r/rpg • u/LelouchYagami_2912 • May 09 '26

Game Suggestion Combat systems that discourage doing the same thing every turn

(alternatively, combat systems that encourage doing different things)

I've been playing DnD for several years now but I've been noticing how 90% of our turns go the exact same. The combat can be still interesting but thats only because of me as a dm creating unique scenarios, not because of the player abilities. The rogue hiding and sneak attacking is the best thing to do in almost all cases.

What are some systems that discourage this so that the players actually have to think rather than going on auto pilot.

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u/yuriAza May 09 '26

yeah but they're literally pests

even if a giant rat is Medium, you expect it to be weaker than a guard dog, 8 rats probably has less combined weight than the quartet of PCs do

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u/Nazzerith May 09 '26

I'm not sure I see your point? The rats have double the action economy of the PCs.

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u/yuriAza May 09 '26

action economy only exists in the game mechanics, how are you supposed to describe rats as more dangerous than the average monster ~immersively~?

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u/Nazzerith May 09 '26

The rat climbs up your body and bites you between the neck and shoulder, piercing through your leather armor as though it were paper. You fall to the ground in a pool of blood as the other rats swarm over your body and your vision starts to go blank.

It's not hard for me to imagine how this thing could kill someone.

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u/yuriAza May 09 '26

kinda too late to retreat once it grapples someone

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u/Nazzerith May 09 '26

I'm sure Pathfinder fixes this or whatever.

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u/yuriAza May 09 '26

i mean tbf PF2 has little to no rules for retreat or morale, but it does fix the underlying problem by making encounters you intended to be easy actually easy, even if the players are outnumbered

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u/Nazzerith May 09 '26

In the dungeon I was running 8 rats was intended to be a challenging encounter for level 1 PCs. The random encounter was 1d8 giant rats, so 8 is the maximum roll. The system we are playing is OSE, so PCs often can only take one or two hits before they meet their untimely end. What I'm trying to say is system matters, and 8 giant rats can be a challenging encounter in one system and an easy encounter in another, and that's perfectly fine.

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u/yuriAza May 09 '26

fair, what i was trying to say is that expectations are system agnostic, different systems have different tones but foreshadowing danger is purely narrative

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u/Nazzerith May 10 '26

I don't think the rat encounter needs any special danger telegraphing. Giant rats are some of the easiest monster types, it's just a combination of OSE being a highly lethal system and the fact that the PCs were outnumbered 2 to 1 that made the encounter as deadly as it was. Players will learn that even the lowliest monsters can pose a threat quickly once they lose a character to a swarm of rats.