I have being thinking for a time about how high level combat can get very slow compared to lower levels and was thinking about ways to attenuate this.
I'm not a very experienced GM, specially with Pathfinder but i've considered the following house rule:
The player rolls only one dice for all his possible attacks with a given weapon and considers the result as his result for all attack rolls for all his attacks with that weapon this turn.
Now for an Example i'll use the 15th lvl sheet for Valeros that came with the Pathfinder dataset for Herolab. He fights with two weapons, a +4 Icy Burst Longsword in his main hand and a +3 Shortsword in his off-hand. His attacks would be respectively:
+4 Longsword: +26/+21/+16
+3 Shortsword: +23/+18/+13
He makes an attack with both weapons and rolls for his Longsword, and has a 18, now we get the lower attack and sum, for a total of 34. Does it hit? If so all the other attacks will hit (they have bigger bonuses), so just roll the damage for all three. If a 34 doesn't hit just sum +5 as it's almost always the difference between attacks. A 39 hits? If so, two attacks hit. If not them see if 44 hits. If not them he misses all attacks.
Now you roll the Shortsword and repeat the process.
It does needs getting used to, but i think it would make things much faster after people get used to it. What you guys think? Can you guys find somewhere where it breaks?
This breaks for crits obviously.
I think you'll make your life simpler if you create/download a dice roller that does all the things automatically.
You can even go as far as not letting players roll, but just let them announce their actions and you roll for them as appropriate. With a program or Excel sheet or something that can be resolved very quickly.
This breaks for crits obviously.
I think you'll make your life simpler if you create/download a dice roller that does all the things automatically.
You can even go as far as not letting players roll, but just let them announce their actions and you roll for them as appropriate. With a program or Excel sheet or something that can be resolved very quickly.
Somehow i forgot about the crits. It's one of those things that are obviously right in front of your face and you don't see until someone points out. How could this be addressed?
And rolling automatically can be an option to the GM but to the players i think it takes something out of the game. Many players just love rolling dice and have many superstitions involving them, to those players making roll using programs feels like taking controls of their action from them. Same thing as having the GM roll perception, stealth and other skills where the characters should not know they failed instead of the players.
True, players do like rolling dice - that is another reason why your suggestion might not be well received ;)
The first thing that comes to mind is what would happen if you rolled a 1? You lose all six attacks? Nuh-uh. Don't like it.
We use different colored D20s and roll them together.
I run PBEMs, so I've been doing all the rolling for...eleven years now. Almost on a whim I decided for my lastest game I would instead use averages for any damage rolls. It made a huge difference for me.
Obviously it's not fair to do this for d20 rolls since no one would ever crit and it would be pretty hard on the players to tell them that because they only had a 45% chance of saving vs. a death spell that they just dropped dead. I suppose the latter expectation could be managed, but I think eliminating all rolls removes a lot of the experience.