Suggestions to speed up combat

[SteveC]

There has been some concern about the speed of combats in 4E and the "grind" that can set in towards the end of a combat. To this end, I suggest combat qualities.

A combat quality can be added to any of your combats that are dragging. They will tend to speed things up at a cost of greater injury to the victor. The first two qualities, Overtime and Sudden Death Overtime don't adjust the XP award for the battle at all. The final one, Mop Up will tend to reduce the XP award for the combat since it removes creatures from the battle and makes others weaker. Let's take a look at them:

Overtime
All creatures cause bonus damage equal to one-half their level on all their attacks.

Sudden Death Overtime
All creatures cause bonus damage equal to their level on all attacks.

I suggest that you initiate Overtime on round 5 of a combat and Sudden Death Overtime on round 10+. From my group's perspective, that adds some extra incentive to finish the battle up quickly, because stalling will mean that the characters may end up getting hurt worse.

Alternatively, consider instituting Overtime in round 8, and Sudden Death at round 16 if your combats move quickly and you're just looking to speed things up at the very end. Obviously, this is a situation where you should consult your players and see where their interest in a battle tends to wain.

I also present Mop Up, a quality when you want to make the combat end much faster, but don't simply want to fiat what happens. Mop Up will reduce the XP award for a battle, so use it sparingly with your group.

Mop Up
All active Minions in the combat are immediately removed from play. No XP is awarded for their removal.
All Standard monsters immediately become Minions. This reduces the XP award for defeating them to one-quarter normal.
All Elite monsters become Standard monsters. Reduce the XP award for these monsters by one half. Make the following adjustments to their profile:

• Reduce the action points the creature has by one.
• Reduce three of the creatures’ defenses by two, including AC.
• Reduce the creature’s current hit points and bloodied value by one-half.
• Reduce the creature’s saving throw bonus by two.
• Remove any special actions the creature is able to perform when bloodied.

Finally, any Solo monsters become Elite monsters. Be careful with doing this, as fighting a solo monster is supposed to be the main event for a conflict. Reduce the XP award for them to one-half normal. Make the following adjustments to their profile:

• Reduce action points by one.
• Reduce the creature’s saving throw bonus by three.
• Change one of the creature’s at-will powers to an encounter power.

The conversion process for Elite and Solo monsters is more of an art than a science, but the goal is to simplify and speed up combat when it is dragging.

That's the basics, what do you think?

--Steve

 

[77IM]

Overtime and Sudden Death seem fine, although you have to adjust damage on every roll, and people might forget to do it.

Also, the 5/10 or 8/16 round limits seem arbitrary -- some fights are meant to take a long time, and the rule should account for that, or at least give a guideline. Maybe, go into Overtime after (X / V) rounds, where X is the total XP value of the fight and V is the XP value of a single standard monster of the PC's level. So if the PCs are level 4, V = 175. If they are in a 1125 XP encounter, 1125 / 175 = 6.428... so you would enter Overtime after 6 or 7 rounds (I'd be inclined to round up here).

The Mop Up seems too troublesome; converting monsters on-the-fly requires too many steps. A much easier rule would just drop some damage on the bad guys. A simple variant (that is hidden to the players) is that all non-bloodied foes drop to bloodied+1 HP, and all bloodied foes drop to 1 HP. I wouldn't feel comfortable having minions drop dead before the players' eyes, but I might give them -5 to all defenses or something.

-- 77IM

 

[Sporemine]

Confusing but effective at reducing combat time but what about the time it takes converting to mop-up? I don't really think it's worth it so make it less confusing or faster in some way.

Otherwise good

-Sporemine

 

[SteveC]

On the issue of mop up, one thing to remember is that you're only going to adjust one or two opponents at most. It mostly comes down to cutting their HP in half and reducing their defenses by two.

The majority of changes: action points, at will power going to ancounter use only and special bloodied powers should hopefully have already been used by now. If they haven't been the combat is probably still interesting enough to keep running normally, since there are still some surprises in store for the heroes.

As far as the "use this on round X and the next option on 2X," that's for the GM and players to work out: I've had combats where round 20 was still interesting (the climactic battle in Keep on the Shadowfell went 30 rounds and was still interesting to my players) and others that were dull by round three (a battle with a hydra we had a couple weeks ago).

Still, I appreciate the comments!

--Steve

 

[scarik]

No XP is awarded for their removal.
This reduces the XP award for defeating them to one-quarter normal.
Reduce the XP award for these monsters by one half.

The rest of the 'mop-up' section is irrelevant, the point of the players winning is to get that XP. What you are suggesting is if someone is getting bored then the PCs get less XP.

Which they will have to fight more later to make up for.

I expect most players would revolt.

If you want fights to end faster, make the monsters run away, everyone gets full XP and the mobs can join a different encounter to make life hell, and then you can beat them to get their XP reward again.

The villain 'Catch and Release' program does very well around here.

 

[evilbob]

If you want fights to end faster, make the monsters run away, everyone gets full XP and the mobs can join a different encounter to make life hell, and then you can beat them to get their XP reward again

Honestly this is a very good alternative to coming up with new rules. With very few exceptions (undead), enemies would naturally either run away or - if intelligent - try to surrender once the fight was clearly going against them. Having the whole party just beat on 1 guy for 3 or 4 rounds who you KNOW is going to lose isn't that fun; having him surrender just to try something else later is much more interesting and better villain design.

If you don't like the idea of having enemies just give up, try reminding players of how the intimidate skill works now (it's kinda crazy powerful - you can force a bloodied target to surrender with one skill check).

 

[77IM]

The rest of the 'mop-up' section is irrelevant, the point of the players winning is to get that XP. What you are suggesting is if someone is getting bored then the PCs get less XP.

I think the point is to discourage PCs from just hunkering down and fighting defensively until enough rounds go by for the DM to get bored and drop a Mop Up bomb on the enemies. By taking away XP if the PCs dally, they are encouraged to take out the enemies quickly rather than rely on the incoming Mop Up bomb. Note that the other options (Overtime and Sudden Death) increase the damage of both the PCs and the opponents, speeding up combat without making it any easier. Mop Up does make the combat easier, hence the XP penalty.


Here's another idea for Overtime and Sudden Death Overtime. If every member of the party is out of encounter attack powers or out of daily attack powers, go into Overtime. If the whole party is out of both, go into Sudden Death. This gives the PCs more control; if they want to get to Overtime, they can deliberately blow through their encounter powers. If they don't, they can have one party member hang onto one power. It also means that the damage bonus will typically apply to at-will powers, making them (the at-wills) seem a little less lame.

This idea was based on the realization that a fight is only going on for too long if the players have run out of powers and must resort to the grind of repetitively spamming at-wills.

-- 77IM

 

[firesnakearies]

I think the "mop up" sort of phase should affect the PCs and the monsters equally. I don't see a point to suddenly saying, "Well, it's been 20 rounds, so here, I'll just make the fight easier for you to win." To me, the point is to make the fight come to a conclusion more quickly, but not necessarily to be easier for the PCs. Drop every non-blooded combatant to bloodied, and every bloodied combatant to 1 hit point. If that doesn't suddenly make the fight a whole lot more exciting, you've got some pretty darn disinterested players.



$

 

[Firebeetle]

There are some meritable ideas here. I'll have to play with it.

The latter part of the mop up seems to confusing and thus likely to slow things down. I do like the idea of demoting creatures into minions with corresponding XP penalty.

It should be noted that a playtest rule is to give all monsters half hit points. I could definitely see halving monster HP while increasing their damage at an "overtime" mark. This would help resolve combats quickly while producing a similar result as a longer combat.