Simplifying combat

[LadyLexi]

I'm having an issue simplifying combat for my party. Most of them deal minimal damage against undead (which is the current plot) but they have really high defenses so the undead rarely score hits and the party rarely fails saves. The issue is that combat drags out because of it. It takes the party's monk 3 rounds to slay a basic CR 1/2 zombie. The party is level 11 but their damage output resembles that of a 3-4 level group.

What can I do to make combat not drag on for hours while still keeping things epic?


On a complete side note, I received a warning from the moderators for unintentionally violating the rules. Yay! I feel like I belong. :-)

[Fates]

Well, you can always give them some good equipment to increase their offensive potential- that's a rather slippery slope, however.

[LadyLexi]

That's the thing... I have been dropping good equipment. They have good stuff. Undead just tend to have Damage reduction and high hit points. We have two casters, two tanks (each with ac 25+) and the monk. They should be fine, and they win, they just are very slow.

It happens with constructs too. Which are the main enemies of this campaign.

[Forbiddenwar]

I'm having an issue simplifying combat for my party. Most of them deal minimal damage against undead (which is the current plot) but they have really high defenses so the undead rarely score hits and the party rarely fails saves. The issue is that combat drags out because of it. It takes the party's monk 3 rounds to slay a basic CR 1/2 zombie. The party is level 11 but their damage output resembles that of a 3-4 level group.

What can I do to make combat not drag on for hours while still keeping things epic?


There's your problem and it sounds homebrewed. Not sure how it works they do 1 point of damage per hit? All rolls are 1? Unless I'm completely misunderstanding you.

Ideas: Don't use undead. Use of the environment to deal damage instead of themselves via traps, ledges, collapsible walls, etc. Have them just run away, zombies aren't that fast (unless they are fast zombies)

Edit: After rereading it, I wonder if you meant that the characters are not doing enough damage to undead because of their builds or something. In which case I have to go huh? Undead Damage reduction isn't that good. especially when most don't have it and those that do it is easyily bypassed. Zombies should be 1 hit kills at level 1-3. If that isn't happening I have to wonder how.

[LadyLexi]

No, it isn't home brewed. The big damage dealing character relies on critical hits. The second biggest hitter does lots of little damage. The monk's punches have no strength bonus, the cleric doesn't pick the right spells and the arcane caster focuses on non-damage spells. I didn't have much say in what they made for characters because I wanted them to play what they like.

I don't plan to send more undead in the future... But they're in the middle of a plot with them that is so heavily slowed down.

[Studoku]

Do any of the party have appropriate knowledge skills to "know" (ie have you tell them) how to get past the DR? Even monks have access to monk weapons to gain different types of damage; if you have access to magic, slashing and bludgeoning you can break most undead.

[Tvtyrant]

You could always modify everything to have high hit and low health. Almost like a template:

Minion Template:
Minion health: A minion has their HD score minimized to a single point per HD, plus extra health from constitution.
Minion Offense: A minion gains a bonus to hit equal to their HD.
Minion Saves: A minion takes a 1/2 HD penalty to their normal saves.

The result is that the minions are quicker to kill but they are also more capable of hitting your party. If it is hitting the enemy rather than damaging them that is the problem, lower the minions AC by 10 and remove the minion health modifier.

[Forbiddenwar]

No, it isn't home brewed. The big damage dealing character relies on critical hits. The second biggest hitter does lots of little damage. The monk's punches have no strength bonus, the cleric doesn't pick the right spells and the arcane caster focuses on non-damage spells. I didn't have much say in what they made for characters because I wanted them to play what they like.

I don't plan to send more undead in the future... But they're in the middle of a plot with them that is so heavily slowed down.

Ah. poor character design decisions. also 3.5.(this was fixed in Pathfinder) I think there is equipment that can allow critical hits against undead. The monk failed to take the necessary feats needed to play a monk like intuitive strike (+Wis to Dam) I still say, suggest how they might use the environment or give them better anti-undead tools.
Also clerics can deal massive damage to undead without preparing any spells. Spontaneous cure spells hurt undead. The cleric should be doing 3d8+11 damage a turn.

In fact, I can't understand how the group doesn't choose to take forever in each combat. Maybe they like it this way? If not, just suggest the wizard and cleric to step up and do their job.

[Kelb_Panthera]

A) define "good stuff," because I'm not seeing alot of high numbers on DR amongst undead

B) Are you sure you're not giving some of your undead DR they don't actually have, because I'm not seeing alot of undead with DR to begin with?

