“You’re chasing the half-dragon demon and his dragonborn minions down the hill, your feet skidding on the soggy leaves underfoot. The trees whip past your faces and you go, arms whirling as you try to keep up. There’s a clearing up ahead as the slope levels out. The dragon turns, prepared to meet you in battle. Roll initiative while I set up the battlemat and get the figures ready. Matt, you wanna grab some more drinks, this is going to take a while……”
Here, at the core, is my group’s problem with 4e: The Combat Bump. We prefer combat to be a part of the action, something which maintains the flow and pace of the story as a whole. Instead, there’s a disjoint between the events leading up to the combat and the battle itself as the game shifts a gear from free-flowing to round-by-round miniatures-based play. The whole thing stops as things are set up, and that immersive sensation of excitement quickly fades. And when you’re in combat in 4e, you’re going to be there for a while.
If a game session was a comicbook, the combat elements should be a few pages of the tale with perhaps a climactic double-page spread. It should be fast, energetic and exciting. In contrast, a 3-hour long session using 4e feels more like a comicbook that’s 80% combat scenes. No matter how cool, well-drawn or awesome those comicbook panels are, if that’s all there is it’s going to get boring, fast.
4e combat slows the whole game down to a crawl. A typical 4e encounter takes about an hour to run. Have 3, and there’s your session gone with little wiggle room left for plot or character development. Do the math. If you’ve got 4 players and 10 foes in an encounter and each player averages 30 seconds to take their turn, and monsters 15 seconds (averaged for attrition), then every combat round is going to take 4 and a half minutes to play out. If it’s going to take about 10 combat rounds to play through the encounter then that’s 45 minutes right there. Add in bathroom breaks, out-of-game chatter and the inevitable rules lookups and it’s easy to see where the hour goes.
So, what’s to be done?
The easy solution is just to say “4e isn’t for me”, and walk away. That’s fine, but you’re also missing out on what is a darned good role-playing system and fun game. Whatever your game engine of choice, there’s bound to be elements you want to chop’n'change to suit your style of play, because you’re not the game designers and how they play is unlikely to exactly match how you play. I don’t know of a single RPG system that I haven’t house-ruled or re-interpreted in some way to better suit my group’s gaming preferences. Such a beast doesn’t exist, and never will unless we wrote it ourselves.
Here’s a few suggestions we’re going to be playtesting over the next few games to see if they can smooth out the Combat Bump and improve the overall pace of play. Some of these are old-school tricks of the trade, some are House Rules or a re-interpretation of the Rules As Written. I’ll let you know how we go on.
1. Halve the Hit Points
This is one that’s already seen a lot of coverage on the Wizards’ forums, and a popular one with the game designers themselves. In theory, by reducing the number of hit points the monsters begin with, you’re reducing the length of the combat by that proportion. That’s not quite true, as 10 Orcs will still take 10 rounds to kill one-by-one unless you’ve got some nifty area-effect firepower (I’m looking at you, Mr Wizard), but it’ll definitely reduce the number of rounds required overall. I’m all for this change, and it’s easily rationale’d by saying that the HP values in the Monster Manual assume a clean, healthy physical specimen at full fitness. Ordinary Orcs, Goblins and the like have bedsores, hacking coughs and festering wounds so the ones the players face are halfway toward death to begin with. Fiddle with the hit points to taste, giving different values to different opponents. Maybe one of the Orc Raiders is particularly weak and sickly with just 10hp. Most are merely of poor health with 23hp (half the usual total) with the Orc Chieftain’s pampered eldest son at the maximum 45hp. This adds in a little more role-playing potential to the game, and speeds up combat at the same time. Perfect!
Minions, being the cannon fodder that they are, remain with just their lowly single hit point. Speaking of which………..
2. Use Minions! Lots of Minions!
Here’s a challenge for you. Watch any fantasy movie, and every time the good guys kill a foe with a single blow, shout the word “Minion!” out loud. I’ll bet you end up saying it an awful lot. Those goblins in the Mines of Moria? All minions. 90% of Conan’s foes? Minions. The huge battle at the end of Narnia? Minions!
