PDA

View Full Version : 4e play speed problems



Skrizzy
2010-02-11, 12:56 PM
So I am involved with a 6 person group for 4e. The problem I have is that each time we have a combat encounter it takes the better part of two hours to finish it. Is this supposed to be 4e or is this the party being slow? If it is the party being slow, how can I go about fixing it?

Kylarra
2010-02-11, 12:59 PM
Use power cards that have pre-printed the math out already, and roll both damage dice and to-hit dice at the same time. That'll expedite matters a little bit.

Altima
2010-02-11, 01:00 PM
Perhaps you could descibe a typical combat session? Include how you build monsters and special events, if any, you're doing.

But to answer, yes, two-hour combats are atypical of most of 4e, even in boss-encounters.

Sipex
2010-02-11, 01:07 PM
Get an 'hour' glass, but...for measuring a minute or 30 seconds. We got ours from a scattegories game.

Everytime someone's turn comes up they have 30 seconds (1 minute...group decision) to decide what to do and announce it. I found this sped up our battles immensely.

Skrizzy
2010-02-11, 01:08 PM
Perhaps you could descibe a typical combat session? Include how you build monsters and special events, if any, you're doing.

But to answer, yes, two-hour combats are atypical of most of 4e, even in boss-encounters.

I am not doing the building, my roommate/gm does that. He is using DDI tools to build every encounter. What I know about it is that he uses the encounter builder to build medium level encounters.

In general anything special he does seems to go faster, we had an arena tournament type thing that each fight only took 45 minutes, which was a lot more reasonable to me.

I like the roll at the same time advice. We already use the DDI character builder for each character and have the power cards from that.

Altima
2010-02-11, 01:18 PM
Well, describe a typical combat, then.

I assume he's using the monster builder from DDI? And he is using a good mix of brutes, minions, solos, and the like?

At what level is your party? What characters? Are you simply not putting out enough damage? Are you missing often?

valadil
2010-02-11, 01:34 PM
When you call initiative, also call out who is on deck. That player should start thinking about his next turn so that when it comes around he's already decided what to do. This is the single biggest speed boost I've seen for combats.

Does anyone have suggestions for the GM's side of things? I ran my first 4e session last week, and found that I was the bottleneck in our combat. I even started skipping some enemy turns just to speed it up a bit.

My problem is that I was overwhelmed by text. I was constantly reading through the monsters to figure out what they should do. And yes, I had read them ahead of time, but there was more info than I cared to keep track of. Tracking damage on another page didn't help either. Maybe next time I should stop worrying about being green and print out copies of my enemies so I don't mind writing on them?

I realize that I'm new to 4e, but I've never had this problem in any other system.

rayne_dragon
2010-02-11, 01:35 PM
Actually, for a while it was typical that our party would take around 2 hours for a regular fight - we have six players, 2 of them kinda new to 4e, our DM likes to have us face a large number of foes, we usually have one or two NPCs with us and a number of people like to use complicated ongoing effects. We've gotten better at it, but here's some things I've found helped.

- make sure everyone knows their character's powers and feats
- try to roll all your dice together. It's easy to roll attack and damage together if you only have one target, if you often attack multiple foes, get lots of differently coloured dice.
- think about your action while other players take theirs
- have the dm limit the time each person has to think about their actions
- having monsters run away or surrender when the fight looks bad can be realistic and end the fight sooner

I've also heard halving monster's hp and doubling their damage is one way to help fix combat speed. You can also try throwing in higher level minions if the party is low on autodamage abilities. They die quickly, but can still present something of a challenge because of high defences.

Sipex
2010-02-11, 01:43 PM
When you call initiative, also call out who is on deck. That player should start thinking about his next turn so that when it comes around he's already decided what to do. This is the single biggest speed boost I've seen for combats.

Does anyone have suggestions for the GM's side of things? I ran my first 4e session last week, and found that I was the bottleneck in our combat. I even started skipping some enemy turns just to speed it up a bit.

My problem is that I was overwhelmed by text. I was constantly reading through the monsters to figure out what they should do. And yes, I had read them ahead of time, but there was more info than I cared to keep track of. Tracking damage on another page didn't help either. Maybe next time I should stop worrying about being green and print out copies of my enemies so I don't mind writing on them?

