Making battles faster.... much much faster.

[Evenglare]

So, I have made several posts about my homebrew final fantasy conversion, now I am at the point of what I want to do with battles. As it stands 4th edition simply has very long battles due to high HP of regular monsters, as well as people unfamiliar with their characters and other things.

In my own regular 4th edition game I have a rule that when any regular monster takes damage equal to it's bloodied damage in one round , it must make a saving throw or die. This may work , but I also am thinking about putting in extra damage equal to half level . Or to simplify, if you did str damage it would be str plus half level.

What do you think? Do you have any house rules of your own for faster battles?

 

[wedgeski]

I'm working this problem myself at the moment, and my biggest fear with gross changes to monster HP is, essentially, the danger of accidentally re-creating 3E, where combat becomes short, unpredictable, non-strategic, swingy, and turns almost entirely around massive damage and save-or-die effects. (I fully appreciate that others' mileage may vary in that respect, but that essentially sums up my experience of running mid and high-level 3E combat.))

At the moment we're tinkering with:
- Removing milestones (and therefore magic item restrictions)
- Additional Action Points, usage (with some restrictions, e.g. Paragon effects can only happen once an encounter) and options (e.g. use an Action Point to shrug off an effect that a Save can end).
- Wider crit range for PC's

If none of these work or prove viable, I guess I'll resort to the reduced HP solution, but I don't really want to (can you tell!).

 

[Evenglare]

The crit thing is also something I may change, instead of max damage, do double max damage or something like that.
Also, I may have neglected the bloodied save thing would be for general encounters, a story defining encounter with a solo or elite, would work as normal. I just wanted a way of streamlining combat quickly.

 

[S'mon]

I found that halving monster hit points, while using more monsters to keep up the challenge level and keeping to post-MM3 damage expressions (monster level+8), solved all my problems with 4e grind. Monsters still hang around quite long enough but things don't devolve into endless at-wills.

 

[S'mon]

I'm working this problem myself at the moment, and my biggest fear with gross changes to monster HP is, essentially, the danger of accidentally re-creating 3E, where combat becomes short, unpredictable, non-strategic, swingy, and turns almost entirely around massive damage and save-or-die effects.

That has not been my experience in 4e with monster hp halved. There are no save or die effects in 4e, no red dragons getting turned into frogs, and I'm willing to nerf save or suck (or just 'suck') effects if necessary, eg pre-errata Visions of Avarice. Certainly combat becomes swingier than in default 4e, but that's a good thing IMO, 4e RAW is not swingy enough to be exciting.

 

[S'mon]

In my own regular 4th edition game I have a rule that when any regular monster takes damage equal to it's bloodied damage in one round , it must make a saving throw or die.

That strongly favours Strikers, the only PCs IME who have a chance* to do standard monster Bloodied value hp in one round - even then it's pretty rare, at least in all the games I've seen. Whereas halving monster hp treats everyone equally.

*There was one time a few sessions ago where a 9th level Fighter PC, Varek, was duelling an 8th level half hp elite NPC, Lady Lucinda. Varek attacked - Encounter Power - '20' - crit - Action Point, Daily - '20' - crit - and killed her in 1 round. That's inredibly unusual, though, and well deserved. With full elite hp she'd still have had nearly half her hp left, which would have felt very anticlimatic.

 

[Tymophil]

I found that halving monster hit points, while using more monsters to keep up the challenge level and keeping to post-MM3 damage expressions (monster level+8), solved all my problems with 4e grind. Monsters still hang around quite long enough but things don't devolve into endless at-wills.

How do you decide how many more monsters you will add to the encounter ? What kind of monster do you add, or don't add ?
Do you change the xp value for the monsters ?

 

[S'mon]

How do you decide how many more monsters you will add to the encounter ? What kind of monster do you add, or don't add ?
Do you change the xp value for the monsters ?

Adding 50% monsters (approx EL=PL+2 instead of EL=PL) maintains the same overall challenge level, or slightly increases the danger.

I would add monsters of the same type; or run the PCs through an adventure written for PCs 1-2 levels higher.

I used to give 2/3 XP for 50% hp monsters. This made advancement very slow (as did full hp monsters worth full XP). Now I give full XP for 50% hp monsters, which keeps advancement to about 1 level per 3 3-hour sessions, a rate I like. Otherwise we'd only get in 1 or 2 fights/night and advancement would need around 5 3-hour sessions, even with all the bonus & quest XP I give.

 

[Truename]

It's very easy: stop using a combat grid. This vastly speeds up combat, as players spend less time making decisions about positioning and effects. I can run an equal-level encounter in about 1/2 or 1/3 the time now.

I describe my approach here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4t...speeding-up-combat-skirmishes-set-pieces.html

It's still fun to break out the battle-mat for the big set pieces, but the battlemat-free "skirmish" style has worked really well for my group.

 

[Quickleaf]

I second [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] 's suggestion to halve monster HP and stick to MM3 damage.

Some other things I do...

* "Accelerants" (damaging terrain & terrain powers)
* Reserve the grid for big fights
* Combat "Outs" & Alternative Objectives
* Allow one-shot kills by giving sentries HP = minion damage (4 + 1/ 2 levels)
* Make boss fights interesting with stages
* PC & Monster cards hung over DM screen in initiative order listing defenses (once the group adapted to this it sped things up dramatically!)

All of these changes added to across the board 50% HP reduction for monsters allowed us to have 3 combats in a session alongside plenty of roleplay and exploration.