, is that outside of moving foot-by-foot (or 5-foot-square-by-5-foot-square), 5e isn't very granular about how you expend your movement allowance. It's usually spending half your movement to do something, such as stand up from prone or to mount or dismount a creature. The simplicity isn't bad, exactly, though it does have a cost, since ostensibly mobile characters lose more from doing things like standing up from prone (when you might expect them to lose less). And, of course, usually, moving foot-by-foot is a matter of spending 1, 2, or maybe 3 feet of your movement allowance per foot you traverse.

These aren't objections, I should note. Just something to think about.

 

[Umbran]

Thoughts?

Attacks of opportunity already suppress movement in combat. Giving people something to do with movement other than move will tend to suppress it even more.

There is a precedent in the Rogue optional class feature Steady Aim - if you don't move, you can spend a bonus action to get Advantage on your next attack roll on this turn.

So, either use up Bonus actions, reactions, superiority dice or something else as well, or the movement-only bit of footwork should be notably less than Advantage in its effect.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

These are the kinds of systems that I think are better off under the purview of different RPGs... ones that are built from the ground up to take these specialized systems into account.

So for instance, The Riddle of Steel is an RPG that is entirely built around a much more precise interpretation of sword fighting. For anyone who wants that kind of in-depth tactical attack and parry fencing game play... using a system like TRoS, rather than trying to jerry-rig something onto the D&D chassis would ultimately give better results methinks.

While I do agree that such a game is better for a campaign focused on precise swordplay, this idea is for a D&D campaign with a little more teeth in the martial toolkit, and to model things D&D has tried various times to model but that 5e just doesn’t bother with.

Nothing about the basic idea is outside what 5e can handle.

Of course, for all I know someone probably already has designed something like this for 5E... so a person would just need to go searching for it on DMs Guild or other places.

Probably, but all the “tactical combat” or related products I’ve seen either just give BM manuevers to all weapon users, add a ton of complexity to the game, rewrite swaths of the game. Maybe there are some that don’t do those, and I’d love to read them, but I’m not gonna hold my breath when I’m perfectly capable of just doing it myself.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It is worth asking how granular/detailed we want combat to be.

E.g. 5e by default isn't very granular. A lot of the stuff referred to in the OP is abstracted away in the way that 5e handles movement and attacks. (In a sense, positional advantage over an opponent in the fiction is represented mechanically by wearing away their hit points until you can finally land a mortal blow.)

The other thing, of course, is that outside of moving foot-by-foot (or 5-foot-square-by-5-foot-square), 5e isn't very granular about how you expend your movement allowance. It's usually spending half your movement to do something, such as stand up from prone or to mount or dismount a creature. The simplicity isn't bad, exactly, though it does have a cost, since ostensibly mobile characters lose more from doing things like standing up from prone (when you might expect them to lose less). And, of course, usually, moving foot-by-foot is a matter of spending 1, 2, or maybe 3 feet of your movement allowance per foot you traverse.

These aren't objections, I should note. Just something to think about.

Some good points. I do think that it might be worthwhile to add a rule alongside that lets you make skill checks to reduce those “half your movement” activities to “10ft of movement”. Doing so leaves features that bring the cost down to 5ft just as valuable, since it’s still less cost and doesn’t have a chance of failure.

I’ll dig more into it later.

Attacks of opportunity already suppress movement in combat. Giving people something to do with movement other than move will tend to suppress it even more.

I’m not sure how “here are things you can do with movement, many of which change your position and possibly that of one or more other creatures” will suppress movement.

As for OAs already doing so, I’ll just say that is very much not my experience. Generally, it is very easy to circumvent them.

There is a precedent in the Rogue optional class feature Steady Aim - if you don't move, you can spend a bonus action to get Advantage on your next attack roll on this turn.

So, either use up Bonus actions, reactions, superiority dice or something else as well, or the movement-only bit of footwork should be notably less than Advantage in its effect.

I don’t think this necessarily follows. Steady Aim is more costly than its benefit merits, to begin with. I don’t have to give up any of my movement to Hide for advantage. The feature should just be a BA with a check of some kind, or a BA and at most half your movement.

Advantage isn’t worth more than the bonus action of a rogue.

 

[Stalker0]

Something I always like to remember when we are talking about Martial control. All martials have prone, push 5 ft, forced movement 15 feet, and immobilization on tap through the grapple action. There is a lot you can do with that action alone that doesn't require fancy maneuvers or alternate mechanics.