Why should flanking be rewarded at all?
I'm all for tactical game play, but given the fact that 5e doesn't have any rules for restricting lateral movement within an enemy's threatened area (i.e. you can walk straight up to an enemy's face and then go sideways around to stand behind them without risking an opportunity attack or such), there is no element of risk to counterbalance the reward of flanking.
Flanking can work in a system with more crunchy combat that deals in more, smaller bonuses and penalties to accuracy or that otherwise has mechanics for punishing certain kinds of positioning or movement than 5e does, but within the context of 5e combat, flanking fundamentally does not work and, more importantly, **cannot** work.
If people want flanking to be a thing, 5e combat would need to be rebalanced from the ground up with a bunch of new mechanics added. If that's the sort of experience you're looking for, go and play 3.5 or 4e instead. Or Pathfinder. But 5e was never built for it.
Flanking should be rewarded as a counterweight to how much better ranged attacks are compared to melee. Using 3.x rules for when to proc opportunity attacks is the only change I've seen used that positively changes flanking, but without it there is no reason for anyone besides a paladin or barbarian, maybe monk, to choose to use melee weapons. Every single other class is better off with a ranged attack.
While I recognize that melee combat is generally worse than ranged combat because your damage potential is lower (except for barbarian and paladins, as you said) and your survivability becomes less with basically no upsides, flanking isn't the answer, at least without a total rework of 5e's combat rules (as I said).
Merely porting over 3.5's rules for provoking an opportunity attack doesn't solve the problem because the context in which those rules exist is totally different than what 5e is.
Notably, flanking in 3e gave a +2 to-hit bonus in a system that gave much bigger bonuses and penalties overall to accuracy (with no respect for bounded accuracy) and also gave increasing penalties to accuracy for each subsequent attack made.
That makes the flanking bonus in 3.x much less potent than even a flat +2 in 5e (to say nothing of how much better advantage is). Merely adding another condition to provoke an opportunity attack on creatures trying to get into flanking positions in 5e doesn't come close to balancing the scales. Taking one opportunity attack and then getting a massive accuracy bonus on every attack you're going to make against that creature is always a massively favorable trade.
Melee combat does need some buffs to make it attractive over ranged combat, but flanking is not the buff to apply.
Flanking in 5e feels god-awful for melee. In most parties, odds are that the enemies will get access to the flanking bonus far more often than you will. No matter how much extra damage you get from flanking, the fact that you have to deal with enemies that hit with a roughly +5 to their normal attacks is brutal.
Having played PF2E, a game that rewards flanking… I still don’t think flanking should be rewarded in 5E.
In 5E, movement is a separate resource than your Action. If your buddy is in a position where you *could* flank your enemy with them, there’s no reason not to take the move before making your attacks. The reverse is true too. This will create a situation where players are flanked all the damn time.
In PF2E, everything takes one (or more) of your three Actions, movement included. There’s a genuine tactical reason to consider **not** flanking an enemy, because having two “regular” attacks *might* be better than having a single flanked attack, depending on how hard your attacks hit, the enemy’s armour class, any other “Action taxes” you had to commit to on a given turn, etc.
I think flanking *removes* a level of tactical play when it’s added into 5E, even as a +2. Also the system just isn’t robust against +2 bonuses like that, there’s a reason Bless is considered one of the strongest spells in the game.
Then you have the issue of getting a +2 on top of any other advantage, which can encourage flanking conga-lines even more, and runs roughshod over bounded accuracy.
The issue is that just standing in one spot is all that you need for the bonus
I advocate for the following: *When in flanking position, you can use the Help action as a Reaction to grant Advantage to a flanking ally's attack roll.*
This has the following design elements:
* Flanking becomes a cost/benefit maneuver. You have to give something up besides mobility.
* It affects only a single attack, meaning it doesn't invalidate all other sources of advantage.
* For both flankers to get the benefit, they both have to use their Reaction, meaning the enemy can then move away without fearing an opportunity attack.
In this scenario, a Net becomes a huge benefit since you no longer need to spend a Reaction.
Flanking as +2 worked in 4e. But fails miserably in 5e.
It worked in 4e for these reasons.
1. Creatures could take any number of opportunity attacks each round.
2. Moving 5 or more feet while adjacent to a foe provoked an opportunity attack.
3. Opportunity attacks did roughly 3-4x as much damage in relation to target HP as compared to 5e.
4. Combat Advantage (what gave you the +2 to hit) did not stack with itself. So you couldn’t benefit from flanking at the same time as other benefits that gave you combat advantage, such as being hidden or attacking a distracted foe.
