quicker fights

[jjarvis]

I've been pondering a way to have quicker fights in D&D as I feel they are sometimestoo long. p sibly allowing for more fights an evening.

monster hp:
changing moster HP so they do in fact get bumped off quicker.

Unexceptional small and medium mosters have 1d6 + # of traditional Hitdice if over 1. add any normal + pips as well.

Tough medium monsters- have 2d6 + # of traditional hitdice = any bonus pips. What is tough is up to the DM, I'd say vamires are tough so they get 2d6+ (7,8 or 9 hp), they'd avegrae out at 15 hp, that is likely 4 or 5 blows by magic sword (as opposed to a likely 8 or more normally)

Large monster have 3 hitdice + # of traditonal hitdice in hp + any bonus pips. Trolls woudl have 3d6+6+3 hp.

Huge monsters have traditional D&D hit dice. Watch out for giants and dragons.

area attacks;

area attacks from spells or dragon breath are divided among all targets in area of effect (casusing a minium of 1 pt of damage per 2 dice). So 6d6 fireball rolled for 18 points of damage vs 3 gnolls would casue each gnoll 6 pts of damage. if the target was 15 goblins they'd each take 3 pts of damage (min of 1 pr per 2 dice on effect).

Dragon breath works a little differently, minimum damage (before save) is dragon HD. otherwise it is divded as other area attacks.

attack- use traditioanl hitdice for attack ability and saving throws.


anticipated effect- most fights will be quicker. epic fights will feel like epic fights and large numebrs of mid level monsters can be used without taking forever to resolve fights.
players are just a soft as always.
single target spell attacks do become more devestating agsint all but the most epic of monsters and charctr types. But players will be hackign their way thru larger hordes so mayhaps they wil have used those spells before they shoudl have.

[lordtwang]

You could do sort of what 2e's BattleSystem Skirmishes did. This is how I'd do it for OD&D.

Divide a character or monster's hit points by 5 and round up. This is how many "hits" they can take.

A successful attack from a fighter does 2 hits. From any other class, 1 hit.

Monsters that do 1d4-1d8 of damage do 1 hit. Anything more does 2 hits. Some monsters like dragons and giants may do 3 hits from a successful attack.

[Finarvyn]

Taking a page from the Chainmail book, you could simplify things so that the HD would represent the number hits a monster (or character) could take, and also assume that each weapon hit does the same damage.

The thing about hit points is that you get a certain degree of randomness whereby a 1st level M-U could actually have more HP than a 3rd level fighter if the dice fall the wrong way. If you assume that all HD are equal (easy to do in the LBB since they're all d6, harder to do once you bring Greyhawk variable HD into the mix) and assume that all weapon damage dice are equal (again, easier to do in the LBB but harder to do later once you differenciate weapon damages) then this system would work out fine.

However ... I think that Chainmail also stated that a "hero" (4th level fighter) had to take 4 hits in the same round and not just 4 hits total. This would clearly change the balance of the game.

[kesher]

Following in this vein, there're some good ideas in Abridged Dungeons & Dragons: www.angelfire.com/games2/warpspawn/ABDD.htm