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

[frogimus]

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.

This.

An occupied square should at least limit movement if not block it completely.

 

[Dausuul]

That does clarify things, thank you. And it also reinforces my belief that "allies don't block movement" is the issue to address. How about changing the third paragraph of the "Movement in Combat" rules to read as follows:

Moving Around Other Creatures: Normally, you can't move through another creature's space unless it is two sizes larger or smaller than you. As a reaction, you can allow one other creature to move through your space, as long as it doesn't end its turn there.

This way, you don't totally block off your allies, but you also can't just pass through each other like ghosts.

 

[I'm A Banana]

KM, I'm not sure how your 'its merely a problem with initiative' solution is actually a, well solution.

It's a solution for the problem of "dogpile the fighter all at once," which struck me as the problem here. Totally possible there's a different problem at work.

The issues is that a fighter should be able to hold a narrow place against a larger force without all that larger force being able to attack him. That's kind of the point of the whole, holding in a narrow place tactic. Previous Editions with cyclic initiative did not manifest this problem, at least to this degree, yet this edition does.

So if this is a more stylistic issue -- not everyone should be able to dogpile the guy in the bottleneck -- then what we're looking at is more on the level of tactics and behavior. The questions become: how does this look in reality, and how does it look in the cinematic reality of our brains, and how can we make the rules encourage those looks?
[sblock=probably unnecessarily complex fix]
In reality, if you want to move someone out of a bottleneck, the most effective way to do it is to hurl yourself against them and throw them back. The bigger the weight in front, the easier it is to knock the person blocking the path over or back enough to let people through. A mass of people can typically press through a bottleneck held just by one person -- part of what makes a doughty, heroic warrior awesome in the cinematic style here is that he can hold back ARMIES, because he's just that strong and mighty.

The duergar's tactics as they played out make some sense in this too -- if they're thinking that this guy looks like he could run a mile with fifteen duergar strapped to him, the best way to get past him is to hit him hard, and then move aside and let your buddy do the same thing. If you can't get around him and the press of bodies won't crumple him, then you just need to stab 'im to death.

That's pretty high-level co-ordinated tactics, though. And there's no support for the "press of bodies" tactic. So what we need is a way for the duergar to at least try and knock him down or shove him aside. Ideally, a way that gets better as allies near you aid you, and involves you having to stay there.

D&D has never done such a thing very well. 3e had trips and overruns and bull rushes, but they were fiddly and OA prone. 4e had some forced movement abilities, but if you didn't have the particular power, then you were boned. What 5e could use is an easy, universal mechanic for what to do when you want to shove some guy over or out of the way, and to allow such a mechanic to gain bonuses as creatures aid you.

Such a thing probably isn't necessary for every game. Certainly not everyone has an issue with this, and, as I noted above, the duergar's existing tactics make "enough" sense for some tables. But it would be a useful little module:

Bull Rush: When you charge, you push an enemy in front of you as you move instead of making an attack. The enemy must make a CON save with a DC of your Strength score to avoid this fate. If you succeed, as long as you continue to move in a straight line, the enemy is pushed in front of you. If you hit any other enemies, they must also make a save, but each target after the first gains a +4 bonus on their save.

Allies can choose to be willingly bull-rushed, and don't count as additional targets if they don't make a save. You can also make any willing ally you are adjacent to initiate a bull rush against any target that they are adjacent to (by shoving them into the target), and you impose disadvantage on your enemy's save if you do, thanks to the help from your ally.​

A bit of opt-in complexity is probably helpful for a lot of people here.
[/sblock]

...alternately, I like the idea that other people are proposing, that allies' squares are a little too easy to move through.

That does point to the move-attack-move, in combination with cyclic initiative, as being the problem. Furthermore, in Ranged combat, it is logical to assume that all of the opponents would not be able to cluster in the doorway to fire at the fighter without getting in each other's way. It seems to me that the problem is being able to move too freely through an ally's space: there should be some cost associated with it. I'm by no means a simulationist, but the whole defend a choke point is something that I would like to see logically and intuitively supported.