I realize that I'm new to 4e, but I've never had this problem in any other system.

I can help here.

1) Roll ahead of time. This can be done one of two ways.
- Before the session. Roll each attack damage several times and record them something like this:
Goblin Sharpshooter (x3)
Crossbow +17 vs AC, 10 damage
Crossbow +11 vs AC, 8 damage
Crossbow MISS (+10) vs AC, 11 damage
Crossbow CRIT (+29) vs AC, FULL damage (10)

All the rolls are still recorded even though one is a crit and one is a miss. In case of intervention of monster or PC powers.

- During players turns. If you use init cards for your monsters you can write them down on the cards.

2) Play similar monsters on the same initiative. Got 3 goblin sharpshooters? They all go at once.

3) Roll monster init before session and have players roll init at the start of the session. This keeps combat from becoming "You see X, everyone roll for initiative." *waiting...waiting...waiting* "What's my init bonus?"

When battle finishes have them roll again.

4) Make cards for monsters if they're on seperate pages. Index cards work well for this, you just briefly record HP, Bloodied value, attacks, defenses.

Mordokai
2010-02-11, 01:46 PM
- make sure everyone knows their character's powers and feats

This plays a huge role. It slows everything for to a crawl when the party wizard takes up ten minutes of time to figure out what his power does. And then he remembers he has the enlarge feat and he makes that much damage and imposes penalties... yeah, knowing powers can be a big deal. Too bad certain people in our group haven't figured that out already.

Beyond a certain point when you know it's game over for monsters, you'd do wise to just end the encounter. When the brute is out of minions for example, it does you little good to prolong the encounter for another half an hour that would take the party to take him down. When you know the players have won just end the fight. Perhaps make the defenders or the entire party pay another healing surge, to simulate that the fight happened, but there's no need to actually play it out to the end.

Hal
2010-02-11, 01:51 PM
Just to add in here, we had a big slowdown with people spending quite a bit of time deciding which power to use on their turn, adding up bonuses, figuring out how to squeeze every last ounce of advantage from their turn.

This was partially relieved when we all got the character builder and had that stuff pre-calculated for us, when we'd all played our characters long enough that we knew which powers to use when, and when we started planning our next turn during everyone else's turn.

An additional solution our DM implemented was a penalty to math fixes: You had until the next person started their turn to correct any math/power errors you made during your turn. Afterwards, you could still "go back" and correct it (either by adding in damage or replaying your turn due to a power not working the way you thought it did), but it would cost you cumulative healing surges each time (that is, first time was 1 surge, second time was 2 surges, etc.).

He doesn't have to break that rule out too often, but it's an effective incentive to know your stuff and make decisions quickly.

Altima
2010-02-11, 02:09 PM
- having monsters run away or surrender when the fight looks bad can be realistic and end the fight sooner

This is also highly useful. I can't tell you how many last-standing goblins I've had that have shifted out of combat, then used their standard action to run like hell.

Also, beware minion-spam, as they are immune to the damage-on-miss effect of most powers (though they still die if they take damage from a non-attack roll source like cleave).

Choco
2010-02-11, 02:26 PM
It slows everything for to a crawl when the party wizard takes up ten minutes of time to figure out what his power does. And then he remembers he has the enlarge feat and he makes that much damage and imposes penalties... yeah, knowing powers can be a big deal. Too bad certain people in our group haven't figured that out already.

This is my 4e groups biggest problem by far when it comes to slow combats. We moved up from 3.5 to 4 just to make it easier for the people who "dont have the time to dig through all the books and learn the system". Well as it turns out, they apparently don't have the time to even learn what the 8-ish powers they currently have in 4e do.

By the way, these are people who admit to surfing the web and/or chatting on IRC for 4+ hours a day and consider that being "busy", too busy to spend 10 minutes a week refreshing what their characters can do (yes, they are all adults...). Oh well, I just make their characters for them based off of a general description of the character they want and mark their power index cards with keywords like "Area attack", "Melee single target", "Marks target", "Status effect" etc. and the games go fine and everyone seems to have fun. Just make sure not to let people like that play the leader, that one role at least has to know how to play their part (funny enough, the one guy in the group that is working 2 jobs and has a family has the time to learn the system and play leader effectively while the single internet-surfers dont :smallsigh:).

