As the players work their way through the Adventure Path, my group is getting to higher levels than we have previously played. I am finding it increasingly unwieldy to keep a handle on the powers and abilities of some of the bad guys during combat (particularly spell casters).
What are some of the techniques for keeping all this information handy and available so we can run a combat without the DM keeping his/her head buried in the rulebooks the whole time?
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Make a combat check list before the game starts.
Bad guy 1 will do "this" on round 1, "this" on round 2, etc...
Bad guy 2 will do "this" on round 1, "this" on round 2, etc...
I've found it to be helpful.
use actions such as:
cast disintergrate at the closest melee guy
cast disintergrate at the closest spellcaster
attack the spellcaster
grapple the spellcaster
set the spellcaster on fire
take the spell components away from the spellcaster
(yeah, spellcasters are my first targets usually.)
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Highlight!!!
This is what I do, highlight and make notes as appropriate for the spells or abilities that really matter. Most of the abilities are really not going to be used (mainly low level spells). Highlight any DR and SR, immunities and so on, so you don't forget those.
In printed adventures they usually provide tactics with the encounter, so you may want to highlight tactics too (sort of the combat checklist fray mentioned.)
Simple point: Have all your combat stats in the same format/location. In other words, try not to have a magazine open for one NPC, and the MMI open for a monster or two, and a different page or magazine marked for another.
Make photo copies, quick notecards, whatever is needed to get things into the same "space".
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Simple point: Have all your combat stats in the same format/location. In other words, try not to have a magazine open for one NPC, and the MMI open for a monster or two, and a different page or magazine marked for another.
I'd second this suggestion!
I've started setting up my adventure prep in my own DM wiki (at PBWiki.com), basically making a "study guide" with every location copied in and cross-referenced via hyperlink to other, related locations.
I also set up NPC and monster stat blocks at Google Documents, linked from the appropriate sections in the wiki, and set up extra pages with timeline info, overview info, or for extra tables like random encounters, knowledge checks, etc. I also throw in links to my favorite online SRD (srd.plush.org) for skill descriptions or anything else that's OGL and might need referencing.
For extra geek credit points, I have a CSS stylesheet set up so various bits of info can be color-coded (or otherwise formatted) based on what kind of info it is so it's easy to scan through the page and find what I need.
It's a lot of work (and I hate doing homework!) but it makes adventure prep better once it's all been done. You basically have to read the material all the way through at least once while you set everything up, then you can keep the books closed (but nearby for handy reference) and check the adventure prep wiki if you need to know anything while running the game.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I usually don't plot much out past the opening salvos but I suppose a game plan made up without reference to the PC's in advance makes some sense. A "Here's how I like to kill adventurers" outline.
Majuba -- Good suggestion and for the first 7 or so modules I have been working from one of those old composition books where I would format the monsters, lists key spells and stats, etc. But as we get more advanced, there is just too much for pages that size. I started thinking about expanding to use bigger sheets for each item etc but it seemed like a downward spiral.
I have resisted using a laptop at the table but grrtigger seems to have it all together. I don't have any experience with wiki's or even a CSS whodjawhatsis but I generally have plenty of prep time between sessions so I may just try that. I may also be back here pleading for grrrtigger's help.
Keep the suggestions coming folks!
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I have resisted using a laptop at the table but grrtigger seems to have it all together. I don't have any experience with wiki's or even a CSS whodjawhatsis but I generally have plenty of prep time between sessions so I may just try that. I may also be back here pleading for grrrtigger's help.
It's always a trade-off, as you inevitably need to reference *something* as you play. I've found that doing the wiki setup works best for me, but of course YMMV ;)
ps, HTML can seem more intimidating than it really is; if you can format a post here at Paizo using the BBCode tags for things like bold or italic, then you also know the basic essence of HTML. While there are a TON of individual HTML tags and a seemingly endless variety of combinations, it all more or less comes down to individual bits and pieces wrapped in tag pairs to indicate how they should appear in the browser.