I still don't see the move-attack-move as being the load-bearing pillar here. The game doesn't readily support the strategy of "try to shove the guy out of the way," (aside from DM judgement calls) which it probably should!

Most importantly, though, splitting up the initiative doesn't actually give them less turns. If the fighter moves on 10, it doesn't matter whether all of the enemies move on 12, or all of them on 1, or whether they're evenly spaced on every odd number - the result is that the all act back-to-back between when the fighter acts and when the fighter gets a second chance to act.

That's why my advice was to split up the turns. You can still roll one initiative (preserving the simplicity of group initiative), you just mitigate the spike potential by spacing out the turns of the members of that group.

The more I think about it, the less I think group init is at issue here. They can all just delay until after the last initiative of their allies. So if the worst roll of theirs is an 8, they can each delay to go when appropriate (7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1). Or if they need room in init order, until simply later in the round fitting around that lowest roll. But if any group wants to all go after each other, but individually on an init count, they can, provided they're willing to go late in the round.

Yeah, but any time you get a "bunching" of initaitve, you get the problem of being hit over and over again without being able to respond. 4e Solos suffer from this, too (which is why they have action denial abilities and interrupts and what not). Any group that delays like that is going to come under the same issue. If the problem is that wave of attacks without being able to do anything in response, the problem lies with every enemy taking a turn at once. There might be other problems, of course!

 

[Thaumaturge]

Though I refuse to call it MAM. It's move-attack-move, or something similar.

What, you didn't get the MAM-o-gram?


I agree adding a cost to moving through allies will greatly improve the situation. And [MENTION=58197]Dausuul[/MENTION]'s solution is very intriguing. I'd want to play it out a few times. I imagine the party's fighter would *never* allow someone to move past him, though.

Which, as I think about it, I rather like. If my big sword-weilding friend in heavy armor doesn't want me to move past him, I probably shouldn't be able to move past him.

Thaumaturge.

 

[delericho]

True. I just think this topic illustrates how easy it is to "game" the MAM system.

It's actually less a problem with MAM specifically, but rather with the discrete turns used in D&D combat generally. As others have noted up-thread, the way it should really work is that everyone is moving at the same time, both duergar and PCs. That would disallow the conga line, because the duergar would necessarily get in one another's way.

But D&D just doesn't work like that. Monster 1 goes, takes his full turn while everyone stands waiting, then monster 2 goes, takes his full turn while everyone stands waiting, and so on. (Perhaps the silliest example of this is actually 3e's jumping rules, where a character could end his turn in mid-jump and thus 'hang' there for however long everyone else took for their turn.)

All that said, I don't have a better solution. Much shorter turns would fix it, but slow everything lse down a lot, while concurrent movement would likely be a nightmare to implement. As far as I can tell, though, any turn-based system like this is inevitably going to have some issues.

 

[DEFCON 1]

While the rules probably could have something added or removed to close or narrow this loophole... speaking personally as a DM who might eventually have to adjudicate this type of scenario, my instinct would be to say to myself "Okay... this is something the duergar could do right now by the rules, but it only is going to work because I saved time by rolling their initiative as a group, rather than rolling each one individually as I probably should have. So if I'm going to artificially have them all go at once... I need to artificially agree not to take advantage of that situation."

Now that being said... if I was to decide to actually roll each duergar's initiative separately, and their numbers all worked out that they still could pull this tactic off... at that point I might let them work the MAM corridor thing. Still kind of cheesy due to the "all combat is supposed to happen simultaneously" paradigm... but at least both sides cannot claim unfair advantage. They both rolled initiative individually, and they both have the opportunity to try this tactic out.

 

[Dausuul]

Individual initiative doesn't change much of anything. No matter what you do, after the fighter's turn, each of the duergar will get a turn before the fighter gets to go again. It's true that other PCs can see the conga line getting started and maybe intervene; but that requires someone squishier than the fighter to step into the front, which defeats the purpose of holding a choke point.

