D&D General Reworking movement and positioning

[Brotton Goodfellow]

I’m tinkering around with positioning and movement rules in combat encounters and am wondering if anyone else has experience with doing so as well.

My main design goal was to make being close to an opponent or multiple opponents stickier and dangerous without bogging down play or being too brutal.

I’ve come up with two ideas that might serve my purpose but am curious to know if anyone has tried doing something similar.

1. If you are adjacent to an opponent, you cannot move out of their reach unless you take the disengage action.
2. If two or more enemies are adjacent to you they are Outmaneuvering you. For each adjacent enemy, a +1 is added to all damage rolls against you.

• To negate the outmaneuvered condition, one or more of your allies has to be adjacent to both you and an enemy that is adjacent to you
• Taking the Dodge action also negates the Outmaneuvered condition

I think this achieves a few things. It makes scrums a little more tactical without slowing the pace of each round down with multiple attack rolls, and it makes being surrounded/outnumbered worse without being cheesy. I also now see shoving and grappling being more useful, as they both could be used to free up space or get a better position.

I’d loved to hear anyone’s thoughts on this. Haven’t tested it out yet, but I feel like it could work for my table.

 

[aco175]

I'm always a fan of making rules that are easy and as simple as they need to be.

I'm not sure why you cannot move out of an opponents reach unless you take the disengage action? This takes your action and limits you doing anything like attacking. The current way of allowing this gives the bad guy a attack of opportunity at the cost of you keeping your action. Maybe you want to run past a bad guy to attack the caster in the back or to position yourself near the big bad. Simply not allowing the PC to move unless they wish to disengage seems off and takes away player choice. There should be choice but at cost which seems to be what we have now. I would not change it.

I do not have problems with granting bad guy that gang up on a PC additional damage. The +1 per monster is ok but does not seem like it scales at higher levels. 4 goblins on the fighter at level 1 granting +4 damage for each hit is a big deal compared to 4 ogres attacking a 10th level fighter and only getting +4 damage to all hits. Not sure on the fix to this. Maybe a +1 to-hit for each monster instead of damage? Maybe this gets closer to the flanking rules than many like though.