C) How little damage are we talking here? You've been somewhat vague. And why don't the beatsticks have PA.

[LadyLexi]

Inflict Neutral cleric, with low Cha. But yes, a cleric would be really good for this. The monk is a monk solely to be a drunken master. I advised my party on things to make better characters, they have what they have by choice. Its just a challenge for me as a DM to balance encounters and not just have dragons smush them.

[Andezzar]

I think there is equipment that can allow critical hits against undead.Yup, Deathstrike bracers and the greater true death crystal both in MIC. The former only works 3 times per day and the latter requires a +3 weapon, but does other things as well (+1d6 damage vs. undead and ghost touch)

[LadyLexi]

Kelb- They have magical gear appropriate for a lv 14 character.

Zombies have DR 5/slashing, Skeletons have 5/bludgeoning. This is often enough to turn a hit of 11 into 6.

The high hit for the party is 16 damage. This isn't good, but it is what is happening.

[Pigkappa]

Apply little changes to the monsters and things will work out.

Tvtyrant's suggestion is a little extreme IMO. Just give every monster -10 HP, +2 to hit, +2 damage.

[Forbiddenwar]

If damage reduction is a problem use undead that don't have DR.

The critical hitter should definitly buy equipment to let him crit undead. Also arrage them to buy (not find as their equipment is already beyond their level) other anti dead gear.

Also the cleric can buy equipment to boost his command undead. Even with low charisma he should have a few skeletons to do his bidding by now.

I think it is great they have a suboptimum build and you should encoarage ways they can work with it. And give them some traps they can trigger in undead faces. Or ledges they can push them off of. Nontypical battle strategies can make an epic battle any day of the week.

[Andezzar]

Zombies have DR 5/slashing, Skeletons have 5/bludgeoning. This is often enough to turn a hit of 11 into 6.

The high hit for the party is 16 damage. This isn't good, but it is what is happening.I guess the characters should invest in slashing and bludgeoning weapons then. There are some in each size category.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Kelb- They have magical gear appropriate for a lv 14 character.

Zombies have DR 5/slashing, Skeletons have 5/bludgeoning. This is often enough to turn a hit of 11 into 6.

The high hit for the party is 16 damage. This isn't good, but it is what is happening.

:smalleek: 16 at level 11? seriously? no wonder dr 5 is a problem.

You could allow the players to use their weapons as make-shift weapons of other types at the usual -4 non-proficiency penalty. A sword is perfectly capable of bludgeoning someone if you swing it right, but it'd probably do damage 1 die type smaller and only crit on a 20 (not that the crit difference means anything in this context).

Are the casters buffing at all? The extra attack from haste could help at least some.

Something's got to give though. Relying on baseline [w]+str+enhancement bonus damage isn't going to work anymore at this level.

[w] is an abbreviation I saw used in the 4e players handbook that represents the damage dice of the weapon a character is using. It's one of the only things I liked about 4e. That and they actually made sleep necessary.

[Lonely Tylenol]

You could use the 4e minion rules (all such minions have 1hp and just "die" when struck). While 3.5e is heavily combat-oriented, it is also possible to just give flavor descriptions of some of the fights--namely, the ones that were never meant to pose any real risk anyway (like a group of humanoid zombies). Neither of these is a real solution for the "boss fight" scenario, but those are usually MEANT to last longer; it's okay if it isn't. (More importantly, if the party's damage output is terrible, then a single big monster might actually survive long enough to be an epic threat; just don't surround him with minions to skew the action economy in the enemy's favor.)

The damage reduction of zombies and skeletons is ridiculously easy to overcome, and your party should only really be failing at it if they have cometely failed to adapt to any threat. The monk's unarmed strikes already deal damage as bludgeoning weapons, so he should already be dealing full damage to skeletons, but the feat Versatile Unarmed Strike would let them change their unarmed damage type to slashing for zombies if they wished. The crit-fisher and the plinker are probably already doing slashing damage (it's a fair conclusion to draw), so overcoming the damage reduction of skeletons should be as easy as "I look for anything within grabbing range that has a blunt end". A club (and, for that matter, a quarterstaff) costs 0gp, and are commonly described as wooden sticks picked off the ground (and those are easy to find), and even if you impose a -4 improvised weapons penalty, a level 11 party should be able to reliably hit a CR 1/2 skeleton (and if not, there is no saving them). Congratulations--your crit-fisher and plinker now deal full damage (but not critical hits) to skeletons.