There are two rules elements that are combining to enable this strategy: Move-attack-move, and allies not blocking movement. Individual versus group initiative is largely irrelevant.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Individual initiative doesn't change much of anything. No matter what you do, after the fighter's turn, each of the duergar will get a turn before the fighter gets to go again. It's true that other PCs can see the conga line getting started and maybe intervene; but that requires someone squishier than the fighter to step into the front, which defeats the purpose of holding a choke point.

That dynamism changes things, though. If one duergar spring attacks, and then the mage lights off a fireball, the other duergar might do something different (like try ranged attacks against the mage, or take cover). If the next duergar still spring attacks, and then the thief takes out the third with a bow (which then misses its turn, sparing the fighter from a spring attack) and then the cleric heals up the fighter or buffs his defenses, and then the fourth duergar spring attacks again, that's a lot less of a "sit there while I beat the crap out of you" moment.

Heck, if the fighter's reaction charged on each initiative character's turn (rather than on his own), that probably would have been enough to change the dynamics, regardless of the spring-attack-ness or ally terrain simplifications.

 

[Gadget]

It's a solution for the problem of "dogpile the fighter all at once," which struck me as the problem here. Totally possible there's a different problem at work.


...alternately, I like the idea that other people are proposing, that allies' squares are a little too easy to move through.



I still don't see the move-attack-move as being the load-bearing pillar here. The game doesn't readily support the strategy of "try to shove the guy out of the way," (aside from DM judgement calls) which it probably should!



That's why my advice was to split up the turns. You can still roll one initiative (preserving the simplicity of group initiative), you just mitigate the spike potential by spacing out the turns of the members of that group.



Yeah, but any time you get a "bunching" of initaitve, you get the problem of being hit over and over again without being able to respond. 4e Solos suffer from this, too (which is why they have action denial abilities and interrupts and what not). Any group that delays like that is going to come under the same issue. If the problem is that wave of attacks without being able to do anything in response, the problem lies with every enemy taking a turn at once. There might be other problems, of course!

The problem is that the simple tactic of using a choke point is rendered irrelevant by the free and easy movement of the opponents. That is why in my quote I pointed out that it is too easy to move through an ally's space. I think the solution is to increase the cost of doing so to mitigate this issue without adding in complex tactical rules. To me, whether or not the opponents all act on the same initiative isn't really relevant. They all get to act between each turn the fighter gets, and that brings out pretty much the same result. In reality, the fighter's friends in the room behind him would get to act in some way to mitigate the situation by casting a spell, doing their own conga-line, etc.; but say the fighter was protecting some lost orphans or some such. Now it doesn't really matter if all the opponents go on one initiative or not. Normally, the focus fire tactic of the opponents would be perfectly acceptable and viable tactic to use, but one would expect the narrow choke point situation to reduce the effectiveness of this approach. I don't think this is something that should require advanced squad leader type tactical modules or rules to resolve. Thus it seems that the solution is to have moving through an allied creatures space be more costly.

 

[Umbran]

Individual initiative doesn't change much of anything. No matter what you do, after the fighter's turn, each of the duergar will get a turn before the fighter gets to go again. It's true that other PCs can see the conga line getting started and maybe intervene; but that requires someone squishier than the fighter to step into the front, which defeats the purpose of holding a choke point.

It does not necessarily require someone squishy moving to the front. "Intervene" can mean a lot of different things. Step up behind the fighter and ready to cast a healing spell, for example. Or (in 3.x) cast Grease on the corridor ahead of the fighter. Or toss a vial of flaming oil into the corridor in front of the fighter - are the duergar going to run into flames to get at him? Or have two of the other PCs team up to move one of those beds from the room into the way, making it more difficult ground and slowing the duergar.

Or, with three other PCs, maybe *several* of those things could happen over the course of the round, which could change the situation significantly.