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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6994120" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.</blockquote>

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