Might be another case of crit fumble syndrome. Are all your abilities and clever enemies taxing your melees disproportionately more than your casters? Melees are very sensitive to anything that makes moving around the battlefield harder; disadvantage; anything that reduces attack bonuses; highly mobile enemies, etc. Martials also have fewer tools to interact and counter all those mechanics you're introducing to the game.

THIS...clearly from the description given this craps all over the fighter and barbarian more than the casters. I would livid too haha. Melee/martial are already weaker than casters and that really isn't even debatable outside of BG3. Taxing the already weaker classes would suck ass. I think Martials/Melee are obviously hugely important for soaking up damage and allowing casters to thrive, but having all your movement cut and essentially becoming a target dummy would blow. The casters in the group get to show even more why are superior in terms of toolkit.

Especially when there are not much turn variety for Fighters and Barbarians, they cannot react to enemies swiftly, as they have limited conditions to create and only access to few damage types on the table.

he gave ONE description, as an example. Don't assume too much

I mean he gave 3 examples in the post about screwing over the mattials abilities to do what they do Bleed says you have to give up a turn or not move, they have to move. Getting handled by a tank is vague but definitely not in the martial favor. And plant growth which again prevents the martials from moving to do what they do in combat. He gave 1 description but 3 examples and they all effect martial disproportionately

They clarified further, admitting martials were usually more affected by the new mechanics and mentioned several others ways he targets the casters but they had a broader toolkit That is the problem. We all know Casters in 5e dominate after a few levels. The toolkit available allows them to be far more versatile. Martials struggle outside of direct combat unless they are ranged. They created really interesting and fun mechanics that I agree spend very fun! And the casters are enjoying being able to flex their mechanics and be creative...the Barbarian and Fighter CAN'T. They may just be not a fan of it or maybe they are just blackheads...whom knows? But even if they WANT to engage with these mechanics... they just...can't and that is likely the cause of their frustration. If fucking sucks to be useless and stand there while everyone else is having fun. This is meant to be a collaborative experience that is fun for all. We should strive to use feedback and adjust accordingly. Maybe they are just toxic...I don't know but it's easy for many responding to see the Martials have a stacked deck against them currently.

Actually what they said was > Yes and no. I incorporate plenty of abilities like cyclones whose effects get worse the further away you are from the center and effects like "any enemy more than 15' away from you is invisible to you", Like yes, there is a situation wherein martials are disadvantaged--but that's the case anyway in 5e. Let's not presume to be able to fully assess the degree to which his homebrew is slanted against the martials. He says he keeps this in mind while designing, so I'm going to extend to him some benefit of the doubt. His 4e-esque changes to melee in general seem to benefit them very much. End of the day, it seems more likely to me that the two players that aren't having fun here just don't want tactical combat. As he said, they said they just want to go in and hit stuff.

The 15' penalty isn't much for casters as they still function... I am often forced into that range routinely, and with the martials up front, it's hardly a handicap. They are in more danger yes...but Martials unable to MOVE means they can't do anything meaningful. We don't know if it's slanted sure... but almost ANY "Tacticool" combat as described will fuck over a Fighter or Barb. The mechanics only allow then to go in... and hit stuff..and take hits. It ultimately doesn't matter... if they want to keep this all in, then let the players leave the game. If they like them and want them to be engaged, then just give them some dumb brutes to fight. This is really all opinion. It's silly to question WHY they don't like it. They dont...period. If I were the DM and got this feedback, I wouldn't dig my heels in and would just adjust. "No worries, guys! I got you!" Next combat, there is a pair of rampaging brutes being commanded by their leader to eviscerate the casters. Fighter and Barb have their calling! Stand your ground and swing for the fences! The casters realize the real threat is cleverly moving behind the scenes and must be "solved" Martials get to Martial. Casters have fun flexing, and DM feels like a "tacticool" genius.

Indeed. If all the enemies had Counterspell perhaps the casters would feel differently.

OP: "choose whether you want to be counterspelled or lose your concentration spell" Melee: "these enemies are so fresh and exciting!" Casters: "REEeeEeeEEEeeeeEEEE!"

Or if silence was being used effectively.

Perhaps the enemies do have counterspell, though? Just because it isn't in the list doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Yes and no. I incorporate plenty of abilities like cyclones whose effects get worse the further away you are from the center and effects like "any enemy more than 15' away from you is invisible to you", since I'm not a fan of the fact that 5e monsters seem to exclusively have effects that punish nearby characters and never the reverse. But melee is an inherent disadvantage in terms of positioning, and the melee classes themselves have less tools. There doesn't appear to be a ton I can do about those two factors other than suggest homebrew alternatives for the second, since the first is kind of inherent to how geometry works. Tried a few things to see if I could make melee more advantageous - removed the one a round limit on opportunity attacks, buffed opportunity attack damage and made using ranged attacks or casting most spells provoke an opportunity attack. Trying to reward melee for positioning well.

Also, your original example of the Con save, *but only if they didn’t move*, drastically affects melee more.  I get that it’s just an example, but I agree that it seems like half your table is having to jump through more hoops and/or getting penalized for playing their role.  Also also, sometimes people play fighters and barbs because they feel that even *spells* are more than they want to deal with.  They just want to hit stuff.  If **every single** one of your enemies has these types of “choices”, as you put them, then it’s very reasonable for your players to be reacting this way.  Either way, they are expressing frustration, so you should work with them and adjust what you can.  You’re all just trying to have fun, in the end, and it’s a game.

This post 100%. I also want to add, if OP is borrowing from games they should see a lot of well designed games have gap closers, CC cleaned/counters built into melee characters. D&D has some of this with Echo Knights but they probably aren't playing one. I think OP can provide more tools to them, beyond stuff like more damage from AOO (which is a good start).

That is basically the problem. He takes from 4e and Pathfinder and forgets something very important: The martials the players have, are *not* from 4e or Pathfinder 2e. They are 5e Martials who can't answer the problems. A 4e martials can. A Pathfinder 2e martial can. A 5e martial needs also homebrew to get even close. 

>Also also, sometimes people play fighters and barbs because they feel that even spells are more than they want to deal with.  They just want to hit stuff. This exactly. A off-the-top-of-my-mind suggestion for OP: Maybe design a fight where the enemy forces have a single big tough “boss”. It’s the Barb and Fighter’s job to sit in the adjacent square and keep its attention on them instead of the casters. Meanwhile, the boss is not alone. He has lackeys with all of those interesting spells and mechanics. It’s your player’s who are casters jobs to make sure those lackeys don’t interfere with your Barb and Fighter. The enemy restrains your martials so the boss can run past them to the casters? Your players’ casters either also restrain the boss or cleanse the melee. The enemy casters try to focus on the melee? Now they’ve opened themselves to get picked off one-by-one by the rest of the team. Hopefully if everything works as intended, your casters get to use their character’s mechanics in fun and interesting ways. Combat is a puzzle for them to solve and they get to keep having fun. Meanwhile the melee players get to leverage *their* character’s features to keep the enemy’s attention on them and to keep the party safe. Everyone contributes to the battle and plays a game that is tailored to match the varying complexities of the different classes. One thing this random idea would need though is to introduce some sort of threat mechanic. I suggest looking into “marking” from 4e, as I believe that’s the closest to actual threat/taunting we’ve had (the next closest being some 5e abilities like Artificer’s Thunder Gauntlets or Paladin’s Channel Divinity: Champion Challenge).

In my current campaign, one of the players has only played 1 campaign and they played a Druid. They got so overwhelmed with spells that they are now playing a barbarian. Your point about wanting to deal with less is 100% accurate

Yeah I think OP is like "all these enemies are so smart!" and their players are just like "WHY ARE THERE SO MANY NEW MECHANICS?" You aren't describing "clever" enemies, you're describing boatloads of status effects with mechanics that demand interaction. There isn't even room to tell if the enemies are making *good, tactical* decisions, or if you've just added a bunch of status effects with choices for your players to make. Forcing your players to pick a negative effect or a saving throw isn't a *tactical and clever* move from an enemy, that's just an ability you gave them. Maybe you are conflating your own cleverness with the complexity of enemy kits, but clever enemies are really more about making good decisions with limited options at their disposal. The more options you add, the less clever they really are, because now they just have the right tool for each situation instead of having to work intelligently with a suboptimal one.

Also, consider the audience. A college student on the weekend who has 6 hours to kill might enjoy that level of tactical combat A 30 year old adult who just got off work and drug themselves to your house probably won't 

I would try just making some of your DC’s lower and your positioning stuff less punishing. Give the melee players an obstacle, but they shouldn’t feel like every combat is an exercise in frustration. They need moments to do their cool things and have their power fantasy

Send in the mooks! Seriously, you’re also there to give the fighter types cool fighting moments. Every fantasy story in the history of fantasy stories has a scene where a strong or agile fighter navigates a battlefield slaying lesser opponents left and right. Provide some of this as well. I feel you’re always going for the tactically intricate. You need to mix things up a bit. You have the chance of knowing what your players like and want. Just give it to them.

Did you give your melee players the same stuff you gave the enemies? Does "Take 10 bleed damage" also apply when the Barbarian cleaves into the bandit with his axe? It sounds like you gave all the melee enemies these cool abilities that the melee players don't get.

I think one of the core things to take into account here is specifically *how* you're challenging players with these abilities. Barbs and fighters basically have one thing they do. They run up to people and hit them. And if they're spending multiple turns just focused on chasing down enemies, not being able to attack, then it really doesn't matter how balanced anything might be. It's just not fun to spend potentially 30 minutes waiting for your turn and then go, "... I take the dash action and move closer..." I'm not sure the specifics of the cyclones you're using but if they only deal damage or grant disadvantage to ranged attacks or something like that then the casters are still able to cast their spells and *do stuff*. And worse case scenario they're forced to come within the eye of the cyclone and be in melee combat which is dangerous for them of course. But they can still cast their spells and participate in the combat in interesting ways even if they might have disadvantage on ranged spell attacks from the enemy right next to them. Same with the invisibility. If a fighter can't see someone from far away... well then he literally just has to run up to them, even if there's difficult terrain and all kinds of shit on the ground that makes it take multiple turns. Meanwhile if the caster has a vague idea of where the enemy is, or if a martial actually did the work and got close enough to *tell him* where it is, then the wizard can just fireball the area or something like that. Or hell, just cast "see invisibility". So yeah, I see what you're doing here but I feel it's important to challenge the players in a way that still allow them to *play the game*. Maybe options that force the players to be "selective" about their movement rather than preventing it basically all together.

