D&D General Didn’t Mike Mearls propose a one-roll combat encounter?

[Ruin Explorer]

(bold added)

I don't know, if that is your take on combat why bother even rolling at all? If the foregone conclusion is the PCs winning (which IMO pretty much is the case 95+% of the time), then what is the point?

To the extreme end, you then have to ask why are you even playing? You might as well just sit around and take turns telling stories to each other or making them up collaboratively.

Ummm, dude.

You're seemingly mad about one of the fundamental principles of 5E's design (and 4E, and probably 3E and so on).

Combat isn't about winning/losing in modern D&D designs. The PCs almost never lose. I'm sure that's true in your games too. I very strongly imagine that even the PCs in your game have an at least "on points" win ratio of like 100:1, because otherwise you'd have parties getting TPK'd or at least TPK-but-DM-fiat-says-they-keep-you-alive'd like, pretty often. I mean, how many fights do you have a session?

Before you talk about "oh but they might retreat!", well, that's extremely hard to do in 5E - in general the specific rules of 5E mean that unless DM fiat is involved, if you actually play out a retreat, the retreating party will usually die (or over 50% of them will). Against faster enemies it's pretty much always going to be TPK-on-retreat unless the right kind of magic is involved.

Anyway the principle is attrition.

That's what D&D combat is about. Resource management. You know this. I've seen your designs and they account for it. Fights in D&D are, typically a forgone conclusion - the PCs survive and move on. The question is, how much of their resources do they retain? Even a fairly easy fight (so "Hard" in 5E parlance) can quickly go downhill with some bad rolls on the PC side and good ones on the monster side. This rarely leads to TPK in 5E (or 4E) but often leads to resources being consumed that the party did not wish to be consumed (spells, consumables, long-rest abilities, HD spent in a short rest after combat, etc. etc.).

The final fight with the BBEG may well involve an actual risk of TPK, that's usually on the table, even if the odds are pretty low unless the PCs really screw up, but up until then, it's generally about resource attrition. There are RPGs where every fight is intended to be "life and death", every single one, but they're relatively rarer - earlier editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Call of Cthulhu, Millennium's End, etc. (not really Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020, whilst they technically can be there's a ton of mitigation, especially with stuff like Trauma Team).

So the questions I see are:

1) Why are we doing combat? The answer is generally "because it's fun and engaging".

I'd personally say 5E's combat is drastically less fun/engaging than 4E's was below level 11, and then after level 11 5E gradually pulls ahead simply because we lose the the chain of attack-reaction-interrupt to the reaction-immediate action etc. that often started happening in that and which ground 4E down. I know 6 out of 7 of the players in my "main" group agree with this (the other one doesn't really like combat in either edition but dislikes it less in 5E because it's quicker).

and

2) Can any "quick resolve" system appropriately reduce resources and would players feel okay with it.

I think anything that's just some dice rolls is going to be poorly received. But if you had players deciding they wanted to expend X resources on the combat, and then those resources influenced some dice-driven resolution mechanism, and the results would determine whether you lost any other resources, that might work better. An even better approach actually might be for players to "bet" X resources on the combat, and if the dice-based resolution went well maybe they don't lose many of them or even perhaps any, and obviously if it goes badly they lose those resources and perhaps then some, etc. etc. I'm pretty sure this could be figured out, but would people want to?

So then we have another question:

3) Why would we want to skip combat? And the answer is likely to be because it's Easy/Normal/Hard (rather than Deadly/Deadly+) combat that isn't likely to be terribly interesting, but is likely to take, say 30-60 minutes to resolve (combats involving large numbers of highly-mobile ranged combatants can particularly take forever in 5E), and the party would rather do something else, but that 5E requires resource attrition to function correctly. So assuming there was an alternative resource attrition mechanism that people were happy with, that would make sense to do.

You see this in videogames, for example, and in others I've certainly wished it existed (especially the first Pathfinder game). The Total War series has it for example. It's literally a game focused on these RtwP tactical battles, but it has autoresolve. And people use it a ton. Why? Because not every battle is equally interesting, but like D&D, attrition is one of the main mechanisms of the game. It's very unlikely you'll lose say a 20 units vs. 10 battle, like literally you could probably just walk away from the chair and win with a lot of armies, but it will take a while, and might be better autoresolved.

That's a lot of words, I guess, but the TLDR is 5E is attrition-based, so combat attrition is necessary for correct functioning, but not every combat is worth playing out to every group so a mechanism for "autoresolving" Easy/Normal/Hard combats specifically (probably just ignore Deadly) would be worthwhile for those groups.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Why not double down and just roll one dice to see if you finished the adventure.

Then go play a game you like.

This is a pretty reductive and irrational reaction, I'd suggest.

