Yes, I love designing interactive encounters.
Even in 5e, you can make it fun if you add environmental hazards and actual space for tactics other than: "I stand next to the guy and roll to hit till he drops".
That being said, I rarely go over level 7 in my campaigns and I'm trying to house rule my own combat system in the future..
Eat a dick, friend.
You can stay a nogames purist or you can accept the game as it is - most people want to play DnD.
Now, that begginers wouldn't even be able to tell if you're running gurps or fricking FATAL, is something that leaves you lots of room for improvisation.
He never said it was good, you fricking spastic. He said you can make even D&D's combat fun by putting in extra effort, which is pretty much saying that it's not good as is. Please work on your reading comprehension before posting again.
5e combat is unsalvageable, sorry. The premise, balanced encounter, is stupid. Actions resolve in stupid ways. These combined make applying common sense impossible or equivalent to writing your own system except it has to be in the moron-speak of 5e to fit in. And then, they still take too long to resolve.
The best one I've played is Fudge. What does it have over D&D? It's faster to resolve and more intuitive. Faster because you're usually rolling 4dF once a combat round and because there's no weird conditional triggers for more triggers. More intuitive because it uses bell curve distributions for rolls and words for attributes, skills, challenges, and outcomes. Because it's intuitive you can do pretty much anything your character could attempt and it's pretty easy to adjudicate on the fly. It's both fast and intuitive because there's no initiative and everything resolves simultaneously. Depending on what you like the tactical depth added by realistic damage and near-endless possibilities can be good or bad. Good because it's fun to come up with a winning move, bad because making a decision can take a lot of time, compared to "I whack him with my club".
Traveller is also good for similar reasons but figuring out how to adjudicate freshly invented actions is harder. I haven't tried GURPS yet.
Depends. I find TSR D&D combat to be good fun, and I think the group initiative helps improve pacing in practice. The 3.5 and 4e board game combat could also be good fun, especially when firing on all cylinders. Honorable mention to Friday Night Firefights, which does make you feel like you're in a John Woo movie once you get past the kludge.
Honestly, RPG designers need to play some fricking wargames. There has been more innovation in skirmish games in the last decade than RPGs have had over the last 40.
It still gets clogged down by individual initiative, and for all the kludge that slows it down, it basically devolves into giving yourself advantage and your enemies disadvantage.
5e combat is an awkward halfway house between OSR combat and 3-4e combat in my opinion. It doesn't really do theater of the mind the TSR D&D or even a zone system does, and when you put it on a grid, it's not that interesting or deep.
Yes, as long arent any castard playoids. Castards, regardless of system, always make the games take forever. Their turns are invariably 10x longer than everyones.
Yes, most of my group like it a bit too much which sometimes makes it a drag for me and one other player who like "social encounters"
(read: not just being murder hobos)
> Impossible in 5e
I haven't touched D&D in over 15 years, is it that bad? I remember thinking oWoD combat sucked ass as a Storyteller but my group still ended up asking for more than the *1 fight every 3 session at a minimum* rule I had for my games.
Yeah I like combat even if it’s just roll to whack with stick, you can try and be a little bit creative here and there as long as you aren’t a boring person and the games not too easy its usually somewhat exciting
I like Cortex combat because it's a very interactive dice mini-game. Easy to play, quick, lots of ways to manipulate your roll, totally mapless. I like Conan 2d20 combat because it's got a lot of fiddly bits and positioning stuff without getting locked into a 5x5 grid (Conan uses "zones", similar to some less-crunchy games, but adds a bunch of more loosely positioning-based combat rules on top of it and it works really well). I like ORE combat because it's super fast and pure chaos. In ORE games, everyone rolls at the same time and the die results themselves determine initiative order, success/failure, and effect. So combat resolves really quickly (since everyone rolls simultaneously) and also very chaotically (as everyone looks at these giant piles of dice like they're witches looking at tea lives as you figure out what just happened that round).
Do I like The World's Greatest Roleplaying Game combat? No, but that's not the only TTRPG. There's plenty of games with fun, punchy, enjoyable combat.
>I like Cortex combat because it's a very interactive dice mini-game.
Was never too sold on the complications/damage track of Cortex tbh, can you elaborate a bit more on what you like about it?
So at its most basic level an action on Cortex lets you select a die from your dice pool and use it to interact with some kind of in-game effect. This is called the "Effect Die." The basic stuff you can do with an effect die is:
>Create a Good Thing
these are typically called assets. Any time the Good Thing applies, you get to add it to your pool. Example: a wizard casts a spell to give a "Magic Shield d8" to a buddy with his effect die. Any time that magic shield might help him, he gets to add the d8 to his dice pool.
