D&D 5E Movement in combat

[Warmaster Horus]

Rather than implement house rules, I prefer to sometimes include environmental effects to encourage movement or discourage remaining static. Or perhaps effects that force movement such as blasts of wind that scatter the combatants and break things up.

This is a great point. There needs to be a reason to move in a fight. People don't move just to move when in combat. They move to gain advantage, avoid a superior threat, get separation to use ranged weapons or the like.

 

[Rod Staffwand]

The simplest method would be to give a minor (+1 or +2 bonus) to melee attacks made after moving at least 1 square. You move and your opponent has to readjust their defenses based on your new line of attack. Hopefully, their readjustment is slow enough that you gain enough of an advantage to get a hit in. The above bonus is small enough that its not mandatory or game-breaking, but it would cause melee combatants to shift a lot within each other's reach to gain their free bonus.

I initially thought of moving once and gaining the bonus for all subsequent attacks you make, but it might be more interesting to require more powerful combatants to move at least 5ft before each attack to gain the bonus.

If you don't want to inflate attack numbers and you can force equal penalty to combatants who don't move, but this seems less fun. Carrots are more fun in combat than sticks, strangely enough.

We mostly run 5E combat at ToTM. I think I'll try this tweak the next time we do a board battle.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Well, first suggestion...don't use mini's or a battlemat. If exact positions ever need to be determined, the DM decides on probability of a PC/NPC being in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g. do it like we did back in the oldtymie dase!)

Second suggestion...when someone involved in the battle does something that could conceivably 'hit' someone other than the intended target, have those near or in line-of-sight make an INT check; whomever scores lowest is it, as well as anyone who refuses to move out of the way. E.g., an archer shoots into melee...the arrow has to pass within 5' of the thief, and then the fighter fighting the orc; Thief and Fighter make INT checks first, whichever one rolls lowest gets hit *if* the shot misses the intended target (the orc)...unless the fighter moves out of the way (5' or more).

I could see something like that working...but it would add, potentially, more dice rolling. Maybe that's a good way to keep everyone at the table involved. Especially if things like Fireball and Blade Barrier are being tossed into the mix!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Tony Vargas]

What you basically never see are two people standing in one spot smacking each other. Try that in a real fight and you're going to get hurt, a lot.

Nod. That's the 'static combat' issue that supposedly plagued 3e.

5e doesn't address it as voluminously as 4e did, but it does have a few things that help. THE big culprit in 3e was the Full Round Action (mostly the full attack, but there were full-round casting times, too). In 5e, the Move and Action are almost entirely separate. You can use your Action to Dash, but that's about the limit of the crossover. You can't 'sacrifice' your move for more oomf, so you're generally able to move, if you can find a reason to.

5e also softened AoOs, but that's a mixed benefit. It does make it easier to move around, but it also makes positioning less important in the first place.

Has anyone managed to come up with any minor house rules that encourage more in-combat mobility? Gives martial types good cause to move between attacks (even against the same target), or reasons to regularly fall back from an opponent?

I've seen DMs run 5e on a grid using essentially 4e rules for movement & positioning with good effect. Not always in the sense of a variant, either, just in the sense of not having internalized the dearth of such rules, yet.

Of course, 5e gave up movement/positioning rules and related combat options, in part to speed combat, and in part to default to 'TotM.' But, at the same time, it also reverted to giving speed/range/area in feet, even if it used the same 1":5' scale as C&T/3.x/4e, and spell areas in geometric shapes. So while you can run a melee combat in a fairly abstract way, TotM, once targeting an AE spell comes up, things can get weird. It's easy to be arbitrary when the underlying mechanics are vague & abstract, but when a mechanic calling for a very specific size & shape effect brought into it, there can be issues.

Of course, for us old-timers, those're issues we dealt with 30 years ago, at a 1":10' (or 30' outdoors) scale that didn't even match the 25mm minis the game was supposedly meant to be used with. (Up Hill! In the Snow! Both Ways!)

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Has anyone managed to come up with any minor house rules that encourage more in-combat mobility? Gives martial types good cause to move between attacks (even against the same target), or reasons to regularly fall back from an opponent? I don't want to add layers of complexity or slow things down much, I'd just love to see more of the battlemap covered by the close-in combatants over the course of a fight.

From my house rules doc:

8.) There is no Disengage. Opportunity attacks occur when you move at full speed away from an enemy (turning your back). You can back away at half speed without turning your back. Creatures like beholders and black puddings have no backs to turn and can move at full speed in any direction without provoking opportunity attacks.

