Combat Mechanics

During this campaign refer to this document for combat mechanic changes from base 5th edition.

Movement

A player will be designated to move the monsters on their turn instead of the DM. Only notable NPC or bosses will be controlled by the DM. This should be thought of and ready to go immediately so that the flow of combat is smooth.

• Movement should coincide with logical choices they would make.
  • A lone bear wouldn't run past a melee character to eat an unarmored caster, but a pack of wolves would gang up on the weakling.
  • Goblins with bows would try to take up defensive positions to snipe the lightly armored characters.
  • A thug would try and flank an adventurer to get advantage on his attack.
• A d6 will represent how deadly an encounter is with 6 being the worst.
  • Non-deadly encounters will see combatants attacking more at random and not seeking a kill.
  • More deadly encounters will see creatures trying to take down the healers and mages while suppressing the front line fighters.

Tracking Combat Damage

Damage done is no secret. You just saw Bill do 12 fire damage to a goblin. You know that the goblin you killed in the last encounter has somewhere around 15 to 20 HP. Your characters could visibly see what 12 damage does to a goblin with around that much HP. Your knowledge isn't meta-gaming because your character's perception of reality closely mirrors your knowledge.
All damage is going to be kept track on the side of the battle map by a player. This will free the DM up from having to fiddle with math and updating a board to move on with the combat.

Flanking is Dead, Long Live Flanking!

Flanking will not result in advantage, it will result in +2 to hit against the target.

Critical Hits and Failures

There are no critical misses in combat. A roll of 1 just means you automatically fail the action.

A critical hit results in a maximum damage on the dice used plus whatever you roll.
Example: Your sword damage is 1d6+5, you crit. Damage done is 1d6+5+6.

Other Rules

Speeding up your turn with a dash of action!

• Be ready on your turn.
• Roll all of your dice at once, hit and damage.
• Describe what you're up to!
  • (movement description) Sue sees Bob is about to be surrounded by goblins so she runs over to cover his flank.
  • (attack action, hit dice really suck) She wildly swipes with her falchion in an effort to batter them back but the tip of her blade goes wide!
  • Sue wants to take another attack, rolls both hit and damage dice again.
  • (action surge bonus action, hit dice are great) Being up close it's obvious that Bob is in worse shape than she thought, she musters her strength and draws her weapon down against the goblin doing 12 damage.

Contents

Table of Contents

Movement

Combat Damage

Flanking

Critical Hits and Failures

Other Rules