TheEmerged
2010-02-11, 02:30 PM
I DM a five-player group -- where two of the players are under the age of 8 and one is a 30+ year veteran of RPGs (like myself). A standard at-level, medium strength combat typically takes 45-60 minutes including time to draw out the area on the mat. I've seen it go as low as 30 minutes.

1> Power Cards, Power Cards, Power Cards! I can't stress this one enough. I print them out with the standard benefits including feats (so instead of reading Str vs AC, for example, they read +9 vs AC). This takes a non-trivial amount of time of preparation (mostly formating the cards, because the otherwise excellent character tool from DDI does not include feats on the cards). I recommend even doing this with the move actions and Second Wind until the players get used to it.

2> Egg timer. I don't actually use this with my current group (I mentioned two of them being underaged, yes?) but I've used this before to great effect. "If you aren't done when it is, you're making a basic attack against the nearest enemy."

3> Presheeting. This is the DM version of power cards. At first, some of the more veteran players didn't like the idea of initiative already being rolled for them -- but the amount of time it saves me at the table quickly proved to be worth it. We actually use a laptop & Excel these days (so I can cut/paste to reflect order changes).

4> Preplanned Strategy for the NPC's. Another one for the DM. Hey, it's an excuse to use my old flowchart diagrams :smallbiggrin: Having initiative already determine makes this a bit easier.

Swordgleam
2010-02-11, 02:39 PM
All the advice above is pretty good. One other thing I've seen some 4e DMs do to speed up encounters is to halve monster HP and increase their damage output. So they deal roughly the same amount of damage over the course of a fight and are thus just as threatening as before, it's just that the fight doesn't last nearly as long.

Sipex
2010-02-11, 02:41 PM
All the advice above is pretty good. One other thing I've seen some 4e DMs do to speed up encounters is to halve monster HP and increase their damage output. So they deal roughly the same amount of damage over the course of a fight and are thus just as threatening as before, it's just that the fight doesn't last nearly as long.

I might start doing this. It sounds viable. I know my players always groan as they whittle down monster HP.

"Is it dead yet? How about now? NOW?!"

It's slightly annoying but I kind of see their point.

The J Pizzel
2010-02-11, 03:05 PM
I'll chime in!! I run a 5 (sometimes 6) man group and we've learned some nifty tricks that help. A typical skirmish (random encounter, standard dungeon room, bar brawl) only last us about 30 minutes now, where it used to last an hour. A big nasty (dragon and cohorts, lich and legion of undead) only lasts about an hour tops. It used to last half the damn night. Here's some pointers (obviously, I'm echoing some previous posts)

-a physical timer for peoples rounds. We use a little stop watch that is set on 20 seconds. It seems short, but trust me, sitting there staring at a player for 20 seconds is a long time. All I do is hit "start" for each person and it dings at 20 sec. If you haven't thought of anything, I'll allow a basic ranged or melee. If no one is in range....oh well.

-same as above for 2 minutes for party planning when time allows for it in game. In an attempt to seem realistic, if the dragon comes crashing down in town square, you don't have time to plan, so we straight up start combat. If, for whatever reason in game there is time to plan, I'll allow 2 minutes.

-pre-rolled initiatives for at least the monstors. My players still like rolling init before each encounter, so I'm cool with that. But they don't mind me rolling it for my monstors ahead of time. Speeds things up a lot.

-initiative list in an visible place where everyone can see. Also, calling who's on deck is a huge bonus.

-attack and damage together. No need explaining here.

-assistant DM. If you have a player who is also an occasional DM, have him help you. He can easily remind you of who's marked, stunned, slowed, weakened, etc.

-ask players to take an hour before they come to the session to read the status effects page. It's one page on the PHB that lists all the status effects.

-something we just started, take an index card and bend it into an upside down V, so it sits up like a tent. Write the players names on the cards and line them on the side of the battle mat for initiative. Next, cut and print on little bitty colored sheets of paper and the different status effects and bend them in a similar manner. Now, if someone is stunned, simply put that effect on that person card. Similarly, get some really small womens hair ties or something small and round. Red means bloodied, black means marked, etc. and put them on the mini. Works like a champ.

