One of my least favorite things about 5e is its combat system. This is funny, because combat is one third of the game on paper, and it’s usually a higher percentage in practice.
5e combat is slow and prone to repetition, and because of that, I tend to get bored with it. My players say they love combat, but some of those players will struggle to pay attention when it isn’t their turn. This leads me to believe combat is boring for them, too.
There are plenty of reasons why combat feels repetitive. Maybe the monsters you’re fighting are too similar. Or your stakes aren’t high enough (or are always too high). Maybe all of your encounters have the same exact goals and win conditions.
But the DM can provide all the variance in the world. Combat will still feel repetitive if the players are engaging with encounters all the same way. And players in D&D tend to do the same moves over and over again. They stick to what they know they can do well, and what they can do well is what’s printed on their character sheet. I don’t think this is a player problem. I think it’s a design problem. 5e encourages you to do this, because trying something else is taking a risk, and that risk is usually never worth it.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
You want to try something that isn’t on your character sheet, like disarm an enemy or keep their attention away from your party members. Depending on your DM, those are all separate actions, resolved using variant or house rules. And they’re usually super risky because your character isn’t explicitly good at them (by virtue of them not being on your character sheet).
If you succeed in this attempt, you might be able to pull off something narratively or mechanically cool! But if you fail, you’ve just wasted the single action your character has in a round. And rounds take forever in D&D, so by the time your next turn arrives, you’ve done nothing in almost an hour.
Weighing your options, you decide to just keep hitting the enemy with your sword. At least you KNOW that has a good chance of working, and dealing damage is a palpable progress marker.
While there are certainly games where failure is fun, failing at the one action you’re able to take in a full round of combat is not. Just ask any wizard whose dice aren’t working out for them that night. This is especially true when a round takes 20 minutes or longer, which is common in larger games.
The Action Economy of D&D 5e is a huge problem for many reasons, but “it discourages variation in play, thus making combat boring” is the big one for me.
Pulling Stunts
The AGE system rebalances the Action Economy and encourages a variation that keeps combat fresh and exciting. It accomplishes this with stunts.
In the Age system (Fantasy AGE, Blue Rose, etc), stunts are moves your character can do under a specific set of circumstances. When you roll your pool of d6s and you get doubles, you earn an amount of “stunt points” that you can then spend to perform stunts.
The game has tables for different kinds of stunts for combat, roleplay, exploration, and spellcasting. During combat, for example, you can spend 2 stunt points to knock an enemy prone, or 3 points to “set up” an ally for success on their next roll. There’s a whole list of them!
My personal favorite combat stunt is “Stay Aware,” which only costs one point. With a successful Perception check, you learn from the Narrator about any battlefield conditions that might be useful to you.
In the Blue Rose quick start adventure, this was how my party learned about the collapsed well that they could push their undead foes into in order to trap them, effectively taking them out of combat. Reducing its HP to 0 would have taken a few more turns, and it would not have felt as cool.
Rolling Perception in D&D is an Action. A full Action. Why would you roll Perception to look around the battlefield when you could be using that Action to deal damage? Especially when Perception can fail! Double especially when there might not be anything on the field, and you’ve wasted your turn making a Perception check.
And that’s the beauty of stunts: they’re tied to success instead of risk. If you’re using the Stay Aware stunt, it’s because you’ve already rolled for something this turn, and you got doubles! Stunts are bonuses that can turn the tide of battle, not high-risk, questionable-reward maneuvers.
Add More Action
Another thing the AGE system does well is it provides players with more action options in general. Quick, think about the non-class specific actions your D&D 5e character can do. You probably can’t name them all, but that’s probably because a lot of them are useless in most scenarios.
I always forget about Shove. And when was the last time you equipped your shield as an Action? Also, use an object is an action. Really. Drinking potions slows down combat so much! Everybody I know house rules it as a Bonus Action for that reason.
Speaking of Bonus Actions, what are some that every character has? Well, you can attack with an offhand weapon, but only if it meets certain requirements. And, you can only do it if you took the Attack action. Other than that, you’ve got casting spells and using features specific to your class.
I like to play rogues because I enjoy doing more than one thing in a turn. But not everybody can play a rogue. Some of us have to play wizards and sorcerers.
The AGE system redistributes a lot of these moves into the “Action” and “Minor Action” categories. Players get one of each or two Minor Actions per turn. And get this: there are NINE different types of Minor Actions in the AGE system. You can use a Minor Action to aim and line up your shot, for example, a thing made available only to rogues in 5e just this year.
Giving people more things to do means they can accomplish more per round. This makes someone’s individual turn more exciting, and it makes combat shorter.
Wait, That Might Be Too Much Action
It’s nice to have a lot of options explicitly laid out for you.
I never knew I could grapple in 5e until somebody told me. I thought I could only do what was on my character sheet! But no matter what game you’re playing for the first time, learning new actions and move sets can be overwhelming.
I found this to be especially the case when running Blue Rose. To run combat, I had to have so many pages of the PDF open at once: the stat blocks, the spells, the list of actions, the combat stunt table, the arcana list, the arcana stunt table, the talents list. It feels like a lot more to keep track of, for both players and Narrators.
Blue Rose’s layout fits so many words onto a page that it’s hard to use as a reference during games. The nice thing about 5e being popular and also having an SRD is that I can find a lot of cool resources for quick references online. No such luck with Blue Rose.
The varied combat of the AGE system is incredibly refreshing after 5e. And I am just talking about combat here. I missed some parts of 5e while playing Blue Rose this weekend: the character customization, for starters. Still, Blue Rose got me thinking about tying variation to success instead of risk. I think that’s the way to go.
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