Universes of Imagination™ - Adventures

I know, I should be updating the story! Are the spiders still there? Has anyone succumbed to a spider's bite? Are they in the Abyss yet? …

All good questions and the story should be told, but a couple of issues are more on my mind today than the story. One of the issues has been present for a long time, how do we speed up play? The other came up at the end of the night and is about the almost infinite power of a series of 1st level spells—the detect spells.

For years now we have struggled with the speed of play. We have some very thoughtful players (who would probably be mincemeat in seconds if they were real characters in a real-life version of DnD!) We also have smokers, game store owners and parents. We have also been very willing to drag in resources from anywhere and everywhere to supplement TSR/WotC resources. Add to this a current party size of 13!!!! and very high level play (just below epic level) and we are lucky to get through four rounds in a night.

Last night we actually got through six rounds and a rest period, but we were also missing three key players, played for an hour more than usual and had, essentially, zero combat! One thing we did new last night was had a magnetic display of everyone's names and their initiative order. In theory, it will now be our individual player's responsibilities to come in on their initiative rather than wait to be called by me.

But that's only a small part of the process. What else should we do?

Another issue that strangely dovetails into this question is the problem of full-round actions. Stick with me here, it will make sense eventually!

While DnD uses initiative to both order play and to quantify those subtle differences in reaction time between different characters, all the players' actions happen in the same six seconds. So if character A uses a full round action to attack character B, character A's attacks are spread over the entire six seconds of the round. But if character A acts first, all of her attacks can be done before character B even begins his actions for the round.

So what? And in low level play this probably isn't a big issue but we are not playing a low level game! We have multiple characters who can deal 150 points of damage in a single full-round action. A critical, high-level opponent could be dead before they get a single blow in!

I could, as GM, simply give all the ‘bad guys’ insane dexterity scores and the Improved Initiative feat to make sure that most of them acted before the party. But that may simply turn the problem in the opposite direction, leaving the party justifiably feeling unfairly compromised.

And the cinematography of it just feels wrong. So character A gets in that first big swing and character B just stands there for the next five seconds taking hits 2, 3 and 4! That's just wrong and is obvious at this level where it probably isn't as obvious in lower level play.

So, what to do? Here's what I'm proposing that we'll try starting next week:

1. The start of each new round will be announced.
2. The players will have five minutes to decide their action(s) for the round. They can even confer during this period.
3. At the end of the five minutes, everyone will be expected to have their first action written down in front of them. If its a full-round action, then the first activity of that full-round action needs to be written down (the target/weapon/feats of the attack(s) with the full attack bonus, for instance).
4. We then quickly run down the initiative order and everyone takes this first action or begins the first part of their full-round action as written down. That means that the third person to hit opponent X may be hitting a corpse! Or, may have to choose whether to take their AoO instead on the opponent who chose to run.
5. Then we run a little more slowly through the initiative order to finish out the round. Still allowing no more than 30 seconds per player.

An alternative at point 5 might be to run a second, two minute, conflab without fixing the actions this time and then giving everyone just ten seconds to deliver their action in initiative order. This would give the GM some time to plan, also! Hmmmm, I'm liking this alternative a lot. Maybe even make it three minutes. We could still be done in less than fifteen minutes per round! Take a ten minute smoke/buy supper from the Chinese buffet break every three rounds and we could get through ten rounds in a three hour session. That I like a lot.

This speeds up play and mitigates the full-round action problem. It gives people time to have their spell/spell-like ability/manouevre/etc information out and ready for the GM for adjudication. It also discourages people from wandering during the round because there is no longer long periods of time when any one person isn't doing much.