I did a quick Google search for "HTML Primer" - this one looks like it might be good: HTML Primer | HTML and CSS Tutorials
CSS is a bit tricker, but once you get used to using HTML it's not that much more to pile some CSS right on top. Just start small and work your way up, and practice, practice, practice! ;)
Edit: also, you can do the wiki/online setup thing beforehand so you can Study Anywhere *tm* then just print out the reference stuff (stat blocks, etc) before you run so you don't actually need a computer at the table. I prefer having my laptop handy because I put so much of my prep in the wiki, but I definitely (again!) second the suggestion to format things like stat blocks or room descriptions identically so you will always know where to look in that particular thing for the piece of info that you need.
I rewrite the creature stats and include all the spells or powers and what they do in the actual stat block. I also do a tactics section for each adversary. Including all the relevant information for spells and powers saves you from having to look those up. The tactics helps with running each bad guy. Make sure your well organized as well. Arrange the bad guys in the order they come up in initiative. If there is more then one of a complex creature then use two entries so that you can mark them up each individually. As an aside here one of the benefits of making the stat blocks again and having them separate from the magazine is there is no hesitation to marking them up.
All of this said my feeling is that there is nothing that will really make this quick and easy. I come away from almost every complex fight kicking myself for forgetting some key way one of my bad guys could have countered an effective player tactic and the fights are getting really long. Thats just the nature of the beast and why a lot of DMs choose to abort the campaign as the players get into the higher levels.
One thing that's helped me lately:
I keep three forms of information in a battle: an initiative chart, a hp chart, and creature writeups. For years I'd put information about any conditions affecting a creature (confused, stunned, etc) with its hp. This campaign, for some reason, I started putting them on the initiative chart, and that works *so* much better. I was always forgetting which critters were affected.
Copying out the full stats of each creature is just too much prep work for me, but I find that having a summary with AC, saves, movement, initiative and to-hit/damage saves most of the lookups unless the creature is a spellcaster. We did two large fights with 5 kinds of giants involved, and the one where I had the MM open to "Giant" and tried to make do with that went very poorly compared to the one where the hit-point sheet was annotated with two line summaries of each giant type.
One thing I'm still mulling over: Paizo has lately taken to giving the buffed-up stats for most opponents rather than the base stats. No matter which you do, it will sometimes be wrong. But I'm coming around to their view that the buffed-up stats are more likely to be relevant. (And it encourages NPCs to use their buffs.)
I've also found it helpful to annotate short-duration spells with their ending round number, not their duration. My player tracks round number for me. We haven't settled on this yet, but he suggests that having spells run out at the end of a turn would be an acceptable simplification compared to having them run out on the caster's initiative, especially since we use Delay and Ready heavily so one has to keep track of the caster's *original* initiative. Anything to make high-level combats a little simpler.
They are still awfully slow. The giant fights took multiple sessions each.
Mary
I started of with init cards, but it was too much work. The best combo I found, which minimises prep work but provides a good experience at the table, was to photocopy the adventure and then scribble and highlight...
Highlight the key stats and powers (incl. spells), and annotate the spells etc with a brief description of what it does. Only highlight the important stuff - if an NPC has 20 spells, just highlight about the key half dozen. Scribble tactics and other notes in the margins. Cross out any rubbish text that gets in the way during a combat, and highlight the important bits (like what the PC's can actually see, hear etc, and the tactics). Do the same for non-combat bits - annotate, and highlight the key bits especially from the PC's point of view (ignore the background text - read it before hand, but you never really need it during play).
Also, once we got to about 16th level, we just used average damage for everything - spells have too many dice, and melee guys have lots of attacks for lots of dice and modifiers all over the place. Just get the players to all work out the average damage for different types of hits (regular, 5-point power attack, full power attack, critical hits, sneak, smite, etc etc), and note that on their character sheet (we ended up using excel character sheets, which helped). The the players are simply rolling to hit, or I'm rolling to save vs damage, and success simply applies the (pre-calculated) average. This speeds play a lot, and doesn't detract from the overall experience as with that many hits going on each round it's more whether you hit or not, vs whether you get lucky and roll ten sixes...
Just about every fight post Spire of Long Shadows has taken up almost an entire session for our group to resolve, with the result that we are now have two modules left, but no one wants to slog through them to find out what happens. I guess we're waiting for 4th edition to come out so we can get through it faster (if, of course, 4th edition really is faster.)
