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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6281605" data-attributes="member: 2067">Ultimately, it's an issue. The relevant question in my mind is, what kind of issue is it? Sounds like it's kind of a gameplay issue: the fighter didn't want to be the target of every enemy. So the natural question to ask: what about Mistwell's set-up allowed every enemy to attack the fighter without the Fighter getting a response (or only one measly response)?The thing that did that wasn't move-act-move per se. Without move-act-move, every monster still would have been able to focus fire. They might not've been able to all melee attack conga-line, but they could've all rained death on the fighter at once from range. Whether the attack is melee or ranged matters little if the core issue is being attacked over and over again without being able to respond. (If the core issue is being attacked IN MELEE specifically over and over again, I'd want to dig into why that's any different from getting hit at range in practice...)What allowed all that concentrated fire was group initiative. You sometimes see something very similar in 3e or 4e when the die gods randomly clump all the enemies together. If they're focusing fire, then you might have one person in the party (you can HOPE it's someone meaty like the fighter, but it isn't always) the center of a bunch of attacks, all at once, without reprieve. Any time you use one initiative count for a load of critters, focused fire can be a bit relentless. It's something of a consequence of being a turn-based game. The benefit of group initiative is generally that it's a big time-saver/bookkeeping-remedy. The cost of it is that we have clumping effects like this that have frustrating play results (leaving aside for the moment their lack of verisimilitude). So how might we change group initiative to something that lazy DMs can use that doesn't clump up turns like that? Might I recommend "take turns" initiative?Roll initiative like you normally would for the whole group, however that is. But that initiative count isn't the count of EVERYBODY. It's the count of one of the members of that group.After that group member goes, the next person in initiative goes. Then, the next group member goes. Then, the next person in initiative. And so on.Say you roll group initiative for a group of 4 duergar, vs. a 4-person party (C/T/F/M - cleric, thief, fighter, mage). You get a 20, and the players get C 13, T 10, F 4, M 17. The turn order plays out like this:- A Duergar- Mage- A Duergar- Cleric- A Duergar- Thief- A Duergar- Fighter...if the Duergar rolled a 1 for initiative, they'd just all go at the bottom. This gives the party (if not the fighter personally) a chance to respond to the enemy's action. The Deurgar can still dogpile on the fighter if they want, but their actions may change in relation to what the party does, and the party can try and protect their fighter from ALL the attacks (if they want). And the bookkeeping is easy, just remember to take a turn for one of your group members after every other person's turn.  Clumping is a result of the initiative system, and group initiative makes clumping worse. If the problem is the conga line of attacks, I don't see that as a move-attack-move problem. It's an initiative system problem. There's probably a lot more solutions out there than mine. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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