I'm sure there's more. I'll add them later.

Skrizzy
2010-02-11, 03:17 PM
Well, describe a typical combat, then.

I assume he's using the monster builder from DDI? And he is using a good mix of brutes, minions, solos, and the like?

At what level is your party? What characters? Are you simply not putting out enough damage? Are you missing often?

Classes in play:
Warden
Barbarian
Wizard
Warlock
Shaman
Cleric

The Warden and the Barbarian both have their next moves planned out, turns last about 6 seconds unless they ask what the DM allows. The wizard is probably the newest player, and likes to drop aoes on as many targets as possible. The cleric and the Shaman start their turn off with "anybody need healing" then make attacks if its a no. Warlock generally goes through his turns rather quickly.

On average we hit on 9 and up. We generally use tactics and time our combo's to get the biggest bang.

Thinking more in depth about what people have been saying, a big chunk of the problem seems to be the wizard taking time trying to figure out the optimal aoe and location. So the idea of on deck seems like it may help there.

Right now the party is between 6 and 7, since people with full attendance should be at lvl seven and the rest at 6. This fight speed problem has existed since about 3.

The only player not using DDI is the barbarian, and he is just as fed up with this as I am.

The DM does end fights when its a for sure victory.

Anything else that you would like to know?

As for everybody suggesting DM side stuff, I will bring it up to him. Thanks for all the input.


Edit: I will be playing again this Sunday, I bring this advice to the group and let you know how things go. Till then I will take all the advice I can get.

TheOOB
2010-02-11, 03:17 PM
Most of what people have mentioned is pretty good advice. Sometimes the trick is just finding where all your time goes and targeting that problem.

For example I had one game where everyone on average took maybe 30 seconds for their turn, but one player took 2-3 minutes every turn, sometimes longer. In his case it wasn't not understanding his powers, but that he tactically appraised the battle on his turn, studying the map, asking questions about hp and stuff. What he did was text on his phone between turns, and figured out his action on his turn.

What you need to have players do is figure out their actions before their turn, barring a dramatic change in the tides of battle right before a characters init count(in which case it's understandable for players to spend some time thinking), a player should always know what they are going to do when their turn comes up. Part of this is player communication. If your wizard wants to unleash a fireball, they should say something the previous turn, then everyone knows to a)get out of the way, and b)give the wizard attack bonuses. If a player is injured, have them ask to get a healing word next turn instead of the cleric having to ask everyone if anyone needs any healing when their turn comes up.

Artanis
2010-02-11, 03:24 PM
Classes in play:
Warden
Barbarian
Wizard
Warlock
Shaman
Cleric

That ain't a whole lot of DPR. Warlocks are one of the lower-DPR Strikers, and there isn't a lot of secondary Strikers among the other four.

Swordgleam
2010-02-11, 03:33 PM
Next, cut and print on little bitty colored sheets of paper and the different status effects and bend them in a similar manner. Now, if someone is stunned, simply put that effect on that person card. Similarly, get some really small womens hair ties or something small and round. Red means bloodied, black means marked, etc. and put them on the mini. Works like a champ.

We do something similar. I have a bunch of 1" mini poker chips in different colors, and put them under minis. Red for bloodied, orange for ongoing damage, green for less common status effects (dazed, slowed, etc), blue for marked, yellow for cursed/quarried, white for buffed. The players really like watching monster minis towering on top of a huge stack of conditions and debuffs.

Yakk
2010-02-11, 03:39 PM
Classes in play:
Warden
Barbarian
Wizard
Warlock
Shaman
Cleric

The Warden and the Barbarian both have their next moves planned out, turns last about 6 seconds unless they ask what the DM allows. The wizard is probably the newest player, and likes to drop aoes on as many targets as possible. The cleric and the Shaman start their turn off with "anybody need healing" then make attacks if its a no. Warlock generally goes through his turns rather quickly.
It is better to deal 20 damage in 10 seconds than 23 damage 2 minutes later.

