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

[Caliburn101]

Then:

Look man, try me.

Ive offered a billion times, but there is no party (optimised or otherwise) I couldnt run a game for. Feel free to present to me a party, and I'll happily stat it up 6-8 medium-hard encounters (and a reason to engage in those encounters) to challenge the crap out of it.

I use the same rules that you do, but our DMing styles differ. Thats why we get different results playing the exact same game. Its also why my advice to you is generally 'DM differently' instead of 'Invent a whole slew of house rules to deal with the problem; a problem you probably created yourself as DM'.

I couldn't agree more.

Too many people on here come to discuss problems they have created themselves - like this, and the thread on 'what is gold for'.

"I don't know what gold is for - there need to be rules telling me!"

I am reminded of the endless threads about lack of ranged options for mobs, when in fact, anything with an opposable thumb or a tentacle can pick up a rock, a spear or in some cases a projectile weapon and use it with their proficiency & Dex bonus. EVERYTHING has a Dex bonus!

By the same logic, one would assume that no Orc ever wears anything but the armour their MM statblock has in it. They apparently cannot fit into ringmail for instance, even when it's made for them... I have seen comments about useless monsters like the Ogre, when in fact an Ogre with a pile of rocks and scavenged armours laced together with hide to improve their AC can be an interesting challenge.

Too many think there should be explicit spoon-fed options for everything so they don't have to mix things up themselves. 4th Edition is partially to blame I would guess - that had every angle stitched up like a set of model wargame or MMO rules...

WoTC made it very, very clear that 5th Edition was about choice. If you nail every option down with a micro-rule and/or a statblock, then you remove a great deal of this, and so should they stick to their design philosophy, there won't be a move to do this sort of thing.

Thank God for that imo...

 

[Ilbranteloth]

On WoF - [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] and I were talking about the AD&D version, which doesn't have a "per turn" wording - that seems to be introduced in 3E.

Re "running back and forth" - well, maybe only spending a short time in the AoE should be less harmful than hanging out in it for 6 seconds? Some of this sort of stuff is an artefact of "stop motion" initiative and action economy.

I prefer the AD&D version myself.

Although I don't necessarily disagree in the time element per se, the rule is really there so people don't abuse it by pushing somebody in, pulling them out, and doing it again in the same round. Otherwise sprinting through it would mean you'd take less damage than walking through it, or hanging out for the round in it.

But yes, a lot of it is a function of the "stop motion" initiative, etc. Although I guess it's worse in 5e because an AD&D round is 1 minute, and the damage is similar for what is now a 6 second round. Which means 5e damage is 10x more. Ouch. It also raises another point in my debating about going back to 1 minute rounds...

 

[Imaro]

Im still trying to understand how, with all the errors in the "experiment" brought to light (and still not addressed by [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] ), this actually proves anything.

Everything from the mob rules to the usage of the spell was run incorrectly, yet its the rules to blame for the ineffectiveness of the gnoll mob? And this is before we get into the modifying of the gnolls to have no ranged weapons and their ineffective (some would say suicidal... I guess gnolls lack a self preservation instinct) tactics. I'd love to discuss an actual example of the mob rules with lower CR (even with no ranged weapons) humanoids but as of this post we've yet to be given one... so why are some still assuming the gnolls would be l, if run with the actual mob rules (as well as correct pell rules) as ineffectual as the OP claims?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

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.

It's indeed a thing. I might argue that the fiction is being subordinated to the DM's desire not to bother creating new mechanics.

In other words, if I wanted your fiction (continuous-velocity charge culminating in a successful spear attack while still moving), I'd create a new mechanic even if it's just "the damage in inflicted per round and in some situations, I the DM will rule on the fly that two turns' worth of stuff only constitutes one round of time and won't have you take damage twice."

I haven't done so, because I'm fine with the other fiction: that decision-making has a non-zero duration and that the time "between turns" is still actual time, implying a pause.