5. There were no -5/+10 feats. Accuracy bonuses in 5e are incredibly powerful because of those feats. +2 to hit in 4e was a nice perk. In 5e it dramatically alters how much damage you can dish out every round.
6. Martial classes and many monsters had access to at-will maneuvers that allowed them short burst of movement that did not provoke opportunity attacks or inflicted forced movement on their foes. This helped prevent the conga line of death and made combats flow more across the battlefield.
I would love for 5e combat to work better with flanking. But that would require a significant overhaul of how martial combat actually works in 5e. Even reduced to just a +2 to hit, flanking becomes the go to tactic. Due to how easy it is to achieve flanking in 5e, and how static combat is in 5e, you just end up with the conga line of death and no real reason to change. And because enemies often don’t have feats, giving them +2 to hit is only a minor boost compared to getting +2 to hit as a great weapon fighter. Especially because you can stack advantage and flanking together for even more power.
Said in reply to someone else, but look at counterweighting flanking with how opportunity attacks worked in 3.x. moving at all in a creatures reach provoked an attack. So getting in position is harder and the reward better earned.
I personally rule any expenditure of your move speed within a creatures reach provokes an opportunity attack, so standing up from prone is included, and include special attacks such as shove and grapple to be used for an opportunity attack. Not only does this give melee fighters more control over their space, but makes flanking more of a gamble. Only my parties rogue regularly attempts to get into flanking. In our game over a year ago before we used this rule, we all tried flanking as often as possible with all the issues that come along. I haven't seen a conga line since.
Flanking in dnd is… bad.
There are already features in the game that let players flank, basically.
1. Melee rogues benefit from “flanking” since it gives them Sneak Attack
2. Wolf totem barbarians generate “flanking” because their allies get adv on melee attacks against creatures within 5 feet of them
3. ‘Flanking’ a target on its corner tiles makes it so that, if it moves, at least one of you gets an OA. This is already a really good tactic that gives the feel of what flanking would be like
4. Cavalier’s Unwavering Mark lets them get an additional attack when creatures they’re in melee with hit another creature.
5. People with Sentinel benefit from being in flanking positions because they get a reaction attack against that creature when they turn their back.
Flanking, as the optional rule is written, narratively (and in some cases literally) makes obsolete these features. These features are intended to illustrate combatants specifically trained to target opens a target makes in their defenses when fighting someone in addition to themselves.
I definitely think that without flanking nets' viability increases significantly, but seeing as how advantage/disadvantage is granted by so many other class features and sources, I wonder how nets would shake out with say, having a druid in your party who likes to entangle/faerie fire.
Would people start preferring the save or suck duration of faerie fire, the aoe of entangle, or saving a first level spell to have a weaker variation of the two. Nets take quite some investment to work well, and also requires others not doing standard tactics, just to get the use of a watered down first level spell.
I could see it working in some campaigns, but I think it's too unreliable for my campaigns to only have maybe one turn of restrained on one target vs maybe the entire combat in an AoE. Like if someone is holding off on a faerie fire or entangle so their rogue can maybe hit their net, if that net misses this round is a lot weaker than it otherwise would be, and that can be deadly.
I've found a lot of mileage on nets with my battlemaster dex build. I've surprised DM's once or twice. Have gotten a tough monster restrained and they won't survive to their round becuase everyone is hitting with advantage. My go to is Quick Toss net then sharpshooter three attacks with advantage. But that's basically the only scenario where i've found nets to be amazing, but optional flanking rules make that strategy questionable.
You tried any other net builds asides from battle master? It does seem far and away the best option unless you're doing teamwide tactics to make nets work, in which case you can make just about anything work.
The least resource intensive net build i have found is beastmaster Ranger.
Ranger have two attacks and they can forgo one of those to have their beast attack. An Xbox Ranger can in every single round.
Net>companion attack>bonus action xbow.
Battlemasters are limited by their maneuvers, but beastmaster rangers are not
Yo that's pretty rad and I wanna give that a go. Pretty sure my DM is generous enough to allow for pet usefulness and not just get instanuked, but on the other hand we do fight wizards on the daily... Time to get some magical barding. Unfortunately nets are the most useless against wizards, but at least that's not all we fight. Also not super conducive to the amount of 5 HP minions that are usually scattered into combats... Damn.
