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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 3282722" data-attributes="member: 926">You can't do that, but you can take one attack on one target, and then switch to another target.  Or take an attack, and then decide weather to full attack or move depending on if the target is dead or not, for example  It's because of the 6 second combat round, much closer to realtime combat than the 1 minute rounds of earlier editions.  But personally, the process of declaring actions, then rolling for initiative, and then actually taking the actions, always seemed way to cumbersome for everyone I've ever played with, and was discarded long before I ever started playing.  That;s why I implemented it in one of the first games I ever ran, because I didn't realize how cumbersome it was.  Hell, we even removed the action declaration phase in Battletech because it was just annoying.  I'm pretty sure that later editions of Battletech even removed that step.  As someone said, it was an artifact of D&D's wargame roots, and it really only fits in a wargame where there's a lag between command and execution, and the possibility of troops acting on outdated orders from a commander, but when it's an individual acting on his own initiative there isn't really a reason to be committed to a possibly useless action regardless of the current situation.  In the middle of a fight most people don't stop once a minute to plan out their actions and then carry through with those actions regardless of what's going on around them, they respond to the current situation immediately, changing their actions in response to what's happening at that moment.However, it did fit the long and involved spellcasting process that 1E modeled, but not the melee combat.  3E spellcasting is much more like Doctor Strange's spellcasting, dodging and weaving and throwing spells in seconds instead of minutes.  (In fact, that's the exact image I got when first reading the 3E PHB spellcasting section, Doc Strange and Dr. Doom fighting Mephisto in an old graphic novel.  Combat Casting, indeed! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />)But weapon speed rules are just whacked.  Yes, a dagger is faster that a two-handed sword, but have you ever tried to attack someone with a two-handed sword while wielding a dagger?  You won't get to attack them, because they'll skewer you with their 6 foot long blade while you're trying to get close enough to stick them with your foot long toothpick.  1E had it right, with weapon length being the first determiner, but 2E was just nuts, where all that mattered was the supposed speed of the weapon, and the guy with the dagger got to hit the guy with the two-hander regardless of the weapon's respective lengths.  That's the major reason why I dislike weapon speed factors all together.The weapon vs Ac adjustments I actually really like, but they just proved too cumbersome for everyone but me.  I just wrote down a descending matrix on my own character sheet for each weapon, but no one else wanted to bother with it.  I liked the fact that a quarterstaff was largely useless against a man in full plate, and maces ignored a large part of a suit of chainmail's protection, but no one else felt it was worth the extra bookkeeping.Expediency won out.  It just didn't add enough to the game to make it worth keeping track of.And the helmet rule I wanted to enforce at first, but then I started thinking of all the books I've read and movies I've seen where it didn't matter if the hero was wearing a helmet or not, it was his skill that mattered, and I realized I wasn't trying to model reality, but those novels and movies instead.  So that rule went away, too.</blockquote>

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