GM gripes about players..

I think that combat can easily become annoying and bogged down in nearly any game system, mainly because it goes into so much more detail than most of the role-playing aspects. When you're trying to circulate at a party and pick up gossip, or bluff your way past the guards at the city gate, it doesn't matter if you're 5' away or 15', nor (usually) does it matter which direction they happen to be facing.

The best combat system I've ever found actually was taking the tick system of Scion and Exalted, and applying it to BESM tri-stat in a home brew. All my players loved the system, because it indulged their desire for tactical fun while still being fast and engaging. Whenever I run another game, I intend to take a good look at the combat system involved and see if it's worth the effort to convert that system over to tick combat.

it works better if you just embrace the gameplay and story segregation to begin with

In our latest boss fight, the GM introduced and enforced a "12 second to decide what you do for your turn" rule. It helped.

Ugh, that is the absolute worst kind of gameplay :P

I mean, I guess if you like that kind of thing, it just means that players don't get to actually think about things.

Good for simple gameplay, but bad for more complex 4E styles of gameplay.

Beats the players discussing tactics at length OOC. The rule before was "lose your turn if you give OOC indications", which is not much better.

The game is D&D 3.5, for reference.

I can relate. I had a player once who (not kidding) spent at least five minutes deciding on the optimal place to throw a fireball.

Discussing tactics OOC is a feature not a bug :P

But it depends on what you're looking for in a campaign. What purpose does combat serve.

Five minutes for a fireball, yeah, that's obviously problematic.

edited 24th May '15 1:14:40 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

I play 3.5E with a group of mostly engineering students, and I recall a time when a couple of them spent a good 5 minutes at least doing geometric calculations to decide if one of the casters could hit an attack from where they were standing.

Maybe time limits on deciding attacks would be a good idea for us, too...

This is why you use a grid.

What kind of idiot waits until their turn to start thinking about their next move? You should already have it decided by the time combat makes it through an entire cycle.

That'd be great if it weren't for the fact that everyone else's turns have an impact on what you do for your turn.

It really depends on how complex and dynamic you make combat out to be. Different strokes etc.

So think ahead and figure how changes affect the plan. It's really not that hard unless you get a curve-ball thrown your way.

Yeah, you clearly don't play the same combat I do ;P

I have to go with CDRW on this one. If you only come up with one possible plan, which depends on very specific decisions from both your party members and the enemy, you're being incredibly inefficient.

On the other hand, if you come up with a list of scenarios, and come up with general plans of action in each one, you can easily adapt for any situation on the fly. Mind you, there will always be some amount of improv that happens (like when I said "I'll use the Aid Another action in combat" the other day in my 3.5 game... it took a minute for everyone to even realize that was an option). But in general, if you have general tactics and use them, you won't have nearly as much of a problem.

But it's even easier to just come up with the plan after everybody has made their move !

And it's realistic, even. A round lasts 6 seconds ; in the heat of combat, mistakes will be made.

Come to my virtual table sometime, I'll show you how it's done ;P

When you have a plan, and then between turns half the party is stunned, you have to readjust your plan. It happens. Do some people take too long to decide their turns? Sure. But this is just looking for people to badmouth.

Why am I (the dm) the only person in this campaign with readable handwriting?

That reminds me of this weird combat system my friends and I homebrewed when we jumped ship from 4e.

1. Roll initiative
2. Lowest declares what they're going to do, then next lowest, etc.
3. Highest gets to do what they want, then next highest, etc.
4. Lower initiative peoples are only mildly allowed to change what they're going to do in face of what the quicker people have done.

Oh gods, it was terrible.

edited 27th May '15 4:57:24 PM by Luthen

Terrible ? Why ?

Because 99% of your actions will be invalidated by virtue of the fact that the people at top get to decide where they want to be?

Wizard is gonna cast a burst spell? welp, just don't be in the pre-determined burst location. Or better yet, move adjacent to them so they provoke an attack of opportunity.

4E especially is built around the idea that you can take different actions as befits the situation. Ignoring things like immediate action powers (which are the core of 4E-a major derivation from previous editions that made off-turn effects pretty rare, though 3.5 did have a fair number of them with psionic characters), 4E places the greatest emphasis on tactical decision making, and if you're unable to respond to the things that have happened before your turn, then that decision making basically goes out the window.

Turn order is a problem in every system. Sometimes you take all your actions in order. Other times you move first then take actions. Other time you declare, then act.

Personally I prefer the rule where every action takes place simultaneously, so everybody gets to act, but the effects don't take effect until the next round.

That sort of thing makes positioning basically a non-aspect of the system.

True, but that doesn't bother me. I rarely use minis in my RP Gs. Most questions of distance are either "close enough" or "not close enough", or "behind cover" and "not behind cover".

I've found that, absent very specific circumstances, letting the players describe what their characters are doing and how they're moving tends to make things go by faster, rather than having them ponder exactly the most efficient route to go from point A to point B. For the most part it seems to work out for me. After all, what it really comes down to is whether the character can or can't do a particular thing.

Right. so it's a question of what role does combat serve in your campaign.

And for me it varies. When I do Star Wars it is very combat-heavy. Characters spend whole adventurers blasting away at Stormtroopers, chasing in speeders, flying through space shooting at stuff. When I do The World Of Darkness, the characters may have only one or two combat sessions in an entire story. Some sessions may go by without even a die roll. Games I've done based on the Savage Worlds system tend to have a blend of the two, usually a peaceful scene or two followed by furious combat, then a breather, then back to combat.

Lately in the D&D 5th Edition game I've been running, a significant portion of the session is based around setting up the adventure. Lots of talking, exposition, meeting characters and deciding on what to do. Then once they leave their safe zone, they're more or less in constant peril until they return.

But I'm not really griping right now. I'll need to think of something to complain about.

Although I'll share a funny story. One of the players I have had a Bard before changing. In one story, I was trying to have the dungeon boss taunt them from a far distance. Things like "Who Dares? intrude on my tomb?" and so on. Naturally the Bard was very flippant about this. "We're going to destroy you and steal your treasure of course! You taunt us, we taunt you back!" Pretty Bardic if you ask me.