"I hate math"

[ashockney]

Well, here's a quick rundown:

18 steps to combat in Dungeons and Dragons.

4 initial steps (determined once at the beginning of combat).

Each combatant must take up to 14 steps to resolve their turn.

Each of the 14 combat steps has up to 7 sources for modifiers.

Each source may have multiple "types" of modifiers, which may or may not apply, depending upon the "stacking" rules for types of modifiers.

Each source has a modifier "range" from -9 to +25.

Just add them all up, multiply when necessary, and conduct probability rolls to determine the outcome of each of the 14 steps, for each combatant, until the combat is resolved.

Simple.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

What is it that you intend to do with these numbers?

 

[WizarDru]

The problem I see with a 'grand unification' formula is that it actually adds complexity.

Yes, all those options exist...but it is rare for a greater majority of them to be in actual use or even available. Only the archers care about the archery modifiers, for example, so now you're doing checks for modifiers that don't apply for all non-archers. Reverse that for Power Attack. Some are precomputed, like Improved Initiative. Some are only used in limited situaitons, such as cleaving.

You'd need a giant causality tree, I think. And then you're getting closer and closer to Rolemaster territory.

 

[Elric]

High level D&D is a grueling, grueling game. Let me just give an example from a recent adventure:

The party (only 3 of us, plus the Paladin’s horse) is fighting a group of Rakhasha fighters and a Rakhasha mage. We are 16th level. With haste, the fighter types have 5-6 (my monk) attacks/round. Even worse, my monk has a ton of martial arts feats (Hold the Line, Defensive Throw, Great Throw and more) that result in even more attack and opposed rolls. The Rakhashas have DR 15/good and piercing. Most of our weapons are not good and piercing. When the Paladin hits with his holy evil-outsider bane sword, he has to roll the actual sword damage separately to see if it exceeds 15, then subtract DR and roll the 4d6’s of extra damage. Then the horse has its attacks which have Poison and more Holy Damage to make things even longer. Factoring the DR into damage was a huge pain and made the fight much longer in real-time. When each round takes so much time, enemies who have DR to keep them alive are just exhausting.

My character is typed and has all of his bonuses to everything listed- this helps keep bonus types in check (did I include high ground in my attack bonus? What’s my plus on trip attempts etc.). I have stopped rolling damage for my monk because 2d8 + 2d6 holy gets to be far too much rolling and adding for the benefit (since I only crit on a 20, almost all of my attacks do similar amounts of damage). I understand that things like Sneak Attack and Holy Swords aren’t doubled on crits, but life would be a lot easier if these bonuses were just numbers and less dice were rolled per attack (increasing the number of dice decreases the chance to deviate from the mean anyway).

Choices are overrated. Consider the book of exalted deeds. Spellcasters who can spontaneously cast sanctified spells take forever to play in combat because you can always look up spells until you find an exceedingly powerful spell that is good under the circumstances. After you do this for a while it gets quicker because you kind of know which spell to use, but you have so many choices that you still have to look things up. Keeping track of spells cast, choosing spells, and buying magic items is not a quick process. Finding the lowest marginal cost route for your magic items, for example, requires you to do a calculation for the relative effectiveness of your magic items that provide similar benefits and to search out all of the different bonuses that you can find.

Let me make it clear that I don’t find any of this to be incredibly difficult. I am good at math so adding up separate bonuses, summing damage, and calculating price:benefit on magic items is not hard. At the moment, I don’t enjoy it all that much and want more of a beer and pretzels kind of game. Concerns for balance and having an effective character necessitate a lot of this, but I find that D&D has become too much of an arms race where the real loser is brevity. I want fights to be quick in real time. In D&D, the vast majority of fights are relatively major and important because the game would bog down too much if you had a fight for an hour against mooks who can’t really threaten you at all. The fights, by sheer real-time duration, overshadow the rest of the game. When your main purpose for gaming is to have a good time with friends, this much wargaming becomes disruptive.

My solution is Mutants and Masterminds. One of the other players introduced the rest of the group to it and I really love its simplicity, ease of play and general awesomeness. It doesn’t pretend that its system can be completely balanced but is well balanced for a pure point based system. Combat under the standard rules is very non-lethal, so the fights are at low stakes. The game (at least in my group) lends itself to light comedy and no one takes it too seriously (there’s little incentive to build the uber-PC). In M&M weapons are all the same- you can customize them from there. You are free of the Greatsword, Unarmed, or ‘weapon you have a prestige class for’ set of options. Pick a weapon, add its powers, describe it however you want. Hero points in M&M lends itself to a lot of creativity. You’re a superhero- you have a few set powers and can try a lot more on rare occasions. Combat is quick, has high variance (that can be controlled using hero/villain points for big fights), and you only get 1 attack a round. I’d highly recommend it and I don’t read comics/watch Justice League or anything. To back up mmadsen, Mutants and Masterminds is a great way to do epic play.

 

[WizarDru]

I’d highly recommend it and I don’t read comics/watch Justice League or anything. To back up mmadsen, Mutants and Masterminds is a great way to do epic play.

That's OK, I'd take your recommendation, even with that handicap.

