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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Gumphrey" data-source="post: 1619110" data-attributes="member: 12872">Ourph: I guess we can agree to disagree, but I'm still siding with the fact that an attack roll does not have to be one individual attack. You can make an abstraction of this. It's much harder to abstract a single telling blow in 60 seconds of fighting. It doesn't really work both ways.So our elf with a longsword (who needs to be 6th level at the minimum for the requisite feats; and to avoid my own rules jockeying we can give him a greatsword) can drop 14 guys in one round. That's not implausible at all; this guy is a fighting machine, a warrior well on his way to becoming one of the greats. But the dropping of 14 opponents in one round is simply not even close to the guarantee you make it out to be, or the guarantee of the goofiness of the minute-long combat round.Now if we say "He is making 14 separate attacks" then it gets a little silly. It's inhuman to swing a weapon that big that many times in 6 seconds. Now comes the cleaving part. Sure, you're making 14 rolls, but that's more for balance than anything else. The rule does not say "you have to swing your weapon as many times as you make attack rolls", so that leaves it open to interpretation. My interpretation is that the fighter is cleaving down 14 guys with maybe 4 enormous and well-placed cleaving swings; and when he's spinning about dealing death to everything around him, four huge chops doesn't seem like much of a stretch. You can cover a lot of area with a 5 foot piece of magical sharp metal.Your example is incredibly specific, whereas the AD&D minute-long combat round happened every single combat, every single game. You'll be hard pressed to convince me that being surrounded by orcs (or other low-hp low AC enemies) en masse, chopping them down, and waiting to take your AO's until more bad guys fill the ranks is a regular occurence in any game (along with the numbers I provided showing that you'd have to be painfully high in level and never roll 1's for something like this to happen with any frequency). The combat rules are abstractions, and always have been. To take them literally invites silliness. I'm still convinced that the 3e combat system is a vast improvement over our earlier editions. I can easily justify my huge cleaving greatsword fighter as simply felling 4 and 5 opponents with one swing of his massive blade and then move on with the game. How do I justify the huge expanses of time that pass in AD&D combat rounds when I compare what a fighter is doing to what someone not engaged in melee is doing?One poster mentioned that being able to throw 20 rocks shouldn't work in AD&D combat because you're trying to prevent other combatants from doing what they want to do to you. Well, what if nobody is attacking or molesting you? What, exactly, would stop my halfling thief in the tree from pitching 25 rocks at the big bad? I can justify the cleaving, and I've done so more than once. If someone can illustrate what stops this rock-pitching from happening or how one could rationalize in their mind why one would only be able to pitch a few rocks I'd be happy to hear it.EDIT: Also, these situations have one thing in common: Cleaving. When we take the cleaving out we drop our number of attacks considerably, meaning that just being able to cleave can't possibly make you start moving at quadruple speed.</blockquote>

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