No full attack option?

[hong]

Ever been in melee combat? It rarely moves more than 10' or so, and it just about never involves the combatants gaining a large separation between each other.

Pish tosh. Melee combat involves people spinning around while fighting in mid-air 5' above the surface of a lake. Cf Hero.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I solve this problem by writing those numbers down beside me on a pad, and then if the player is math challenged all he has to do is report his die rolls. This also has the advantage of making it clear to other players when one of thier members is consistantly misreporting his dice rolls.

I refuse to keep track of the player's attack rolls. I have enough to worry about as a DM rather than worry about the PCs attacks as well as the enemies. I normally half ignore their turns as I try to figure out what all the enemies will be doing during their turns. I wait until I hear a "I hit ac X" or "I do X damage with X spell" and write down the damage.

Players that cannot resolve thier actions efficiently are punished by the loss of in game turns (they are given a six second warning if they dither to much). If the player is confused or hesistant and doesn't act, so is the character. It only has to happen once or twice, and players become paragons of dice rolling efficiency. They also tend to pay attention more when its not thier turn in the combat.

I wish. My players won't do this. I know this. They view the game as a casual experience that is more fun if they get to plan out their moves and figure out the best strategy.

I've tried to hurry them up but it always ends up the same way:

Player: "So...umm...should I flank the enemy?"
Other players: "Yes, we need the plusses to hit."
Player: "Ok...so I move here, then here, then here....no, wait...that's beyond my movement rate."
Other player: "If you move on an angle you have enough movement."
Me: "Ok, well, which way are you moving, make up your mind."
Player: "Ok, then I move on an angle this way..."
Me: "You will provoke an AOO when move out of that square."
Player: "Oh, right...I forgot about AOOs...umm, well is there any way I can move there and not provoke?"
Me: *looks up from reading the stats of some enemy* "Umm...what? Oh, right...I don't know. Where are you again? Oh, ok...no, if you want to move to flank, you have to provoke an AOO."
Player: "Well, I don't want to do that...I take a 5-ft step and attack."

The couple of times that I've said, "Look, make up your mind...otherwise I'm skipping your turn" people always come up with excuses that make it not their fault and spend 5 minutes arguing about how they can't be forced to make a decision that quickly. I've heard: "I didn't know that was a table, so I thought I could move right through it", "that player's mini was halfway between squares so I thought I could move there", "I needed to look up the range on all my spells. My character would know them all though, so he could decide quickly", "He put his player's handbook on my character sheet and I couldn't find it to look up my bonus", "That guy took my pencil and I need it to write down damage from last round before I can act", etc. The list goes on and on.

If I get mean and play the tyrant, my players just lose interest in the game and pay even less attention as it is no longer fun for them.

I'm actually hoping that having a bunch of triggers for immediate actions will cause my players to pay attention for chances to use their powers.

 

[Horacio]

Pish tosh. Melee combat involves people spinning around while fighting in mid-air 5' above the surface of a lake. Cf Hero.

I think we have here a good exemple of different expectations. People think of different things when they hear "D&D melee combat"

I tend to fall in Hong's side here, Hero or Tiger-Dragon over realistic sport fencing (and I've done fencing for several years)...

 

[sidonunspa]

I think we have here a good exemple of different expectations. People think of different things when they hear "D&D melee combat"

I tend to fall in Hong's side here, Hero or Tiger-Dragon over realistic sport fencing (and I've done fencing for several years)...

Well I can name some American movies with tons of movement and dynamic melee combat.

1) LoTR Trilogy: The Hearos are cutting down orcs and moving to meet the next one, leaving a trail of bodied behind them. Look at all the fight when they face the goblins and the cave troll.

2) Willow: (wow that’s from left field) remember when Mad Martigan picks up the sword and hacks through bad guys? (wow, you are great..) notice, he never stopped moving

3) Braveheart – Do I need to bring up how Wallice cuts though people and moves through the battle?

4) King Arthur (2004) - the battles are very dynamic and contain tons of movement though battle, and some nice "combat moves" as well.

5) 300 – Come on, do I need to explain this one? I can also come up with some combat manuvers looking at this film.

I know I can come up with more if I thought about it

 

[Horacio]

Touché...

Your examples are way better, because nobody can think of Willow or Braveheart as Wuxia (and then people who dislike wuxia won't feel that their game is wuxified )

So yes, I want combat in my games to be as in Willow, Breaveheart or LotR, or as in old Errol Flynn movies, not as realistic fencing or realistic bar brawl.

