Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 77 - Optional and Crazy Combat Rules That Can Quicken Your Game

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Is combat getting a little bit...stale?  Are your D&D or Pathfinder combats taking too long and they have become a long battle of hit point attrition, rules research, and having to explain 3 times per round what's going on?  Are you willing to try a few things that are...unconventional?  Well, my good open-minded listener, we talk about 20 ideas in 20 minutes for making combat faster, easier, crazier, and maybe a little better.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 77 of the Taking20 podcast. This week, all about optional and crazy combat rules that can quicken your game. This week's sponsor is Goodfellas Photography. Ask us about our framing services if you know what I'm saying. If you like this podcast,, let others know about it. My listenership's up to about 150 per week, which isn't bad considering how little I actually market. But if that number grows and I can start getting some sponsorships, I'd love to set up a Discord server, have monthly games, and other possible rewards, but that can only happen with your help.

I'm always looking for ways to get the word out, so if you wouldn't mind helping me do that, I would greatly appreciate it. It's almost a universal truth that the slowest part for players in any RPG is combat when it's not your turn. It's your turn, you declare what you want to do, you may roll a few dice and move your miniature around on the virtual physical tabletop, then you wait for everyone else to go. And let's face it, many adventuring parties are big. Six, seven, eight players with one DM. I mean, the DM to player number disparity is huge, and I'm hoping some of you that are players will lose the fear of being a DM and will actually DM some games for some of your friends or maybe people that you meet at a gaming store. The bigger the gaming party is, the longer you'll have to wait for everyone to go before it is your turn again. As an aside, by the way, combats aren't

the slowest part of the game for GMs. It tends to be the thing that's the most frenetic for us. We have seven baddies on the board. One's a hobgoblin leader. There's also a spellcaster that's a hobgoblin. Five goblin fighters, all with different stats and weapons and hit points, abilities, and spells. You're trying to play them smart, but not too smart, because this is supposed to be only a mild challenge for the PCs. You feel like a juggler where the occasional ball transforms into a knife as you're about to catch it. It's also true that combat really slows down at high levels for the players. Spellcasters now have lists of prepared spells at high levels that rival the length of the U.S. Constitution. Fighters now have 22 different

things they can do on a simple melee swing. They can attack, power attack, fight defensively, which is different from total defense, enact a magic item's special ability, use a weapon's special property, take a combat action like trip, bull rush, overrun, disarm, not to mention scads of other feats and special attacks that you've earned on your adventures. A round, which occurs in 6 seconds of game time, can take 30 minutes or longer of real time. I'm DMing a campaign right now where the players are currently 14th level, and combat can easily become a slog if I'm not really on top of it and if the PCs aren't really committed to keeping things moving. The PCs are all armed to the teeth and they have

a ton of options. If left to their own devices and if the players weren't dedicated to keeping the action moving, the players would wait 25 minutes between turns. I know because I timed it one night. Without pushing to get combat done, we were lucky to complete one combat per game session. That's why I wanted to make this episode. If you feel like your combat is moving too slowly, there are tricks that you can use to speed things along a bit. Let me give a caveat. By no means am I suggesting you adopt all of these ideas. That would be batshit. Don't do that.

But if one or two of these ideas sound reasonable would be batshit. Don't do that. But if one or two of these ideas sound reasonable, give them a try. If they don't work for your group or your parties, discard it and move on. So let's start with my five recommendations that shouldn't be all that controversial or weird. Now, we're on the same map as Crazy Town, but we're nowhere near the actual city yet. Have a visual initiative tracker. A visual reminder of whose turn it is and who is coming up. It doesn't have to be fancy. I mean, before I had one that I could mount to my

DM screen, one of my players made an initiative tracker out of paper towel holders and painted napkin rings. You know, napkin rings. Those round wooden things you can insert napkins into to make it look all fancy for when you got important company coming over. Oh look we're gonna have the somebody important call on us for dinner. Larza you can't have your clout napkins looking all cattywampus. You use a napkin ring. Oh I'm as full as a tick. Let's retire outside. Well we could take a walk and you could kiss me on the veranda. Lips would be fine. If players are still being slow even with the visible initiative tracker, you can call out the initiative just to make sure everybody knows.

