D&D 5E Helping melee combat to be more competitive to ranged.

[pemerton]

you can do whatever you want. But if you're going to discuss what you do, which constitutes testing if large mobs of enemies are effective against a group of PCs, and you remove most of the ranged capability of the enemies, and then draw the conclusion that they are weak opponents....expect some folks to point that out.

But why should the viability of a mob depend upon its possession of ranged capabilities? In real life, there have been many powerful "mobs" that don't depend upon ranged attacks. The fantasy genre is also replete with them (eg Theoden's charge on the Pelennor Fields).

If, in 5e, a mob is only powerful if it has ranged attacks, that seems to be a distinctive consequence of 5e's mechanics. That's not a default assumption that any FRPG GM needs to have.

Or, in other words, . . .

Thus proving the point of this thread once again:

(1) Don't bring a knife to a gunfight, gnolls.

I think [MENTION=6774887]Ashkelon[/MENTION] made this same observation some way upthread.

I'm not arguing that you can't or shouldn't change the fiction in your game, you absolutely should if you feel it is necessary, I'm arguing that the design of the spell is acceptable in the vast majority of use cases, and therefore doesn't require change.

By that last occurrence of "change", do you mean change by WotC or change by some hypothetical D&Der who doesn't like the way Spirit Guardians works? If the former, I think I agree. If the latter, I don't agree - if someone doesn't like the fiction that SG - or some other mechanic - generates, then absolutely they should change that mechanic.

Criticism of art requires examination of the author's intent versus the actual result in the intended audience.

Complaining about art means saying that you don't agree with or "like" the intent of the author.

The intent of 5e's game design could not be clearer.

<snip>

the fact that the designers made a mistake and made a few feats a bit more powerful than intended doesn't hurt the overall design intent of the game and therefore doesn't require fixing. I've made the same argument about the PHB Ranger from the other side.

<snip>

I don't complain about the design, but am more that willing to offer advice to those for who do not like the intent to make the game work better for them, while also arguing against changing the fundamental design of the game.

I don't agree with this.

First, I don't share your theory of criticism in general. Sometimes a creator's intention is not the most important thing about their work. (Eg the reason many people admire the great cathedrals of Europe, as works of architecture that are worth protecting, is quite divorced from the intent of their architects and buiilders.) And sometimes creators' intentions are flawed, and are worth identifying as such. (Eg in the sphere of RPGing, Ggygax's intent seems to have been to balance MUs vs fighters over a campaign in which it is assumed that even experienced players don't begin their PCs much above 3rd level. That design intention seems open to criticism, if it does not mesh well with the way the intended audience of the game are actually going to play the game.)

Second, not everyone who wants to change something about the game is thereby disagreeing with WotC's intent. Maybe they think the game, in actual accomplishment, falls short of its ambitions. If a few feats, at someone's table, undermine the game's realisation of its intent, then that person absolutely has a reason to fix those feats. If enough people have that problem, then WotC has a (commercial) reason to fix them. WotC seems to take that view of the ranger - enough people are dissatisfied that WotC think it is worth their while coming up with a verion that the players of the game will be more receptive of as satisfyig the design intentions of the game.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

With this sort of stuff, where the gnolls' planning turns on the way the round structure works, we some odd consequence of turn-by-turn, "stop motion" resolution.

To bring the issue out, consider the following two scenarios:

(A) The gnolls approach slowly and cautiously, not using their full movement but stopping short of the spirit guardians - and then move through at a modest jog (30' move, halved to 15' for the spell effect) to get close enough to attack and (for the sake of analysis) break the spell (by killing the cleric or otherwise disrupting concentration). They take only one lot of damage. (When they enter on their 2nd turn.)

(B) Gnolls who charge through wildly (move + dash, to get adjacent to the cleric at the end of their turns), and then attack and break the aura, take two lots of damage (entering on turn 1, starting in the aura on turn 2).​

In the fiction, why do the second lot of gnolls get more badly hurt? - they've actually spent less time in the aura, because they moved through it at a greater pace!

