4e combat takes time. I’ve run enough and played enough to realize that the speed of 4e is not a bug, but a feature.
How can this be, you say? 4e combat takes entirely too long, we need to speed it up! But do we? More importantly, what are we trying to speed up? I’m going to address what I believe makes 4e combats take a while, but first I want to talk about what is not going to help you out.
Procedural tricks don’t save you nearly the sort of time you want. There are many great tricks for running combats more efficiently, but let’s face it — these don’t shave that much time do they? They’ll save a little time, but I’ve yet to try one that offers notable speed improvements. Note that procedural tricks don’t combine well for ultimate efficiency; I can’t use three different methods for running a combat to cut the combat time in half.
Combat will also not get much faster with most rules tweaks you do. There is the classic halving tweak (half hit points of combatants), but in practice all that does is de-stabilize your game. 4e is built with certain hit point totals in mind, the whole game is built on a particular tempo of attrition. You change that and you break up that tempo. I’ve played with this rule several times and found it always lacking. You can add more action points but that doesn’t quite do it either; action points are actually subordinate to accuracy so only certain party compositions can abuse action points enough to make a considerable dent in the overall combat time.
So by my reckoning, trying to prune your procedures doesn’t work, rules tweaking doesn’t really work…what does speed up 4e combat?
Knowledgeable players. Players who know the system well enough to make decisions quickly. This is the only thing that I’ve seen make combat go fast in practice. When players come in with game plans and high system knowledge, they tear through combats. Playing at GenCon’s D&D tournament 2 years ago with Mike Shea, his wife and Jake Fitch, we tore through multiple combats in around a half-hour. We knew what we wanted to do tactically, we knew the system very well, we came we saw, we almost conquered. Why we didn’t actually win is a whole other article, but can be summed up as this: the encountered we ran out of time on introduced variables that slowed our decision process and also introduced variables to eat up precious game time. But half-hour combats are totally do-able if you are “pros”.
But that’s not what you wanted to hear is it? An RPG shouldn’t be about system mastery if you don’t want it to be right? I’m all about system mastery in games I play but I actually don’t want to enforce that mindset on my players. People play for all sorts of reasons, and for many people who are completely awesome to game with, this is not a goal they keep in mind. I support their right not to know the system inside-out and to enjoy the roleplay more than the “game”. I know I’m not alone with this viewpoint. So what are we supposed to do?
The first thing to understand is that 4e’s default speed of “slow” during combat is actually a feature, not a bug. 4e combat is created from the ground up to be very tactical; It offers more meaningful choices per round than any other game out there. Where do I move this turn? What impact does that move have on my group’s turn? How do I spend that minor action, if at all? Which of my multiple powers will I use for my standard and what effect will that poewr have on the fight and my group? The list gets even more subtle and muanced than that, but my point remains: There’s a lot of stuff to decide each turn. And that decision cost is where your time goes. This is why tables full of experienced players go significantly faster than tables full of new players –the experienced players make better decisions faster. But let’s take a further step and we can see that games with Essentials characters also move more swiftly. In this case it is because the classes tend to offer less choices per turn (not true of all the classes), so it speeds up the decision-making process.
Again, because 4e is designed to give choice, this isn’t something I would label a “bug” or “flaw”, though it does create problems for sure. Recognizing this, we can see though that ultimate reason for slowdown is people making choices. Now we can just people on time limits, but I file that under “procedural trick” and note that it just tends to encourage poor, time-constrained decisions which cost time because you have to make choices later to correct the rushed choices you made earlier.
I feel a little bit that this is something that WotC has steered us wrong on with fight design in the past, only now starting to correct it in their more recent adventure design. Older adventures were just brutal gladiator pits of fight after fight after fight. Story existed, but it was assumed that the story was mostly going to advance through fighting, encouraging the notion that 4e is all fighting all the time. But 4e actually works better with fewer, better designed fights.