I tend to use baseball terms because I played baseball when I was a kid. Mythicross you're up, Leanna you're on deck, and Bugbear's in the hole. Meaning it's Mythicross's turn, Leanna comes next, and then the Bugbear goes third. Second way you can speed up combat. Have your players plan their turn when it's not their turn. I think they should be doing this anyway, but players, please plan your turn when it's not your turn. Don't tune out from the table, watch something streaming, or browse social media, and then all of a sudden you hear, Mythic says your turn, what? What are we doing? Please take the time to plan what you're doing so you can act quickly on your turn and keep combat moving. Third suggestion, players and DMs

roll the to hit and damage dice at the same time. It saves very very little time on a per die roll basis, but when you think about you've got four PCs and the DM going every round and every time you've got at least one die roll if there's attacks going on, it does save quite a bit of time as it starts to add up. If you have multiple attacks, match up your to hit and damage dice based on color or some other distinguishing characteristic. That way, for example, my fighter can roll five attacks because I have five different colored dice out there, all at the same time. Fourth tip, during

combat, the player whose turn it is should have the focus. If it's not your turn and you want to have conversations on the side, that's fine, but please keep chit-chat and other side conversations down below that player's level so that player can communicate what they need to do to the DM and the DM can hear them. Fifth non-controversial idea, spellcasters. Use an online dice roller for your damage. It hurts me to give this advice because I love calculating the numbers on my dice, but no offense. It takes time to count 10d6. And while your brain is going, okay, 100 miles an hour, let's see, 7, 11, 12, 16, 20, 22, 26, 28, 34, 36 points of damage. We're all hearing the Jeopardy theme in our heads, waiting for our turn. Even people who are lightning fast at counting dice can't do it as fast as a computer can.

Use an online die roller. Wizards of the Coast has one. All of your virtual tabletops have them. Hell, if you type your damage dice into the Google search bar, it rolls for you. As an experiment, I checked, and yes, Google could do rolls with bonuses. It calculated 35d6 plus 35 before I could find 35d6s. Now don't you doubt me, I have them. They're just buried in my dice bag or my rolling tray or my gaming closet, but I know I've got 35 D6 around here. So use an online dice roller. It does speed things up quite a bit when you're rolling for damage. Now I don't think there was anything earth-shattering in those five, so let's set our GPS towards Crazy Town.

Eight ideas to speed your game up that can be found on the outskirts of Crazy Town. 1. GMs, when you have a lot of enemies, have them act on a single initiative role or in groups. I had a combat recently where a bad guy animated 16 objects to fight the players. I put them in groups of four and added them to the initiative tracker as a unit of four, not with 16 different initiatives, with four different initiatives. Each group still had four attacks and were still four individual objects, but I didn't drag the game to a halt while I adjudicated actions of 16 different initiative markers. 2. Put your players on a timer. Now, this could cause some stress for players out there, so you should only do this if you have one or more players who are taking a really long time

on their turns. If turn delays by players are affecting the fun of the DM or the fun of the other players, this is a solution that you can use. I would discuss it with my players first, and definitely don't call out any individual. Now's not the time to say to your group, well, we're going to turn on the timer, especially because Wyatt. No, that's not the time to do that. If you do put players on a timer, make the timer visible. I'd recommend those starting without a penalty. If someone runs to the end of their time, if somebody does get to the end, it's time to say, okay, Wyatt, what would you like to do? Only add penalties to it if you absolutely have to. Maybe bump them down the turn order until they're ready to act.

Even then, they can only act after another player has completed their turn or after another bad guy has completed their turn. Don't let the player interrupt. Third suggestion to move things along. Instead of rolling randomly for damage, use an average damage amount for every attack. For example, if an attack does 1d6 damage, then it does on average three and a half points of damage. But how do you deal with the halves? The first time it damages you go round up and it becomes four damage. The next time you round down it becomes three so it becomes this alternating damage of four three four three four three. This reduces the amount of math that it takes to get everything done. You can just figure out what the average damage is for every single die they could

possibly roll and just apply it and be done. Fourth suggestion, have your enemies take ten on initiative. When the DM rolls initiative for 9 different baddies, it just takes a long time. So have all your enemies take 10 on initiative rolls. If enemies and PCs though take 10 on initiative, then combat becomes samey, so I would not recommend you do that for PCs. If you do it for PCs, then the rogue is always going to act first. Chances are the cleric is always going to act last. Which, having roleplayed a cleric a lot, I love going last.