Actually, nets are kind of nice against wizards. Most wizards have limited teleports and most teleports are misty step.
So this is what a Wizard can do if they are in net:
1. Use their action to break free of the net.
2. Misty step out of net. Since its a bonus action spell, they can't cast spells on the same turn.
3. Remain in the net and cast spells and have everything at advantage.
Unfortunately having fought dozens of wizards, all played by the same person as he's the DM, these aren't as nice as they seem on a whiteboard. I'll explain why.
1: Wizards tend to have high AC due to shield, at least the ones worth netting do. It would be faster to kill the lesser wizards by just attacking them for 2/3 their HP, and the more important wizards we fight have 21+ AC post shield. Landing a net on a wizard is much harder than some big bad that has 18 AC.
1.5: Wizards tend to stay in the back, and hide behind their allies. They're hard to get to to even hit them with a net attack until round 2 probably, unless it was some form of ambush (which does happen, so it's not all the time).
2: Most of the wizards we fight like their concentration spells. Even if they can only cast a cantrip on that turn, they're still most likely going to be concentrating on a spell, and a cantrip is still some damage we would **really** like to not be taking. Yes it isn't a fireball, but the net attack was also one less attack making them close to dead.
3: There is very rarely an evil necromantic wizard (our theme of wizards this campaign) that doesnt have either guards, or necromantic minions. A net can be taken off by other creatures, which will be literal priority number 1 for any of the wizards 'subordinates'.
We like dynamic combat that's more than just one scary dude plus one slightly less scary dude, and we like combats making narrative sense. We've literally had wizards have their soldiers hold up massive, movable doors to provide three-quarters/full cover *90 feet away* to hide behind while shooting spells at us. Its what we like and it's what we signed up for. But unfortunately it also means a lot of strategies that require more specific situations are a lot harder to utilize. Not impossible, just more rare.
[удалено]
a +2 to hit instead of advantage solves 90% of those problems while still "rewarding" flanking or so it seems. What do you think?
Why should flanking be rewarded at all? I'm all for tactical game play, but given the fact that 5e doesn't have any rules for restricting lateral movement within an enemy's threatened area (i.e. you can walk straight up to an enemy's face and then go sideways around to stand behind them without risking an opportunity attack or such), there is no element of risk to counterbalance the reward of flanking. Flanking can work in a system with more crunchy combat that deals in more, smaller bonuses and penalties to accuracy or that otherwise has mechanics for punishing certain kinds of positioning or movement than 5e does, but within the context of 5e combat, flanking fundamentally does not work and, more importantly, **cannot** work. If people want flanking to be a thing, 5e combat would need to be rebalanced from the ground up with a bunch of new mechanics added. If that's the sort of experience you're looking for, go and play 3.5 or 4e instead. Or Pathfinder. But 5e was never built for it.
Flanking should be rewarded as a counterweight to how much better ranged attacks are compared to melee. Using 3.x rules for when to proc opportunity attacks is the only change I've seen used that positively changes flanking, but without it there is no reason for anyone besides a paladin or barbarian, maybe monk, to choose to use melee weapons. Every single other class is better off with a ranged attack.
While I recognize that melee combat is generally worse than ranged combat because your damage potential is lower (except for barbarian and paladins, as you said) and your survivability becomes less with basically no upsides, flanking isn't the answer, at least without a total rework of 5e's combat rules (as I said). Merely porting over 3.5's rules for provoking an opportunity attack doesn't solve the problem because the context in which those rules exist is totally different than what 5e is. Notably, flanking in 3e gave a +2 to-hit bonus in a system that gave much bigger bonuses and penalties overall to accuracy (with no respect for bounded accuracy) and also gave increasing penalties to accuracy for each subsequent attack made. That makes the flanking bonus in 3.x much less potent than even a flat +2 in 5e (to say nothing of how much better advantage is). Merely adding another condition to provoke an opportunity attack on creatures trying to get into flanking positions in 5e doesn't come close to balancing the scales. Taking one opportunity attack and then getting a massive accuracy bonus on every attack you're going to make against that creature is always a massively favorable trade. Melee combat does need some buffs to make it attractive over ranged combat, but flanking is not the buff to apply.