It is in fight design that we will actually create speed within our fights. Encounter design is key. We can’t make every player a 4e jedi master able to instantly move on his turn with the best choices, but we can build encounters that offer them improved situational choices that increase the speed of the combat. Hey, I notice I can trigger a mini-avalanche and bury those henchmen in it…In the far corner there is an orb reanimating these skeletons…If I put my sword in the fire I can make it a flaming sword for the encounter…
The point is that you’re putting accelerants into the combat with a minor opportunity cost (don’t make it too hard or players are going to go back to their old standards) to make combat more interesting and also faster. Trust me, the characters are going to remember the time they leapt inside a water elemental to attack the creature’s “heart”, doing critical damage each time (true story, and fun fight).
Accelerants can be environmental effects such as terrain, but they can also be great places to work in off-the-cuff situational advantages. A player successfully bluffs a stupid ogre as a minor action and gets a chance to make his next attack versus the ogre’s will instead of AC. Speaking the proper sacred blessing (successful religion check?) removes the insubstantial keyword from a ghost.
Where accelerants in your encounter can go wrong is having too many moving parts. The temptation is to make it so a perception check needs to actively be made (or having high passive perception), then 2-3 steps must be taken to unlock the accelerant, then you can start using it. If you design something with this many (or more) steps, make sure it ends the fight and make it clear that it will do so! Otherwise, players will stick with the “safe” choice. I find the best way to add such elements is to tie them into something the players are going to do anyway ( first successful attack notices something, or a character enters an area) and then abuse the heck out of minor actions. Making a character spend 1-2 minor actions to activate your special terrain is the sweet spot. If a character really wants to do it right now, he can spend multiple actions to get it done. Otherwise he can take a standard action and not feel as if he’s “missing out”.
The next thing we’re going to do is build outs. I’ve seen many different morale systems, but I think rather than leaving it to chance, you only need to determine a threshold for which combatants leave the fight. A dragon may fly away when it reaches 3/4 of its hit points, or a group of soldiers may break when they are halved in number. Just determine the threshold and use it. Morale can be done as the monsters fleeing, or what I like to do is a “finishing sequence”; the characters reach that threshold and then I ask them to describe how they mop up. Players dig taking control of the scene for this and you get some interesting RP out of it. When you alternate that with just having monsters turn tail and flee, you get to keep the threat of all your monsters for most of the fight while getting rid of that ending standoff dance that sometimes happens. I recommend setting your threshold for monsters leaving at about 3/4 of total strength. Less important fights can have a higher threshold, as you just want the “feel” of the fight anyways, not to run the whole thing in full.
This post is already ballooning in size, so I’m going to stop here. I encourage you to share your thoughts, questions, and complete disagreement with me though. Have you used these methods in your fights? Do you use other methods to speed up fights? How well do they work?
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
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Very good insight, and timely, as I’ve been seeing a lot of blogs and tweets lately on the speed of combat. I especially like the “describe how you mop up” trick. I’m definitely using that one from now on. I usually just say, “Ok, I’m going to call this fight.”
I think you’ve pinpointed key aspects of where the slowdown really comes in – it’s about decision points and encounter math, not merely handling time. I’ve been thinking about accelerants and early exits in my encounter design for a bit.
Now I’m wanting to see more builds at a “Slayer” level of complexity. Yes, must to the consternation of many fans, but the most vocal fans online are the hardcores who have their system mastery. I’d like to see a variety of classes to fit a player’s desired level of engagement.
In my campaign, I’ve made the decision to have fewer full combat encounters per character level rather than trying to speed up the suggested number. That pacing lets me make the story-critical encounters more interesting while not feeling the need to grind through filler fights. I have a blog post scheduled for next week that goes into more detail.
I agree that the “mopping up” trick is good, and the 3/4 rule seems pretty solid. There will be times in a close fight that your players will want to grind it out, which is fine; it makes those moments even more memorable when you do fight to the finish. Usually, though, you hit that tipping point and players are just doing at-wills to clean up. No need to play that out!
