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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Furious_Puffin" data-source="post: 6860809" data-attributes="member: 11831">There are only two real options here because 2 requires DM fiat and 4 is as you point out generally a not good idea. The net is a good strategy if the party outnumbers the monsters and they are eligible to be netted. But... that's the thing. It doesn't change the flow chart significantly. 'Can target be netted, and does the party outnumber the target such that it's action economy advantageous to repeatedly net the target. If yes, net target. Otherwise, fire hand crossbow'Note that from a player perspective at high levels netting sucks. The big drawcard of the fighter is that you get multiple attacks, but if you are throwing nets you can only attack once! Very unfortunate. Probably more of a cleric activity, less to lose. We mostly play hard encounters, but this just causes another problem that I've complained about in another thread - the classes are balanced for the assumption of 6-8 encounters a day in a meat grinder. If you don't do that, suddenly short rest classes look amazingly bad. As a result, this isn't a great solution IMHO. I really don't like it with your later suggest cranking up the difficulty of fights because this REALLY punishes short rest classes because more long rests are forced to get HP back. In our game fights already are 'difficult' in that players might die - some of the encounters in the Mines of Phandelver are pretty tough. My beef just that you often don't have a derth of options once the fight has started. For example, when I'm playing my druid and I'm locked in combat with 4-5 bad guys that I'm holding down with sentinel I don't actually have to think. I cannot move, because otherwise I will get pounded into the ground by AoOs. I cannot cast any spells, because wild shape. So what I'm going to do is use multi attack and maybe heal myself. This is not a hugely complex decision tree.Yeah, there is a huge shift - you can see it in how long it takes to generate a character. 1E is fast (the basic box is insanely fast), 2E is slowing down, 3.5 and 4E take FOREVER to make characters and 5E is a lot faster but still much slower than the basic box esq ones (not sure if more or less than AD&D, it's been too long). The game completely changed focus at some point, possibly 2 or 3 times (because grouping 3.5 and 4 together is skating over tons of issues). I've actually long thought that WoTC should do something like:D&D Classic: Repacked basic box, gygaxian cruft stripped out, very simple, focus on exploration and supporting the character meatgrinder form of play.  Of, you know, get Crawford to do Spears of Dawn D&D version. D&D Tactics: Repacked 4E, strong focus on tactical combatD&D 'Dragonfinder': Repacked 3.5E/PF picking up the best lessons of 5E.I understand why they don't do this though. 5E is a bit awkward at times because it's stuck with a bunch of the complex trappings of 3.5E (but not all of it) while sort of reaching for the elegant simplicity of the basic box and not getting there because it's got a pile of cruft stapled on for unclear reasons. Sometimes I feel like it doesn't really know what to be.</blockquote>

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