Minions should make up a high proportion of the bodycount in any battle, yet it’s all too easy to just think “….oh, and four Minions” when designing an encounter. Turn that around and put the Minions at the top of the list, and you’ll make for a much faster paced (and bloodier!) game. Minion slaying is what makes the heroes feel like heroes. Remember that Minions don’t wear a hat that says “I’m a Minion! Hit me!”. Don’t make it clear who’s going to die in one hit and who is going to keep on coming and hit right back. Give them the same weapons as the rest of their tribe and the players can’t tell ‘em apart and don’t know whether they’ve just downed a Goblin Skullcleaver at low hit points or a lowly Goblin Cutter until you tot up the xp at the end.
It might seem counter-intuitive to say that adding more foes to the table speeds up play, but in reality it’s the difference between one foe who lasts six rounds, and four foes who last one round each. It’s down to the math again. Picking on the Orc once more (guess which page I’ve got open on the Monster Manual), an Orc Berserker is a level 4 Brute with 66 hit points. It’s going to take a fair few rounds to bring him down. His Minion counterpart, the Orc Drudge, is worth a quarter the XP but will do down in one hit. Drop 4 of ‘em onto the battlemat and you’ve only added 4 more combat rounds (assuming each attack hits) to the game, but given the players more chance to shine. And that’s a good thing, right?
3. Roll Five
This is something we’ve used to good effect in previous sessions. Have the players roll 5 d20s at the start of combat and jot them down. These are their combat rolls for the next five rounds, and they can use them in any order, for any attack. This greatly speeds up combat and encourages tactical play at the same time. Let’s say the player rolls 20, 17, 10, 6 and 2. They’re most likely to use the 20 for a Daily or Encounter Power (‘cos missing with those sucks, right). They’ll save that for when it matters the most, burning the low rolls on at-wills and doing what they can to turn them into hits. It’s amazing how players love combat modifiers when they know they’ve got a low roll to work with. Not rolling the attack dice round-by-round means more time to emphasize role-playing and tactical play – another good thing. Optionally, allow the player to spend an Action Point to re-roll their 5 if they don’t like how the dice fell. Every five rounds, call for another five rolls, and keep on playing.
4. ……and as GM, do much the same
Roll a ton of d20s and note them down in order – or spend an hour writing an Excel spreadsheet or use Google to see if someone has done the same. Rolling dice is quicker. Seriously. Unlike the players, use the result in order. As the game progresses just strike a line through each one as you use it. If you REALLY want that Goblin to hit, or those guards to notice the players for Reasons of Plot then strike a 20 off the list further down the page. Thus, the Karmic Balance is maintained (you’re just pre-using a future roll) and not cheating either. Not really, anyhow. Anyway, GMs can’t cheat. Who asked you?
Doing this means you can plan in advance, right at the table. If you know that three rolls down the line there’s a 20 then set that up for the Big Bad’s Special Power. ‘Cos missing with those sucks too. Bwahahahahah, etc. This speeds up combat because the players aren’t sitting there watching you roll dice all the time (you’ve already done that ahead of time), meaning the action flows more quickly, so more fun can be had by all. That’s the theory, anyhow.
5. Gridded whiteboard
Grab a whiteboard and a permanent marker. Carefully draw a 1 inch grid covering the entire board, and you’ve got a battlemat that will last you – well, if not forever then for a fair few game sessions. Use normal dry white markers to draw terrain features as you play and place the figures as you describe the surroundings. I prefer using Jelly Babies for miniatures, but that’s just me. This saves time hunting out the right battlemat for the setting and means less juggling stuff mid-game. You’ve just got the one battlemat in the table all the time, and don’t have to worry about sorting your precious figure collection into encounter order. Ick.
6. Have fewer encounters, but make ‘em count
Take too long to run 3 encounters in a single session? Aim to run 2, but make them doozies. If you’re struggling to fit two in the allotted time, run 1. If you’re struggling just to fit a single encounter into a game session, you’ve got problems! The key is to go for quality, not quantity, and it’s much better to spend time running a couple of decent, memorable encounters into an evening that rush through as many as possible and make the evening one big smush. Good word, smush. Fewer encounters, played well, means a more enjoyable experience all round, and more time for all that important plot and character development stuff. Good, eh?