Familiarity and awareness are important. If you players are familiar with their characters and the rules it helps a lot. I also ask my players to be on top of all effects they are responsible for. If they caused some condition to a monster, they need to remind me when that monster’s turn comes around. If a monster does something to them, it’s their responsibility to deal with it. Delegating combat tracking across the group helps a lot.
I also try to avoid getting bogged down in details and referencing the rules. If you can’t remember how something works in the middle of battle, just wing it and look up the rule later for future reference. 4e makes it very easy to come up with something on the fly that seems fair even if it isn’t exactly how the rules were written. I’d rather fake it up and keep combat moving smoothly instead of stopping everything to hunt through rules.
I wonder how common calling the fight is.
My groups got a great way to speed up combat: our gnome wizard casts sleep with a -8 save mod on the whole thing and then the groups 2 1/2 strikers clean up but thats a special case.
You raise some interesting points. Personally, I like the combats, so I just don’t see the point in rushing through them so that we can spend our table time trudging through the wilderness and failing Endurance checks to get to the next combat we will rush through. I wonder sometimes if the problem is that combats are actually too fast and too sketchy at the same time. Would we enjoy them more if we slowed down to put more RP into them, more description, more motivation? Could “Slow Combat” take its place alongside Slow Food as part of the Slow Movement?
Knowledgeable players being the key to faster 4E combats is exactly the attitude I’ve taken for a while now.
You are the 4e jedi! You nailed it, especially the part about “offering more meaningful choices per round than any other game out there.” If I want some turn-the-brain-off fun, I’ll play video games. I like my D&D with combat complexity.
Great post and I’m asking your permission to translate it in Russian and post in my blog (with all due credits of course).
But just to be clear – 3/4 of total strenght to flee? Isn’t it a bit too fast? 200HP dragon flies off after taking 50 dmg? Or do I miss something? Did you mean after losing 3/4 of HP?
This is a brilliant post. Thanks! I’ve been poking around with a 4e mod that reduces the complexity/options. I’m trying to find a threshold that suits the gamers at my table. Your insights are a great help in this regard, because I want to leave some tactical elements in, but make them more optionally activated (like the terrain and environmental elements you gave as examples.) Tactical components that players can opt into as the opportunities present themselves seem like a key to quicker decision making. Roll your to-hit. Missed? Next persons turn. Hit? Now you have a choice between (default) “do damage”, and “do damage” plus “tactical effect” (drawn from a core list of options.)
My response is here: http://21sided.o-r-g.org/2011/01/enjoying-combat-speed-and-awesomeness.html
Summary: I agree completely with the analysis, and present a further option for improving the enjoyment of combat and at the same time speeding it up
Excellent insights. There seems to be an underlying assumption that combat and role play are mutually exclusive. They don’t need to be. Here are few things you can do to encourage role play and narrative in combat:
-If players roll ahead of their turn and simply use their turn to describe “in game” what they do, the focus is on narrative as apposed to mechanics.
-The DM can finish each player turn with a brief narrative description of the results of the actions.
-The DM can provide objects and terrain that can be used creatively with non-power actions. Then reward those actions with bonuses, etc.
-The DM can encourage verbal communication between NPCs and PCs and between PCs by providing incentive to communicate “in game”. Have the enemy insult and taunt the players, have the victims cry out for help, etc. Remember speaking is a free action.
-Other thoughts?
@Brian letting players describe what they do to wrap up or finish off an enemy is a general trick I like to employ to help get players get into the game. I find it works wonders.
@devp wouldn’t it be cool to play a wizard version of the slayer? Esseentials classes really do have speed on their side. I do think you can emulate it with clever class design, but then we’re right back at system mastery. Toying around with releasing some essentialized classes. no promises but we’ll see.
@glimm that is also a nice approach. I like big fights and not small fights so much, but if more fights are a must, lesser fights then have to go along with it.
@mike knowledge is key, but the other key is making sure that the lack of knowledge is not a barrier. a tricky balance for sure.
