Mouseferatu
Hero
Watch any small-scale melee in the movies, in modern video games, or IRL, and you'll note that people are moving all over the place. Boxers move around the ring. Even fencers go back and forth.
What you basically never see are two people standing in one spot smacking each other. Try that in a real fight and you're going to get hurt, a lot.
But very often, despite our best efforts, that's what melee combat in D&D comes to. Once the fighter and barbarian have engaged the giant, there's nothing to be gained from a lot of shifting around (and in fact, the opportunity attack rules often discourage it).
Flanking makes advantage too easy, and it doesn't really involve that much maneuvering anyway. And yes, monsters might try to move to take cover from ranged attacks or what have you, but it's not always an option, and not really what I'm talking about.
Has anyone managed to come up with any minor house rules that encourage more in-combat mobility? Gives martial types good cause to move between attacks (even against the same target), or reasons to regularly fall back from an opponent? I don't want to add layers of complexity or slow things down much, I'd just love to see more of the battlemap covered by the close-in combatants over the course of a fight.
What you basically never see are two people standing in one spot smacking each other. Try that in a real fight and you're going to get hurt, a lot.
But very often, despite our best efforts, that's what melee combat in D&D comes to. Once the fighter and barbarian have engaged the giant, there's nothing to be gained from a lot of shifting around (and in fact, the opportunity attack rules often discourage it).
Flanking makes advantage too easy, and it doesn't really involve that much maneuvering anyway. And yes, monsters might try to move to take cover from ranged attacks or what have you, but it's not always an option, and not really what I'm talking about.
Has anyone managed to come up with any minor house rules that encourage more in-combat mobility? Gives martial types good cause to move between attacks (even against the same target), or reasons to regularly fall back from an opponent? I don't want to add layers of complexity or slow things down much, I'd just love to see more of the battlemap covered by the close-in combatants over the course of a fight.