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Yeah you shouldn't be needing to blow all healing spells per fight.

squidhills wrote:
Here's what you missed:

squidhills wrote:
The one fight that I tried casting what few offensive spells I had nearly ended in a TPK (with over half the party down and making death saves by the skin of their teeth) because we ran out of healing and took too many crits.

I didn't base my actions on math, I based my actions on the one time I tried it your way, half the party nearly died. I examined the math after the debacle of our first combat encounter and realized what the problem was. From that point on, the only sane thing to do was keep all spells in reserve for healing.

You also missed the part about how, in another D20 game (Pathfinder) I am playing the same class (cleric) but having much more fun, due to having more options for my character. I've been gaming since AD&D 2nd Edition. I've played every flavor of D20, as well as five editions of Shadowrun and 2 editions of D6 star Wars. Hell, I even willfully inflicted the insanity that is Palladium on myself for several years. I am familiar with a wide variety of games and combat systems. 5th Edition is the only one I find genuinely boring.

I'm not going to try and take any sort of high ground - I'm a noob when it comes to these sorts of games - but there's also this issue with your "only" other option being to hit it with an axe.

I play a barbarian, and it can quite easily be boiled down to "run up, rage, and hit stuff". So far, there have been very few fights where I decided to just run up and hit stuff:

I've snuck in, gotten behind the enemy and managed to slam a cooking pot over his head to blind him for a turn
I've run out of javelins, so I threw the Dwarf in the party instead
I've been made larger by the wizard, then used an enemy as a weapon against the rest
I've destroyed every item I found in a blind rage, randomly rolling for which door to go through, and ultimately summoned a dwarf goddess by smashing her alter, then rolled a nat 20 when persuading her that the dwarves who owned the place had asked me to do it (they had, in fact, asked us to kill the kobolds in their house, but my character wasn't listening).
I've thrown a waterskin on a large area of flaming grease, causing a chip-pan explosion
I've parkour'd off a magic sword to attack a water elemental
I've lured said water elemental to fling me into the air, using a boat as a seesaw, so I could attack it
I've thrown the druid, who turned into a giant octopus in mid-air

All of these encounters I could have approached boringly, and with greater success, by boiling it down to "I will rage, then I will attack". But it would have been a lot less fun.


I still recommend that you persuade some of the rest of your group to take some healing to free you up to do some more! Or, let your character die/retire and make a new one which you can enjoy more!

 some bloke wrote:


I'm not going to try and take any sort of high ground - I'm a noob when it comes to these sorts of games - but there's also this issue with your "only" other option being to hit it with an axe.

I play a barbarian, and it can quite easily be boiled down to "run up, rage, and hit stuff". So far, there have been very few fights where I decided to just run up and hit stuff:

I've snuck in, gotten behind the enemy and managed to slam a cooking pot over his head to blind him for a turn
I've run out of javelins, so I threw the Dwarf in the party instead
I've been made larger by the wizard, then used an enemy as a weapon against the rest
I've destroyed every item I found in a blind rage, randomly rolling for which door to go through, and ultimately summoned a dwarf goddess by smashing her alter, then rolled a nat 20 when persuading her that the dwarves who owned the place had asked me to do it (they had, in fact, asked us to kill the kobolds in their house, but my character wasn't listening).
I've thrown a waterskin on a large area of flaming grease, causing a chip-pan explosion
I've parkour'd off a magic sword to attack a water elemental
I've lured said water elemental to fling me into the air, using a boat as a seesaw, so I could attack it
I've thrown the druid, who turned into a giant octopus in mid-air

All of these encounters I could have approached boringly, and with greater success, by boiling it down to "I will rage, then I will attack". But it would have been a lot less fun.


I still recommend that you persuade some of the rest of your group to take some healing to free you up to do some more! Or, let your character die/retire and make a new one which you can enjoy more!

Basically, what you're advising right now is "play the campaign I'm in". You're projecting your idea of fun in a way that borderline shames another person for playing a different character in a different campaign, especially with that sign-off. Are you really suggesting they retire or kill off their character for their enjoyment? Or so they can make one that aligns more with your own idea of enjoyment? Even without that, it implies the issue is wholly their fault when enjoyment is the job of everyone at the table.

And what about everyone else's enjoyment? There are several other players and a DM around that table, and your post focuses entirely on you - with the exception of the part where you suggest persuading everyone else to play differently.

The harsh truth is that sometimes the only way forward is to quit the game. If people won't take up the healing mantle, or the DM won't restructure the fights, and you don't want to be forced to play a different character, then you accept the game isn't for you any more. At the end of the day, your personal enjoyment is precisely equal in weight to everyone else's, and if there can't be a mutual agreement or compromise then that's the end of it. Trying to tell someone to play differently is always going to be antagonistic, because they're already playing how they want to play.

I've got a player in my game who isn't keen on the RP aspect, and struggles on their own. I make provisions and I allow them to simply tell me what they want to do without any sort of "Good morn, innkeep! A flagon of your finest mead for every table!" because A) I'm perfectly happy with it, and B) they're more comfortable that way. If it was an issue for me, I'd be frank and tell them it doesn't sound like I'm running their kind of game. If other players objected then they're free to look for a game elsewhere. What remains is a table of people who are comfortable and happy. If I tell them "well gak, just keep trying anyway" or have players that constantly sigh and tut or roll their eyes whenever the non-RPer's not in character, then it's not an enjoyable experience. The main difference between the two is that one accepts that it's nobody's place to tell you how to play, and simply lays that down as law; the other takes a flexible "just try to have fun" approach that imposes one person's fun on everyone else, or everyone else's fun on one person.

As one final thought:
"but there's also this issue with your "only" other option being to hit it with an axe."

Why is this an issue? You're not playing their character or their campaign, or with the other people at their table, but you're treating this as if it's wrong regardless, and that's because of that aforementioned projecting. You're imagining that they're playing an identical game to your own, with the exact same rules, playstyles, DM style, combat style, mapping, the works, but there's no proof of that whatsoever.

'Why not parkour off a magic sword at a water elemental?' is a wholly moot idea if an option like that will never materialise; and no, trying to make it happen isn't the solution for every reason I've ranted about above.
'Throw a party member at-' The party member tells me 'no, that's suicide'.
'Slam a cooking pot-' What cooking pot? There's nothing to blind someone with, and if it fails then I get stabbed and die.
'I destroyed everything because my character wasn't listening-' 'You put the entire party in danger because you weren't paying attention. Some of us wanted some of the things you broke and now we can't have them. One of them was precious and part of another party member's character arc they're been working with the DM on. You acted like a mad idiot, "convinced" a deity with a lucky houserule*, and got out of it by the skin of your teeth, while everyone else just had to go along with it all.'

I'm not trying to gak on you doing it, just providing some realistic examples of why it's not that easy. It's great that you've got a campaign you can all enjoy. But remember that's your campaign, and it and all its rules and styles exists in a vacuum from everyone else's. Sometimes the only option a player does have is to hit something with their axe.

*Natural 20s are only automatic hits in combat, and count as 2 successful death saves, by the actual rules. They're not an auto-pass for everything, that's simply a bafflingly common houserule that more or less breaks the game.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Yeah you shouldn't be needing to blow all healing spells per fight.

I never said I was blowing all of my healing spells each fight. If I gave that impression, I apologize for any confusion. What I said was that, out of a real worry that the fights could, at any moment, inflict more damage on us than we could handle (and already had done so once before), I would not cast anything except a healing spell. I usually didn't have to cast more than one or two spells per encounter, but we were doing a literal dungeon crawl (Dungeon of the Mad Mage) and we'd end up having several encounters before stopping for a long rest. So any spell cast on something other than healing was a cure spell I didn't have when we would end up needing it. As the party healer, it was my job to... well, heal. 5th Ed's swingy combats made it all the more imperative that I have those heal spells available when called on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 some bloke wrote:


I still recommend that you persuade some of the rest of your group to take some healing to free you up to do some more! Or, let your character die/retire and make a new one which you can enjoy more!

