Hi guys, I'm going to be running Dead Suns in the next month or so and I'm wondering what people's average combat times are for both personal and starship combat.
I'd like both a real-time and round length estimate if you'd be so kind!
Any opinions on what the biggest time-sinks were during the combat phases or any methods/shortcuts you guys had in place would be helpful as well, just trying to get this running as smoothly as possible.
Thanks!
Regular combat mostly depends on party composition. Our table has 6 players, only 1 of which is a big damage dealer so our combats are generally rounds×targets+2. The first two rounds is positioning then afterwards cleanup from our damage dealer. Biggest time sinks were misses, cause they happen. Early levels encounters lasted about an hour, but we just recently hit 3 so everyone's damage just went way up.
Starship combat, 3 hours. If we get in the ship to fight, that will be our session for the night. A lot of this comes from needing to use the FAQ page to get the right DCs for actions and exactly what they do.
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Starship combat, 3 hours. If we get in the ship to fight, that will be our session for the night. A lot of this comes from needing to use the FAQ page to get the right DCs for actions and exactly what they do.
Link? or page number?
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Regular combat has on average taken my group around 5 to 6 rounds to complete, with each round taking about 1 minute per person assuming everybody has a good idea of what they want to do. Since we haven't had anyone trying to do a lot of spellcasting in combat, it's mostly been moving and shooting or swinging to hit with a melee weapon. So it's been pretty fast. Each round has involved focus fire on 1 or 2 enemies, with people either shooting the same target as the melee character if their shots aren't obstructed or firing on another target if they are. Approximately 2 successful attacks from melee is enough to knock most targets out, about 3 successful ranged attacks to knock them out.
Starship combat....seems to drag on quite a bit. It will depend on if you're players figure out how to optimize ship design and the optimal strategy to fight enemy ships or not. If they don't, it can drag on for over an hour and become drastically unfun. If they do figure it out, it can go pretty quickly. However, for everyone but the pilot it becomes pretty repetitive after the first round.
First round typically involves the science officer/engineer scanning the enemy ship for any arcs that don't have weapons or figuring out weaker shield arcs. After that they'll use either the ability to shift shield energy around or to repair shields. The gunners will attempt to just keep firing on the same arc, and the pilot will attempt to maneuver the ship to the weakest arc so that you can keep firing on it. If you have enough hands on ship, targeting specific systems is very useful. Pilots have the most variance though depend on the specifics needs of combat you might need to back off and keep distance to recharge a shield arc or something to that effect. Everybody else will just do the same thing over and over again.
Honestly, ship combat is one of the weakest systems and I don't particularly enjoy it.
Link? or page number?...
Starship combat, 3 hours. If we get in the ship to fight, that will be our session for the night. A lot of this comes from needing to use the FAQ page to get the right DCs for actions and exactly what they do.
http://paizo.com/paizo/faq/v5748nruor1hi
There you go. All the errata not in the current printings.
In Dead Suns, the average time of starship combat is wildly different before and after book 2, because there is a transition from prevail ship to player built ship. Starship Combat in the first 2 books could easily be 5-10 rounds. After that, 2-3 rounds, unless the party's gunner is very unlucky, because a player built ship will massively out gun everything published in the same tier.
I am DMing the Dead Suns campaign and I am on the 5th book. To answer your question it really depends on how many people are playing in your group and what kind of players they are. What I mean, are they dedicated players that know their roles and are ready to play or is the game secondary to hanging out?
Anyway, for me with an Avg of 4 players (sometimes 5 or 6 have maxed out at 7) I can get in 1-2 combats per session (3 hours or so). Those to hit KAC/EAC on the NPC's can be pretty massive.
Ship combat on the other hand is long and for me as a DM REALLY boring. The combat IMO is not fleshed out like it needs to be and (at the risk of being redundant) is severely lacking. I am tempted to convert Battletech/Aerotech rules to SF as the current rules seem to be a half assed version of them anyway. Yes I am little salty on this as this should be one of the cooler and exciting aspects of the game and instead is a burden for me to DM.
Sorry for the digression.
In my opinion, combat length is "the right one".
We haven't had rocket tag encounters that last one or two rounds, and we haven't had a bog down like in PF1 in the later stages. We are starting book 6 of Dead Suns this sunday.
Starship combat, as written in the APs, is pretty dull I think. However, I modify those. Adding new stuff helps a lot. Clouds of space dust with 20% concealment, asteroids, radiation zones where missiles can't lock on enemies, space creatures, attempts to board, and even giant space tentacles of energy have helped a lot.
As everyone says depends on party makeup. With no long arms and no magic in the group I run they got absolutely stuck fighting the writher swarm (10 rounds), but can rush through other stuff, killing book 2’s boss in 2 rounds.
Average I find is 2 to 3 rounds. Attrition is the name of the game in SF with Stamina a limited to refills and HP much harder to maintain. Short quick combats which whittle away the teams resolve (hence the name of the points) rather than the usual challenge of DPS versus healing in PF.
Dead Suns is especially good for this is you, after the point hits home, point out that they are on a time limit. While it doesn’t mechanically effect the game, I have implied to my players it does to encourage them narratively treating it right. This stops them from bedding down to keep resolve up
Like others I found ship combat could drag, so I made round order cheat sheets for each players position on the crew, with all their actions and DC’s on the laminated sheet. Sped things up significantly. No need to keep finding references and players are able to quickly figure out their actions before their turn even comes round.
As the DM, play the NPC starship crew as maniacs that never balance or divert power to shields, and just focus on damage dealing. Either the players go through your ship faster, or you have a little bit of a chance of damaging theirs, if they roll bad enough. Consider surrender or fleeing if it won't impact the story too much.
Tactical combat seems to go pretty fast, with the monster low AC but high attack rolls guaranteeing damage on both sides at all rounds. They usually aren't dull, unless the enemy CR is divided between more than 4 mooks. Then the players know they are in no danger and just have to chip away at the monsters, expecting the big one behind the next tree.