Normally whenever one creature attacks another, they roll a d20, add up their attack bonuses, and see if it beats their opponents armor class which is just the opponent's Dex Bonus and Armor Bonus +10. So if the party gets swarmed by 42 goblins, there's a lot of sitting around waiting for goblins to stop attacking you, so you can try to hit them one at a time, and then back to sitting and waiting.
So what if instead of a static armor class, players could roll a d20 of their own against the opponents dice in a defensive roll? You'd add up your defense bonuses as usual, and then see who can roll the higher number. And if you have a particularly boring player who would rather not roll defensively, he can just 'take 10' on the roll and use the regular rules.
A defender can roll a 20, maybe giving him an attack of opportunity against his attacker or something, he can roll a 1 which would be a critical fail. Maybe double damage against the defender? And if the attacker and defender roll the same number, their weapons clash and they can duel again by making a strength check (or an "Endurance Check" if you read my last thread) to win a critical hit off the loser.
What do you guys think?
I think that for small groups in small fights this would be fun, but in the 42 goblin scenario you're talking about, you're ultimately effectively doubling to tripling the real time duration of this combat. A fight that felt like it was dragging on before will take even longer this way.
I personally feel that for large melees you want to minimize the dice rolled rather than increase them.
What about a mix. The defenders roll the first time they attempt to defend and that number becomes their AC for the round.
This could be fun, though JO has a good point, also. There was a post somewhere about decreasing the number of attacks, but raising the bonus on the first few. The result supposedly ended up being similar. A combination of both could be win.
Alright. Great points, guys. I'll play around with these ideas and see what happens.
Your idea has merit, and it has been done before. In the case of 42 goblins though I - the dm/gm - would just roll handfuls of d20s to speed it up.
I did once run a battle featuring six 7th level pcs vs sixty 1 hd goblins each with +1d6 sneak attack. It was a bloodbath and the players felt like bad asses, but that was the point. The difficult part was getting all sixty goblins painted in time. Of course, I am now set for life as far as goblins go.
Lol. Sounds extreme. Like walking through a day care with a sledgehammer. XD
Like vin deisel with a hammer chasing smurfs.
Edit: why is it you mentions smurfs in a post and your avatar changes?
I just don't see the point of this or many of the other "busy work" ideas designed to keep players occupied between turns.
I have eight players and our turns go very fast. When it's not your turn, you're planning your next move, looking up mechanics for your next spell/attack/whatever for when it comes around to your turn again. If you're done with that, you're helping advise those with less system mastery than yourself.
What is it that's bogging down your games so much? I sincerely want to know and am in no way, shape, or form being sarcastic or "judging".
In my games, chatter. We're all friends and enjoy talking about all kinds of things unrelated to D&D.
In my games, chatter. We're all friends and enjoy talking about all kinds of things unrelated to D&D.
We have that too, as like you're group, we're all friends (ages range from 29-52).
The most time consuming thing we had going on previously was counting up damage dice for a couple of the players and one looking up spells.
I picked up dicenomicon for the slow counters, as an option, which they took to and we print out spell cards for all the spellcasters.
Re: Ciaran - no idea, but it's the #1 reason I'm careful who I quote. I don't know if quoting will change it or not, but I'm not taking any chances.=P
Well, my group doesn't really have that problem either. I just wanted a mechanical excuse to throw dice at eachother. XD
And I don't smurfing know why in the name of smurf it would smurfing do that bullsmurf to you.
EDIT: What the smurf!? It smurfing worked!
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I haven't seen too much mass combat in Pathfinder (or any P&P game, for that matter). However, on the end of multiple attacks it might be worthwhile to make such multi-attack creatures give up their iterative attacks to instead roll multiple dice for their primary and take the best. This would hopefully keep AC relevant, but still increase the average damage of their attacks in a similar way to a normal full-round.
As an example of the above, a creature could attack and roll a 4, 18 and 14. On a normal full-round this might be a miss, hit, miss. If only the highest was used, but with full attack bonus, the same result would occur. The difference is, it's easier to roll all three and only compute the highest than to compute all three separately. This reduces the maximum damage the creature can put into a round (since it's only one attack), but that might be desirable when the attacks are coming from chaff.
As for mass combat, assuming the creatures have the same to-hit bonus my group would just grab a d20 for each foe, figure out what number they need to hit and roll all at once. Each die that comes up at least that number is a hit. If who performed the attack matters we roll it randomly (e.g. "Well, there were eight attackers so.. *d8 roll*, it was that guy *points*."