I can figure out which player got stabbed the worst and be ready to heal them at the end of the round. But consider having your enemies take 10 on the initiatives. Fifth suggestion. Just multiply the damage on crits instead of rolling twice. Game systems are different. Some of them have you roll the damage dice multiple times. Instead of doing that, just roll the damage dice once and multiply the dice as appropriate, following the other damage rules as appropriate for your gaming system. In Pathfinder First Edition, for example, weapon damage and non-dice-based damage are multiplied by the weapon's critical modifier

before you add things like sneak attack, flaming weapons, and so forth. In 5th edition, you roll all the attacks, damage, dice twice, and then add them together, and then add relevant modifiers in total. Different game systems do it different ways. Just instead of having to roll two sets of D6, or two sets of 2D6, or especially as you get to large, complicated weapons, oh, it's a times three crit, and it does 3d6 damage.

Instead of rolling 9d6 and doing all the math ad, roll 3d6 and multiply it by three. Be done with it. Sixth suggestion. Criticals get one maximized die, and then you roll the rest of the dice. It's a variant of number five above. Let's say you got a battle axe that does d1212 damage and it does 2d12 on a crit.

A crit would do maximum damage on one die roll, which would be 12 in this case, and you'd roll the other d12, and then add those together and there's your crit damage. For a longbow, which does 1d8 but does times 3 on a crit, so 3d8, you would do maximum damage on one die, 8 in this case, and then you roll the other 2d8 to add to it. It sounds complicated, but it makes critical hits feel more substantial, 1, and 2 makes the math faster. Win-win. Seventh suggestion, and I think DMs really should adopt this one. Not everything fights to the death. Animals and monsters run away when it's clear they're not going to win. Predators

will realize that there's an easier meal elsewhere and may run away from a fight. People may surrender and negotiate. Don't make all combats a slog to get down to the last hit point. When the baddies are down fairly low and it's obvious the good guy PCs are going to win, call it. Resolve the combat and get to the post-combat snuggling. Oh, sorry, whatever your gaming group does after combat. Whether that's move on to the next event or hold each other and talk about their feelings. And do me a favor, let the DM be a little spoon occasionally. Sometimes we just like to be held. Eighth suggestion. Move on to the next player after the previous player rolls to hit and before the damage value is announced. I've seen this recommended multiple places so I

thought I would include it. Alright Briley, that's a hit and while you calculate damage, Rajani, Briley's short sword causes the ogre to stagger and there's an opening. What do you do? I've never used this because I feel like it might create a bit of a disjointed feel at the table, but it definitely would speed things along so I'm including it in the conversation. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, if you look out the left side of the vehicle, we just passed a sign that says we are entering Crazy Town proper. Things are going to get weird from here. Here are three crazier ideas to speed up combat. One, no looking up rules or opening rule books on your turn. It's your character's time to act.

If you're not sure how something works, you can't use that ability, or your character is simply choosing to delay until your player is done looking up what they need to. It does force your players to spend more time memorizing their character abilities and what's on their character sheet, but it does move the game along faster. Fair warning, this is kind of harsh and should only be used if this is a problem for you or your players at the table. Second suggestion from CrazyTown to speed combat along. Crits do max damage, no roll. 2d8 crit means 16 points of damage. 3d6 crit means 18 points of damage. My caveat for doing this is, yes it does speed things along, partially because it makes critical hits absolutely lethal.

So, use with caution. Third suggestion from Crazy Town. Go theater the mind during combat instead of miniatures. It does take time to move miniatures around, set up maps, whether it's physically or on a digital tabletop. So, try running combat without a map, And if you want some encouragement and some tips on how to do that, see episode 35, where I discuss it. Now let's talk about some ideas from inside of Crazy Town. Only a fool would mention anything this crazy or anything crazier. You'd have to be a complete buffoon to suggest anything from this coming list, much less the next one.

