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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ggroy" data-source="post: 4857737" data-attributes="member: 83805">In my legitimate 3.5E games, I only did defense rolls for the monsters when they were attacked.  The players were largely not interested in rolling any defense rolls every time they got hit.  I was fine with this arrangement.With just the monsters doing defense rolls, it didn't slow things down anymore than usual.  Without sounding silly, I did roll a lot of low numbers for the badguy's defense rolls, which made my players very happy.  So some players were able to hit a badguy with a total attack roll of 6 or 7 sometimes.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I suppose one way to really weaken the monsters and to make the encounters really speed up, is to do a defense roll and only use the defense roll if it is lower than the monster's static AC.  Occasionally I did resort to this in my legitimate 3.5E games, if I felt the players were being slaughtered too quickly than I anticipated.In my 1E AD&D games which used the "defense roll" mechanic for both the badguys and players, it didn't slow things down anymore than usual.  Doing defense rolls for both sides took a lot less time than having to look up the combat tables, AC adjustments to weapons, etc ...For the monsters, I dropped the hit points and instead used a condition bar system with health states:- not-hit- bruised- wounded- bloodied- dying- deadwhere each state had 1 to 5 ticks, depending on the monster's constitution.For the combat, a player hitting a monster with:- a d20 roll of 10-15 would knock down one of the ticks- a d20 roll of 15-19 would knock down the health state by one- a critical would knock down the health state by two, and any additional damageSo two critical hits on a monster starting in a not-hit health state, would knock down its health state into "dying".  All it would take is another d20 roll of 15-19 to send it into a dead health state.  Even without rolling a crit, if the player did roll a high amount of damage, sometimes I would shift the health state down even further accordingly.  For example, if the player had a d20 roll of 10-15 but also rolled a very high damage, I would bring down the health state by one instead of just one tick.  If the damage was truly extraordinary, I would bring the health state down even more, or even just straight to dead.The ticks in each health state were easy to keep track of.  For example, a "3 tick" monster starting from a not-hit health state would have to be hit consecutively 4 times with d20 rolls of 10-15, to be knocked down to a wounded health state.  I essentially was keeping track of each monster's health with vertical slash tallies, one tally for the ticks and a second tally for the health state.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_marks" target="_blank">Tally marks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a></blockquote>

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