D&D 4E How to speed up combat?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Mirrors my experience with D&D in general. I have run in games where we did high-level one shots, but never organically growing to high levels. I honestly feel like D&D should trim off levels past 10th to begin with, since high level characters get access to so many powers that played-straight can just completely shut down storylines.

13th Age has 10 levels, and it is clearly TOO compressed. There are rules to do 'incremental leveling' where you get some of your next level partway through the last level. I find that a bit silly. Obviously if all you want to do is low-level play, then just play the first 10 levels over and over. That's fine. What I want to do though, is play a coherent story from low level to high level and on to character apotheosis. I can't do that in a game that saws off 'epic'. What I need is a game that has something like, say, 15 levels, and where the top ones are distinctly epic. At least 4e gave us 30 working levels, no other edition ACTUALLY WORKS above about half to 2/3 of max level, although 5e seems to at least be closer than most.

 

[overgeeked]

13th Age has 10 levels, and it is clearly TOO compressed. There are rules to do 'incremental leveling' where you get some of your next level partway through the last level. I find that a bit silly. Obviously if all you want to do is low-level play, then just play the first 10 levels over and over. That's fine. What I want to do though, is play a coherent story from low level to high level and on to character apotheosis. I can't do that in a game that saws off 'epic'. What I need is a game that has something like, say, 15 levels, and where the top ones are distinctly epic. At least 4e gave us 30 working levels, no other edition ACTUALLY WORKS above about half to 2/3 of max level, although 5e seems to at least be closer than most.

Any more, for me, levels seem like pointless busy work and filler. They should switch to using tiers as levels or ditch it entirely and make monsters‘ difficulty relational to the group. That’s all levels are really used for anyway. To gauge how powerful the PCs are compared to the monsters...and gaining bigger spells. You can do the same with direct relational “levels”.

Give stats for ogres that are stronger than, equal to, weaker than, and irrelevant to your party.

Or to use 4E parlance, at 1st-level an ogre is a solo, at 2nd it’s an elite, at 3rd it’s standard, at 4th it’s a minion, and at 5th its whole tribe is a cakewalk. There’s no point in making a huge distinction between 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, and 1e. Just collapse it into five level tiers. New 1st is old 1st-5th. Etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Any more, for me, levels seem like pointless busy work and filler. They should switch to using tiers as levels or ditch it entirely and make monsters‘ difficulty relational to the group. That’s all levels are really used for anyway. To gauge how powerful the PCs are compared to the monsters...and gaining bigger spells. You can do the same with direct relational “levels”.

Give stats for ogres that are stronger than, equal to, weaker than, and irrelevant to your party.

Or to use 4E parlance, at 1st-level an ogre is a solo, at 2nd it’s an elite, at 3rd it’s standard, at 4th it’s a minion, and at 5th its whole tribe is a cakewalk. There’s no point in making a huge distinction between 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, and 1e. Just collapse it into five level tiers. New 1st is old 1st-5th. Etc.

Yeah, it is just a matter of working out what the mechanical details are. I mean, I think various supers games have done similar things. Superheroes pretty much fall into a small set of bands, from 'ordinary human' up through 'very talented ordinary human', and on into 'super powered', 'really super', and 'ultra powerful'. I guess you can argue who falls into which of those bins, but your design would basically be about the same thing.

I was actually thinking about this the other day. I mean, there's an argument that says you only really need 1 or 2 story arcs per tier, and 3 tiers definitely seems like the 'sweet spot'. You could do all of that in 5 levels (with epic getting shortened to 2 levels). Each level would be one story arc, nice and simple. Finish it up, level up, go on to another one. Such a game does assume a fairly rapid pace of advancement though, assuming you play reasonably often. Even if each story is 3 sessions long, that's only 15 sessions, maybe 6 months if you skip some weeks. You could stretch it to 5 sessions each without too much trouble, that would give you maybe up to a year of play. For ME that would be more than enough, but there are many who really like to both progress fairly often, and yet play a much longer campaign. Granted, they often don't actually run them through to the end.

So, maybe the idea of 'progression' should be altered. Currently it is level based in D&D, but you could create a system that isn't. My own game runs on 'boons' for example, where you gain a level when you achieve a treasure (which is basically a goal since 'treasure' is a very loose idea). It is the boons that actually carry the new character abilities. All levels are doing in my game is adding hit points, etc. (as in 4e). You could ditch the labels of 'level' and just have every 'power up' be part of some boon (treasure). That might be interesting. Tiers would become more implicit, but you could still work something out there.

 

[overgeeked]

Yeah, it is just a matter of working out what the mechanical details are. I mean, I think various supers games have done similar things. Superheroes pretty much fall into a small set of bands, from 'ordinary human' up through 'very talented ordinary human', and on into 'super powered', 'really super', and 'ultra powerful'. I guess you can argue who falls into which of those bins, but your design would basically be about the same thing.

