How awful is this house rule? (removing AoOs)

[Ry]

OK, so here's what I want to do, particularly for my PBeM games I'm running right now.

I want to get rid of attacks of opportunity.

Here's my rule: There are no attacks of opportunity. If you retreat from a melee, opponents get a free attack if you withdraw and do any other action in a given round. Please don't build characters around the attacks of opportunity mechanic.

I know that AoOs provide for a certain kind of rules-realism. But I'm not concerned about losing that, since I don't find AoOs added much compared to 2nd ed's rules.

 

[Crothian]

A lot of people have done this. I fine that in games that don't use minis and tactical maps, getting rid of AoO is easy

 

[Orichin]

I'd probably assign something to make spellcasting in AoO range a bit less abusable. Something as simple as "Spellcasting in threatened space requires a character to cast defensively" and eliminating the "provoke attacks of opportunity" option.

It's also going to make holding a defensive line much less effective, but you can let the PC's deal with that one.

 

[Ry]

That sounds OK, but I haven't found it matters in my games; casters seem to just take a 5' step back and then cast anyway.

 

[reanjr]

OK, so here's what I want to do, particularly for my PBeM games I'm running right now.

I want to get rid of attacks of opportunity.

Here's my rule: There are no attacks of opportunity. If you retreat from a melee, opponents get a free attack if you withdraw and do any other action in a given round. Please don't build characters around the attacks of opportunity mechanic.

I know that AoOs provide for a certain kind of rules-realism. But I'm not concerned about losing that, since I don't find AoOs added much compared to 2nd ed's rules.

In some games, I remove them for movement only. That way, casting spells, using unarmed attacks, etc. don't get unbalanced. It's easy to keep track of these cases once you've gotten rid of the AoOs for moving.

 

[Ry]

Tried it out in an online game today (Roger Wilco for audio communication, Screen Monkey for the tabletop. Bless them.) and man, it was great. None of the characters had reach weapons or were built around AoOs, so nobody minded the change... and combat was so smooth I could hardly believe it.

 

[Aaron2]

I want to get rid of attacks of opportunity.

I'd suggest keeping AoOs but only allow normal damaging attacks (i.e no tripping, grappling, sundering) and no cleaves either. That gets rid of 90% of the wonkyness associated with them.


Aaron

 

[Ry]

You know, we did end up having some grappling yesterday, and I didn't feel like it detracted from the game. It was a little bit "wonky", but everybody enjoyed it. For now, I think I'll just accept the consequences of no AoOs - more unusual combat manouvres, less keeping track of squares. As far as rules expoits go, my players tend to stay in shallow water, making sure they get a prestige class as soon as possible (but my game is capped at level six, so even that's a pretty small factor these days).

 

[Aaron2]

None of the characters had reach weapons or were built around AoOs, so nobody minded the change... and combat was so smooth I could hardly believe it.

How could AoOs possibly make that much of a differerence? I played with AoOs from day 1 and it never had much of an effect on how combat went. If anything, it reduced the number of arguments/bad feeling since my bad guys couldn't just walk around the party unmolested.


Aaron

 

[Ry]

Again, that's never really been a problem. In fact, arguments and bad feelings haven't been a problem in my group... going on about 7 years. We've never seen an argument over rules - the only time rules catch us up is when they irritate by slowing us down. Maybe I'm just lucky. But we definitely find tracking squares, reach, doing 5' steps, combat casting, or whatever takes time away from the action.

Mechanically, though, the reason it made a big difference is that nobody was doing the 5' step dance, and nobody was saying "oops, did that trigger an AoO? Or, wait... is there room for me to do a 5' step?" It also meant that people really just act on their turn - and don't have to worry about the DM interrupting them and saying "Sorry, Attack of Opportunity, let's see if you _really_ do that."