Going walkabout

I recently finished running some gamers through a one shot scenario in my roleplaying game Heroes By Trade.  Overall they seemed to have a great time, and the experience gave me some insight into one particular rule in DnD that I did not include in Heroes By Trade.  Naked Man gave me a lot of flak for not having it, but now that I have seen people's reactions I am sure I made the right decision.

That rule is attacks of opportunity.  The basic idea is that if you do something that leaves you open your opponents can take advantage and bash you.  That outline looks fine, but the way DnD implements it is disastrous.  The key problem is that 'leaving yourself open' includes simply walking away from the enemy.

This means that once a melee character closes in, you are stuck next to them.  This is especially true if the melee character has a single huge attack, because often you lose half of your HP if you move away, so you are trapped next to them for the duration of the battle.  

I can see where this comes from.  Old DnD fighter design was that fighters walked up to people and bashed them.  They had no options, no choices.  If a ranged character was a bit faster they could simply walk away and keep on shooting and the poor fighter was absolutely wrecked.  It seems kind of silly that a ranged character who is slightly faster can so trivially defeat a melee type, so the designers decided to make it punishing for anyone to walk away from a melee combatant.  Walk away, you get smashed.

They solved the problem wrong.

The problem is that melee types have no options.  You don't solve that by locking down ranged people so that *nobody* has any options!  You solve it by giving melee characters meaningful ways to keep people in range.  Unfortunately the solution they went with is to keep fighters mind numbingly boring and make it extremely hard to maneuver around a battlefield.  Once people lock swords, everyone stands in a pile fighting.  

The players in my test game were DnD veterans.  When a monster walked next to them they wanted to move away, and then looked at me with big, sad eyes, asking if they were going to take an attack of opportunity.  I said no, because my game doesn't have such a thing.  Their faces lit up with glee, and they moved around the battlefield to find a better vantage point.  The players clearly wanted to wander, and in Heroes By Trade you can.

Of course you do have to solve the problem of melee being trivially defeated by ranged folks who keep on running away.  My solution is to give melee options.  They can knock a ranged person down, preventing them from running and making them easy to bash.  They can grab a slippery caster, keeping them within reach.  They can dash madly across the battlefield to get in position to thump.  They can't always do all of these things of course, compromises must be made, but they have ways to keep a ranged enemy pinned down, just as the ranged enemy has ways to escape.

I am extremely pleased with my choices, particularly after seeing the results in this game.  Players have a lot more fun when they are actively involved.  It is more exciting to choose to use Immobilizing Shot to pin an enemy in place that to simply walk next to them and have attacks of opportunity keep them close.

People want to make choices, to have control over their fate.  They also like to be able to run around in a fight and do exciting things.  Attacks of opportunity prevent both of these things.  Good riddance.