Were any person to suggest using anything from the below lists, they should probably be taken to the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time thanks to the modern pharmaceutical sciences. So here's a couple of crazier ideas to speed up combat. One, use minion rules. Lower level creatures are assigned one hit point each and have the rules changed about the way they operate in combat. See episode 45 for many more details about using the minion rules. Two, rolling ahead of time but keeping the rolls hidden. This only works if you use cups or something similar to roll dice where the result is hidden from the player who rolled it. So think about it this way. Every single player has a cup with their to hit and damage dice in it. They all

roll it simultaneously and now, okay, Tina, it's your turn. She lifts her cup and says, oh, I got a 17 to hit for 19 damage. That way everyone can pre-roll. We're not all waiting for people to shake their dice and blow on it and pray to the great dice god Gygax that they're going to roll a 20 this time. Concealing the dice keeps the players from rolling and re-rolling and re-rolling until they get the results that they want. This does speed up the game, but it doesn't allow players to cheat randomness of the system. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the heart of Crazy Town. If you look around, you'll see some of the buildings use non-Euclidean geometry.

There's one with seven dimensions folding in on itself. Ooh, over there's a person breaking causality by becoming their own great-grandparent. And on that corner, you can buy crack. By no means am I suggesting you use these next two rules, but they would certainly speed up combat. And probably create other problems, but let's just get to the list. 1. Give the option for players to take 10 on attack rolls against lower level, non-boss opponents. Yep, if players are fighting something with a challenge rating 4 lower than their average party level,

those monsters aren't realistically going to be any sort of challenge to the adventuring party. Once you get to this point, you may be better off just hand-waving the whole combat. One time I was jamming for a 9th level party and I was using a random encounter table, and I rolled up an encounter of 4 skeletons, a CR 1 encounter. I asked the players if they wanted to steamroll a bunch of skeletons or just move on. We just moved on. I said, okay, through the magic of roleplaying you destroyed the skeletons and let's just move forward. A later encounter though, they wanted to fight it out. They had to flee from the high level big bads minions and they wanted to take it out on this low-level big bad scouting party that they stumbled on.

To speed things along I said okay guys why don't you just take ten on all of your attacks instead of rolling them. The scouts still rolled their attacks and they got one or two good licks in but the party pretty much just steam rolled the encounter and moved on. This does eliminate critical hits, but also the frustration of fighting this creature that should be no match for you and you still keep rolling natural ones that are just automatic misses. Those just prolong combat at that point. So having your players take 10 does speed the combat along,

but at the cost of randomness, both the good and the bad kind. Second suggestion from the heart of Crazy Town, resolve all your combat with a single roll of a d20 by the good guys and the bad guys. I saw this suggested somewhere and I started doing some research on it and this is entirely subjective. Assign a bonus to the players and a bonus to the bad guys based on the average level, an estimation of their overall martial capability, and maybe a little fudge factor that you decide entirely by gut. Bad guys roll their d20 and add their bonus. Good guys roll their d20 and add their bonus. And

then based on what they roll, you as the DM estimate the power level between the groups of combatants and just kind of come up with an amount of damage that was dealt and any death or debilitating conditions that would come from the combat. Total honesty, I've never done it this way. I've never used this before. It would certainly speed things along and by no means am I recommending it. With that absolutely batshit suggestion, we're going to leave our tour of crazy ideas to speed up combat for your PC. Am I suggesting you use all of these? Absolutely not. Am I suggesting you use one of these? Only if it makes sense for your group.

But if you feel combat's getting slow and stagnant, consider some of these changes. They might make things a little crisp, a little different, and maybe a little better. Thank you so much for listening. Please give us a like, a rating rating or hit that subscribe button for me I once again want to thank our sponsor Goodfellas Photography who want to remind you that if everything seems a little blurry around you it's probably because you've lost focus this has been episode 77 of the taking 20 podcast optional and crazy combat rules that can quicken your game my name is Jeremy Shelley and I hope that your next game is your best game.