I'm not about to ask other people to tank their character concepts and add class levels they don't want to add just because I think combat is boring. I'm not about to kill of the character, because a) I really like this character and b) then the party wouldn't have any healer at all. That doesn't solve my problem and it adds a new problem, because combat is still boring, and now we're all dead.

I mean it when I say that I really like the character I played in 5th edition, and plan to port her over to the next Pathfinder game I'm in. I think she's awesome, and I had a lot of fun with her anytime we weren't in combat. But in combat? I could've downloaded an app to run her and been happier doing something else. And the problem is, we were doing Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Spoiler alert: it's 85% combat. Now, I'm no stranger to ye olde-schoole dungeon crawl. I played through Against the Giants, and the two that came after it (frost giants and fire giants... the names escape me atm) and those are straight up "kick in the door, kill the monster, loot the body, rinse and repeat" modules. Had an absolute blast doing it, but we were using 2nd Edition, which I think handled combat better than 5th.

I think it highlights the underlying issues with dnd that we are talking about these people (read characters) and their abilities like they are a diablo class.

Its a role playing game. Your suposed to be playing a person in a world. If dnds combat or anything about it is boring/bad this highlights what that is and why. You should be playing people going on adventures. Not a instance party built to handle packs of mobs in prebuilt pulls and calculating situations and resources for boss fights.

Dnd fails most of all at being a rpg.

 Avatar 720 wrote:

Basically, what you're advising right now is "play the campaign I'm in". You're projecting your idea of fun in a way that borderline shames another person for playing a different character in a different campaign, especially with that sign-off. Are you really suggesting they retire or kill off their character for their enjoyment? Or so they can make one that aligns more with your own idea of enjoyment? Even without that, it implies the issue is wholly their fault when enjoyment is the job of everyone at the table.

That wasn't my intention at all, and I apologize if I came across as trying to shame anybody. I was simply trying to point out that this game will be boring if you boil everything down to "do I heal, or hit with an axe". I could do the same with the Barbarian - "do I rage, or save my rage, before I hit them". I try different and interesting things because I find it increases the enjoyment from the game, for all parties, not just myself.

And what about everyone else's enjoyment? There are several other players and a DM around that table, and your post focuses entirely on you - with the exception of the part where you suggest persuading everyone else to play differently.

As an RPG, where everyone is in control of all of their characters actions throughout, I shouldn't have to focus overmuch on what the other players are doing to enjoy themselves. If I was playing with someone who was finding it boring because they only decided between hit or heal for every turn of every encounter, then I might offer the odd suggestions, but it's ultimately up to them. Asking other players to maybe take some healing spells, if their class choices would allow it, is just a way to try and salvage your enjoyment in the campaign - otherwise you may as well tell the DM your formula, turn the character into an NPC and then make a different one. There's no point playing if you don't enjoy it!

As one final thought:
"but there's also this issue with your "only" other option being to hit it with an axe."

Why is this an issue? You're not playing their character or their campaign, or with the other people at their table, but you're treating this as if it's wrong regardless, and that's because of that aforementioned projecting. You're imagining that they're playing an identical game to your own, with the exact same rules, playstyles, DM style, combat style, mapping, the works, but there's no proof of that whatsoever.

'Why not parkour off a magic sword at a water elemental?' is a wholly moot idea if an option like that will never materialise; and no, trying to make it happen isn't the solution for every reason I've ranted about above.
'Throw a party member at-' The party member tells me 'no, that's suicide'.
'Slam a cooking pot-' What cooking pot? There's nothing to blind someone with, and if it fails then I get stabbed and die.
'I destroyed everything because my character wasn't listening-' 'You put the entire party in danger because you weren't paying attention. Some of us wanted some of the things you broke and now we can't have them. One of them was precious and part of another party member's character arc they're been working with the DM on. You acted like a mad idiot, "convinced" a deity with a lucky houserule*, and got out of it by the skin of your teeth, while everyone else just had to go along with it all.'

I'm not trying to gak on you doing it, just providing some realistic examples of why it's not that easy. It's great that you've got a campaign you can all enjoy. But remember that's your campaign, and it and all its rules and styles exists in a vacuum from everyone else's. Sometimes the only option a player does have is to hit something with their axe.