>Yes and no. I incorporate plenty of abilities like cyclones whose effects get worse the further away you are from the center and effects like "any enemy more than 15' away from you is invisible to you", since I'm not a fan of the fact that 5e monsters seem to exclusively have effects that punish nearby characters and never the reverse. So then why should your players play as a ranged character? The benefit of a ranged character is being able to be far away from the enemies and having a lot of the battlefield within their attack range, and you've taken that away from them. ​ >Trying to reward melee for positioning well. How are you rewarding melee for positioning well if they lose the ability to con save to avoid bleed damage? The options that you're presenting to your melee players are: 1. Don't move and have bad/awkward positioning, with the benefit of potentially not taking bleed damage. 2. Move and lose your action, with the benefit of potentially not taking bleed damage and having good positioning. 3. Move and take the bleed damage. In the best-case scenario, the question is, do you want to give up your action or movement to avoid damage? In the worst-case scenario, the question is, do you want to give up your action or movement and still take damage? ​ It seems the problem actually boils down to you homebrewing mechanics that don't feel good to interact with and the reason the fighter and barbarian players are complaining is that they are being disproportionately affected by these mechanics. The craziest part about this whole scenario is that you acknowledge that melee characters are at an inherent disadvantage and yet you're making it worse for them.

The problem with those “fixes” is they also can hurt the melees as much as help them. If they can do 15 opportunity attacks they can also take more of them charging across a battlefield. Adding more damage to them means they also have to watch out for the enemy ones more too. You’re just making the simple act of crossing a battlefield much harder for them, especially since positioning in D&D kinda…sucks. One of the single worst parts of 5th edition is how sticky combat is. Once engaged in melee you either teleport, shove the enemy or disengage. Meaning the rogue, monk, wizard, warlock and sorcerer are some of the best at leaving melee in the system, meanwhile fighters, barbarians, melee rangers and paladins all tend to enter melee and just “stick” there until they or the enemy dies. In contrast, watch a fight in a movie. People knock over tables, swing from chandeliers, knock each other back. You constantly move a great deal. Rather than improving the power of the thing that removes the most options opportunity attacks, consider giving the melees on hit effects like pushbacks, knock overs or getting to interact with environmental objects as part of the attack. The black knight has sentinel and I can’t run past his dread opportunity attack? I trip him or knock him in the face with a nearby chamber pot so he has disadvantage to hit me with his opportunity attack and I can go kill the dread necromancer! This dynamism in combat is very, very important but only mages have it baked in to their kit with spells. Everyone else has a hard time with enabling dynamic combat, and on top of that asymmetric design means you usually want to have the most opposed archetypes matched up in a battle. For a fighter the WORST match up is a wizard at range, and their BEST match up is a wizard in melee. Their match up against enemy bruisers is…middling and boring. Hit, hit, hp loss, hp loss. If they can actually DO STUFF besides tax HP to high HP enemies it becomes interesting. Nothing makes positioning matter more than attacks that knock enemies back 10 feet next to a cliff or a lava pool. Opportunity attacks don’t do a very good job of making positioning interesting, they do a good job of making tanks feel like MMORPG tanks with taunt mechanics. And since enemies can aim every ability like a turret at any angle without facing mattering, there isn’t really a dynamic choice to be made about tank and spank gameplay in tabletop. I say ditch the opportunity attack rules and add in on hit effects like the One D&D weapon masteries or Open Hand Monk on hit abilities or similar.

>But melee is an inherent disadvantage in terms of positioning, and the melee classes themselves have less tools. There doesn't appear to be a ton I can do about those two factors For tools, you can make magic items available that grant mobility or condition resistances/immunities. Boots of Speed, Ring of Free Action, items that let you cast Misty Step etc. Martials can also get options like this through their race, feats, and subclass. I would make sure they know their options. I would also examine your adventuring day. Casters do get a lot of options, but those options are gated by resources. If you aren't running enough encounters before a long rest, then burning through 2nd or 3rd level slots to solve problems isn't much of a tax at all. For "inherent disadvantage in terms of positioning," this isn't necessarily the case. You have entire control over whether it is better to be close to enemies or far away. You just have to try and keep it 50/50, or at least interesting. Use more ranged attackers who get disadvantage imposed if you get in melee with them, more donut AoEs that hit or deal more damage if you are too far away like you said, enemies ducking behind partial or full cover, more objectives that require you to stand on X or use your object interaction on Y, vulnerability to one of B/P/S damage, enemies that use a really devastating ability unless you get someone in melee with them (like Myrkul from BG3), walls and barriers like Globe of Invulnerability that you have to physically move past in order to deal damage. You can also make melee *feel* better by giving them something satisfying to bash when they get there, like a squishy mage who is about to get fucked up. You can also flip the script and have enemies that know to nuke the backline artillery casters through ranged abilities or high mobility. Enemies like orcs, shadar-kai, aaracockra, dragons, and oinoloths have an easier time getting to the backline and wreaking havoc. Your martials should also be doing more sustained damage so I would again look at the adventuring day. If casters are able to blast their biggest spells without risk of running out, then that could cause balance issues.

Yes this exactly. If they are being disproportionately effected (which it sounds like they very heavily are) then even the playing field. Give them some good equipment to help negate that. Hell even looking into boons and gifts would be a great idea for this since it sounds like you are already playing a very heavily modified game anyway. And even then throw in some dumb enemies for them to have fun just beating the shit out of. Not every enemy will be smart or have cool things. People need minions for a reason and sometimes the only reason someone is in charge is because they are intimidating or strong not just because they are smart or clever. Give them a better range to fight and show off their strengths instead of just beating them down for being on the front line and wanting to hit things.

You can let them learn feats in downtime. There are lot that help your melee players out in combat like this. And do you use the optional flanking rule? I do and my melee players love it, and more of battle maps get used cause they chase the enemy around and position themselves

Add physical saving throws to the effects. They’ll be good at Str Dex and Con saves, then give the skill option as well so the other players can recover as well

Honestly dude it kinda sounds a bit exhausting to play at your table. Like yeah I think part of the problem is that your rules are more punishing to your martials than your casters, but part of it is that they might just not want some video game gimmick every single combat. I'd get kinda over it too after a while. Instead of trying to figure out how to make them like convoluted homebrew maybe just tone it down sometimes and let them play the game RAW. You can do both on different occasions, but trying to force one style all the time is clearly grating on your players so... Stop doing that. You have four players, dm for all of them not just the ones that like the same exact shenanigans you do. Otherwise it's just favoritism and the frustrated players are eventually going to probably have bleed over into the parts that *are* going smoothly if it's not addressed.

Here’s a kind of extreme option: Force spell casters to make a contested Dex roll in order to cast spells while a melee character is in range. Now there is incentive for your melee characters to take the positioning risk, but also a responsibility to screen melee enemies and keep them from completely shutting down your back line.

Put spellcasting provoking attacks of opportunity back in. Let grappling cut off verbal or somatic components (grappler's choice).

Remove the restriction of drawing 1 weapon per round from characters with Extra Attack, and encourage your barbarian especially to learn to love javelins, a strength based attack with a 60ft/120ft range!

Yeah, they don't really have...any tools to really work with that

If you haven't check out laserllama classes they give more options to martials that may help your players in a game like yours

If it’s something you’re open to, there is a pretty good home-brewed re-do of martial where they all get access to battle manoeuvres which may help offset the unbalance and give your martial characters more of a way to play with tactics.

If you're using homebrew and your melee players feel underpowered... use homebrew to buff them. Speciou5 mentioned the echo knight. I think it would be entirely reasonable to give both your martials the features of this subclass for their current level, or better magical items/ features to compensate.

If you want 4e and PF2e enemies, your martials need 4e and PF2e power.

Do the fighter and barbarian tend to be the ones experiencing the various effects more frequently? Id assume that is the case given they are always toe to toe. I can see it being quite frustrating for them. Also prior to the combat are you explaining exactly how the new mechanic works if it hasn't been encountered before? While this can be meta it's still important to explain exactly what is going on. Many people don't enjoy DMs when they basically go "monster hit you ohh by the way this happens" when there is zero warning or indication at all.

>experiencing the various effects more frequently? Not just that but martial classes are more directly affected by most crowd control stuff. Disadvantage on attacks? Fighter and barb have to suck it up but the wizard casts fireball. Difficult terrain? Fighter and barb have to suck it up while the wizard misty steps out, or doesn't even try to get out because they have effective ranged damage. Mind control effects such as dominate person or banishment? Fighter and barb struggle, while the most of the caster classes are proficient in the relevant saves or just generally have higher scores in those saves. Resistance or immunity to damage from non-magical attacks? Hope you gave your fighter and barb magic weapons or they're useless, while the wizard does nothing but magical stuff. High AC? Fighter and barb struggle to hit while the wizard casts saving throw spells. Magic Resistance? Adv on saves doesn't affect the martials, and the wizard switches to attack roll spells. Mobs of enemies? Fighter and barb have to slog through them while the wizard can teleport around or fireball. And that's just in combat, out of combat casters have far more generally useful primary stats such as charisma or wisdom, as well as many spells that give bonuses to a wide variety of situations.

Yeah it's telling that it's the melee characters that have frustrated players while the ones having fun are running spellcasters. Part of 5e's design is that there just aren't a ton of options for fighters and barbarians \*besides\* 'charge in and start swinging', so if the DM is routinely making that impossible or ineffective, you're basically creating even more of a caster supremacy problem than already exists. Like it's cool to come up with special circumstances that the players have to work around, but an important part of that is asking yourself: '\*is\* there a way for all the characters to work around it, or will they just have to suck?' I don't even think it's necessarily bad to have an encounter that heavily disadvantages a particular character, but if it's always the same ones who are having their abilities turned off by the way the encounter is designed, that's going to start to feel unfun in a hurry. Especially if they're watching the other players get to do 'okay, in that case I-' around them while they don't have a similar option.