I understand your point ("initiative purge", discretized mechanics lead to weird outcomes) but find the example kind of confusing. In (B), the pace with which they moved through it isn't a clear indication of spending less time in the aura, because they then stop before attacking. The example would be to the point if (B2) was a group of gnolls mounted on wargs who take just as much damage as group (A) despite spending less time in the aura. In your example (B) though it isn't clear whether (B) is spending more or less time in the aura than group (A), despite B's greater movement velocity. You could just as easily infer that apparently it takes them a second to recover their breath after Dashing, which is why they take more damage.

Therefore, an even more obviously pathological example involves a bunch of PC Champions who take turns grappling an enemy and each dragging him into and out of a once-per-turn damage effect (like Spirit Guardians or Wall of Fire) so that he takes damage on each of their turns, and winds up taking 3x or 4x more damage from the effect than he would have had he just stood there in the aura the whole time.

Stuff like this is one of the reasons why I ditched the 5E initiative system. Not to beat a dead horse, but... though there are still some discretization artifacts in my variant simultaneous initiative system, "initiative purge" as you describe it doesn't happen--you take damage once per round, period, and you are never penalized for having higher initiative than someone else. (I.e. all turns are concurrent with the entire round.)

I'm starting to think I should make this my new .sig:

--
Hemlock

Ceterum autem censeo cyclic initiative esse delendam

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] - does your initiative system handle the "stop motion" issue more smoothly?

In our 4e game we just suck it up - because of the way off-turn actions work in that system it's mostly only an issue for zones/auras of auto-damage, and normally they're not doing enough damage relative to a victim's hp that it manifests so absurdly as to be worth worrying about.

Back in my RM days it came up more often. The game itself has some rules to help handle it (eg the effects of a stun penalty depended on whether or not you had acted between rolling initiative at the start of the round and suffering the penalty), but they didn't deal with every case. When they didn't, we would either groan and suck it up, or work around it in some fashion on an ad hoc basis. One off-shoot of RM's complexity is that the micro-correlations between mechanical events/processes, and events/processes in the fiction, is often fairly clear, which means that coming up with fair ad hoc workarounds that enjoy table consensus is often not too hard. But it still takes time.

RM has a lot of variant initiative/action-economy systems (I would say at least half-a-dozen, maybe more, in print), some of which try to achieve true continuous action, but they can get extremely baroque, and I've never used a fully continuous resolution system.

Burning Wheel doesn't use initiative at all - instead it goes (i) blind declaration of positioning and actions (which can include attack, parry, dodge, push, lock, etc - all the usual stuff), (ii) positioning roll to work out who gets their desired positioning advantage, (iii) simultaneous resolution. A quirk of the system is that some characters can have more actions than others, which spill over into unopposed action "slots". So a big part of making your declaration is trying to optimise things so you can get off a good strike in an unopposed "slot".

It's quite intricate, and much better for duels than large melees - the game offers other, mechanically simpler ways for handling fights where the intricacy is not warranted. But at least in my experience so far it doesn't produce "stop motion" paradoxes.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

But why should the viability of a mob depend upon its possession of ranged capabilities? In real life, there have been many powerful "mobs" that don't depend upon ranged attacks. The fantasy genre is also replete with them (eg Theoden's charge on the Pelennor Fields).

They tend to lose against other real-life mobs that have effective ranged attacks.

But 5E ranged attacks against moving targets are also improbably accurate, 5E archers are freakishly mobile without losing accuracy, and 5E movement speeds are improbably slow. (That is, movement speeds are low, but archers retain a freakishly-high percentage of that low speed while still firing at full speed.) And of course, in 5E there is by default no fog of war, and you always know where all the combatants are and who is friendly/hostile.

5E ranged combat is probably (IMO) 3x to 10x as effective as ranged combat in real life.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

@Hemlock - does your initiative system handle the "stop motion" issue more smoothly?