*Natural 20s are only automatic hits in combat, and count as 2 successful death saves, by the actual rules. They're not an auto-pass for everything, that's simply a bafflingly common houserule that more or less breaks the game.

I wasn't suggesting that they try to perfectly imitate the things that I have done - I was simply giving some examples of things I've done in combat instead of simply raging and rolling dice. The "rage and hit everything" game, I was killing kobolds every turn, and expected to smash a chair when I said "I'll hit whatever's closest and then go to the next room". I was playing a lot like Sir Lancelot from Monty Python & the Holy Grail, where he pauses to slash at a bunch of flowers on the wall. The DM saw an opportunity and he took it. By the end of the game, everyone was laughing so much that they couldn't breathe. I don't think it was exclusively for my own enjoyment.

At the end of the day, I stand by my original sentiment (however muddied it has become by my anecdotes) that the Combat is, by and large, what you make it. If you boil it down to 2 options, and never veer from that, then any combat will be "a period of time in which you choose between 2 options every 6 seconds" which is, we can probably all agree, going to get boring pretty quickly.

 Lance845 wrote:
I think it highlights the underlying issues with dnd that we are talking about these people (read characters) and their abilities like they are a diablo class.

Its a role playing game. Your suposed to be playing a person in a world. If dnds combat or anything about it is boring/bad this highlights what that is and why. You should be playing people going on adventures. Not a instance party built to handle packs of mobs in prebuilt pulls and calculating situations and resources for boss fights.

Dnd fails most of all at being a rpg.

I'm new to D&D but this is pretty much exactly what I feel. Coming from a weird RPG background (hacks of old Palladium systems in which we ignored half the rules, etc.) D&D doesn't really strike me as an RPG. It's just a dungeon crawling board game with a lot more rules/stats. At least that's how my two GM's have more or less treated it. The rules seem to heavily support that concept though...so I can't really blame them.

I mean, it's no 4th edition. But it's certainly better than 3rd, 2nd, or 1st edition when it came to combat.

 Lance845 wrote:
I think it highlights the underlying issues with dnd that we are talking about these people (read characters) and their abilities like they are a diablo class.

Its a role playing game. Your suposed to be playing a person in a world. If dnds combat or anything about it is boring/bad this highlights what that is and why. You should be playing people going on adventures. Not a instance party built to handle packs of mobs in prebuilt pulls and calculating situations and resources for boss fights.

Dnd fails most of all at being a rpg.

Are you saying..... system matters!


**** Runs and hides whiel the other thread members throw rotten fruit at me*******

I don't have that problem with DnD, but I also don't ever try to pretend to roleplay a "normal" person in DnD. It's not built for that. It's built for heroic adventures by capable people as they take on epic quests to save the world, or at least some small part of it, and probably build (and spend) a treasure hoard doing it.

A lot of the problems people have with DnD are trying to do things it was never designed to do. If you want, for example, to roleplay a normal, talentless nobody thrust in to a situation they are wholly unprepared for, you're probably better off playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, a game where you can play such things as a ratcatcher, your basic merchant, or a farmer without any adjustments.

It's the same reason I wouldn't play Vampire or Shadowrun as the same kind of epic heroic character that you typically play in DnD or Exalted. Doesn't match what the game was designed to do. It's not the point of those games.

As for combat, frankly, the DnD game that handled combat the best was 4th edition, and my group is actually moving towards playing 4th lately as a break from 5th. But both are still better than the utterly unbalanced, bloated mess that was 3/3.5, or the broken wreck of earlier editions.

As a relative newcomer to Dnd 5e from mostly playing other "looser" systems like Fates and Powered by the Apocalypse games, I think combat in dnd can be quite good....if the DM is extremely good at creating good encounters. And is willing to be flexible with allowing the players to take creative actions and improvise the results. We have a couple of players who are very new to RPGs and while they're steadily figuring out the roleplaying, purposefully built extremely basic, easy to pilot characters for combat that literally just hit things - a dual-wielding fighter and a ranger with a bow and arrow. The biggest challenge of building combat encounters has been accounting for the fact that two of our party members are total damage hoses while the other two are...well, two low level casters who have a little too much fun casting the silly out of combat spells. We each have 1 damaging cantrip, 1 combat leveled spell, and 1 heal, and beyond that it's just stuff like detect magic and silent image and create or destroy water.