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Just about every fight post Spire of Long Shadows has taken up almost an entire session for our group to resolve, with the result that we are now have two modules left, but no one wants to slog through them to find out what happens. I guess we're waiting for 4th edition to come out so we can get through it faster (if, of course, 4th edition really is faster.)
one lil problem there, everyone will have to have entirely new characters. Some character classes aren't going to be in 4e off the bat, so good luck...
I and my group also found that as we got closer to the end of the AP (we are just finished Kings of the Rift) that it was taking longer and longer to complete each encounter. I found that there were two reasons for the slow down, other then that the encounters were getting more complicated themselves.
The first was that I needed to put a little more prep time in, and be a little more organized at the table. I took care of this by using a couple of the same things others have suggested. I created an encounter sheet in Excel that I use to track initiative and other information, and for more complicated scenarios or NPC, I try to plan out some tactics in advance.
The second was that I found that my players were not taking the time when it wasn't their turn to plan what their next action is going to be. Not that I don't want them to converse and have a good time, but we have six players in our group, and you can have a lot of time in between turns, and then if you take 5-10 minutes when your turn comes around to decide what to do, it really drags it out. So, I got me a little two minute hour glass (actually our dentist gave each of our kids one so that they would brush for two minutes, and I "borrowed" one), and started timing my players if they started slowing down, and that helped as well. If time runs out they are basically doing nothing that round.
DJ
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Like Hastur, I have used initiative cards faithfully from first level to, unlike Hastur, the current 12th in Spire of Long Shadows. They were a free download from game mechanics dot com, and I adore them. I have one for each character, one for each group of similar monsters and one end of round card. Roll intitiatives, put them in order and start flipping. I usually fill out the cards to reflect all of the boosts, make notes about the extra abilites or unique powers and I'm good. Like Jeremy though I usually end a game session realizing I missed something and wind up kicking myself.
Thanks for all of the ideas here. Its great to hear how other DM's prep and balance a game. If anyone else has non-computer based tools that make running high level games easier that would be awesome.
Thinking back, I actually found that towards the end, a lot of combats actually started to go faster (especially using average damage). The mid-levels can be a definite slow-down period, where players have plenty of options but haven't mastered them all yet, and the DM is also fighting increased complexity. If you can get on top of this, as a group, through better DM and player preparation, and also get the DM moving things along, then by high levels you can actually start to really reap the benefits.
Also, by high levels, a lot of combats can be over very quickly, like one or two rounds, if your spell-casters are up to scratch - if they only play non-optimised blaster-types, it becomes a crawl as the players try to whittle down the monsters hit points, but if your players are smart they are disabling / killing monsters in 1-2 rounds with spells then the fighter-types are cleaning up the remnants.
Oh, another thing I did, again mainly at high levels, was to simply speed through the end of a combat if it was obvious that the PC's were going to win. Especially where a type of monster has already been worked out and defeated easily. So I might go so far as to say, "after a couple more rounds, you kill the rest of them", or something like that. I've even skipped whole combats at times, just saying "you come across another group of X, but they are quickly dispatched", if I think it's going to be boring and chew up time.
So if you're finding the mid-levels (say around 12th) to be grinding to a halt, take a breather, work out how you can all get more prepared (DM and players), then at each session make sure you're making an effort to speed things up. When the players, and DM, are on top of their characters / monsters, and really understand what they can do and how best to apply their abilities, then most combats really move along quite quickly.
We certainly managed a fairly even standard of about 3-4 fights + non-combat role-play per 3-4 hour session through all of AoW (possibly a little more, here and there) - only the final battle vs Kyuss etc took a long time (like, 2 sessions) - which is fair enough, really. Even Dragotha and three minions (including Brazemal) was dispatched in about 1 hour...
p.s. as I say above, my main "tool" is the a photocopier, a highlighter, and a pen. That is what I have used for about the last 2-3 years as my main form of preparation, and it has proven to be very successful.
The other "tool" I use, and love, is writing the initiative counts down on a plastic sheet, using the same whiteboard marker I use for the (laminated) battle grid. I used to write it on the battle grid itself, but lately I moved to a plastic folder because I can also slot some papers into that too, like a cheat-sheet I have for all the PC's basic stats, XP chart, etc. Make sure that the initiative count is then in a place where everyone can see it. That way, it's not just my job as DM to call out whose initiative it is, everyone can see who's next and when their turn is, hence there really is no excuse for being unprepared when your turn comes up. This isn't my idea, I got it from these boards, but again, I have fine-tuned it and it has proven to be very successful for the groups I've used it with now.
