Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Negflar2099" data-source="post: 4992607" data-attributes="member: 65944">I've been running a 4th edition game since it came out and while I love the system I have run into the same snags other people seem to be running into, namely combat (which should be exciting and fast) is running slow and boring. I've been all over the boards and read everything and tried everything to fix this but combat still runs slow. Recently a player of mine expressed her frustration at the speed of combat. She pointed out that the big stumbling block seems to be the time it takes to do the math and it got me thinking, why does D&D combat feature so much math? Does it have to? Compare D&D to almost any other game involving dice (such as Craps). When you roll the dice in Craps you know right when it comes up if you've won or not. You know right when you look at the dice. That's not true in D&D. In D&D the dice comes up say 13. Then you add some modifiers and tell the DM you rolled a 25. Then he says you missed, but then you remember the +2 your Warlord buddy gives you and so it's really a 27 and then the DM says you hit. But then you have to roll damage and until you do you don't really know how well you hit. You might do max damage and then that's a great hit or you might do minimum damage and not so much (or something in between). I think that's even why Crits are so exciting, because when that 20 comes up you know right away that you hit and exactly how much damage you did. Very exciting. So that got me thinking has anyone proposed we eliminate some of the in-combat math? Why not eliminate the damage roll for instance? Every attack would do average damage (or max damage if it's a crit). That way you would know exactly how much damage an attack does without needing to roll it. The other idea I had was telling the players exactly what they need to roll on the dice in order to hit the enemy before they roll the dice. So a player might say "I'm targeting AC with a +7 attack." Then I'll say "Okay you need a 12 or higher in order to hit." They roll the dice and know right away if they hit or not, the second the dice hit the table. Now I know that some people would say that's giving away too much information to players, but remember I wouldn't tell them the defenses ahead of time. All I'm telling them is what they need to roll with this specific attack. Sure a clever player can just do the math and figure out the defenses but they can do that already so what's the big deal? Under this system I would just be telling them the target number they need to roll before they roll. That's all. Has anyone tried these systems? I'm aware I'm probably proposing something that's been proposed before, so I'm asking, are there any snags that I don't see?</blockquote>

Verification