Well, to be fair, any combat in an RPG is an abstraction unless the players and GM come to physical blows and walk around garbed in the armor their characters wear.
As I said above, I’m not trying to elevate one style of play over another and as long as the players are all in agreement about it there is no issue, but I’ll say that I’m personally at a loss to understand the fun of tactical grid combat with rules that aren’t don’t really lend themselves to tactics in the sense of, “If we screw this up we might die!” Original D&D came out of tactical medieval combat rules (TSR originally stood for “Tactical Studies Rules”) and having played the original Chainmail rules the conventions made sense but didn’t really lend themselves to roleplaying any more than you’d play squash with a cricket bat, which is probably why the game got such a reputation for munchkinism despite the many creative (if crude my modern standards) modules published for the game.
Most D&D combat that I’ve seen largely consists of swing/arrow,arrow/fireball and isn’t very tactical because the system doesn’t innately provide for it (I don’t know how much that has changed with 5e but it seems about the same), and I always found the discussions about how far a character could have moved last round after firing two arrows or successfully defending against a blow tedious versus the GM just adjudicating in a way that maximized the narrative opportunities and player agency.
Not really. I prefer it because it allows me to make the most use of the combat tools the games provide. If I’m casting a spell with a 30’ radius, it’s faster, easier and more effective to know what’s in that circle than to litigate it with the DM (who is then probably determining it on the fly because he didn’t know either ten seconds ago). Likewise for what’s between me and the bad guy during my 40’ movement. In my experience, whatever time is saved in not shuffling toys around on a map is spent saying “Wait, I thought there was a table between the shaman and me; in THAT case I…” Your mileage may vary, of course.
In other games I’ve played that rely less on the distances baked into D&D to determine what does what to who, I’m fine with not having a mat. In D&D, having played extensively both ways, I prefer it which has nothing to do with how much anyone likes role playing, exploring, or describing our amazing hats. But a big part of why I enjoy D&D (and its kin) is the role-playing AND the heroic stabbing of fire-breathing lizards. If I mainly wanted to role play a councilor in an elven court for three hours, there’s probably better games with more evolved social systems.
We really like Pulp Cthulhu and our Gaslight campaign uses those. My houserule add slashing (roll weapon damage die again) and bashing (double strength bonus).
Well, 4th edition was hugely tactical and using a grid in combat was mandatory. It was one thing that turned a lot of people off (though I enjoyed it).
5th edition is more of a return to earlier editions, but at the end of the day if your combats consist of a bunch of bored folks saying, “I swing my sword, turn over. I shoot two arrows, turn over. I shoot a fireball, turn over,” that’s not a problem with the system but with the way the players and DM are approaching the game.
One player in my group always plays barbarian archetypes, no matter the system. In D&D, barbarian mechanics honestly do boil down to “I swing my axe twice, turn over.”
And yet we joke that his turns take longer than anybody else, because he’s also the kind of player who loves finding ways to interact with the map during battle. What are those pillars made of? Is that fireplace burning wood or coal? Do those windows have curtains? He’s the guy who’s spending the time between turns carefully counting the distances between his character and various points on the map so that he can figure out what he can run to, vault over, slide under, etc.
A system’s only job is to provide mechanical structure for the things you want to do. It’s up to the players and DM to create narratives around those mechanics.
D&D is like a beat-up but reliable old car. It gets you where you want to go, but it’s not flashy. There are systems that might do a couple things better than it, but D&D is serviceable across the board. Filling in the rest is up to the group.
In a pathfinder game I played a Druid. In one combat, we got the jump on the bad guys (weird cultists who would drink polymorph-type potions to turn themselves into werewolf equivalents) and I realized one of them was sitting on a bench…made of wood…and my 4th level druid warped the bench into a wooden cocoon (left her head out of it so she could breathe).
Granted, Warp Wood is overpowered in my opinion (at least the way our DM ruled it worked), but the woman got to count herself lucky because everyone else in her party ended up being killed in combat.
I wonder why Warp Wood wasn’t (alliteration!) put in 5E. It can be because it’s overpowered, else they would ae also have done away with the even more broken Wall of Force. Or did they just rename it?
I just took a look through the list of druid spells in 5E; unless I missed something, it certainly seems to be gone.
I’d always seen Warp Wood as being one of those spells that can, situationally, be very good, but not a must-have for druids, but then, it appears that I may not be as creative in using it as others have been.
Looks like 3e was the last edition to have it. Seems weird that they got rid of it but kept Shape Stone. If I was running a game and someone brought it up, I’d be willing to toss it in as a 2nd level Druid spell. That would put it on par with Knock – also useful for messing up boats and shields but not useful against metal, stone, etc.
There really isn’t much you could do destructively with Warp Wood that you couldn’t do with a crowbar, just that you can do it faster and at some distance.
I set up a group in 1979 and because I was a chess-playing computer programmer, all my players came from my chess club or from work.
We immediately decided that we would all take turns being the DM, so agreed a set of rules to aid consistency.
That led us to use hex maps and tactical wargaming for combats. (We still enjoyed roleplaying when talking to NPCs.)
After decades together, we had a really united group.
I remember one combat in particular when the players suddenly split - some of the adventurers were fighting mere troops in one location whilst the rest first chased, then confronted the big bad spellcaster.
I realised this would give me some problems … so I gave full details of the enemy troops to the players concerned and asked them to run the combat themselves!
Meanwhile I could concentrate on the spellcasting. It all worked out jolly well - I could hear the trusted players earnestly discussing how best to play the enemy troops.
(I have also enjoyed the ‘Theatre of the Mind’ type of DM - based on what Stranger said, I think it’s far easier to Dm a group who all enjoy the same approach.)
Looking at the 3.5 description, it doesn’t really fit with the design philosophy of 5e spells. Generally speaking, held or worn objects can rarely be the target of spells and I’m not sure they can ever be affected by AoE spells.
I’ll note that neither the 2nd or 3rd edition versions of the spells really allow control of the warping, so doing precision stuff like cocooning an enemy is beyond the written scope of the spell and would definitely contribute to its being overpowered for its level.
Still, you could probably break this into two 5e-scaled spells, using existing ones to inform their levels and effects.
Part 1: “warp item.” Use heat metal as your template. Thorns and brambles erupt from a held or worn item for the duration of the spell (requires concentration), forcing the wielder to drop it or else suffer penalties.
Part 2: “shape wood.” Use stone shape as your template. Note that this is a 4th level spell and has a very limited radius. You might change the area of effect to be either a small radius or a single contiguous wooden object like a tree.
Heat Metal and Stone Shape are both already on the druid list, so this wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.
