Speeding up combat: have you tried to halve hit points?

[LostSoul]

[MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION]: sounds cool, but it's not clear to me how you handle, for example, a power that stuns.

It's not too hard; we pretty much go by what it says - "End of next turn" means just that. Which does change things.

Anyway. What Keenberg says is true, it's a pretty different system and you'd need to get a good degree of buy-in if you were to use it. What I did, though, was work "outside of the box" - I figured out what I wanted to get out of the system (1st - more description which would have an effect on action resolution; 2nd - quicker combats) and changed the system in order to get that.

That'd be my advice: figure out what you want and don't be afraid to mess around with everything in order to get it.

 

[Crowsion]

I think it's called the Ogre Rule. It's when all damage dealt to a bloodied creature is doubled. I've used it before and it worked well. Strikers won't have any easier of a time one-shot'ing things. The main side-effect I saw was that it put more importance on quick healing rather than big healing, so leaders could keep allies above bloodied.

Another thing I do is when The battle is clearly going to be won by the PC's is if a shot doesn't get a creature to exactly 0 Hp or less I say it's "effectively dead" and have the PC just kill it.

Alternatively, if the PC's are about to TPK I also employ the "effectively dead" mechanic as well so they can survive.

 

[Dragonblade]

[MENTION=27897]Ryujin[/MENTION]: yeah, that's what I'm concerned about. Likewise, I'm afraid that brute monsters would one-shot some of my players. (I'm thinking of removing crits from monsters.)

The thing is, 4E for us is a good game, but really we've never been able to manage fights in a sensible timeframe. By never, I mean that we've been playing it from the start and we're still at the 2-hour fight for normal fights and 3 hours for long ones. This eats too much time into battle for my taste. I've read dozens of threads on speeding up combat, nothing improves the timeframe significantly. We have one player that handles initiative, we roll damage dice at the same time as we roll attack dice, I cut down on usage of soldiers and solos, I have the enemies surrender or flee when it's apparent they'll loose, and recently, I even ended up preparing shortened PC sheets for my players in a short (few-sessions long) paragon tier adventure that look like monster stats (with powers having double or triple uses instead of having multiple different powers) to cut down on the PC sheet reading time, but even that wasn't enough. All that to no avail, although the battles are slightly (say, 5-20%) shorter, they're still way too long. We do include a bit of roleplay pretty much at each creature's turn, but asking us to do away with that is too much. I don't think we go overboard there, however.

Anyway. Thanks for everyone's comments so far. Hopefully more people will chime in, especially those that have tried this. The comments so far surprise me as I was not expecting the suggestion of halving monster HP but keep player HP as is. To me, this would have meant increasing the number of opponents to keep the fights balanced, which would have defeated the purpose. Now it seems some people do that however.

One optional rule that others mentioned is halve monster HP (but not players) but then double damage that monsters do (not players).

Mathematically a monster that normally lives for 6 rounds now dies in 3. But they still do the same amount of damage in those three rounds so combat moves faster but its just as exciting and tense.

If you want to play the game as is, your group can train like a military unit to speed up combat, though that's not for everyone. My group trained for the Ultimate Dungeon Delve (which WotC discontinued a couple years ago), and that helped tremendously.

Essentially, the UDD is a WotC convention tournament they used to host. Your party of 5 has 45 minutes to get through a tough encounter. If you run out of time before you defeat all the monsters, you lose. You then have to beat 6 timed encounters like this with no extended rests, but you get a short rest between each one.

We used the Dungeon Delve book and grabbed encounters out of there to train with. At first it was hard, but after about 3 to 4 practice sessions of really focusing on speed, we got through it. By our 7th or 8th run we could beat the encounters in 30 to 40 minutes and our main limitation became the speed of the DM to run all the monsters.

As a result of our delve training, long encounters no longer occur. Every one of our players can take their entire turn in under a minute and usually in under 30 seconds.

Here are the tenets of fast gameplay we developed:

1. Pay attention to what's going on in the battle.
2. Know your character's powers intimately, and when your turn comes be ready to act immediately.
3. Roll attacks and damage together.
4. Tell everyone when you are done so the next player can act.

Delve style play isn't for everyone, but on a side note here are some of the delve rules we developed to run our group more like a fantasy commando unit that could make it through the delve quickly:

Designate a leader (as in unit leader, not the 4e role)- The leader's job is to decide who gets focus fired.
Focus Fire - Pick the most dangerous enemy, usually a controller, and target them above all else, then move on to the next most dangerous enemy and so on.
No turtling - No hanging back and launching tentative attacks. Be aggressive.
Don't split the party - Everyone goes together so the monsters can't isolate a PC
Know your roles (aka Protect the Squishies!) - Defenders defend the controllers and leaders, leaders stay back and heal the defenders and strikers, controllers control the battlefield to hinder the enemies and help the defenders and strikers, strikers support the defenders and focus fire on the designated targets

 

[Dragonblade]

For those curious, we beat the UDD and our group was supposed to go into the UDD Hall of Fame on WotC's site, but then they discontinued the UDD events at Cons. So that was kind of a bummer.

