Simplification of Combat

[CBikle]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

the thing that needs to happen to speed up combat' date=' in my experience, is that people need to pay attention to what's going on and have a plan of action BEFORE IT'S THEIR TURN! Watching the poor gm do a complete combat recap for every person every time, and then watching that person look down at their character sheet while humming a tuneless noise as they ponder what their next move is...THAT is what slows combat down.[/quote']

 

Also, not every action has to be an elaborate event involving "Creative Use Of Powers" through the Power skill.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Also' date=' not [b']every[/b] action has to be an elaborate event involving "Creative Use Of Powers" through the Power skill.

Amen!

[Superskrull]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Also' date=' not [b']every[/b] action has to be an elaborate event involving "Creative Use Of Powers" through the Power skill.

 

No kidding. It's always amusing to me just how much can be solved in-game by just smacking the opponent.

[Super Squirrel]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

But seriously' date=' folks, the thing that needs to happen to speed up combat, in my experience, is that people need to pay attention to what's going on and have a plan of action BEFORE IT'S THEIR TURN! Watching the poor gm do a complete combat recap for every person every time, and then watching that person look down at their character sheet while humming a tuneless noise as they ponder what their next move is...THAT is what slows combat down.[/quote']

That and remembering what order they go in combat. I can understand three or four game sessions not knowing that you go after Monkey Boy on Phase 5 but after a half-dozen it is getting a bit absurd.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

No kidding. It's always amusing to me just how much can be solved in-game by just smacking the opponent.

 

 

Your opponent?

 

Nah.

 

You'll speed up combat far more by smacking your players now and then

 

Merry Christmas in this season of tolerance and good will

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Congratulations! You've almost created M&M. Now all you need to do is cut-out all that slow dice rolling and counting and add Hero Points and you have it.

MitchellS, I appreciate your input on M&M in general, but here...

 

 

Besides, it's hardly even a good comparison. But if you want to debate it, another thread would be better.

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

I'd play official Champions or the simplified thing I came up with first long before I'd consider M&M.

Funny you say this, I was just referencing Champions 2nd edition. It's really a great system. I wish someone would republish it or something very similar. M&M is nothing like it, nor are hardly any systems.

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

I don't know where you get your numbers but if all you're going to do is post on the Hero Boards about how cool M&M is, maybe you should consider just not posting here.

 

One of my buddies is the infamous Champsguy, who really does not like Steve Long, Darren Watts, or Dan Simon - but even he thinks that what you are doing is wrong.

 

I would not go post on M&M's dime and constantly seek converts and tell everyone how much more I like HERO. I especially wouldn't distort the reasons why I like HERO which you've done on at least one thread.

Hey, as I say every so often, say hi to Champsguy please. He's missed.

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

That's funny, I see Champsguy on the M&M boards all the time.

 

I don't seek converts. You're just too sensitive. I like Hero. I have nothing against Hero. What I have is a dislike of people who put Hero on a pedestal and tell us all how much every other game sucks.

 

You're the one posting here how to change Hero to be more like M&M and I'm the one posting that you shouldn't change Hero but let it be itself lest it lose its identity. Who's trying to convert who here?

 

And there have been no distorted reasons as to why I currently like M&M better. You just refuse to accept that my tastes have changed over the last 24 years; something even Zorn attempted to point out to you several times, but you chose to ignore in your zeal to bash a non-Hero lover [as you perceive me to be].

Let's be fair, the thing is, to expand on my earlier post, what you raised here was inappropriate to the topic, as nobody was remotely referencing other systems as sucking or such.

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Can we license Cockroach-Foot-Nuclear Bomb?

 

Hey, did you make that up? Whatever the case, it's quite clever, I'd never heard it before.

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Sure, I understand that. But it's not a fair comparison- M&M 2nd is their big core book, recently released, and it's doing quite well. Comparing it to a supplement of ours (especially the twentieth in a line, like CWW) doesn't tell anything about the relative markets for the two games. I'll happily cop to the fact they've sold more of their core book than we have of all but a couple of our supplements ever, but that hardly means M&M has driven Champions out of the market. Compare, for example, the number of Champions games to M&M games offered at Gencon or Origins. I don't know whether there are more current M&M players or Champions players- off the top of my head, I'd bet it's too close to call.

 

And I'm sure your Alliance buddy will confirm my telling you that 70-80% or so of all the sales you're going to get of an RPG in this market come in the first 3-5 months. If M&M wasn't outselling our twentieth Champions book by a bunch, they should be very worried.