There’s plenty of other ways to speed up combat using such techniques as having fixed damage values for monsters (Minions have them, why not all monsters?), encouraging simultaneous play where two (or more) players act on the same turn, every turn, and more. We’re going to stick to using the ones above for now, but I’m interested to see what other suggestions you folks can come up with.
How would you speed up 4e combat?
Aye but does the XP from these “Non-Combat Encounters” add up the same for whole party as the equivalent time spent in combat?
I always reward MORE experience for non combat solutions than combat ones and I always have done, even when we used to play 2E. This is because creative problem solving should always be encouraged as it leads to more fun for everyone. An example of this was how the party recently roleplayed their way out of an encounter with a Spectre but tricking it; I awarded the player in question 500 experience points for that – its MUCH harder than just swinging your magic sword at it until its dead. So yep, always reward for non combat actions and solutions and reward MORE for them than they would get by just bringing the sword to the same problem.
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Speed damage – tell players if they make their attack and damage rolls. Giving you totals within 10 seconds of their attack they get speed damage added to successful hits.
Buff monster damage and half their HP. +5 to all attacks by monsters.
I have the problem of having a mixed group of players, a couple of them are munchkin/min/maxers, the rest don’t care too much. So any changing of the rules will just upset half the group.
The solution I need has to be behind the screen and as invisible as possible.
I’m likely going to half monster HP and increase the damage (by the monsters) by +1/2 level.
I figure that combat will end around 50% faster, and the threat of death will be relative. Players don’t have to do a thing, no modifications, nothing to their characters.
I’ll also keep the XP & treasure the same, so level progression will stay the same, or may seem a little accelerated. Which is not a bad thing, imo.
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I really like some of your suggestions. I’m definitely going to yoink the half-hps, set dmg/atk, and prerolling on the DMs side. Not sure if the players would go for the pre-rolling on their end of things.
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Make any amount over target on the attack roll to add to damage? More damage each hit.
“Make any amount over target on the attack roll to add to damage? More damage each hit.”
ONLY if you then don’t apply strength to the damage, or you would otherwise be doubling it up.
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1. Use pregenerated parts of terrain (houses / towers / mills / hills)
2. Use Excel (or other program like this) for creating monster / team chars (with HS . conditions / powers as circles to crosses when used)
3. Use some fabulous parts off-session (put them on for example blog to get all players connection to it).
I like the idea of speeding things up, but balk at doing all that math to double/half everything. I think that instead of four minions = 1 monster, using something like Tier*5 minions = 1 monster. At paragon tier, you can replace one monster with ten minions, and 15 at epic. talk about epic.
Maybe if someone wanted to try out another system of taking out monsters faster, instead of doing the math. Whenever a bloodied monster is struck, there is a 10% chance that that monster goes down, increasing with each it. Ignore this rule for important monsters or monsters that powerup when bloodied. For the latter, reverse it so that when struck when not bloodied, there is a chance to knock them to bloodied. Now your monsters will drop faster, and you dont have to worry about universal multiplication/division.
I’m fascinated by the Roll 5 suggestion– it’s such a Forge idea, if you’re familiar with that board. What I particularly like about it is that the player, possessing foreknowledge of “bad rolls,” pretty much gets to choose when their character misses. That allows for some pretty dramatic choices. Do you allow players to table-talk and coordinate their rolls?
@Alas Definitely. It makes for great tactical play at the table. I’ve had three players plan ahead and save their high rolls to use on the same round to takedown the big bad villain with their high-damage dailies – and it felt….. brilliant, cinematic and epic all at the same time. The adventurers felt like a team. They’re willing to burn a few low rolls on missed at-will attacks because the payoff – knowing their special attacks WILL hit – is well worth it.
After a few sessions they’ve also started to look very closely at the combat modifiers in the PHB, and are getting pretty proficient at making even those low rolls count. If they’ve rolled a 5 (for example), they’ll set it up so they’ve got Combat Advantage and use an attack which targets Fort, Ref or Will instead of AC. That’s effectively a net +4 to the roll (on average), turning that meagre 5 into a not-so-bad 9.