Only in some cases. As I said, there are still some discretization artifacts. All it does is get rid of initiative artifacts and the multiple-turns-per-round artifacts, but it doesn't change the basic reality that the optimal strategy for penetrating a Wall of Fire includes a short stop and then a fast sprint, not a continuous fast sprint.

In our 4e game we just suck it up - because of the way off-turn actions work in that system it's mostly only an issue for zones/auras of auto-damage, and normally they're not doing enough damage relative to a victim's hp that it manifests so absurdly as to be worth worrying about.

Yep, pretty much this. That's how I deal with the remaining discretization artifacts in my game (e.g. the Mounted Combat rules); don't worry too much about them, especially if they're not occurring in actual play. If I need to I will make up a rule to normalize them but so far I haven't had to.

RM has a lot of variant initiative/action-economy systems (I would say at least half-a-dozen, maybe more, in print), some of which try to achieve true continuous action, but they can get extremely baroque, and I've never used a fully continuous resolution system.

Me neither. I don't think you could do continuous resolution in 5E without breaking the 5E idiom. I think you could do segmented movement (e.g. movement by 20% of your movement rate) with the right tool support, but doing it on a whiteboard or battlegrid would be as painful as trying to play Kriegspiel (the chess variant)with a referee instead of a computer.

Burning Wheel doesn't use initiative at all - instead it goes (i) blind declaration of positioning and actions (which can include attack, parry, dodge, push, lock, etc - all the usual stuff), (ii) positioning roll to work out who gets their desired positioning advantage, (iii) simultaneous resolution. A quirk of the system is that some characters can have more actions than others, which spill over into unopposed action "slots". So a big part of making your declaration is trying to optimise things so you can get off a good strike in an unopposed "slot".

It's quite intricate, and much better for duels than large melees - the game offers other, mechanically simpler ways for handling fights where the intricacy is not warranted. But at least in my experience so far it doesn't produce "stop motion" paradoxes.

Burning Wheel's system sounds quite interesting. Thanks for sharing.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION], we cross-posted - I hadn't seen this when posting just upthread. (EDIT: and cross-posted again, but I think this post is still relevant.)

I'm starting to think I should make this my new .sig:

--
Hemlock

Ceterum autem censeo cyclic initiative esse delendam

My Latin is weak almost to the point of non-existence. Google translation gives me "I think that the initiative should be destroyed, however, cyclic". So I'm going to take it as "I think that cyclic initiative should go!", but I'm not sure where the "however" fits in.

an even more obviously pathological example involves a bunch of PC Champions who take turns grappling an enemy and each dragging him into and out of a once-per-turn damage effect (like Spirit Guardians or Wall of Fire) so that he takes damage on each of their turns, and winds up taking 3x or 4x more damage from the effect than he would have had he just stood there in the aura the whole time.

Stuff like this is one of the reasons why I ditched the 5E initiative system.

I'm familiar with that sort of thing. In principle 4e could be rife with it, but at my table it thankfully doesn't come up often enough to worry about, simply because of our particular PC builds and the way encounters tend to play out.

In (B), the pace with which they moved through it isn't a clear indication of spending less time in the aura, because they then stop before attacking.

<snip>

You could just as easily infer that apparently it takes them a second to recover their breath after Dashing, which is why they take more damage.

I was assuming that they don't stop: that they charge and attack. The appearance of them stopping is simply an artefact of their turn ending - but in the fiction they just move quickly and strike with their spears. (I feel this is even more so in 5e which doesn't have a charge action, and so doesn't have any clear mechanical way of contrasting moving then pausing from attacking at the end of a move.)

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

@Hemlock, we cross-posted - I hadn't seen this when posting just upthread.

My Latin is weak almost to the point of non-existence. Google translation gives me "I think that the initiative should be destroyed, however, cyclic". So I'm going to take it as "I think that cyclic initiative should go!", but I'm not sure where the "however" fits in.