I was actually thinking about this the other day. I mean, there's an argument that says you only really need 1 or 2 story arcs per tier, and 3 tiers definitely seems like the 'sweet spot'. You could do all of that in 5 levels (with epic getting shortened to 2 levels). Each level would be one story arc, nice and simple. Finish it up, level up, go on to another one. Such a game does assume a fairly rapid pace of advancement though, assuming you play reasonably often. Even if each story is 3 sessions long, that's only 15 sessions, maybe 6 months if you skip some weeks. You could stretch it to 5 sessions each without too much trouble, that would give you maybe up to a year of play. For ME that would be more than enough, but there are many who really like to both progress fairly often, and yet play a much longer campaign. Granted, they often don't actually run them through to the end.

So, maybe the idea of 'progression' should be altered. Currently it is level based in D&D, but you could create a system that isn't. My own game runs on 'boons' for example, where you gain a level when you achieve a treasure (which is basically a goal since 'treasure' is a very loose idea). It is the boons that actually carry the new character abilities. All levels are doing in my game is adding hit points, etc. (as in 4e). You could ditch the labels of 'level' and just have every 'power up' be part of some boon (treasure). That might be interesting. Tiers would become more implicit, but you could still work something out there.

Right. Your levels go up, you get more hp, better to-hit, better spells, etc. and the monsters also level up, getting more hp, better to-hit, better spells/abilities, etc. So instead just make it relational. Set the PCs at “level 3” and have the monsters go from level 1-5 based on how tough they should be compared to you.

Or even simpler: impossible, disadvantage, standard, advantage, irrelevant. Stat monsters up as standard, and modify from there. Impossible and irrelevant are fiction-based encounters rather than full-on dice and minis combat encounters. For disadvantage you get disadvantage on rolls against them (and they get advantage on rolls against you) and their hit points and damage are doubled. For advantage you get advantage on roll against them (and they get disadvantage on rolls against you) and their hit points and damage are halved. Add and subtract PCs abilities as desired because you have a shorthand for making monsters easier or tougher on command.

 

[Voadam]

Right. Your levels go up, you get more hp, better to-hit, better spells, etc. and the monsters also level up, getting more hp, better to-hit, better spells/abilities, etc. So instead just make it relational. Set the PCs at “level 3” and have the monsters go from level 1-5 based on how tough they should be compared to you.

This got essentially done in Spycraft 2.0 and then adapted to a product for d20 Modern. NPCs with stats essentially based on +/- X compared to an APL baseline.

4e with its straightforward math lends itself to adjusting monster stats up or down levels fairly easily.

 

[MwaO]

Sure, OTOH the design of the game is still centered around 30 levels. What I propose (what I did in my own rules) was to get rid of the last 10. This reduces the amount of 'filler material', particularly powers, that have to exist in order to fill out all the slots that are needed to accommodate progression through 30 levels. Yes, you may not use the last 12 of those, but that just means there's a lot of pages of books wasted that we all paid for.

Beyond that, NARRATIVELY I find that 300 encounters worth of action is a rather unwieldy quantity to construct a fairly strongly directed story from. It gets messy and hard to understand, and the players lose sight of the vision that motivated them in the beginning.

I think one of the problematic aspects of D&D is that there are a set of levels not typically designed to be played, but are in fact merely aspirational. And a significant percentage of players want to see those aspirational levels in existence. And if they're not there, they'll get mad.

An easy example of this is Vancian casting. Most players don't ever get to cast Wish or even 6th level spells — yet if you take 6th-9th level spells out of the system, they get really upset about it not being D&D. And when you get to that level of spells, there are all these campaign destroying options that DMs are expected to wing their way through.

4e resolved this by making playable aspirational levels that work in a not-significantly optimized game and optimized games can figure out paths to make it work. But if those playable aspirational levels aren't there, I think it gets a little weird.

In any case, I think a campaign that goes from 1st level to 16th level is a very doable campaign that can cover an entire narrative. And then if you really want, 17-30 is the 2nd campaign based on the 1st when you're ready for it.

 

[Voadam]

In any case, I think a campaign that goes from 1st level to 16th level is a very doable campaign that can cover an entire narrative.

That is pretty much the model for a lot of Paizo's adventure paths with some variation going up and down for where exactly they are designed to end.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right. Your levels go up, you get more hp, better to-hit, better spells, etc. and the monsters also level up, getting more hp, better to-hit, better spells/abilities, etc. So instead just make it relational. Set the PCs at “level 3” and have the monsters go from level 1-5 based on how tough they should be compared to you.

