Battles taking too long - whats the tricks?

[ggroy]

Whay are you having to do this all the time?

I've always been doing this since 1E AD&D.

If you use the proper level monsters for the player's levels and they are equipped properly you shouldn't need to checking the maths for every encounter.

There appears to be an implicit assumption of the players having magic weapons of an appropriate level. I don't know if 4E was originally design this way, but in practice this assumption makes the combat encounters less "grinding". But on the other hand, this assumption does make the combat encounters somewhat "cookie cutter" regardless of level. In a previous recent thread,

http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-rules/270715-1-level-instead-level.html

it was shown that the to-hit roll scales approximately as:

~ d20 + level

for an attack using a player's primary stat along with the assumptions of magic weapon enhancement and regular player ability stat increases.

 

[Amaroq]

The main drawback of group initiative, is to minimize players from piling on and attacking the boss (or mini-boss) monster, and killing it in the first round. (Though the players all piling on a minion or a generic monster and killing it in one round, isn't much of a problem). Usually I'll have a layer of minions and/or generic monsters near the boss (or mini-boss), which can trip up the players via opportunity attacks.

Hmmm - group initiative has a drawback, too:

An encounter featuring several Gray Wolves (L2) and one Dire Wolf (L5) is of a much different difficulty if the wolves all go at the same time - you get this "okay, the first wolf moves to get Combat Advantage. It hits; now you're prone. Every other wolf piles on doing double damage as they savage a prone target" effect.

If the wolves each have their own separate initiative, interspersed with the PCs, you get a much more tactical encounter as the players can use zones, push, pull, marking, etc, to try and screen the other wolves off the downed player .. nothing like the pressure being on a character who isn't built for it trying to play the defender to give the bloodied fighter a chance to get back on his feet!!

Seriously - I kid you not - giving each wolf a separate initiative changed this encounter from a near-TPK to a fairly easy party win when I ran my testbed party through it.

I'm sure there are lots of other monsters that benefit massively from the synergy of getting to go all in one clump (even if they have to survive a round of the PC's going nova on them to get their turn).

 

[Nifelhein]

Um, sure - I yoinked Kiznet's re crib sheet, linked from the opening post of that thread, and found the second page of Alasomorph's crib sheet (4th page of same thread) for conditions.

For the "skill check actions", I wrote my own - guess I oughta PDF it and post it to that thread, huh?

Thread hijack last part: that would be awesome, those sheets are indeed useful.

 

[RangerWickett]

I never understood this approach. If you make it too easy to hit, where is the fun in hitting?

Wasting a time in a game is not fun for me. Missing in combat is very similar to skipping your turn, only you do it after you've spent time trying to come up with some cool way to aid your buddies. I mean, you know how frustrating being stunned is, right? When you can't do anything useful in the game, it's sorta like you're not being allowed to play.

"Hitting" is itself not fun. Having agency over the game is fun. Outwitting your opponent is fun. Having better luck can occasionally be fun, but optimal fun, in my opinion, comes when you come up with a creative plan and pull it off.

You don't need to make attack rolls in Chess, but it's still a fun game.

I kind of want a game where 'attacks' don't have separate attack and damage rolls. You just spend an action, decide what you do, then roll to see how effective it was. Maybe a high roll deals physical damage, and a low roll still reduces your target's defenses against further attacks, because you're wearing him out. You'd only ever miss entirely in special circumstances, like if the target has cover, or is really far away, or uses a special power. Sort of like Mutants & Masterminds.

But that's too big of a house rule for me to figure out in 4e without mucking up a lot of other combat math, so I'm trying out a less invasive fix.

So basically, I don't think I can make it 'too easy' to hit. I want players to worry less about hitting, and more about doing cool stuff.

Pardon my threadjack.

 

[Victim]

What characters do you have? A party light on damage - say a warlock, sword and board pally (or shielding swordmage), pacifist cleric, and invoker - will usually take more rounds to do the same damage as another party, so the fight takes longer. Not that those characters are all necessarily bad, but it can be a problem when you put them all together.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I never understood this approach. If you make it too easy to hit, where is the fun in hitting?

Easier hits can be offset by more hit points. If opponents are harder to hit and have a lot of hit points, well there's your slow combat right there.

I don't mind things being hard to hit as long as they can be taken out with just a few hits. If an opponent has over a hundred hit points AND only being hit 50% or less of the time then just wake me up when the fights over.

 

[KarinsDad]

Easier hits can be offset by more hit points. If opponents are harder to hit and have a lot of hit points, well there's your slow combat right there.

Easier hits makes the bookkeeping harder due to conditions.

The difference between a 50% chance to hit and a 70% chance to hit is an increase of 40% more conditions and hence, more bookkeeping.

It also changes the dynamics of combat considerably when NPCs have more conditions per encounter placed on them and/or more forced movement.

 

[ggroy]

Hmmm - group initiative has a drawback, too:

An encounter featuring several Gray Wolves (L2) and one Dire Wolf (L5) is of a much different difficulty if the wolves all go at the same time - you get this "okay, the first wolf moves to get Combat Advantage. It hits; now you're prone. Every other wolf piles on doing double damage as they savage a prone target" effect.

If the wolves each have their own separate initiative, interspersed with the PCs, you get a much more tactical encounter as the players can use zones, push, pull, marking, etc, to try and screen the other wolves off the downed player .. nothing like the pressure being on a character who isn't built for it trying to play the defender to give the bloodied fighter a chance to get back on his feet!!

Seriously - I kid you not - giving each wolf a separate initiative changed this encounter from a near-TPK to a fairly easy party win when I ran my testbed party through it.

I'm sure there are lots of other monsters that benefit massively from the synergy of getting to go all in one clump (even if they have to survive a round of the PC's going nova on them to get their turn).

In practice, I try to avoid having all the monsters piling on one player all at once. Usually I try to have one monster attacking one player.

 

[Jhaelen]

You don't need to make attack rolls in Chess, but it's still a fun game.

Well, that's debatable. I don't think anyone in my D&D group would be interested if combats were like chess.

Without the random element, D&D would be pretty boring.

 

[DanmarLOK]

I never understood this approach. If you make it too easy to hit, where is the fun in hitting?

I add a +2 to-hit across the board. The default 50-60% chance to hit is too low in my opinion to keep the game fun and interesting for the players. They typically wait 10+ minutes to get their turn in and missing sucks. By kicking the chance to hit up to 70% or so that falls in line with human studies on the 'sweet spot' between success/fail ratios where it's not a guarentee to succeed but the miss rate doesn't suck the enjoyment out of the game.

Between that and adding +1/2 level to all damage, even huge fights with 5 pc's and 20+ creatures rarely take more than an hour to an hour and a half. And I can point a finger at one or two players for them taking that long as they're a little indecisive on what to do every time they come up.