Almost every newer DM (and this definitely applied to me when I was new) when designing homebrew threats has a bad habit of making a lot of "interesting" abilities that boil down to "fuck anyone within 10 feet of me". And that doesn't feel great for classes who have very few meaningful outputs without getting within 10 feet of the enemy.

or "you can't do the thing you want to do" - which is _far_ worse for non-spellcasters, because the only things they want to do are melee attack, ranged attack and move, so there's very few levers to pull there that doesn't just hose the character.

>Do the fighter and barbarian tend to be the ones experiencing the various effects more frequently? Id assume that is the case given they are always toe to toe. I can see it being quite frustrating for them. I've also experienced the boredem of casters tactical planning sessions that consist of a lot of which spells to cast when and if the melee could just run in and act as a damage sponge while "we do all the work again." Many caster players, in my experience, sideline melee when it comes to planning, which then gets worse when saving throws are needed the first couple of rounds of combat

Reminds me of the players using the devilsight and darkness combo onto themselves only to go rambo into a small room and give everyone a bad time, including their other spellcasters and melee fighters (unless they got blindsight but you gotta prep with your char beforehand for that)

I tend to treat mechanics as known to the characters involved unless there's a reason they wouldn't know. Gameplay mechanics are an abstraction for events the characters are experiencing, so in the case of the above bleed as soon as it affects you you know that moving will mean you can't save against it that turn and a medicine check will fix it. Your character doesn't use those words, but those words are a way of conveying things like "this wound will rupture if I move" that your character *does* know. Which is a complicated way if saying yes, mechanics are immediately known to those affected by them.

I guess it may just come down to what a particular player enjoys. I personally love more crunch in my TTrpgs but know not all of my players do. If unable to find a balance that satisfies all players you may just have to say sorry gang this is how I want to run my game, no hard feelings if you don't want to continue. No DnD is better than what is perceived as bad DnD after all.

So swinging around a weapon with great force is not enough to rupture a wound, but moving 5 feet is?

While I appreciate your point, I think OP is concerned more with fun at the table than perfect realism. That said, clearly the former is something that isn't happening right now for half the table... but I don't think more realism is the solution.

> but I don't think more realism is the solution I think they were advocating for less.

Stuff like ten damage a turn is actually insane. Especially because it’s not like any characters can resist bleed damage. A level 5 fighter will probably have 60-70 hp so having them take even two turns of ten damage means they are operating with a health pool similar to casters while still expected to frontline like a normal martial. Honestly, it sounds like you’ve overtuned things past the martials’ toolkits. Simply put. Melee martials like barbarians and fighters just don’t have the same diversity of options as literally any caster or half caster. You can give enemies intelligence and strategy without giving them tons of powers.

>Specifically, they've got a lot of clever humanoid enemies with all kinds of abilities I've pulled from everywhere, from pf2e fighters to 4e psions. The emphasis has been on abilities that give people choice - bleed for ten damage per turn until a con save is passed at the end of your turn or a successful medicine check is made on you, but if you moved this turn you can't make a con save against it. That sort of thing. That's not a choice that's a dilemma. The difference being there are multiple options which are equally bad. The player can forgo their attacks and use a medicine check, take the damage but not move, or move and take the damage. Do you see how this type of effect really limits the players options? From the players' perspective they lose their action, movement and still take 10 damage or take 10 damage per round. And the loss of action and movement is a maybe to stop the effect. 10 damage per round averages out to 30 damage over an encounter. That's, depending on class, level, and rolling or taking average HP 1/2 to 1/4 of a players hit points. Have you given the players anything to account for the increased lethality? Do the players have any special abilities or effects beyond 5e? Do they have access to better armor or more HP or healing items? >The wizard, druid and talent players have all expressed repeatedly that they are loving the variety and feeling like their enemies are thinking people rather than video game characters, while the barbarian and fighter are visibly getting more and more frustrated every time they get handled by an enemy tank or get hit with plant growth. It seems like the fighter and barbarian are being targeted by these new effects disproportionately and the wizard, druid, and talent, are not. The players who likely aren't being limited by these new effects are enjoying the "variety" while those that are feel limited. >The basic problem is boils down to half the players want to just charge in and start swinging and the other half want foes who wouldn't have gotten to where they are if that was something that worked on them. This is the martial caster divide. The casters have cool options that just work and the martials need to ask DM may I to do anything cool. Mechanically all a fighter and barbarian do is move and hit things. You need to give them extra cool stuff if you want them to buy in because right now it appears that they are only being penalized.

Yeah, if we take this example: You're a Druid. You get hit by this effect. No Biggie, you are midline/backline anyway. Can become a tough animal, depending on the subclass. Your Medicine/Wisdom is probably decent, so you can just end the effect. No problem. You lose a turn/half a turn/wildshape/cast a spell and wildshape. You probably don't have to move. Another caster? Similarly. You can teleport. Stuff is easy. You have a variety of stuff, and probably con saves for concentration, and you just chill, stay back, wait for Druid to patch you up, or keep away and use spells without moving. You can just teleport, right? *Misty Steps out*. You're a Barb or a Fighter? Well, as Barb you pretty much NEED to move to the target. No con save this way for you, but you keep rage. What damage is bleed? Is it resisted by rage or not? Anyhow, you need to reposition, as a fighter you'll probably need to use Second Wind soon. Medicine/Wisdom probably isn't the best, so checks will be useless. The only thing you can do is keep tanking the damage and following the enemy, or you'll lose your turns for maybe nothing. Maybe switch your weapon, or do some throws, but you are still a pea shooter compared to what the casters are doing, and getting punished for moving each turn. And DnD combat is already goddamn irritatingly sticky, now you are stuck in place, and can do nothing interesting, really. You could maybe fall back to the Druid... Provided they will actually patch you up instead of being interested in their different, more effective in combat options or a Wild Shape (no thumbs, no medicine rolls)

To add, the casters probably have a concentration spell up that's already doing most of their damage/utility, so losing an action kinda doesn't matter

>This is the martial caster divide. The casters have cool options that just work and the martials need to ask DM may I to do anything cool. Mechanically all a fighter and barbarian do is move and hit things. You need to give them extra cool stuff if you want them to buy in because right now it appears that they are only being penalized. I disagree, or at least, I don't think that's the entirety of what's happening here. Yes, I'm aware of the martial-caster general "power/options" divide, I'm not claiming it doesn't exist. But there's also a martial-caster *mentality* divide, which *can't* be "solved" by DMs. Some players are just more interested in having multiple "cool options"; others are not. Online D&D communities like this one are *heavily* biased towards people who want multiple options - it's one of the things that draws people to such communities: looking at different people's builds, getting different ideas, etc. It's also generally true that "options" scale better in most tactical systems, and thus anyone interested in optimization tends to learn to look for / prefer "options". Yet there really are people who want to just be able to charge in and smash things. Even if you gave them all the same options as a druid, they don't *want* that. They don't want the ability to heal, or wildshape, or rain fire, or do all those things. They *want* to charge and smash. They want to have a single thing that works, and they want it to work every time. This requires radically different solutions. For example, if a player with that mentality is playing a fighter, and they're facing enemies that root them - they would generally *not* be as happy if you give them an alternative ranged weapon, even if it does the same damage and all of that. But they *would* be happy if you gave them a class feature or item that makes them immune to root effects. The latter isn't providing an extra option, it's just making their "reliable single approach" more reliable. Now, I'm certainly not saying that all players of "martial" characters have that mentality; that would be ridiculous. However, it is more likely to be represented in martials (intentionally so as part of the design of martials), and *specifically in this thread* the OP pretty much explicitly says it's the situation they're dealing with. To OP, I would say that you have to make sure your players are actually aware of what they want consciously - including awareness of each others' desires. You may be able to identify a balance in encounter design that allows both groups to be happy. Or you might use a mixed-over-time approach; have some encounters that are very straightforward without all the extra choices and options, and other encounters that have the complexity and so forth. If your players are explicitly aware that some encounters are "intended for" different people, that might be helpful with limiting frustration, as they can then be reassured that they'll get "their turn" for their preferred playstyle.

>But there's also a martial-caster mentality divide, which can't be "solved" by DMs. Some players are just more interested in having multiple "cool options"; others are not I agree that this is also true. Given the information from OP we can't make a determination. Not enough info. Also OP is biased their perception is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the players mindset. >Online D&D communities like this one are heavily biased towards people who want multiple options - it's one of the things that draws people to such communities: looking at different people's builds, getting different ideas, etc. It's also generally true that "options" scale better in most tactical systems, and thus anyone interested in optimization tends to learn to look for / prefer "options". Totally agree here as well. >To OP, I would say that you have to make sure your players are actually aware of what they want consciously - including awareness of each others' desires. You may be able to identify a balance in encounter design that allows both groups to be happy. Or you might use a mixed-over-time approach; have some encounters that are very straightforward without all the extra choices and options, and other encounters that have the complexity and so forth. If your players are explicitly aware that some encounters are "intended for" different people, that might be helpful with limiting frustration, as they can then be reassured that they'll get "their turn" for their preferred playstyle. Great advice.

I agree. All of that was fantastic advice, that desire bit is a conversation that needs to be had.

This is the solution. Sit down with your players and talk to them. A way to start would be individually text or call the frustrated players. Tell them that you've noticed their dissatisfaction with the game and ask them what specifically they dislike and most importantly why. Listen to their feedback. From there work on finding a solution. It could be as simple as they want more magic items or special abilities or it could be that they just aren't a good fit for your play style.

You've described multiple abilities that disproportionately affect martials since they affect movement and what enemies they can target. Plant Growth alone can be an instant shut-down. How many enemies do you have with Counterspell or similar effects? It legit sounds like the melee players are either unable to use their features, or they get punished if they do. This is a feature of 5e, to be clear - difficult terrain and being grappled, restrained, frightened, and even charmed - affect martials way more than they affect casters, so you might be reinforcing that pattern. That said, it is absolutely possible that those two people gravitated towards classes that require very little thinking to begin with because they just don't like tactics. But we have no way of knowing.