Or even simpler: impossible, disadvantage, standard, advantage, irrelevant. Stat monsters up as standard, and modify from there. Impossible and irrelevant are fiction-based encounters rather than full-on dice and minis combat encounters. For disadvantage you get disadvantage on rolls against them (and they get advantage on rolls against you) and their hit points and damage are doubled. For advantage you get advantage on roll against them (and they get disadvantage on rolls against you) and their hit points and damage are halved. Add and subtract PCs abilities as desired because you have a shorthand for making monsters easier or tougher on command.

The problem with all these sorts of ideas is the lack of progression. IMHO the #1 characteristic of D&D which has kept it in the forefront of RPGs all these years is the focus on a very strong ramp up of character power. Every character progresses. The player feels a sense of material accomplishment in achieving a new level of play, and part of that involves taking on the more and more potent monsters in the 'monster ladder'. You start out as a newb who gets to play with bugs, zombies, and goblins, and then you advance. Pretty soon its orcs and hobgoblins, and then its bugbears, ogres, and ghouls. That's just the start though, you always have the prospect of someday taking on the mighty dragons, and eventually the biggest game of all, the terrifying Demon Lords.

I believe this formula is the strongest and most consistent element of D&D, and I don't think it is a smart design move to eliminate it. I'm willing to consider if it is always needed in every type of game, and whether it cannot be tweaked, either just to make it better over all, or for specific sub-genre or whatever. Still, it is a core concept. I would get rid of hit points, armor class, even ability scores before I would do away with the core concept of advancement as it exists in the game today.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think one of the problematic aspects of D&D is that there are a set of levels not typically designed to be played, but are in fact merely aspirational. And a significant percentage of players want to see those aspirational levels in existence. And if they're not there, they'll get mad.

An easy example of this is Vancian casting. Most players don't ever get to cast Wish or even 6th level spells — yet if you take 6th-9th level spells out of the system, they get really upset about it not being D&D. And when you get to that level of spells, there are all these campaign destroying options that DMs are expected to wing their way through.

4e resolved this by making playable aspirational levels that work in a not-significantly optimized game and optimized games can figure out paths to make it work. But if those playable aspirational levels aren't there, I think it gets a little weird.

In any case, I think a campaign that goes from 1st level to 16th level is a very doable campaign that can cover an entire narrative. And then if you really want, 17-30 is the 2nd campaign based on the 1st when you're ready for it.

Yeah, but like I say, I wanted a game where we play from 'heroic inception' to 'mythic apotheosis'. There are no 'aspirational levels' except in the sense that the players aspire to carry their characters through this whole path. Even so, sure, a lot of games manage to end early or reach some intermediary conclusion, etc. That is fine, but in designing a 4e follow-on game I was aiming for it to all work. The character of the 'Mythic' levels is rather different from that of the 'Legendary' and 'Heroic' portions of a character's path, but has equal play significance.

Anyway, I am not personally so wedded to the absolute idea that PCs must have 'stuff' associated specifically to levels in the classic D&D sense. Nor that monsters must always be specifically graded as they are in D&D. However, I do hold to what I call a 'narrative sense', which I think you will find in @pemerton's examples too. That is, the FLAVOR of what happens at high levels is 'epic'

 

[cmad1977]

I’m looking for suggestions on how to speed up combat in D&D4E.

I need mechanical fixes and game system changes that will make things go faster, not suggestions about timers at the table or other social fixes.

I’m aware of the common refrain of x2 damage 1/2 hit points. It’s not enough. I’m also aware of the MM3 and MV math fixes at the end of 4E’s life cycle. That’s not enough.

One thought I had was bringing in B/X morale checks. Make morale checks at first personal hit taken, on bloodied, first combat death, etc, but still rewarding XP for defeating any monsters who broke and ran.

I’ve seen a few suggestions about making combat into a skill challenge, but I’m not really sure how that would work. Anyone have thoughts on how to pull that off? And would it be satisfying?

So beyond the common responses, what suggestions do people have for mechanically speeding up combat in 4E?

I can’t speak specifically for 4e but a couple suggestions based on your post...

Don’t do morale checks but DO morale. Have NPCs break in whichever way you feel best at any time you think appropriate. Don’t bother rolling a die and consulting the chart. Does the goblin stand firm in the face of danger or quail in terror? Why roll when you know the answer? You probably have better understanding of the motivation of your NPCs in the moment than some chart or system.
Also... don’t fight to the last HP! Most battles are “over” before they’re over. Have NPCs surrender, flee, or even die before they’re last hP. Who wants to spend time “mopping up” when they can be adventuring.

Re: combat as skill challenge...
I guess you could do that and I can see some ways to do it I guess. My issue with “skill challenges” is that the activities within a skill challenge are basically just “adventuring” so I don’t see why you would swoosh to another “mode”.