Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imperialus" data-source="post: 2787741" data-attributes="member: 893">I just finished reading the Semi-Rant: Maturity and dumbing down a game thread and was orriginally going to post this there but figured it would get lost among the good fun vs bad fun vs posts.  I would like to hear about how others discribe combat and their characters/NPC's actions/reactions during it.  Do you roll the dice, say what AC you hit and then how many points of damage delt leaving it at that?  Or do you discribe in minute detail the actions and emotions of your character, at some point hopefully mentioning that you rolled an 18 to hit and 12 points of damage?  Something in between?Personally when I DM I keep a list of a couple hundred varous combat manuvers grouped by weapon type (slashing piercing crushing, ranged and unarmed/improvised) that I've written down over the years (mostly stolen from novels) that I can pick essentially at random to discribe how a blow plays out.  I keep them brief, discriptions like; "your *weapon* strikes below his ribs tearing the chainmail, he lets out a  grunt of pain."  I tend to only pull this list out when the PC's are fighting a BBEG, participating in a fight that I want to otherwise be memorable or roll a praticularly spectacular critical hit.  It keeps me from repeating myself too often and helps provide memorable experiances for the fight.  When it comes to a killing blow I also have a list of "finishing moves" that I use for BBEG or even for mooks who's deaths are unusual enough that I want them to be remembered.In regards to mook fights I don't tend to discribe very much.  If there isn't going to be anything praticularly memorable about the encounter then why waste everyones time discribing the barbarians axe cleaving through yet another orc skull.  Sometimes though the actions of the players a mook fight will turn into something memorable but usually it's just "roll, hit AC X, do X+2 points of damage, next!"  I do truely wish that I could make all my encounters exciting and memorable but I'm not that good a DM, and somtimes the PC's just need an XP mill.</blockquote>

Verification