D&D 5E (2024) Unfreezing the Narrative

[NotAYakk]

I'm thinking about mechanics to unfreeze the narrative in D&D. Ie, some creature's turn comes. The creature tries to do something, but rolls poorly or the enemies roll well. Nothing happens. The next creature goes.

That is a frozen narrative - the turn could have been skipped. Sometimes some resources get spent (so bookkeeping) but the state of the battle doesn't really move.

This happens when a pure save-or-suck spell is cast and the target passes the saving throw (or uses legendary resists with no expectation they'll run out), every attack is missed, or similar.

...

For spells, many spells deal half damage on a successful save, or are multiple target (reducing the probability of no-narrative-progress). Spells with a duration who don't have immediate impact have implied future impact (we hope) so they don't leave the situation utterly unchanged. Concentration spells that have zone effects usually have an effect when first cast, so even if concentration is broken they do something.

Weapon attacks seem to rely on swinging more than once to ensure they impact the narrative.

Cantrips (barring EB) have a really bad frozen narrative "miss" problem. I guess this is balanced by larger narrative impact from spell slots on spell casters, but it sort of feels crappy.

...

Imagine if the Attack action itself had some impact even if you missed, maybe tied to the class, and deferred to level 4-6 to avoid multiclass dip tempations.

As a brainstormed list of such ideas:

• Apply some condition on a creature even if you miss. Like "unless they damage you back first, you'll get advantage next turn on them" (a pseudo-4e style Mark).
• They choose between taking a 5' step back (which you can follow) or granting you advantage (or auto-crit?) on your attack (if it hits).
• The swashbuckler "creatures you attack cannot take AOs on you" type thing.
• You gain a defensive boost against them (your AC is increased by 2-4 against them, or if they attack you back you get to counter-attack as a reaction) until the end of your next turn.
• You grant a defensive boost to a nearby ally (similar to above).
• You gain a spellcasting boost (they have disadvantage against saves of the first spell you cast on them on your next turn)
• You gain a legendary resist, or save bonus, against their spells or effects until the end of your next turn.

These aren't all that huge, but they do mean that your "attack" did potentially did something even if it wasn't a hit, the narrative situation changes.

...

In theory we can extend this to cantrips. But if we ignore the level 1-4 "apprentice" levels, non-warlock spellcasters don't spend that much time using only a cantrip on their turn.

Spells themselves can also be tweaked to follow this rule. Their effect on landing can be reduced if needed for balance reasons.

I'm already replacing Legendary Resists with one that causes a status impact on the monster (level of exhaustion is a good one) to make it less "you must cast X spells to win" and make soaking spells more tactically interesting.

 

[billd91]

The challenge with so many of these ideas is that they encroach on other spells, feats, actions, or abilities that do something similar and therefore devalues them - all because, as a PC, your attack/spell targeting the enemy missed its mark. I understand that people get frustrated when the dice produce results that aren't to their liking and their turn feels like its full of nerf. But I think we have to be careful about what kind of power we give out to alleviate that frustration.

Apply some condition on a creature even if you miss. Like "unless they damage you back first, you'll get advantage next turn on them" (a pseudo-4e style Mark).

Something along this line is probably the best way to give out a benefit without overly encroaching on other effects. It's personal to the PC who missed and helps set them up for the next attempt. They're "getting their range" or "taking their measure" of the target and if they persist in going after it, they will benefit. I think advantage is too good - I'd rather just give a +1 to hit for each successive failure like they're gaining momentum (and treat that +1 like a -1 on the target's saving throw if casting non-attack roll spells). I also wouldn't remove it with the clause "unless they damage you back first".

