D&D General Structural Flaw of the D&D Combat System

[pukunui]

When I last ran 4e, I experimented with giving the PCs the recharge mechanic for their encounter and daily powers. At the start of each of their turns, a player could attempt to recharge a spent encounter or daily power. IIRC, I made it so an encounter power recharged on a 5 or 6, while a daily recharged on a 6 only.

We found it a lot of fun. I'm not sure how it would work in 5e, but I do wish something like that was built into the system already.

 

[Committed Hero]

The Sentinel Comics RPG is a flavor of Cortex but one of the interesting things they did is set up a Green/Yellow/Red hierarchy where some of your powers are linked to a particular status "color" - encounters start at green, then move to yellow after a few rounds (unlocking some powers), then go to red after a few more unlocking your strongest powers. This is also tied to a character's health so if Jazz Man takes a beating early on he may be able to use his yellow or red powers early on. It's worth a look if you'd like to see how one other game tackled it.

Agreed. Their stated rationale is that "if you are driving to work and you're 15 minutes early, you go slow. If you're 5 minutes late, you drive like a maniac."

13th Age has an Escalation Die which rises each round, giving PC's a combat bonus.

 

[Morrus]

This is exacrty what the escalation die in 13th Age is designed to affect.

 

[GMMichael]

First of all, I do not see this as a flaw, but as the logical way a fight progresses. Watch a boxing fight that goes over 12 rounds sometime . . .

Same thing with war: strike hard and fast so your enemy has little time to react, regoup, or recover. It's called seizing the initiative (somewhat like the D&D version).

If D&D combat takes too long, use a pooped-out rule:

• Combat ends after round 5.
• At that point, PCs get the following options: limp away, switch to social combat, or flip a coin to see which side dies.

 

[MichaelSomething]

That's sounds like 4th Edition talk, buddy. Here in Enworld we bend the 5E rules to run whatever game we want. If we want to run Dr. Who in 5E; Gygax willing, we will!

That was 40 years ago.

Resource management was abandoned in the mid-80s in favor of scripted set-piece scenes that form a coherent pre-written story.

The situation that players throw out all their best abilities at the start of a fight and then go through less and less powerful and interesting option comes from the simple fact that they don't need to save anything for later and that they have the confidence that they can not lose the fight. If they play really poorly, the GM will fudge things so the pre-written story can continue as the script demands.

Everything is completely different when the PCs have to fight for their lives and also will have to fight their way back out of dangerous places. There is a tension and hesitance to use all your best powers at the start because you really might need them later. As the fight progresses and things don't look good, using the really powerful guns now instead of saving them for later becomes increasingly attractive and ultimately urgent. We won't be able to fight our way back up to the surface if we die right here and now.

The great majority of problem with D&D is that it stopped wanting to be a dungeon crawling game 40 years ago, but also always wanted to maintain the appearance of still being the same game.

Edit: adding in a link to said 5E Doctor Who game

Doctors and Daleks: Collector's Edition

The Doctors and Daleks Collector's Edition Set contains the Player's Guide, The Keys of Scaravore, Alien Archive and the Gamemaster's Screen. Buy from the creative source at Cubicle 7.

cubicle7games.com

 

[M_Natas]

It's been this way in D&D for a long time and I do not see it changing but it has been addressed in other systems.

4E D&D addressed it with the At-Will/Encounter/Daily structure for powers and players tended to save those big booms for the big encounters.

4e did some things right, it seems

The Sentinel Comics RPG is a flavor of Cortex but one of the interesting things they did is set up a Green/Yellow/Red hierarchy where some of your powers are linked to a particular status "color" - encounters start at green, then move to yellow after a few rounds (unlocking some powers), then go to red after a few more unlocking your strongest powers. This is also tied to a character's health so if Jazz Man takes a beating early on he may be able to use his yellow or red powers early on. It's worth a look if you'd like to see how one other game tackled it.

I will have a look at the sentinel comic rpg. It sounds a little bit similiar to my proposed charges, just that they don't use up the charges.

 

[M_Natas]

Several other games over the years (Iron Heroes & Chronicles of Ramlar) use a mechanic called momentum. In these systems, you have access to your basic attacks, but to "open up" using the more powerful abilities you have to essentially build up momentum to use them. As you make successful attacks or complete other actions, you are awarded with a certain amount of momentum, say 1 point. Those points may be tracked on each character independantly, or as a group. Then, casting something like a maxxed out lightning bolt may cost 5 momentum, generally allowing you to quickly end the combat.

