Community

I would be interested to know a few things:

How many soldiers and leaders do the enemies have?

Soldiers have higher than average defenses and, especially in paragon, can slow down the paces by doing things like marking different people and inflicting status conditions that slow things down.  A large group of soldiers pulling your strikers apart can make the combat take a long time just by being what they are.  Soldiers are the defenders of the monster world and some of them are very effective at it.

Leaders, or leaderlike creatures that allow power recovery (when those powers can cripple) or heal can also extend the life of team monster by a lot.  Try to use those sparingly.

How high Op are these groups? How many rounds does a combat last?

A High Op party can maul through creatures like they are made of paper.  High Op strikers are doing over 1KPR, as are High Op leaders.  Taking a controller and a defender together to get 1 more KPR you have a team of players that are, on average, able to take out 4 monsters on the first round (1 leader, 1 defender, 2 strikers, 1 controller).

Then as you go down the list the combats take progressively longer.  There is nothing inherently wrong with not being High Op but there should be a certain amount of optimization going on, especially in paragon, to prevent the combats from devolving into at-will slugfests.

How long does a player's turn take?

When I ran a Battle Interactive the average player turn was between 45 seconds and one minute.  It had to be in order for them to get through a high-paragon BI in the time limit.  Home games have way more flexibility on how much time a game can take because it isn't as structured, but you want to make sure your players know what they will be doing when their turn comes around.  When I was running games with younger players (11-14 year olds) I would announce who was "on deck" and that player would be required to think about what they were going to do, pick up their attack dice in one hand and their damage die in the other hand.  This wasn't needed for a very long time before several of the players came up with their own way to figure out exactly what they wanted to do and were ready without prompting.

Also, for some players, a Cheat Sheet can be unbelievably helpful.  While yes it is simple to know your ATK bonus, CA is only an extra 2, charging is an extra 1, enemy being prone is +5 damage etc etc etc, having a Cheat Sheet to glance at and know exactly what they need to roll in a given situation can really speed things up.  Mental math starts to get a little crazy with +1s and +2s in paragon, not to mention AP turns.


How long do your monster turns take?

How simple are your monster turns and how long does it take you.  It should be understood that a DM should take no more than a minute to resolve minions, no more than 2 min to resolve standard actions and no more than 5 minutes for a solo.  Thats just the mechanics mind you, that isn't talking about how you are describing actions and what not (which you should totally do), but I'm trying to give you some benchmarks on timing for the mechanical side of the DM experience.

Are things like initiative clearly displayed at the table?

Initiative flags I have found are extremely helpful.  Making sure your players know when exactly their turn comes up can be helpful for planning, especially if you don't tell players when they are on deck or the player has a complicated turn coming up.  Status flags can also be helpful for when players do big, encounter alterning effects (like a War Chanter spends an action point and uses Mantle of Unity in the same turn).

Do your players know vaguely what they are hitting at?

I give my players a "Plus Yes" for every encounter.  That means I tell them in the first round what the highest defense is a the table for team monster so they know if they beat it they can assume a hit without asking me (rarely you will have to ask for their hit if the monster has a temporary bonus of some kind).  Less often my players ask for a "No" or what the lowest defense is at the table because that tends to be less useful.  That doesn't mean you have to tell what the defense is, or what creature has that, but it speeds up the parts where your striker is rolling 5 rolls and some of them are well beyond missing anything in the encounter.

Can your players take parts or all of their turns before it gets to them?

Everyone has a different opinion of this.  In situations like the BI it was basically required, at my home game some of my players take turns in advance some of them do not.  In one of my games most of the players take their turns in advance so they can concentrate on description of their action on their turn, but I completely understand some DMs not liking their players to do this.

How much distraction is there at your table? 

I've said before that Monty Python is as much of many DnD gaming groups as initiative can be, but if you want to go quickly you have to limit the amount of distractions at the table.  Are any of your players playing facebook games/on the phone / away from the table / cross-talking about non-game related stuff that is slowing down the pace of the game.  Some of this will happen, DnD is a social event, but some people might get frustrated if there is never any focus at all at the table.

The idea of having boxes you can check for Maptools is something that the Cheat Sheet does in real life games.  Basically gives you a grid of every basic scenario (ie, all the scenarios your character can give for themselves) to work with.  Its really helpful for system math.

Nov 21, 2012 -- 9:38PM, Malph wrote:

Here is a good thread compiling ways to accelerate combat. 

Helpful in general, but the question I think is why melee combats specifically are taking longer not all combats.