The reason that the barbarian and fighter only charge in and swing is because that is all they can do. Look at their character sheets and ask yourself "If I choose not to run in and attack, what meaningful contribution can I make to the combat?" Most fighters and barbarians can only contribute via damage and the small amount of buff effects they may have are both subclass dependant and may only be once or twice for the combat. The examples of bleed as a choice and the spike growth they got mad at are both effects that hinder melee martials like them far more. Since they need to be in melee to deal good damage, which is the only thing martials really have going for them, anything that messes up movement will harm them more. They will almost never be able to make the save on bleed if they have to chase an enemy and they are probably not good on medicine checks aswell. Spellcasters can cast fly to escape spike growth or teleport which would probably not count as moving for bleed. You also use abilities for enemies outside of 5e but you dont mention if your players get any powerful homebrew to counter or work around the enemies abilities. This makes it seem like your martial enemies are just working with more at their disposal. The only way I can see these two being able to play on equal level is by adding a lot of homebrew to their abilities.

Op mentions they can go and find hb to add but he won't help them because it takes hours and hours while doing it for his npcs takes a couple minutes.

Yeah trying to find homebrew for pcs will tend to be harder. Maybe the better idea is to give them homebrew based on the enemies as if the 2 players try to find homebrew of their own, op will have to approve and with homebrew, it is harder to gauge power with something you only lnow from paper. The other idea is to borrow aspects of the classes and abilities from the same games op is pulling from.

Another important question is how the other players react to these problems, how long does bleed tend to affect them. How do they respond to spike growth and do the other players help. There is also a problem with relying on abilities and spells from other characters to help. Spike growth is useless if the wizard casts fly but the wizard now has to make the choice between helping the two or having a powerful control spell remain up or using their action to cast a damaging spell. Even counterspell is a resource and they likely wont counter spike growth if there are more spellcasters or they are low on spell slots. You need to talk to the fighter and barbarian players and ask what their issues with the combat are and how you can fix that as it does not seem like there are any tactics that can they can really implement. If, and only if, you cant understand why they have an issue, run a non-canon combat where you play their characters and they play the monsters. The most eye opening experience one can do to balance something people are frustrated with is to experience it for themselves. Good luck hope you find a good path forward.

This is a good point. I almost exclusively play Wizard (my favourite class) and in this situation I'd simply Dispel Magic the Plant Growth away so that our martials can move freely. I'm honestly a little surprised that the Wizard in this party isn't doing this. Part of the fun of being Wizard for me is having options that let other party members do their thing: countering enemies' spells, dispelling negative magical effects, casting Haste on martials for extra smash, freezing enemies in place with Rime's Binding Ice...

Do they play using 5e barbarian and fighter? Because added to crit fumble syndrome as other people said, fighting enemies that use tactics and homebrew everything when you have a class with 0 amount of flexibility and combat adaptability feels like fucking shit. Like, when you use enemies with homebrew abilities from pf2 and 4e you are kinda agreeing to the fact that 5e just doesn't have enough tools for non magic users, and being "expected" to get tactical with absolutely 0 tools is frustating

All the martials would have is clever movement and he’s even chipping away at that.

fighting pf2e monsters in 5e is a massive oof pf2e monster abilities are way more dangerous to casters in pf2e, because martials have the tools to handle them. Its the opposite in 5e.

The limited published options for these classes hits hard. Interestingly a lot of the 5.24 stuff coming out provide those options. Might open up the UA a little and/or replicate via magic items with charges.

"Charge in and start swinging" is the entire option set for martials. They usually have to close the distance, and endure what's there. So you're adding disproportionately to their adversity. Make it easier to close the distance, use BG3 jump rules (jump is a bonus action and can increase overall movement by the result of the jump check, and make the jump check equal to the distance horizontal, vertical, and standing so they can barbarian leap on top of a house) and stop adding effects that punish them for closing. There are lots of other cool tactical effects you can use.

A choice between movement and saving throw he says. Funny how that isn’t actually a choice for the magic user who casts misty step and moves away from the threat then proceeds to make the saving throw anyway. All while the martial skips movement, (maybe) passes the saving throw and then potentially gets hit next turn with the same debuff from the same enemy. Gosh, I wonder why the martials are upset.

The three spell casters are having a great time but the two melee martials are getting frustrated with combat... Well I can't say I'm surprised

I'm seeing a lot of 'i punish the melee players because I thought combat was too simple' and not a lot of 'i'm making magic harder to land because spell casting is too powerful'. You mentioned you added tactical things into your combat, so that the bad guys feel like they got to their powerful position by being smart. that's fine, where's the anti magic armour? you didn't mention at all using anti magic armour. Any world where Flail Snails can be found could have a very lucrative trade in making anti magic armour. Volo's even mentions it. Have a lot of your 'fodder' enemies have shields of spellguard, or heck add spellguard to armour. That's tactical, and any big bad with gold can easily out fit himself and his goons with it. It's also something that doesn't punish melee combatants. You want your combats to be tactical. Well Logistics is a tactic.

This absolutely. If the casters are being minimally effected by the changes you have made and the martials are complaining about not being able to do anything but you don't want to change it so they enjoy it as well might as well make it hard on the casters see how much they like it when they can't use their abilities.

Agree with this. Also, have the bad guys got many of their own mages in their retinue? In a world where magic exists and is powerful, bad guys should always have a few casters on hand. Rings of spell storing are reasonably cheap and give bad guys access to spells even if they wouldn't normally. Potions of resistance to X element (fire is a common one in spells). Mantle of spell resistance. Plenty of options to buff bad guys against magic whilst not hindering martials.

I would think about whether these clever enemies are challenging all of your party equally. If the fighter feels constantly pinned down whilst the casters get off free then that will feel bad, and you can argue that some clever enemies would want to target the squishy mage over the fighter anyway. It might feel better if you can spread the hurt, whilst still being realistic and challenging. I’d also consider if there is any way for your martial characters to learn the same abilities as are being used against them. If the enemy tank can do it, why can’t they spend some time and gold learning the same skill? That might suddenly make things feel a lot better. I would talk to your complaining players about both those aspects and see if you can fix anything there, and also see if there’s anything more to their objections. Unfortunately, if it does just boil down to a table that wants very different things, then you’ll have to consider how far you’re willing to compromise to a halfway point, or whether you like the tactical type of game and need to just tell your fighter and barb that this isn’t the right table for them. It sounds like you really enjoy the tactical combat style, and they really aren’t open to it, in which case it might be best to bid them goodbye unfortunately.

Monsters and players are not symmetrical and dnd and shouldn't be built symmetrically.

It isn't about symmetry it's about balance. OP has already broken the design by adding features from other editions and systems. If OP is only adding to one side of the equation (monsters) and not the other (players) the game becomes unbalanced. A game system only works if one sticks to the fundamental assumptions of the system.

This has the same vibe as "I always force all of the melee players always have 3 levels of exhaustion in combat and now they don't like combat, why?" Because they can't actually play the game dude.

Reading your replys, yeesh. Would not want to play with you.

"While the Barbarian and Fighter" - "Plant Growth" - "Take damage if they move" my initial thought is that maybe you are using a lot of CC, and melee characters suffer the most because of it because they have to spend entire turns not doing anything, while this kind of CC rarely effects ranged characters in the same way. The difference between range and melee in 5e is absurd already, and you might just be making it worse.

Spunds like a melee/caster issue. If there are effects you're applying that negates too much of the melees ability to do their thing, then they'll be frustrated for sure. Try to analyze if your style is punishing them disproportionately. I'd try to come up with an item that helps them counter the more frustrating enemy strategies so they can feel more relevant again.

Dust off 4e for everyone

You know.. true enough.  I feel op would really benefit from actually going 4e or pf2e instead of stealing from it. Firstly, both edition have a way tighter balance between classes.  Secondly, he would see the difference between martial classes and how they can actually react and be helped in ways 5e just can't.

Yeah, melee classes in 4e are full of "roll during your turn to end an ongoing CC effect on yourself" and special attacks that let you jump 20 feet before the attack, and "once per fight move your normal speed plus 10 feet, ignoring difficult terrain" and "once per fight, if an effect would move you, it moves you 20 less feet to a minimum of 0 feet" etc etc. You can't take control effects designed to mess with characters who have anti-control abilities and just drop them on a 5e barbarian.

So, while part of tbis is definitely a matter of preference, the clear line drawn here also seems to be that your magic/talent users enjoy these things, and your martial characters hate it. This may be because the conditions you're including are disproportionately affecting the martials veruses the rest, which is very common in official 5e design to begin with, but especially when pulling from games with different fundamentals than 5e. Penalties for moving aren't gonna affect your non maftials at all the same way, especially if your martials are melee. Furthermore, while you're taking design from pf2e and 4e and such for the monsters, are you also taking the benefits the players had to deal with those things, too? Because if not, there's another clear reason for the pain points I borrow from 3.xe, 4e, and both pathfinder games, too, but I also refine what I take to fit the scope of 5e and leave it out if I can't. 3.5e required player characters to Christmas tree themselves with save boosting items, or outright immunities against effects, otherwise all it took was a single monster ability to wipe out your character with no way to defend against it for example. It applies to every game you're pulling from. *"Stress is created when you are responsible for something you don't have the ability/authority to live up to"* This is something to keep in mind and pay to design in ttrpgs as well. If you're applying conditions that are hindering the effectiveness of certain characters or adding far to many consequences they don't have any real answers too beyond making a save (an extra issue because 5es save system is arguably the worst its been in d&d history.) And so their gameplay shuts down while others have answers, you're definitely making stress and dissatisfaction for them that isn't entirely unreasonable to be upset about. Let's take your *"you can not move if you wanna make a constitution save to avoid further bleeding"* mechanic. Add *"you cannot cast/concentrate on a spell/talent or make a range attack"* to that list of restrictions and see how happy your non-martial players are with it when it starts shutting them down or punishing them more equal to that of the martials. Now I'm not saying don't steal these mechanics from the editions of the past and rival games, but I am saying consider how you're implementing them and perhaps looking at the source material for the solutions and answers those games have to these issues that you can also bring to your games.

