|
Post by Finarvyn on Jan 19, 2021 15:07:35 GMT -6
Reading Jon's The Elusive Shift got me thinking about my current 5E game and why it is so much slower than OD&D or C&C. With this in mind, I'm going to look at 5E from the lens of how to simplify and pick up the pace.
I'm not looking to write a "new" game system, but I am looking around at Dungeonesque and Into the Unknown and some other stuff like that. I'm willing to keep all of the classes and races in the PHB and other books. I'm willing to give players more choices than OD&D allows. I just need to brainstorm about how to make the game more "role" and less "roll."
So far, I have a couple of things I feel like I want to "fix" in my home game.
(1) 5E has too many hit points. Both characters and monsters. Old zombies were 1/2 hit die, or something like that, and 5E zombies are around 20 HP each. The end result is a slog fest where simple encounters take forever. I figure if I trim down character HP, I can start pulling monsters from my AD&D Monster Manual again.
(2) Skills are driving me nuts. Lots of time with players gazing at character sheets trying to decide who should try to persuade the NPC, who should recall Arcana knowledge, or whatever. I'm thinking of making a list of powers by class as per C&C and defaulting to stat checks. Proficient characters can have advantage.
Any other thoughts? What are the big factors that slow down your 5E?
|
|
|
Post by hamurai on Jan 19, 2021 23:55:51 GMT -6
Dungeonesque is just the Basic Rules reformatted, isn't it? Into the Unknown is one of my personal favourites. It does a really good job at B/X-ing 5E. Our game is mostly slowed down by unexperienced players, really. We just started a new campaign with new characters and it takes folks to adjust to the new classes' abilities. Lots of looking stuff up, but that fades with (player) experience over time. We didn't have that problem in our last campaign past the first 3 levels (which do come rather quickly in 5E). Speeding this up would only be possible by taking away class abilities, which will mess up too much other stuff (read: balance). Regarding your ideas: (1) That's probably the easiest and best house rule to make. Drop the HD to what they were in older editions and you're good to go on using your old Monster Manuals, modules etc. without converting anything. To speed things up you might want to leave the damage values as they are in 5E? Spells will become more powerful, though, especially cantrips. (2) Freely giving out Inspiration for good ideas might be a fix, so that everyone has that "1 roll with advantage" chip ready for skill checks, too. So they don't feel like they have to hold onto it in case a saving throw comes up. If you use stat checks and grant advantage on proficiency, you'll still have those characters do the checks who have the better chances. That's probably always the case as long as anyone gets any bonuses on the check. But I grant you that using stat checks will speed up the process of selecting the character as they don't have to go through the entire skill list. I've toyed with the idea of making stat checks 1d6-based*, by dividing the stat by 4, rounding fractions under .5 down. That way, "skills" will cap at 5-in-6. Class-relevant actions could still get advantage and you roll 2d6, picking the best result. Looking at what you're trying to do, having smaller granularity means more equal chances, means more people would be available to engage. Of course, granting class-"skills" advantage will mean that the specific classes will still be favoured, but that's a natural thing, in my opinion. That's even the case in my OD&D games, where I usually assume the cleric or magic-user will be better with words than the fighter, especially in codified social encounters like at court. Another idea is using "passive" skills for most things you don't want to roll for. Passive Perception is already a thing, which is 10 + Perception skill bonus. You can easily treat any skill like that for non-combat skill checks in save environment. "Taking 10", as it's also sometimes called, will speed things up as there's no dice rolling, so everyone can just state their number and be done with it. If you ditch the skill system entirely, you can just use the stat bonuses +10. Getting rid of skills and proficiency will mean you "rob" the players of their +2 bonus at level 1 for proficient skills, but classes still get this bonus for their saving throws - so it might be an idea to actually roll ability saving throws instead of stat checks when substituting skills. The saving throw proficiencies are tailored to the classes and correspond with the areas of expertise they'd be more experienced in. *Edit: You could also go the Call of Cthulhu 7E route and multiply by 5 and use %dice, but that'll not solve your problem, I guess Just some mathematics thrown in here.
|
|
|
Post by Finarvyn on Jan 20, 2021 5:32:14 GMT -6
Great thoughts there!
