boring combat

[War Golem]

You know...I've never been particularly cinematic in my combat descirptions. As DM, I figure it is the responsibility of the players to use their own imaginations to fill in the details beyond "The troll attacks you and...hits with a bite and a claw for...15 points of damage." If they want to imagine their character ducking out of the way of one claw and then the troll scything through their armore with the second claw and bite, that's their business.

As a player, I often resent the DM telling me how my character reacts to the attacks of the monster.

If a player wishes to describe the actions of his PC in combat, good for him.

On top of that, there are only so many ways you can describe the action. I'm very much preoccupied with tracking the monsters, keeping the adventure material organized and up to date and acting as ref. Having to come up with creative and new ways to describe how the orc chieftain swings his morning star and misses the heavily armored fighter is just not very productive, IMO.

So I tend to reserve the cinematic descriptions for killing blows on the PCs or important NPCs or for other rare and interesting situations.

Put me firmly in Uller's camp. This almost exactly describes my attitude towards running combats. Not that it was ever something I sat down and made a conscious decision about, but just the way my style has evolved over the years.

I recognize that part of this is because I tend not to bother with a lot of smaller, soften-them-up combats and usually just plan in one or two big battles per session, with the odd environmental factors thrown in as much as possible. With the bigger battles, there are nearly always a mix of monster types, all with their own special abilities (this is especially magnified at higher levels) to keep track of. Also, I frequently have NPCs involved, and they always take a fair amount of mental effort to play intelligently in combat.

Trying to keep all of that straight (which I can usually do pretty well) AND trying to keep combat moving (which does not seem to happen) leaves me little mental energy for cinematically describing every sword blow and claw attack. I try to do it when I remember, but I often forget, and honestly, I'm never too sure how much my players really care anyway. They don't ever describe what they're doing much; they seem pretty satisfied with:

PC: "I cast fireball... here.. for 38pts of damage!"
DM: "Ok, two creatures make their saves and are smoking, but still up. These three all failed and are toast." (removes figures from battlemat)
PC: "Great. Somebody hurry up and wipe out those other two."


Comment: I remember back in the early days of 3e when my group was playtesting the Realms, and there was so much chatter on the net about how much faster combat was in 3e, it was practically revolutionary. Well, combat was slow for us then, but we figured, ok, we're still learning the rules. Well, it's a couple years later, I know the rules pretty well by now, and combat is NOT faster. Some of our more complicated combats take hours of real time to resolve a mere few rounds.

Question: Just wondering... when using a battlemat and figures or tokens, do you remove the figure from the board when it dies (thus effectively clearing that space on the board for other stuff) or do you leave the figure to represent the dead body for the duration of the combat? We've always taken them off the board, mostly for convenience sake, and I guess also because there is some gratification in seeing the tokens representing your enemies diminish as you conquer them (kind of like playing Chess). But I suppose leaving them on the board would be more realistic.

Cheers,

-War Golem

 

[Carnifex]

It helps if the players themselves develop their own distinctive fighting styles and tactics. Let me give the example of my Planescape character Magnus the Wild, a bariaur fighter (this was in 2e).

The game was run with two different parties, occasionally crossing each others paths (though doubtless later on to meet up for good). When I joined, Magnus joined an NPC wizard called Heiron and a PC tiefling mage/thief called Desar'ii, who had sought out Heiron to deliver something to him and had decided to join him for a while to learn more magic from him. They were following the Modron March, and Magnus hooked up with them.

Well, the baatezu had their reasons for being after both Desar'ii and MAgnus, and early on we got attacked by two black abishai and an erinyes. The battle was going poorly, with Heiron having damaged an abishai badly but our lack of much in the way of magic weapons causing problems. Magnus, who would be a barbarian if he were a 3e character, solved the problem of unhurtable abishai by...

Knocking one down, jumping up and down on it, and then picking it up and throwing it at the erinyes. She dodged, and the devil slammed into a nearby tree.