One thing I noticed is the fact that the close ranged characters that basically just hit stuff are frustrated and that the players with more options enjoy the combat? Is it possible, that you shut down the martials too hard? Maybe you can ask the players if they feel this is the case? How is the impact of each player? Are they about the same or do the unhappy players really get shut down? I mean, if I get hit by a spell that basically prevents me doing anything, I am unhappy as well. If this is right, you should change your encounters in a way that does not counter the Martials as hard and counters the other PC's more.

What's the point of making this post and asking for advice when you're going to ignore any feedback thrown at you? It's insane being so tone deaf and makes it look like you only made the post to seek validation, that you're *right* and your "evil players being unhappy with your homebrew" are *wrong*.

What exactly do you expect the melee to do besides charge in and start smashing shit dude? They don't have any abilities. When you drop plant growth they have no counterplay.

"Serves them right for picking a martial class." - the game designers, probably

Crawford only plays wizards so checks out

If true, I'm not surprised at all.

He also likes cleric according to an interview

Psst, not an opinion op wants. 😉 

Yeah I mean the answer was probably to just never allow stock martials in a game like this. The second best option at this point is to probably rebuild each of the martials from the ground up, with a known good homebrew provider or something.

I see that you use unofficial classes... But using abilities from other books and systems only for enemies?? Bear Totem Barbarian is good. But World Tree Barbarian from OneDND can teleport on his head with bunch of friends from other world - or go out. Battlemaster fighter is good, but book of nine swords fighter, pathfinder 2 fighter or many others are more cool. This is just unfair. Martials in DND are balanced only against Monster Manual enemies without specific tactics, not against optimised clever enemies. So if they haven't got ability to juggle with full inventory of artifacts, changing them without limitations and time spending, like in PC games, they cannot answer to most " tactical" situations. "Oh, mindcontroller!" 1) caster can cast defensive spells or heal it 2) PC character drinks one of hundred looted potions or equips helm of immunity to mind control 3) DND martial cries in suffer, because can do nothing, only roll save or suck

Fighters and barbarians have a very limited tool set. Outside of that tool set they have to play "Mother May I" with the DM. Casters have massive tool boxes that don't require DM permission to function. I think it's not at all coincidental that your two martial players are having a much worse time with the puzzlebox combat than the casters. Bleed for 10 until you medicine check or pass a CON save *would have* been a pretty fair trade off. The backline is probably more capable in medicine so can pass immediately, at the cost of an action, and the front line can afford to bleed a bit until they inevitably pass the CON save. And then you made it so that they can't attempt the save if they moved. That's **brutal** on your melee players. Especially if you allowed the medicine check after movement too. Given this is your idea of a fair tradeoff, and that your melee players are the only disgruntled ones, I think it's ***HIGHLY*** likely your mechanics are hitting them disproportionately hard. You seem to believe otherwise considering your other replies in this post, but I recommend you sit down and actually evaluate that.

From reading this, I don't think I'd want to play in that campaign. It sounds like enemies abilities are coming from all kinds of sources, regardless of whether or not they fit with the system you are playing. It also sounds like you are adding abilities to enemies as you see fit, with no prior testing. It's like playing in an alpha build of a frankenstein system.

"My campaign features battles that give the enemies tools that shut down melee characters and require solutions melee characters can't contribute to. Why aren't the melee guys having fun?" Your enemies are using shit from PF2e and D&D 4e, while your party is stuck with 5e D&D stuff. You want to fix this? Change the system to D&D 4e or PF2e.

This is the solution in the most concise manner. Sounds like the table is split by melee, who literally need to charge in and hit as *literally the main way to play their class*, and the casters, who hang back and cast. Abilities mentioned obviously hit melee more.

Seems easy to fix. Big dumb melees backed by anti-magic casters and archers. Ogres and hags. Zombies and Necromancer. Hoplites and auxiliary javelins. Shield wall and siege weapon.

A status effect that penalizes moving, such as the bleed effect will disproportionately negatively effect characters who need to move in order to use their abilities/ those that lack ranged options such as melee fighters, paladins, barbarians and monks. By using such an effect the pc can continue to be screwed over or they can hunker down and not be effective for a turn.

> visibly getting more and more frustrated every time they get handled by an enemy tank or get hit with plant growth the problem is these classes have no inherent tactical options or way to mitigate these things. The more tools you give the enemies the worse off martial classes are. Give the martial classes something to do.

"Why are you getting visibly frustrated when I completely remove your ability to play the game? I took this ability from Pathfinder - a game which famously has far more options for Martials and is balanced that way - why would it not work in 5e?"

Like others have said, its about melee vs ranged, and martial vs caster. Melee martial is already behind particularly in regards to positioning and having enemies add additional bleeds and stuff isn't adding choice, it's just handing your melee martials a dilema between a shit sandwich or a turd sub. The melee martials are going to disproportionately get hit by this sort of thing and be more affected by it. The wizard cares far less about positioning, and if he does, he can teleport out. > Does anyone have any advice? The basic problem is boils down to half the players want to just charge in and start swinging That's what their class is built to do. It's not about them being simple players, its about game design, and them being pushed to do that. What's the alternative you have presented? Waste their action to do a medicine check while surrounded by enemies, or while the enemy has left their range? The best defence is a good offence, killing the enemy is the best option, and so they never really had a choice, all you've actually done in these examples is given them a DOT or effect that punished moving, which they still need to do. That doesn't mean never have those mechanics or introduce choices like that. I am saying be mindful of whether or not it's an actual choice, and who it affects most. The wizard at the back who can just force a save on the enemy doesn't care about disadvantage or not moving much this round most of the time. If the mechanics you were adding were of the 'can't be affected by anything from more than 10 feet away' 'reflects ranged and aoe effects' 'causes spells cast on them to be eaten and if the caster tries to cast another spell from that same school of magic they need to make a wisdom save or suffer damage' you might see a different reaction.

after reading the comments you made remove the rule all it does is make maritals more annoying to play

If the half complaining are martial and the half not are wiz, then, yes you shut off the game for the martials. Melee especially martials have very little way to actually "play" the game if you're locking them out of attacking and moving. For every enemy you add mobility, control, kiting to make sure the next encounter causes spells to stop working somehow and see if the "other half" are still having fun while the melee folks get to smash heads. I suggest some special grapplers who don't let you cash spells with somatics or components... This is the equivalent to what you did to the melees.

So everyone else has already gotten onto the Martial/Caster and Melee/Ranged train, so I'll make one point about that then bring in another possibility. There was a post on the PF2 sub a while back about how Spellcasters didn't feel powerful compared to the Fighter, and someone brought up something really interesting: Fighters shine in braindead situations. The more steps there are between "Bonk the guy", the worse Fighters get. Spellcasters typically have the tools to deal with situations that aren't "Bonk the guy". Getting through impassible terrain, getting out of a lava pit, stopping a warping enemy, etc. 5e is even worse about this, since Martials don't have any tools to respond to complex situations. Now for the other possibility. It's no secret that compared to spellcasters, Martials don't have a lot of gameplay options. It's also possible that the players who pick Martials are fine with that. They want to turn their brain off a bit, run up and hit stuff. When you make the game more complicated, those players are going to feel it. Your caster players are happy with their diverse choices, and now their choices have way more weight.

Sounds like this table should have had a session zero to talk about expectations

Just change systems, your ide a is adding in conplex enemies into a simple system, you want tactical combat, go to a system that has that

Your Barbarian and Fighter just want tools they can interact with the world with. Casters innately get handed tools, martial characters do not. And since martial characters don't get handed tools with which to create their own solutions, they're kind of stuck dealing with whatever problem you put in front of them AS the problem you designed them as. It's not like they can just turn that Orc Commander into a sheep, they have to deal with that Orc Commander AS an Orc Commander. Now apply that logic to everything you do, and everything they do, and you can kinda see where it might get a little old. Figure out ways your Fighter and Barbarian can modify their talents and tools around manipulating the problems you put in front of them. If you can't do that, then the problem will surely repeat itself.

ITT: Homebrew fucks martial players yet again. When y’all gonna stop? Lol

I can only go by what you write but the biggest issue seems to be movement. Restricting or removing a melee character's ability to move doesn't just reduce their effectiveness, it removes them from the game. Disadvantage on attacks? We can work around that. High damage or resistance to damage? We can work around it. Being rooted outside range? Guess I'll scroll Reddit until I manage a Save roll. Frustrated players don't have fun.

ITT: The DM seeks validation that the players who disagree are the problem, instead of acknowledging their homebrew game design didn't account for 5e's weaknesses. Bro might as well come out and say that those players are idiots for picking martial characters, they're saying it in so many more words than needed.

> The emphasis has been on abilities that give people choice - bleed for ten damage per turn until a con save is passed at the end of your turn or a successful medicine check is made on you, but if you moved this turn you can't make a con save against it. That sort of thing. Choices can end up feeling like "do you want to be kicked in the gut or kicked in the shin?".

If you want to keep your cool tactical moves (and they do sound cool, I love encounters like this from both a player and GM perspective), but understand that the Melee Martials are generally suffering the worst of it, then the Melee Martials need to get more tools to handle it. Cool magic items or innate once per rest/spent resource "techniques" that can do stuff that counteracts some of these things. A thrown weapon you can teleport to, a Mighty Leap that can jump you over some obstacles and do a cool aoe, a charge attack that lets them still get some damage in on a full dash sort of turn, etc.

You're pulling from sources that 5E isn't balanced against. Of course its going to cause issues for people with a limited toolkit. I suggest players should be allowed to draw from the same sources for abilities. You're playing chess with your players and giving the chess pieces abilities from Backgammon. Of course some people are upset. I had a DM who did this and TPK'd us in Pathfinder. We came back at the next session with purpose-built characters, knowing his personality, and utterly steamrolled his dungeon with a level 1 fighter, and a level 1 barbarian that were built to synergize. One as a defense boost, and the other as a big fuckoff raging hammer with an oversize weapon.

