Dynamic melee tables, following a meditation on friendships in freshwater ponds

I'm always tryna think of ways to nudge my players use their own damn cognitive-ass skills more and their character skills and abilities less. From afar, I admire old editions of d&d for their austerity in this regard: I dunno, asshole. How ARE you, half a broadsword, and a clutch of robin eggs gonna cross the Pit of the Beef Weird?

But my players are only abstractly aware of the contextual problem-solving in older editions, so me sandbagging skills and abilities wholesale is like an amphibian saying to his fish buddy "Ok Jen we're gonna work on that air-breathing today!" and hurling her out of the lake.

Kyle, no I don't-- KYLE, JESUS NO

The calamitous severity of this approach is self-evident.

I believe 5e combat places a burdensome opportunity cost on melee combatants who choose not to use the Attack action(s) on their turn. Compoundingly I find that having to burn your action to Disengage* tends to render static, process-oriented battlefields where the self-reinforcing order of operations

1. Close
2. Thwack
3. Repeat #2 until someone hits 0hp, then begin again at #1

recurses ad mortem for melee combatants. The game, in the bones of its arithmetic, rewards thwackers for this behavior.** To be fair, my players, lil sugarsnaps that they are, often find ways to diversify the potential tedium of a fight by thinking outside of their character sheets. And yeah while my tastes may run towards the gonzo, I don't want EVERY fight turning into a Cirque show at the MGM Grand.

So I'm fixin to try out these dynamic melee tables. The idea is that, based on the attacker's size relative to the target's size, the attacker will roll randomly for a dynamic effect if their to-hit roll exceeds the target's AC by 7 + the PC's proficiency bonus. If the attacker rolls a critical hit, they roll critical damage and get to pick which effect they want.

If attacking creature is the same size as or bigger than target, and exceeds AC by [PC proficiency bonus + 7] or more

1. Target is pinned/stuck to something in the environment, must dislodge itself to move/attack on its next turn.

2. Target is tossed/pushed 5 ft from its current spot to an unoccupied spot, but remains standing. You pick where it goes.

3. Target is tossed/pushed 5 ft from its current spot to an unoccupied spot. Lands prone. You pick where it goes.

4. Target is flung/heaved into the air, landing 1d2 grids (or 5 - 10 ft) from current spot. Lands prone. You pick where it goes. Takes 1d6 bludgeoning damage.

5. Your melee attacks are so savage, you have discombobulated your target. If it has more than 0 hp, it has the Stunned condition until the start of its next turn.

6. You can add up to half your movement speed to your speed this turn, and use it now. You provoke no opportunity attacks on this turn.

7. You can take one more attack action on this turn.

8. You push, trip, or hurl target into one or more of its allies within 5 ft. This can either knock them both prone, cause 1d6 bludgeoning damage to both, or something along these lines.

9. ARTERY! 1d6 additional damage, and 1d6 damage rolled at the start of target's every turn unless it is healed magically or stanched with a DC12 Medicine (Wis) check.

10. Fearsome thwacks. Target is so shaken by your attacks that is gains the Frightened condition for 1d2 rounds.

If attacking creature is smaller than target and exceeds AC by [PC proficiency bonus + 7] or more

1. You can mount or otherwise climb onto your enemy.

2. You can trip, knock down, or otherwise hobble your enemy momentarily. It lands prone. [(CR/4)d6] damage

3. Your attack disorients your enemy -- move it to last in initiative order for the rest of the fight.

4. Through raw strength, magic, trickery, or cunning you cause your enemy to be pushed or move in a direction and facing of your choosing. It is not prone.

If I done my math right (and this is NEVER a sure thing), that means that a level 5 character with a +7 to-hit has a 25% chance of triggering a dynamic melee hit on an enemy with AC 13, 20% for AC 14, and so on. I haven't playtested this yet or even thought it through all that hard, but I'm gonna use these in my next session. If you read this and have a thought, leave a thought.

***

*How did disengaging or the equivalent work in past editions of dnd?

**tip of the cap, however, to the Fighter's Superiority Dice.

The works of man in the American West, unicorn babysitters, & 'ZARD FIGHT

At some point in the 1960's, American naturalist, essayist, and national treasure Edward Abbey looked out over the new, dam-formed Lake Powell near the Utah/Arizona border. Where his fellow citizens saw virginal liquid prairie upon which they might sow the seeds of their leisure, Abbey saw the roof of a mausoleum: drowned, irreplaceable canyonlands hidden in their repose under dozens of millions of acre-feet of water that weren't there before.

