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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6281810" data-attributes="member: 2067">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. 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. 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!</blockquote>

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