I'm curious -- how much of your gaming sessions are spent playing out combat?
50% would be a lot for us. Sometimes we've had nights where only a single combat occurred (and at times it would be none if I weren't careful as DM to make sure it happens).
I'm curious -- how much of your gaming sessions are spent playing out combat?
50% would be a lot for us. Sometimes we've had nights where only a single combat occurred (and at times it would be none if I weren't careful as DM to make sure it happens).
Please define 'Out Of Combat' , are you talking about walking around roleplaying, checking for traps, falling down traps or actual out of a situation, walking around town sort of thing?
Please define 'Out Of Combat' , are you talking about walking around roleplaying, checking for traps, falling down traps or actual out of a situation, walking around town sort of thing?
I mean periods that are not dominated by dice-rolling.
The occasional Streetwise roll (as an example) wouldn't count, but rolling against things that immediately threaten damage (like traps) most certainly counts as combat, for my purposes.
My group, for instance, spends lots of time planning and interacting with NPCs (important or otherwise). They also spend lots of time straying from the plotline, and force me to roleplay NPCs for whom there are no prepared stats.
In fact, we've had sessions where they've never even gotten to the planned adventure.
Please define 'Out Of Combat' , are you talking about walking around roleplaying, checking for traps, falling down traps or actual out of a situation, walking around town sort of thing?My group, for instance, spends lots of time planning and interacting with NPCs (important or otherwise). They also spend lots of time straying from the plotline, and force me to roleplay NPCs for whom there are no prepared stats.
In fact, we've had sessions where they've never even gotten to the planned adventure.
I've had a number of sessions where PC's have spent the whole session talking about what's going on in the environment, who's up to what in the campaign. Talking to NPC's and fact finding.
I've roleplayed almost a whole game with no previous stats just quickly thought up the persons name and persona plus what they know( motivations) and roleplayed from there. I've often used the NPC's to get something going on either in a combat encounter if things are going slow or onto the main adventure.Personally if the PC's are more interested in roleplaying in the campaign world then go with it, than rolling dice then your doing it right.
You can always have some of the bad guys jump the PC's if you're really wanting a combat, let one of them surrender or be captured and let on info that moves the adventure on where you want it to go.
As an average I would say 50% of game time is taken up with combat. I try not to let it become the be all end all of a PCs existence however and have had multiple sessions where no combat occurs at all. The introduction of skill challenges has given me a simple way to give out a little XP on those combat-less sessions as well. I try to make them very vague however asking for a Diplomacy check here, an intimidate check there and so on. The last SC I ran the players didn't even realize it was happening until I gave out XP at the end of the session.
As an average I would say 50% of game time is taken up with combat. I try not to let it become the be all end all of a PCs existence however and have had multiple sessions where no combat occurs at all. The introduction of skill challenges has given me a simple way to give out a little XP on those combat-less sessions as well. I try to make them very vague however asking for a Diplomacy check here, an intimidate check there and so on. The last SC I ran the players didn't even realize it was happening until I gave out XP at the end of the session.
I thoroughly agree, some games can be combat heavy but in the long term of a campaign I'd rather encourage the PC's to negotiate, learn, investigate and roleplay by giving them XP so they don't think every thing around them is XP on legs ( or tentacles, claws etc).
I'm curious -- how much of your gaming sessions are spent playing out combat?
50% would be a lot for us. Sometimes we've had nights where only a single combat occurred (and at times it would be none if I weren't careful as DM to make sure it happens).
Out of combat? Well, it tends to vary depending on how hard the combats are that do happen. Sometimes the combat that is scheduled to occur can last quite a while (especially when we began - those lasted far longer than they should have) - but typically we can resolve all but the most difficult battles in about 15-20 minutes on average. That leaves lots of time to roleplay the other aspects of the game...
I would say that in a 4 hour session there is equal time spent in combat-situations (including traps and skill challenges). Roughly. Some dungeon crawling scenarios are far more in-combat than out, and most town scenarios are far more out of combat than in.
Hope that helps at all :)
For us, 4e has been great because combat is more tactically interesting and that's where we spend our time.
That's such a great way of putting it -- tactically interesting.
Unfortunately, my group no longer has any interest in switching; what 4e offers us doesn't make up for what it lacks. Personally, I'd kill to find a way to effectively integrate 4e's magic system into 3.5.
We haven't found it to be lacking in anything...
While we have, it isn't my intention to list what we perceive to be 4e's shortcomings. My suggestion that one version of D&D might be deficient can only get us off-topic. Sorry about that inadvertent derailment :/
Instead, I'm trying to compare my group's gaming style with that of others.
