D&D 5E What Single Thing Would You Eliminate

[Reynard]

Never mind that the healer is - or certainly should be - open to attack during this if the combat is still going on within reach, and might lose the spell to no effect.

I don't think there is a way to cause a caster to lose a spell in 5E because of the way readied actions work.

Really, a group of smart enemies encountering the party should gang up on any obvious cleric or other healer first and foremost, then move on to the controllers. Let the tank tank nothing until they are ready to gang up on him. But this leads to "D&D combat as war" which is seen as fair or even fun by many players.

 

[rmcoen]

Yeah, players make many more saves than that Orc that’s dead in two rounds does. So it hugely disadvantages players. Doesn’t feel much fun to me.

Well so far - the players just reached 5th level - the players have had to make a couple poison saves against giant spiders, some STR saves against being knocked prone (dire wolves), one disease save (gas spore), and a series of paralysis saves (carrion crawler). They have fought one caster enemy, a deathlock, so a few had to save against hunger of hadar for 2d6 damage. On the other hand, two of the five PCs use cantrips with saves as their primary attack. So right now we're looking at maybe 20-30 player saves across the whole campaign, vs. something like 8ish saves for monsters every encounter. They have enjoyed the occasional "auto-12" on toll the dead when the monster Nat 1s.

Although, as I type this, I realize that the reason this works at my table is probably based a second house rule! We did away with Inspiration (actually, revamped it to be very story- and player-based, and no one has triggered it yet), and replaced it with Luck Points. Generally you get 1 per session (our sessions are generally 3-4 hours), and you can "store" up to 3. [There's more to it than that.] You can spend a Luck Point to reroll "after seeing the die, before knowing the result", or you can spend a Luck Point to change a "missed by 1" to a success, or "made it exactly" to a failure. So when a PC rolls a Nat 1 on a save (or suffers a Critical Hit), they spend a Luck Point...

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't think there is a way to cause a caster to lose a spell in 5E because of the way readied actions work.
[B
Really, a group of smart enemies encountering the party should gang up on any obvious cleric or other healer first and foremost, then move on to the controllers/b]. Let the tank tank nothing until they are ready to gang up on him. But this leads to "D&D combat as war" which is seen as fair or even fun by many players.

That gets into why removing almost all of the conditions that trigger an AoO practically eliminates the so much of the support for tactical combat. With a robust system of AoOs the tanks you mentioned can significantly hamper or dramatically injure opponents who want to go splatter the healers and controllers as you note but without robust AoOs opponents can literally just run a circle around them to go smash the healers and controllers without any risk unless doing so requires actually stepping sway.

 

[Reynard]

That gets into why removing almost all of the conditions that trigger an AoO practically eliminates the so much of the support for tactical combat. With a robust system of AoOs the tanks you mentioned can significantly hamper or dramatically injure opponents who want to go splatter the healers and controllers as you note but without robust AoOs opponents can literally just run a circle around them to go smash the healers and controllers without any risk unless doing so requires actually stepping sway.

Sometimes I really want to let loose against the PCs but it can be disruptive to an ongoing campaign. I am toying with having the PCs discover and investigate the site of a battle between the BBEG and some group of powerful good guys, and actually have the players play out that battle as sort of a flashback. This way I can give them information about the BBEG's capabilities while also scaring them with just how ruthless and powerful the BBEG is.

 

[rmcoen]

Sometimes I really want to let loose against the PCs but it can be disruptive to an ongoing campaign. I am toying with having the PCs discover and investigate the site of a battle between the BBEG and some group of powerful good guys, and actually have the players play out that battle as sort of a flashback. This way I can give them information about the BBEG's capabilities while also scaring them with just how ruthless and powerful the BBEG is.

I did something like that once... the PCs (5th level) were exploring some ruins they found in the wilderness, and decided to take a long rest in a tower. They "woke up" instead in custom-made PCs of their choice (with some thematic limitations), 10th level, and played a two-session mini-adventure which ended with their deaths at the hands of the BBEG (specifically, in that tower)! Then the PCs truly awoke, a strange blue mist fading from the area... It worked great for showcasing the BBEG's power, gave them a little "inside information" about the locale and their foe, and then.... they fled!

 

[TheSword]

Well so far - the players just reached 5th level - the players have had to make a couple poison saves against giant spiders, some STR saves against being knocked prone (dire wolves), one disease save (gas spore), and a series of paralysis saves (carrion crawler). They have fought one caster enemy, a deathlock, so a few had to save against hunger of hadar for 2d6 damage. On the other hand, two of the five PCs use cantrips with saves as their primary attack. So right now we're looking at maybe 20-30 player saves across the whole campaign, vs. something like 8ish saves for monsters every encounter. They have enjoyed the occasional "auto-12" on toll the dead when the monster Nat 1s.

