[nextlevelwizard]

Yeah, both players were either rogues or tabaxi (although feline swiftness isn’t dashing)

This is also directly why I don’t like D&D. It is way too combat focused and video gamey. If your combat system is so complex that people find (or even feel that they need to find) “exploits” in it then your system probably sucks. So many class features are purely combat focused completely ignoring the actual roleplaying part of role playing games.

Also the “counter chaining” feels odd to me, is this something that actually happens? Like people waste spellslots counterspelling a counterspell?

[pigpop]

From my limited experience, many players and DMs seem to get things backwards in exactly the way you're describing. They take the rulebook as the starting point or the "controls" for the game and since combat is the most detailed they tend to focus on that to the exclusion of other parts of the game. I've always viewed the rules as a way of settling disputes or uncertainty instead, so you start from the role playing and only resort to rules when you need fair adjudication or clarification on complicated situations. i.e. don't give me quotes from the rulebook, tell me what your character does and we'll work it out as part of the story.

[nextlevelwizard]

When most of the games rules are about a thing that thing becomes the focal point. 5e also assumes pretty high amount of combat encounters per day to keep all classes in balance, if you are having less then it will make some classes just bad picks which can feel bad

Personally I don’t like it when people don’t play by the rules of the game we have decided to play together, so definitely things should work as the rules say and then ambiguous things are sorted with GMs world’s logic as “rulings”.

If you start by ignoring the rules and only consulting them when there is a dispute then I want to play another game with less rules to begin with

[pigpop]

I guess it depends if you want the game to be a grind for the next level or if you want real interactive fiction. Different people like different things.

[nextlevelwizard]

It really just depends on do you play D&D or something else. It is perfect fine if you don’t want to play by the rules, but then you aren’t playing the game and we might as well just stop pretending and pick a better system

[antisthenes]

> If your combat system is so complex that people find (or even feel that they need to find) “exploits” in it then your system probably sucks.

Couple of things.

1. People will try to find exploits in just about any system. That's kind of part of the fun.

2. If the difficulty curve sucks in a particular D&D campaign - that's the DM's fault, not the system's. Plenty of tools at DM's disposal to make campaigns less combat focused or being more lenient to players.

[nextlevelwizard]

Eh, I don’t find it fun because if you can break the combat then you either decide not to play “optimally” or GM has to purposefully create situations to fuck with you specially which is just antagonistic

I don’t know how you go to difficulty curve

[e28eta]

re: grapple leapfrog, it links to this question: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/q/136964

Maybe the AI used the accepted answer (with 4 votes vs the next with 39) and then mangled things from there?

re: counter chaining, I think so. I spent some time watching Critical Role and iirc they liked to counterspell a counterspell.

[nextlevelwizard]

First one is pretty easy. The player is just trying to do RAW instead of intention. Intent obviously is that while dragging every feet of actual movement costs two of your characters movement allowance, so dropping the burden doesn’t give you more movement.

Countering a counterspell feels like a waste since for one you have to have another caster with counter spell and now they are wasting their reaction plus a slot instead of just going another round. I guess there are situations where that makes sense, but somehow feels bad