These are all great ideas.
I, too, post the initiative order in plain view so that all can keep up and not just me.
Also, I started using a simple planning device for those fights that I really needed to be able to be perfect.
I kept it in excel but I also used paper in some instances.
The idea is that a BBEG/or other bad guy is or is not aware that a fight is coming, has or does not have time to prepare, has or does not have buff spells to cast, is or is not content to just sit back and wait on the party, or will or will not be able to go first.
Aware? Prep Time? Spells? Content? Initiative?
1 Aware Prep Time Spells Content First
2 Aware Prep Time Spells Content Not First
3 Aware Prep Time Spells Not Content First
4 Aware Prep Time Spells Not Content Not First
5 Aware Prep Time No Spells Content First
6 Aware Prep Time No Spells Content Not First
7 Aware Prep Time No Spells Not Content First
8 Aware Prep Time No Spells Not Content Not First
9 Aware No Time Spells Content First
10 Aware No Time Spells Content Not First
11 Aware No Time Spells Not Content First
12 Aware No Time Spells Not Content Not First
13 Aware No Time No Spells Content First
14 Aware No Time No Spells Content Not First
15 Aware No Time No Spells Not Content First
16 Aware No Time No Spells Not Content Not First
17 Not Aware Prep Time Spells Content First
18 Not Aware Prep Time Spells Content Not First
19 Not Aware Prep Time Spells Not Content First
20 Not Aware Prep Time Spells Not Content Not First
21 Not Aware Prep Time No Spells Content First
22 Not Aware Prep Time No Spells Content Not First
23 Not Aware Prep Time No Spells Not Content First
24 Not Aware Prep Time No Spells Not Content Not First
25 Not Aware No Time Spells Content First
26 Not Aware No Time Spells Content Not First
27 Not Aware No Time Spells Not Content First
28 Not Aware No Time Spells Not Content Not First
29 Not Aware No Time No Spells Content First
30 Not Aware No Time No Spells Content Not First
31 Not Aware No Time No Spells Not Content First
32 Not Aware No Time No Spells Not Content Not First
I know that this looks complicated and/or cumbersome at first glance but take the BBEG in SoLS. He will hear the party fighting in the other room, is content to sit back and wait for the party to come to him, has some prep time, and has buff spells to cast. That means that I only plan for two options of whether or not he goes first. In either case, I have a round by round plan of what he intends to do with only a slight variation.
The three knights in the room close by may or may not be aware (thick door, etc.), don't need time to prepare, have no spells to cast, wouldn't be content, and may or may not go first. So, I only think about what they would do in those four options. After a while, I started to get pretty quick about it and would simply just copy the round by round enemy intentions only make slight modifications.
I know that there are many many many more options than those that I took into consideration but this was just to help me clarify in my own mind what the bad guy intended to do if threatened.
When I think of "bad guys", I try to think in terms of "what would I do if I had been sitting in a dungeon for that long?" First, I would go nuts. Then, I would start planning. If it's a dumb opponent, then I think in terms of "what's my next meal?"
I have found that these two thoughts have greatly increased the speed of actual gameplay at my table.
Well, thanks to grrtiger (and I do mean "thanks" it was an enlightening experience), I have learned just enough html to be happy I don't have the time or energy to learn more. I miss being a high school/college student where I could and would spend hours putting together a program or algorhythm but those days are sadly gone.
Mary, thanks for the game mechanics dot com tip. I am going to check them out shortly. I like the initiative card idea a great deal and think I will give that a try as opposed to my frequently over-written and illegible notebooks.
I think what is really killing me is mid-battle spell research (particularly with the WotC penchant of putting out a new book every month with new spells in it). Is anyone aware of any good spell spreadsheets available for public consumption (you know, an alpha list with range, duration, damage spread, sr and saving throw info....)?
I do like hearing everyone's suggestions though. If you have a different method that hasn't been written up yet, please add your ideas to the mix.
Take care all.
Sorry. I mean thanks "John Wood" for the game mechanics dot com suggestion.