Edit: actually, in the initiative system that I use, it would actually be fairly straightforward to model continuous action resolution in this case. "If you declare a multi-round long charge (Dash for a while and then attack at the end), then there is no decision-making pause in the middle, and any hostile terrain effects on the terminus of your charge will be treated as damaging you for the minimum possible number of rounds. If it is possible to move through and attack in one round, then in this case you will not take damage again on the second round because you're performing a continuous action." Boom, done. You can't do that as elegantly under PHB turn-by-turn initiative because there's no good way to tell the difference between continuous action and pause-to-decide, since no one except [MENTION=6709383]Cosmic[/MENTION]Kid seems to skip your action declaration on the second round. ;-) So to answer your previous question, [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], it appears that my system does make it easier to alleviate the stop-motion issues of this particular case.

My bias is towards simulationism, and a large part of the interest of RPGs is seeing what sort of fiction falls out of the mechanics. I think it's interesting that D&D creatures heal almost all wounds in a matter of minutes or hours; I find it fascinating to consider what impact that might have on animal behavior, for instance. E.g. lions and sharks can afford to be more aggressive and tackle more dangerous prey if they know that any wounds taken will heal before the meal has finished digesting. And indeed, just as this predicts, we find that D&D wolves/lions/other predators are stereotypically more likely to attack (N)PCs than in the real world. What impact does this have on the way NPCs organize their communities? Etc.

RPGs for me are essentially an exercise in creative extrapolation, plus a series of games (e.g. "Save Loretta's Baby From Becoming a Werewolf!") which take place within the universe established by that extrapolation.

 

[cmad1977]

Im still trying to understand how, with all the errors in the "experiment" brought to light (and still not addressed by [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] ), this actually proves anything.

Everything from the mob rules to the usage of the spell was run incorrectly, yet its the rules to blame for the ineffectiveness of the gnoll mob? And this is before we get into the modifying of the gnolls to have no ranged weapons and their ineffective (some would say suicidal... I guess gnolls lack a self preservation instinct) tactics. I'd love to discuss an actual example of the mob rules with lower CR (even with no ranged weapons) humanoids but as of this post we've yet to be given one... so why are some still assuming the gnolls would be l, if run with the actual mob rules (as well as correct pell rules) as ineffectual as the OP claims?

Some people refuse to take responsibility for their games.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

*cough*

FYI, it took me a while to even understand that you were in fact intending to suggest a fix there, partly because "Half the speed of..." is a sentence fragment, whereas it appears you meant, "Halve the speed of...", which is a suggestion.

But yeah, there's a lot of possible rules alterations you could make. Few people seem interested in those solutions though--at this point, the OP is long gone, and AFAICT the only people left on it are pretty much those who have a rules fix they want to evangelize to others (like nerfing feats), and those who like talking about game design/tactics/mechanics vs. fiction for its own sake. I don't get the impression that there's anyone left who is looking for other peoples' solutions. :-/

FWIW, the primary impact I foresee from your suggestion is that there will be more fights to the death.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I couldn't agree more.

Too many people on here come to discuss problems they have created themselves - like this, and the thread on 'what is gold for'.

Some of us consider excessive DM fiat a cure worse than the disease.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Im still trying to understand how, with all the errors in the "experiment" brought to light (and still not addressed by [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] ), this actually proves anything.

Everything from the mob rules to the usage of the spell was run incorrectly, yet its the rules to blame for the ineffectiveness of the gnoll mob? And this is before we get into the modifying of the gnolls to have no ranged weapons and their ineffective (some would say suicidal... I guess gnolls lack a self preservation instinct) tactics. I'd love to discuss an actual example of the mob rules with lower CR (even with no ranged weapons) humanoids but as of this post we've yet to be given one... so why are some still assuming the gnolls would be l, if run with the actual mob rules (as well as correct pell rules) as ineffectual as the OP claims?

I'm not sure anyone is still assuming that. Can you think of any names? CapnZapp seems to have quietly walked away from that argument, and no one else was proponing mob ineffectiveness in the first place.