>Create a Bad Thing
The opposite of Good Things, these are called complications and they're attached to enemies. Example: Spider-Man creating a "Webbed d10" on a hired goon. Any time the goon tries to do something that being webbed would not help with, that d10 goes into his opposition pool to be used against him.
>Make a Thing Bigger or Smaller
The last general thing you can do is make good things better, bad things worse, and vice versa. Instead of creating a new effect, you can use your effect die to add to or subtract from an existing one: strengthening the magic shield, tearing off the webbing. Or, if you're Spider-Man, maybe adding more webbing (increasing the die size).
The added caveat here is that, when a Bad Thing is stepped up past the maximum die size, that person's eliminated from combat. This doesn't necessarily mean dead. For instance, if Spider-Man webs that guy enough, he's going to end up glued to the wall and unable to take action for the rest of the fight.
At its core, that's all "damage" is in Cortex. It's remarkably flexible and allows for both players and npcs to interact in all sorts of ways. You want to grab the guy? Try to add a "restrained" effect to him. If you can get it high enough you've pinned him and won.
Some crunchier versions of the game codify these Bad Things with "Stress Tracks", (like "Physical / Mental / Emotional") to provide generic Bad Things for players to attack cooperatively.
It's nice when everyone has an easy, agreed-upon Bad Thing so they can say "I'm punching him to inflict Physical stress," but mechanically they're often the same. Some games go even further and add "Trauma", which is a secondary stress track that tends to last longer and be difficult to remove, but cannot be targeted directly (typically, trauma only steps up when your stress gets maxed out). Stress is taking a punch, trauma is breaking your leg.
This makes for combat that is very, very easy to say "yes" to. Can the player grab that curtain and wrap it around the bad guy's head? Hell yes they can, roll to create a "blinded" complication. Can the player rip up a lamp post and use it as a bludgeon? Of course, roll to create a "ripped-out lamp post" asset. Can players end combat non-lethally? Easily, in a million ways: instead of inflicting stress, create a "restrained" or "knocked out" or even a "talked out of it" complication (this is one way that some of the games use Emotional stress). The result is a "damage" system that feels very loosey-goosey and narrative, but retains the solid core resolution system throughout.
On top of that, you start getting into game-specific rules. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, for instance, uses Stress, but tends to provide special rules that making applying assets and complications easier. To use Spider-Man again, he inflicts stress normally, but if he chooses to create webs instead, he can increase the size of his effect die for free. The downside to that, of course, is that the rest of the party can all inflict physical stress, but they probably can't help him step up his webbed complication. This puts Spider-Man into a kind of support role, where he's encouraged to web enemies once to provide a sizable debuff, but generally not incentivized to try to finish them off with it (since he'd be doing it alone). There's all sorts of neat synergies you can work into the system, and it's super easy to hack.
Only Oldschool fast combat or simplified mass combat. Video game like combat from systems like 5e or Pathfinder is destestable, horrid, terrible, disgraceful
Yeah honestly I am starting to feel like combat is the biggest reason I play TTRPGs. My imagination is dying the older I get so I invest in miniatures to make the hobby more visual. I feel less and less willing to accept that every D&D group is gonna have le religious man le spellcaster wizard man le sneaky man and le fighter man. I am starting to only have patience for all-fighter parties. I am starting to think more and more about the game in terms of combat only. I try to roleplay the NPCs but it feels like all I get in return is stuttering attempts at characterization. Like combat is the only thing that satisfies me. My girlfriend started playing with us and I feel bad that she has sat through pretty much nothing but combat encounters so far. I try to describe wilderness travel and people are on their phones within 30 seconds. I try to make it a minigame and they just ruin it with a 35 on their Survival check. You can blame D&D but this happens in other systems too. I can't get them to play OSR games. So yeah I just do combat, which they BTFO as well but I can always put like 3x as many monsters and it is still a bit of a challenge. I should just get into wargames but most of them don't appeal to me and they feel soulless and empty. I need the context of a long-term campaign for them to feel meaningful.
>I try to make it a minigame and they just ruin it with a 35 on their Survival check.
You shouldn't make it be possible to skip the challenge with a dice roll. The player describes their intent, and then they roll to see how well they've executed it. Assuming the action really is non-trivial and can be reasonably expected to fail.