It took a while to find the right balance, but now I feel like combat serves the purpose it's supposed to have in a role playing game. I despised fourth the times I played it precisely because I was there to play an RPG and it felt like I'd play 30 minutes of an RPG and 4 hours of a fairly bad skirmish wargame any time someone convinced me into a session. I understand that's me, and someone might really want to have their character extremely heavily tied to the various special moves and signature tricks they have in combat. But now we've got a nice rhythm down, combat takes 3-4 rounds, everyone gets to do their cool gak, there's some drama usually, someone goes down and has to get revived or someone does a particularly cool creative thing like realize that their 500-pound tortle can have Jump cast on it and use that to Blue Shell an enemy boss monster, and then it's done and it gets out of the way and lets us get back to roleplaying.

the_scotsman wrote:
As a relative newcomer to Dnd 5e from mostly playing other "looser" systems like Fates and Powered by the Apocalypse games, I think combat in dnd can be quite good....if the DM is extremely good at creating good encounters. And is willing to be flexible with allowing the players to take creative actions and improvise the results. We have a couple of players who are very new to RPGs and while they're steadily figuring out the roleplaying, purposefully built extremely basic, easy to pilot characters for combat that literally just hit things - a dual-wielding fighter and a ranger with a bow and arrow. The biggest challenge of building combat encounters has been accounting for the fact that two of our party members are total damage hoses while the other two are...well, two low level casters who have a little too much fun casting the silly out of combat spells. We each have 1 damaging cantrip, 1 combat leveled spell, and 1 heal, and beyond that it's just stuff like detect magic and silent image and create or destroy water.

It took a while to find the right balance, but now I feel like combat serves the purpose it's supposed to have in a role playing game. I despised fourth the times I played it precisely because I was there to play an RPG and it felt like I'd play 30 minutes of an RPG and 4 hours of a fairly bad skirmish wargame any time someone convinced me into a session. I understand that's me, and someone might really want to have their character extremely heavily tied to the various special moves and signature tricks they have in combat. But now we've got a nice rhythm down, combat takes 3-4 rounds, everyone gets to do their cool gak, there's some drama usually, someone goes down and has to get revived or someone does a particularly cool creative thing like realize that their 500-pound tortle can have Jump cast on it and use that to Blue Shell an enemy boss monster, and then it's done and it gets out of the way and lets us get back to roleplaying.

I think that this is an important part - and one where I may have gotten wrong/missed in my earlier post. Sometimes, I've seen the roleplaying stop when combat starts, and people mechanically move through the most efficient methods of combat until the combat is done, then the roleplaying starts up again. it makes it seem like 2 separate games, really, in which you use the same characters.

It definitely comes down to:

1: having good encounters set up. I've been reading "The angry GM" (it's a website) and he explains how there shouldn't be "combat encounters", there should just be encounters and the players need to decide how to deal with them. It's something that I'm taking to heart with my designs at DM-ing, and I'm not treating any encounter I'm mocking up as a definitively combat-based experience. I want to make roleplay encounters to fit into a roleplaying game, as opposed to combat encounters to remind the roleplayers that they have weapons. Might be an entire group spend the whole campaign making friends with monsters and persuading them to stop eating villagers, with no blood spilt - and that's fine.
2: Keeping the roleplay going - this is where I fell down in my last post. If it fits your character to hit or heal then that's the right thing to do (as it fitted my character to run in screaming and find unusual ways of hitting things). I think that this is made more achievable if the DM sets up encounters which aren't there for combat's sake - if your character would rather talk it out, or stealth around them, or poison their food and wait until they eat it, that's all valid options.

but as a basic system by which to deprive your enemies of all their hit points, the combat has potential to get a little stale.

Good points. My group tends to do that too. There is RPG time and combat time and the two do not meet. My approach to these encounters as RPG moments too has been an eye opener to them....