Although, as I type this, I realize that the reason this works at my table is probably based a second house rule! We did away with Inspiration (actually, revamped it to be very story- and player-based, and no one has triggered it yet), and replaced it with Luck Points. Generally you get 1 per session (our sessions are generally 3-4 hours), and you can "store" up to 3. [There's more to it than that.] You can spend a Luck Point to reroll "after seeing the die, before knowing the result", or you can spend a Luck Point to change a "missed by 1" to a success, or "made it exactly" to a failure. So when a PC rolls a Nat 1 on a save (or suffers a Critical Hit), they spend a Luck Point...

That would make a massive difference.

Worth noting that it doesn’t matter how many saves the monsters make as a collective... they are expected to die. Whereas PCs only need to fail once or twice and that’s a big deal.

Sounds like you have the safety bet though with luck points.

 

[DammitVictor]

As for the rest, other than an extremely rare property of some magic armours I don't use DR.

It's one of the most common house rules touted by "realists". There was even an implementation in the 3.5 version of Unearthed Arcana.

Armor Check Penalty must be from an ediition or splatbook I'm not familiar with.

Third Edition?

Three arrows in six seconds? Not gonna happen unless you're somehow trying to fire them all at once.

Case in point, then. What level do you think this guy is?

What level of Fighter do you suggest that a player character has to be, to be a better-- or at least faster-- archer than a guy with a YouTube channel?

Thing is, grounded realism extends way beyond this into much more basic things that we most of the time just take for granted. We generally assume gravity and magnetism work the way we're used to; ditto the relationship between elements and materials (e.g. water puts fires out while oil makes 'em burn hotter) and that the same materials are generally used for the same things they are in the real world (houses are built of stone or wood, clay can be made into ceramics for pots and urns, weapon blades are metal, etc.).

Most of us also assume - until and unless specifically told otherwise - some real-world basis for how things like geology, tides, weather etc. work, and how they shape the physical world the characters inhabit.

These are the basic sort of things that make a game world consistent and - for us limited-to-the-real-world players - relatable.

See, and this is why magic doesn't work in D&D, why all of the magical elements and the "heroic" elements don't hang together-- because D&D worlds are not magical worlds, they are mundane worlds with a thin layer of magic spread on top. People then expect that magic to conform to the same physical laws that, by definition, it is breaking and are stymied when it doesn't and can't.

I'm not advocating for some kind of Eberronian magitech or some Final Fantasy business... but, fundamentally, magic cannot be consistent and make logical sense in a reality that stipulates the existence of nonmagical processes. An actual magical setting isn't nearly as unrelatable as you're suggesting, because most of the sciencelords demanding that magical law at least imitate physical law aren't really that good at science in the first place-- just ask them about their dice.

 

[Xetheral]

Really, a group of smart enemies encountering the party should gang up on any obvious cleric or other healer first and foremost, then move on to the controllers. Let the tank tank nothing until they are ready to gang up on him. But this leads to "D&D combat as war" which is seen as fair or even fun by many players.

I tend to find that in most Combat-as-War games (defined as the expectation that players use pre-initiative strategy to engineer encounters to be lopsided in their favor) tanking works better than it does in Combat-as-Sport games (defined as the expectation that characters use post-initiative tactics to win encounters as they are presented by the DM). This is because in a CaW game, the outcome is often decided before initiative is even rolled, so there is less cost in RPing target choices during the actual battle based on a character's immediate circumstances (i.e. not ignoring the opponent in your face with a sword), rather than strictly optimizing target selection based on the game mechanics.

In a CaS game, however, since the difficulty of the encounters is determined by the DM and largely static, there is usually more pressure to resolve the fight "optimally" either to ensure victory (for a DM-planned climactic encounter) or to minimize resource expenditure (for a DM-planned resource-draining encounter).

For the same reason, I tend to see retreats and outright routs much more often in CaW games, whereas CaS tends to lead to more fights to the finish as the encounter difficulty was calibrated by the CaS DM on that basis. (The "sport" analogy here is particularly apt, as the expectation in most sports is that the losing team still continues to play to the end of the game, rather than fleeing the stadium when things look grim. War, by contrast, has no such expectations.)

 

[fearsomepirate]

People who replace Armor Class with Damage Reduction with no allowance for stilettos and warhammers.

Yeah, anyone who needs the system to accurately emulate what it's like to fight in plate mail with a warhammer while wearing stilettos is probably not gonna enjoy D&D.

 

[Reynard]

Yeah, anyone who needs the system to accurately emulate what it's like to fight in plate mail with a warhammer while wearing stilettos is probably not gonna enjoy D&D.

Wrong kind of "dungeon."