Yes. Done well (and fast) and it's like a game of communal chess. Distill it down to just the combat of TTRPG and that's wargaming.
It's REAAAAAAL easy to frick up though:
- Too many players. 4 is ideal. 6 is too many.
- Any system where you have to pause, look up the rules, and halt the flow.
- Spells and players that don't know how to use them. Almost any TTRPG where a player says "I can't X".... hang one lemme look it up
- Any system where there are no choices. I am fighter. I swing tohit. I roll damage. I done.
- Some combat of the mind can be too vague and confusing.
- Tables which are too chatty. Chatty can be fine, but if players are getting distracted or don't know it's their turn, it bogs everything down.
Yes, but it's hard to quantify. The ideal circumstance would be allowing players to bend the rules a bit and 'be cool' at times.
The problem is most of the tabletop audience (looking at you 5e) are a bunch of skibidi toilet ADHD zoomer homosexuals that would use it to do increasingly absurd shit attempting to one-up each other.
In the case you have don't have a group of them, you'll have a group of powergaming autists that will use and abuse that loose ruling to the max and take every excuse available to squeeze out every drop of mathematical advantage possible.
Tabletop combat could be a lot better.
The issue is you can't fricking trust anyone to restrain themselves before the inch given becomes a mile taken.
As a side note: the one time I've seen this used to great effect was in the Dimension 20 Bloodkeep mini-campaign. Without going into too much writing, the players were allowed to do some crazy stuff - partly because it made sense for them to have the ability to do so but also because it was a very short one-off campaign so it didn't matter too much what happened. And it looked super fun. Personally I'd love to let players get loose with the rules in the interest of doing something cool that was at least semi-believable in a fantasy setting. But again, you can't trust anyone.
Yes, but the following conditions are necessary: >The GM and ALL the players have a good grasp of the rules >The GM has created an interesting combat scenario >Combat is happening with some kind of objective, not just for its own sake
If everyone has a solid grasp of what's going on, a combat (regardless of crunch) can be tense and exciting. If some people are checked out, or the fight seems pointless, then it sucks. This is why I'm generally against things like 3 random wolves attacking the party while they travel. If the party is well rested and equipped, then the wolves pose no threat, they're a dull speed bump that means nothing. If, on the other hand, the players are starving and desperate, wandering a frozen waste and have to fight off the wolves to get clean drinking water, then it's cool.
What 5e DMs frick up in overland travel is that unlike a dungeon, where random encounters should disrupt the party's ability to pull off a short rest, overland travel should disrupt the long rests.
If, like you say, time doesn't matter, then random encounters are pointless. If they occur in a context where time matters, then they can add to the strategic tension.
Completely agree. I think what makes 5e, and D&D in general kinda tricky to run *properly* is that there's an assumption of multiple encounters per day that's important for class balance. The Wizard can't just nuke every encounter, for example, if you have three or four moderately challenging battles and then a big showdown with something really nasty at the heart of the dungeon.
However, coming up with four intriguing combat encounters for a single adventuring day can be pretty tricky, and I think a lot of DMs basically default to coming up with one really cool boss encounter, and then either rush to that, in which case you lose a central factor of the game, or you throw several barren rooms of three skeletons and a goblin shaman at the party that no one cares about or feels threatened by.
Basically, DMing requires a lot of non-intuitive effort to do *really* well, and it's super easy to do it badly.
Gygax was right all those years ago about STRICT TIME RECORDS, without which you can't have meaningful adventures. 5e DMs need to overcome the culture of player entitlement and push back against long rests in hostile territory and roll honestly for wandering monsters when they take a short rest.
>However, coming up with four intriguing combat encounters
They really don't need to be that interesting most of the time. That strategic context can supply a lot of the tension. Honestly, if the encounters become too tactical, your pacing starts to suffer.
>Basically, DMing requires a lot of non-intuitive effort to do *really* well, and it's super easy to do it badly.
The 5e DMG is so up its own ass about "making a multiverse", it forgets to tell DMs how to run a session. This is really sad because the 4e DMG did a fantastic job about explaining these things.
Yep.
Yes, but not in DnD.
Yes, I love designing interactive encounters.
Even in 5e, you can make it fun if you add environmental hazards and actual space for tactics other than: "I stand next to the guy and roll to hit till he drops".
That being said, I rarely go over level 7 in my campaigns and I'm trying to house rule my own combat system in the future..
>"DnD 5e is good if you just make up your own rules and change it into something else."
I am so fricking tired of hearing this moronation from DnDrones. So tired.
Eat a dick, friend.
You can stay a nogames purist or you can accept the game as it is - most people want to play DnD.
Now, that begginers wouldn't even be able to tell if you're running gurps or fricking FATAL, is something that leaves you lots of room for improvisation.
He never said it was good, you fricking spastic. He said you can make even D&D's combat fun by putting in extra effort, which is pretty much saying that it's not good as is. Please work on your reading comprehension before posting again.
Just change your interpretation of his post to something you like, then it will be good.
>just putting othet shit in the combat space is making up entire rules
Terminal moronation.
5e combat is unsalvageable, sorry. The premise, balanced encounter, is stupid. Actions resolve in stupid ways. These combined make applying common sense impossible or equivalent to writing your own system except it has to be in the moron-speak of 5e to fit in. And then, they still take too long to resolve.
So what's the aspirational combat system?
The best one I've played is Fudge. What does it have over D&D? It's faster to resolve and more intuitive. Faster because you're usually rolling 4dF once a combat round and because there's no weird conditional triggers for more triggers. More intuitive because it uses bell curve distributions for rolls and words for attributes, skills, challenges, and outcomes. Because it's intuitive you can do pretty much anything your character could attempt and it's pretty easy to adjudicate on the fly. It's both fast and intuitive because there's no initiative and everything resolves simultaneously. Depending on what you like the tactical depth added by realistic damage and near-endless possibilities can be good or bad. Good because it's fun to come up with a winning move, bad because making a decision can take a lot of time, compared to "I whack him with my club".
Traveller is also good for similar reasons but figuring out how to adjudicate freshly invented actions is harder. I haven't tried GURPS yet.
Depends. I find TSR D&D combat to be good fun, and I think the group initiative helps improve pacing in practice. The 3.5 and 4e board game combat could also be good fun, especially when firing on all cylinders. Honorable mention to Friday Night Firefights, which does make you feel like you're in a John Woo movie once you get past the kludge.
Honestly, RPG designers need to play some fricking wargames. There has been more innovation in skirmish games in the last decade than RPGs have had over the last 40.
It still gets clogged down by individual initiative, and for all the kludge that slows it down, it basically devolves into giving yourself advantage and your enemies disadvantage.
5e combat is an awkward halfway house between OSR combat and 3-4e combat in my opinion. It doesn't really do theater of the mind the TSR D&D or even a zone system does, and when you put it on a grid, it's not that interesting or deep.
Yes, as long arent any castard playoids. Castards, regardless of system, always make the games take forever. Their turns are invariably 10x longer than everyones.
In my experience, it's the exact opposite. I suspect you need to try not playing D&D.
Yes, most of my group like it a bit too much which sometimes makes it a drag for me and one other player who like "social encounters"
(read: not just being murder hobos)
Yeah, but I usually play games with meatier combat and have a long history of wargaming.
> Impossible in 5e
I haven't touched D&D in over 15 years, is it that bad? I remember thinking oWoD combat sucked ass as a Storyteller but my group still ended up asking for more than the *1 fight every 3 session at a minimum* rule I had for my games.
Yeah I like combat even if it’s just roll to whack with stick, you can try and be a little bit creative here and there as long as you aren’t a boring person and the games not too easy its usually somewhat exciting
I like how my games handle combat.
I like Cortex combat because it's a very interactive dice mini-game. Easy to play, quick, lots of ways to manipulate your roll, totally mapless. I like Conan 2d20 combat because it's got a lot of fiddly bits and positioning stuff without getting locked into a 5x5 grid (Conan uses "zones", similar to some less-crunchy games, but adds a bunch of more loosely positioning-based combat rules on top of it and it works really well). I like ORE combat because it's super fast and pure chaos. In ORE games, everyone rolls at the same time and the die results themselves determine initiative order, success/failure, and effect. So combat resolves really quickly (since everyone rolls simultaneously) and also very chaotically (as everyone looks at these giant piles of dice like they're witches looking at tea lives as you figure out what just happened that round).
Do I like The World's Greatest Roleplaying Game combat? No, but that's not the only TTRPG. There's plenty of games with fun, punchy, enjoyable combat.
>I like Cortex combat because it's a very interactive dice mini-game.
Was never too sold on the complications/damage track of Cortex tbh, can you elaborate a bit more on what you like about it?
So at its most basic level an action on Cortex lets you select a die from your dice pool and use it to interact with some kind of in-game effect. This is called the "Effect Die." The basic stuff you can do with an effect die is:
>Create a Good Thing
these are typically called assets. Any time the Good Thing applies, you get to add it to your pool. Example: a wizard casts a spell to give a "Magic Shield d8" to a buddy with his effect die. Any time that magic shield might help him, he gets to add the d8 to his dice pool.
>Create a Bad Thing
The opposite of Good Things, these are called complications and they're attached to enemies. Example: Spider-Man creating a "Webbed d10" on a hired goon. Any time the goon tries to do something that being webbed would not help with, that d10 goes into his opposition pool to be used against him.
>Make a Thing Bigger or Smaller
The last general thing you can do is make good things better, bad things worse, and vice versa. Instead of creating a new effect, you can use your effect die to add to or subtract from an existing one: strengthening the magic shield, tearing off the webbing. Or, if you're Spider-Man, maybe adding more webbing (increasing the die size).
The added caveat here is that, when a Bad Thing is stepped up past the maximum die size, that person's eliminated from combat. This doesn't necessarily mean dead. For instance, if Spider-Man webs that guy enough, he's going to end up glued to the wall and unable to take action for the rest of the fight.
At its core, that's all "damage" is in Cortex. It's remarkably flexible and allows for both players and npcs to interact in all sorts of ways. You want to grab the guy? Try to add a "restrained" effect to him. If you can get it high enough you've pinned him and won.
Some crunchier versions of the game codify these Bad Things with "Stress Tracks", (like "Physical / Mental / Emotional") to provide generic Bad Things for players to attack cooperatively.
Cont.
It's nice when everyone has an easy, agreed-upon Bad Thing so they can say "I'm punching him to inflict Physical stress," but mechanically they're often the same. Some games go even further and add "Trauma", which is a secondary stress track that tends to last longer and be difficult to remove, but cannot be targeted directly (typically, trauma only steps up when your stress gets maxed out). Stress is taking a punch, trauma is breaking your leg.
This makes for combat that is very, very easy to say "yes" to. Can the player grab that curtain and wrap it around the bad guy's head? Hell yes they can, roll to create a "blinded" complication. Can the player rip up a lamp post and use it as a bludgeon? Of course, roll to create a "ripped-out lamp post" asset. Can players end combat non-lethally? Easily, in a million ways: instead of inflicting stress, create a "restrained" or "knocked out" or even a "talked out of it" complication (this is one way that some of the games use Emotional stress). The result is a "damage" system that feels very loosey-goosey and narrative, but retains the solid core resolution system throughout.
On top of that, you start getting into game-specific rules. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, for instance, uses Stress, but tends to provide special rules that making applying assets and complications easier. To use Spider-Man again, he inflicts stress normally, but if he chooses to create webs instead, he can increase the size of his effect die for free. The downside to that, of course, is that the rest of the party can all inflict physical stress, but they probably can't help him step up his webbed complication. This puts Spider-Man into a kind of support role, where he's encouraged to web enemies once to provide a sizable debuff, but generally not incentivized to try to finish them off with it (since he'd be doing it alone). There's all sorts of neat synergies you can work into the system, and it's super easy to hack.
Yes, in my system atleast
Only Oldschool fast combat or simplified mass combat. Video game like combat from systems like 5e or Pathfinder is destestable, horrid, terrible, disgraceful
Yeah honestly I am starting to feel like combat is the biggest reason I play TTRPGs. My imagination is dying the older I get so I invest in miniatures to make the hobby more visual. I feel less and less willing to accept that every D&D group is gonna have le religious man le spellcaster wizard man le sneaky man and le fighter man. I am starting to only have patience for all-fighter parties. I am starting to think more and more about the game in terms of combat only. I try to roleplay the NPCs but it feels like all I get in return is stuttering attempts at characterization. Like combat is the only thing that satisfies me. My girlfriend started playing with us and I feel bad that she has sat through pretty much nothing but combat encounters so far. I try to describe wilderness travel and people are on their phones within 30 seconds. I try to make it a minigame and they just ruin it with a 35 on their Survival check. You can blame D&D but this happens in other systems too. I can't get them to play OSR games. So yeah I just do combat, which they BTFO as well but I can always put like 3x as many monsters and it is still a bit of a challenge. I should just get into wargames but most of them don't appeal to me and they feel soulless and empty. I need the context of a long-term campaign for them to feel meaningful.
>I try to make it a minigame and they just ruin it with a 35 on their Survival check.
You shouldn't make it be possible to skip the challenge with a dice roll. The player describes their intent, and then they roll to see how well they've executed it. Assuming the action really is non-trivial and can be reasonably expected to fail.
Yep
Yes
Yes. Done well (and fast) and it's like a game of communal chess. Distill it down to just the combat of TTRPG and that's wargaming.
It's REAAAAAAL easy to frick up though:
- Too many players. 4 is ideal. 6 is too many.
- Any system where you have to pause, look up the rules, and halt the flow.
- Spells and players that don't know how to use them. Almost any TTRPG where a player says "I can't X".... hang one lemme look it up
- Any system where there are no choices. I am fighter. I swing tohit. I roll damage. I done.
- Some combat of the mind can be too vague and confusing.
- Tables which are too chatty. Chatty can be fine, but if players are getting distracted or don't know it's their turn, it bogs everything down.
Yes, but it's hard to quantify. The ideal circumstance would be allowing players to bend the rules a bit and 'be cool' at times.
The problem is most of the tabletop audience (looking at you 5e) are a bunch of skibidi toilet ADHD zoomer homosexuals that would use it to do increasingly absurd shit attempting to one-up each other.
In the case you have don't have a group of them, you'll have a group of powergaming autists that will use and abuse that loose ruling to the max and take every excuse available to squeeze out every drop of mathematical advantage possible.
Tabletop combat could be a lot better.
The issue is you can't fricking trust anyone to restrain themselves before the inch given becomes a mile taken.
As a side note: the one time I've seen this used to great effect was in the Dimension 20 Bloodkeep mini-campaign. Without going into too much writing, the players were allowed to do some crazy stuff - partly because it made sense for them to have the ability to do so but also because it was a very short one-off campaign so it didn't matter too much what happened. And it looked super fun. Personally I'd love to let players get loose with the rules in the interest of doing something cool that was at least semi-believable in a fantasy setting. But again, you can't trust anyone.
>tldr players suck, water is wet, the game
Yes, but the following conditions are necessary:
>The GM and ALL the players have a good grasp of the rules
>The GM has created an interesting combat scenario
>Combat is happening with some kind of objective, not just for its own sake
If everyone has a solid grasp of what's going on, a combat (regardless of crunch) can be tense and exciting. If some people are checked out, or the fight seems pointless, then it sucks. This is why I'm generally against things like 3 random wolves attacking the party while they travel. If the party is well rested and equipped, then the wolves pose no threat, they're a dull speed bump that means nothing. If, on the other hand, the players are starving and desperate, wandering a frozen waste and have to fight off the wolves to get clean drinking water, then it's cool.
What 5e DMs frick up in overland travel is that unlike a dungeon, where random encounters should disrupt the party's ability to pull off a short rest, overland travel should disrupt the long rests.
If, like you say, time doesn't matter, then random encounters are pointless. If they occur in a context where time matters, then they can add to the strategic tension.
Completely agree. I think what makes 5e, and D&D in general kinda tricky to run *properly* is that there's an assumption of multiple encounters per day that's important for class balance. The Wizard can't just nuke every encounter, for example, if you have three or four moderately challenging battles and then a big showdown with something really nasty at the heart of the dungeon.
However, coming up with four intriguing combat encounters for a single adventuring day can be pretty tricky, and I think a lot of DMs basically default to coming up with one really cool boss encounter, and then either rush to that, in which case you lose a central factor of the game, or you throw several barren rooms of three skeletons and a goblin shaman at the party that no one cares about or feels threatened by.
Basically, DMing requires a lot of non-intuitive effort to do *really* well, and it's super easy to do it badly.
Gygax was right all those years ago about STRICT TIME RECORDS, without which you can't have meaningful adventures. 5e DMs need to overcome the culture of player entitlement and push back against long rests in hostile territory and roll honestly for wandering monsters when they take a short rest.
>However, coming up with four intriguing combat encounters
They really don't need to be that interesting most of the time. That strategic context can supply a lot of the tension. Honestly, if the encounters become too tactical, your pacing starts to suffer.
>Basically, DMing requires a lot of non-intuitive effort to do *really* well, and it's super easy to do it badly.
The 5e DMG is so up its own ass about "making a multiverse", it forgets to tell DMs how to run a session. This is really sad because the 4e DMG did a fantastic job about explaining these things.
I always wanted to try simultaneous actions + prefab action cards, but I haven't played since 2015