D&D 4E Playing 4E without miniatures and the battle grid.

[Shin Okada]

Hmm. So basically, your goal is to speed up the pace of story.

IMHO, just eliminating miniatures and grids will slow down each combat encounters as long as you continue to use most of the 4e powers and combat rules.

Using the essential PC build options may speed up the combat encounters faster. Because, in overall, those rules give much simple selection of powers and abilities, thus tactical decisions will be narrowed down.

Or, maybe you can decrease the number of combat encounters and add more non-combat encounters which is composed of skill challenge. Social ones, traveling past dangerous area, etc.

Skip non-significant combats entirely, or making some combats as skill challenge, will be another idea.

In older editions, each combats ended in shorter time (maybe not so in 3.Xe). But in those days, many of the combats were insignificant ones. You open a room of a door of the Temple of Elemental Evil, find 20 or so Orc grunts are there, and the party wizard uses a wand of fireball once and the party fighter swing his sword once or twice. Then you open another door and find a bunch of skeletons there ..... did those "combats" really needed to be played using combat rules?

As a DM, you can just tell some insignificant or not-so-dramatic combats as a part of the story, say, "Your brave heroes traveled through regions dominated by Orcs, fighting against those savages several times. Now, after a month of travel, you finally came near to the hideout of the Orc King."

Or, you can make this journey as one skill challenge. Which may involve Endurance, Nature, Perception, Stealth and such. Each failure may reduce the number of healing surges PCs have. It represents that they either fought some orcs, killing it but somewhat injured. Or found by weak, but numerous orcs and run away from them and thus exhausted.

 

[LostSoul]

I do use the grid when I run my "Skill Combats". It's not as important in vanilla 4E, and I imagine you could get by without it, but it's helpful. I've nearly always used a grid map - ever since Pool of Radiance came out - so getting rid of the grid wasn't a big deal for me. Combats do resolve quicker and there's more fictional flow to them, which was important.

I don't know if you'll have the same amount of success, since I wrote the system and I can quickly answer any corner cases that arise. I'm sure there are issues that I haven't written down, rulings I make that I'm not even aware of. ("If you can do it, you can do it" springs to mind...)

 

[vic20]

...I can't make a search on the forums...

Yes you can. Go to google.com (or any google-bar installed in a browser) and type "site:enworld.org Orc and Pie", substituting whatever search terms you're interested in for "Orc and Pie".

 

[Tony Vargas]

What we do not enjoy is that combat, when it becomes such a tactical exercise, slows the game down to the point where one entire 3 hour session can be taken up by one major combat. In AD&D and 2E, we were able to plow through 4 or 5 combats, and a good deal of story, in the same amount of time.

I'm always a little incredulous at games like this. 5 combats and substantial RP in 3 hours? I can't recall ever doing anything like that in any game, with or without minis. Games with less combat focus, and no minis, generally involved a combat or two in a 4-8 hour session, with lots /and lots/ of RP, skill use, and the like filling it out. Heavy combat-focused, mini-using games, OTOH, 1 combat in a session, with it taking up the bulk of the session. I remember plowing through 3 encounters, occassionally, in an 8 hour 3.5 session if it was prettymuch all combat, and that going up to 4 in 4e. Of course, I've generally gamed with larger groups - at least 6 players, sometimes 8 or 10.

 

[karolusb]

I'm always a little incredulous at games like this. 5 combats and substantial RP in 3 hours? I can't recall ever doing anything like that in any game, with or without minis. Games with less combat focus, and no minis, generally involved a combat or two in a 4-8 hour session, with lots /and lots/ of RP, skill use, and the like filling it out. Heavy combat-focused, mini-using games, OTOH, 1 combat in a session, with it taking up the bulk of the session. I remember plowing through 3 encounters, occassionally, in an 8 hour 3.5 session if it was prettymuch all combat, and that going up to 4 in 4e. Of course, I've generally gamed with larger groups - at least 6 players, sometimes 8 or 10.

In AD&D, at low levels, most enemies lasted a hit or two. While people missed a pretty good amount, rounds with a missed attack were generally nearly instantaneous.

Minis make every round a chore. Swing and miss 5 second rounds become tactical move, minor action, planning summary, missed attack 3 minute rounds. Yeah you could get through alot more combats back in the day.

I like 4E, I also like the fact that you can get people to play it (didn't like 3.5, you know how hard it is to get people to play HERO, it was a drought in my gaming life). I have played many games over the years, and don't that my ambivalence to miniatures bars me from playing d&d.

That said last game I ran I rarely used battlemats. I asked players to avoid very fiddly power choices (the monk dropped his every enemy adjacent to you at any point during your shift power etc). Five of the players worked with it just fine. One was really flustered and confounded by it (another in truth was flustered and confounded by miniatures). Most 4E powers are pretty easy to handle in a narrative fashion, but some are nearly impossible. The monk who was heavy in positioning powers worked fine, teleporting enemies next to the fighter etc.

I didn't go for extreme abstraction. Guy is 60 feet away, you move 25 feet in a move action. If you move and make a ranged attack you are at 35 feet away. The kind of thing that can be sketched on graph paper with little x's and passed around the table when people need clarification.

It didn't speed us up massively. But it did some. A game session that might involve 2 combats only become one that involved 2 combats and some roleplay. The gains weren't as much as I would have liked, but they were there, and we did occasionally use battlemats, though I never felt they added much to regular combat encounters.

 

[EP]

I've almost always used minis, even in games where you'd never expect to use them (like Vampire). It just saves a lot of confusion in combat and makes the battle go by faster. The only problem I have with combat is the amount of money spent on having the "latest, greatest" minis. Par example, I wanted to use the actual Orcus mini for our 30th level god-romp but there's no way in hell I'm spending $90 on a single mini for one game. So we used a pit fiend instead. Good enough.

However, I have played a couple of 4e encounters without minis and it went off without a hitch. In those cases, one character was flying/burrowing and the minis became more confusing as no one was standing on the same level as the rest. Small group with just 2 or 3 players and an equal number of monsters works best as it's easier to keep track of mentally.