As far as tactics to overcome other woes, that is also easily done with basic tactics not unseen in first-level adventurers. Suggest the crit-fisher pick up a greater truedeath crystal, or a wand of Gravestrike fitted into a wand chamber in their weapon. Suggest the wizard cast Enlarge Person on the monk--a fairly basic tactic they should be doing anyway. In fact, suggest the wizard cast Mass Enlarge Person, so everybody can join in on the fun! (It's just more important for the monk, as size increases are pretty much the only hope a monk has.) The cleric should either be able to turn undead or rebuke them (I know they have selected Inflict, but a neutral cleric worshipping a neutral deity still has a choice); either one should be trivializing every encounter against hordes of CR 1/2 zombies almost without fail.

If your party fails to adapt, and changing monsters is out of the question, you may have to question how the whole "survival of the fittest" concept fits into your whole undead-heavy campaign. I'm not saying that you should kill your players, but if they've leveled ten times and they haven't yet figured out to hit the bones with the blunt end and the meat sacks with the pointy end, you have to wonder how far they'd get if you just let it happen.

[Fates]

I would try throwing some different kinds of undead at them. Zombies and skeletons are boring for an 11th-level party anyway. Throw in some wights and ghouls/ghasts- no DR, but much better offensively. If you look around, you should be able to find some undead that will keep your party engaged, and make combat more interesting, as well as (hopefully) shorter.

[KnightOfV]

Your melee characters need to get some weapons that beat DR, like a nice magic quarterstaff for the monk. Maybe make them unique weapons that do an extra d6 to undead. A wand of scorching ray/fireball for your caster, or scrolls of Cure spells for the Cleric would aslo be a good way to nudge them into using more efficient tactics.

They can be given these weapons by an important NPC, or might find them on the corpses of some dead adventures before/after a major fight. It's great that you're encouraging your players to make their own builds and that no one is a crazy optimizer, but whenever this kind of thing happens in my games I try to change the treasure to help overcome the party weakness.

[KillianHawkeye]

If there's a level 11 Cleric in the party, why are they even fighting low level zombies? :smallconfused:

The Cleric should just turn/rebuke them and the battle is over.

[danzibr]

I've totally gotten blanked for accidents I made.

Anyways, I was in a group once where we took on a golem and had like... No way to fight it. It was terrible.

I'd also suggest fiddling with the stats a bit, but also throwing in other types of bad dudes. Even if it makes more sense to throw loads of undead at them from a plot point of view, it's more fun to spruce it up.

[Kelb_Panthera]

It occurs to me that if you're using cr 1/2 zombies and skellies, you're probably throwing a massive number of the buggers at them, yes?

You could gather them up into a mob as per the mob template in DMG2. That'd make it a single creature....... with...... 105hp......... Nevermind, bad idea.

[Wise Green Bean]

Weapons of Bane and Holy Weapons are nice things you could give them. Bane is +1 and Holy is +2. Slap an extra 2d6 damage on there, and if you give them the right sort it will bypass the relevant DR. Or stick it on a weapon with both weapon qualities(there's gotta be something with bludgeoning and slashing qualities). And of course, there's the king of anti-undead weapons, the disruption weapon. Save or die for all undead hit by it. Again, +2. You could find them off the bodies of a dead adventuring party or something, it would be quite reasonable for them to be prepared if they knew they were going into undead infested territory. Pass out any one or two of those weapons and ass will begin to be kicked in short order.

[ahenobarbi]

Minion Template:
Minion health: A minion has their HD score minimized to a single point per HD, plus extra health from constitution.

You do know that'd make undead drop in 1 hit basically?

Do you know if they want to be effective in fighting? If they do maybe you should give them a little more motivation to become more effective.

My group (I'm a player) was horrible at fighting for some time. Mostly because we used horrible tactics. It changed very fast after 3 (of 4) characters almost died fighting mimic. It should have been an easy but out fighter-y guys decided to hug it. Then DM did a bit talking (you know it was easy for you to immobilize it and kill it from range, guys think what you do!).

Maybe something similar would work for your group? Throw an encounter at them that should be easy (but not trivial) and if they make poor decisions it will be hard (avoid TPK though). Talk to them that they could have handled this easily.

[Tvtyrant]

You do know that'd make undead drop in 1 hit basically?

Do you know if they want to be effective in fighting? If they do maybe you should give them a little more motivation to become more effective.

My group (I'm a player) was horrible at fighting for some time. Mostly because we used horrible tactics. It changed very fast after 3 (of 4) characters almost died fighting mimic. It should have been an easy but out fighter-y guys decided to hug it. Then DM did a bit talking (you know it was easy for you to immobilize it and kill it from range, guys think what you do!).