Cunning tactics, teamwork and faster gameplay? I love it!
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I like the idea of ‘rolling five’ but what happens when a player rolls all crappy numbers? What would you do if you knew your next five attack rolls were going to be: 1, 3, 7, 2, 3? Would you even engage in combat? Would you flank and Aid Another? Would you use an action point?
What if you were to automatically assign rolls like 1, 5, 10, 15 and 20 to every player? Or would that be too non-random?
@by_the_sword Thanks for the feedback! I suggested this:
Optionally, allow the player to spend an Action Point to re-roll their 5 if they don’t like how the dice fell.
Agreed about assigning preset rolls – too non-random. Players like to roll them dice :D
Roll 5 seems to be a big hit here. I like it in that it allows players to have more of a say in telling the “story” during combat, but doesn’t let them necessarily dictate an easy victory.
As for my idea: just tried it recently in the first 4E session I DM’ed. 4E stat blocks are nice and compact and self-contained, without referencing obscure or complex rules or spell lists that need to be reviewed extensively ahead of time. I photocopied stat blocks (don’t sue me, WotC, I’m not making money off this!) and lightly taped them on to oversized index cards. These cards are sorted into initiative order along with different-colored cards of the same size for the PCs, whose cards have all pertinent info to DMs (defenses, passive skill values, etc). Small stickies are used to keep track of HP. I’m playing with the idea of using different-colored small stickies to indicate conditions, and tallying rounds on those.
Takes only a little prep time, and saves LOADS of page-flipping between different pages in the Monster Manual.
Another thing I do that’s not necessarily a huge time-saver is drawing out all encounter maps on large grid paper ahead of time. It allows me to have some fun being artistic and gets me really familiar with the maps. I overlay this with plexiglass on which we can note persistent spell effects, changes in terrain, locations of fallen foes, etc. using colored white board markers.
Thanks for sharing your ideas and I hope the ideas above work for you or others.
If i half the hit points should i double the boss damge (maybe just the damage bonus and not the dice)??? What you think?? how will that afect the game??
Or should i hlf the PCs hp too????
@Miguel. No, just reduce the monster’s hit points. You don’t need to do anything else.
What I do is think of the creatures in the Monster Manual as monsters at full health – and that’s something which monsters rarely are. They’ll have old wounds, infections and illnesses due to the unsanitary conditions in the dungeon. So, they might only be at half, three-quarters or even only a quarter hit points when the PCs arrive. The sons of the leader, biggest Orcs, etc might be better fed and cared for so they’ll be at full hp, but the rest of the tribe won’t be so lucky.
Hope that helps!
I do this too, I run all monsters at half hitpoints unless it is a major monster or villain, in which case it gets full.
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There are quite a few ideas I like here and if I am ever to DM I will definitely use them. One has me concerned though. I like the idea of rolling 5 but it seems to give an advantage, if only slight, to some classes.
Tempest Fighters and Two-Blade Rangers are my first worry. With both of them having an at-will attack that allows them to strike twice, that gives them the ability to burn through any bad rolls faster than other classes. This obviously means that they have the chance of coming across criticals more often. It may make others playing as other classes feel less epic than these.
My second worry is the Avenger class. Having the ability to basically reroll any attack roll makes this class a very appealing class to play. Knowing when you’re going to hit and then having the ability to turn a miss into a possible hit every turn seems almost game breaking for a striker class. Especially since hoarding enemies at them will only provoke them to go for the Censure of Retribution build and throw up defender like defenses for good measure. Heck, if they could only heal themselves they’d be able to pretty much solo half of what you’d throw at them less it be specifically designed to destroy them.
I guess controller classes would be able to burn through bad rolls as well but you don’t really have to worry about their damage output.
Is there something I may have missed that would help even out these concerns?
Just came across this blog. Great advice. A couple questions and comments:
1: If you halve the monsters’ hp, do they still have the same Bloodied value, or is that changed too? It seems like it would be a bigger advantage to those PCs that get bonuses when opponents are bloodied if all enemies were bloodied at the beginning of combat.
