D&D Combat Mid-Mortem.

[alexandraerin]

I'm going to post the transcript from last night's session later... I want to be wide awake when I use search-and-replace to format it, so I don't end up with weird errors like I did last time when I threw it up more or less immediately.

A single combat round went slower this time than it during the test. A lot of that was me. I think in retrospect I probably should have broken the session off at 11 instead of plowing on, because my brain does get fatigued and that makes it hard to do the spatial reasoning stuff. At the very end I almost skipped one player's turn and also forgot the fact that you can't take actions after a charge.

I think part of the slowness was also the battlefield... I was experimenting with adding difficult terrain, and the way I did it was describing the bottom of the quarry as being full of difficult terrain that would make movement take longer (because you'd have to go around it or through it, with a net effect either way of taking extra actions to get anywhere). Not very exciting in excecution. By the time we got to the end of the round I'd stopped penalizing movement, and I'm not going to do that when we pick it up next week.

I think difficult terrain can have a use in an ACME game, but it's got to be a relatively concrete thing... a big patch of it you could use to dissuade a shifty monster's chosen tactics, or that is on a direct line between you and some enemy archers. It has to be placed deliberately, in other words, so that it can have a deliberate impact. Otherwise it's just "movement takes twice as long", which makes the first round a wash.

The other thing I learned is that the halve monsters HP/double up their attacks thing might make the fights go quicker but it can also prevent any of the individual monsters from sticking around long enough to show what they can really do. Since I'm making a point of making each NPC in a fight distinct from each other (Goblin circus performers in the test, elemental animals in this session) to make position tracking easier, this can be a bad thing because each one's got some interesting tricks to show off and the fight can lose something based on which ones drop in the first round.

So instead of double attacks and halve HP, I think I'm going to leave their HP alone. This will mean that the typical monster is between a standard an elite, which means I'll be splitting the difference on experience. This will result in fewer opponents in a standard fight, which is something I want to do anyway, and one of the reasons every fight has at least one elite in it.

I'm also thinking that since the players end up waiting for their turns, I'm going to make "intro text" for each fight that I can post here giving a better description of the foes they're facing and better hints about their capabilities (who looks fast, who looks tough, etc.) I generally favor giving more information over less, but trying to put it into a scrolling Skype window can be tough.

Comments

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Just to toss in something from my perspective as a Leader in the group, the half hp/double damage situation also made things extremely complex in terms of healing. Because our capabilities for healing haven't doubled as well, it becomes far more important to ensure that the squishy characters are protected, the injured ones are healed very quickly, and enemies are eliminated as fast as possible.

If for whatever reason we can't mitigate the amount of damage coming in under the 1/2 hp x2 damage setup, we're in a world of hurt very quickly. Bad dice, Leaders being unable to provide healing, or simply being unlucky or uncoordinated could cause us to lose heroes at a rapid rate. This becomes even more the case if you start factoring in things like status effects that limit a Leader's ability to heal, monsters that can hurt multiple heroes, and monster types that are already geared heavily in favor of damage output.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

This would be why I doubled attacks, not damage... the first time I read someone describing 1/2 HP/double damage that occurred to me. The monsters you're fighting are actually doing default damage for MM3 monsters, and in some cases they have had those numbers tweaked downwards. Their increased damage capacity comes from the ability to attack two different targets in a single turn.

The fire snake spit fire at someone and then slammed Spectre for ongoing fire damage. The mud spider spat a web at Lady Scarlet and then tried to bite Spectre. The storm fist is a slight exception, in that its grab attack did massive damage to a single target, but on subsequent turns it would have been doing ongoing damage to one target and slam damage (from a weaker attack than its grab) to another target.

You've had two party members bloodied, and both of them pretty badly, but in a nine person party with three full Leaders that's not exactly terrible. One of them was a squishy ranged fighter with the misfortune of being at ground zero of the monsters' appearance [edit to add] and also voluntarily took part of Spectre's blast to the face. The other one chose to free himself from the storm fist the hard way instead of majestic wording (it's a daily for him) himself out of its grasp.

That's not to say it doesn't change things... even with the attacks being spread out, there will be more healing to do in a shorter amount of time, but I think the rate at which people are bloodied has more to do with the MM3 math changes than with the double attacks. The damage figures were upped in that book specifically to deal with the issue of battles where nobody was ever knocked unconscious or in danger of being so.

Considering the rest of the party's barely scratched and there are six Leader healing surge powers left, I think you're doing alright.

I mean, the guy who's knocked on his back and on fire is still at +3 HP over maximum.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Ah, should've known. You're usually two steps ahead of me when it comes to these sorts of things.

[downeymb.livejournal.com]

Another option you could take is to raise their level in terms of offensive capability and lower their level in defensive capability. So you'll get monsters with a little more damage and who hit a little more often, but they also can't take quite as much and are hit more often. Maybe a +2 levels for damage and to hit and -2 levels for defenses and hp? I'm sure experimenting will find a comfortable and appropriate level.

You'll still speed up combat a little bit but not at the cost of disproportionate offensive damage. And the monsters will still be able to stick around long enough to do something cool and interesting.