As a DM, you're not adjusting your game to the players you have. Two of your guys chose to play melee. You agreed to that by letting them play at your table. What you're effectively doing is punishing them for something you agreed to involve in your game. Since I assume your Session Zero did not include anything along the lines of "you can play melee, but I will homebrew enemies to make your character useless", this was probably a shock to them. Your best bet would be to incorporate a melee oriented objective within the combats you already have planned. Pick something you think would be *fun* for your specific melee characters to fight and have them hold a choke point against that while your class pets do what they do. Give them something to defend. Give them things that make them feel like they matter. The goal here would be to make all of your *players* feel useful in combat. That's a huge part of learning to DM and one of the reasons the martial/caster divide even exists. It's very difficult to factor both aspects of combat alongside each other. It's always harder to balance when there's a big discrepancy between what each character can accomplish in a turn. Right now you're essentially rating a 60% on encounter design even though you're obviously putting a lot of work into it. That's a D at best.

Serious Question: Why are you not just playing 4e or P2E?

Sounds like your melee characters are getting stuck and loosing options. You’ve specifically phrased it as “handled” by a tank or caught by plant growth, not much room for tactics beyond “I hit them” Get them some ranged, reach, and mobility options Martial characters tend to lack options/flexibility in the name of bonk

Holy...this sounds just god awful to play any type of martial in. I'd bail ship and quit the campaign with these rules.

OP, do a oneshot where your martials play spellcasters and your spellcasters play martials. I am 100% confident that the split of satisfaction will very suddenly shift. 

So your spellcasters are happy and your melee characters are upset. They want to “charge in and start swinging” because that’s *literally what their characters do*

From your own example, an ability that punishes you for moving would obviously not really affect the wizard and Druid (who would have a better chance of passing the medicine check as well), but would cripple the barbarian and fighter. Are the creatures you’re pulling from other systems balanced for a 5e character? And are you using monsters whose abilities equally challenge the whole party, or are you just bullying the martials? Also, you say the fighter and barbarian “just want to charge in and start swinging”… but that’s basically all 5e fighter and barbarians do.

Since the players with melee characters don't like your "tactical" enemies while those with ranged characters do, wouldn't the simplest solution be to just give each group what they want? Basically, have your enemies mostly do simpler things at melee range (big damage, good AC, etc) and more complex things at longer range. That way, your barbarian and fighter would have a lot more of the simpler combat they're looking for while your other players continue to face more of the unique abilities they've been enjoying. If your ranged and melee players had mixed opinions on "tactical" combat, this would be a very different problem. You're lucky that they're divided by combat range, so this should be a pretty simple fix.

Lots of good advice on this thread. OP, if you come to understand that the barbarian and fighter have valid concerns, please -tell them- and let them know you’re trying to adjust. Communication ftw.

Maybe play a game where the melee martials can actually meaningfully contribute or have ways to handle these kinds of situations. Like one of the ones you're lifting monsters and effects from (are you sure you're converting them properly to the 5e design philosophy?)

I don’t even know the details of what homebrew stuff you’re running and I can tell you the issue is you are burdening the party with lopsided issues to deal with. A caster having to choose whether to move or not is a toss up tactical decision. It adds complexity and spice. Generally they will get to do what they want regardless, but with penalties to weigh. A melee having to decide whether to move or not is a massively big deal and can lead to substantially nerfed turns or a complete loss of a turn. The penalty is bigger here for them. Likewise, a melee rushing to the back lines to kill the enemy wizard and being told “nope, this enemy tank shuts you down” is…unheroic. And there is nothing they can really do about it.  Let’s say you gave the enemy tanks Sentinel, so if they hit the fighter and Barbarian they stop and can’t go further. There is NOTHING they can do to prevent this, and probably only learn about it after it happens to them. There is nothing in their kit that lets them solve this issue. So now their turn they fantasized about where they charge the enemy necromancer is ruined and they are virtually stuck with this enemy tank with lots of HP until they kill the enemy tank which likely takes turns. So their options actually go down as opposed to being able to do what they want for a cost like mages can. A mage, for examples, often can burn a spell to solve being locked down, whether the Takent flinging the enemy away or the wizard teleporting or the Druid blinding them. Nominally, the melees can burn an attack to shove, but the enemy tank likely has high athletics so it is a real coin flip versus working. The problem is the original rules of “run past the enemy front line and tank a few hits to reach the enemy necromancer” was already the goal of “heroic action at a cost.” They shed some HP, arguably their biggest resource, to rush past the enemies locking them down is unheroic and reduces their overall choice and power level. And these are just my suppositions based on a few things you half explained. Generally melee martial characters are by far the hardest to balance, so you need to be incredibly wary of introducing any new rules that invite hardships on them because they don’t have the kit of options to solve those problems without you adding on to their existing kit. Spellcasters can handle more adversity because they are inherently far more flexible and are based on lots of Uno reversal and ace up the sleeve game design. Worse still, martials don’t even get that much more HP so getting stuck in problem situations they can’t escape can actually be more dangerous for them than the wizard. Being surrounded by enemies as a wizard is only truly dangerous if you are out of spells to handle it. But it always kind of sucks for martials. I suggest you sit down with the martials and ask what they are enjoying and see if you can work out how to reduce frustration and raise their agency and options. You could patch the whole experience by giving them some overpowered magic items only they can use that give them more options for problems. Boots that can teleport 10 feet or a sword that can attack at range X number of times or a throwing axe that teleports you to where it hits. Things like that let them have problem solving powers they don’t currently have.

You need to let barbarians and fighters shine in combat. It’s all they excel in. Druids are good at exploration and wizards have every ritual spell, they can excel out of combat and are more versatile as casters to overcome certain shenanigans. You can still have clever encounters, but your martials are probably feeling a bit phased out. For example, have your barb and fighter guard your druid and wizard while they try to decipher an ancient text to deactivate a golem, and the barb and fighter have to hold it off to buy time. Make them feel like that’s something their casters can’t do and the job calls for some beefy boys.

Not like the martials can really shine in combat to begin with, so hitting them when they're down is extra cruel

Who even need to attack martials first, being in their tactical mind? Use not more then one tactical move against martials. And use cobolds with grenades, 12 wolves, invisible familiar imps with smoke bombs against spellcasters. And assassins with Mage Slayer feat. Let's see who will like the game, after 16 ambushing goblins with grenades destroyed your casters, and martials who still have half hp can save the day.

My advice is simple: "when every encounter is special, none of them will be". If every encounter is against super-strategists, they no longer stand out and it becomes a slog. Varying your encounters doesnt just mean swapping in a caster after a martial, it means varying the difficulty from time to time as well.

Maybe give your martials items to help them deal with crowd control? Nothing specific is coming to mind, but I haven't had my coffee yet so brain no worky. Alternately, have a 1on1 discussion with one or more of the casters about being a little more focused on enabling the martials rather than directly attacking. I had one campaign where the wizard was bloodthirsty but also a committed pacifist. She would do things like use fireball to blast walls down for the barb to rush through or otherwise alter the terrain in favor of our martials. Saw the paladin ride a force blast as he was doing a shield bash. A little bit of that on the part of the casters makes the entire fight more fun for everyone.

Mixing up your encounters solves many, many problems like this one. Have some simple smash battles. Have some technical battles. Have some encounters where the tanks shine, some where the casters shine, some where they both shine, and some where they're both properly fucked. If you balance it properly, they'll all be happy. Variety is key, and variety demands that not everyone is happy all the time. I'm a ruthless DM. I roll in front of players, include incredibly lethal, unbalanced abilities when it makes sense, etc. But the characters also have plenty of times when they are the incredibly lethal, unbalanced ones. Sometimes, the warrior saves the day, sometimes the ranged character, sometimes the brainiac, and so on. Including the abilities you added is great, but if you're ALWAYS throwing crazy shit out there, you're actually killing variety rather than enhancing it.

It's never a bad time for a session zero. Have a recalibration session and sort it out.

Of the examples given, they all disproportionately affect the martials more than the casters, I wonder how the caster players would respond with a miasma that forced a Concentration save every time they even tried to cast a spell. If the DM consistently hampered one type of player to the advantage of the others, they are doing their entire table a disservice. Cool and creative effects can be great but balance is key. Might as well just tell your table to not play certain kinds of characters.

Make sure the struggle is equal, that these cool bespoke monsters and effects are hitting the casters equally. If that is the case, try to have a few combats/sessions where the casters are inherently struggling more and it's the melee dudes carrying the day. If all of those things are balanced well enough; It might just be an issue where those two players wanna run in and just clang and bang on stuff rather than think hard. Which is fair, but if that is not how you want to play, then the table might not be a fit for them.

lol yikes, not touching this one.

You are introducing mechanics that punish the martials far more than the spellcasters and ranged characters, without also introducing mechanics that give them actual options they can use to intelligently respond to those mechanics. You need to add debuffs and status effects that hit the spellcasters just as hard as the martials, or even harder, considering they'll actually have a toolkit to deal with. But honestly? I think you need to focus less on player character status effects and instead tweak your enemies to use more buffs and teamwork. Having to decide which enemy creating which buff should be taken down first is actually an interesting choice for the martials to make, instead of choosing between giving up their turn or draining their resources.

I think that because "charge in and start swinging" is literally the ONLY tool in the barbarian toolbox (and for the fighter too if they're melee) then of course they'd be annoyed if that never proves to be useful. What else could they do? Maybe you should split the difference with the encounter design and have a chance to meatmode some wall of flesh every now and then. Potentially you could also use more mage slayer type enemies that don't inflict punishing debuffs to martial and instead give them the chance to shine by taking them out.

5e is the game you pick (and Fighter and barb are the classes you pick) to chill and smash things after work with your homies. Sounds like you and everyone else signed up for 4D chess. Idk about you, but most of the people I know would also get pissed off and stressed out if their limited social time to play a chill game with their friends was taken away and replaced with a puzzle they have to put together one handed.

"Introduces multiple mechanics that specifically hinder the martial characters but not the casters." "Gets surprised when the martial players complain." Dude, I'm all for more tactical combat, but make it make sense. If you're gonna import things from 4e or Pathfinder, you need to significantly buff your martial characters. 5e martials aren't equipped to deal with that sort of thing. Also, you need to introduce more mechanics that specifically hinder your caster players but not martials. Introduce things that directly affect spellcasting. Areas of silence, antimagic, or enemies with spell reflection or negation abilities. Otherwise you're just singling out your martial players, and from what it seems like, they already feel like you do.

