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My gaming group is mythic
We have
1 Skinwalker Warpriest (dual wielding shields and doing multiple die per weapon, plus his bite attack)
1 Catfolk Slayer (who has up to 11 damage dice per attack and might be doing up to 9-11 attacks per round by level 18/MR 7) She always gets her sneak attacks because she can use a mythic point to give herself greater invisibility.
1 Android Alchemist, who can throw three bombs a round
1 Gnome Bard/cavalier (who gives everyone else MORE attacks AND has an AC Griffon as well as a Kasatha Gunslinger (race/class was randomly rolled by me and the character built by me) follower who has 12 attacks a round)
Needless to say combat got very slow, to the point that we could only manage one combat per session, due to the massive amount of dice rolling and on the fly mathematics.
Players do average damage all the time (the path ability that allows one to treat all ones (and twos, and threes if you take it three times) is changed to state that they treat their average as 3 higher. For someone rolling d6s (our slayer and alch) they treat everything as a 6. This is very helpful for the Slayer who by level 16 will be rolling 11 dice per attack, and maybe up to 11 or even 12 attacks per round (depending on haste, and other such things).
I also trust my players enough to let them all know the AC, and touch AC of anything they face. That way they can simply preroll attacks while others are attacking and report to me if they hit or miss, and how much damage there is. This means that the combat time has been cut dramatically. Of course they are outputting so much damage, that often non-boss or mini boss (anything not named or new and therefore unbuffed) goes along the lines of "you find a 10 hobgoblins and kill them all).
Does anyone else have solutions to perventing long combats at high levels, and when there are a ton of dice involved (like playing anything that can sneak attack a lot, alchs or people with insane amounts of attacks per round)
Pre-rolling is just huge.
If it's REALLY bogging down, you can use a dice roller like rolz.org. It may not feel the same if you're not physically rolling the damage dice... but it's better than just taking the average.
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Pre-rolling is just huge.
If it's REALLY bogging down, you can use a dice roller like rolz.org. It may not feel the same if you're not physically rolling the damage dice... but it's better than just taking the average.
The party is quite happy with taking the average as they're more interested in a story than the combats. Also, as I've stated those with the most dice have taken mythic path abilities that mean their "average" is their max (6 in this case).
Also using an online dice-roller is a no-go because I'm the only one with an electronic device at the table.
I used to play with a DM who liked "average" damage. I put that in quotes because while he had a PhD and was an accomplished linguist his ability to calculate the average result of a die roll was highly suspect. Anyhow, some of the players felt like average damage was boring, so the DM made a compromise where you roll damage once and then multiply that by the number of hits. This can be sort of bad since it can lead to big swings in damage on a full attack, but the players seemed happier that way.
As a sidenote, the idea of a game where only one player has a phone or tablet seems very strange to me now. In the games at my house I'm the only person who isn't almost constantly looking at one. 3 of the players have a Pathfinder rules app on their phones, and they reference it a lot, and the DM uses her tablet to help run the game. That group is steadfastly against average damage or online dice rolling though. Heck, one guy has a box of minuscule d6s he bought for doing sneak attacks with a TWF Rogue in an AP game which finished at 15th level.
One problem with doing fixed damage is that it can be annoying knowing that you can never bypass DR greater than your damage amount. At least, that's what I remember from playing the old-timey Marvel Super Heroes Roleplaying Game.