Quickening the Pace- D&D combat needs to be faster

[Prak]

Or, it needs more tactical depth if it's not going to be faster.

Kurtis Wiebe is working on a Dungeon World based Rat Queens RPG. This makes me sad, because it's my favorite comic, but he's using DW. He says it's because it needs a fast paced system, which D&D admitedly is not.

And in amongst debating DW with people, I thought about D&D's combat system, and I must admit that it is way too slow for it's tactical depth.

We all know how D&D combat goes-
-The fighter spams his sword/chain/bow
-The caster spams his highest damage spell or best save or sucks
-The rogue maneuvers a little, but just until he can flank
-The druid chooses whether to be a fighter or caster and the bard stands in the corner twiddling his flute.

And yet a combat that takes less than a minute of game time takes half an hour of real time.

There are two ways to solve this, either make D&D combat more tactical (which honestly would just increase the resolution time even more) or make D&D combat faster.

I could see kludging together Fate's complications and zones systems and M&M's battered and condition system into something that is maybe a little less of a slogfest, but I'm not sure how well that would actually work.

Another option that comes to mind is collapsing multiple attacks into single rolls, something like for every 2 points your attack roll exceeds the opponent's AC you deal an extra hit of damage? Basically you would want to reduce rolls without sacrificing power or options.

I don't know, what are other peoples' thoughts for how to speed up D&D combat? If you can increase the ...maybe not tactical depth, but the cinematic-ness while still speeding things up that would be good too.

[PhoneLobster]

D&D (any edition, tomes included) is sufficiently shitty tactically you could probably improve that and simplify at the same time.

But simplify wise, a lot of your list probably looks like this, you might not have to do everything, but even one thing not done could eat up all your streamlining.

Much lower numbers of HP.

No randomized damage, no soak rolls, no defense rolls, no special defense responses.

No multiple rolls for single actions ever, multi-attacks pretty much fuck right off.

No Vancian spell system. Nothing that resembles it. Ditch all the long lists you select long lists of complex unique options from then select from those options in combat, then resolve them even though even one option from that list often is complex enough to take notable resolution time.

Simplified positioning/range/area/movement system.

Simplified or removed initiative system.

No minigames, not just my usual "all minigames should be integrated" argument, I mean fuck it, no minigames, PERIOD. None that happen in combat, none that happen parrellel to combat, none that are integrated as part of combat. Even your out of combat only minigames are reduced to "roll once, done, whatever".

Less or no stupid bullshit little conditional bonuses people forget then at the last minute remember, every damn time.


Now. I'm sure I've missed some stuff. And I KNOW my own fantasy rules don't do (much of) this stuff. And I'm not sure I think it's a good idea to do this stuff. But this is the sort of stuff you need to do.

[Kaelik]

Could everyone who's name starts with a P in this thread just accept that you don't want to play D&D, and go play some other game?

Alternatively, you are an idiot Prak.

[Prak]

You're right, I'd honestly rather play Mutants and Masterminds with non-episodic equipment rules, or Fate with maybe a bit more structure. And I'd like to give AS a shot. However, given that I can't convince anyone around me to do something other than D&D...

[PhoneLobster]

Could everyone who's name starts with a P in this thread just accept that you don't want to play D&D, and go play some other game?

I don't particularly want to play actual D&D any more, and I so I already do go and play some other game. That should be pretty widely known around here already.

And that doesn't stop me from recommending some extreme measures I also don't want to implement myself that would help to achieve a goal that is also not one I share.

I don't think I see what the point of you getting your knickers in a knot over that is.

[Prak]

It's how Kaelik relaxes, he's stated this before

[hyzmarca]

Macros. Accomplish complex dice rolls with single button pushes.

[ishy]

I don't think I see what the point of you getting your knickers in a knot over that is.

Well...

Quickening the Pace- D&D combat needs to be faster

[MfA]

To some extent it's impossible ... it ain't D&D without d6 per CL save for half fireballs, the sacred cows lock you into lots of dice and double digit math.

As for a fantasy games in general which play fast while having a large option space with high predictability of outcomes ... design it as a card game.

[Ferret]

Collapse variable damage into static damage codes, possibly allowing degrees of success to add additional damage; instead of 1d8, a longsword would do 5+STRMOD+DoS vs fixed defensive value of the opponent. Same thing for spells - take the average die result per level and figure your damage once when you level up, saves convert to static defenses a la 4th edition.

All miss chance effects instead impose a required degree of success to hit, or ablative turn-hits-into-misses a la Mirror Image.

I'd probably remove iterative attacks and instead allow melee combatants to instead attack a growing area of Effect with their action each round if desired. High level melee guys would basically be living fireballs which might make an interesting dynamic for them.

Maybe make Sneak Attack a SoD if fixed damage per die didn't end up giving the desired result.

I think the above would result in something that still mostly feels like D&D in play, but reduces combat to 1 roll per character per round.

