New Legends & Lore

[Balesir]

I really miss those descrition combats... but i guess this is a thing of the past... we must improve on what we have now...

Huh?? Why do that? Play D&D 4E for the cool encounter busting, and play a good sim game for the immersive, descriptive combats! You can have the best of both worlds - by playing different games for each one!

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

This is my biggest gripe with 4e. Not that the rules are not good... they are too good to be honest. We are too easily lost in the skirmishing game that results from the exciting gameplay

I really miss those descrition combats... but i guess this is a thing of the past... we must improve on what we have now...

You don't even need to leave 4e to get descriptive immersion in combats. It is largely up to the DM, and to a lesser extent, the players to make sure this happens.

I use a grid, and have on and off since late 2nd edition. I always try to make a point of hamming up the description of things my monsters are doing that aren't covered by their actions to help bring the fight to life for the players (and myself). I describe player actions when I need to use my judgement to resolve their actions, or when they don't use their own descriptions. I try to make things cinematic and intense.

Only my players could tell you if I do an adequate job, but I feel like it works. We don't have too many "plug-your-ears-and-go-lalala" moments.

 

[Dausuul]

This is my biggest gripe with 4e. Not that the rules are not good... they are too good to be honest. We are too easily lost in the skirmishing game that results from the exciting gameplay

I really miss those descrition combats... but i guess this is a thing of the past... we must improve on what we have now...

I don't think we need to give up so easily. That sort of "description combat," as you put it, is not necessarily ruined by giving players more tactical options or better balanced math. The way I see it, most of the problem comes from the combination of strong battlemat focus and abstract combat mechanics, where the underlying concept (what the combatant is actually doing in the game world) is an afterthought. Fixing those would go a long way to resurrecting that style of play.

It might also help to have complex tactical options--the stuff that players frown and puzzle over--be designed to come late in the fight. One way to do this (not necessarily the best, just throwing out an idea) would be with a "token pool" mechanic such as Iron Heroes used; you accumulate tokens from round to round and then spend them to power special abilities. That way, in a short skirmish, by the time you had to select an Awesome Combat Move, the fight would be mostly over and you wouldn't have to sweat the decision. Just pick whichever move is the most Awesome and watch the last bad guy explode in extra-gruesome fashion. Big fights would last longer, so you'd have time to really explore the range of options available, but you still wouldn't be making a big decision every round.

This would also address the problem some designer noted a few months ago in the executioner design article, where the last rounds of combat suck because everybody's down to their at-wills; right at the moment when you want to be speeding things up and bringing the fight to a conclusion, things are slowing down instead.

Huh?? Why do that? Play D&D 4E for the cool encounter busting, and play a good sim game for the immersive, descriptive combats! You can have the best of both worlds - by playing different games for each one!

I don't have time to play different games for each, and I don't accept that one game can't do both... in the same combat, no less. People around here are way too quick to say "It can't be done."

 

[UngeheuerLich]

No, it does not work like that... it is like playing NES adventures... they were great once... but you can´t play them more than once in a while...

edit: it can and should be done... i guess it gets better once my players and I am better used to the mechanics... i still have too look up too much...

 

[Incenjucar]

Man, 4E combat is easy to get narrative about. Narration just tends to slow things down. Nobody's going to stop me from describing how the angel I summon when casting Offering of Love (Invoker Power: Offering of Justice) outstretches her right hand to offer mercy and kindness while her left hand is hidden behind her and shaped like a rakshasa claw, ready to plunge into the target's chest if it refuses to accept the love, nor the squicked look on said angel's face when she's being made to make the offer to an otyugh.

--

Memorizing the mechanics definitely helps to speed things up. I'm actually not much of a rote learner, but I've read through the compendium and reread the various conditions enough that I don't generally have to check the books to see what they do, and it makes things easier for everyone at the table.

 

[MrMyth]

For a skirmish fight? 1-2 minute turns? Hell no. At least in my view, a skirmish fight should go something like this:

Fighter player: "I run forward and attack the big orc. [rolls] I hit AC 22, 11 damage."
DM: "You shatter his skull and he drops. Dire wolves' turn. The two dire wolves come at you from either side. [rolls a couple times] AC 18 and 24."
Fighter player: "24 hits, 18 misses."
DM: "You block one dire wolf with your shield. The other tears a strip out of your arm. Next!"
Rogue player: "That rope holding the door to the wolves' cage up. Can I hack through it and swing across the cave to the shaman's ledge?"
DM: "Sure. You cut the rope and the cage door falls. Roll Acrobatics."
Rogue player: "I got a 17."
DM: "That'll do. You land next to the shaman."
Rogue player: "Can I attack him too?"
DM: "Hmm... yeah, we'll call it a charge attack. You can even sneak attack, since he totally wasn't expecting that. Make your roll."
Rogue player: "AC 20, 15 damage."
DM: "You put a knife in his belly. He's looking bad but he's not quite down. Next!"