--> I was thinking of reducing damage dice for cantrips to d6 and maybe lowering them for regular spells (d10 becomes d8, d8 becomes d6, etc) or maybe leaving damage alone. Combat is more deadly if damage stays high.
--> I've been experimenting with Jason Vey's uses of inspiration from Amazing Adventures, where you have a larger list of what that inspiration chip can do. Also, allowing characters to have more than one.
--> I like your d6 check idea. I'll have to ponder this further.
--> When I said "stat check" I think I was actually intending to use "saving throws."
|
|
|
Post by hamurai on Jan 20, 2021 6:11:13 GMT -6
Glad you like 'em! --> I was thinking of reducing damage dice for cantrips to d6 and maybe lowering them for regular spells (d10 becomes d8, d8 becomes d6, etc) or maybe leaving damage alone. Combat is more deadly if damage stays high. Iirc, there are no cantrips with d4 damage, so that'd work. Still, speeding things up would favour deadlier combat, and therefore the original 5E damage values. Also, you'd have less work re-working the spell section. --> I've been experimenting with Jason Vey's uses of inspiration from Amazing Adventures, where you have a larger list of what that inspiration chip can do. Also, allowing characters to have more than one. Yeah, I have AA 5E, too. Good stuff! That might also be a good house rule, yes. --> I like your d6 check idea. I'll have to ponder this further. Let me know what comes to your mind! I've been arguing with myself over the pros and cons for a while now --> When I said "stat check" I think I was actually intending to use "saving throws." *thumbs up*
|
|
|
Post by Finarvyn on Jan 20, 2021 9:05:31 GMT -6
--> I was thinking of reducing damage dice for cantrips to d6 and maybe lowering them for regular spells (d10 becomes d8, d8 becomes d6, etc) or maybe leaving damage alone. Combat is more deadly if damage stays high. Iirc, there are no cantrips with d4 damage, so that'd work. Still, speeding things up would favour deadlier combat, and therefore the original 5E damage values. Also, you'd have less work re-working the spell section. I like the idea of not reworking damage (spells or weapons or whatever) but in that case I need to be careful about taking monsters from a 1E MM because they would have 1E damage while the character would be doing 5E damage. That could be interesting.
|
|
|
Post by jeffb on Jan 20, 2021 10:21:53 GMT -6
Easiest fix in the world is to utilize minions. That's it. They Fight at full power, but go down in a hit (or two, or three) No need to track tons of HP. Player still get to roll damage and have fun, when they hit, you tick off a box, make a check mark whatever. This loss of minion mechanics was a huge step back from 4E, IMO (and was underutilized/ignored by most 4E DMs).
Exploding dice for damage rolls - this helped alot for my 4E games as it whittles down the HPs faster. Roll a 6 on that d6? roll it again and add it. Especially fun on a crit!
I find the above two speed things up AND also increases fun and fear for the players (and makes one think less about combat slogging along. Plus you don't need to make any math adjustments or do any work as a DM with extra prep as re-write/re-stat everything.
Side initiative speeds things up a little.
Try the optional rules for removing skills in the back of the DMG , or better yet adopt 13th Age Backgrounds (which 5e optional rules are a weak copy of). Let them have proficiency apply to any stat roll if they can use their background in a appropriate/creative way.