 

And sure, d20 fantasy outsells Fantasy Hero- we've certainly never claimed otherwise. d20 outsells *everything.* We've sold a lot more pulp and sci-fi than they have, too, since they don't have any products in those lines. I don't know exactly what GR as a company will do for sales this year, but I'll bet it comes within, say, 20% on either side of our figures- we're about the same size as a company. dw

On a side note, I wanted to play an M&M game at Gencon but there were too few and times didn't work out. I heard others discussing how M&M was on some level hurting in terms of getting visiblity there, and while that turned into an ugly argument over whether cons influence sales, the point is I do think it was unfortunate for them as for somebody like me who never gets to play it this was a big missed opportunity.

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Hey' date=' did you make that up? Whatever the case, it's quite clever, I'd never heard it before.[/quote']

 

Much though I'd love to claim credit, I cannot tell a lie. That 70's Show used ockroach-Foot-Nuclear Bomb on an episode a couple of years ago as a substitute for Rock-Scissors-Paper. [They even had hand symbols for the three choices.]

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Having come from a d20 system, I actually find HERO combat simpler than d20 combat. No more concern over who has which iteritive attacks or when they go off; I treat it as a string of actions which are taken in a given round and simply call off phases and mark who's going when. Pretty straight forward, really.

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Much though I'd love to claim credit' date=' I cannot tell a lie. That 70's Show used ockroach-Foot-Nuclear Bomb on an episode a couple of years ago as a substitute for Rock-Scissors-Paper. [They even had hand symbols for the three choices.']

Okay, thanks, either way thanks for relaying it.

[archermoo]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Also' date=' not [b']every[/b] action has to be an elaborate event involving "Creative Use Of Powers" through the Power skill.

 

D@nm straight! If you are using the Power skill to modify your powers to do non-intended things every action, you didn't buy the right powers to start with.

[archermoo]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Ok, let's not get ridiculous. Obviously Paper-Rock-Scissors is the way to go

 

But seriously, folks, the thing that needs to happen to speed up combat, in my experience, is that people need to pay attention to what's going on and have a plan of action BEFORE IT'S THEIR TURN! Watching the poor gm do a complete combat recap for every person every time, and then watching that person look down at their character sheet while humming a tuneless noise as they ponder what their next move is...THAT is what slows combat down.

 

I've known GMs to put a time limit on how long players can take for their turn just to try and cut off this kind of thing. And for that matter be unwilling during combat to give a recap to anyone. Want to know what is going on in the combat? Pay attention. If you need a recap, ask your teammates, though anything said is said by the characters. Not my style, but I can understand what can push people to those type of extremes.

 

Though I will say I've occasionally done "hexless" combat. Just done the map freehand and provided rulers and AOE templates. No measuring before declaring an attack. It takes longer to resolve some types of things, but cuts down somewhat on the "measure everything to make sure you are doing the optimum attack" syndrome a bit.

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Way back, not in my current campaign but the prior, I used one of those hourglass sort of things, I think it was a 30 second measure or maybe a minute, to try to speed things up. Nobody minded the idea, but often the timing was requested for pausing for various clarifications and "what if..." questions. It didn't really work that well but it did help.

[archermoo]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Way back' date=' not in my current campaign but the prior, I used one of those hourglass sort of things, I think it was a 30 second measure or maybe a minute, to try to speed things up. Nobody minded the idea, but often the timing was requested for pausing for various clarifications and "what if..." questions. It didn't really work that well but it did help.[/quote']

 

I guess I've been fortunate to never have really had to deal with this whole "combat takes forever" thing. Where most of my groups get bogged down is in the out-of-combat part. Flying off on tangents, things like that. Most groups I've played with fly off in all sorts of different directions out of combat, but tend to get fairly focused once the damage starts flying...

 

[zornwil]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

I guess I've been fortunate to never have really had to deal with this whole "combat takes forever" thing. Where most of my groups get bogged down is in the out-of-combat part. Flying off on tangents, things like that. Most groups I've played with fly off in all sorts of different directions out of combat, but tend to get fairly focused once the damage starts flying...

 

I don't mind that, but, yeah, it surely happens as well.

 

I can't remember what fueled it in particular in the old group. I think mainly it was just too much deliberation about what to do, if I recall correctly. The current group isn't too bad, mostly they move things along. Sometimes I am probably the slower one when GMing, frankly, along with one player.

 

To some degree, though, I think deliberation and taking time is important, too, and combat can be too fast. Players aren't real life action heroes and don't have the ability to think and act that way, so we need time to make things interesting.

[archermoo]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

I don't mind that, but, yeah, it surely happens as well.

 

I can't remember what fueled it in particular in the old group. I think mainly it was just too much deliberation about what to do, if I recall correctly. The current group isn't too bad, mostly they move things along. Sometimes I am probably the slower one when GMing, frankly, along with one player.