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I'd say somewhere in the 40-50% range. I typically structure my games to start with combat to get everyone's attention, have some roleplaying encounters in the middle, and then end things with some more combat. Ideally, the first fight is a boss fight because that's when everyone is the most alert (and, let's me end the prior session as a cliffhanger).
I envy you guys. My current group spends about 90% of our evening on combat once the game starts. That's the way they like it. That's the way they've played for 30 years now. Nights when I introduce more roleplaying some of the guys like it but most of them wander off and start doing other things. We have an average turnout of 7 players + 1 DM since we adopted 4e about two months ago. It was closer to 5 players + 1 DM towards the end of our 3e campaigns.
For us, 4e has been great because combat is more tactically interesting and that's where we spend our time.
My gaming group has been gaming together in one form or another for about 25 years and have moved away from the 'all combat' gaming. Don't get me wrong there are some evenings when the game is a combat fest but only 1 in 10 maybe.
I see 4E as viable for roleplay more that 3rd ed but only because the combats in 3ed at later levels can take a whole evening even in one encounter.
Before I get my flamed I'd like to add we have had some excellent roleplaying with 3rd ed games but that's more to do with the players than the system used.
I do use a rank based system for skills in my 4E game to make the PC's more individual and it seems to work well. A person Trained in the skill gets +3 instead of the +5, for each Trained skill the player gets 2 ranks to distribute among the skills with a maximum of level+1. It shows experience teaching the person skills or a trained person.
After 1st level the player gets 5 skill points plus Int bonus to distribute.
I've also added a couple of skills back in including Disable Device ( which covers Open Lock and Disable Device) Knowledge Nobility, Swim for example.
So far I'd say about 60% as Scales of War does not give enough background material to really riff off of and do more role playing work with. In fact it'd be even higher but the players actively work to inject more role playing into what has, so far, been basically an endless series of combats.
I'm hoping this will drop down to more like 40% (which I would personally consider pretty ideal - I like combat) as the game develops and hopefully some of the future adventures will be less focused purely on combat.
My 3.5 Maure Castle Game has less out and out combat and a lot more problem solving though it might have even less actual role play as 'getting to know each other' is not a big part of Maure Castle - its more a 'scream like a girl' type environment.
This all tends to vary from group to group. Most of the time I would say 50/50. There are nights, however, when my group just barely crawls through combat and it can take up most of the evening.
To speed things up in 4E I've adopting the common house rule of reducing enemies' hit points by 30-50%. That still keeps them up long enough to be a threat but lowers their HP enough that they can be taken out in 2-3 rounds without having to spam them with at-will powers towards the end.
That is my only true complaint about 4E; the drastic increase in monster HP. I was putting my group through an RPGA module yesterday and a level 1 or 2 encounter can often require the PCs to do 200+ points of damage to finish everything off. That's 8-10 rounds if the PCs are hitting 50% of the time and each round usually takes 5 minutes, more or less.
I'll admit that my party is pretty slow when it comes to combat, frustratingly slow at times. Reducing the HP quickens combat without losing challenge and leaves more time in the session for roleplaying, eating, and movie quoting. :)
The best part of the session was actually a rather lengthy skill challenge that took nearly an hour and a half to complete because everyone was enjoying roleplaying it out. Ended up being everyone's favorite part as this group is really really really terrible at combat. :)
My 3.5 Maure Castle Game has less out and out combat and a lot more problem solving though it might have even less actual role play as 'getting to know each other' is not a big part of Maure Castle - its more a 'scream like a girl' type environment.
Yeah, that kind of adventure is great for my group. I've got MC waiting on my bookshelf, but we tend to dislike the complexity of play at those levels.
My group likes the thinking part of the game. They love outsmarting monsters, and they often force encounters to play out diffently from the way a module intends.
At the risk of taking us off-topic, that's the main reason we dislike the delve format -- my group is good at surprising the monsters, or luring them out of the room(s) they're in, or just mucking up the villains' well-laid plans. Delve format is (IMO) designed for set-piece combats -- which makes it wasted time and space for me.
Yeah, that kind of adventure is great for my group. I've got MC waiting on my bookshelf, but we tend to dislike the complexity of play at those levels.
While Maure Castle is loads of fun it also ups the ante in terms of complexity in some ways as its very clear that it was submitted as a 1st edition AD&D adventure and Erik and the Paizo crew then hurriedly converted it to 3.5.
There are a lot of things in the adventure that don't quite work as we would expect them to in 3.5. Lots of opportunity to get into conflict with your players on whether or not something qualifies as a mind affecting or is perhaps a compulsion since the text is not clear.
The only other problem at this level is that its save or die city and thats going both ways. Monsters can die any round and so can the players.