|
|
|
Post by hamurai on Jan 20, 2021 11:18:41 GMT -6
Iirc, there are no cantrips with d4 damage, so that'd work. Still, speeding things up would favour deadlier combat, and therefore the original 5E damage values. Also, you'd have less work re-working the spell section. I like the idea of not reworking damage (spells or weapons or whatever) but in that case I need to be careful about taking monsters from a 1E MM because they would have 1E damage while the character would be doing 5E damage. That could be interesting. Just step their damage dice up a step or two I guess that'd be the easiest way to adjust them for 5E. As jeffb pointed out, exploding damage dice may also work. I kinda like the way it's done in Trudvang Chronicles, where all weapons have a d10 damage, but 1-H light weapons damage dice explode on 10, 1-H heavy weapons on 9-10, 2-H weapons on 8-10. Maybe you can use that for your game, too: 1-H light weapons explode on maximum damage roll (5E dagger on a 4), 1-H heavy weapons on 1 below max damage already (5E longsword on a 7-8), 2-handed weapons on 2 below max damage (greataxe on 10-12). The greatsword uses 2d6, though, which will reduce the chance to get exploding damage dice. That way, the system would be really deadly, I guess.
|
|
|
Post by Finarvyn on Jan 20, 2021 11:47:18 GMT -6
I have a kind of cool way to deal with mid-level monsters. I either use a d6 with pips as the mini or set the d6 next to the mini. I put one pip on the die for each 5 hp and monsters take damage in 5 hp increments (rounded).
I let my players roll out their full damage and then round to the nearest 5 and that determines how many pips of damage are taken. (I suppose you could do it with numbered dice and any size, but pips and d6's are just so much fun. A d12 could go up to around 60 hp, a d20 could do 100 hp.) So damage of 0-2 is no damage, 3-7 is 1 pip, 8-12 is 2 pips, and so on.
|
|
EdOWar
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 315
|
Post by EdOWar on Jan 20, 2021 17:17:20 GMT -6
A variant idea on using minions: instead of minions having just 1 HP, they have a HP threshold. If the damage roll equals or exceeds the threshold, the minion dies. Otherwise, they're wounded but still up and fighting. It still removes the necessity of tracking HP for lots of little guys, but still rewards characters that do high damage. It's also a way to scale the difficulty of minions while minimizing bookkeeping. In fact, maybe you could do this for all but the most powerful monsters.
Another option, just halve all the 5E hit point totals out of the book, but not damage. No need to convert anything (other than halving HP) and combat is quick and deadly.
I also like the idea of using all passive skills.
|
|
|
Post by kaiqueo on Jan 20, 2021 20:51:50 GMT -6
I had similar problems running 5e, but I tried to solve them without changing the mechanics.
(1) Your problem seems to be that the combat is taking too long. Some suggestions: a) Pre-roll player's initiative for some combats at the start of the session. b) When battle erupts, you tell the players the initiative sequence and each player is responsible for calling the next one. c) Give the player 10 seconds to declare an action or loose his turn. c.1) You can skip that in the first round to give the party a chance for a more tactical approach, unless they are surprised. d) Make the player's roll their attack rolls and damage together. Now you have combat fast and furious.
(2) For that one, I suggest a moment before the campaign (or the introduction of a new character) where the players introduce their characters to the others. Not only how they look but what they can do and what they do best. You can even run a minigame to test how much your players know about the other player's characters.
|
|
|
Post by asaki on Jan 20, 2021 21:36:49 GMT -6
The only thing I've noticed that has slowed down our games, is that I'm not super familiar with spells, so I have to keep looking them up. I made an RTF document "spellbook" for myself, and that speeds things up a lot, but it still takes me a minute.
Similar thing that slows us down, is when we have to keep looking up changed rules that we have memorized from older editions. Sometimes we'll just go with the old rules, and find out later that we were wrong.
|
|
|
Post by hamurai on Jan 20, 2021 23:57:47 GMT -6
The only thing I've noticed that has slowed down our games, is that I'm not super familiar with spells, so I have to keep looking them up. That's increasingly a problem when you get more and more spells, yes. Personally, I use spell cards* to have my memorized spells ready to look up. Our druid player also, it helps him a lot and speeds up play. At lower levels and/or especially for the classes with a small selection of spells, that's very easy to manage. When my wizard got to a higher level, I used a playing card folder, you know, with those sheets to put your collectable/trading cards in. First page was for all my memorized spells, the other pages were my collected spell book, organized by spell level. When I memorized a spell, I put it in the front page. Spells I didn't need any more were put back into the spell book pages. * Edit: Note that there are free spell cards available for the SRD spells, and spell card forms to add those not covered by the SRD, if you're trying to save money. Depending on your printer and the design you get for your cards, printing them out yourself might be even more expensive though.
|
|
|
Post by tdenmark on Jan 21, 2021 3:27:26 GMT -6
Playing this evening a simple dungeon crawl in the sewers below the town I was getting a little frustrated with 5e. It was a simple encounter with a gang of kobolds preparing to roast a villager for dinner. It took over 2 hours to conduct this one combat.