Maybe something similar would work for your group? Throw an encounter at them that should be easy (but not trivial) and if they make poor decisions it will be hard (avoid TPK though). Talk to them that they could have handled this easily.

Yeah, which would speed up combat tremendously. The undead are much more likely to hit now, but also much more likely to die. I also pointed out that if it is the skellies AC that is the problem to lower their AC instead of their HP.

[Dusk Eclipse]

I am still confused on how the hell your players are only dealing 11ish points of damage at level 11...

A standard barbarian 1 with 18 str and a two handed weapon deals more damage, say our barb 1 is wielding a greatsword which is 2d6 so average 7 points + 6 ( 1.5 * 4) which is an average of 13 points... at level 1. Now lets add rage which would send our str bonus to 22, now we are dealing 2d6 (7 average)+ 9... 16 ish damage regularly. Nevermind other bonuses such as higher str, magic items, etc (and I am not even using POWER ATTACK!!!)

[Yora]

It all sounds to me like there is something wrong with how the rules are used. Even if you intentionally shot yourself in the foot, you can't get 11th level characters that are so weak.

[zlefin]

just give them all +1 holy/undead bane weapons; the +3 + 4d6 boost to damage should make it easy enough to one-hit them.
aside frmo that; i'd like to see a breakdown of what they have and what they're doing; as it seems hard to have damage that low at level 11. i concur with the others that there may be some sort of rules error going on.

edit: or if you decide to just skip past the undead part of the plot; bring in a turning-optimized radiant servant of pelor and just obliterate all the undead in their path.

[Studoku]

It all sounds to me like there is something wrong with how the rules are used. Even if you intentionally shot yourself in the foot, you can't get 11th level characters that are so weak.

This looks likely.

Is there any chance you could post your players' character sheets so we can tell if this is the case? If not, I'd like to see just how they've managed to make characters that weak at 11th level.

[LadyLexi]

I sent 10 zombies 1/2 CR. With that I sent a few unique "boss" zombies from LM and sort of had the zombies be fancy speed bumps. The arcane caster(bard) doesn't have enlarge person. The Monk has a template and isn't humanoid anyway.

I think the big problem is they have no tactics. We had a barbarian who died because he charged into a battle that took the other characters 4 turns to get to because it required a climb check or to go the wide way around. I set it up for them to use to their advantage, they had the drop on their enemies and turned the situation into a drawback.

Ultimately the problem might lie with the lack of thought about actions. They know I don't want to kill them.

I was looking for more mechanical things I could to to speed up my side of the turns. 10 zombie rolls goes quick but the special zombies can take 30 seconds to figure out and it can slow things down.

The cleric... is really really good at rolling bad. More 1's than the rest of the group gets combined. I sometimes let him reroll, just out of pity. This means he epicly fails most rebuke type checks. No fixing that.

Thank you for all the advice everyone

[LadyLexi]

Here is one rough character (I don't hold on to them, and they level between sessions)
11 knight
15 Str
12 Dex (I think)
16 Con

+2 Keen Great scimitar
32 AC (I don't recall the breakdown)
90ish HP

[Dusk Eclipse]

According to this (http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/) encounter calculator, your 10 zomibies are a CR 5 encounter... which a party of level 11 should steamroll , hell they are so strong that they aren't supposed to get XP from said encounter.

I'll ask again, can we get a snapshot or something about the mechanical aspect of the characters? As I proved earlier even a level 1 character can deal 11 points of damage. I still don't understand how level 11 character (virtual demigods by commoner standards) can be so weak.

[Kelb_Panthera]

It all sounds to me like there is something wrong with how the rules are used. Even if you intentionally shot yourself in the foot, you can't get 11th level characters that are so weak.

Sure you can. It shows a lack of system mastery, to be sure, but it is very much possible.

That a character has 18 str is a bold assumption. New players and players that don't optimize tend to spread their stats out more. A 15 or 16 to start is more likely. At level 11 that could be 17 +2 for gauntlets of ogre power makes 19 That's only a +4 bonus. If they're also swinging a one-handed weapon because they went sword and board you could very easily get [w]+4. A +2 or +3 weapon doesn't add much either. So let's say a long-sword and you get 1d8+4+3 for an average of 11.5 at level 11, assuming that the character is melee focused and doesn't have rage.

Unless you have a source of bonus damage, such as power attack, sneak attack, or weapon special qualities, damage grows very slowly if at all with level. It's very much possible to have a 20th level character doing less than 20 damage with a melee weapon.