My 3.5 Maure Castle Game has less out and out combat and a lot more problem solving though it might have even less actual role play as 'getting to know each other' is not a big part of Maure Castle - its more a 'scream like a girl' type environment.Yeah, that kind of adventure is great for my group. I've got MC waiting on my bookshelf, but we tend to dislike the complexity of play at those levels.
My group likes the thinking part of the game. They love outsmarting monsters, and they often force encounters to play out diffently from the way a module intends.
At the risk of taking us off-topic, that's the main reason we dislike the delve format -- my group is good at surprising the monsters, or luring them out of the room(s) they're in, or just mucking up the villains' well-laid plans. Delve format is (IMO) designed for set-piece combats -- which makes it wasted time and space for me.
I am slowly beginning to see this as well. The format usually only prepares or gives notes for three possible outcomes; they kill the monsters, they don't kill the monsters, or the monsters escape.
A little preparation on my part as the DM helps find at few other possible outcomes but you still never know what the PCs might try. This has always been a problem with modules so I'm not really blaming it on the delve format too much.
What I really don't like is the mountain of text that each combat encounter seems to have. I like interesting terrain features but sometimes they add so much that I miss half of it while actually DM'ing the encounter. Keeping track of what parts of the room have dim light and which don't is the biggest pain in the butt. There may be 2 out of the 5 monsters without low-light vision and 1 or 2 of the PCs that don't have it. It's too easy to forget who's getting that penalty from being in dim light and who's not.
A little preparation on my part as the DM helps find at few other possible outcomes but you still never know what the PCs might try. This has always been a problem with modules so I'm not really blaming it on the delve format too much.
My group tends to be wildly creative at times, so too much preparation on my part is usually wasted.
Which is part of the reason we spend little time in combat -- their plans tend to put monsters at severe disadvantage, sometimes finishing battles before they begin. They're like PC versions of Tucker's kobolds :)
And the craziness of their schemes makes play soooo much fun.
I'll admit that my party is pretty slow when it comes to combat, frustratingly slow at times. Reducing the HP quickens combat without losing challenge...
Five minutes per round sounds pretty good actually. Sure that does mean that an 8 round combat takes 40 minutes but I'd usually think that 40 minutes is pretty reasonable unless the combat is a real push over. Though 8-10 rounds sounds a little high, my group is doing about 5-8 and we don't have any strikers so I'm not sure why we see quite that much variance - do you guys have a cleric? Maybe thats important in upping the chance to hit and reducing the number of rounds when an attack is skipped?
Also I'm unclear how come reducing the monsters hps by 50% does not reduce the challange the monster poses? Certainly I recall a really tough fight with a dragon and we were pretty much kicking ass and taking names until we ran out of daily's and encounter powers. I figure we had done about half the dragons hps by that point and it had not really done much to us since it was constantly under some detrimental effect. After we ran out of things that would nerf it it came roaring back and the fight was just brutal. We called a time out twice to discuss running away. We used up everything in that fight - we had no healing left; none. One player down every player bloodied, we drank all our potions etc. Two more rounds at most and remnants of the party would have been fleeing leaving their comrades behind as dragon snacks.
My point is that the results would have been dramatically different if the Dragon had only half its hps. We'd have walked and kicked that dragons butt and absconded with its horde easy, we'd barely been scratched when it was bloodied because we'd nerfed it with potent powers every round until we ran out of such powers.
Though 8-10 rounds sounds a little high, my group is doing about 5-8 and we don't have any strikers so I'm not sure why we see quite that much variance - do you guys have a cleric? Maybe thats important in upping the chance to hit and reducing the number of rounds when an attack is skipped?Also I'm unclear how come reducing the monsters hps by 50% does not reduce the challange the monster poses?
For the first question, yes, there was a cleric in the game but she ended up being the worst player at the table. After several months of play she still cannot remember her powers from one round to the next. She simply cannot seem to get her head around the fact that her attacks do more than just damage things. I also have to remind her to heal her allies or she'll go several fights in a row without healing anyone once. I finally got tired of reminding her what her powers do after the first 6 sessions or so and just go with it for the sake of speeding up play. Plus she would forget what her powers do, I'd remind her, and then she'd be mad at me. Way too much drama for a GAME.
I know that I have a group of "special" players and, since we're talking about it, I actually decided to drop the game last night because I'm not getting anything out of them as a DM.
