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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 7555290" data-attributes="member: 463">The cinema choreographers are trying to plausibly keep the protagonist(s) alive - if they fail it looks like Uma Thurman vs the Crazy 88, where the ones behind her just stand there while she fights the ones in front.IRL 2 skilled opponents will normally defeat 1 more-skilled opponent; 3 pretty much always will. A good choreographer can work around this somewhat - my favourite example is Valeria fighting her way past several guards in the escape from Thulsa Doom's Mountain of Power, it looks like it could pretty much actually happen.The CtB fight choreography is excellent that way. But most modern films just have mooks stand around waiting their turn - this is often a result of an excessive force imbalance - or the stuntmen have to obviously deliberately miss, as with Rey & Kylo vs Snoke's guards in TLJ.In most fantasy games we use rules systems that already allow for one vs many combat. They tend to give unrealistically little advantage to multiple attackers, eg in 5e a PC has the same AC vs 8 foes as against one. Games like Dragon Warriors & Runequest where the PC can only use full defence vs 1 attacker are quite rare. I guess if you wanted Runequest to look cinematic you'd need a mook rule; but D&D already has mook rules by default.In terms of directly looking/feeling cinematic through the gameplay, I think D&D is completely the wrong engine. It was originally based off a game of battleships pounding away at each other; the only cinema it even vaguely resembles is the armoured knights of Excalibur slogging away at each other. If you have a game where one hit can kill/disable the hero, but they can be really hard to hit, you can start to build cinematic mechanics around that. The WEG d6 systems as in d6 Star Wars is designed that way. Savage Worlds somewhat, also. WEG d6 gives groups of mooks the option to add a bonus to a single attack, rather than all roll and inevitably miss.Personally I don't have much issue with seeing 8 D&D mooks vs Conan as resembling the Thulsa Doom's Orgy scene, but it does help if combat rounds are not considered to be a 'real' 6 seconds - 6 seconds of actual action per character with lots of observe-orient-decide before each action, maybe. Then hp loss is fatigue and scratches - a mook who 'misses' is the guy who didn't really attack at all or gave a half-hearted lunge from out of threat range; the mook Conan only just parries caused Conan to use up significant hp. I guess Valeria used up a lot of hp fighting her way out, which is why Thulsa's snake arrow did her in. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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