Combat speed - works for our group; one-hour encounters

[DNH]

A friend of mine, [MENTION=38140]Frylock[/MENTION] here on the boards, spent quite a bit of time figuring out and playtesting how to give the combats in the game the same feel as the old dungeon crawls.

If you remember 1e, or maybe you don't, there were combats between the party of heroes and 20-40 creatures, and that didn't seem to bother the game framework.

So he went ahead and wrote an article about it. Follow this link for the full article.

Thanks for this. I do remember 1e, yes; we have played every edition of D&D but the Chainmail rules!

Interesting article. I particularly like the 'end-of-encounter riders' idea and will probably adopt something along those lines for my own game.

 

[surfarcher]

With our system we have 1 hour or less combats fairly regularly.

Our system has two sides - the PCs and the DM.

On the players' side we have certain things we expect them to do (know your character, be prepared, be ready when it's your shot, etc - see our Combat Notes on our campaign portal). We also use a Rewards System that encourages the players to take their turn quickly... And the rewards themselves also reduce combat time (because players can turn a miss into a hit or upgrade a hit to a crit).

On the DMs side I took Stalker0's advice on grind to heart a long time ago. Experimentation and experience since has borne it out. It's certainly as valid in the post-MV era as it was several MMs ago.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A friend of mine, @Frylock here on the boards, spent quite a bit of time figuring out and playtesting how to give the combats in the game the same feel as the old dungeon crawls.

If you remember 1e, or maybe you don't, there were combats between the party of heroes and 20-40 creatures, and that didn't seem to bother the game framework.

So he went ahead and wrote an article about it. Follow this link for the full article.

What I don't remember is having 20-40 MEANINGFUL enemies...

In AD&D you could have many 'mooks' (usually low level humanoids like orcs or somesuch). Now, try running 40 minions in 4e. It actually isn't all that hard. Make say 4 different groups of 10, roll init for each group so you can mostly just have them all move and attack at once. It actually works fine, and isn't much trouble at all. Certainly no more than 1e where you had to do basically the same amount of work (IE make a save or a to-hit roll for/against each one as appropriate basically). 1e didn't explicitly have 1 hit point minions or fixed damage output minions either, though I'd call that a trivial simplification and most DMs were well aware of how to do that.

And just to clarify, I've run encounters with 40 figures on the bad guy side. Turns actually didn't take appreciably longer than normal. Using Maptool helped a lot as it greatly streamlines tracking various things, but with them all being minions there really isn't much to track, they're either up and going or deaders.

My experience with AD&D was always that risky fights and high level fights often were quite long and drawn out. More trivial fights were generally a good bit faster. Things could be pretty variable. If you started running into more complex effects and/or had higher level casters running around making creative use of the more powerful spells then things could get slow quite fast. I clearly remember many all-night 1e fights.

Really IMHO what 4e needs most is an easy spelled out way to resolve moderate difficulty fights that are not really plot important. The best thing right now is to just avoid having them. There are various options, but none of them are spelled out in the rules. I'm not sure sacking most of the tactical fun of the interesting fights is worth it just to get "4 orcs in a guardroom" to play out fast.

 

[DNH]

I played through a short adventure about a year ago and there was one encounter that was a combat encounter but was run as a skill challenge. And for no real reason other than the point of it was to escape massing hostiles, rather than slaughter them all. Successes were awarded for successful attacks and so on. It kinda worked but my players didn't like it one bit and grumbled all the way through. So yes, there are ways of doing things differently but they don't always work well for everybody (there's Mearls' spaghetti sauce again!).

OTOH, I rejigged the actual Siege of Bordrin's Watch as an extended and quite complicated skill challenge (as per some suggestions found online somewhere; forgive the lack of citation/link) and that worked really well.

 

[Lexeme]

I like that idea -- gonna have to give it a try. Any chance you could share the "chart of fun effects"?

"Fun" may be a bit of a liberal description, as I threw it together pretty quickly. I can't seem to find the original I created in Word, unfortunately.
It was a d100 chart with effects ranging from +3 to +6, most often with riders.
Things like:
-Regain a spent daily (or recharge an encounter)
-Gain an action point
-Gain a healing surge
-Auto-crit
-Additional damage (flavored in various ways ("Enemies in sight take 5 psychic damage from the trauma of seeing such a powerful blow delivered upon their ally"))
-Application of various status effects (stunned, dazed, blinded, etc)

After going through and digging up my chart, I think I'll create a new one that only expects a d20. A lot of the ones in my original become rather repetitive.