Overall, I'm not sure how necessary something like this really is. ACs and saving throw bonuses tend to be down in 5e compared to some other editions so completely missing for long stretches of time is relatively unlikely (not impossible - my heart goes out to players with bad dice luck like Dave and Cam in my own campaigns). And situations where the target number is high are opportunities for players to switch their tactics up a bit and do a little more coordination by deliberately engineering advantages on their attacks/disadvantages to their opponents rather than just rely on old stand-by tactics like "I attack again" or "I'm casting another encounter-ending save or die spell" that show little to no initiative in changing things up and cooperating to improve chances.

 

[Kobold Stew]

I think I disagree with the premise, that a single miss in combat creates a frozen narrative. If the state of play hasn't changed between the start and the end of the players' turn, that's on them -- they have the opportunity to move, and often they have bonus actions (which are a clunky mechanism in some ways, but work against this concern specifically).

You miss, play moves on. Accept the loss. But it's simply not the case that "the turn could have been skipped": you have a chance to do damage, and you've taken your chance. Just because you don't like the result of a miss doesn't mean your turn could have been skipped. So it's not "frozen".

And as for "narrative": your character might have been hacking away and unable to penetrate the rapid shield blocks of an enemy; or your sword could have been levered between the jaws of your opponent, that was snapping down; or whatever. That's action, and that's story, there for the invention if you want it; it just happens not to do a d6 of damage.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

With the bar set so low for difficulty in 5E, I feel these suggestions may as well do away with the dice and just let people narrate how they win.

Missing isn't a big deal. Your turn will come again.

 

[slobster]

I personally would say that, if your combats feel like they get locked in stasis, what you likely have is a pacing or engagement issue rather than an issue with too many attacks missing. There are teams of threads and advice about making d&d combat more fun; I won't annoy you by resurrecting them here!

However, taking your premise at face value, I would avoid "on miss" effects like the following:

Imagine if the Attack action itself had some impact even if you missed, maybe tied to the class, and deferred to level 4-6 to avoid multiclass dip tempations.

• You gain a defensive boost against them (your AC is increased by 2-4 against them, or if they attack you back you get to counter-attack as a reaction) until the end of your next turn.
• You grant a defensive boost to a nearby ally (similar to above).
• Snip
• You gain a legendary resist, or save bonus, against their spells or effects until the end of your

It seems to me that if you are trying to make a system that speeds up combat and cuts back on the feeling of "you could have skipped that turn and made no difference to the outcome", you want to avoid patterns like a combatant swinging and missing, but gaining a defense beuff, so the opponent casts a spell that whiffs, so they grant disadvantage to the next attack on them , so the next player misses...

• next turn.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

Historically, the DM would do all the dice rolling and the players would describe their actions (in combat or otherwise) and the DM would roll the dice.

RAW, combat rounds are supposed to happen simultaneously in six seconds. My rule as a DM is that I ask the players what they do in initiative order, and then have it all resolve at once. If the player says something like "I will attack the third goblin from the right" and that goblin dies before their turn, I'll let them know and pick another course of action. As a DM I don't tend to run fights with lots of minions that die fast, so this doesn't happen all that often at my table. I feel it makes the game more cinematic, even if there is less frantic energy going on.

 

[GMMichael]

Missing isn't a big deal.

Oh contraire! In D&D, missing is a breath of fresh air. It's a moment when there's no decision paralysis, there are no extra dice to roll, no "however" rules to look up. No one asks, "can I miss right now?" It just happens, and life is good.

Imma start calling "attack rolls" "miss checks" instead.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

Oh contraire! In D&D, missing is a breath of fresh air. It's a moment when there's no decision paralysis, there are no extra dice to roll, no "however" rules to look up. No one asks, "can I miss right now?" It just happens, and life is good.

Imma start calling "attack rolls" "miss checks" instead.

"Make an impact save"

 

[Li Shenron]

It happens, and when it happens for many combatants in a row (perhaps even spanning multiple rounds) it can in fact raise the boredom flag.

I don't think I would introduce extra rules for the sake of making something happen at all costs. For the sake of narrative, the DM could just well... narrate misses a bit more. IMXP however combat narration itself gets boring quickly: I've been in countless games where the DM added flourishing descriptions to every attack result on the first couple of rounds of the first combat, then ran out of words and just recorded hp damage for the rest of the campaign.

