Have We Lost Our Way? Two masters on combat and alignment

[MeepoTheMighty]

I guess I'm on the other end of the spectrum, where I find it ridiculously implausible to play with rules that allow a character with the right feats and weapon to get upwards of 25 attacks in a 6 second round.

So first you tell people that they're "failing to read the rulebooks," and then you make up a strawman that isn't supported by the rules? Great.

 

[Ourph]

Could you qualify that, or is that just hyperbole? The only way I could think of that even coming close to reality would involve great cleave, a giant with lots of class levels and a high dex, and lots of kobolds.

A 4th level Elven Fighter (Dex=20) wielding a spiked chain with Great Cleave and Combat Reflexes surrounded by a whole village of Orcs (4hp each). The spiked chain allows him to threaten up to 20 opponents if he's completely surrounded. If the character gets lucky and keeps hitting and dropping opponents with his normal attacks and cleaves, he's gotten 20 attacks. Then another batch of opponents move in to surround him, allowing him an additional 6 attacks of opportunity due to Combat Reflexes. That's 26 attacks in one 6 second round.

And that's assuming you don't allow him to Cleave off of AoO. :\

Will that happen in every combat? No. But it's possible according to the combat rules. Is it plausible? It's just as plausible as getting 1 attack every minute AFAIC.

So first you tell people that they're "failing to read the rulebooks," and then you make up a strawman that isn't supported by the rules? Great.

Apparently some haven't taken my advice yet.

 

[RFisher]

1st edition combat stressed and was designed primarly for attrition. If a group of adventurers met a monster, they basically had to beat on it until they knocked all the hit points off its body...there weren't any options beyond that. There were fewer options for combat tactics based on positioning.

The simple rules of the classic D&D combat system gave you plenty of tactical options. They didn't give you subtactical options, because the system assumed your character choose the best subtactical options based on his combat skill & ability. They didn't spell out tactical options because that's a huge topic already covered fine elsewhere & isn't really what rules should be doing. Besides, a little imagination & intelligence & experience can get you by.

OAD&D as written went perhaps a little overboard on the options & details. Most people, in my experience, played it somewhere between classic D&D & AD&D.

Saying that there weren't any options except to exchange attack rolls until somebody dropped is like saying that chess is a boring & pointless game because you always just exchange pieces until only the kings are left & end in stale mate.

A deliciously ironic complaint, given that the ORIGINAL INTENTIONS of D&D were that you would use the Chainmail wargaming rules for all combat.

It seems there was often tension between what EGG intended & what he wrote. In OD&D, he wrote that Chainmail was intended to be used for combat, be in practice he always used the "alternate" system. OAD&D has weapon v. armor adjustments & unbelievably complex unarmed combat rules, which EGG hardly ever, if ever, used himself.

 

[kenobi65]

Could you qualify that, or is that just hyperbole? The only way I could think of that even coming close to reality would involve great cleave, a giant with lots of class levels and a high dex, and lots of kobolds.

And, even then, it's not 25 attacks; the Cleave is (at least in my cinematic view) one attack that follows through to one (or more, with Great Cleave) additional target(s). Think Sauron at the beginning of the FotR movie, whacking a half-dozen men with each swing of his mace. It's not swing-whack, swing-whack, swing-whack, etc.; it's one mighty swing-WHACK!

If you view it that way, at least it makes a little more sense from the standpoint of a 6-second combat round. (Then again, this *is* supposed to be heroic fantasy; I don't play D&D for gritty realism.)

Assuming you're not going into Epic levels, about the best I can come up with (for a normal humanoid) is 7 attacks in a round:
-16th+ level fighter type, with 4 iterative attacks with his main weapon
- Improved Two-Weapon Fighting for 2 more attacks with the off-hand weapon
- Haste (or an equivalent buff) for one extra attack during a full-attack action

Though, I'm sure there's a feat or ability buried somewhere in one of the books that'll add another attack or two to that...

(edit: OK, I did forget about Combat Reflexes. So, with the 20 Dex guy, that'd give a total of 13 possible attacks. If I'm DMing, and I've got 20 guys surrounding a spiked-chain wielder, and he mows 'em all down in one attack flurry, I think my monsters are going to think twice about entering his threatened squares. )

Mike Mistele

 

[Dogbrain]

I would argue that 3.5 uses an abstraction, while 1st edition is being concrete.

Concrete?

Heh.

Ha ha.

Tee hee hee hee.

BWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

EGG and his sycophants used to go through SOOOOOO many verbal convolutions insisting that 1st edition AD&D combat was ABSTRACT! And now somebody comes along and calls it "concrete"?

