Bodhiwolff
First Post
I love 4E. In fact, I had given up on D&D over a decade ago until 4E came along! However, with all of the additional combat options, riders on powers, tactical decisions, and basic all-around-wonderful *stuff* at our disposal, it came as no surprise that our combats slowed down, and the game just tended to get a tad slow at times.
So here is a list of the techniques we adopted to speed things up. I encourage others to post their own tricks, techniques, and modifications.
Now, we play with the rules-as-written, so I’d love to hear what people are doing to play a fast, tight game of 4E without modifying the actual rules, or changing the damage value, etc.
1. The 30-second Rule. Each player has 30 seconds to make their decision until their dice must hit the table. If they fail to have dice hit the table before the timer reaches the mark, they automatically are put on “all out defense” for that round. And use a timer to keep people honest, and keep the momentum up. We found that we can cut the time for an encounter in HALF by adhering to this simple rule. Granted, after the dice hit the table, there are often some pauses to do calculations, perform secondary actions, etc., but at the end of the day this one little rule has sped things up incredibly, and made things more fun!
2. Power Cards with pre-calculated Values. Nothing slows things down quite so much as looking up rules and performing calculations. Things go *much* more smoothly if you have power cards *with pre-calculated values* on them. Sure, we all think that the math is simple and easy, but in the heat of the moment, an awful lot of time will be spent doing stupid little calculations, each and every round, when it’d be so much simpler to read “1d20+15 To Hit; 1d8+12 damage; slide enemy one square on hit”
3. Condition Placards. One of my players showed up one day with a set up stand-up placards, each of which has the rules for a condition on them. One side will say “I am Blinded” (to face the table) and the other says “You are Blinded”(to face the afflicted player). Each side summarizes all of the rules and modifiers which apply. Having these little placards saves a *ton* of time from looking up rules, but also stops us forgetting various conditions, or having to go back and re-do various actions when something gets forgotten.
4. Transparency. I am an old-school gamer who cut his teeth way back in the early 80’s, when the DMG was the forbidden book for players, and when only the DM *really* knew how the game was played. It took me a long time to learn that “not knowing” is not the same thing as “mysterious”, and therefore doesn’t actually add to the fun-factor. Instead, we’ve adopted a full transparency model for our games. When a creature is bloodied, I tell the players the bloodied and full-hitpoint values. When the players first attack a creature, I tell them the AC they need to hit. I point-blank tell the players that “these 3 guys are wearing poor armour and acting untrained”, so they know which monsters are minions. This sort or transparency has done wonders for speeding things up, and hasn’t diminished the mystery or wonder one little bit!
5. Delegation. There are 5 players at the table, each of which is really only busy during their own turn. The rest of the time, everybody has time to do a job or two. One person tracks initiative, and announces to the next character or monster that they are next, and also warns the person who is “on deck” after that. One person tracks all of the monster damage. One person handles tokens, markers, and various on-grid condition markers. This leaves the DM to simply move about miniatures and roll damage dice.
6. Etiquette and Protocol – the Procedure! We have found that it is necessary for players to adopt a certain set of steps in their turn, in order to make sure that we’re not wasting time. Players roll both their “to-hit” dice and “damage” dice *at the same time*. Players hold the power card they’re using in their hand, so they can refer to it quickly if necessary. Or, if they get up from their chair to move miniatures and such, they take the card and dice with them, so they don’t have to shuttle back-and-forth in order to finish their turn. All of these *seem* like tiny little fiddly rules, but added all together they shave a good deal of time off everybody’s turn.
7. “Just Go With It!” There can be a tendency to try to get things perfectly, and to become over-focused on the minutiae of rules. If, however, everybody agrees that a more expedient game means a more fun game, then everybody agrees to hold their corrections, rules lookups, and other interruptions until the next break. The DM makes an adjudication, and everybody agrees to run with it. If you have an objection, look it up during the break, but don’t waste game-time doing it. Everybody has to share this attitude, and it is predicated on the understanding that we’re all here to have fun as a group, and part of the fun is *getting stuff done*!
8. Player Mats. We found that having simplified, pre-calculated player mats, without all of the character-generation details, makes looking up the appropriate values much quicker. During gametime, the important stuff to know is what your surge value is, what your Acrobatics check is, and so forth. You don’t need to know your equipment, or your feats, or your languages. If you *do* need that information, you can look it up on your conveniently stored character sheet. But for actual *play*, have a summarized, distilled set of pre-calculated values good to go. These wind up being fairly minimalistic, and therefore finding the values on these mats is speedy and efficient. We use mats because we like to use poker chips (in two piles) for hit points, which speeds healing up because everybody can see *directly* how wounded each character is. When one stack is gone, you’re bloodied, and when they’re all gone, you’re dead. Whites are one point, reds are five, blues are ten, and blacks are temporary. Speedy and simple. No fussing about with erasers and pencils, and more time for play!