Perhaps the issue has some correlation with lack of combat dynamics by both PCs and monsters. If the players keep doing the same attack every round because it's simply better than all other options, the narrative just doesn't fly high, even if they don't miss.

But if the players won't vary their actions because it's not optimal to do so, the DM still has the luxury of having the monsters do it! This is one thing I appreciate in BG3, that the enemies are very often doing something different every turn, including moving around and change their positions, and that helps keep moving the narrative.

 

[Deset Gled]

I'm thinking about mechanics to unfreeze the narrative in D&D. Ie, some creature's turn comes. The creature tries to do something, but rolls poorly or the enemies roll well. Nothing happens. The next creature goes.

That is a frozen narrative - the turn could have been skipped. Sometimes some resources get spent (so bookkeeping) but the state of the battle doesn't really move.

I'm going to do something never done on ENWorld before and disagree with your premise.

The narrative is fine. In fact, some of the best narratives come from dead rolls that lead to no action. The sword fight where Dread Pirate Roberts battled Inigo Montoya was a dozen failed attacks where no one could manage to score a hit. Countless sports games, from American football to curling, can have fans gnawing their fingertips as the teams push back and forth with only inches of change, waiting to see to who budges first. In Pulp Fiction, a mook missing a point blank attack is discussed deeply and considered a "miracle".

The problem is the players. Players get bored. Players want to do things. Players get more annoyed when others do things and they don't.

Reframing this problem this way starts to show some of the problems with your solutions. First, they don't all allow tension to build. Allowing things like free adjustments and defensive boosts minimize the tension from a failed roll rather than ramp it up. That's counterproductive. Second, providing something too powerful on a failed roll, like a legendary effect, means that players would sometimes prefer to get a failure to a success, which undermines the entire purpose of rolling in the first place. And finally, having the same benefit from a failure every time doesn't actually help with the boredom problem, it just kicks it down the road a little bit.

I propose some alternate solutions.

1. Speed up the game. Missing a round a doing nothing is a killer in Risk, where a turn could take hours and players are super bored. But missing a round in Ticket to Ride, where turns just take seconds, matters a lot less. All you have to do to make misses matter less in D&D is make sure your combats have lots of short rounds rather than just a couple tediously long ones. Part of this is insisting players learn the rules. Part of it is forcing them to act quickly instead of measuring every spell effect and movement 5 times to optimize everything. Part of it may just be properly using a VTT or a tables to speed up math. Part of it may be disallowing character options that grind combat to a halt (3e grapple based fighter, you're out of here). But any way you need to do it, it's the job of both the DM and the players to make sure the game moves fast enough that no one gets bored. And giving lots of complicated options on a fail, like allowing additional movement, works directly against speeding up the game.

2. Find ways to make sure players are involved when it's not their turn. Make sure movements of enemies and other players will have an effect on all players. Make sure all players are being actively engaged; don't just attack the meat shield in the front while the archers in the back get bored. Maybe consider changing some bonus actions to reactions so more things get done between turns rather than just on a player's turn. In any cases, damage dealt on a failed roll doesn't help the problem of a player losing interest during other players turns.

2. If you must do something to grant a benefit on a miss, make it a tiny thing that builds up over time rather than an immediate boon. For example, I recently played a game called Mystic Punks which features a system where each player gets a token on a failed spell. That token can be cashed in at any time to give a +1 or -1 on any roll (I'm guessing this isn't unique to Punks, but I don't know where it originated). Now, a change of 1 isn't a lot by itself. You have to build up a decent number of failures before you have a cache that will make a notable difference. The fact that it doesn't help right away maintains the narrative power of a failure. But it still gives a little bit of positivity to a bad roll. And it helps keep the players engaged by attracting them to rolls by others players or enemies where their meta-currency may be useful.