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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7559489" data-attributes="member: 4937">Glad to hear you are restoring sanity to your game.  Yes, often the way to restore sanity is for players to play by the rules they claim that they want.   One problem D&D has always had was that offense tends to great excel defense, to the point you can get into situations where the average combat lasts less than one round.As for your experiment, you are going to be trading off good and bad things.   I don't know of a good way to handle the problem.   Fundamentally, the 3.X system is turn based while trying to simulate a non-turn based event.   There is no perfect solution to that problem.  You could break the turns down into very small pieces ('segments' or 'impulses') and force players to trade off bursts of action over the course of the turn, but that attempt to adhere to realism results in a game that is too complex to really enjoy playing.  (But coming from the situation that they actually seemed to like, with players taking 10 minute actions during their turn, that might not be true.)At low levels, the 3.5 movement system works just fine.  Most of the time, a player isn't giving up very much to move and take a standard action compared to a full attack action.  It's only at high levels of play - say 11th level or higher - that this is an issue.   Combat tends to be reasonably fluid in my experience through the first 10 levels.  It's only as you lose more and more iterative attacks at higher levels that the game tends to punish you for moving.  I have never played 3.5 at high level.  I play a game that levels up fairly slowly, so that leveling up every six months is eventually the norm.   This keeps things in a sweet spot before the problems of 6th level spells and the like really take over the game.   In that, I'm not really able to tell you whether I'm good with high level play by the RAW.  I had my own particular problems I considered more pressing - the 5' step.The intention of the 5' step was to keep movement going during melee combat, with players repositioning themselves strategically as the fight went on.  In practice, it rarely gets used for that and instead gets used to abuse the turn based representation of the action, specifically to step out of melee to allow you to make all of your actions unmolested.  That was the biggest problem I had with RAW.  By the RAW, archers and spellcasters tended to be more powerful than melee characters, certainly once tactics were put into the equation, but in theory the rules seemed to propose balance in that if you tried such actions when it melee you'd be subject to additional attacks.  In practice, the 5' step allows archers and spellcasters to step out of melee to do whatever action they like without drawing attacks of opportunity.  In my opinion, this is the biggest movement related balance/theme issue you'll run into, and my solutions to keep people stuck to a melee foe were fairly extreme:1) No 'partial' withdraw action.  Withdraw only as a full round action.2) Five foot steps only did not draw an attack of opportunity if, after you stepped into the new square you were threatening any target that had originally threatened you.  While this does mean that a wizard with a staff can do this sort of withdraw from melee, I was OK with that thematically.   What it does prevent is an archer doing a 5' step and then doing a full attack action with a bow against a target he'd just been fighting.3) Increased numbers of feats for martial classes.  For example, my variant fighter got not 11 bonus feats, but 17 - plus a handful of class abilities. The idea behind #3 in part was that a fighter that wanted mobility could take feats that provided for mobility.  For example, I had a lot of feats that allowed additional movement between or after attacks, or which compensated a fighter for not getting a full attack (extra attacks during a charge, extra damage from a charge, bonus damage to an attack if you'd moved through a square the opponent threatened, ect.)  when it wasn't open to him, or which allowed a fighter to respond to movement as an immediate action with movement of his own.  For example, homebrew feats like 'press the attack' lets you move 5' towards anyone that just moved away from you, 'tornado attack' let you move up to your movement rate before making an attack on every foe in reach, and 'avalanche attack' lets you move 5' after each successful attack provided you continue in a straight line.It's not perfect.  While I've evolved the number of combat maneuvers available to a class, I really would like at some point to develop a system that gives characters with above a certain number of BAB automatic access to improved combat maneuvers (the ones that let you for example, bull rush without always drawing an attack of opportunity) to encourage characters in combat to use battlefield control as it is available to them instead of just making straight attacks, without having to spend a feat to make such actions regularly worthwhile.  And I'd like to unify my own system with the Pathfinder system, which has cleaner combat maneuver language and some good ideas of its own.One minor and one free that appears in later editions offers a really clean action economy, but it will take a lot of reworking because the 3.X system never was built to support minor actions.  I think you'd be better off avoiding that language if your goal is a simple tweak of the system, and instead look into universal combat maneuver options.  What do you intend to have them do with those minor actions anyway?Before I try to offer further advice, can I ask you what it is that you don't like above movement being its own action?  What specific circumstances annoy you?  What level are you playing at currently that its a problem, and can you fix it by giving them more combat options for different sorts of full attack actions, either by feats or just making them freely available?</blockquote>

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