There is so much to like in 5e, but it really made me want to strip it down or just bust out Swords & Wizardry.
|
|
|
Post by Finarvyn on Jan 21, 2021 5:32:52 GMT -6
Playing this evening a simple dungeon crawl in the sewers below the town I was getting a little frustrated with 5e. It was a simple encounter with a gang of kobolds preparing to roast a villager for dinner. It took over 2 hours to conduct this one combat. There is so much to like in 5e, but it really made me want to strip it down or just bust out Swords & Wizardry. That is the heart of my dilemma. I ran 5E Tomb of Horrors and it's been really fun, but has taken me 5 sessions so far. Now, I know our group is social and chatty sometimes, and game sessions aren't as long as other groups I find sometimes, but it seems like we only get through a few rooms and our time is done. I don't dislike 5E by any means, and there are some awesome parts to the rules, but overall I have this feeling of slowness. Fighting the Big Bad is okay at two hours, but a basic kobold encounter shouldn't be that long.
|
|
|
Post by jeffb on Jan 21, 2021 8:06:10 GMT -6
5E has just enough complexity/moving parts to make it play in a similar fashion as 4E during combat. It's not really a good "Dungeon Crawl" game. Same for 3rd, or Pathfinder, or what have you.
Again, Minions help if you want to do that sort of thing and that is exactly why 4E had them in the game. An element of real threat, but easily taken out in one hit, to keep things moving along. Otherwise, assume a set piece battle (and for published materials-way too many of them as presented). Most 4E DMs never "got it".
For my style of DMing- Minsions and other "tools" are perfect- There are far fewer but more "meaningful" combat encounters in my games and I don't track XP (use milestones, whatever you want to call it). If I have to improv an encounter, it's usually a minion type fight, and I've even done a "montage" scene where I simply have set up a "scene" , and then have them narrate the fight, myself interjecting questions, obstacles, results with no dice rolls involved. I realize it's a game of dice rolling, but my players seem to like it as a change of pace instead of spending way too much time fighting something out that is trivial.
If you are going to run something like B1/2/3/4 where there are a multitude of monsters, and half of them you are likely to fight, the TSR rule-sets they were designed for are clearly superior. 5E, 4E, etc require a very different approach to adventure/encounter design if you don't want to slog through combat for most of your session, every session. I know a large # of people want to do 5E, but make it "old school cool", but it is it's own animal, and the sooner people accept that and work within it's design parameters, the more fun they will have with it. Trying to change it into something it's not is futile (as I've said many times- been there, done that). You get rid of those moving parts and it stops working as intended, and you are better off with whatever TSR version.
|
|
|
Post by hamurai on Jan 21, 2021 10:16:26 GMT -6
5E has just enough complexity/moving parts to make it play in a similar fashion as 4E during combat. It's not really a good "Dungeon Crawl" game. Same for 3rd, or Pathfinder, or what have you. I've DM'ed the Dwimmermount Megadungeon for 5E and part from the readily available healing, I found it does in fact work for dungeon crawling. Not as good as the old editions, but still. We played with 4 players and we didn't have endless combats... Playing this evening a simple dungeon crawl in the sewers below the town I was getting a little frustrated with 5e. It was a simple encounter with a gang of kobolds preparing to roast a villager for dinner. It took over 2 hours to conduct this one combat. How many players? How many kobolds? Anyone familiar with the system? If you're new to 5E, I believe that. During our first sessions we often had to look stuff up, too. Otherwise, 2 hours seems really too long.