I'm no kind of classical scholar, but the story as I've heard it told is that after the Second Punic War, they spared Carthage, and some Romans were not cool with that and considered Carthage to be an ongoing threat. Cato the Elder in particular was famous for ending all of his Senate speeches, no matter what the topic, with "And BTW I also think that Carthage must be destroyed" or some variation thereon. ("Autem" can mean "moreover"/"however"/"on the other hand"/"notwithstanding", and "and BTW" is how I translate "Ceterum autem" in my head.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est

(Naturally, in real life I don't feel nearly so strongly about cyclic initiative--I can live and let live--but the .sig still tickles my funny bone, and has more than a grain of truth to it.)

I was assuming that they don't stop: that they charge and attack. The appearance of them stopping is simply an artefact of their turn ending - but in the fiction they just move quickly and strike with their spears. (I feel this is even more so in 5e which doesn't have a charge action, and so doesn't have any clear mechanical way of contrasting moving then pausing from attacking at the end of a move.)

I'm not arguing that you can dispositively infer that interpretation--the point I was trying to make is that from the mechanics you can't tell what was occurring in the fiction. 5E doesn't have a "velocity" stat, and acceleration/deceleration are always instantaneous. Since the example doesn't clearly result in a clearly nonsensical outcome, only an ambiguously nonsensical outcome, it's a weaker example than one such as a human who uses Expeditious Retreat to ride 4 different Phantom Steeds 200' each for a total of 800' during his turn.

I can imagine house rules which would prevent these kinds of clearly nonsensical outcomes, but so far the complexity/benefit ratio doesn't seem to be in favor of their implementation.

 

[hawkeyefan]

With this sort of stuff, where the gnolls' planning turns on the way the round structure works, we some odd consequence of turn-by-turn, "stop motion" resolution.

To bring the issue out, consider the following two scenarios:

(A) The gnolls approach slowly and cautiously, not using their full movement but stopping short of the spirit guardians - and then move through at a modest jog (30' move, halved to 15' for the spell effect) to get close enough to attack and (for the sake of analysis) break the spell (by killing the cleric or otherwise disrupting concentration). They take only one lot of damage. (When they enter on their 2nd turn.)

(B) Gnolls who charge through wildly (move + dash, to get adjacent to the cleric at the end of their turns), and then attack and break the aura, take two lots of damage (entering on turn 1, starting in the aura on turn 2).​

In the fiction, why do the second lot of gnolls get more badly hurt? - they've actually spent less time in the aura, because they moved through it at a greater pace!

It's an interesting point and the way the game mechanics work can at times conflict with expectations. I'm not sure that's what is happening here, though.

Are the dashing gnolls actually in the aura for less time? The non-dashers approach the aura, and stop outside it. Their less cautious allies charge right in, taking damage. Then, a new round starts and the cautious gnolls enter and take damage and the dashers take another round of damage for starting within the aura.

The dashers are within the aura for two rounds and the non-dashers only one. Now, a round is a mechanical construct of the game, yes, but whatever amount of time it may be, I think it's safe to assume that the dashing gnolls have been within the aura for a longer period of time, even without thinking in terms of rounds.

And, more generally, is it "munchkiny metagaming", or is it "good GMing", for the gnolls to time their actions not based on the logic of the fiction (how much time do I spend in the aura? how quickly do I want to get to its source, so I can end it?) but based on the logic of the mechanics (how can I pace my movement and actions so I hit the damage trigger only once rather than twice?)?

I don't know if having the gnolls choose to not enter the harmful effect is metagaming. I get your point about determining one round of damage versus two....but I think there's enough going on that I'd let such slight metagaming go without worry. The gnolls know the aura is harmful....it follows that they would know spending more time within it would be more harmful. They also likely know that spells can be disrupted if you hurt the casterenough...so it'd be a risk/reward situation for them.

But why should the viability of a mob depend upon its possession of ranged capabilities? In real life, there have been many powerful "mobs" that don't depend upon ranged attacks. The fantasy genre is also replete with them (eg Theoden's charge on the Pelennor Fields).

If, in 5e, a mob is only powerful if it has ranged attacks, that seems to be a distinctive consequence of 5e's mechanics. That's not a default assumption that any FRPG GM needs to have.