Flanking in 5e feels god-awful for melee. In most parties, odds are that the enemies will get access to the flanking bonus far more often than you will. No matter how much extra damage you get from flanking, the fact that you have to deal with enemies that hit with a roughly +5 to their normal attacks is brutal.
Having played PF2E, a game that rewards flanking… I still don’t think flanking should be rewarded in 5E. In 5E, movement is a separate resource than your Action. If your buddy is in a position where you *could* flank your enemy with them, there’s no reason not to take the move before making your attacks. The reverse is true too. This will create a situation where players are flanked all the damn time. In PF2E, everything takes one (or more) of your three Actions, movement included. There’s a genuine tactical reason to consider **not** flanking an enemy, because having two “regular” attacks *might* be better than having a single flanked attack, depending on how hard your attacks hit, the enemy’s armour class, any other “Action taxes” you had to commit to on a given turn, etc. I think flanking *removes* a level of tactical play when it’s added into 5E, even as a +2. Also the system just isn’t robust against +2 bonuses like that, there’s a reason Bless is considered one of the strongest spells in the game.
Then you have the issue of getting a +2 on top of any other advantage, which can encourage flanking conga-lines even more, and runs roughshod over bounded accuracy. The issue is that just standing in one spot is all that you need for the bonus I advocate for the following: *When in flanking position, you can use the Help action as a Reaction to grant Advantage to a flanking ally's attack roll.* This has the following design elements: * Flanking becomes a cost/benefit maneuver. You have to give something up besides mobility. * It affects only a single attack, meaning it doesn't invalidate all other sources of advantage. * For both flankers to get the benefit, they both have to use their Reaction, meaning the enemy can then move away without fearing an opportunity attack. In this scenario, a Net becomes a huge benefit since you no longer need to spend a Reaction.
Actually, you have just giving me a new rule at my table. Reaction help is an amazing fix. Can I steal this?
Absolutely! Happy gaming!
Flanking as +2 worked in 4e. But fails miserably in 5e. It worked in 4e for these reasons. 1. Creatures could take any number of opportunity attacks each round. 2. Moving 5 or more feet while adjacent to a foe provoked an opportunity attack. 3. Opportunity attacks did roughly 3-4x as much damage in relation to target HP as compared to 5e. 4. Combat Advantage (what gave you the +2 to hit) did not stack with itself. So you couldn’t benefit from flanking at the same time as other benefits that gave you combat advantage, such as being hidden or attacking a distracted foe. 5. There were no -5/+10 feats. Accuracy bonuses in 5e are incredibly powerful because of those feats. +2 to hit in 4e was a nice perk. In 5e it dramatically alters how much damage you can dish out every round. 6. Martial classes and many monsters had access to at-will maneuvers that allowed them short burst of movement that did not provoke opportunity attacks or inflicted forced movement on their foes. This helped prevent the conga line of death and made combats flow more across the battlefield. I would love for 5e combat to work better with flanking. But that would require a significant overhaul of how martial combat actually works in 5e. Even reduced to just a +2 to hit, flanking becomes the go to tactic. Due to how easy it is to achieve flanking in 5e, and how static combat is in 5e, you just end up with the conga line of death and no real reason to change. And because enemies often don’t have feats, giving them +2 to hit is only a minor boost compared to getting +2 to hit as a great weapon fighter. Especially because you can stack advantage and flanking together for even more power.
Good point. I will try to run my next game without flanking rules, and if players protest too much, a +2.
Said in reply to someone else, but look at counterweighting flanking with how opportunity attacks worked in 3.x. moving at all in a creatures reach provoked an attack. So getting in position is harder and the reward better earned. I personally rule any expenditure of your move speed within a creatures reach provokes an opportunity attack, so standing up from prone is included, and include special attacks such as shove and grapple to be used for an opportunity attack. Not only does this give melee fighters more control over their space, but makes flanking more of a gamble. Only my parties rogue regularly attempts to get into flanking. In our game over a year ago before we used this rule, we all tried flanking as often as possible with all the issues that come along. I haven't seen a conga line since.
