Suggestions for Speeding Up Combat

Andre said:

While a casual player can enjoy the game, if they're a significant part of the group, the whole game will likely come to a grinding halt.

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I think it's important to remember that D&D play generally rises to the level of the most adept player. I.e., they will determine how tactical/crunchy the game gets. Problems arise when gulf between that player and the next most adept one is too great.

When Adept Guy is the DM, you get players who feel they're being hammered by difficult encounters that take them forever to defeat. When Adept Guy is a player, he's either bored by the easy (to him) encounters, or else he's starting an arms race among the rest of the group who are desperately trying to kick as much ass as he does (since he's probably easily beating the encounters, which sucks all the fun out of it for the others).

So... Cobblestone, assuming you're the most adept player in the group, and you're the DM, one option (if you don't want to just use a different game, which is still my recommendation) is to simply scale down the difficulty level and complexity of the game. E.g.:

1. Eliminate or simplify more complex aspects of combat (grappling, movement, cover, etc).

2. Encourage players to use classes that are easy to manage, like warlocks, warmages, rogues, favored souls, or barbarians. Don't allow wizards, warblades, or other classes that require lots of resource management and bookkeeping.

3. Scale down the encounters. Shoot for CRs/ELs that are little bit under the typical guidelines for the party's level.

Once you've played like this for a while, you should be able to gauge whether the players want to start adding the complexity back in as they get familiar, or whether they want to stay where they feel comfortable.

Still, what it really comes down to is the nature of the game. If combats taking too long is an issue, it may simply be that tactical combat is of no interest to your group. If that's so, D&D is absolutely the wrong game for them.

One thing I've done is offload as much responsibility for manual things on the players as possible. My group usually rolls the attacks and damage by their opponents, as well as saves, spells and anything else. Its practical and fun (nothing like a player rolling a devastating crit against their own character). I also try to get them to move miniatures on the table as much as possible.

For us, 20-30 seconds to declare an action is a LONG time. I usually give them 5-10 seconds to declare, and if they haven't by then, they're on hold and I move to the next.


If you're rules-adept, one thing you might consider is to have the less rules-adpet players describe the action they want to do in real world terms, not game terms, and then translate it to game terms for them. You (hopefully) won't have to do this for long, as the players will eventually get it. But it gives them a bit more flexibility in their actions to see what is and isn't actually capable. (I also recommend giving players a little slack when they describe real world actions - IMO you want them thinking cinematically, not mechanically, but that is another discusssion.)

As far as fight-to-the-death encounters go, make sure that baddies run away sometimes. Two things happen there - you get recurring villains (which add depth to the game), but also, practically speaking, players will see that it can be done, and may try it themselves. In general, I find the best way to get the players to do something is to do it to them.

Cobblestone,

Have you considered using a different combat system? I find that in 3.5, players do limit themselves as per your #3

"--A general feeling on the part of the players that their actions are limited to what's in the rule-book, either because a certain action isn't allowed in a round, or because by-the-book, the action is too difficult to make it worthwhile to try."

I even see this behavior bleeding over into other games. Lately, I seem to be constantly reminding my players to "play the situation, not the rules." I want them to come up with stuff that their characters should do, not what they can do. I hope you know what I mean here.

I find with a rules-lite game like older editions of D&D or Chaosium's/Avalon Hill's Runequest, that combat is a fairly free-wheeling deal, because there are not a lot of conditions placed upon character actions. There are games besides these that are pretty good, too. For instance, substituting Arms Law for the combat system in any RPG can yield spectacular criticals and fumbles while eliminating a lot of the feats and skills that can straitjacket a player into having a one trick pony character.

Also, previous suggestions in this thread are good, such as rolling damage dice along with to hit and having each player track a different aspect of combat, such as initiative, durations, etc. This last bit is an old wargaming technique where everyone chipped in to keep things moving quickly and smoothly.

EDIT: ADDENDUM: 4e combat goes much, much faster than 3.5, so you may want to consider that. I was able to play in a demo a couple of weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised at how fast combat went. 4e in general wasn't my cup of tea, but combat was fast.