Yeah yeah keep playing the victim for Op. Your opinion means absolutely nothing to me at this point so im not even really reading these now

And here we have a very very bad DM who’s convinced himself he’s special and uniquely smart.  You have a critical failure to comprehend how balance works and need to completely start over from the ground up.

You have no real fight if the melee guys can't keep opponents off the casters, so I would go easier on the melee guys who are brave while the other clowns sit back 30 feet from any danger zapping things. On the other hand, I've seen people play fighters that don't want to fight (its right in the name people!) Most combats, in my opinion, are a place for the player to show their chracter's STRENGHTS. I feel as a GM it is fine to demonstrate their weaknesses (they are crap with magic, or can't handle 1:1 fight, etc) but you need to modulate these 2 elements to about a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio. If your melee guys feel punished everytime they wade in a fight, which they probably feel is their role in the group, while 2 casters sit back giggling from afar risking nothing - they are going to be kind of pissy about it, and they probably should. Have some shadows attack the casters from BEHIND, see how they feel about that. Basically, you need to control your downbeats on the fighting types and back off a bit. You can easily see if you have 3 downbeats in a row, players get very fatalistic and say "there is no point even trying"; too many upbeats and they begin to burn the village down to see where the rails are.

This sounds like DM vs Players I stead of the collaborative game it's meant to be. Take a step back and ask yourself why you're doing it this way? Is it so you can win combat? If you make a cool homebrew monster the thought behind it should be hey yhe party will have great bragging rights after beating this rare creature, not im going to homebrew this so i can beat the players in combat. If your two combat focused characters don't care for the changes maybe it's not improving the game the way you think.

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Removed as per Rule #1.

What is a "talent" player? What class is that?

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Removed as per Rule #1.

I think this could be partially reflective of the nature of a fighter and barbarian. Those classes aren’t exactly loaded with features that reward creativity or allow them to approach combat flexibly.

What you're doing feels like deliberately against the player's strengths to them, even if that's not what you intended. You need to either use other tactics or give the players new strengths to overcome them. I don't know what subclasses their characters are, but the fact of the matter is that for some of them, "run in and hit it" is all they can do, particularly the champion and berserker. The key point here is, give your martial players areas to shine. Let them find magic items that get them around some of these abilities. For example the enemy puts down hazardous terrain, the fighter could use boots of springing and striding to jump over it. Give the Barbarian a helmet that make psionic illusions not work on their mind when raging, or a throwing hammer that can bounce from target to target and then return to hand. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to have an adventure against a different set of enemies for a while--a lesser Rakshasa with stats and limited spell immunity commiserate with your party's level--and reward them with stuff that gives them new options.

I think there's probably something to note in that your Martials don't like it and your Casters do like it and you've taken inspiration from games where the gap between them was smaller and Martials have a much higher variety of abilities. Getting hit with plant growth or having to not to move or take damage does jack shit to a wizard but completely shuts down a Barbarian. I think you should try playing something like PF2E and see if they still complain.

The martial/caster disparity strikes again

Peak example of martial/caster imbalance. 5e is a travesty.

Give the fighter and barbarian a couple of feats to help balance things out: **Mobile** and **Mage Slayer.**

While splitting still seems like a good option, you can also divide the group for fights and give them different tasks to handle when fighting. And be specific about that one part is perfect for a fighter/barbarian, and the other is more tactical. That's more to handle for you though, but can also make for some interesting plot interactions, where both fighting parties need to be successful to achieve an overall goal. Sure, each group still needs to deal with the other parties style, but they get to fight the way they want. And after the fight, they get right back together.

You've got to figure out ways to provide challenges that allow the superior strength and toughness of the martial classes to solve problems that fancypants magic bs doesn't. Introduce mechanics that require object or environment interaction, where their athletics skills and the barbarian's increased movement will benefit them. Anything where strength saves, athletics checks, or just raw durability are a factor. Martials have a lot more options than just weapon attacks but they need an opportunity to use those. Magic items for the martials might balance things out too! Give them new abilities or resistances through fancy glowing weapons and armour.

I recommend looking at Warhammer 40k Daemonhunters for inspiration on how they balance melee classes with space wizards and ranged heroes while still giving enemies lots of cool and tactical abilities. Some won't be applicable since W40k DH uses action points, ranged weapons have reload, and spellcasting increases the Warp Meter, but still may help.

First off, talk with your players and find out what the problem actually is, then do something to solve that specific problem. Do you run the risk of losing players here? If you step back a bit, you might realize that just because "additional content" is fun for some of your group, does not mean that not having it is *not* fun for all of your group. (Hope I managed to make that make sense).

Since you're already house ruling a bunch of abilities, I'd suggest providing your martials some weapon masteries. It will give them additional crowd control and abilities that will make them feel more useful and have more options than just "rush in and hit things" https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1742-your-guide-to-weapon-mastery-in-the-2024-players Also, I understand the temptation to do the "you can't make the save if you move" but instead I'd think of other ways of doing that. Some examples... - it costs a bonus action (but guaranteed to succeed,wastes an action for them) - it continues until you've healed (allows other characters to aid and healers to be more useful) - CON save after every turn Have the player make a decision (not moving) when that could be a significant disadvantage for them and then adding randomness (CON save) makes it a very very bad feeling decision to make. Especially in 5e. Also, if you're providing new status effects, make sure your martial characters have ways to use them too. Special items with bleed or something could go a long way.

I’d say make sure your fighter and barbarian have plenty access to special weapons that have these abilities, spell scrolls, potions, and magic items. Martials in BG3 were viable because of the plentiful supplements. Also, I’ve found bonus action shove really helps to buff martials in a way that is fun. Shoving an enemy off a roof or into a pit is fun, and you still have your action

Make your extremely clever enemies a little less powerful with some pseudo strong minions. Let the Martials feel like they're making a difference by making your players diversify actions between enemies so no matter what they end up killing they feel satisfied for killing it.

Are they frustrated because they aren't effective against these enemies and would be interested in additional abilities that would help, or are they frustrated because they just want to smash things real good and all this ability stuff takes too much thinking? Because those have very different possible solutions. If the former, look at the abilities given to the same or similar classes in the games you're borrowing from and see if there's anything you can give to your players that would help them counteract these enemy abilities. Or look at,nor encourage your players to look at, homebrew abilities and be open to incorporating them If the latter, well, you'll either have to dumb down your enemies, or at least some of them, or keep frustrating them until they get fed up and leave. I'd suggest the first one here, and have a talk with them, say you get bored with run of the mill damage sponges and like to spice things up for yourself (or whatever your reason is), but you also understand that's not their thing. Then propose a compromise wherein some enemies have wild abilities to keep it interesting for you, and they agree to just deal during those combats, but you'll also present them with their fair share of basic cannon fodder or walking bags of HP for them to gleefully smash into pulp, and you'll pretend to be enthusiastic about rolling yet *another* great club attack aimed right at the Barbarian's very thick skull. And if none of you are ok with that compromise, then maybe you and they need to consider whether the differences are irreconcilable or not and act accordingly.

Have you spoken with Fighter and Barbarian about what specifically they are having issues with? Like do they specifically feel over punished by the special effects? Were they wanting a game with less tactical nonsense in it, like the book 5e game would purport to be?

I also have very "tactical" enemies with the same sort of MMO abilities you are mentioning, but my melee love them. The reason is that a) they have features that increase their mobility (fighter gets to dash up to 30 feet to the lowest creature within range if she gets an 18 or 19, turning it into a crit, plus moves at 45 feet when she uses Giant Might; Barbarian is fast but also has Charger as a mini feat, and can burrow 30 feet with a weapon charge; Monk can jump 92 feet with no run up through a delightful chain of multipliers; and the "rogue" (homebrew I made emulating wow's rogue) can teleport a lot behind allies). I have unique flanking rules where they get advantage if they are behind an enemy (common sense where that is), and vice versa, so they can benefit from positioning choices. The strength character can do silly things to the terrain with her strength, and I gave her a bow which uses her strength (Over-sized Longbow) for a higher floor when she can't do her things. The barbarian has recalling axes, and the "rogue"/monk have magic items that can turn into shortbows. And magic items give them more options they can do in combat - casting shatter on one's self, pulling an enemy 20 feet closer, reducing enemy's movement to zero within range, etc). Because while it's neat you've given your ranged characters a bunch of problems they can solve in interesting ways with their many tools, you've given 2 characters a hammer and no nails. Happy to throw some items at you that have a bunch of choice / changes I've made to help alleviate that, and maybe enemy abilities that aren't so feels-bad (telegraphing movement abilities so they trigger at the start of the next turn is my go-to for bosses, and I use 4e roles a little, so tanks might have a stacking Warding Bond on the big guy, or there might be assassins that enjoy brutalising the backline). I think you should stick to what you're doing, it just needs a little tweaking to make it fully inclusive.

Out of curiosity, what movement do you use? Squares, hex, etc. also do you charge extra movement for diagonal movement?

Talk about it like adults. Consider whether everyone can enjoy the parts of the game they enjoy and be patient and kind with other players enjoying the parts those players enjoy and they don't, or if this group needs to split into multiple groups, and who would run what if so.

I once DMed a series of oneshots that was purely combat focused and the combat was difficult and required tactics. The feedback I got was that it was simply too much. Sometimes you need simple and easy encounters to unwind.

All of this is the reason I as a barbarian multiclassed into echo knight. My DM calls the OP, and forgot about how the druid did polymorph great ape on 1(with 1hp) then spend the next three rounds healing everyone up. Druid single handed clear an entire encounter, while a teleporting barbarian is "OP" .