Mostly, he could not get over these tart lil Park Services signs on the shore:

PLAY SAFE
SKI ONLY IN CLOCKWISE DIRECTION
LET'S ALL HAVE FUN TOGETHER!

Yep there is black comedy in speedboats, RV's, and car campers -- siege instruments of the vacation-industrial complex -- marshaling in the craw of one of the southwest's most indecipherable (Abbey's word) and sphincter-loosening (my word) expanses. And this was NOT lost on him; it appears to be the only thing he left with.

To which I say: ok, Abbey has the moral right of way here but have you ever water skied? Them shits can be FUN. Sometimes you cross a desert and you wanna jump in a lake.

In this spirit, below is a dumb, fun exercise that I'll drop into play if I feel like my d&d campaign has become the grimmest of tits. Maybe the PC's just escaped The Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine (which means someone has just died or at the very least suffered battlefield amputation). Maybe one of them just got tugbodied. Maybe I'm sensing grief fatigue but I don't wanna give the PC's a total fluffer like oh my god guys these unicorns wanna go on a date night but they can't find a babysitter for their adorable but rascally unikids. 

[Side note: this is one thing that grinds my gears about 5e. The chunked-up character creation process basically begs players to fall in love with the achieved, huffy little striver they've just dreamed into existence. It feels rude to kill them, like how could you. Well.]

'ZARD FIGHT (click for access to game) is intended to be a lurid, wild, point-scoring spell duel between the PC's and their opponent(s). Since the outcome is wholly dependent on luck, I either a.) make the duel free of stakes and communicate this to the PC's, or b.) allow the parties bet gold on it; in any case I play up the abject lunacy of the whole sorcerous duel. I have found that 'ZF encourages laughs and creativity from both extroverted and reserved players, and functions well as a brief (~20 minute) interlude to reinvigorate play. As in all things, YMMV.

• The duel is organized like baseball innings: the opponent takes a turn, then PC1. Then the opponent, then PC2. And so on. 
• To afford the players a dramatic comeback opportunity and demonstrate the spirit of the game, I always have the opponent (read: DM) go first.
• Players (let's say, uh, Chris) pick any Spell Part 1 based on what appeals to them. Each Spell Part 1 has a random base number attached to it that they can't see, like say 5 or 13. Then Chris picks any Spell Part 2 to complete an awesome-sounding spell; this has a similarly hidden random arithmetic operation attached to it. Like +6, or -2, or /3. Snippet is probably better'n words here (hidden values shown):

• Then the DM does the math, notes the score (I keep the running score visible to all, for HIGH DRAMA):

• ...and lets the players know "Poor/decent/great score, Chris" by glancing at this:

• Then? Well Chris pretty much gets to describe a buck-gonzo turn of Magic: The Gathering using the spell they just chose as a guide, making it as insane, horrific, or funny as they want. Don't limit their rosebud imaginations. Do they summon an army of baleful Duanes to besiege their opponent? Spill their enemy's vitals in the dust with an enfeebling enema? Summon their opponent's grandmother, only to bind her as thrall to the demon Fgulnarp, Vizier of Pus and Regret? You tell me, Chris.
• The DM, having access to these hidden values, just rolls 2d20 for random results and narrates accordingly. I just rolled Cloud of Agriculture and Groping Cloaca, for example. The mind races at the arcane possibilities. 
• Spell parts and their values are removed once used. 
• Then you repeat the rounds for as many PC's as are partaking. Team with the most points after the last PC goes, wins.

***

To rationalize the participation of nonmagical characters, when 2 sides consent to a duel I warp 'em to a dramatic-ass battlefield on a different plane with black clouds racing under a tie-dye sky. Towers beholden to unknowable geometries blink in the distance. The words of power (spell list) hang over them like arcane commandments written in energy. Here, they are all casters. Their opponent, the hierophant Anki Ketki Pomabb, keatons into 4 identical clones, 1 for each PC. Let's fight, 'zards. Wait, what's that, Tormented Ghost of Edward Abbey?

PLAY SAFE
SKI ONLY IN CLOCKWISE DIRECTION
LET'S ALL HAVE FUN TOGETHER!