Anyone need healing ... healing can usually be done at the same time. You could also use the whiteboard HP trick. (fully visible HP for all players)

Texting during combat, even when it isn't your turn, is rude.

You can also have the "you must have your standard action power card picked before your turn starts" rule.

Swordgleam
2010-02-11, 03:54 PM
Texting during combat, even when it isn't your turn, is rude.


This. I'm pretty sure this is your major problem. Texting during a game is bad. Not realizing that it's a good idea to plan out your turn beforehand is bad. Not planning out your turn because you're texting, especially in a game where everyone else is engaged and on top of things?

Since this guy is a new player, maybe he just doesn't get it. I'd take him aside and explain that when you game, you game, and if everyone else is paying attention, you should be, too.

valadil
2010-02-11, 04:17 PM
For example I had one game where everyone on average took maybe 30 seconds for their turn, but one player took 2-3 minutes every turn, sometimes longer. In his case it wasn't not understanding his powers, but that he tactically appraised the battle on his turn, studying the map, asking questions about hp and stuff. What he did was text on his phone between turns, and figured out his action on his turn.


This is solved by calling out the player who is on deck. It gives him a round to evaluate. Some players need this called out, others don't.

Shardan
2010-02-11, 06:09 PM
I remember being the new guy. and I made the bad decision to play a class that is pretty complicated. Shaman. My turns took ages the first few sessions between mis-remembering exactly what happened and simply not knowing the rules well.

In the end I got better, but i could tell the frustration from the other players...

(of course our group tends to have random 20 minute BS outbreaks anyway so hour+ encounters were normal anyway)

BobTheDog
2010-02-11, 06:40 PM
I remember being the new guy. and I made the bad decision to play a class that is pretty complicated. Shaman. My turns took ages the first few sessions between mis-remembering exactly what happened and simply not knowing the rules well.

In the end I got better, but i could tell the frustration from the other players...

(of course our group tends to have random 20 minute BS outbreaks anyway so hour+ encounters were normal anyway)

This is something that most people overlook. How is turn-to-turn conducted? Is it:

"you go"
*turn*
"Now you"
*turn*
"now monster"
*turn*

or

"man, that was awesome!"
"hell yeah! what was that?"
"my new encounter power, Coolest Strike Ever. came out on Dragon and I retrained last level up"
"Cool, did you see that article on Kickass Druids? I so wanna play a druid now... Anyway, whose turn is it?"
"Joe's"
*turn*
"Woot, that'll teach him to mark me!"
"Yeah! another one down! Is the other one bloodied?"
"Lemme see... Nope, that one's not bloodied. This one is."
"Okay, I'll keep that in mind."
"Okay Bob, you're up"
*turn*

It's not a bad thing to have chit-chat going on, specially if it's "related" to the game at hand (and not about superbowl or what have you), but most people don't realize how much time it can add up to.

I'm starting to use the Init cards shown on that "Five DMs" thing on WOTC site (first episode). Works nice to keep track of init and conditions. Saves some time and backtracking ("oh, did you remember to take 5 fire damage and roll the save?").

RebelRogue
2010-02-11, 07:19 PM
I'm currently playing in a six man group as well, and even though we're pretty lighthearted and people crack jokes all the time, our battles run pretty much like clockwork. We're all experienced players and we've known each other for some years. Even though some of the others have played relatively little 4e, it helps that two of us have DMed in the system at work: rules questions are answered quickly and cleanly (most of the time).

Galdor Miriel
2010-02-11, 07:53 PM
One thing we do in our game is go with average dice rounded up damage. Before the game we write down our damaga and our crit damage for each power, so there is no figuring it out on your turn, its easy.

For example my cleric with a fullblade does

7 (1W) + 7 (str) + 3(enh) + 2(feat) = 19 damage with an at will
and.\


12(1W) + 7(str) + 3(enh) + 2 (feat) + 12(crit dice) + 7(critical weapon) = 43 damage with a critical.


It takes 2 minutes to do all your powers and it speeds up play a lot. We all also use half monster hp with higher damage. We do not use an eggtimer because by speeding up the other stuff we actually have time to come up with cool strategies and interesting ideas without making the combat overly long.