It's very possible for games you like to contain elements you do not, or for certain situations in a game to perhaps be suitable for a different resolution method to that originally proposed by the game designers. I don't think many people would want to play 5E resolving all combats automatically (however, I do think more RPGs could stand to treat combat with the same respect they treat the rest of the game, not vastly more - not D&D though), but given 5E D&D is about combats where victory is, intentionally, by design, a forgone conclusion in virtually all cases, and thus is designed around attrition, not winning/losing, it makes sense that some combats would not be that interesting.

5E's 6-8 encounter/day structure is more extreme than previous editions here, note, in being built around attrition. If it wasn't so focused on this I doubt people would even be considering "autoresolving" combat. Easy/Medium/Hard (severe misnomer on the last there, in my experience) combats can often feel perfunctory rather than engaging. I think having a well-designed mechanism for resolving those might actually make 5E a better game.

Of course not designing that way in the first place would probably have been smarter...

 

[AnotherGuy]

My thinking is that should we attempt to reduce combat to one roll or even a set of rolls, like a skill challenge, then it would be better to change the entire resource system and character design. Though you may as well play a different game at that point.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

I remember a tweet where he took a poll about whether people wanted a faster combat resolution mechanic. I don't remember seeing an actual one-roll resolution mechanic. That would be awesome.

Lots of games have something like that. It could be something as simple as make one attack each. The monsters make one attack each. Calculate all the hit points lost. And done. Wrap things up in a big hurry and not waste an hour or more on rolling dice for a foregone conclusion of a fight. Combat as group check, basically.

Yikes, I would hate that. Combat is one of the most entertaining parts in our game. I would hate if it was just one roll and done.

Everyone gets more animated and excited during combat and the role playing is more engaged. The longer the better IMO.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I wouldn't be against such an option existing for people that want to use it, but I feel like if you don't want to play out the combat... you just don't have combat.

 

[Deset Gled]

This is a pretty reductive and irrational reaction, I'd suggest.

Taking the 30,000 foot view, isn't the basic premise of this thread "How reductive can you get?"

Well, that and tracing the question/answer back to Mike Mearls or other D&D designers, I suppose.

 

[Stormonu]

I don't think I'd want it reduced to one roll, period - but I wouldn't be adverse to one roll per player, total up the success/failures and narrate the outcome from there. And that'd only be either for relatively trivial fights or a campaign that de-emphasised combat.

 

[Jer]

I don't think I'd want it reduced to one roll, period - but I wouldn't be adverse to one roll per player, total up the success/failures and narrate the outcome from there. And that'd only be either for relatively trivial fights or a campaign that de-emphasised combat.

For fights where the players are going to overwhelm the opposition but "have" to happen for narrative/verisimilitude reasons we basically do exactly that. Each player says how they approach the combat, then they each make one attack roll and if they succeed then they lose no resources and if they fail they lose some resources (in D&D 5e usually hit dice or a spell slot, in 4e it was healing surges or a daily power). Then we'll just narrate it out and move on.

So if the 10th level PCs pick a fight with a bunch of goblins who are just there for color, we'll just do a montage like that and move on narratively (it also has the benefit of causing my players to ... not view every encounter as a potential combat encounter. Which is a great side effect.)

 

[Li Shenron]

Why not double down and just roll one dice to see if you finished the adventure.

Then go play a game you like.

Jokes aside, I think this idea is exactly meant to gloss over one part of the game someone doesn't like

And of course, it doesn't mean it's supposed to be used in each and every combat, but more probably for some combat that are expected to be not so interesting, but you still want some chance of losing (even if that means losing some resources, not necessarily some lives).

 

[overgeeked]

By design, almost every combat favors the PCs. Otherwise the party would lose half the time, and no one wants that.

I’d rather there be something worth the time investment happen. Combat as foregone conclusion isn’t worth the time or energy. You shouldn’t bother with the full combat rules unless your chances are way less than 95%. Something like 50-60% as the max worth bothering sounds about right. Then your round to round decisions actually matter. Resources actually matter. Movement and positioning actually matter.

However, there's resource loss in almost every combat, which is what the dice and party tactics determines.

Not really. The resources used, if any, only matter if you run out during the fight…making winning the fight harder…or if you have several fights in a day…where the loss of resources will actually matter by making those future, same day fights harder. Without those stipulations, resource loss is irrelevant as everything recharges on a long rest.

This would simply remove the party tactics from the equation, leaving it purely to chance. Interestingly, this could solve the issue some have with getting enough encounters per long rest, since you could have 4-5 of these followed by 2-3 real combats.

Sure. Just have anything less than a deadly encounter as a group check. Spending a resource when you know there’s more fights coming might be worth an auto-success or something…or turning a failure into a success.