Still, we all got free WotC swag for winning.

 

[LittleElvis]

I had a house rule for pbp that everything's hit points were reduced by 15% (PCs and monsters). The only tweak is that I gave 133% XP for minions since minions became a bit more powerful than before. I think all of that works fine.

You could make it 10% if you want to make the math quicker and easier. And obviously 20% or more would have a stronger impact.

 

[Unwise]

In a campaign I DMed, there is a red moon. When it is higher in the sky than the blue moon, all NPCs have their HP halved and damage doubled. This way we sometimes play that way and sometimes do not, but it feels consistent and the players can decide for themselves sometimes, by waiting until the moon is high before launching their attack.

What I find by playing that way though is that controllers felt considerably less worthwhile. My players feel there is little point controlling something when you could kill it in two shots.

I am a big fan on damaging terrain and realistic NPC reactions. I often make encounters near lava flows etc so that one way or another the fights are over more quickly. I like to give controllers their time to shine once every few encounters. I am also a fan of surprise rounds, which make the fights feel much quicker. The PCs can get ambushed by lurkers, take a lot of damage, then quickly dispatch them.

Having realistic reactions from guards is important too. If a guard is deep in a linear dungeon, surely they are going to realize that if this group of 5 guys is here, they have probably just slaughtered everyone else and he better run. Most monsters run away well before their HP fall too low.

I also use a morale system. Each enemy that falls, cool bit of intimidate roleplay, or particularly nasty critical etc erodes the enemies morale. When it gets low, the players can trade in a few healing surges to hand-wave them cleaning up the rest of the survivors. As the morale gets lower, this drops down to only 1 healing surge to clean up the rest.

I did an unusual thing once, the PCs were up against an army of hobgoblins who always used a set patrol pattern and set squads. They fought one of these squads, I told them before hand that this would be taken as an example of how they fight more of these squads "off-screen" and they should avoid using daily powers. It was pretty cool, it ended up with most people losing 1 surge, but the avenger and fighter losing 2.

Each time they failed to avoid a patrol from that point on, or chose to ambush one, they would take the same losses and get some random treasure. Fighting these patrols was not the point of the adventure, so it was a good way to move past them and continue.

In the same adventure, I set up an encounter that took place half way through an 'off screen' encounter. I set up the map with lots of hobgoblin bodies laying around, assigned 8d20 damage they could share out between themselves as they wanted eg. mage takes 1 dice, fighter takes 3 etc. To reflect the state of the current fight they were in. There were still a fair few goblins around, but nothing that would have stressed them at all, or had to be played through. That is when the BBEG's right hand man suddenly made am appearance though. It played really well, coming in half way through a mundane fight rather than playing through it.

 

[Truename]

I did an unusual thing once, the PCs were up against an army of hobgoblins who always used a set patrol pattern and set squads. They fought one of these squads, I told them before hand that this would be taken as an example of how they fight more of these squads "off-screen" and they should avoid using daily powers. It was pretty cool, it ended up with most people losing 1 surge, but the avenger and fighter losing 2.

Each time they failed to avoid a patrol from that point on, or chose to ambush one, they would take the same losses and get some random treasure. Fighting these patrols was not the point of the adventure, so it was a good way to move past them and continue.

Cool idea. Yoink!

 

[KarinsDad]

Doubling hit points means that feats and abilities like Improved Initiative go from being decent to good, to being gold.

Except at real high levels, strikers one shot kill foes and non-strikers one shot bloody foes.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I update everything to new math on the fly (Defenses and damage) then combine encounters in waves and half hp of any creature I don't want on the table a long time.

For non-combined encountes add 1 minion per reduced hp creature.

Elites and solos are usually left alone.


PCs are encouraged to maximise damage over screwing around with the enemies or going defensive.


Base damage for creatures is 8+level. +25% brute, or limited. -25% area.

 

[Viking Bastard]

I just describe it. I've never encountered a situation where it's been too complicated.

This sounds pretty much how I ran all my combats pre-3e. The only question I have is when do the monsters go once the fight has started? Just when you feel it's appropriate? Once the PCs have all done their thing?

That'd be my advice: figure out what you want and don't be afraid to mess around with everything in order to get it.

Yeah. 4e's biggest strength IMO is the flexibility of the underlying mechanics. It's all very malleable, but if you understand the repercussions, it should all hang together.