2. I agree with your minion comments. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve also been increasing the number of skirmishers and artillery there are. Soldiers and Brutes, especially soldiers, are the worst for long combats. Knocking a couple points off their defenses is a good idea too, especially if they’re higher level. There’s no worse thing than an encounter where the PCs have to slog through some soldiers in heavy armor after their boss died, hitting a quarter of the time. Yuck.
3. Instead of halving hit points (or in addition to), how about monsters running away more? Chances are these aren’t loyal battle-hardened fanatics. When they get bloodied, it’s completely reasonable for them to want to run away, surrender, play dead, etc. In fact, the Intimidate skill can be used for forcing this exact thing. If their troop is half dead and the boss is taken out, why on earth would the remaining orcs stay and fight? Of course it’s a D&D cliche that PCs don’t take survivors and don’t tolerate monsters fleeing from battle, but at least then it puts that choice in the PCs hand and a skill challenge chasing down monsters is at least a break from the long battle.
@Seth Thanks for your comments! In reply:
1) Yes. Half the monsters Hit Points means you halve the Bloodied value too. This means that monsters who get a special effect when they’re Bloodied get to do their thang that much quicker too. That’s intentional. The goal is fast, highly-charged combat, after all.
2) and 3) Absolutely! Monsters are People too! They will run away. They will surrender. They will panic and charge and do all the other things folks are likely to do during combat. If the Big Boss falls or they’re Bloodied and clearly outclassed they are far more likely to lay down their arms than they are to fight to the death. Unless their mindless zombies, cultists or just plain stupid, of course :D
Something several commenting seem to have trouble accepting is that most combat encounters in D&D don’t matter. D&D isn’t chiefly a tactical combat simulator, at least for most players. Yes, we do occasionally grab our 40k miniatures off the shelf and use them in D&D, but we aren’t playing 40k.
What this means, at least to many (and I think I can safely say most here), is that combat simulation and tactical play is simply a plot device and means to advancing the story. It’s almost a mini-game.
Thus halving monster health doesn’t necessarily take away from the combat. The monsters are still performing the same role and still living up to their expectations and purpose. They are intended as fodder from the start.
This is even more true in 4E. The difference between pitting the PCs against opponents at full health and pitting the PCs against opponents at half health is one or two healing surges. With the way many of their powerful abilities are recovered between every encounter, the former role of attrition that minion encounters played has been lost.
So if the minion encounters have no effect on the final boss battle, then why force the players to slog through a dozen inconsequential encounters just to get to the plot arc?
I’m not saying drop all minion fights or anything like that. They can be a lot of fun and serve the purpose of some realism. But when they cease to be fun and the added realism is causing more harm than good, it’s time to adapt. Halving minion health is one way of doing this.
From my own perspective, I also prefer not using an experience system at all. Players level after a fixed number of encounters/quests.
Another compatible idea: use an Armageddon clock.
Set aside a die with a fixed number (five, ten, whatever) and use it as a counter each round. When all rounds pass, double the damage of all attacks. Repeat.
Oh, and I prefer to half the hit points of the PCs too. It’s quicker and puts some pressure too.
I think the addaption that I use had been termed 4E Brutal. I’ve run 2 1/2 combats using this so far and it has gotten a very positive response from my group. All the changes are on the DM stat side so it does not cause any problems for players or changing encounters.
The changes to the creatrues stats are:
1 3/4 HP, and adjust Bloodied by the same. This helps the creatures go down faster.Do not adjust any healing abilities
2 Reduce all the creaures defenses by 2 to a minimum of 10. The players enjoy hits more than misses.
3 Increase all of the creatures attacks by 2. The creatures hit more.
4 Increase the damage of all creature attacks by 1/2 their level.
The combat should speed up as the monsters drop faster and it end ups being more exciting for hte players as they are in reasonable danger now and have to use tactics.
Good suggestions,
I allow my players to get automatic hits for daily powers and actions received through Action Points. (or even just a significant bonus +5 to hit)
IMO nothing slows down combat more than when players big spells fizzle into nothingness and/or you spent the dang action point so you should at least hit the monster.
You could say that these abilities do average damage instead of rolling for damage if you are worried about the players unleashing havoc on the Boss. Also rule out crits for these attacks since you have already given an automatic hit.