Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Shin Okada" data-source="post: 5328647" data-attributes="member: 1956">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 &quot;combats&quot; 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, &quot;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.&quot;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.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Shin Okada, post: 5328647, member: 1956"] 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. [/QUOTE]

Verification