As for the second question, it was revealed that reducing monster HP was a common house rule during the WoTC playtesting and it has been adopting by several DM's who post regularly at the WoTC forums. The idea behind this is that most monsters are going to burn through their own encounter and/or daily abilities in the first few rounds and deal most of their realy damaging attacks early on. Of course, this isn't always the case and I try to adjust it depending on how challenging or how long I want the encounter to be. For solo monsters I usually leave the HP as is. Random encounters because the PC's turned the wrong corner at the wrong time are usually the times that I really drastically cut monster HP. Otherwise I don't reduce them by more than 25-30%.
It has sped up combat and was working for my group, allowing more time for roleplaying. Obviously if you have a very efficient group of players then your needs will change. I sat at an RPGA table where we were all very good players, with good tactics and intimate knowledge of our characters' abilities. We blew through 3 modules in the time it took the rest of the tables to get through 2 without the DM, obviously, having to reduce anything. It was only a suggestion afterall. :)
Though 8-10 rounds sounds a little high, my group is doing about 5-8 and we don't have any strikers so I'm not sure why we see quite that much variance - do you guys have a cleric? Maybe thats important in upping the chance to hit and reducing the number of rounds when an attack is skipped?Also I'm unclear how come reducing the monsters hps by 50% does not reduce the challange the monster poses?
For the first question, yes, there was a cleric in the game but she ended up being the worst player at the table. After several months of play she still cannot remember her powers from one round to the next. She simply cannot seem to get her head around the fact that her attacks do more than just damage things. I also have to remind her to heal her allies or she'll go several fights in a row without healing anyone once. I finally got tired of reminding her what her powers do after the first 6 sessions or so and just go with it for the sake of speeding up play. Plus she would forget what her powers do, I'd remind her, and then she'd be mad at me. Way too much drama for a GAME.
I know that I have a group of "special" players and, since we're talking about it, I actually decided to drop the game last night because I'm not getting anything out of them as a DM.
As for the second question, it was revealed that reducing monster HP was a common house rule during the WoTC playtesting and it has been adopting by several DM's who post regularly at the WoTC forums. The idea behind this is that most monsters are going to burn through their own encounter and/or daily abilities in the first few rounds and deal most of their realy damaging attacks early on. Of course, this isn't always the case and I try to adjust it depending on how challenging or how long I want the encounter to be. For solo monsters I usually leave the HP as is. Random encounters because the PC's turned the wrong corner at the wrong time are usually the times that I really drastically cut monster HP....
At the end of the day the monsters HP's are up to the DM to determine. If a minor encounter ( couple of guard critters) are taking ages to take down, decide that one more hit will drop them and move the adventure along. The only thing worth bearing in mind is the Bloodied condition, if you adjust the HP then the creature may be bloodied now. Shouldn't be hard to figure out though on the fly. I can do it and I'm not a genius.
At the end of the day the monsters HP's are up to the DM to determine. If a minor encounter ( couple of guard critters) are taking ages to take down, decide that one more hit will drop them and move the adventure along. The only thing worth bearing in mind is the Bloodied condition, if you adjust the HP then the creature may be bloodied now. Shouldn't be hard to figure out though on the fly. I can do it and I'm not a genius.
Figuring out bloodied values for new HP isn't really hard at all. I usually just make sure that the new HP value that I assign is an even number and divide from there. Unlike my players, I am actually capable of gradeschool math. ;)
It really is funny how an experienced group plays differently from an inexperienced group. In my RPGA group I have now been through several modules where my Swordmage character ends the day without ever having spent half his healing surges or used his daily power. With a smart group of players everything goes so much better. I almost wept with joy. Lets just say I'm done running groups of all newbies for awhile. :D
At the end of the day the monsters HP's are up to the DM to determine. If a minor encounter ( couple of guard critters) are taking ages to take down, decide that one more hit will drop them and move the adventure along. The only thing worth bearing in mind is the Bloodied condition, if you adjust the HP then the creature may be bloodied now. Shouldn't be hard to figure out though on the fly. I can do it and I'm not a genius.Figuring out bloodied values for new HP isn't really hard at all. I usually just make sure that the new HP value that I assign is an even number and divide from there. Unlike my players, I am actually capable of gradeschool math. ;)
It really is funny how an experienced group plays differently from an inexperienced group. In my RPGA group I have now been through several modules where my Swordmage character ends the day without ever having spent half his healing surges or used his daily power. With a smart group of players everything goes so much better. I almost wept with joy. Lets just say I'm done running groups of all newbies for awhile. :D
My guys are getting the feel for the system, using their Encounter abilities to their best advantage each encounter and saving their Daily for the big finish.
I ran the adventure in the DMG and they were a little horrified to meet a dragon at the end. The monster dropped all bar one of them, the cleric Brandon who after a couple of passes the very wounded dragon tried to flee but turn on the priest and was felled by a Blazing Holy Lance. It was a good final encounter for the first game.