|
|
|
Post by jeffb on Jan 21, 2021 10:25:51 GMT -6
I've DM'ed the Dwimmermount Megadungeon for 5E and part from the readily available healing, I found it does in fact work for dungeon crawling. Not as good as the old editions, but still. We played with 4 players and we didn't have endless combats I can hammer in a nail with a cast iron skillet. It works. I'm much better off with a hammer.
|
|
|
Post by tdenmark on Jan 21, 2021 13:22:22 GMT -6
How many players? How many kobolds? Anyone familiar with the system? If you're new to 5E, I believe that. During our first sessions we often had to look stuff up, too. Otherwise, 2 hours seems really too long. It was a solo adventure. I was playing a 1st level elf wizard. 1 kobold. I've been playing 5th edition since it came out, so I'm pretty familiar with it.
|
|
|
Post by hamurai on Jan 21, 2021 13:24:05 GMT -6
OK... so how does this drag out to 2 hours?
|
|
|
Post by asaki on Jan 21, 2021 14:30:13 GMT -6
I don't mind combat taking too long, in any edition, as long as people are having fun...when I'm the DM, though, I try to put limits on combat when it starts getting late...bad things happen when players start falling asleep. Personally, I use spell cards* to have my memorized spells ready to look up. Yeah, that's the same concept I'm going for, except in digital form. Haven't bothered printing them, since this game is online-only. I've been thinking about speeding it up even more by converting it to HTML, so you can click to expand spell descriptions you need, or hide spells you don't.
|
|
|
Post by cometaryorbit on Jan 21, 2021 19:45:13 GMT -6
In my current 5E game, combats rarely take that long; it's clearly not as fast as some older editions would be, but simple combats (as opposed to 'boss fights') don't generally take us 2 hours (though in my old in-person, pre-COVID game, with 9 people at the table, stuff could certainly drag out).
But I think this may be because we don't usually have a ton of 'analysis paralysis' in our group - most people have one or two standard things they do unless there's a specific obvious reason to do otherwise, people aren't checking their whole spell list every turn. 5E with 'analysis paralysis' inclined players is potentially *way* slower, since most characters have spells or some equivalent.
|
|
Dohojar
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 114
|
Post by Dohojar on Jan 21, 2021 22:40:01 GMT -6
OK... so how does this drag out to 2 hours? I was thinking the same thing.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jan 22, 2021 6:24:36 GMT -6
Easiest fix in the world is to utilize minions. That's it. They Fight at full power, but go down in a hit (or two, or three) No need to track tons of HP. Player still get to roll damage and have fun, when they hit, you tick off a box, make a check mark whatever. This loss of minion mechanics was a huge step back from 4E, IMO (and was underutilized/ignored by most 4E DMs). Exploding dice for damage rolls - this helped alot for my 4E games as it whittles down the HPs faster. Roll a 6 on that d6? roll it again and add it. Especially fun on a crit! I find the above two speed things up AND also increases fun and fear for the players (and makes one think less about combat slogging along. Plus you don't need to make any math adjustments or do any work as a DM with extra prep as re-write/re-stat everything. Side initiative speeds things up a little. Try the optional rules for removing skills in the back of the DMG , or better yet adopt 13th Age Backgrounds (which 5e optional rules are a weak copy of). Let them have proficiency apply to any stat roll if they can use their background in a appropriate/creative way. Matt Coleville did a video about Minions. He's clearly a big 4e fan and laments that wotc completely threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater when they rebooted into 5e, because 4e despite its gameyness had some innovations for slick combat.
|
|
|
Post by tdenmark on Jan 22, 2021 18:49:21 GMT -6
OK... so how does this drag out to 2 hours? That was a joke. It was 4 players (with a couple NPC henchmen) & a dozen kobolds. Between looking up rules, figuring out spells, tactical movement, etc. it ended up taking about 2 hours. Not like everyone was a crackerjack at 5e rules and totally on the ball, but reasonably experienced players. Sometimes I'll fudge through some of the details to speed things up, but we really tried to play by the rules.