[silva]

Kurtis Wiebe is working on a Dungeon World based Rat Queens RPG. This makes me sad, because it's my favorite comic, but he's using DW. He says it's because it needs a fast paced system, which D&D admitedly is not.

Just googled this Rat Queens thing and, Uau! Such a powerful imagery. Looks a badass comic series. And matching it with DW sounds awesome to me, since D&D was never my cup of tea. Any news about this adaptation ? Will it be kickstarted or somehting ?

[Josh_Kablack]

Well if you want combat to resolve faster at the table you have a limited number of areas to work on:

1. You can reduce the amount of time it takes each player to resolve their actions
2. You can reduce the number of player actions that happen within a combat
3. You can reduce the number of players taking actions within a combat
4. You can reduce the time players spend doing anything which isn't taking actions

1. Quicker Action Resolution
Doing the first of those can be done in a number of ways. You can use existing D&D rules but with an added stopwatch or chess clock for each player or you can attempt to streamline and simplify the rules in many of the ways suggested previously in this thread. Personally I'm a big fan of using "everything is at-will" power schemes to all-but eliminate resource management decisions and thereby reduce player-side analysis paralysis, but a lot of the other suggestions here make just as-relevant improvements on this.

2. Fewer Actions Per Combat
The second involves making each individual action more effective at bringing the combat towards a close. This can involve attacks that never miss, attacks with higher damage, lower base hit points, removal of in-combat healing, and similar methods. Some of those can be done within existing D&D rules via MC monster selection and player prioritization of offense over defense, but that's not reliable so rules changes or rewrites into a non-D&D system are likely here. It would also probably help to have more plausible capture, flee and surrender options than D&D traditionally has had, since those would allow for combats to end in fewer rounds.

3. Fewer Combatants Per Fight
However, the third is probably the lowest hanging fruit. Fewer combatants in each fight should be given serious consideration as an easy way of streamlining. It also models a lot of single-author fiction better than traditional assumptions of RPGs. Within D&D, it's trivially easy for the MC to choose opposition which is fewer in number than the PC group. If not handled carefully, this approach can run into a pair of issues: either players fighting superior opposition end up feeling that their characters are inferior or the nature of the D&D action economy means that supposedly challenging fights turn into trivial stunjuggles with no illusion of danger. So those are things to watch out for.

Outside of D&D, it would be interesting to see a ruleset where there were mechanical incentives to strictly limit the number of PCs involved in any single fight. Players not participating in the current fight could then be expected to either run opponents, pursue noncombat challenges during the fight, or heck even spectate or make the beer run. As much as people whine about how bad it is for a player to have to sit out a whole fight scene in a co-operative endeavor, it is probably better to tell a player "you're out of this fight scene, we won't need you for at least 30 minutes" than to tell a player "you're in this scene, we'll need you to move your mini and roll dice for one to three minutes out of every fifteen to thirty minutes for the next hour or so, so pay attention but don't do anything until your turn comes back up"

4. Reduction of Distractions

During an RPG combat scene, players are going to do a lot of things which are not related to the combat. They are going to make jokes, eat cheetos, look up rules, run to the restroom, take phone calls, etc. A lot of these distractions can be reduced via etiquette and peer pressure. You can foster a table culture where people know the rules most likely to come up, where people take bathroom breaks after their turn (instead of right before), etc. But some things are rules issues: if players need to roll saves against attacks, or if characters have optional-use defenses, or out-of-turn reaction then the game has to pause any time enemies attack them, and these pauses get lengthy if such attacks happen during their bathroom break or "I gotta call my wife between my turns". It seems counterintuitive for a co-operative game, but combats are vastly sped up if the ruleset is designed to support asynchronous play.

Furthermore, a lot of in-combat tabletime is traditionally wasted on initiative systems. As I've recently posted elsewhere, Feng Shui requires something like 20% of the group's time during any given fight to be spent merely figuring out turn order. And honestly, that's an improvement over things like 2e D&D, where nearly half the rolls the player of a low-level nonweaponspecialized character would make in combat were likely to be initiative rolls, which the MC then had to perform not merely a single less than comparison but an actual Sort ( NlogN to N^2 operations ) on each round.

[codeGlaze]

I was actually thinking about the same thing today, oddly enough.

I was considering just eliminating the hit die and using the 20 for variable damage/effects. Clearly requiring a chart or something...

In any case, people LOVE rolling piles of dice. Or at least my players do. So I was thinking instead of having a chart telling you that "1-5" is 1 damage and "16-20" is max damage (or what ever); instead you would get to roll larger numbers of dice.

Which, in the end, probably just brings us back to square one. I primarily liked the idea because it was also conceived to help,eliminate "misses".

[Prak]

Any consultation of a chart will increase the amount of time combat takes.

[codeGlaze]

Eh, depends on the chart. Small ones that are memorizable aren't so bad.