Mobs are a dozen different kinds of nasty in 5E if you don't have specialized ways of dealing with them, e.g. dragon fear and high AC. That's by design--it's part of bounded accuracy. The 5E designers wanted it to be possible for high-CR creatures like dragons to be potentially taken out by social/roleplaying means (e.g. low-level PCs rallying and leading the town guardsmen) as well as through straightforward combat (high-level PCs kill a dragon), and they wanted to be able to tell stories like "Fire Giants attack the city" and have the guards plausibly hold off the fire giants for a while without having to boost the guards' stats.

We think the bounded accuracy system is good for the game for a number of different reasons, including the following...

...The DM's monster roster expands, never contracts. Although low-level characters probably don't stack up well against higher-level monsters, thanks to the high hit points and high damage numbers of those monsters, as the characters gain levels, the lower-level monsters continue to be useful to the DM, just in greater numbers. While we might fight only four goblins at a time at 1st level, we might take on twelve of them at 5th level without breaking a sweat. Since the monsters don't lose the ability to hit the player characters—instead they take out a smaller percentage chunk of the characters' hit points—the DM can continue to increase the number of monsters instead of needing to design or find whole new monsters. Thus, the repertoire of monsters available for DMs to use in an adventure only increases over time, as new monsters become acceptable challenges and old monsters simply need to have their quantity increased.

...It opens up new possibilities of encounter and adventure design. A 1st-level character might not fight the black dragon plaguing the town in a face-to-face fight and expect to survive. But if they rally the town to their side, outfit the guards with bows and arrows, and whittle the dragon down with dozens of attacks instead of only four or five, the possibilities grow. With the bounded accuracy system, lower-level creatures banding together can erode a higher-level creature's hit points, which cuts both ways; now, fights involving hordes of orcs against the higher-level party can be threatening using only the basic orc stat block, and the city militia can still battle against the fire giants rampaging at the gates without having to inflate the statistics of the city guards to make that possible...

This goal has been fully achieved. Hordes of orcs are murder on (unprepared) PCs, especially in a straight-up fight like "you have to defend the orphanage."

 

[hawkeyefan]

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.

I don't agree. What you're saying would be true if there was no way for the fiction to support the idea that one group of gnolls actively stopped outside the aura. Why can't they? It is a clearly harmful affect and they recognize that and stop.

Why can't the fiction support this? If they then choose to enter the aura afterward, it would be based on what they observe. "I can get to him before these angels rip me apart."

Such a view does not rely on the mechanical construction of rounds, but rather on the passage of time, which te rounds are designed to represent. Yes, there is a cyclic aspect at play due to initiative, but it need not be contradictory to how the gnolls would view the situation anyway.

"Those angels ripped the others to shreds...looks like I may only have one shot at this!"

 

[Gardens & Goblins]

Eh. If a player has a problem with how a DM is running a game, they can always DM themselves. To each their own.

Of course - there's always the nightmare DM scenario where fiat is applied like a sloppy, iron fist, and not everyone has the luxury of being able to choose who they play with.

Still, I've always felt D&D works best when a DM is trusted enough to step away from the rules, for the sake of play (with the obvious caveats). I remember in the old Dragon magazines where they were pushing DM's to assign % chance of any action, promoting the idea of not saying 'no' but saying 'yes, but' and so on. I really enjoyed all that!

[sblock]Personally we prefer a human arbitrator who can lean on rule sets if required, rather than fussing with adding additional rule sets. Wasn't always like this with our lot - we went through about a decade of trying to codify everything. In the end, we determined that, while the intent was consistent (and arguably obvious - 'to have fun'), the behaviour tended to bog things down. For us, that was the kicker - we prefer fast pace play, be it social/exploration/combat, with minimal book/table/rule checking.

Of course, we do have the advantage of having a group of between 5-6 players who have played together for twenty five years plus, where everyone has taken a turn DMing. As such, there's a lot of love and support for who ever DMs and we know what to expect in terms of fiat/judgment/arbitration.[/sblock]