Yes, obviously it would be great if this wasn't the case. And you know what? Sometimes you get your wish and it does happen after all. Sometimes the enemy transforms into their Hell Angel form or the initial wave of soldiers retreat only to be backed up by the Elite Magma guard (ttly different set of abilities u gaiz!). As long as we're talking about best-case scenarios, it would also be great if everyone took acting lessons and three courses on creative writing and also spent at least 20 hours a year drilling simple math operations.quanta wrote: There is something wrong and boring about a combat system where the situation doesn't change between turns 1 and 6.
I've heard this non-solution solution towards shaking things many a times and I'm skeptical of this to the point of being actively contemptuous. This is the worst kind of 'blame the DM and players for their human limitations' Gygaxian shit. Just out of principle I feel that you should be looking for an alternate solution to fix this problem if at all possible.
But you know what? Even if the DMs and players decide that this is their responsibility and on their heads be it, this doesn't actually happen in practice. Why? I'll post that big blob of text again to tell why this won't actually happen.
DM/Game Designer-Side Problems
1. Goblin archers across a forest chasm isn't actually much different than drow archers on a cliff in a cave with grimlocks at the bottom or pirate cannoneers on a ship drifting away from the docks. As much as we hate to admit it, a lot of tactical setups are actually really reductionist; video games and tabletop games have figured this one out for years to the point of naming a lot of them. The obvious way to avert this would be to dump more shit onto the tactical field to spice it up--there's also a thunderstorm going on and a weird magical fog that causes random teleportitus and there's also a strange stone that creates an anti-goblin arrow force field on one corner of the battlefield where the players might turn the tables! So the goblin archers send one of the trolls to try to push it into the chasm. Which leads into the second problem.
2. Making a robust tactical situation is actually really, really difficult. If you have a game where combat is rare then it's definitely quite possible to create unique special snowflake battles that the players have never seen before, making the first complaint seem churlish. But in a game like D&D where stories of a group running three battles in a night are common, this is a near-impossibly tall order for the DM. A lot of DMs, including yours truly, will not actually create special snowflake battles for many of them and will end up resorting to 'eh, fuck it, goblin archers in the alleyways, some difficult terrain here and there from garbage and dead peasants, we're ready to rock' in order to meet time constraints or battle quotas. Which of course will lead to monotony after enough time.
The obvious way to avert this is to have a robust monster manual with lots of wild and wooly monsters in it that is easy to run. Goblin archers in the forest need not feel the same as umber hulks in the forest or even drow archers in the forest. This is actually probably the biggest goal of monster manuals, but as we've learned from 3E and 4E D&D there is a limit to the amount of complexity you can give the average monster before they become too complex to run.
Beyond that though course there's the problem that D&D has lasted for 30 years and on top of that expects people to fight 10+ battles in the average story arc. As amazing as it might sound, people are actually quite familiar with dragons, man-scorpions, frost giants, demons, and golems due to D&D's longevity and effect on related media like video games. You will reach a point and soon where ogre magi backed up by yakmen are old hat. Such is the success of D&D, but it's a pisser when you're trying to come up with monsters that people haven't already Seen A Million Times. So you can't solely rely on the Monster Manual to jazz things up. A game needs to hopefully find a third way of attacking combat monotony but the only really big thing you can change in the combat equation is player tactics. And that's where Winds of Fate come in.
And before you immediately tell me again 'that's why you need to throw out diverse sets of monsters at the players that need different tactics!', let me tell you why it's not a good idea to rely on this. Even though the expected goal of throwing out the occasional golem or fire elemental or puzzle monster or whatever is to break players out of the routine of 'I fireball it!', what actually ends up happening is something a lot different because this ignores the reason why players resort to ability spam/5Mod in the first place. Actually, I made this argument a couple of times earlier in the thread so I'll just post it again. In the next spoiler.
1) It's often not as obvious as you think it would be for people to pick that 'just as planned' power. For example, should you hit the fire elemental with an Empowered Iceball, a Plane Shift, or a Wall of Stone? Depending on how you construct the game, they all might be equally useful even though a layperson would say 'go for the Iceball!'. Without such obvious decision points, the average person is going to default to what they feel most comfortable with, which invariably leads to ability spam. (Ed: This especially becomes a problem if you actually went ahead and made a small set of powers diverse, because it incentivizes people to stick to one power even more. There are a lot of occasions in which sunbeam won't do donkey dick and are forced to diversify, but it's very hard to come up with occasions that makes summon monster or mass curse more harmful than using another power). This is exactly what happened with Psions; they chose a small list of generically useful powers, some buffs and edge-case effects, then went to town. The only way you can avert this is by splitting up all versatile powers into individual spells, but then that either makes characters boring and one-note or it introduces option paralysis... which leads to people spamming the same one power anyway. Sigh.
2) Even if you do have a This Power Works Best situation, a lot of people aren't going to take it anyway. Either because of cautiousness, paranoia, laziness, roleplaying reasons, or they're just not that bright. They will of course stick to what they're comfortable with, which invariable leads to ability spam. Even though this seems like a minor thing, it's not. It's probably the biggest impediment on this list in fact. People are a combination of stubborn and looking for the path of perceived least resistance i.e. lazy. If you do a 'you can spam this power, but you'll get a -4 to attacks for it so it's a good idea to use something else', a large percentage of players will still choose to spam it. A lot of players' response to Salamanders Attack Your Fire Mage! is to sigh, suck up the fire resistance, and throw out fireballs anyway. You could theoretically put up enough obstacles to break up the player's pattern (these goblins have fire immunity and can fly over short walls!) but the problems with THAT approach is that A) this becomes very obvious after awhile and B) see caveat #2 about DMs being just about as lazy as players.
3) Those 'OMG that was just a PERFECT use of that power!' situations happen in comics and cartoons because, get this: the writers get a lot longer than 5 minutes to come up with something and even have considerable power to manipulate events into a 'just as planned' situation. The 'Iron Man modulates his laser to hit a ghost' tactic might seem obvious to you because you crafted the adventure, but it might not to the people actually playing it--at least not within a reasonable time frame. If someone is on a time crunch they will tend to default to what they feel most familiar with, which leads to ability spam.
Somehow PhoneLobster misconstrued that to think that I am against 'other ways' of introducing tactical complexity. I'm not, I just think that relying on the old chestnuts (monsters, wild and wooly battlefields, Fog of War, Eigenplots, etc.) has been inadequate and we need other wakes to shake things up.