Monsters and other matters

[kt_peasant]

So, to those experienced GMs and players out there, how would you recommend making combats in table-top short and snappy, but still interesting and full of good stories? Is there a best number of comabtants? Question inspired by last nights Dark Heresy game, run by the immensely creative chromenewt another involving a horde of mooks, who provided much drama

Comments

[oldnick]

I don't know how DH combat works, but...

Big combats will be slow - but they can be memorable if they go well, and are worth doing occasionally.

Pick a system with a 'cinematic' approach to mass combat. If the game doesn't do that, cheat so as to make it seem as if it does.

1) Do as much as you can in advance, so as to speed up the mechanics. Spreadsheets with randomised dice rolls and as-far-as-possible pre-calculated results are your friend.

2) If it's really large mass-combat, with many NPCs on the PCs' side, work out some averaged figures for how NPCs vs. monsters should work out, stick a bit of randomness on top, and spreadsheet the results.

3) Never rely on PCs retiring or losing to get to a combat result that fits the story. Players sense when this is done, and will be horribly tenacious in making sure it doesn't work.

4) Make sure that some of the opponents in nay fight have distinctive characteristics / descriptions. Not all of them have to, but enough that not all of them are just nameless cannon fodder.

[chromenewt]

I did experiment once with a previous game (40k based on the Big Eyes Small Mouth rules) with a mass combat formula that included variables which were both inside and outside of the PCs control, and it worked out NPC casualties on both sides. I created a spreadsheet to fill in the values and it would give the casualties which would then be used in the next calculation. UInfortunately it took just as long to fill in the spreadsheet as it did to do dice rolls normally.

Just to give an idea, DH is very similar to Warhammer Fantasy RPG. Difference is that there's more emphasis on long range combat than the predecessor. One idea that we came up with is to abolish the dodge roll for ranged combat unless the appropriate talent is owned. Dodging bullets should be bordering on the supernatural, not something that mooks and low level PCs can do.

[oldnick]

My spreadsheet approach is (I think) simpler than you are envisaging.

A line for each monster, each round, with (using fairly generic terms - you'd need to modify to suit the mechanisms) the attack it would use, their (randomised) dice roll(s), the armour classes that it would affect, and the damage it would do.

You then just say monster A attacks PC B - check any modifiers and see if it hits B, and read off the damage it does then cross through that line so you don't use it again by accident.

Stick a description above the monster, so instead of reading out "Monster A", you say "The X that smells of eels", and that's it.

The trick you're trying to achieve is to get back to the players running their characters more quickly, by not being bogged down by the dice rolling and calculating for monsters.

[chromenewt]

Ahh, I getcha! I do that with the more complicated NPCs and it worked rather well with a bunch of well equipped "cultists". The only reason I abandoned it for this game was the number all at once meant it was hard to keep tabs of hitpoints on the same page.

[kt_peasant]

We did look at pre-calculating where possible, but there are a lot of situation modifiers in DH, and I think we haven't really yet got a grip on which ones are likely to change during a fight and which don't, so as to know how much can be done in advance. Because the mods exist, the players try to use them to their advantage during fights, reasonably enough, which means the npcs have got to be affected. Hmmmm