D&D 5E Move Attack Move: Issues with The New Standard for Combat

[tomBitonti]

Hi,

An issue is that, in d&d, attacks take half or all of a round.

With simultaneous action, at best the blocking fighter is attacked at most twice.

With non-simultaneous initiative, you get any number of attacks.

I'd say this was an abuse of the initiative system, and disallow it.

At least in 3e, that is a gm prerogative.

Note that whether the attackers have the same or different initiatives doesn't change the result.

Also, the problem is limited to melee attacks which are bottle necked through a single square.

Being subject to many ranged attacks was and continues to be a possibility. I don't see an issue in that regard.

Thx!

TomB

 

[mhensley]

Might I recommend "take turns" initiative?

Yeah, I've been thinking of changing initiative to something like this. I always liked the way that the original D&D Minis game ran initiative. One roll per side for init, then they take turns activating 2 creatures per phase. It worked really well.

This way you don't have to write down or remember init rolls and you don't end up with all the monsters going on one init.

http://ddmguild.com/downloads/original/Rulebook.pdf

 

[Klaus]

Yeah it was 5 feet, but the Duerger were not trying to get past him, just kill him and then retreat to force the party to chase and endure another swarm attack.

I'll try to format a letter-based map here. Hope it works:

a.b.c..............o.p.q.
d.e.f. j.k.l.m.n. r.s.t.
g.h.i. .............u.v.w.

Each letter is a 5-foot square.

So, if the fighter is in square "m", a duergar would need to be in square "f", run 15-feet to square "l", attack, then retreat 10-feet (movement 25) to square "j" (and he took an attack of opportunity).

The next duergar, in squares b, c, e, h, or i, would have to move 20 feet to square "l", attack, then retreat 5-feet (again, move 25) to square "k".

The next duergar (in any of the squares above) would again move 20 feet to square "l", attack, then would have nowhere to go, since his movement isn't enough to reach an empty square, so he is stuck in square "l".

And now no duergar can reach the fighter, and the DM could even determine that any ranged attacks against the fighter would have disadvantage, since he is now obscured by 3 creatures.

I think the real issue here was not using a map and counting the duergars' movement. Even if they had movement 30, at some point they'd have nowhere to retreat and start crowding the corridor, where the fighter can then take them one-on-one while his party on healing him or attacking the duergar back rank with spells or whatnot.

 

[Dausuul]

Under the correct circumstances, the duergar could use such tactics. Example:

----| |----
....|-|DD..
....F..DD..
....|-|DD..
----| |----

In this scenario, each of the six duergar can move 3 squares to the point in front of the fighter, strike, and return to its point of origin. What should be a choke point strongly favoring the fighter has become a death trap. However, this only works if the fighter is in just the right spot. Move the fighter back a square, or make the corridor 5 feet longer, and it all falls apart. Unless you allow diagonal movement to "cut the corner" of a wall, only the single duergar in front can both strike and return.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I wonder how it would play out if you adopted the rules from (for instance, I'm sure there are other examples) the recent XCOM games. In them you get two actions, but as soon as you attack (one action), your turn is over. This would obviously stop the duergar conga line, but would also unfortunately prevent the pop-out, fire, pop-in action of a ranged attacker. I'm inclined to say the latter is also ridiculous if you consider actions happening at the same time - ten duergar cannot all take a turn to shoot down the corridor in six seconds. The two either side of the corridor could for sure, which says to me that the rules should let you peek around cover. This also solves the slightly silly problem that strictly, after you shoot down the corridor and duck back behind your cover, you can't see anything happening down it.

So to allow for some dynamics, there needs to be some bending of the 'attack and your turn is over' rule. Clearly it's better as 'if you attack first thing, you can still move', provided your target still has a reaction to potentially use against you, but if they use it, then yes, the 2nd and 3rd attackers that turn could disengage for free. This would be perhaps easier ruled as 'if you consider all people in the same melee, and your team outnumbers your opponents, you can disengage for free'. You might even want to make melee strict and deadly with a 'once you're in melee, there's no getting out without a distraction, a trick, a spell or someone helping you out'. Anyway back to dynamics, clearly if your attack kills your opponent, you should be able to still move, so that fighters can gleefully cleave through goblins when they have multiple attacks, and clearly some tricks should exist to let you move-attack-move fully - like spring attack. I am inclined to agree with the OP though - everyone having it by default is a bit silly, and I would go further to say that it makes some monsters or characters less interesting because they should *uniquely* be able to do it.

Let's be more elaborate:
[sblock]The rules are that on your turn, you get to move your speed and take an action such as attacking or casting a spell etc. The key rule change is to state that after an attack/spell/whathaveyou action, you can no longer move. To allow for the best bits of flexibility from the current rules, you can still use leftover movement to do other stuff - so you could switch weapons or close a door or something even if you've attacked.