He picked up on this tactic, and became a real strength-based combatant, who when fighting with a well-armoured priest of Set up on a platform over a large room got so irritated at trying to injure the hard-to-hit cleric that he picked him up, too and threw the sod off to his doom on the floor below.

Characters doing things like this, especially in 3e using Disarms and Bullrushes and Trips etc, can really liven up combat from a simple 'I roll to hit, I hit, I roll for damage' type thing

 

[Greybar]

Uller - I think this can also fall into the "do what is best for your group" category. As someone said earlier, if your players and you are having fun, then whatever you are doing is dead right. I wouldn't want the GM tell me too much what my character does when I'm a player either.

That said, I'll stick by my encouragement to people who wanted ideas on how to "make their combats less boring." I hope all of our feedback helps all round.

I gotta throw out one of my favorite scenes from a game maybe 6 months or more ago as an example of descriptive combat. The GM was the kind who is more storytelling than numbers (your mileage may vary). Our group was dealing with a vampire's servant who had used Suggestion to great effect on us. A comrade was now "happily a guest" of the evil vampire. My group had come in to try to talk our way to where he was. There there three of us, including my paladin who was very unhappy. The man in front of us was obviously evil (to a paladin's god-given sight), but the party was negotiating. One by one they were falling under suggestion. Finally the evil spawn turned to Reginald (my paladin):
"Sssoo, you agree then that you should stay will us until this is all resssolved?"
Save vs. Will, I succeed, I ask the GM "do I know he just tried to enhanct me?"
Answer: "yes, what are you going to do?"
"I draw my sword, charge with a cry to Heironeous, and cut his head off with a Smite."
[dice are rolled and my longsword is a critical, almost 30 pts of damage when it's all done.]
"Your sword bites into his neck and his head flies into the area. The group stands stunned as Reginald stands over the crumpling body, and they shake off the compulsion."

Now that was me being descriptive, and the GM being descriptive. I wouldn't at all be suprised if the bad guy technically had a few hit points left, but the GM knew that the scene would be 500% better if I actually *did* cut his head off just as I intended to. Perhaps Heironeous smiled on his journeyman paladin for a moment.

One of the shortest, most memorable, and most fun combats I've had as a player in the past year or so...

John

 

[Chairman7w]

Boring Combat

One thing I have found is that it really helps to roll the dice out front where all can see. I tried rolling behind the screen for about 8 months and I noticed my players getting bored. When I roll out on the table, I notice EVERY player watches EVERY roll! If they die, they die, and they know this. They are REALLY into the combat.

To me, the game is no fun if there's no danger involved. They are "adventurers" after all. If they didn't want to wade into danger and take the chance of dying, they would have been bakers, right?

 

[Uller]

Uller - I think this can also fall into the "do what is best for your group" category. As someone said earlier, if your players and you are having fun, then whatever you are doing is dead right. I wouldn't want the GM tell me too much what my character does when I'm a player either.

Right. My point is that having cinematic battle descriptions all the time might be what is getting boring. Maybe sleeponcouches's players have reverted to "I attack" roll "and hit AC 25 for" roll "20 points of damage" because there are only so many ways to describe the action.

Here is a for instance: I just watched Black Hawk Down last night. Now...there is all sorts of combat going on and people are killed by the fist-full. The first U.S. Ranger to be killed is the .50 gunner in the mini-convoy that is carrying PFC Blackburn back to the base. He's shot in the head and the death is pretty dramatic (the whole U.S. force basically pauses for a moment in disbelief). There are a few Somalians who are killed in rather dramatic ways too (like when two of them are trying to reload a crew served machine gun while a Ranger is trying to reload his grenade launcher...whoever is slower will die). But if Riddly Scott had directed the movie in such a way that every death and every major wound was "described" in dramatic fashion, the movie would quickly grow boring, would it not? (not to mention that it would be about 6 hours long).