@freezer common enough but maybe could be more common? As for your sleep method of speed, if you know some tricks, you can do nasty things to your opponents in 4e for sure.
@michelle my take is that 4e combats are like movies. When the combat is entertaining, it is always too short. If it is not, it is always too long. My preference is to make combat better and stress less on time.
@Euan yup, though I’ve been trying to find a good framework for helping players make decisions in 4e. like a flowchart for each class or something.
@yax thanks! Yeah, I like the “puzzle” of tactical combat myself.
@snarl yeah, that was a big typo. I meant at 1/4 health remaining, so 3/4 damage taken. And please translate! That would be cool.
@anarkeith glad you like! and I agree with you 100%. Not that the essentials martial classes do preety much what you suggest — MBA + potential kicker. I’m stilling searching for that magical way to transfer the basic knowledge painlessly to people, and I think I’m almost there with it.
Initiative cards have really sped up play. But, as you say, the bottom line should be to stop and see whether you want play to be sped up. I love tactical play, so I don’t mind taking a bit more time. What I don’t like is meaningless combat. I suspect a lot of gamers really just want the combat (regardless of duration) to stay thrilling and engaging. There are a lot of ways to do that and it exposes the weakness in 4E not providing enough info on proper encounter design.
Good suggestions. I like a little randomness in my game, so I’m planning on using Dice of Doom’s recent morale system. It’s really simple so it won’t slow things down further.
For a set threshold, 1/4 remaining hit points won’t work in a normal combat where there is more than one monster. This is because you’d be killing individual monsters prematurely instead of calling the battle, which throws off the game balanced you mentioned, as rules tweaking does. Instead, call the battle when there’s half or less than half of the monsters remaining and they are all bloodied. That’s when they’d flee, surrender, or just lose hope and let themselves be killed.
One thing that helped my group is to make each turn more entertaining for everyone… not just the player who’s turn it happens to be. It’s always a blast when you’re the one taking the turn, but what about the rest of the party?
I came up with the solution that if people describe their attack they will get a +1 to +3 on their attack roll. all they have to do is at least give a short description that does not just name the attack they have chosen.
This doesn’t speed up the combat… in fact it does quite the opposite. But each turn is far more entertaining and engaging for the ENTIRE group… making the time it takes more acceptable.
I see your point on having knowledgeable players and raise you a ‘stop using minion mobs.’
I jumped into 4e and dragged a bunch of new players who were basically doing me a favor. One was the most indecisive person you’ll ever meet, the other analyzed every move to death. Their poor wives finally started painting their nails at the table (achievement unlocked: DM fail). I tried the procedural tricks and they helped a little. But they only helped me – who already had the whole thing planned out ahead of time; they didn’t speed up my players.
The other problem, realized only in hindsight, is that I wanted to give my PC’s the feeling of cutting down hordes of enemies. That meant lots of minions. Lots of minions means a lot more encounters to track and more NPC actions between player turns. The end result are players getting bored as I work my way through 10 goblins before their next turn. Unfortunately, recognizing the problem does not necessarily generate a solution to go along with it – so I’m not sure, exactly, how to balance that out yet.
The early retreat does – and has – worked, and I’ll use it again in the future. I’ve been tempted with the increased damage/decreased HP, but only as a last resort. I’d like to avoid it for the reasons you stated here.
So, I guess we’re left with the question: Does 4e combat have anything to offer PC’s who could care less about its tactical strengths?
Great essay.
I’ve been using exit points for some time now, not just in 4E but also back in 3rd. It not only lets you dispense with the least interesting third of the scene, but it’s also actually more realistic. Few people or creatures really want to fight to the death, so having opponents flee when the battle is clearly against them lends veracity to the campaign.
I agree with the idea of creating a threshold point for the baddies to flee, but it’s also a good idea to just keep an eye on the flow of the drama. The moment when it’s clear to everyone that the PCs are going to clean up is the time for the bad guys to leave. That’s true in terms of in-game motivation, and it’s true in terms of the drama at the table. Because that’s the moment when the fight goes from thrilling to monotonous.