Mutants & Masterminds is an excellent system, one of the best put to paper, in my opinion. But I don't see it as a good substitute for high-level play in D&D. M&M sacrifices some things for speed and ease of playability, which is one of it's strengths....but those sacrifices also remove cetain options from play. My players like M&M a lot, but they're not likely to give up the characters they built from 1st to 23rd level just for that purpose. Having to factor a few bonuses just isn't that much work, for us.

High-level play doesn't have to be grueling. If you'd like some suggestions on how to make it easier and speed it up, I can direct you to several threads where I and several others offer some pointers. My most recent combat, with 6 23rd level characters taking on two CR 25 creatures, didn't take that long. Heck, I had a combat with 250 githyanki warriors, 25 duthka-gith (half-red dragon gith), 4 blackguard gith knights with red dragon steeds, two half-red dragon astral dreadnaughts, four CR 20 gith ghost warriors, four mid-level gith spellcasters and two high-level gith lich spellcasters against those same PCs, a few levels ago....and that combat didn't take that long, either. It can be done.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I had a combat with 250 githyanki warriors, 25 duthka-gith (half-red dragon gith), 4 blackguard gith knights with red dragon steeds, two half-red dragon astral dreadnaughts, four CR 20 gith ghost warriors, four mid-level gith spellcasters and two high-level gith lich spellcasters against those same PCs, a few levels ago....and that combat didn't take that long, either. It can be done.

Was an epic level spell cast in round 1 that blew them all away?

How long did it take you, and how did you speed things up while doing justice to the range of options each of the enemies had? The last big fight we ran (party of 6, average 10th level, vs equivalent level druid, barbarian, dire bear and 8 large spiders took 2 hours on its own.

 

[Funksaw]

For the life of me, I have no idea why Dungeons and Dragons wasn't developed with the ease of use and character creation as, say, the similarly class based Feng Shui.

Damn. Now I have to write up a conversion.

 

[WizarDru]

Was an epic level spell cast in round 1 that blew them all away?

How long did it take you, and how did you speed things up while doing justice to the range of options each of the enemies had? The last big fight we ran (party of 6, average 10th level, vs equivalent level druid, barbarian, dire bear and 8 large spiders took 2 hours on its own.

Nope. No epic level spells came into play....the party was 18th through 20th level. But shapeable fire storms do terrible amounts of damage, for a start. Summoned Elder elementals and elemental swarms certainly don't hurt, nor do appreciable application of Maze spells. You'd be amazed how fast a high-level party can clear the field. Super powerful turns (of which the cleric has 16 greater, 15 lesser) help deal with undead AND outsiders, super capable archers can drop tons of lesser troops with lightning precision. High-powered rogues can gut an entire crew of an astral flier so quickly and stealthily that four opponents haven't even hit the floor before the sole remaining crewman, the captain, has a chance to notice.

There are lots of things we do to speed up combat, many of which I'm sure you've heard of doing in other threads. Pre-rolling, rolling damage at the same time, keeping players aprised that their turn is coming up and making sure they know their action and relevant information....and we don't even 'pay the pig'.

The two biggest necessities? Trust your players and let it go. That assumes, of course, that your players rock. Mine do.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Nope. No epic level spells came into play....the party was 18th through 20th level. But shapeable fire storms do terrible amounts of damage, for a start. Summoned Elder elementals and elemental swarms certainly don't hurt, nor do appreciable application of Maze spells. You'd be amazed how fast a high-level party can clear the field. Super powerful turns (of which the cleric has 16 greater, 15 lesser) help deal with undead AND outsiders, super capable archers can drop tons of lesser troops with lightning precision. High-powered rogues can gut an entire crew of an astral flier so quickly and stealthily that four opponents haven't even hit the floor before the sole remaining crewman, the captain, has a chance to notice.

There are lots of things we do to speed up combat, many of which I'm sure you've heard of doing in other threads. Pre-rolling, rolling damage at the same time, keeping players aprised that their turn is coming up and making sure they know their action and relevant information....and we don't even 'pay the pig'.

The two biggest necessities? Trust your players and let it go. That assumes, of course, that your players rock. Mine do.

My impression is that high level d20 required dedicated players who have "mastered" the rules vs more casual players.

 

[ruleslawyer]

And there it is. IMX, math in high-level D&D isn't a problem unless 1) your players don't feel like doing the work OR 2) you don't trust them to do it. I know that in previous editions, I assumed the role of an utter control freak, keeping all applicable modifiers totaled on a separate party summary with complete "stat blocks" for each PC, and even rolling damage instead of my players doing so. Then I relaxed, and let the players figure out all applicable modifiers. Guess what? The game got terrifically easy for me. A player rolls, does his own math, and tells me what the result was; I compare it to the applicable AC or DC, and it's either a success or failure. Easy-peasy.

And yes, there are applicable and inapplicable modifiers for every situation, and yes, the number of modifiers can be huge. What you need is an iterative process for determining what applies. In general, though, I find that the vast majority of modifiers to rolls apply across the board to all situations, once the effects that generate those modifiers are in place. The only ones I can think of that change from moment to moment are:

1) Cover bonuses
2) Circumstance bonuses/penalties
3) Alignment-based bonuses/penalties, and those rarely IMX, since IMC, most combats are good vs. evil
4) Favored enemy bonuses

Those are pretty easy to deal with, IMX.