Simplifying, speeding up, gameplay

[Judging__Eagle]

What sort of things do you guys do to speed up gameplay?

Sometimes I have monsters go in 'grouped' initiative order (instead of rolling for each guy); with only bosses or special monsters getting to act on their own initiative step.

Other times I'll handwave a fight that is near the end; it's minutes wasted, and we know what's going to happen. Even if the monsters crit every hit, the PCs are able to deal enough consistent offense that the monsters will die; and the PCs will survive the last of the encounter.

Also, with some PCs, that have "too many dice" to roll, I feel better just giving them average dice rolls, so that they don't have to roll 6 dice for their damage rolls, several times per round. When a PC seriously has 6 attacks, you're better off checking to see if any miss/hit/crit, and just make damage a few dice, and a flat number, or even just a flat number.

I did that with the Barbarian in my game; I know that she does X damage when not raging; and X+Y damage when raging, on average. She gets enough attacks to achieve an 'average' damage spread every round, so it's faster to just set her damage to average, all the time.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Normally, I speed up my D&D games by making them at least half Magical Teaparty. I also sometimes just take 10 or assume a spread of 8-12 when making a bunch of d20 rolls. When making something like 40 attacks with very weak NPCs, I assume a spread of 1-20 in rolls.

In my upcoming game, I'm going to test out an idea I have for play-by-post where I ask for general tactics from the players and run things either in chunks of several rounds or until the tactical situation changes. If this works as planned, many battles will end with just a couple posts from every player, and in general combat will take less real time.

[Crissa]

What I don't like that speeds up games is when half of 2d6+n damage becomes 1d6+n damage.

The curves aren't the same. And I find it confusing to account.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

Probably the easiest and most universal way to speed up games is to have the opposition retreat when things are going badly for them.

I am amazed at the number of DMs who have critters fight to the bitter end, even when it's just like two skeleton archers out of an initial horde of ten of them. You can shave off like 30 minutes of time by having monsters retreat or just going 'look, the monsters have no chance, anyone mind if I just say you guys win?'

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

1. Spend minimal time on the combat grid. Mention where everyone is, and don't worry about the minor details
2. Forgo attacks of opportunity if at all possible
3. Roll initiative 1 time for all involved.
4. Have all monsters go on the same initiative roll
5. Give a player 30 seconds to decide their action and then quickly move onto the next one. (With practice this can be reduced)
6. Roll to hit and damage at once with one hand if using actual dice, normally I suggest using a random number generator

[ggroy]

[souran]

1. Spend minimal time on the combat grid. Mention where everyone is, and don't worry about the minor details
2. Forgo attacks of opportunity if at all possible
3. Roll initiative 1 time for all involved.
4. Have all monsters go on the same initiative roll
5. Give a player 30 seconds to decide their action and then quickly move onto the next one. (With practice this can be reduced)
6. Roll to hit and damage at once with one hand if using actual dice, normally I suggest using a random number generator

All these things reduce the importance and value of combat in your game. Thats fine if thats what you want. However, the detail and crunch of combat are designed to do just the opposite.

Part of this is that when you do rpg combat half the people want final fantasy combat and the other half want final fantasy tactics combat.

What people like in combat is usually when they feel like they have worked as a team, and that combat feels responsive.

I has sort of got me thinking about how to build a really GOOD rpg combat system with enough interesting interplay to keep wargamers like me happy while it also appeals to people who like to fight but don't want to care about flanks and grid movement and what not.

Here is sort of what I have come up with:
Zone Combat System
1. Instead of a grid system, with defined movement and distance, combat happens in a number of zones that loosely identify the relative distance between players.
2. The zones are melee, near, far, long, and extreme.
3. Instead of the regular movmement scheme players are allowed to use there movement to Close (move one zone more toward melee), distance (move one zone further than melee) Charge (move 1 zone toward melee and attack, or move 2 zones) or Flee (move 2 zones away from melee and do nothing else)
4. Normally players may only melee attack other players in the melee zone. Ranged attacks may target players in the same zone or one zone closer at no penalty and players one zone further away at whatever the games "long range" penalty is. (Note that this is a MAJOR abstraction, probably needs to be rewritten with unique rules for each zone the rules here make the most sense for ranged attacks in the near zone.
5. A player in the melee zone who chooses close or charge moves his Target toward the melee zone.


Other rules beyond these really depend on the game. For instance flanking can be handled by letting whatever side has the most individuals in melee recieve the flanking bonus (this is comparable to how D&D with miniatures turns out usually anyway), or by letting people get the flanking bonus by saying they are attacking a target that has been attacked by another player in melee since their last turn.

Again the idea is to be really abstract, usually most combats end up with some point being the center of the action and most of the movement happening sort of around that. This lets you generate that feel without having to put down tiles or minatures. Additionally, its fairly easy to build on. Say your place of combat has two interesting places to fight, like say near the cliff edge or around a big tree on the cliff. Just make two melee zones and say that they intersect at one of the other range zones. Players can close or charge from that zone into either of the melee zones.

[K]

In Epic, I just assumed an average roll on 30+ die rolls. It ended up being +/- a die of damage anyway with that many dice, and it takes too much time to count them up for that little variance.