You're taking a specific example and what works in that example and trying to apply it to all instances. "A" mob's efficacy may not rely on ranged capability...but "this" mob's did.

And it's not just the ranged capability, but also many other factors that contributed to this gnoll mob's failure. Generally speaking, the strength of a mob isn't in its mode of attack or its positioning, although those can matter. It's in its numbers....the idea is to overwhelm the opponent.

So, using a mob in a way where it cannot bring its numbers to bear defeats the purpose of having a mob. Now, a big part of that is the PC using a spell that works so well against mobs. Wise choice and well played. But that spell's effect was only increased by how the gnolls reacted to it and how the area of the encounter was designed to favor the PCs.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Nothing wrong with a Thermopylae style epic stand....the idea is cool and that may be exactly what was desired.

I just think that it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that mobs are weak based on this scenario.

 

[pemerton]

Are the dashing gnolls actually in the aura for less time? The non-dashers approach the aura, and stop outside it. Their less cautious allies charge right in, taking damage. Then, a new round starts and the cautious gnolls enter and take damage and the dashers take another round of damage for starting within the aura.

The dashers are within the aura for two rounds and the non-dashers only one. Now, a round is a mechanical construct of the game, yes, but whatever amount of time it may be, I think it's safe to assume that the dashing gnolls have been within the aura for a longer period of time, even without thinking in terms of rounds.

I've bolded two words - "stop" and "then".

For the moment, I bracket [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION]'s suggestion (not far upthread) that "it takes them a second to recover their breath after Dashing, which is why they take more damage".

What I was getting at is that, in the fiction, there is no STOPPING, and hence there is no AND THEN. In the fiction, it's all continuous - the A gnolls advance cautiously (30' in 6 seconds, then 15' through the Spirit Guardians) and the attack, taking another 6 seconds - whereas the B gnolls dash in (45', including closing 15' through the Shield Guardians) then attack (which must take less than 6 seconds, given that they still have a full move entitlement left in their round).

So the A gnolls are in the aura for 15' of cautious moving - say 4 seconds, to put a round number on it - plus the time required to beat up the cleric. The B gnolls are in the aura for 15' of rapid moving - say 2 seconds, to put a round number on it - plus the time required to beat up the cleric.

The appearance of the B gnolls hanging around in the aura, while the A gnolls cleverly wait outside it, is entirely an artefact of cyclic initiative and turn-taking. In the fiction, the world doesn't operate on a metrnomic pattern of stopping-and-starting in 6 second intervals. In the fiction (again, bracketing Hemlock's alternative explanation), the B gnolls sped through the aura so as to be quicker to kill the cleric; yet they take double the damage of the A gnolls.

Now, in order to save the consistency of the fiction vis-a-vis the mechanics, we could say that Hemlock's suggestion must be what really happened - the B gnolls really did stop for a breather after their dash (but by my numbers it has to be more than a second, if it's going to justify taking double the damage of the A gnolls). Or - which is how I tend to handle it in my 4e game - we could just say that the B gnolls got unlucky, and more Spirit Guardians happened to attack them than attacked the A gnolls. (This tends to be workable in 4e, because 4e is based on a high turnover of foes - lots of novelty in opposition - as befits its level-based scaling, and PC abilities can also change over time; it probably doesn't work quite as well in 5e, because 5e goes for more consistency, over the course of a campaign, both for PC abilities and for foes faced, and so the "unluckiness" might start to stick out more.)

But in any event, whatever fictional account we give to make sense of the mechanical outcome, we now have a case in which the fiction is being subordinated to the mecahnics. Ie it is apparently impossible to have a scenario where the B gnolls dash in and through and don't take a breather before cutting down the cleric.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing: the mechanics of a game like D&D are certainly going to shape its fiction in some ways rather than others. But it's definitely a thing.

 

[Yunru]

Half the speed of anyone starting adjacent to a hostile. Makes it harder to escape melee, means it's more rewarding to engage in melee.

*cough*