We're looking at 15-30 seconds per turn here. The whole idea of a skirmish fight is to be fast-paced, with a high energy level. People waffling over tactics defeats the point.

I dunno, I think the battlemap might slightly encourage more tactical play, but it isn't nearly as absent from non-battlemat play as one might think.

Anyway, I think the above scenario is definitely the ideal, but I really don't think it is nearly that easy to pull off in actual play. A player who is thinking of jumping across a ledge might ask a few more questions to figure out how hard it will actually be, or figure out the consequences of failure. When the monsters get damaged, the DM needs to jot the numbers done, note who is defeated, etc. The DM is unlikely to be instantaneous in tossing out numbers on how easy it is to pull some of these things off. Complete chatter silence from the group also seems unmanageable.

It isn't that I don't think it can be done, but I think it is an extreme rarity, and unrealistic in most groups. 15-30 second turns? Consistently? I commend any who can pull it off, but don't see it as especially viable for most.

 

[LostSoul]

An anecdote - I use a skirmish system without a battlemap. The last fight was against 2 cacklefiend hyenas and a human transmuter fighting on a fortified bridge above an icy river; the PCs started off hidden beneath the bridge. There were 4 PCs, levels 1, 7, 9, 9.

The combat lasted 10-15 minutes and involved a lot of pushing into the river and teleporting. The transmuter showed up in round 2. The fight lasted 4-5 rounds.

There was only one hiccup - at one point the PC wizard wanted to move somewhere but he was under the bridge; I called for a check to see if he could jump into the position.

 

[Dausuul]

An anecdote - I use a skirmish system without a battlemap. The last fight was against 2 cacklefiend hyenas and a human transmuter fighting on a fortified bridge above an icy river; the PCs started off hidden beneath the bridge. There were 4 PCs, levels 1, 7, 9, 9.

The combat lasted 10-15 minutes and involved a lot of pushing into the river and teleporting. The transmuter showed up in round 2. The fight lasted 4-5 rounds.

There was only one hiccup - at one point the PC wizard wanted to move somewhere but he was under the bridge; I called for a check to see if he could jump into the position.

So, assume 4.5 rounds at 12.5 minutes, that's just about 2:45 per round, for 4 PCs plus the DM. Say 30 seconds per PC and 45 seconds for the DM. Pretty fast for 4E!

I'm very curious to hear how your non-battlemat skirmish system works. Can you give us a rough idea? (Also, off topic... what's with the one first-level PC in a level 7-9 party?)

 

[kaomera]

But the counterpoint is that, without the battlemat, you instead have some players spending 2 minutes asking the DM to better describe where everyone in the room is, if they are close enough to attack, or move behind cover, etc. Even if the DM just described all the same things on the last player's turn.

I'm sorry, but I hate this argument. The battlemat does not do anything to make players think or pay attention. I've regularly had the same players who use this argument in defense of the battlemat spend 2+ minutes asking me to describe what everything I've drawn is, even if I just described it on the last player's turn. If I had the time / money / ability to transport accurate 3D terrain and miniatures for everything I needed it might not be a problem, but having to explain that the fire giant is this one, over here, with the post-it note on it that says "FIER GIANT" on it turn after turn hurts my brain.

 

[LostSoul]

So, assume 4.5 rounds at 12.5 minutes, that's just about 2:45 per round, for 4 PCs plus the DM. Say 30 seconds per PC and 45 seconds for the DM. Pretty fast for 4E!

I'm very curious to hear how your non-battlemat skirmish system works. Can you give us a rough idea? (Also, off topic... what's with the one first-level PC in a level 7-9 party?)

Everyone declares their actions at the same time (at the start of the round), we calculate modifiers and DCs based on those actions, then we all roll at the same time to determine results. Hit points and damage have been reduced by a factor of about 2.25, and we don't roll for damage. (Typical at-wills deal 4-5 damage, and those hyenas had 30 hit points as 7th-level brutes. Hmm, that's too low.)

It doesn't always go that fast; some combats take a lot longer because the players take more time to deliberate over their actions. Usually that's because there are many more combatants (the most we've had at one time has been ~50) or it's a life-or-death situation and the wrong move can get you killed.

One other factor that speeds things up is making morale checks at the end of the round. NPCs usually don't fight to the death.

The 1st-level guy is there because his last PC got ripped apart by zombies, didn't get gentle repose cast on him in time, and he didn't want to play his 2nd or 3rd level henchman. New PCs start at 1st level.