Combat Timer


Homebrew and House Rules


Just thought of something, want your advice on it. In my games sometimes combat takes too long, and at least one of my players has requested a 'combat timer' to be in effect. So I was browsing some other threads about combat and how some classes take longer than others to do their turns, typically casters vs martial classes.

Therefore, what if the amount of time you had to declare what you were doing and resolve it was equal to your int+wis or something along those lines - would any of you do this in your games? If you dumped int/wis you're probably a barbarian optimized to hit hard so there's not much to decide, whereas if you're a mystic theurge you've got several viable spells at any given moment that you could cast.

Lemme know your thoughts on this, as I might try implementing it in my next session.

*Edit - the inspiration was from this thread


Nothing would change?

I mean, it all ends up the same because martials don't have as many options to think on as casters, and casters will generally have high int/wis anyways (save for cha casters, but they usually have a limited list to cast from as is).


I've implemented timers to help speed up combat, but nothing based on the characters. I had several players who wouldn't even begin thinking about their turn until a minute after their turn began (seriously, no joke). So, I got a one minute hourglass. At the start of someone's turn, I'd flip it. If they had not decided what to do and began executing it before time ran out, they got delayed until after the next person's turn.

It was extremely effective. Players were ready to go when their turn started. It didn't help speed up actually resolving a turn, but things like rolling attack and damage together or even rolling multiple attacks at once with different colored dice can help there. I did allow the players to call a "time out" at the start of combat to talk strategy. But after that, it's go or get delayed...


There's a school of thought that says that, since the characters only have split seconds to react, the players should also have only a few seconds to react to the situation. This school of thought is incorrect. The character has years of combat experience and training under his belt that doesn't translate linearly to how well the player can figure out what to do during their turn. Furthermore, player skill varies. A veteran player can figure out what to do faster than a novice.

That having been said, it might be OK to model it after tournament chess rules. Each player has a "reserve time" for the whole match. Lets say, for the sake of example, 2 minutes of reserve time. They are then given a certain amount of time per turn; say, 30 seconds. They have a special timer to track this. The timer tracks the 30 seconds for the turn and, if you go over that, it starts deducting from your 2 minutes of reserve time. When you finish your turn, you hit a button which stops your timer and starts your opponent's timer. The reserve time and time/turn can be adjusted for the skill level of the player to reflect appropriate handicaps. It'd probably be better to use a stopwatch rather than a sand timer because you need to track whether or not they went into their reserve time. But, unless you have a highly distracted player(s), tracking the time would likely not save you much and may even make it take longer since the GM can't be sitting there calculating time differences when he's supposed to be paying attention to the game.

A better approach would be just to work with your players and teach them how they can pre-figure most of the stuff and work out battle strategies before-hand. Simple rules-of-thumb to help streamline their decisions will probably do the most good overall.


My house rule: Each player sets up a default action for his/her character. If the player doesn't choose an action within 30 seconds, the character takes his default action. Examples:

Barry the Barbarian - Default action is charge to closest enemy and power attack with my axe.

Sara the Sorcerer - Default action is Magic Missile on the most dangerous looking enemy.

Sam the Summoner - Default action is casting Summon Monster III for a wolf.

Cory the Cleric - Default action is smashing the closest guy with a channel negative energy smite attack.

And so on. Make sure they know that if they're still thinking they can always delay to the next initiative tick.


Hmmm, true, good thoughts on the matter. I'll probably implement some sort of timer system, though it probably won't be akin to my original idea

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