I've also tried to get people to roll attack dice and damage dice at the same time, but they never seem to want to.

[souran]

In my 4E games, I just used a lot of minions and "super" minions. The super minions are essentially ordinary monsters with the normal hit points stripped out, coming in two varieties: a 1-2 hit minion, and a 2-3 hit minion. (Essentially the hit points are replaced with something resembling a health bar).

A 1-2 hit superminion requires two hits to kill it. The first hit bloodies the superminion, and a second hit kills it. In the case where a player rolls a critical and/or does a lot of damage, it kills the superminion right away. After one hit, any bloodied activated powers are in effect (if any).

A 2-3 hit superminion requires three hits to kill it, with a similar pattern as the 1-2 hit superminion. Once this superminion is bloodied, whether by two successive hits or by a critical and/or high damage, the bloodied activated powers are in effect (if any).

If the players get lucky and hit these superminions really hard easily, I'll secretly have them take a healing surge.

In terms of gameplay, these "super" minions play similar to ordinary monsters without all the bookkeeping, and without the players knowing what's really going on behind the screen. It speeds things up significantly.

For mini-bosses or bosses, I'll usually use the normal hit point accounting.

Other characters which I turn into modified minions, are archers and magic users which do a lot of ranged attacks damage on the players. By the time the players reach and kill these archers or wizards with one hit (or two), the players would have received a lot of damage from these ranged attacks. (Essentially I put these archers or magic users slightly out of range of any of the players' initial attacks).

Honestly, I really like this. Hit point accounting is basically a pain in the ass and honestly, unless the players roll super great or beyond terrible most monsters come into about a the ranges you discuss. Honestly, the monsters usually come down after about 3-5 successful attacks.

So, what if instead of actually having hit points D&D had a thresholding mechanic. When you get hit you roll damage as normal and compare to a threshold. If you are above the threshold you get a hit, if you are 2x the threshold you cause two hits etc. If you below the threshold you reduce the threshold by 2 and keep going. In 4e it seems like you could make this threshold equal to say the healing surge value and you would be just about right.

[Judging__Eagle]

Ditto on the attack/Damage dice Rolling K.

I can however give a player 6d20; and have them roll all of their attacks at once.


An other thing that I do that is strictly to save me time in planning, and to give me more flexibility when it comes to player actions; is to have encounters created at the start of the sessions using a combination of player d% rolls; a stripped down version of the DMG monster encounter tables; and being able to look in 3-4 different books to find a bunch of Ice, Outsider/Fiendish, Reptile, Jungle, Undead, whatever, type of monster in order to 1) play a game that is interesting, and that I didn't have to do a lot of planning or thinking about and 2) have monsters/encounters in an area be thematic, and make sense.

[Juton]

Take good legible notes. My last character was a buff Cleric, so I had his attack progression written out for the most obvious buff spell combinations.

Limit the number of dice you roll, another character in our group rolled 8d6 on every attack, plus he had Robilar's Gambit. Seriously it took minutes to resolve his turn, everyone else was done in 20 seconds.

Lastly try to avoid pointless fights. Putting 2 dire rats up against a 3rd level group is pretty pointless, if you are familiar with the AP group some of the weaker monster together for a more interesting encounter.

[Josh_Kablack]

1. Play a rules-lite system. No edition of D&D nor WoD qualifies here, but Feng Shui and Toon are good.

But If you must run a rules-heavy system (like D&D or HERO)

• Fuck rolling initiative entirely. The combat round starts with the character with the highest initiative bonus, and then the PLAYER seated to the right of that character takes the next turn. When it reaches the DM seat, all the antagonists act.
• Institute a mook rule of some sort. Unnammed characters are dramatically uninteresting and therefore go down in one hit, or automatically take max damage or something. 4e minion rules are close here but the wackiness of immunity to a miss and 4e continuing damage leads to some confusing interactions that you would want to houserule as "the orc dies in a manner of your choosing"
• Consider setting all non-critical attack damage determined by multiple dice to be the average. Beware that this can fuck with some systems and abilities where certain attacks are supposed to be more or less swingy.
• Account for as much of the bookkeepping as possible in out-of-session time. Seriously, make people figger out their attack bonuses and damage and make a little chart of what happens to those numbers when they are weakened, when they use each combination of their buff powers and when their cleric buddy throws a buff on them. Have them list not only die rolls but minimum damage (and in 4e "maximum" damage for crit purposes). Assign the senior rules-lawyer to make such charts for the new players.
• Fuck the advice about encounter difficulty. PCs either face hordes of monsters of much too low encounter level, and mass kill them quickly or face a single boss monster of notably higher level (this guy's main attack should have like a 50/50 shot of KOing the average PC). The mirror match where your 6 PCs face of against a mixed group of 6 equal-level antagonists either bogs down in complexity or results in people forgetting appropriate abilities and counter strategies and has no place in a gotta-be-quick game.
• Be an asshole about side conversations. While the game session is running, people need to be focused on the game or leave the room. If you do this, I strongly encourage hard-scheduling "commercial breaks" into your session at least every 45 minutes.

[ggroy]