How funny that I read this right after coming home from a session where both things happened. We are a bunch of level 3′s and two minotaurs (CR 5) charged us. The monk stops one square in front of me (the wizard) and is charged over and gored. I didn’t even realize till afterwards but he could have moved all the way behind me but sacrificed himself. He did it on purpose to save me.

I used the time to read a rope trick scroll and climbed up to drink a mage armor potion. Our warrior and paladin fell back and I slid back down the rope, behind the minotaur now. Instead of running to heal the monk I CHARGED the minotaur with my dagger. I missed, but I gave the warrior flanking bonus, changed his roll from a 13 to a 15 and it caused the hit that let us kill the minotaur before it killed us. Teamwork. It was awesome.

As far as teamwork goes, you do see some with the support classes (like the bard’s inspire courage or the clerics buffing spells), but you’re right — most people don’t use tactics very well.

We have only tried to do it once in our group. Our DM was running a split campaign with a “good” group and a “bad” group that met on a different night. At the end of the campaign, we were going to meet and fight en masse. Unfortunately, he had to stop DMing so we never got the chance, but the idea was exciting anyway. I was on the “good” team and my cohort Dante and I were planning all sorts of horrible team attacks we could do against them. Our DM said the other guys were very self-centered in their combat and we probably would have torn them apart had we done so. Which I thought was really funny because the “bad” team played D&D minis all the time and loved to do nothing but battle and we were the method-acting roleplaying types.