I never stop roleplaying when combat starts. It's fun to do clever things like use Thaumaturgy to trick an enemy in to thinking he's being flanked, or use Acrobatics to reposition myself, and so on. When I DM, I reward creative solutions when they apply.

As for "reduce hp to zero", that's not the only way to win combat even in DnD. Rules for morale do exist, and if the players' enemies are intelligent creatures they'll know when to flee.

D&D invented the roleplaying genre, and it has always been about crawling dungeons and killing monsters. It is very good at what it wants to do, people like to use it for other things.
I agree, other games are better at narrative play or giving mechanics to aid in portraying someone as a complex individual with many aspects.
But that is not what D&D is for (and is also not what RPGs HAVE to be for). It is a pulp adventure game about killing monsters and taking their treasure or killing monsters and saving the world. If you go into it looking for deep psychological explorations of character you will be disappointed because that is not what it is trying to do.

I dislike gatekeeping about what "real roleplaying is". It tends to mean "My favourite style of roleplaying" with a heavy dose of "I am looking down on people who prefer other styles".

PbtA to me is a fairly good example of a "loose" game. I like it, it has a lot of flavour and is very flexible due to it's high level of abstraction. It is elegantly designed. But for sure characters in Dungeons and Dragons and antagonists in that game have more fleshed out mechanics.

I hate FATE, it is unenjoyable to me. I am usually the DM, and I prefer to run a fairly simulationist sort of game as a DM. I prefer to let the narrative form from events at the table, and am not interested in forcing a three act structure or whatever on to my games. FATE therefore offers me nothing as a DM. As a player, it is even worse, because I want a break from being a DM but the mechanics are forcing me to break immersion and acknowledge that I am in a narrative, not a world, and influence it. Urgh. Absolutely hate it, anti-fun for me. Give me any editiion of Dungeons and Dragons over that.

To Eric’s original point -

You have to keep in mind that “the rules” (in this case, the rules of combat) don’t constitute the game.

The game is about taking on the perspective of a fantasy character. That’s where the play is. The roleplay.

The combat rules are just guidelines for randomizing outcomes of what the PCs attempt.

Don’t confuse D&D with a miniatures skirmish game.

Yeah, combat stats and rules aren't the be-all, end-all of RPGs, even (or especially) D&D.
One of my favorite character could get beaten bloody by pretty much everyone else in the party - and wound up being more powerful than any of them. While the others amassed wealth and items, he accrued favours and rose up in the ranks until he was basically the power behind the throne (occupied by the party's paladin, no less), running both the legal and illegal sides of the kingdom's organisation. Nick Fury meets whatsthebaldguysnamefromgotagain style. Most of it without so much as rolling a single die.

I get that in a table top rpg... or really any game, you are free to just change things however you see fit.

When I played 40k I made house rules because the basic game just isn't that fun.

But here is the question... Shouldn't the basic product be fun and functional all on it's own?

I GET that dnds combat rules are there to facilitate telling that piece of the story. So then shouldn't they do that without any intervention from the DM? Shouldn't the game just work? I don't feel like that is a crazy big ask. I feel like thats what we should all just expect from the product out of the box. If dnds mechanics are too strict or inflexible or don't allow for ______ that comes up often enough that people need to invent rules for it or borrow rules from other systems then isn't the problem dnds rules? This doesn't seem like an unreasonable position to take. They know what kind of game they are making. They know what players will do. So fething make the product to do it.

“without any intervention from the DM”

This is a telling statement. The DM doesn’t intervene in the rules. The DM makes calls — how we figure out what happens in any given instance of a player saying “my character tries XYZ.” The rules are just the guidelines for making those specific calls.

If all your character ever tries is “i swing my weapon” and then complains that it’s boring, well, that’s sort of like calling your reflection ugly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Melissia wrote:
If you want, for example, to roleplay a normal, talentless nobody thrust in to a situation they are wholly unprepared for

Then play a level-0 character.

Most editions of D&D have a “normal human” entry in the Monster Manual. Play that. After (IF!) that character survives their first adventure, pick a class to enter a level-1.