(If the players are determined to kill the bad guys, it can also inject some tension back into the scene. Because suddenly there’s a change of objectives from “slog through the rest of his hit points” to “stop him from getting away.” And the certainty of success goes from high to unknown.)
I think it’s likely that increased player knowledge will speed up the tactical aspects of nearly any game out there that has such an aspect (analysis paralysis situations aside), and I’ve definitely seen that in my 4E experiences. In the early days, when we were making up paragon characters for one-shot delves, the panoply of choices meant character generation took forever and combat rounds were very slow. That has, as expected, changed as players became more familiar with the system and their characters (though some players still take longer than others).
When I play, I love having choices. I routinely played wizards and clerics in 3.5 because I loved all the possibility afforded by the wide variety of options those classes offered, though the weight of those options became very heavy at high level. One of the reasons I love 4E is because of the amount of player choice and the number of options — there’s plenty of variety there without it becoming overwhelming (although, to be fair, I have yet to play regularly at paragon or epic). So far, as both a player and a DM, I am not chafing at the speed of combat. Similar to other commenters, I love combats in D&D, so I don’t want them to be over too fast; I don’t feel the need to speed them up.
What I found especially interesting about your post, though, was the comment about 4E being better with fewer fights that are designed better. That’s a conclusion I’ve been coming to in my own game, something I plan to explore more as my game matures. I definitely don’t like filler fights, so I have been working on having fewer fights in my game, with each having more impact and drama attached. It’s not hard to craft appropriate story, but I have been playing around with getting the mechanical aspects right, since there are considerations to manage when having just a couple of fights “per day” in a system designed to keep the characters going for many more than that. And of course, more interesting fights usually mean more options and more choices, which brings us back to needing more time to run the fight. But as I said, I happen to like long fights…
I really don’t want this to sound like I’m being a jerk, but isn’t the act of calling a fight early not much different than cutting hit points/raising damage, except you’re putting more emphasis on coaxing role-play over the thrill of the kill-shot dice roll?
I actually have used the run away trick a number of times. My players talk about it as a joke now, believing that all of the enemies that have escaped will someday come back to get revenge (which admittedly I’m going to run with). I don’t really like it though because they don’t like it. They want to kill off the enemies and most of my group is a bit unconcerned with role-play in combat. I’ve tried and even my best role-player has said that there are just too many things to do each round to worry about role-playing.
I think accelerators are a good idea. My only issue would be that it would be one more thing to add to my planning, but that’s my own grumpiness and lack of desire to put any more effort into DMing speaking. I assume you mean things like terrain effects in the DMG? I’ve never made the effort to include them, but maybe they’re more important than I ever gave them credit for.
I like the idea of using skills to “power up” PCs. I have just never been able to think of a way to implement it in a way that wouldn’t add excessive time to combat. I like your bluff to change the target defense idea. More ideas like that would be good, I think.
I really like your idea about things like mini avalanches and adding fire to a sword during an encounter. How would you suggest adding those things to an encounter and further, making clear to the players that those options are available?
Good overall post. Hopefully you can expand on the ideas in it.
Although I have not tinkered with 4E, I do have some experience with Star Wars Saga Edition, that has a lot of shared mechanics with 4E. As far as the speed of combat, and choice goes, the biggest issue I have had is players having analysis paralysis as far as choosing what feat, talent etc to use in a given situation. That is the biggest drag I have found vs a more quick and dirty combat system.
Enemy retreat: I am a big fan of this, the believability factor of your campaign can be greatly increased. Is your average human thug going to fight to the death over a few coppers a day from the bandit chief, or if push comes to shove when he get sliced a few times, by the often better equipped adventurers, or getting the gods cranked off at him once the cleric starts slinging his or her divine mojo around.
If the players really want to chase their fleeing enemy’s that is always an option, but that sort of brutality can comeback to haunt them in the form of reputation, or alignment restrictions, it strikes me that striking down a fleeing foe, assuming its not a big EVIL could be a tad non-heroic.
