I've got a most unusual pathfinder campaign going on with triplets two girls and a boy, age 11. This is here in Moscow, and I'm getting paid for DMing because it's actually an English conversation lesson.
The problem is one of the girls HATES combat with a passion and just wants to talk and role-play. The other girl doesn't mind a fight here and there, but gets bored if combat lasts more than 5 minutes. The boy as could be guessed is a total munchkin and just wants to kill monsters and take their treasure, but also is impatient and shouts at me to hurry if I have to look stuff up or if things drag.
They all love treasure and XP, arguing endlessly over who gets what, and so there has to be SOME combat, but it needs to be speeded up to an extreme.
I've taken to shortening battles artificially - for example, in a fight with a mummy, I had a talking bird fly in to give a tip to one of the characters to use fire, and then when the sorceror cast spark, poof - the mummy goes up in flames, battle over.
I've also thought of scrapping initiative for each character and going back to 1st edition AD&D initiative rules. We actually did play AD&D at first before pathfinder, but they found combat slow there as well, so I need to figure out how to speed things up even more.
Any advice? What to do when players want role-playing, XP and treasure, but lightning fast combat? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
If multiple attacks have bogged down play, you should consider picking up the Trailblazer Rule PDF. It has a very nice system for cutting down the number of attacks.
Also, I'm just guessing, but it sounds like the most bored girl might enjoy a wizard or cleric — doing some battlefield control, expecially if you show her that the less direct spells are actually the most effective.
She could probably get into the notion of enchanting enemies to become friends or using illusions to bypass unnecessary fights, rather than roasting opponents with fireballs.
Honestly, if the kid prefers the subtle approach, that should be encouraged. Make sure that you still give XP to the whole party even if they bypass combat ingeniously. Let the fighter kid kill monsters on occasion, but try to make situations where it is only him who must do it. Be sure to keep the pressure on (soft timers, resource attrition) sometimes so that combat becomes a less appealing solution and they have to rely on their wits.
But, as always, the best GM advice is to change it up, often. Include as many different scenarios as you can think of, because it is variety that reveals the true balance between classes. That goes for combat/non-combat focus characters as well.
Be very familiar with the 'monster's' rules- don't use something that you have to look up constantly. If you're unsure about something, just roll with it an make something appropriate up (just keep it going).
Assume the monsters take 10 for most everything-
Encourage the one girl that prefers the RP part to the combat to solve the combats that way. If she wants to charm a beast, if she can use an appropriate bit of logic to do so, grant her a handle animal roll to pacify it, stuff like that.
This doesn't have to do with speed, but make the crunchiness of combat feel less sluggish: be descriptive. Don't resort to it attacks, deals x damage. It has to charge, slobber spraying from a razored maw. It bites, and whips its muscled head back and forth! If you can keep the combat feeling just like an extension of the RPing rather than a break from it, it will make it more engaging.
-unrelated to speed of play
Don't let them die, but don't let them know that. But they still need to be able to 'fail.' Kind of vague here but to work it has to be keyed to the situation. A magic weapon breaks, a loved NPC dies, a bad guy absconds with the treasure.
I would just scrap the combat system altogether and make combat purely cinematic with rolls for successes or failures. You want to chop the gnoll's head off? Give me an attack roll. 34? Wow. *Cue awesome description that makes the player feel super bad-ass*
Against big bad guys, just make the combat require a certain number of "successes" regardless of if they are even really attacks and HP damage. Just give everyone a chance to do something super-sweet, then wrap it up epicly.
Are you familiar with Mouse Guard by David Petersen? The Mouse Guard stories win all kinds of awards, and it has an RPG (not d20) that has won several awards as well. The game is very description heavy and I have not heard a negative comment towards it yet.
I run with a group of 8. Here are the things we have done to speed up combat.
1. Roll init once, start with the highest person and go around the table.
2. Creatures don't die until their turn. That means everyone attacks, and then the baddie either falls over or continues on his turn. This means that you don't have each person waiting to figure out what they are going to do until the person before them does something.
3. Use THACO. They are plus +5 to hit? That means they need a 15 or better to hit AC 20. Make THACO charts, download them or I'll send you some.
4. Roll to hits and damage dice at the same time.
5. Weapons do average damage, so a long sword does 5 hps damage.
6. Iterative attacks are all at the same plus instead of -5 more for each one.
These things speed up combat a lot, letting us get in several combats into each game.
Good luck!
excellent points all around! This whole thing with introducing pathfinder to my English lesson was just an experiment really, and one I don't regret. They all hated English before and now love role-playing and I think when they get a bit older they may like combat more as well, but the whole point is getting them to speak English, and making combat more cinematic and just making stuff up to speed things along I think will work best of all. The biggest problem now is with treasure because they practically start screaming at each other on who gets what loot, it's actually pretty nasty, the boy being the greediest of all. I solved it partially by having the mummy who got one hit on him give him mummy rot that takes away his strength every time he gets greedy and wants to take stuff away from his sisters but goes away when he's generous.
There's a disadvantage to using average weapon damage or max weapon damage.
I played D&D since I was 7 (and Rolemaster at 11!). We had to do a lot of calculations in our heads. This was not a bad thing at all, it's a skill, and it's a skill you can use in real life. I think ALL of my friends benefited from it (we're 2 engineers, PHD, real estate agent, Hi Tech VP, and a teacher now).
You can dumb down D&D if you like, but in the process of speeding it up in this manner, the kids are missing out on other (real-life) skills they could be using. Math and logic!
My best idea for speeding things up is:
a) As DM, not "worrying about the details". It doesn't matter if the enemy is at 5 hp or 10hp, just roll with the narrative, your bookeeping doesn't have to be "perfect". Even make up an AC or saving throw if you didn't prepare well enough. What I'm saying ... is that it doesn't really matter.
This applies to adult DMing to a certain extent as well. For example, my DM turn might take 30s compared to some DMs that take 3-4m. Big difference.
b) Not making the encounters too difficult. The CR should be their APL only. Any higher and the combat lasts too long and/or you have to force tactics on them, or you could kill them, which you don't want.