That is disingenuous. This whole thread is about dms stepping outside the box to accommodate players doing whacky gak.

5th has far less allowances than 3rd for the sake of simplicity. Like disarms and feints being basically non existant rules wise. How individual dms handle those situations, with luck rolls, advantage/disadvantage, and whatever is all well and good but that is dm intervention when the system itself fails to hold up its end of the bargain.

And that was my point. Of course the players and dm can just do what they want. But shouldnt the game just work allowing it to begin with?

 Lance845 wrote:
That is disingenuous. This whole thread is about dms stepping outside the box to accommodate players doing whacky gak.

5th has far less allowances than 3rd for the sake of simplicity. Like disarms and feints being basically non existant rules wise. How individual dms handle those situations, with luck rolls, advantage/disadvantage, and whatever is all well and good but that is dm intervention when the system itself fails to hold up its end of the bargain.

And that was my point. Of course the players and dm can just do what they want. But shouldnt the game just work allowing it to begin with?

I find this wholly incorrect.

If anything, the 5th edition is the one which allows the most allowance to players.

I have played 3th, 4th, 5th, Sine Requie, Savage World, Exalted and many others. Probably the only one which comes near to 5th in terms of freedom of actions is Exalted.

The 5th edition is a system built around the concept that you describe an action, and the DM has a some guideline which allows him to understand how to make that action happen. It is not 4th edition where everything is hard coded and you have the illusion of being able to do a lot of stuff.

I'm currently running 4 campaings, 3 as DM (a Madmage, a standard one, and a Zendikar setting with evil party) and one as a bard. All with different players and all at low levels. I've never run into the issue of a fight being repetitive or boring, they have all been quite engaging.

5th Edition has rules for swinging your weapon and casting your spells. EVERYTHING else is GM's discretion. If your GM is good, he'll allow you to attempt whatever crazy idea you come up with, work out a mechanic that works, and have you roll. If your GM is bad (or very new and not comfortable straying outside of any well-defined rules), he'll prevent you from trying anything that doesn't have a hard and fast rule in the book.

You can look at that and say "any game can be made boring with a crap GM". And you'd be right. But you'd be glossing over 5th Edition combat's core issue; everything that isn't "swing weapon" or "cast spell" is dependent on whether your GM is "good" or "bad".

In 3.5/Pathfinder, position on the battlefield matters. Movement in combat matters. Flanking matters. Trip-Fighters are a viable build. Disarm-Fighters are a viable build. Sunder-Fighters (while denying everyone else valuable loot) are a viable build. Certain weapons work better for certain tasks. My GM can be a mound of pudding and it won't change whether or not I'm flanking someone. He can be legally braindead, and I can still attempt to trip someone. I never have to ask the GM "can I do this" and hope he'll let me. I tell the GM "I'm going to try this" and the dice tell me if I succeed.

In 5th? All of that is either at the whim and mercy of the GM, or (like weapon differences beyond damage die type) utterly meaningless. I don't like combat systems where 2/3rds of the things I might want to try rely on the GM being in a good mood that day.

squidhills wrote:
5th Edition has rules for swinging your weapon and casting your spells. EVERYTHING else is GM's discretion. If your GM is good, he'll allow you to attempt whatever crazy idea you come up with, work out a mechanic that works, and have you roll. If your GM is bad (or very new and not comfortable straying outside of any well-defined rules), he'll prevent you from trying anything that doesn't have a hard and fast rule in the book.

You can look at that and say "any game can be made boring with a crap GM". And you'd be right. But you'd be glossing over 5th Edition combat's core issue; everything that isn't "swing weapon" or "cast spell" is dependent on whether your GM is "good" or "bad".

In 3.5/Pathfinder, position on the battlefield matters. Movement in combat matters. Flanking matters. Trip-Fighters are a viable build. Disarm-Fighters are a viable build. Sunder-Fighters (while denying everyone else valuable loot) are a viable build. Certain weapons work better for certain tasks. My GM can be a mound of pudding and it won't change whether or not I'm flanking someone. He can be legally braindead, and I can still attempt to trip someone. I never have to ask the GM "can I do this" and hope he'll let me. I tell the GM "I'm going to try this" and the dice tell me if I succeed.

