Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6073744">No matter which way you cut it, regardless of edition, it's not quite that simple.  At it's base, we still have two rolls, attack, and damage.  Now, we could certainly make either one or both of those static, but I suspect that flies against the whole "we like to roll dice" philosophy.  In my gaming experience though, dice rolling has little to do with time spent in battle.  It can, but I've played games with 10 times the number of dice a 20th-level 3.x Wizard throws out that go much faster than any edition of D&D.  Simple doesn't always necessitate "fast", complex doesn't always mean "slow".  "Fast" doesn't always mean "fun".  It can, when done properly, but in my experience RNG alone is not "fun".My point was only that we shouldn't let the quality of a fight be determined by a pre-determined by a certain amount of rounds or minutes.  A fight should take as long as a fight takes.  If it doesn't come off as an enjoyable fight, that's something the whole group needs to think about.The post I originally quoted broke a session down into specific increments and then attached certain aspects of play to certain allotments of time and that doesn't feel like the right way to go about things.Sure, but do those really qualify as "fights"?  I mean I had a 7th level party tracking down some demon worshippers, who had enslaved kobolds to mine this corrupted crystal produced by the imprisoned "body" of their demon god.  THe party of course had to go through the mines, but even a dozen kobolds were of little challenge to them, and I didn't want to have them fight powered up kobolds, so I just said "you encounter kobolds, they try to attack you, what do you do?"  "we kill them mercilessly", "okay" I said, "they die like the horribly squishy little things they are."It was almost more of a skill challenge than a combat.  We didn't roll initiative, we didn't roll attacks or damage, we just did it because there was no point in having actual combat for the situation.By most standards, I'm fairly hardcore when it comes to gaming, but by others, I'm pretty casual.  So when we talk about capturing the "casual" market or appealing to the "hardcore" players, it always makes me wonder who exactly we're talking about.  It covers a pretty wide range of people and includes a lot of different variables and I don't think the amount of time one sets aside for gaming alone determines how "hardcore" or "casual" you are.  I'm not suggesting we aim for either really.  I'm suggesting we aim for quality, for appropriate challenge.  I'm saying we shouldn't design with an estimated time spent on the fight in mind.  Some groups will go slower than others, some will go faster, in the same fight with the same characters.  There's a lot of variability here that no amount of rules can deal with.  Some actions will take longer to resolve than others, so we shouldn't start saying: "Well, a kobold should take 2 rounds to kill, but a squad of kobolds will take 5 rounds, but then if we include difficult terrain it might take 7, or if the party is all wizards it will take 2 rounds, of if it's all fighters it'll take 10 minutes".  Those aren't qualities we need to design around because they're far too diverse and outside the control of the game to be something it can reasonably address.Look, here's the heart of it:  All monsters, and by extension all fights should be based around how much of a challenge you want them to be for players.  The time it takes for players to deal with that challenge will vary significantly from group to group, and there's really nothing to be done about it, it's the nature of the beast.  But if we design each monster with the idea of being a fair challenge at the right level and then allow DM's to design their encounters based around how difficult they want that specific encounter to be, we'll be able to produce easy, moderate, difficult and epic fights with a singular, unified math.  If we attempt to design monsters and encounters with them based on an abstract measurement of time based on an average group experience of select testers, we're going to get monsters and encounters that do not hold to those measurements at all because of the high level of play variability experienced at the table.In short: let the game deal with the math.  If the math if sound, anything is possible.  Let tables deal with the time, because that's something the DM can manage on the spot and make appropriate to the expectations of their group.Designing monsters for simplicity or complexity are entirely different issues.  If you want to aim for simplicity first to capture casuals, sure that's great, but simplicity doesn't imply speed, so leave time out of the equation, the number of possible variables associated with time spent in a fight are simply too many to be an issue the game can reasonably address through it's math and framework.  Time is a table issue.  Simplicity and complexity are math issues the game can handle.</blockquote>

Verification