Anyhoo. Sidetracking for a second is an 18,000 ft tall monster too big for 20th level characters? >.> (nearly the size of my everest)

[Zaranthan]

A party of level 20 3.X D&D characters are DC superheroes. They can take on forces of nature and expect to win.

That said, whether the 3 mile monster is an appropriate challenge has nothing to do with its size and everything to do with its abilities. If it can do things every round that are on par with 9th level spells, and has defensive numbers that let it at least hope to resist the party's assault, then yes, it's a fair challenge. If it's just a gundam-sized tarrasque, then no, it's a chump.

[codeGlaze]

I did a size chart of sizes proportional to level and ended up with 18,000ish ft on the far end of the largest size.

Was just wondering if I was the only one who thought an ancient beast as big as my Everest would be a sweet level 20 threat.

[Zaranthan]

In concept? Yes. Fighting a walking island is awesome. In mechanics? It needs to open the combat with storm of vengeance or the players are just going to laugh at it and be disappointed.

[Prak]

Yeah, lv 20 stuff needs more than just big numbers. Even a +2000 attack bonus and 45d20+5000 damage is going to be laughed off by a group that preps. Even 500,000 hp doesn't guarantee a reasonable fight for 20th lv characters, because there are non-hp interacting methods to defeat the creature, and even without that it just means that it's going to take a while.

[PhoneLobster]

Well...

Pick one.

Either Prak wants to play D&D and his desired changes/goals don't stop it being D&D and that's fine and we get to talk about them.

Or Prak doesn't really want to play D&D and his desired changes/goals stop it being D&D and that's fine and we get to talk about them.

Or who cares, be a dick, pick both, but it's still fine and we get to talk about it.

[Prak]

D&D 3.0 is the first RPG I learned, and it's near-dungeonpunk take on fantasy has greatly informed my tastes and expectations. Generally speaking, I prefer D&D for fantasy, possibly because I'm not aware of another Iron Age fantasy game that even comes close to be as not bad as D&D 3.X, except maybe Pathfinder (it's worse than 3.x, but better than everything else).

If someone said "pick a system, I'll run a fantasy game with it" I would probably actually pick Mutants and Masterminds with a couple variant rules because it's even more flexible than d20, what with being point buy. But I know one person who runs M&M and he moved to San Diego last year.

So in absence of a better fantasy rpg, I work on tweaking D&D, even if it's just academic. D&D 3.X is not the best Iron Age fantasy game, it's the least bad and has a lot of problems that need to be fixed, like 30 second scuffles taking 30 minutes to resolve.

[OgreBattle]

Make a list of everything you think slows down the game without adding significant value and we can start from there

[silva]

So what you're saying is that, because you lost your virginity to D&D3, you have difficulty in appreciating other games, even when these games supposedly make something better than your first love (like being faster) ? That's sad. Tip: go wild and fuck with as many partners as you can until you find something to your liking. Chances are, eventually you will find one that pleases you. It was my case with Shadowrun and nowadays I'm happy to have left that convoluted mess of a game behind.

And what do you mean by D&D3 being Iron Age ? It always looked pretty medieval to me, from its cruciform longswords, to leather boots, to plate armor to kingdoms etc.

[Judging__Eagle]

Cruciform swords, leather footwear, plate armour and kingdoms are a bad way to judge if a culture is iron age or not; especially as all of those existed within, and we have the artifacts to prove it, pre-collapse Bronze Age kingdoms such as Mycenaean, Crete, Troy and the Middle East.

Better metrics for whether a setting is "Iron Age" or something else:

[*]Does the culture use iron? Really, that's the major one; and can't be ignored.
[*]Is the iron prevalent and available as commonly as actual iron is on Earth? (i.e. very common, the bulk of Earth's mass is varying states of Iron)
[*]Are there sufficiently distributed blacksmiths in the population such that the society won't collapse into chalcolithic/paleolithic technology when their iron tools needs repair? (Anyone studying Iron Age economies who doesn't understand the linchpin position of the blacksmith in maintaining their local technology at ferric age levels is either blind, or doesn't understand how economy or cultures work)
[*] Is blacksmithing and metallurgy in general seen as "almost magic" by non-smiths? (not commonly known, but originally this was thought in some places; before the industrial revolution)
[*]Are moral codes still pretty much: "might makes right", "kill all enemy combatants; enslave the healthy; leave the rest", "The ruler is the most badass warrior around"
[*]Are the bulk of the most advanced technological devices no more complicated than things that can be assembled by hand (i.e. no need for highly machined parts with low fit-tolerances; which are sort of required for higher performing cannon and steam age equipment).

[silva]

Nice points Judging Eagle.

For more authentic Iron Age settings, see Glorantha (with bronze age elements thrown in), Agon, Hillfolk, Yggdrasil, etc. There was that d20 setting that had a strong iron age vibe too but the name escape me now. *EDIT* Scarred Lands!