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Another game design notion for making a D&D-alike game that is meant to be similar in different ways to 4th and 5th Edition D&D.
So, the "action economy" is a big deal in both of those games' mechanical balance considerations.
So, the "action economy" is a big deal in both of those games' mechanical balance considerations.
5th Edition in particular has a thing you can spend your main action coin for the turn doing called The Attack Action, which is a big deal. By default it means you make one attack. When you "I hit the orc with my axe", you're Taking The Attack Action.
All the various different abilities that allow you to make extra attacks are controlled from stacking by the simple expediency of wording: they specify *how many attacks* the Attack Action gives you. They don't give you "+1 attack per round".
So if you hop around multiclassing to try to collect every extra attack ability, you'll have a collection of abilities that all read "When you take the attack action on your turn, you can make two attacks instead of one."
No matter how many you have? Two attacks.
No matter how many you have? Two attacks.
And similarly, most abilities that allow you to make an attack using your bonus action key off a trigger of "When you take the attack action on your turn". You can only use one bonus action (and they avoid giving the ability to get more) so again, doesn't matter how many you have
But more than that, with very rare exceptions, they avoid giving the ability to make an attack as a bonus action when you're not already attacking. A bonus action attack mostly only happens when you're committed to fighting for the turn.
A notable exception of this is Fighters of the Eldritch Knight subclass, who as of level 7, can make an attack as a bonus action on the same turn that they use their action to cast a cantrip (minor, unlimited use spell).
I've long considered that mainly a sort of sop to the fact that Fighters uniquely keep getting better versions of the extra attack ability that increase the attacks to 3 or 4, so they're giving up more damage as they level in order to cast a spell.
But I watched Murph in Dimension 20 twice cast a spell as an eldritch knight that I rarely see anybody consider worth casting: blade ward, which makes you resistant (halves damage) to the all damage types inflicted by ordinary weapons, since he could still attack once.
And it hit me that two cantrips that have always seemed to be 100% not worth casting -- Blade War and True Strike, which gives up the action you'd use to attack this round for advantage in hitting next round -- that begin to make sense for an Eldritch Knight.
Now, one of the things that bedevils me about D&D-ish combat is... it's almost never worth it to do anything with your action but attack. If you even cast a spell that doesn't inflict damage or potentially remove someone from the fray, you are moving backwards, or treading water
Any kind of cool stunt you might want to do is probably going to be suboptimal compared to Hit The Dude With My Axe, no matter how cool it is in your head.
And another thing is that 4E and 5E both have a lot of mechanical cruft that's there to guardrail the assumptions that undergird their action economy that makes even things that are fairly straightforward kind of fiddly and finicky.
So what I'm thinking is... the Eldritch Knight's feature, which is a very exceptionally exception even for a game steeped in exception-based design winds up encouraging a fighter to cast spells that otherwise are heavily mechanically disincentivized, right?
And the Monks and Rogues have features that let them do various non-attack tactics as a bonus action instead of a full action, which incidentally means they wind up actually doing those things when usually if someone does them, it means they're losing. But they do them, TO win.
Basically, 5th Edition makes the choice to MOSTLY guardrail you into either Attacking OR Doing Something Else each turn... and the nature of the system makes it so that Attacking is almost always the right choice (including direct offensive spells as attacks).
But the cool things that come out of a fight are when someone manages to sneak some Something Else in with an attack, as when a Sorcerer quickens a spell so they can attack and do something cool, or a gish-y subclass combines attacking and spellcasting, or when a Monk or Rogue.
So my basic thought for making combat more interesting is - throw out the assumption that funneling characters into Attacking OR Something Else-ing. Anything the game can do to encourage Something Else is a good thing.
And this is not dissimilar to my observation earlier in the season of Dimension 20 that it really feels like the optimal number of things to let players get away with in a turn is 3, if you can make them work a little bit for the third sometimes.
And I think maybe it's less that 3 is a magic number of things to do and more that players should always/frequently be able to advance a goal beside Lower Hit Points while they are pursuing the goal of Lower Hit Points.