Depending on the system, momentum may be kept until used - or in the case of Ramlar, until someone blows a roll. The latter creates a "push-your-luck" sort of system. Maybe you can risk everything to build up to that death spell against the dragon that will instantly end the fight, or you can make smaller leaps forward with enhanced attacks that chip away at the dragon at an accelerated rate.

Uh, the pushing your luck seems interesting. Like ... you roll a d4 or d6 to get charges, but when you roll a 1 you loose all your charges. But that also could get frustrating. But it is more rolling, which is often more fun for the players.

 

[M_Natas]

There are two dynamics at play in my perspective on D&D. The first is an adventuring day. This means you have a finite amount of resources and have to use them cleverly to rule the day. This is a bit of an old school mindset that player skill is the exciting part as the game unfolds. The other dynamic is adventuring encounters. The encounter itself is the game experience and should always be fun in a self contained way. This is a more modern take where round by round tactics are more important than upfront strategy.

My recommendation is to examine these systems for types of play.

• 3E/PF1 Strategy based adventuring day.
• 4E/PF2 Encounters based adventuring.
• 5E hybrid of the day/encounter tactics and strategy without emphasis on either.

The proposed items above sound very encounters based design, and thus unlikely to be adapted in 5E. Though, maybe thats your in to lean 5E in that direction as a homebrewer indie developer?

That is the thing with 5e, the design is not really encounter focused. There are now no nothworthy encounter based abilities (or they unlock at very high levels). You can do it either always (like sneak attack) or have to stretch the ressources like spell slots out over the day. So the only decision in combat is: do I use the limited ressources in this combat or not? And if I use them it is best to use them as early as possible.
The only things in 5e at the moment that are RAW that changes this systematic are, like some people mentioned here, legendary resistances and fights that you put in waves with weaker monsters first and the harder ones later.

So maybe I need to look more at the monster and battle design, to get my more cinematic fights - that would have the advantage of not needing to change a lot of rules for the players.

 

[M_Natas]

I dunno man, you’re describing a Dragon Ball fight progression. PC should be professionals who don’t take chances.

For a Gladiator who is wowing the crowd power abilities sound great but there is a lot of showmanship in gladiatorial fights.

Not so much in grim life or death struggles.

Yeah, but 5e is definitely a lot of things ut it is not grim life or realistic. 5e is super hereo in fantasyland. It seems more cinematic than earlier editions to me.
And so having structually anticlimactic battles is ... sad. Like, in the last campaign I DM'ed the group had to lead a city under attack against an amphibious attack with a big kraken. So that had some set pieces fights against smaller scale enemies inside the city, using up some ressources and then they went after the kraken, who destroyed most of the fleet defending the city already, leaving the characters as the last line of defense. So far so good. A battle with rising tensions, very cinematic and now we are reaching the climax, the final encounter if the battle.
Our characters on their small ship against a freaking Kraken (fir which they where underleveled) - so they make the only sensible thing that makes sense in 5e - the go in the first rounds NOVA on the Kraken, using up the highestspell slots and rare and very rare single use magic items (like a candle of invocation to open a gate to summon the god they are allied with).
And in the End, the Kraken gets killed by a cantrip, because by then everybody was drained.
The whole battle started strong and ended on a cantrip, because in the End that was the only thing left, the characters could do. Cantrips. Very anticlimactic. Very uncinematic.

If I would redo the battle now, I would change some things- if I would do it RAW, I would maybe create a magic item for the group, that they would need to charge during battle, that can ensnare the encounter or at least quicken it, so that it doesn't end in a cantrip slugfest.

 

[M_Natas]

Its a question of how much fantasy do you want in your fantasy? Do you want fights like they have in the movies, a long more draw out affair. Or do you want realistic fights where duels are often settled in seconds?

For me it is not so much about the duration of the fight. I don't have a problem if the characters win or loose on the first round once in a while. The problem with the system (for me) start, when fights get longer without already having an obvious winning side (where it would be appropriate to let the enemies just run away). Then it turns into a slugfest of cantrip, attack, cantrip, attack because everything else is already used up, especially after a longer adventuring day. Like if you follow the adventuring day recommendation, you have like 3-5 easy to hard fights and end the day with a deadly fight against the main boss for the campaign. But the main boss fight will turn really quickly to "cantrip, attack, cantrip, attack", because the characters are drained from the adventuring day. I know from a Ressource management perspective being drained is supposed to be interesting, but mechanically, the characters have in the last fight no interesting abilities left.