 

To some degree, though, I think deliberation and taking time is important, too, and combat can be too fast. Players aren't real life action heroes and don't have the ability to think and act that way, so we need time to make things interesting.

 

Yup, the important bit is to get a good balance. Push things too fast and things get boring as no-one innovates and comes up with cool moves since they need to rush out their action. Go too slowly and people start pulling out rulers and calculators to figure out the exact optimal action for each one of their phases. At either extreme the game becomes less interesting.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Simplifying combat. Why would you want to do that

 

We like to use an entire room for Champions combat, piles of books or furniture for buildings and 1" tall homemade paper figures for the protagonists: everything is measured by tape ruler. Unlike some games Hero really is not confined to the battle mat, and indeed, given some of the movement rates available trying to play on a tabletop can rapidly become silly. Anyway, it has much more interactive appeal than scribbles on a piece of paper....

 

One thing that I tried (after doing an underground LRPG where I began to understand the importance of perception rolls and communication...) was to give everyone apiece of paper and ban out of character talking: they had to write down everything they wanted to do and hand it to me: no one knew what anyone else was doing, unless they had actually bought some communication power or were willing to yell out plans.

 

I wouldn't recommend it for a campaign, but I probably would for the START of a campaign, where the characters don't really know each other that well.

 

Point is when someone's turn came round they had to habd me the piece of paper, no messing: if they weren't ready we moved on to the next one and they were assumed to be delaying their phase (they only exception to the 'write it down rule' was when a character aborted). Gave a really good feel for the chaos of combat

 

Had two advantages:

 

1. Players tended to keep it brief and not stick in loads of conditions as they did not have time.

2. There was no real argument about intent as it was written down in their own fair hand.

 

Oh, and I did find it speeded up combat becasue people were looking for the basics of what they wanted to do AND were having to get ready for a certain point: Champions combat is QUICK: even quite epic encounters are not likely to exceed a minute of game time, during which 30 or more actions might have been performed per character. That is not a lot of think time.....

 

There are any number of tricks you can use to speed up play, most of which have been mentioned here or in the book somewhere. One relatively minor point is that I find it really useful to have a decently designed character sheet, with all the combat info together, or a seperate combat character sheet, and as the GM I like to have index cards witht he major info about PCs on it behind my screen, so I can be reasonably sure that I'm setting it all up right without having to keep asking for PC information from the player.

 

The other thing that I think really makes a world of difference is character design. The characters in the book are pretty good examples, IMO: they are clearly 'super' but all have similar CV and DC values and none of them - even the bricks - have really high defences. The 'slow but powerful brick v the nimble martial artist' may be a genre classic, but, unless you are a bit careful, a Champions combat of that sort can go on for hours.

[bigdamnhero]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

One relatively minor point is that I find it really useful to have a decently designed character sheet' date=' with all the combat info together, or a seperate combat character sheet[/quote']

Absolutely. It's amazing how much quicker combat can run if you don't have to ask "What's your DCV again?" every other phase.

 

Something I put together sometimes if I know a big combat is coming up is a SPD-DEX chart, plotting out who goes on what phase in what order. Example attached: PCs are black, friendly NPCs are blue, opponents are red. The original is an Excel sheet, which allows me to highlight different characters as stunned, KOd, etc, which helps me keep track of how long NPCs have been down.

 

 

bigdamnhero

“This is stupid.”

“When did that ever stop us.”

[Black Rose]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Also' date=' not [b']every[/b] action has to be an elaborate event involving "Creative Use Of Powers" through the Power skill.

IMO, if you're spending more than, say, half your actions involved in "elaborate events involving 'creative uses of powers' via the Power skill", well, you designed your character poorly. If you can't think of something vanilla to use your poweer builds on, talk to your GM about a radiation accident, or maybe invest some of the XP you're getting for your ky00l m00vz in MP slots so you can actually do the things you want to do with built powers.

 

Sorry, pet peeve. I likes me the Power Skill, but I feel it's a good measure of power need; if you use it for similar things a lot, you need a real power to do the job, not 5-7 pts invested in Power Skill: Bull$#!t the GM 13-.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

What Black Rose said.

[radioKAOS]

Re: Simplification of Combat

 

Sorry, pet peeve. I likes me the Power Skill, but I feel it's a good measure of power need; if you use it for similar things a lot, you need a real power to do the job, not 5-7 pts invested in Power Skill: Bull$#!t the GM 13-.

 

Agreed.

 

Though I do have to say it's a great justification for purchasing those new powers and or advantages for powers.