Oh, YEAH! In EVERY SINGLE SWORDFIGHT EVER, nobody EVER had ANY opportunity to attack more than ONCE EVERY TWENTY SECONDS!

Concrete?

Rubbish.

 

[Dogbrain]

OAD&D has weapon v. armor adjustments & unbelievably complex unarmed combat rules, which EGG hardly ever, if ever, used himself.

And he simultaneously insisted that, if you weren't playing by the written rules, you weren't really playing AD&D.

 

[Ourph]

And, even then, it's not 25 attacks; the Cleave is (at least in my cinematic view) one attack that follows through to one (or more, with Great Cleave) additional target(s).

That's a nice way of looking at it, except that the rulebooks contradict you by saying "you get an immediate extra melee attack".

The fact that you're also making another attack roll also argues against your POV.

 

[Enkhidu]

I've always been of the mind that the 1 minute round was a holdover from the time when 1 figure = 10 men on the battlefield, and was simply never addressed by EGG.

1 minute is about the right amount of time for 10 men to come together, beat at each other for a bit, and have real casualties/ losses (assuming that they are aware of each other and have any sort of skill in teamwork). Plus, facing in a block of soldiers is pretty damn important (much more so that in single combat) because of the way a unit works.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

A 4th level Elven Fighter (Dex=20) wielding a spiked chain

Sounds like a spiked chain problem instead of a mechanics problem to me. Seriously.

Q: What other weapon allows you to pull a stunt like this?

A: Not a single one.

The spiked chain is somehow a 2-handed weapon with no leverage, and allows you reach (while using it 2-handed) and the ability to attack adjacently (while still using it 2-handed). It allows you to simultaneously use it with finesse and brute force. The weapon is just silly. Good idea, poorly implimented. [IMC I allow it to be used as a d6/d6 double weapon or a d6 reach weapon interchangeably each round. You can apply finesse or power attack at your provision, but not both.]

You're also skewing this quite a bit. You're assuming a few things that simply aren't guarantees.

• The fighter can hit 13 AC every single time on a roll of 2 or better. This means we need Finesse and Focus in additon to a mw/+1 weapon, PA, C, and GC, meaning he can't have Combat Reflexes. EDIT: Forgot something huge as well: EXOTIC WEAPON PROFICIENCY. That means Mr. Elf can't even have Great Cleave. What a shame.

• Orcs only have 4 HP. Well, they've got 5. This means at least a 16 str in order to fully drop them with minimum damage. Pretty hard to come by a 16 and an 18 in most creation methods without utterly shafting your other scores. Otherwise we're going to be using some power attack and bring ourselves to point 1, and to a lesser extent, point 3, as you are no longer playing the "don't roll a 1" game.

• The fighter will never roll a 1. This is the big sticker for me. I see 1's get rolled every single session. If you're making 26 attack rolls, by the law of averages, 1.3 (or 1) of these rolls at the minimum will be a 1. This means the Cleave chain ends and the AO's may not even occur...not that he has Combat Reflexes anyway since he opted for +11 to hit instead.

• EDIT: The fighter is surrounded by 20 orcs to begin with, meaning there was an overflow of 20 orcs that all got into perfect position after this fighter took his AO (or AO's depending on the build). Also, the 9 adjacent orcs were unable to cause significant damage to our fighter, who has an absolute celing of about 20 AC with magic and a negative Con stat.

That's a nice way of looking at it, except that the rulebooks contradict you by saying "you get an immediate extra melee attack".

The fact that you're also making another attack roll also argues against your POV.

That's also a nice way of looking at it. As long as we're going 100% by the book, I'd like you to show everyone where it says "a single attack roll equates to one swing of a weapon, and only one swing of a weapon". I don't remember reading anything like that. The fact that the feat is called "Cleave" should lead anyone to believe that you are in fact cleaving something. In the spiked chain example it's not too hard to simply assume that you are striking groups of opponents with each swing of your chain.

 

[T. Foster]

we had a lot of situations in AD&D where people were doing non-combat actions simultaneous with the battle, and wondering why it took them five minutes to open a pouch, produce a key, cross the room, unlock a door and walk through it.

Interesting that you guys jump all over Ourph's example, and even when he explains it under the rules still argue and dispute it, while this blatant straw man is allowed to stand unmolested. If this is not just a completely fictional account and actually represents the kinds of things that used to happen in your games than I'm sorry to say that your old AD&D DM had absolutely no idea what he was doing, WizarDru. But don't feel bad, he wasn't the only one by any means (as this thread has shown).