The first exception to the rule would be that you're still allowed to move if you attack immediately at the start of your turn. The second would be if you kill your opponent with a melee attack and are no longer in melee. For opportunity attacks, you have to work out whether you are in melee, and whether you are stuck in melee - let's call that 'overwhelmed'. This is easy to envisage on a grid but not necessary - you are in melee if an opponent threatens you. To determine if you are overwhelmed, count up who is in the same melee by starting from you, counting every opponent who threatens you, then every one of your allies that threatens them in melee, and so on until you're done. If there are more of their team than yours then you are overwhelmed and moving out of melee will provoke reactions from everyone you are immediately in melee with (if there's no clear exit path you might trigger these again and again, so limit reactions to one per person per person's turn. If you're not overwhelmed, you can move without provoking reactions (but again if there's no clear path you might stumble into a melee you are overwhelmed by. An example: the fighter is in front, three goblins face him in melee - he cannot move without giving a reaction to each of them. If two rogues appear from the shadows behind them (and they aren't killed), then the teams are now equal and he could escape melee (notably trapping the rogues who would then become overwhelmed themselves). If the fighter waits and then another goblin appears behind the rogues, then they are all once again overwhelmed - even if the fighter tried to escape, the rogues cannot distract the goblins themselves because another goblin is distracting them.

Exceptions beyond this ought to be abilities/powers/spells - stuff like the super defender fighter counts as *two* when counting up who is in melee, or the rogue being able to escape if their attack is successful, or a giant owl being able to fly-by and attack provided they use their full movement in a continuous line.[/sblock]

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Could we see a ten foot wide version of that scenario? (If I could draw maps, I'd do that myself.)

 

[ExploderWizard]

As long as players get the same rules whats the problem? As someone pointed out, standing alone in front of many enemies WILL mean you are subject to a lot of attacks, either missile or melee.
The tactical thing to do would be to retreat so that the enemy would need to use all or most of their move to get to you, kill the guy next to you, and repeat. Unless the enemy is much faster than you are in which case you are in bad shape.

 

[Umbran]

As long as players get the same rules whats the problem?

In the stated example in the OP, the players didn't get the same rules. The players rolled individual initiatives, and the monsters had rolled a group.

As has been noted, group initiative is great as convenience, but in circumstances where order of actions really deeply matters, it can be unfair. If the duergar had initiatives scattered around the round as you'd normally expect, other members of the party might have been able to fire down the corridor, cast healing on the fighter, or the fighter could choose to retreat part way through, leading duergar into ambush in the room, and so on.

As someone pointed out, standing alone in front of many enemies WILL mean you are subject to a lot of attacks, either missile or melee.

Yes, but then how you're going to be working the enemy should be mentioned up front, as I don't expect the player was counting on a full duergar conveyor belt coming at him all on one initiative tick.

The tactical thing to do would be to retreat...

If the fighter had an action in which he could retreat once he saw the opposition, that might have been a fine idea. The group initiative eliminated that possibility once the round had begun.

 

[Dausuul]

Could we see a ten foot wide version of that scenario? (If I could draw maps, I'd do that myself.)

Ten feet changes the dynamic:

----| |----
....|-|DD..
....F..DD..
.......DD..
....|-|DD..
----| |----

The tactic still works, but it's not nearly as useful, because the fighter is no longer blocking a choke point. The duergar can just surround the fighter and go to town. They still only eat one opportunity attack; they don't have to eat one on subsequent rounds; and they ensure that any blasting spell which hits all of them, also hits the fighter.

After thinking about it some more, the real problem here is not move-attack-move. It's the fact that the duergar can move through each other's spaces with no penalty. The tactical value of holding a choke point comes from the enemy being "bottled up" and getting in each other's way. If the duergar couldn't move through each other, they wouldn't be able to pull this stunt.

 

[Mistwell]

I'll try to format a letter-based map here. Hope it works:

a.b.c..............o.p.q.
d.e.f. j.k.l.m.n. r.s.t.
g.h.i. .............u.v.w.

Each letter is a 5-foot square.

So, if the fighter is in square "m", a duergar would need to be in square "f", run 15-feet to square "l", attack, then retreat 10-feet (movement 25) to square "j" (and he took an attack of opportunity).

The next duergar, in squares b, c, e, h, or i, would have to move 20 feet to square "l", attack, then retreat 5-feet (again, move 25) to square "k".

The next duergar (in any of the squares above) would again move 20 feet to square "l", attack, then would have nowhere to go, since his movement isn't enough to reach an empty square, so he is stuck in square "l".

And now no duergar can reach the fighter, and the DM could even determine that any ranged attacks against the fighter would have disadvantage, since he is now obscured by 3 creatures.

I think the real issue here was not using a map and counting the duergars' movement. Even if they had movement 30, at some point they'd have nowhere to retreat and start crowding the corridor, where the fighter can then take them one-on-one while his party on healing him or attacking the duergar back rank with spells or whatnot.

We used a map, it was 100% grid based, they have a move of 30 (at least these did, and 30 is a common move in 5e), and they all had somewhere to go.

And with so many people saying they also have experienced this, I am not sure why you didn't just take my word for it.

If it will help, I believe this was the actual situation. I was trying to simplify it for purposes of discussion.

They did not all get to attack the fighter, I think it was about 7 or so that did, and then as some died reinforcements moved in to replace those who died. The party won anyway, and I was not saying this was necessarily a "problem", just that it changed how this battle happened, and tactics used, quite a lot.