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13 months ago ::
May 25, 2012 - 11:28PM
#1
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Date Joined:
Dec 17, 2006
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I love the advantage/disadvantage rule in theory, but it gets real awkward in larger combats. For example, last night I had my fighter burst into a room of 40 kobolds, who all immediately threw their spears at him. Their racial trait gives them advantage when they outnumber their opponents (which is all the time), so that meant I had to roll 80 dice for one round of combat. I decided to "forget" about their racial trait for that round.
I love that D&DN is a fast-playing game like BD&D/AD&D where you can have an absurd number of combatants, and just pick up a giant handful of dice, roll them, and count the hits, but the advantage rule makes this awkward for the DM when handling multiple attacks at once. Not just for the 40 kobold scenario (which is not likely to happen often), but also for smaller things: the owlbear has three attacks, so I have to roll six times? I can only imagine this getting worse when players have multiple attacks and/or henchmen fighting with them.
I'm considering replacing the roll-twice mechanic with a simple +3 or -3 when it would be awkward to roll twice, and I wonder if it might be a good idea to put this (or a similar solution) in the DM book as a suggestion.
Tangentally, I'd welcome some other guidelines on abstracting large numbers of die rolls--when the wizard cast sleep and burning hands on the horde, I made a few on-the-fly decisions about how to decide how many kobolds made their saves (I ended up rolling 4 saves, each of them representing 3d8 kobolds... it made sense at the time). This experience actually boosted my confidence, and got me in the hang of making up whatever crap necessary to keep the game going smoothly (which I now understand is what "DM empowerment" means, and I love it), but I'd like to see some clear guidance.
How have y'all dealt with large numbers of rolls? Even things like 8 kobolds carrying 1d8 sp apiece--do you roll 1d8 x 8? Do you roll 8d8? I'm curious to know how other DMs have been resolving situations like these.
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13 months ago ::
May 25, 2012 - 11:39PM
#2
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Date Joined:
May 24, 2012
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I had this same situation come up tonite but with goblins. I have already houseruled that having a partner in melee against a single enemy should give advantage, sort of like 4e flanking. I dropped this when I realized I would need to roll even more dice and keep track of them.
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13 months ago ::
May 25, 2012 - 11:43PM
#3
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Date Joined:
Jan 10, 2012
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How about to help get rid of some of those extra dice, if both sides are being granted some sort of advantage, negate an equal amount from each side? Not sure how much it would help with massive numbers of monsters, but it could help with slightly large groups. Now on the other hand, if only one side has the advantage, you may just need to make-up some sort of combination attack.
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13 months ago ::
May 25, 2012 - 11:44PM
#4
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Date Joined:
Mar 14, 2008
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In the case of fourty kobolds throwing spears, I would have likely just rolled some amount of damage. Unless you really dig the storm trooper effect, you should assume that some number of kobolds probably hit the guy.
As for lots of attacks with advantage, I'm considering only giving advantage to the first attack per critter. Obviously if you end up with a character surrounded on all sides, you're still talking about a lot of dice rolling, but maybe that's another time to assume someone probably gets a successful hit in there and abstract away the actual to hit rolls.
Doesn't feel as heroic, but I'm kind of a harsh DM.
I'm interested if anyone has good ways to handle these kinds of issues that are quick, efficient, and can maintain that heroic feeling though!
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13 months ago ::
May 26, 2012 - 2:52AM
#5
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Off the top of my head:
1) I'd probably group attacks. So 10 attacks, 2 rolls each, becomes 5 attacks, 2 rolls each but double damage. 40x2 attacks could be 20x2, with double damage. still a lot of dice in this particular situation.
2) Another idea, since the second die only matters when the first misses, roll the number of attacks then reroll missed attacks once. This will decrease crits, since the crit after hit never gets rolled, but that seems acceptable to decrease the dice rolled.
If we are saying that the fighter has a 50% chance to get hit, and combine both ideas, the number of d20s rolled will be about 30, with each hit doing double damage, instead of the initial 80. It's a lot of dice still, but hey the fighter busted into a room full of 40 kobolds.
For the sp example, I'd probably do something like 4d8x2, since 8d8 is a hassle, and 1d8x8 is to swingy.
Two seperate diceless options
Write a program to deal with it, or use the expected averages.
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13 months ago ::
May 26, 2012 - 5:27AM
#6
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I still haven't played yet, but I picked up on this problem right away. And when I saw the sheer amount of kobolds in their lair, I laughed.
The advantage/disadvantage mechanic is something that when you first look at it, seems amazingly cool and fun. But if you look at it any deeper than that, its riddled with problems.
Unfortunately, it seems to be one of the core mechanics.
Even more unfortunately, I think everyone's initial WOW COOL reaction is going to override people who test it out.
I'm still going to play with it before I give my feedback, but it frighten me.
Character optimization is a group decision not an individual one.
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13 months ago ::
May 26, 2012 - 6:47AM
#7
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Date Joined:
May 24, 2012
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I noticed the same problem yesterday, playing with my group. Until the number of combatants is limited, it's doable, and when it's under 8 it's all good, but when the number grows.... it's a HELL of dice rolling.
So, I house ruled immediately that if both sides of a fight have an advantage, they cancel each other's advantage. I mean, it sounds logical to me: you don't have an advantage if the other has too, you're sort of "even".
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13 months ago ::
May 26, 2012 - 7:30AM
#8
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Date Joined:
May 19, 2004
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The fighter burst into a room of 40 (!!) kobolds? Why are you bothering to roll dice?
Script the scene or give the fighter a chance to creatively escape. Otherwise, the fighter is simply dead.
But, this is true in basically any edition of the game. The fact that a particular mechanic breaks down during mass combat is nothing new to D&D. That has been true in basically every edition of the game. If you think about it carefully, rolling 40 d20s is basically just as bad as rolling 80 (most people don't own that many d20s... heck, there aren't usually that many d20s at the entire game table when I play D&D).
Complaining that the mechanic breaks down during mass combat is meaningless, given that the entire game basically breaks down during mass combat.
-SYB
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13 months ago ::
May 26, 2012 - 7:44AM
#9
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Date Joined:
May 24, 2012
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The solution for fastest rolling multiple attacks with advantage:
1. Roll plenty of dices.
2. Separate Critical Hits.
3. Separate Hits and roll them again; look for Criticals and add them you CH group.
4. Roll Misses, pick up Hits and Criticals, assign them to appropriate groups.
I like the idea of grouping attacks, but personally I would treat rain of 40 spears as a 5-foot-radious area attack, let’s say 4d8 piercing, half on successful Dex Save. Or said “It deals 50 dmg minus double your AC”. But my players are ok with these kind of immediate house rules.
As for sp, I would arbitrary decided that it is… 35sp.
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13 months ago ::
May 26, 2012 - 7:44AM
#10
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Date Joined:
Nov 10, 2008
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Advantage/Disadvantage for players, should probably not be too much of a problem. Worst case scenario, you have a fighter who uses his surge plus gets to cleave, giving him three attacks in a round. It shouldn't slow them down.
DMs are going to vary based on their monsters, and different scenarios. So, for DMs, it becomes "not all monsters work the same, nor do all encounters work the same". While not available yet, the modularity approach would hopefully give options for mass combat, different ways to use advantage/disadvantage, etc. That's one of the good things about using the words advantage/disadvantage ... you can change it's definition as part of the modular houserules, and yet use the same monster stat block/adventure as everyone else without changing 'it'.
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