In 5th? All of that is either at the whim and mercy of the GM, or (like weapon differences beyond damage die type) utterly meaningless. I don't like combat systems where 2/3rds of the things I might want to try rely on the GM being in a good mood that day.

Those kind of systems is what i call "No freedom of action". I want to disarm an opponent? It's hard coded, so either i do it like that or i don't. You have the feat/skill/class/weapon whatever or it isn't happening, which sucks. In 5th i want to disarm an opponent? I describe the action to the DM and roll for it.

Yeah, D&D sucks with a bad DM. But that is true for the RP part as well.
Doesn't mean that combat rules are bad, it means that D&D is a game as good as the DM, which is surely a flaw.

 Lance845 wrote:
And that was my point. Of course the players and dm can just do what they want. But shouldnt the game just work allowing it to begin with?

And that was my point; it does.

squidhills wrote:
I don't like combat systems where 2/3rds of the things I might want to try rely on the GM being in a good mood that day.

It sounds like what you are really after is a tactical skirmish miniatures game. Try 4E.

Spoletta wrote:
Doesn't mean that combat rules are bad, it means that D&D is a game as good as the DM, which is surely a flaw.

If it’s a flaw, it’s not a flaw of D&D but rather all RPGs.

The game doesn't need to hard code every potential action as it's own separate action if the rules of the game are flexible enough.

As a contrast the Unisystem had 2 versions. The cinematic version had a big list of combat manuevers that covered basically everything. You want to kick someone in the balls? Stab them in the heart? Head butt? There is a manuver. You get +/- to your stat + skill and it modifies damage and triggers effect. Thats hard coded.

But alternatively, the game just says if you want to do something it's stat + Skill with penalties for targetting smaller things.

Wanna disarm? Dex + Weapon - 2 or 3 depending on the weapon you are targetting and the opponent opposes with Dex + weapon of their own. Ties g to the defender. Attacker wins the weapon has left their hand.

The BASIC mechanics on the unisystem are robust enough to cover everything quickly and effeciently without the DM needing to make some gak up on the fly. DnD isn't. It needs bespoke rules or it needs a good DM whos happy to color outside the lines.

I’m pretty sure D&D also has the concept of modified opposed checks.

 Manchu wrote:
I’m pretty sure D&D also has the concept of modified opposed checks.

It has the CONCEPT for doing things like stealth vs a spot check or whatever the hell they call it in 5th. But they don't have it for combat. Because DnD still runs on d20 which is using DCs for the majority of it's mechanics including combat. You can't do an opposed roll for disarming or whatever because attacking isn't attribute mod + "skill". It's BAB or proficency, + attribute + other bs vs a specialized DC that is your AC.

The unisystem runs entirely on the singular mechanic of stat + skill. It's built to do it opposed. Built to modify the roll based on outside factors. And built to gauge degrees of success when doing a task unopposed or opposed.

Again, DnD just isn't built for it. The system isn't robust or flexible enough.

 Manchu wrote:
It sounds like what you are really after is a tactical skirmish miniatures game. Try 4E.

4E is no less (or more) a RPG than the other editions of D&D.There are plenty of other RPGs that have interesting tactical decision making during combat, for example Savage Worlds, 2d20 Conan, or Exalted, which are not tactical skirmish games and don't rely on GM fiat to make the combat engaging.

 Manchu wrote:
If it’s a flaw, it’s not a flaw of D&D but rather all RPGs.

It is a flaw of D&D, and not all RPGs are equally flawed in that respect.

No one is arguing that 4E is not a RPG.

In terms of combat, it is structured around the conceit of being a miniatures game; which sounds like what a number of posters ITT are looking for. That may also be true for Savage Worlds, etc.

Every RPG depends on the players. System will never make up for bad players, where actual roleplay is concerned.

I can't argue with any of that, bad players will always be a drag factor on any game.

But if rolling a d20 to see what happens is the limit of the tactical options available within a system, that puts a huge burden on the GM to make it fun.