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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 4865431" data-attributes="member: 29398">There are a few ways in which the mechanics can help reflect realism a bit more without too much extra clutter.Turn-based is one.  Now, what I'm suggesting doesn't play well in 3e (don't know about 4e) because d20+modifiers initiative is too big, but for 0-1-2e it's pretty easy to put initiative on a d6 and *re-roll every round* to reflect the randomness of combat.  And if several things happen simultaneously on a '3', well so be it.In 3e, allowing interrupting or simultaneous actions sort of accomplishes the same thing.  Take the following situation:You've got a river with woods (and thus, cover) on both sides.  There's an open bridge.  Bad guys are crossing the bridge and we, the party, are hiding in the trees trying to shoot them as they cross; occasionally, some of them shoot at us to keep our heads down.  This makes it a combat, thus we're on a turn-based clock.By the book, unless the DM allows simultaneous actions, we can't shoot them when they have no cover as they cross the bridge!  Say I'm one of the archers.  My turn comes up, but there's no-one on the bridge to shoot (as it's my turn, it's not the turn of any of the enemy, so they're all safe under cover and not moving).  So my action is to hold my shot until someone's on the bridge where I can see him...and a bad guy's turn then comes up and his move action is to cross the bridge.  Well, if my held action puts my init. just ahead of his, he hasn't started moving yet and still has cover...and if it puts my init. just behind his, he's already across the bloody bridge and now has cover on the other side!  For this to work, I have to be able to act simultaneously with his move; but the rules say I can't, and that is completely unrealistic.Same thing comes up if two people want to move simultaneously in combat; my own example from a game I was in was a situation where some of us charged in to start a combat while two of us had held back hoping to sneak in on the enemy under cover of a Silence effect centered on me.  Buddy held his action until mine so we could move together, but by the book we still could not do it - the turn-based rules dictated one of us had to finish moving before the other could start, thus there was no way we could run in together under Silence.Now obviously a DM can overrule this (though I did lose the Silence argument), but wouldn't it be better to simply allow simultaneous actions in the first place?  And think of the tactical and swashbuckling options to be had if characters could plan to act simultaneously ... <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=":)" />Another easy mechanical way to reflect reality is to put anything random on a bell curve (i.e. rolling more than one die in combination to resolve it) rather than a line (rolling one die), as that's how just about all random things in reality work - on a bell curve.  It messes with the other math of the game - bonuses etc. have to be completely rethought - but it might be worth it.  Hit point rolls are one obvious and easy thing to do this with...instead of rolling a d8, roll 2d4.Lan-"what is it about this thread that attracts all these long posts?"-efan</blockquote>

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