Well yeah, sometimes.

The Tugbody

Hanging in the dark right there at the edge of your campfire or outside the window of the inn, a bad face. Rictus smile under eyewhites. Now the grin clambers towards you, limbs at vomitous orthogonal angles like a lizard -- there, it's in the light now and you can see it. A naked human with darkly translucent skin and clean, beautiful genitals. You recognize it? It unfurls arms and legs to restrain your companions. It unhinges its jaw to take you in, moaning quietly. It is still grinning. It never blinks.

Yep, checks out.

Ok, here's the deal: it is known to the Sidereal Opsits of Rensz, whose gorges are forever exposed from a lifetime spent directing their tearful investigations towards the stars, that dense and dim singularities sit in the great void beyond the sky and consume. Worlds and stars. Light. Everything. The works! It is known to the Opsits as well that on rare occasions these singularities meet and devour each other. What is not known to the Sidereal Opsits of Rensz is that such meetings effect the birth of an old-wives' bugaboo: the tugbody. When two of these devouring cataclysms cross paths in the emptiness of space, someone somewhere who went to sleep (demi-)human wakes up as a child of the hungry singularities: a tugbody.

It's one of the universe's most touching mating rituals: as two black holes circle and drink each other, spacetime yawing and disintegrating around them, parsecs away some blameless sentient putz emerges from a good night's sleep an agent of their propagation. The universe, man.


By day the tugbody resembles the man or woman it was. Mostly. If it's in a town fulla 7, 8, and 9 CHA duds it'll bide its time until a charismatic adventurer passes through (charisma being, after all, another form of gravity). But something is off. It smiles a little too much. It repeats what you just said, not all the time but enough to notice. Doesn't blink much. Wait, come to think of it, did that merchant at your table ever blink? It will offer secrets, favors, trenchant gifts; things the PC's might want. Dear PC, don't accept these, even one! The moment you do, you are prey. If you glance back as you leave the tavern, it is looking at you.

Like this, JUST like this.

That night it comes for you as a perfect, inky human, nude and decisive with impossible joints. Vocalizing softly, it will attempt to devour the PC with the highest CHA and subdue others but now it will take what it can get. A gravitational creature, it adds/subtracts its victim’s CHA modifier to its gulping attempt. If it succeeds in devouring its victim it closes its eyes and lips beatifically – at last! – as the poor soul kicks and screams repulsively in the milkrubber distension of its gut, and then... gone. The tugbody immediately teleports to its lair to digest. The victim drops to the floor alive and undamaged where a second ago the tugbody stood or crouched -- a miracle? Alas, no, they are star-sick.

And then this, sorta.

In 1 hour, 1d4+4 discrete points of starlight appear on the victim's body. Any oldwife or stooped elder could tell you in the candlelight that the victim has to hunt down the slumbering tugbody before the sun comes up or they are doomed. You've gone star-sick, luv. Outrace the sun for your soul. They're close: the victim has 2 days to kill the tugbody in its lair, or at midnight on the 2nd day the victim is yanked screaming into the firmament by the glowing napes of its star-sickness, like a marionette violently recalled to its puppeteer, to form a new constellation. Simultaneously, the tugbody molts. Its sloughed leavings skim the ceiling of its lair and then ascend slowly but purposefully into the night sky quite as if in pursuit of its starbound quarry. It leaves behind 1 marble-sized pitblack sphere weighing 800 lbs. This Singularity Pearl is valuable, worth 4d100gp x4 to transmutationists and alchemists, x2 to general wiz-holes and shrewd warlordy types, and x1 to randos like a vain noble. Pain in the ass to haul around, but the mind whirs at its potential uses. The abrupt new constellation will be visible to any astute skywatcher, among whose number are (of course) the Sidereal Opsits of Rensz. They chirrup and weep dispassionately as they record this astral development in the damp of their clay archival ceilings.

Constables I'm tellin yinz, he went up dat way. Yellin and glowin n'at.

The victim retains a type of locked-in, diffuse consciousness as a constellation: dimly aware of floating in a vacuum, unable to move or act. Eventually they can feel powerful moaning tugs from a great distance as something dense, hungry and familiar draws ineluctably closer in the void.

***

I reckon the tugbody is more fluff monster than gameable monster right now, but up next I'll make BRIEF vague gestures at a statblock, some hooks, rumors, spoors, lair bla bla.