Speeding up Combat: Accelerants

[TarionzCousin]

Gamefiend has an article on his site devoted to speeding up combat. It is ostensibly for 4E, but can be applied to almost any game, IMHO.

The Speed of Choice: the Real Reason your 4e Fights are so Damn Slow.

The key is to design encounters with "accelerants." These are things that will end (or possibly drastically shorten) combat.

Hey, I notice I can trigger a mini-avalanche and bury those henchmen in it…In the far corner there is an orb reanimating these skeletons…If I put my sword in the fire I can make it a flaming sword for the encounter…

The article has other ideas as well, but this one really resonated with me.

 

[garrowolf]

I think that the real reason that 4e is so slow is that speed of play was never a goal for the game designers. They stopped using reality as a reference point for the game at all and focused on MMORPGs as a reference point. I can see something thinking that they could pull away players to their game that way but it just produced a lot of game mechanics that reference other game mechanics.

There are plenty of game systems that have faster combat. My own Nexus d20 has reduced actions to one dice roll an action. There is no defensive rolls or damage rolls or confirming criticals. One roll does it all. It's fast and fair. I can run large combats quickly and without a lot of notes.

I got rid of anything in the D20 system that slowed down play such as attacks of opportunity and experience points.

There are several systems that focus on speed of play. You can use tricks to end a combat more quickly in any game but I don't think that they are solving any real problems. I think that the problem lies more in your choice of system.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Slow combat has not been an issue for my group so far. Combats seem to run much quicker and each person gets more turns per combat in 4E than we did when we played a long-running 3.5E campaign. I think with fewer combat options available to most of the players and the DM, it has greatly sped up combat for us compared to when we played in previous editions.

Previously, we were lucky to get through one combat per night. Now, 2-3 is the norm for my group, and with more time left over for role-playing & character development.

I guess we must be doing something wrong if combat is not taking forever? Even by level 6 or 7 in 3.5E, the casters had a lot more options available to them each round than did a cleric, wizard or psion in 4E., and deciding which option to choose often took a while... and, then the DM (me) would slow things down by having an evil spellcaster of a few levels higher who then had even more options to choose from, and would need to change his choice on the fly based on what just happened in game.

 

[giant.robot]

You can also "minionize" non-solo opponents once they get bloodied or their ranks are significantly thinned. There's a couple ways to do this. The easiest is to just drop a monster's HP to 1 once it gets bloodied. They're still a danger if the party ignores them but they're easily dispatched once they've taken some hits. This keeps you from wasting two players' turns finishing off a weakened monster. If you want a monster to last a little while longer but not forever you can just treat all successful hits against them as critical hits once they're bloodied.

Turning opponents into minions or making them minion-like once they are bloodied helps make combats go a lot faster. For instance let's say you've got a monster like the trusty Goblin Cutthroat with 30 HP with an AC of 15. For a well mixed party the average attack damage is about 8 (D6 avg roll of 3 + 4 ability modifier) points. Assuming the party doesn't miss the Goblin it takes four turns to kill him. If there's five Goblins you're looking at a minimum of twenty rounds to kill them all. *see note below

Characters are going to miss about half of their attacks on average so that's an average of forty player turns (10 rounds). If you only take two minutes per turn that's almost an hour and a half for a single combat encounter. By "minionizing" opponents or simply including more minions instead of skirmishers you can cut the number of player turns needed to finish the combat by at least 25%.

Either "minionizing" monsters or using an accelerant are both ways to cut the number of turns required to take out the bad guys. D&D has had a problem with an imbalance of monster HP and character damage output for a long time. This is really an artifact of the whole idea of HP. Mechanically there's no penalty for PCs or monsters to run around with only a few hit points. A creature's curve mapping its effectiveness in combat is essentially flat until it hits 0 HP. There's no real penalties (outside a few powers that trigger when bloodied) for running around with 3 HP. D&D's hit point system has always been a bit of an odd abstraction for a creature's ability to absorb damage. Hit points make sense when you're modeling a unit of soldiers on a battlefield but less so when you're talking about a singular creature.

*note: These are all averages. A Barbarian with a great axe, a Rogue with combat advantage, and a controller with a good high damage AoE can all help dispatch opponents faster than the average but the "long combat" meme says "on average" combats take a long time.