|
|
|
Post by tdenmark on Jan 22, 2021 18:53:31 GMT -6
Matt Coleville did a video about Minions. He's clearly a big 4e fan and laments that wotc completely threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater when they rebooted into 5e, because 4e despite its gameyness had some innovations for slick combat. I feel someone like him who is a professional dungeon master 4e might be fine. For us mere mortals 4e is too much. Wizards made the right decision tossing that thing out. I still think 5e is way more complicated than it needs to be for the amount of fun it delivers.
|
|
|
Post by hamurai on Jan 23, 2021 1:20:03 GMT -6
It was 4 players (with a couple NPC henchmen) & a dozen kobolds. Between looking up rules, figuring out spells, tactical movement, etc. it ended up taking about 2 hours. Not like everyone was a crackerjack at 5e rules and totally on the ball, but reasonably experienced players. OK, now I get it. 4 players + X henchmen + 12 kobolds make about 20-25 combatants on the battle map, which is quite a lot. Playing with battle map and tactical movement does, of course, take more time than theatre-of-the-mind play. It's pretty much a setup for a skirmish tabletop game and I don't doubt it taking 2 hours if you play out every combatant. In such a big fight I'd figure out the hit chance for the kobolds compared to player/henchmen AC (with a +4 to-hit bonus and 1st-level players, I'd guess about 50%) and roll a 2d6 to see how many hit (2d6 will average out on 7 hits, which is close enough to 50% for my taste here; 3d4 might also work). I'd do the same for the henchmen, unless they're very different in respect to their fighting abilities, but I guess they have combat stats similar to the kobolds. So, depending on their number, maybe 2d4 or 2d6 again to determine how many hit. 5E offers fixed values for damage with no need to roll at all. The standard kobold with sling or dagger does 4 damage. No need to roll and calculate. If movement has been tactical and everyone tried to gang up on and outnumber an enemy, these targets have priority in being hit (because the attackers would roll with advantage). With fixed damage values, this fight will probably not take longer than 2 rounds for most kobolds and henchmen because they'll be down by then. And then the number of combatants will be down to a number where you can play out everything by the book. Of course, your choice of VTT might also influence how long some things will take.
|
|
|
Post by hamurai on Jan 23, 2021 1:29:20 GMT -6
I know the minion idea from several other RPGs, and while it does speed up play, I found that it always favours a certain approach to fights with minions. Since minions will, despite their 1 HP, deal more or less normal damage (or at least add to group damage), players will favour the tactic to attack minions first and then attack the "real" enemy. This might work for the classic "necromancer with undead hordes" fight at the end of a dungeon, but not for an average encounter where focusing on the boss might be a better move to break morale. Depends on the location, too, of course.
That said, I don't know 4E's minion rules but for most of our games, cleaving through hordes of minions is not our style of play for low-level characters. Higher-level fighters might do that to speed up play, though.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2021 7:40:35 GMT -6
Matt Coleville did a video about Minions. He's clearly a big 4e fan and laments that wotc completely threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater when they rebooted into 5e, because 4e despite its gameyness had some innovations for slick combat. I feel someone like him who is a professional dungeon master 4e might be fine. For us mere mortals 4e is too much. Wizards made the right decision tossing that thing out. I still think 5e is way more complicated than it needs to be for the amount of fun it delivers. I'll take your word for it. I wasn't playing any D&D at all during the years 4e was a thing. I barely played any 3e. Most of the d20 stuff I did was Star Wars and I never owned any of the books. I hear two completely different representations of what 4e was online. It seems people either really liked it or really hated it and there's no middle ground much.
|
|
|
Post by jeffb on Jan 23, 2021 8:09:14 GMT -6
I guess I should start charging- I was a Professional Dungeon Master when I ran 4E!
|
|
|
Post by tdenmark on Jan 23, 2021 11:54:04 GMT -6
I guess I should start charging- I was a Professional Dungeon Master when I ran 4E! Well, if you can gather an audience like Matthew Colville has then go for it.
|
|