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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alex319" data-source="post: 4692376" data-attributes="member: 45678">Well, you might be getting a little ahead of yourself in terms of talking about "running combat like a skill challenge." I'm not sure you want to start reworking the entire combat system unless you need to.When I give advice about house rules, the first thing I always start with is "Clearly state what your goal is." As I understand it, your goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes to run a PbP combat. To do that you need to do the following:1. Reduce the number of posts necessary for each player.2. Reduce or eliminate ordering constraints on the players' posts.To achieve these objectives, you'll need to do the following:1. Make it as easy as possible for players to calculate the effects of their own actions, to reduce the number of go-arounds between the players and the DM.2. Reduce or eliminate dependencies of one player's actions on another, like powers that give bonuses to other players or strict initiative orders.3. Significantly reduce or eliminate "interrupt" style actions.---As I understand it, it also seems that you want to avoid reliance on the map. Do you see this as a primary objective, or do you just think of it as a side effect of the changes you are proposing?Anyway, let's start from how it works now and see what changes we need to make.Suppose we were to use the current combat system, but take out OAs and interrupt powers, and instead of the regular initiative order, there's just one initiative for the PCs and one for the monsters, and PCs just go in whatever order they post. You would also have to let the PCs know what the monsters' defenses are so they know whether they hit and they would know how to resolve their attacks. Then each PC as well as the DM only has to post once per round, and you can knock the length of each combat down by, say, decreasing monster HPs but increasing their attacks, so that could get you down to 2-5 rounds per combat, one post per round, no ordering constraints, you've got it.Since we wouldn't have OAs, we would have to come up with some other method for battlefield control. Let's say each square of movement in an opponent's threatened space costs triple, or something, so that people could still block each other (like what OAs are supposed to do) but doesn't require any interrupting of a player's move.So, would that work? And if not, what do you think would need to be changed?</blockquote>

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