 

[Celebrim]

Well I can name some American movies with tons of movement and dynamic melee combat....I know I can come up with more if I thought about it

I'm sure you could. I however can describe all of those things in terms of the current combat system. Pretty much all of the scenes described are 'high level fighter vs. horde of dispersed loosely organized mooks', often with 'high level fighter wants to get somewhere and has to move through the mooks'. Run that combat in 3rd, and you'll have alot of movement too.

(I would also like to take the time to say I HATED the combat scenes in 300, and hense pretty much the entire movie.)

What 3rd is very bad at capturing is chase scenes interpersed with combat. For that you need something like the 'Hot Pursuit' rules, and that sort of thing (chase/evasion resolution subsystem) was much closer to what I wanted to see added to 4e as an improvement over 3rd than what I'm apparantly getting.

UPDATE: Let me add to that by saying that this is another example of 'not getting it'. Those 'high level fighter vs. vs. horde of dispersed loosely organized mooks' scenes that you like so well in the movies, work so well because they are visceral violent visual action scenes (and they are resolved very quickly). As such, they are alot more fun to watch than actually participate in as a player. Try to capture those scenes in your game, and your player will quickly get bored. He's moving all over the place and wading through mooks, but in practice its just redundant and gets tiriing in hurry. You won't change that by changing the mechanics, and you'll be left with this vague disatisfaction that the scene wasn't nearly as fun as watching the one in Braveheart.

To use an analogy, the difference between what is cinematic in a primarily visual fast moving media like film, and what we do in RPGs is like the difference between soccer and football. Of the two, soccer is (for your average person) more fun to play. Football is a grinding brutal very non-casual sport involving when played well discipline of motion that a professional dancer would envy or admire. On the other hand, soccer is a much less fun sport to watch (for your average American) because there is moment to moment no way to measure progress the way you have in football. Soccer doesn't have as much moment to moment dramatic tension when watched, for all that it is more fast moving continious play. (I fully expect the non-Americans to not get this analogy, but a discussion of soccer vs. football in detail is outside the scope of this thread).

 

[Brother MacLaren]

Well I can name some American movies with tons of movement and dynamic melee combat.

1) LoTR Trilogy: The Hearos are cutting down orcs and moving to meet the next one, leaving a trail of bodied behind them. Look at all the fight when they face the goblins and the cave troll.

2) Willow: (wow that’s from left field) remember when Mad Martigan picks up the sword and hacks through bad guys? (wow, you are great..) notice, he never stopped moving

3) Braveheart – Do I need to bring up how Wallice cuts though people and moves through the battle?

4) King Arthur (2004) - the battles are very dynamic and contain tons of movement though battle, and some nice "combat moves" as well.

5) 300 – Come on, do I need to explain this one? I can also come up with some combat manuvers looking at this film.

I know I can come up with more if I thought about it

Maybe by allowing some variant of Supreme Cleave as a high-level feat? You get to take a 5' step after downing an opponent before your Cleave attack, up to a total movement of a single move in a round?

I don't like the idea of "I move up to you and hit you 4 times" since it gives the fighter an insta-kill if he reaches the enemy cleric in the back lines. But moving and mowing through the low-level opponents has cinematic value.

 

[hong]

UPDATE: Let me add to that by saying that this is another example of 'not getting it'. Those 'high level fighter vs. vs. horde of dispersed loosely organized mooks' scenes that you like so well in the movies, work so well because they are visceral violent visual action scenes (and they are resolved very quickly). As such, they are alot more fun to watch than actually participate in as a player. Try to capture those scenes in your game, and your player will quickly get bored. He's moving all over the place and wading through mooks, but in practice its just redundant and gets tiriing in hurry.

No, it doesn't.

 

[Celebrim]

No, it doesn't.

And as a natural consequence 'party takes on 300 orcs on a largely open plain' has become a staple of D&D encounter design, so much so that its driven almost every other sort of encounter to the margins of the game?

Yeah, right.

 

[Nebulous]

I think that the scene in the Caves of Moria can be recreated quite well with 3.5, it just takes some flavorful description from the DM, and that in my opinion is one of the very hardest parts of the game (other than roleplaying interesting NPC's). If we assume that in "gamespeak" that all the movement Aragorn and Gilmi and Legolas are taking DOES provoke attacks, they're either not getting hit, or their HP "luck" is getting ticked off bit by bit (until that critical from the troll where it slams Aragorn, and then another hit on Frodo). All of that can be enacted in the rules as is, except for the almighty No Cleric to Heal Them.