Remark: Dashing while moving backwards replaces and is equivalent to Disengage. You move half speed ('15), but you do it twice because you Dashed, so you move 30' without provoking opportunity attacks--that's why Disengage does not exist, because it's redundant.

Refraining from penalizing you for minor movement isn't quite the same thing as encouraging minor movement mechanically, but it opens the door to express yourself through movement: e.g. the hill giant falls back 20' in the face of your attack, moaning and clutching his wounds, although he hits you back as he is doing so. You can't do that under RAW, and it does make the fight feel different even though it doesn't change the outcome.

This rule was stolen from AD&D 2nd edition.

 

[jasper]

mmm. Off the cuff. At the end of round any toe to toe combat shifts a square. Monster decides movement. PC mini stays in relative position. On square roll a d8.
1,2,3
4,M,5,
6,7,8.
This does not provoke any attacks. Only thing that could happen depends on terrain. Example 1. Room. PC in square 1. Monster rolls a 4. Shifts Left. Pc is shift left also. Pc is now against the wall, his next attack is at disadvantage. Example 2. Bridge with little to no side walls. PC is in square 2. Monster rolls a 5. Monster and PC shift right. Both OFF the bridge. Well no. DC x DEX Saving Throw. On natural 1 long fall.

 

[Plaguescarred]

I hear you but i at the same time i find 5th edition allows more mobility than 4E/3.X in a sense too, by not having movement provoke an opportunity attack while still within reach.

If you want to improve mobility even further, consider allowing to Disengage as a bonus action or reaction instead of an action. This should reduce the associated cost and thus make it more commonly used.



Yan
D&D Playtester

 

[CapnZapp]

Watch any small-scale melee in the movies, in modern video games, or IRL, and you'll note that people are moving all over the place. Boxers move around the ring. Even fencers go back and forth.

What you basically never see are two people standing in one spot smacking each other. Try that in a real fight and you're going to get hurt, a lot.

But very often, despite our best efforts, that's what melee combat in D&D comes to. Once the fighter and barbarian have engaged the giant, there's nothing to be gained from a lot of shifting around (and in fact, the opportunity attack rules often discourage it).

Flanking makes advantage too easy, and it doesn't really involve that much maneuvering anyway. And yes, monsters might try to move to take cover from ranged attacks or what have you, but it's not always an option, and not really what I'm talking about.

Has anyone managed to come up with any minor house rules that encourage more in-combat mobility? Gives martial types good cause to move between attacks (even against the same target), or reasons to regularly fall back from an opponent? I don't want to add layers of complexity or slow things down much, I'd just love to see more of the battlemap covered by the close-in combatants over the course of a fight.

Perhaps something like:

When a creature makes a melee or ranged attack and hits its target's AC exactly, that target gets to immediately make 20 ft movement that doesn't provoke OAs.

If the target is downed by the attack, or otherwise incapacitated, you (the attacker) gain the movement instead. Remember, you can still interweave attacks and movement as normal.​

D&D combat is so abstract there isn't any reason to not make this an essentially random occurance.

I opted against keying this to rolls of 20 or 1 or any specific d20 number, since roling or not rolling those can be affected by too many features or effects of the game. Rolling AC exactly is mostly a "middle" value that should occur fairly often even with advantage or disadvantage, for instance. Keying it to reaching the target's exact AC as one of the few non-static things that are easy to remember.

20 ft isn't a lot, but should be enough to escape the reach of most monsters, or to reach a new and interesting spot in most cases.

 

[CapnZapp]

Alternatively (or concurrently): switch action points (=Inspiration) away from game bonuses (=Advantage), and instead make spending Inspiration give you a bonus round's worth of free movement.

Yet another relatively straight-forward approach:

Each creature gains a number of tokens equal to its proficiency bonus after completing a short rest. Each token can be spent to take half your Speed as extra movement (two tokens is the maximum per round; allowing you double speed that round). This movement triggers OAs as usual, but a successful OA negates the movement (wasting the token) instead of causing any damage or other effects.

This would enable heroes to move about a bit more. More importantly, it would help monsters to be much more mobile (since they presumably use all their tokens in one and the same fight). Both in fights, but especially at the start of fights.

 

[Rhenny]

I agree with that theater of the mind works better for the "feeling" of movement.

The problem with a grid, is the same problem as taking turns in a combat round. It is a gamist invention to keep order and run combat without confusion. People should realize these things, like Hit Points, are just abstractions not intended to "show" what combat is really like. Narration brings the "show" to combat.

Additionally, the DM can encourage more movement and the feeling of movement if he/she makes the foes move more often, and in some cases, even provoking AOs so that other foes can move without AOs. Cool strategy, have the more heavily armored foe provoke AO so that the others can move around without provoking AOs.