Humanaut said:

I like to use 3x5 cards and write the PC names down, and one (or more) for the foes. Whenever a PC finishes their turn, i place them on the bottom. That way if someone delays i can easily change the order too.

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Seconded.

Have them run skirmishes - mock battles involving the player characters.

You can have them face off against each other 1v1 or against monsters, but the point is that the player should just control his own character and have no allies in the fight.

It's very helpful to new players in terms of getting to know their characters and being comfortable with their options in combat.

I'm gonna echo the suggestion that you use index cards for initiative. I like to keep control of the stack, in case there are undetected enemies that the pcs don't know about yet (this happens a lot, especially in the first couple of rounds of a combat).

moritheil said:

Have them run skirmishes - mock battles involving the player characters.

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Good point. That's how we learnt grappling: We sat down and played three or four encounters between our fighter and various bears.

Initiative cards, Buff Cards and Status Cards have all been useful, IME. As well as a flipmat and markers. A white board, sometimes.

That 'skirmish' suggestion is an excellent one. I've done similar things, and it helped a lot. Actually, I've done that with more systems than just D&D 3e.

To speed up combat for NPCs and monsters, I pre-gen a matrix of 50-100 d20 results and tic them off in sequence as I use them. This involves a good deal of trust on both sides of the DM screen, as players will want to be assured that you are being "random" while you are being sure to stay true to the order of the numbers as they appear.

If your players are willing and trustworthy, they could use a similar matrix for their own rolls... chances are, though, your players will prefer to roll all their checks.

My proposal to speed up combat (since you mention your players feel constrained by the combat rules): Expand and simplify it. Focus on a few key actions, and handwave the rest.

Don't play out how dozens of minions get killed one by one by the fighter blocking the door they want to get through. Have him roll to kill the first, and eyeball the outcome from that, narrating it as a heroic action with lots of cleaves.

Skip the "charge, full attack full attack, cleric heal! full attack" routine.

Instead make special moves matter more than the rules make them. Make it so that if the fighter can bullrush the enemy off a cliff that this means half the fight is won (could play this out in 2 or three rounds, tops - fighter bullrushes the enemy to the edge, the rest closes in to keep him there, next round it's bullrush over the edge). If your NPC gets disarmed, make that matter more than "he picks his weapon up, AoO, he attacks". If the weapon is disarmed, it should very hard to recover due to terrain or party action.

A way to visualise this is to not see the enemy as having hitpoints that need to be dropped, but as having a few key "assets". Once all or the majority of those are removed/destroyed/neutralised, the battle is over.

Example:

The heroes are facing an undead knight clad in black plate, wielding a black sword dripping poisonous ooze and riding a nightmare while commanding a horde of lesser undead.

That's the following "assets":
- Protection
- Magic Sword
- Mobility
- Minions

Any of those can be dealt with in various ways. Fighters can (attempt to) sunder/disarm the weapon, kill the nightmare, block and cleave the minions, and hack the armor to pieces (least effective). Rogues (or similar characters) can trip/ensnare/hamstring/kill the nightmare, backstab past the armor if in position to do so, drop a chandelier on the minions, or pull a rug, or otherwise block them, use some magic device to neutralise the poison, etc.
Mages and clerics can use various spells to either neutralise one asset (turn undead, fireball, wall of force, etc. to deal with the minions, banishment/dominate monster/slay living/disintegrate, hold monster/force cage/entangle etc. for the nightmare, protection spells to avoid damage from the sword, spells to make the undead easier to hurt, etc.

So, in essence: focus on pulling a few key stunts/moves, and handwave the rest with narrating. Don't roll how long it takes to kill all minions, or how long it takes to hack past the 30 AC of the undead night once he's lost his mount, weapon and minion. If the main enemy is dead or has fled, handwave the minions away as fleeing/getting killed easily.

And of course, NPCs should flee or attempt to as well if the battle goes against them. At the very least this makes them easier to kill when they turn their backs, speeding up combat as well.

If the battle turns against he group, do the same for escaping, present a few key tasks they need to do, and see if they manage - you can always switch to full "hp by hp" mode if TPK starts like it will happen.