You describe your character killing a hated enemy in dramatic fashion...great. It was probably a lot of fun and a special moment in the campaign. What if _EVERY_ time your character killed an enemy was described with the foes head being severed and flying through the air...it would quickly grow very dull. Right? If one of my players describes his actions in detail, I'll describe the results in detail (usually). But if my players don't want to describe their actions in detail then I'm not going to bother either.

That's all I'm saying...in my group, most combats are "I roll...I hit...I cast...etc." But when the big bad guy or some other dramatic moment comes up, things get considerably more cinematic. It keeps it fun and it keeps the drama of important combats from growing stale.

I _used_ to try to describe every hit and swing...but I found that it just became dull and combersome. YMMV.

 

[Al]

I did try the 'graphic combat' and it doesn't really work. It sounds fine in theory, but has anyone actually run it in their game? I have, and it failed drastically.

So for the first combat perhaps it adds a little spice. And by the second the DM is getting a little tired of *every* attack thinking of something new and original to say, the players are getting a little weary. By the third combat, the players are getting fed up, the game is getting slow and the DM is getting frustrated. Continue it for more than a few sessions, and it gets old hat very fast. It slows the combats down immeasurably, the originality can only be kept going for so long, and the players get annoyed as they seem to achieve less in any given session. That's in a middle combat game. It may just work in a low combat game, it doesn't in a middle combat game, and in a dungeon-hack, don't even think about going there.

If combat is boring, making it drag on for even longer is not the way to do it. Challenge the players more, toss tougher baddies at them to keep them on their toes, change the scene or parameters, introduce cunning alternatives or even cut back the amount of combat. These are the ways to stop combat getting stale: using 'graphic combat' only slows thing down and piles on even more boredom after a while.

 

[Wolfen Priest]

I think at the very least, critical hits (especially x3 damage ones) and killing blows should almost always be described. If you can't describe that (different from not wanting to), then I don't understand how you could describe anything else in the game to the players short of reducing everything to raw numbers, like my last DM did. "Roll a perception check... Ok, you notice a small blah blah blah..." That was pretty much all he ever did.

It was really bad when we encountered NPC's, and one of the players would ask what the guy was dressed in. "Robes. Just brown robes." Asking for any kind of detail just seemed to frustrate him.

Frankly it did get a little boring, like we were just playing a dice game, rather than a _role_playing_game_.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Wow.

If you guys are having fun, that's great, and I'm not knocking it. But I can't stand combat that's just "I hit. 15 points. I miss."

No, you don't have to describe every blow in a new and different way. But even a simple "Your sword passes just over the shield he raised to block and cuts across his chest" isn't that hard, and it adds to the imagery. I can't imagine running combat without that.

And no, I don't tell my players what they did; they have to tell me, since my games do involve a dodge roll. I just incorporate that into the description.

I also won't tell them if the enemy made their save or not. I leave it up to them to interpret the description. "The troll leaps away from the fireball. You see he's scorched, but not as badly as you might have hoped."

It really doesn't require any effort at all once you get used to it.

 

[radferth]

What works in campaigns I have run is fear. I see many campaigns in which the players are rarely put at real risk. I make sure that most combats I run are quite dangerous and likely to kill a PC or two if they use bad tactics. The players I have played with seem much more attentive if they know that a tactical mistake on their part could result in real harm to their character.

 

[LostSoul]

I did try the 'graphic combat' and it doesn't really work. It sounds fine in theory, but has anyone actually run it in their game? I have, and it failed drastically.

I do it all the time. Maybe it works because we usually only have two encounters per game.

I stand up, and physically act out the motions. I remember what happened last attack, and go from there. ("You try to dodge his sword, but he's too fast! Luckily, it bounces off your armour; the magic in it saved you." roll again... miss again, this time big. "The assasin tries to recover his swing, but you're ready and you parry it, no sweat." roll again... somebody from behind hits the PC, five points of damage. "But the guy to your side swings when your sword is out of place, and you roll with it just in time. It'll leave a big bruise.")