![]() While it’s frequently more complicated and interesting than counting backwards, this metaphorical shin kicking is at the heart of combat in dungeons and dragons and has been since its earliest editions. Hit points are the most most obvious example: generally creatures have a fixed hit point maximum, and whichever sides’ hit points hit 0 first loses. The fundamental concept at the heart of combat is resource attrition. Opportunity Attacks help to reinforce this mechanic by deterring creatures from running past each other to find a more favorable target. When you’re a fighter in full plate and a shield and your friend is a sickly wizard in a bath robe, you need to position yourself to keep them alive so that they can blow stuff up and identify the loot when you’re done. Positioning is also crucial to keeping your frail allies alive. In the confines of a cramped cave or dungeon, there’s rarely enough room to allow creatures to frolic about waving swords at one another, so generally opposing sides will position themselves as best they can to beat their opponents and not move unless compelled to do so. In many encounters, characters start and end the fight within one turn’s movement of where they started because going any further is rarely helpful. However, in reality movement is often only used to move to a more advantageous position, where characters will then stand perfectly still until a more advantageous position reveals itself. This, in theory, allows creatures to move around quite a bit in combat. Movement in 5th edition doesn’t carry an action cost, which means that it’s always available to creatures in combat. If we want to change how combat works in dungeons and dragons, we need to understand how it works to get a baseline to work from. ![]() ![]() RPGBOT Session 2: 4 heroes and even more snakes.RPGBOT Session 1: 3 heroes and a whole lots of snakes.Clearing out a room full of CR 0 enemies is hard when you have one attack and your best area damage is Burning Hands. ![]() Heavily-optimized characters at levels 3 or 4 might be able to manage, but the power spike at level 5 really does make a difference here. There simply isn’t a broad enough range of CRs from which we can select enemies, and players below 5th level often aren’t strong enough to survive encounters in this style. One word of warning: I do not recommend this system for player characters below 5th level. There’s going to be some math here (don’t worry, you won’t need a calculator), some tables, etc., but the rules for building encounters actually give us a lot of room to work without breaking anything or accidentally putting a polearm through a window or something. This is another one of my wild excursions into pushing the system to do something unusual, similar to my Practical Guide to One-Hour D&D Sessions. I played through both, and ever since I have asked myself “how do I make dnd combat work like that?” Despite being armed with an array of primarily ranged weapons, the player still dives in and out of melee combat, sometimes against large single foes, sometimes against a cluster of smaller ones. The games are famous for their “press forward” combat, high-adrenaline gameplay, and a rapid resource loop that compels the player to play aggressively rather than playing the game like a cover shooter. 2016 saw the return of the Doom franchise.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |