One of the post ideas that’s been puttering about in my head for at the last year is the conceit that D&D 4E drastically cut down on the amount of actions a player can perform. Ostensibly there are the same number of actions: one standard, one move, one “other” (minor in 4E, swift in 3.5E), and as many free actions as a DM will tolerate. But 4E has this nasty habit of making moves and minors only tangentially relevant for corner cases or builds specifically designed to use/exploit them. Instead, all the money is in standard actions.
In 4E, things get done when characters use standard actions to do them, and most of them time that “thing” is hurting a target guy. A fighter uses a standard action to swing a sword and deal damage; attacking triggers the free side benefit of a mark, allowing the fighter to do his job as a defender. A wizard uses a standard action to cast a spell and deal damage; using this spell causes some control effect, allowing a wizard to do their job as a controller. Even a cleric spends their day making attacks to deal damage, and some of them have the tangential benefit of healing or buffing allies. The actual bread-and-butter healing is relegated to a minor action. 4E is structured around people using standard action attack powers to hurt other people, and perhaps those powers also allow them to fulfill some unique role in the party.
It’s one of the things that gets under my skin with 4E. It bothered me when I couldn’t stand 4E, and even now that I know what 4E does and why I like it I’m still upset by this focus on standard-action attacks. It’s not that standard-action attacks exist, because they’re a reasonable mechanic that know what they want to do and do it well. It’s that the game is built around standard-action attacks to the exclusion and detriment of all other types of actions. I’ve seen far too many players consider that a combat turn without using an attack power is a combat turn wasted, because moving to a better position or helping an ally or trying to disarm the trap aren’t action that hurt enemies. The entire game is phrased around “there are bad guys, kill they” and to the players targeted by 4E any non-killing action is an action not worth taking at all. It’s like the entire role-playing system takes a backseat to an imaginary damage-tracking app, like D&D is some sort of MMORPG raid and anybody not putting up sufficient numbers isn’t pulling their weight.
So I was all ready to write about how much this design choice upsets me as a player, DM, and designer, and as a counterexample I was going to talk about how different and better things were in 3.5E. That’s where I hit a snag: they’re not.
3E is built almost exclusively around standard actions for spellcasters and full-round actions for non-spellcasters. If a wizard spends a round not affecting combat with magic, it’s a waste (or the end of a long day). If a fighter spends a round moving and attacking rather than full-attacking, it’s a waste. This is one of the explicit issues Wizards wanted to address in 4E, the “5-foot-step, full attack, repeat” essence of melee combat, though we ended up with “flurry of expendable powers, then at-will attacks and shifts on repeat”. At least 4E gave players the rare occasion to do something at all with their move actions besides moving, drawing weapons, and trading them for iterative attacks.
Both editions have the same problem with different faces, and that problem is “if you’re not directly affecting the combat right now, you might as well not be doing anything.” There’s almost no support for setting something up and executing it in a turn or two besides buff spells, which generally last for multiple rounds, and the aid another action, which in the opinion of my players is the biggest waste of an action in the Core rules. Usefulness in D20 is defined by an action’s ability to solve a problem quickly, and “in two rounds” is too long a time.
I do have to give some credit to Wizards because they at least tried. Late in 3.5E they introduced spells that got more powerful the longer a character took to cast them. Channeled pyroburst is a ranged burning hands when cast as a swift action, but it’s a stronger version of fireball if you focus on it for two rounds. You can determine your casting time while casting, so you don’t lose the spells if you need to end the casting early. But these were spells introduced so late in the system’s life that they didn’t even make it into the Spell Compendium, even the updated version as far as I’m aware, and most players don’t know about them. With more options at more levels channeled spells become a viable and interesting tactic or character build.
Another multi-round action is a combo, a staple of fighting games and professional wrestling (two of the highest forms of art). The closest thing D&D has to a combo is “I spend an action weakening a target, then spend a round capitalizing”, which as as much a combo as “walk to store, purchase groceries”. 3.5E’s tactical feats tried to provide combos, thing like “charge a target in one round, then Power Attack in the next for bonus damage”. Spellcasters got in on it too, with tactical feats like “cast a darkness spell, then cast a lightning spell next round and everybody is dazzled or something”. But given that 3E players are generally feat-poor, tactical feats often require significant prerequisites, and committing to a combo robs players of their next-turn flexibility, they haven’t seen a lot of play.
It’s not that players are completely patience-averse. I have a player right now who lugs around a cannon. With a half-dozen NPC allies he can aim in one round, fire in the second, and repeat from the third round on. Without said squishy allies, reloading takes much longer. But he’s very willing to basically do nothing for one to three rounds between attacks, because firing the cannon is a nearly-guaranteed hit at ridiculous range for an average of forty-five damage. That’s enough to clobber* an monster of equivalent CR, which means that by round two even a dragon is bloodied with almost no cost or expenditure of resources, unlike spells. The downside is the sit-on-hands period, a sacrifice that the player is willing to make. Even if my other players wouldn’t run a similar character, they generally agree that the cannon is ridiculously powerful and truly awesome when it goes off.
Rather I think the problem is that D&D doesn’t support multi-round actions and players aren’t inclined to go looking for ways to tweak a system that isn’t helping them. A player can write their own channeled spells or tactical feats, or find an option like a cannon, but “just do something twice” is much easier. There’s a reason the only multi-round action that comes up in Core rules, a spontaneous caster using a metamagic feat on an already-long spell, is explicitly a penalty. D&D isn’t designed to handle a setup-and-execute style of play.
There are a few reasons I can think of why this would be. One is that D&D doesn’t like it when a player does nothing for an entire turn because it’s a negative play experience. However, 3E was full of paralysis, sleep, and other effects that take a character out for rounds or minutes, and 4E has an entire monster type and character type based around disabling the other team. Even in 5th Edition [REDACTED]. It’s not a design choice to be avoided if it’s constantly front-and center. Another potential downside is cognitive load, where we require players and DMs to keep track of previous actions to know how their actions this turn will go. But each group already has a method to deal with ongoing effects at the table, a method we can leverage. I don’t see a sufficiently compelling design reason that D&D doesn’t support multi-round actions (feel free to mention anything I missed in the comments).
However, I said that D&D doesn’t support it, not that it can’t. Tactical feats are great, they’re just very specific and suffer from their barriers to entry. Channeled spells are great, we just need more than three of them. 4E runs on powers, and I see room for a power or class that uses something like the Combo keyword in UFS (if you don’t get that reference, that’s fine, because I’ll explain it later).
Right now I’m just pointing out a problem, examining it, and posing a hey-you-know-what-would-be-cool solution. In future posts I want to address each of the examples above and potentially others. I want to come up with ways we can add multi-round actions to D&D without the game grinding to a halt and use those ideas to build something viable enough that we can use it in play without completely rewriting the rules. In a system with as many options as D&D, it doesn’t seem right that that we can’t do something Mega Man has been doing since 1991.
* – “Clobbered” is a house rule status ailment first mentioned in the Player’s Handbook. Per the rule, whenever a creature loses half of their maximum hit points in one attack they are staggered for a round to represent the force of the blow or spell. This makes some sense with a 100-hp character takes fifty damage from a sledgehammer. But it’s a little less fun at low levels where many character don’t have as many as ten hit points. It’s become shorthand in our circles for “received a blow that should stagger or knock out the player, but we ignore that because it’s not fun at all” and it’s representative of an acceptable break from reality even in simulation-heavy D&D.