D&D 4e’s combat length has been killing me since we began, and I’m a DM/player veteran since 2e. I’ve since learned with great blog articles like this At-Will one and this week’s similar one at Dungeon’s Master, that I can make and have already began making simple changes that keep 4e’s rich tactics, but return to faster, more thrilling and fantastic combat and adventure pacing.
For me, the biggest time-saving hitters right now are:
1) Eliminate Random Encounters
They worked in previous editions because the time-cost wasn’t so significant. Now they’re a chore because they take too much time and don’t advance the adventure meaningfully. In 4e, focus on the “most important” encounters of the adventure only. Mention the unimportant random encounters as background, narratively.
2) More Fantastic and Offensive Elements
Fantasy is up like the DMG says. But to take a step further towards time-saving and more exciting fights, use terrain, interactive features, and ideas that up accuracy and damage. From pits to Fonts of Power to some of the “accelerators” mentioned above, like the cool water elemental heart weakness.
3) More Diverse Encounter Goals & Narrative Closure
Encounters with purpose, relative to the adventures plot in some specific way, and with varying victory conditions – both tactical and more roleplay in nature – beyond “kill everything.” Along the same lines, more narrative closure to essentially decided combats to avoid the late-encounter “grind” – very similar to the “How do you mop up/finish them off?” trick above.
Two more bits of useful advice: 1) Encourage players to use the intimidate skill more (page 186, PHB, standard action) after enemies are bloodied in combat. It’s a rule mechanic that is already in place. And DMs can also tweak it a bit to make it even more powerful and effective, if they want. 2) For those who like skill challenges, try basing some of your combat encounters around them. When done properly, they can create the “feel” of fighting and accomplish a lot of story narrative and roleplaying while advancing the storyline as well as enhance realism by making a larger amount of time pass between fights (days, weeks, or even months can pass while the overall “arc” of the skill challenge/combat encounter occurs). You can even include an “all-out” battle at the end of the skill challenge with a few accelerants in place that can be unlocked by the successful completion of that skill challenge. So a successfully completed skill challenge will provide the PCs with the “reward” of being able to end the fight more quickly.
thanks for commenting guys! First I want to say some of you are skipping ahead…speed is one thing, but the real thing to note about combat is…does it rock? is it awesome? If it is, then the time spent probably isn’t the real issue. if people aren’t complaining you’ve got no issues! I’ll talk about that in another post, with the concept of what I call “liveness”.
Another way to think of these thresholds is as transition points…you’re determining when the play transitions from a raw fight to something else. A lot of great ideas are in the comments already and you could use any of these to transition to.
OK, that was a general response to everyone. A couple of specific answers:
@afet you’re skipping ahead
But yes, I will be dealing with quality of fights in short order.
@kingworks I think that it does, and what it offers is descriptive flexibility. Since the fiction of the game is pretty separate from the mechanics of your game, you can describe stuff however you want. When someone is not a tactical god, here’s what I do: Walk them through their turn tactically, but focus on getting them to describe what’s going on. Bring the character and their actions to life, and you can make it really interesting for people who otherwise care nothing for tactics. You can even go so far as to ask the person to give the narrative of their action, then you or a more tacitcally minded player walks through the crunchy bits. You tolerance for this may vary, but this is something I’ve used when I’ve been in these situations.
@alio I definitely think adding in cool terrain makes the battles more fun and can speed them up. 4e combat is always more interesting when you have a nice synergy between monsters and environment. That offers the characters a layered system of threats that generates more interest and when done right, makes things faster (dealing extra damage, taking critters out of combat, etc).
As for how do players see the items in question? Don’t put it behind the perception wall. Link it to an action that can happen in battle. I’ve tied events to criticals ( risky because they might not roll it, don’t tie anything critical to the scene here) or to hits or being hit –any type of action related to the environmental effect will do. You can then offer a clue or the chance to roll to get more info, etc. I’ll try to write an encounter soon and see if I can’t illustrate it clearly.