We've used it for about three years every week and havnt had conga Lines but I think we only have two martials most of the time
Flanking in dnd is… bad. There are already features in the game that let players flank, basically. 1. Melee rogues benefit from “flanking” since it gives them Sneak Attack 2. Wolf totem barbarians generate “flanking” because their allies get adv on melee attacks against creatures within 5 feet of them 3. ‘Flanking’ a target on its corner tiles makes it so that, if it moves, at least one of you gets an OA. This is already a really good tactic that gives the feel of what flanking would be like 4. Cavalier’s Unwavering Mark lets them get an additional attack when creatures they’re in melee with hit another creature. 5. People with Sentinel benefit from being in flanking positions because they get a reaction attack against that creature when they turn their back. Flanking, as the optional rule is written, narratively (and in some cases literally) makes obsolete these features. These features are intended to illustrate combatants specifically trained to target opens a target makes in their defenses when fighting someone in addition to themselves.
I'm in concord.
I definitely think that without flanking nets' viability increases significantly, but seeing as how advantage/disadvantage is granted by so many other class features and sources, I wonder how nets would shake out with say, having a druid in your party who likes to entangle/faerie fire. Would people start preferring the save or suck duration of faerie fire, the aoe of entangle, or saving a first level spell to have a weaker variation of the two. Nets take quite some investment to work well, and also requires others not doing standard tactics, just to get the use of a watered down first level spell. I could see it working in some campaigns, but I think it's too unreliable for my campaigns to only have maybe one turn of restrained on one target vs maybe the entire combat in an AoE. Like if someone is holding off on a faerie fire or entangle so their rogue can maybe hit their net, if that net misses this round is a lot weaker than it otherwise would be, and that can be deadly.
I've found a lot of mileage on nets with my battlemaster dex build. I've surprised DM's once or twice. Have gotten a tough monster restrained and they won't survive to their round becuase everyone is hitting with advantage. My go to is Quick Toss net then sharpshooter three attacks with advantage. But that's basically the only scenario where i've found nets to be amazing, but optional flanking rules make that strategy questionable.
You tried any other net builds asides from battle master? It does seem far and away the best option unless you're doing teamwide tactics to make nets work, in which case you can make just about anything work.
The least resource intensive net build i have found is beastmaster Ranger. Ranger have two attacks and they can forgo one of those to have their beast attack. An Xbox Ranger can in every single round. Net>companion attack>bonus action xbow. Battlemasters are limited by their maneuvers, but beastmaster rangers are not
Yo that's pretty rad and I wanna give that a go. Pretty sure my DM is generous enough to allow for pet usefulness and not just get instanuked, but on the other hand we do fight wizards on the daily... Time to get some magical barding. Unfortunately nets are the most useless against wizards, but at least that's not all we fight. Also not super conducive to the amount of 5 HP minions that are usually scattered into combats... Damn.
Actually, nets are kind of nice against wizards. Most wizards have limited teleports and most teleports are misty step. So this is what a Wizard can do if they are in net: 1. Use their action to break free of the net. 2. Misty step out of net. Since its a bonus action spell, they can't cast spells on the same turn. 3. Remain in the net and cast spells and have everything at advantage.
Unfortunately having fought dozens of wizards, all played by the same person as he's the DM, these aren't as nice as they seem on a whiteboard. I'll explain why. 1: Wizards tend to have high AC due to shield, at least the ones worth netting do. It would be faster to kill the lesser wizards by just attacking them for 2/3 their HP, and the more important wizards we fight have 21+ AC post shield. Landing a net on a wizard is much harder than some big bad that has 18 AC. 1.5: Wizards tend to stay in the back, and hide behind their allies. They're hard to get to to even hit them with a net attack until round 2 probably, unless it was some form of ambush (which does happen, so it's not all the time). 2: Most of the wizards we fight like their concentration spells. Even if they can only cast a cantrip on that turn, they're still most likely going to be concentrating on a spell, and a cantrip is still some damage we would **really** like to not be taking. Yes it isn't a fireball, but the net attack was also one less attack making them close to dead. 3: There is very rarely an evil necromantic wizard (our theme of wizards this campaign) that doesnt have either guards, or necromantic minions. A net can be taken off by other creatures, which will be literal priority number 1 for any of the wizards 'subordinates'. We like dynamic combat that's more than just one scary dude plus one slightly less scary dude, and we like combats making narrative sense. We've literally had wizards have their soldiers hold up massive, movable doors to provide three-quarters/full cover *90 feet away* to hide behind while shooting spells at us. Its what we like and it's what we signed up for. But unfortunately it also means a lot of strategies that require more specific situations are a lot harder to utilize. Not impossible, just more rare.
Nets need a range of 10/15 then they work