So these are the sorts of things we’ve adopted to speed up our game. With all of these factors in play, we’ve cut our encounter time down to about 45 minutes for a full-on encounter (which, according to the official dungeon-delve competition rules, is the official time-limit).
Does anybody else have some good tips?
So here is a list of the techniques we adopted to speed things up. I encourage others to post their own tricks, techniques, and modifications.
Now, we play with the rules-as-written, so I’d love to hear what people are doing to play a fast, tight game of 4E without modifying the actual rules, or changing the damage value, etc.
1. The 30-second Rule. Each player has 30 seconds to make their decision until their dice must hit the table. If they fail to have dice hit the table before the timer reaches the mark, they automatically are put on “all out defense” for that round. And use a timer to keep people honest, and keep the momentum up. We found that we can cut the time for an encounter in HALF by adhering to this simple rule. Granted, after the dice hit the table, there are often some pauses to do calculations, perform secondary actions, etc., but at the end of the day this one little rule has sped things up incredibly, and made things more fun!
2. Power Cards with pre-calculated Values. Nothing slows things down quite so much as looking up rules and performing calculations. Things go *much* more smoothly if you have power cards *with pre-calculated values* on them. Sure, we all think that the math is simple and easy, but in the heat of the moment, an awful lot of time will be spent doing stupid little calculations, each and every round, when it’d be so much simpler to read “1d20+15 To Hit; 1d8+12 damage; slide enemy one square on hit”
3. Condition Placards. One of my players showed up one day with a set up stand-up placards, each of which has the rules for a condition on them. One side will say “I am Blinded” (to face the table) and the other says “You are Blinded”(to face the afflicted player). Each side summarizes all of the rules and modifiers which apply. Having these little placards saves a *ton* of time from looking up rules, but also stops us forgetting various conditions, or having to go back and re-do various actions when something gets forgotten.
4. Transparency. I am an old-school gamer who cut his teeth way back in the early 80’s, when the DMG was the forbidden book for players, and when only the DM *really* knew how the game was played. It took me a long time to learn that “not knowing” is not the same thing as “mysterious”, and therefore doesn’t actually add to the fun-factor. Instead, we’ve adopted a full transparency model for our games. When a creature is bloodied, I tell the players the bloodied and full-hitpoint values. When the players first attack a creature, I tell them the AC they need to hit. I point-blank tell the players that “these 3 guys are wearing poor armour and acting untrained”, so they know which monsters are minions. This sort or transparency has done wonders for speeding things up, and hasn’t diminished the mystery or wonder one little bit!
5. Delegation. There are 5 players at the table, each of which is really only busy during their own turn. The rest of the time, everybody has time to do a job or two. One person tracks initiative, and announces to the next character or monster that they are next, and also warns the person who is “on deck” after that. One person tracks all of the monster damage. One person handles tokens, markers, and various on-grid condition markers. This leaves the DM to simply move about miniatures and roll damage dice.
6. Etiquette and Protocol – the Procedure! We have found that it is necessary for players to adopt a certain set of steps in their turn, in order to make sure that we’re not wasting time. Players roll both their “to-hit” dice and “damage” dice *at the same time*. Players hold the power card they’re using in their hand, so they can refer to it quickly if necessary. Or, if they get up from their chair to move miniatures and such, they take the card and dice with them, so they don’t have to shuttle back-and-forth in order to finish their turn. All of these *seem* like tiny little fiddly rules, but added all together they shave a good deal of time off everybody’s turn.
7. “Just Go With It!” There can be a tendency to try to get things perfectly, and to become over-focused on the minutiae of rules. If, however, everybody agrees that a more expedient game means a more fun game, then everybody agrees to hold their corrections, rules lookups, and other interruptions until the next break. The DM makes an adjudication, and everybody agrees to run with it. If you have an objection, look it up during the break, but don’t waste game-time doing it. Everybody has to share this attitude, and it is predicated on the understanding that we’re all here to have fun as a group, and part of the fun is *getting stuff done*!
8. Player Mats. We found that having simplified, pre-calculated player mats, without all of the character-generation details, makes looking up the appropriate values much quicker. During gametime, the important stuff to know is what your surge value is, what your Acrobatics check is, and so forth. You don’t need to know your equipment, or your feats, or your languages. If you *do* need that information, you can look it up on your conveniently stored character sheet. But for actual *play*, have a summarized, distilled set of pre-calculated values good to go. These wind up being fairly minimalistic, and therefore finding the values on these mats is speedy and efficient. We use mats because we like to use poker chips (in two piles) for hit points, which speeds healing up because everybody can see *directly* how wounded each character is. When one stack is gone, you’re bloodied, and when they’re all gone, you’re dead. Whites are one point, reds are five, blues are ten, and blacks are temporary. Speedy and simple. No fussing about with erasers and pencils, and more time for play!
So these are the sorts of things we’ve adopted to speed up our game. With all of these factors in play, we’ve cut our encounter time down to about 45 minutes for a full-on encounter (which, according to the official dungeon-delve competition rules, is the official time-limit).
Does anybody else have some good tips?
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