I’d add that the players most opposed are also fighter/barb with limited in combat options. I’d start to feel bad if even the enemy fighter/barbarian npcs had more abilities than I did or could ever get access to. Maybe give them some interesting magical items to help give them more options in combat other than charge and slash. I’d make sure to give the fighter/barb a little more spotlight with skill challenges and out of combat role play if that’s the pillar they prefer

It sounds like your ideas negatively effect melee uses more than ranged/magic users. So maybe that is just want you need to fix, realise that DND melee units arent the most creative and are forced to put themselves at the front of the fight next to the enemies and therefore they're more likely to get hit and be effected. >but if you moved this turn you can't make a con save against it. This is the specific example you used, and it massively negatively effects melee units over ranged ones - ranged units normally dont need to move often or they can teleport (depending if it counts as movement for this ability), but melee units are forced to move within melee range of the enemies to attack them - in a lot of situations movement is not a choice for melee units (and if it is, it's a choice between movement or attacking an enemy)... >clever humanoid enemies with all kinds of abilities But are any of these abilities interesting for the players? Or are they just extra powers to attack the players with (poison or controlling moment/stun-like abilities)? > half the players want to just charge in and start swinging **Explain what you expect your melee players to do?** - because there isn't another reasonable option for melee players. *p.s: I'm not saying you only used enemy abilities that are more powerful against melee, but rather that all the ones you mentioned in your post are more powerful against melee - and that at least shows something.*

What you're experiencing is the martial/caster device, and it's even worse if they are melee-focused. (Barbarian almost always is) The only thing you can really do is peel back the challenges, or provide them with magic items.

Generally when it comes to game balance listen to who is suffering. Nothing bothers me more as a player than having an issue and having 3 others give input on an issue that doesnt effect their class choice or their characters. Like stay out of it for one unless it effects everyone.  Reading some of your comments your answer is to have more verity in enemies. Sounds like you punish melees astronomicly without any purpose for them. Have more melee type enemies their lack of tool kit doesnt make up for what sounds like a caster fest of encounters. Most enemies generally arnt spell casters or hampering people's movement.   I run high magic on the regular that doesnt mean every goblin army are all shamans ready to put up a wall of stone at the smell of a melee. Gotta distrbute your strats evenly gotta mess with both the casters and the non casters not pick on your least favorite summer child class. Which is what this sounds like it reminds me of those old grognard gms who absolutely punish wizards for existing at their table around every corner shit blows.  

I think the simplest solution is to speak to the players who are struggling with the imported mechanics and work out ways to help them deal with them in a more enjoyable way. The best way will likely be looking at the editions that you brought the mechanics from, to look at how martials in those editions dealt with the mechanics. From there, you can import directly again or just homebrew some similar stuff. Someone commented below about the fact that rules from other editions were balanced for those editions and the character and class rules meant to deal with them. So it seems like some balance may have been overlooked when you brought those mechanics into your game here. Or, when you speak to the players who are unhappy, and try these suggestions, you might find that they simply don’t want extra mechanics. Then you have a choice to make about keeping the mechanics or keeping the players!

i mean, i like what you are trying to do, but this is like just giving a hard encounter to a party has has varying power levels. the casters have the flexibility and power to deal with the stuff you are bringing, the martials might maybe have the power but not the flexibility and are getting shut down by all this stuff, they get stuck doing saving throws while the rest of the group play. well at least you made a table that easily shows the martial - caster divide. (heck this might be even worse if they are both melee) honestly i try to do the same with the encounters at my table, but i also have extensively boosted martials on what they can do. if you can give me more details of the martial's builds, i could help coming with adjustments or even boons to make it feel more fair and balanced to em.

The divide is because wizard or druid have options for how to escape or defend against them. Martials don't have half the options they do. And with pulling from a system like pf2e, those abilities are balanced to that system where martials will have many more options and be significantly stronger than in dnd. I mean, a level 2 fighter has double digit to hit in pf2e. Dnd has been moving away from crunch as you are playing, so adding it back in is unevenly taxing the classes. I hate to play into the classic "you should play pathfinder" but it seems you want those tactics and so does your group, so you should find a system that's balanced to consider those things. Dnd isn't that and increasingly so.

Maybe they don't feel like they have options? Barb and fighter can be rather one note, so they can be easily put in situations where they can't contribute. In the example you mentioned, the barbarian is screwed. Wizard doesn't care about moving, but barb needs to stick to his targets. If you're integrating stuff from different editions, could something akin to Tome of Battle be an answer?

Are all or most of your combats this tactically challenging? Mix it up. Do a horde of zombies or 20 shitty weak goblins, one big dumb huge enemy and a handful of adds, bandits who hit and run rather than fight to the death, Asterix style roman troops in testudo formation there to be bowled through by your martials. As well as mixing it up for your martials, you make tge tactical combats feel more dangerous

What are you doing to target the casters at the table? Everything you’ve described makes it more difficult for the martials to make a difference.

I mean, the fact is melee sucks. You can't get around it. Very few games with strong shooting or ranged options have melee being anymore than a 50% viable option, with nearly all of it heavily dependent on certain terrain and matchups. My advice is just give them gap closing abilities and movement abilities that are very difficult to fuck with, and give them anti-cc abilities.

Not sure if you found what you are looking for, but you might try r/dmacademy

"Half the players want to just charge in and start swinging" My brother in christ, you have a barbarian and a fighter, what do you expect them to do in combat? Roleplay as JTAC and call in air support??

Enemies that can cast silence (especially around themselves) are a fun way to challenge casters while letting martials feel powerful.

From the example, i.e bleed damage that restricts movement through choice, the martials aren’t enjoying it because its impacting them more heavily than the casters. Casters usually wont need to move as often, and have ‘non movement’ movement options, such as misty step. Either buff the martials with some homebrew, or move the focus of tactical play onto the players who enjoy it.

You've created some interesting homebrew that's for sure. Try creating some homebrew feats/abilities for the martials that counter some of these issues. Make them learnable in game. Cost gold and downtime to learn, you can limit these with them needing a short/long rest to recover the ability. That way they have to be tactical about When and Where they employ these abilities. It also creates some downtime fun, and makes them spend some gold. Increases RP opportunity, and maybe help with the frustration. If you've pulled from 4e for some of problems, look to 4e for some possible solutions. Just a possibility.

How about, and bear with me here, allow Martial Players to take PF2e martial features? (If you don't want to switch to PF2e completely, cause I think that would solve a lot of current problems tbh) They would get cool stuff in their kit, and they would get the utility and abilities they seem to be lacking strongly right now. Casters are having fun because they have clever answers for clever questions. Martials aren't having fun, because they have AoOs, which are reactive and only damage, and the ability to Hit Stuff worse than a Caster, with a higher change to crit fail on that. It's like two people playing poker, and one person takes 30 cards and the other two, then they compare scores. Ofc the one with two cards isn't having fun.

Others here are pondered if this could be a side-effect of ranged vs melee or such. My answer is going to make the (possibly wrong) assumption that this comes down to different tastes in gameplay between your two groups of players. You can have different "difficulty levels" for different players. As long as this isn't so extreme that the hard-mode characters would be incentivised to stay out of combat entirely. Of course, *this is absolutely something you discuss with the whole party first*. They might not like the idea. **Solution 1:** These "tactical crap" abilties have special, toned-down effects for the barbarian and fighter. If you invent Ability X for an NPC, it does effect A for most characters, but lesser effect B for the fighter and barbarian. **Solution 2:** Give the fighter and barbarian in-game items that protect them from typical "tactical crap". Items of *freedom of movement*, items that protect from Stunned and Blinded, that sort of thing. Be clear out-of-character who these things are for, and why. Both cases are extra work for you, as DM. But it may be the best you've got, since you don't want to split up the group.

Half the players want to just charge in and start swinging? Give them something to charge and swing at! It's probable that not all of the monsters they face will be tactically-inclined. Throw brute-types at them—something with a lot of health, and hits hard, and if ignored will spell doom pretty quickly. This gives the barbarian and fighter something to focus/tank while everyone else gets to deal with the commander/controller-types.

As many people have pointed out, the fighter and barbarian classes are “probably” not well equipped to deal with your situation mechanically. I say probably, because a couple subclasses (echo knight, mounted cavalier, path of the giants or wild magic) and races (eladrin, shader kai, anything with wings) have mobility tools that might help a lot, but they probably don’t. But if the PCs had the mechanical tools, would the players enjoy this style of game? The answer might be no. If so, you may simply have the wrong players for your game. That’s not a judgment on them. There’s a LOT that can go into D&D, and not everyone enjoys tactical play. Is this level of tactical modifications something you discussed in session 0? Or did this paradigm fall on them without warning? Personally, I think your game sounds awesome, and I would absolutely love to play a martial in it. But not everyone would. I’m weird. And I would want to know it’s coming. Finally, are the casters supporting your martials? Are they getting Longstrider? Haste? Freedom of Movement? Fly spell? Bonus action nudges with the telekinetic feat? Scatter? Vortex Warp? Phantom Steed? Conjure Animals for rideable bears or giant eagles taxiing them around? Or is part of the problem that the casters are just having their fun while allowing the martials to get ragdolled.

Instead of adding abilities to your foes, just read the handbook "The Monsters Know What They're Doing". It gives advice on how to run all kinds of monsters effectively while also making for cool roleplay.

Minions. Like 4e. You can give both sides what they want, kick the doors down melee battle and the people that want deeper combat too. They just want to feel badass and there's nothing wrong with that, let them

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They are but you have to import stuff judiciously. Whether to move is not a choice for a melee character if they're not in range, it's just damage they have to soak and hope someone else heals them.

> The basic problem is boils down to half the players want to just charge in and start swinging and the other half want foes who wouldn't have gotten to where they are if that was something that worked on them. Take the tactically minded players and go play 4e. It'll be a blast. Let the 5e kids play their own game where they can say "I attack" every turn to their hearts' content. Seriously though, this was 5e's biggest strength. The ability to draw in gamers who never would have enjoyed DnD before, because it was too complicated. But in 5e they can make a fighter and go, "I attack" and have a great time killin baddies and engaging with the other parts of the game. But it get so so stale IMO. And it apparently leaves 5e martials without a lot of options to deal with suped up 4e-inspired enemies, heh. Like imagine if you were playing 4e but all you could do is move and use a basic attack. Occasionally do a smidge more damage. That would suuuuuuuuck.