Different people find different aspects of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) fun. For some, it’s the tactical combat that’s fun. For others, it’s exploration in a largely unknown fantasy world. Still others find enjoyment in building a character and finding loot to upgrade their character with.
If you enjoy one aspect of TTRPGs, you might find another aspect boring. My group plays Dungeons & Dragons (DnD) and enjoys exploration, but finds combat a boring drag. We also don’t have much time to play, and normally end up playing 1-2 hour sessions once or twice a month.
In many TTRPGs, and especially DnD, it’s the dice rolls that take up the most time. It’s counterintuitive, since a roll of dice only takes a second, but each dice roll also includes a description of what’s happening, time making a decision of what to do, an announcement of intention, an interpretation of the dice roll necessary, the actual dice roll, counting the results and adding modifiers, and then finally interpreting the result and announcing them to the players. In a combat encounter involving dozens of dice rolls, this can add up to half an hour or more for a single combat encounter.
In DnD, combat tends to take up most of the game time, and my players hate that. To make it more fun for my players, I came up with a few simple rules changes to drastically shorten combat encounters by reducing the number of dice rolls required to bring combat to its conclusion.
One simple rules change to drastically shorten combat encounters
The simplest way I’ve come up with to shorten combat encounters is to never roll for damage. Always use the maximum amount of damage when assessing damage inflicted.
For example, in DnD you roll an 8-sided die to determine damage from a longsword. With these modified rules, a longsword always causes 8 damage under normal circumstances.
If there are damage modifiers, they are also added to the damage. For instance, a particularly strong character with a +2 damage modifier due to strength would inflict 1-8 damage with a longsword, plus their strength modifier of +2, under normal DnD rules. That’s 3-11 damage. But under the modified rules, the character would always inflict 11 damage with the longsword.
In DnD, players roll a 20-sided die to determine success or failure of an attack. If a “20” is rolled on the attack, the damage is doubled. Using the example strong character above, if that character attacked with a longsword and rolled a “20” on the attack roll, the damage would be 22.
You would apply the same concept of always using maximum damage for every damage situation. A greatsword causes 12 damage. A club causes 4 damage. An unarmed strike causes 1 damage. An unarmed strike by a character with a +2 strength modifier causes 3 damage.
A fireball spell causes 48 damage (8d6, in standard TTRPG dice notation), unless the character successfully makes a saving throw (jumps out of the way), in which case they would take 24 damage (4d6, or half damage).
The latest DnD Monster Manual says an Adult Red Dragon does 17d6 damage with its “Fire Breath” attack, or half damage if its victim succeeds in a dexterity saving throw (avoids the brunt of the attack by dodging out of the way). With these modified rules, the dragon’s fire breath would cause 102 damage, or 51 damage if the victim could jump out of the way.
You get the idea. Never roll for damage. Always use maximum damage.
By only using maximum damage, everyone involved in combat suffers more grievous injuries when they get hit, and combat is resolved much quicker. I would guess that the total time it takes to resolve combat in this way would be halved. Low level monsters would be taken down with one successful attack, and higher level monsters would go down with about half as many hits as it would normally take.
An exception to the rule for the sake of the players
Player characters at the low levels (levels 1-3) have few hit points. If we’re always dealing max damage, a single arrow hit might take out a player’s character. That’s no fun.
I suggest inflicting average damage against player characters. Average damage is half of maximum damage. You can even round down in the case of odd numbers. In this way, the characters maintain relatively normal survivability in combat, while monsters will die much faster.
Doing this does decrease the difficulty for the players somewhat, since the monsters are dying faster and will thus get fewer chances to attack the players. However, if your players are not ones that enjoy combat, they would probably enjoy dying in combat even less. Making combat easier would likely increase the fun for these types of players.
If you’re against making things easier for your players, then I still recommend using this exception to the max damage rule, but only for players who are levels 1-3. At the low levels, the best way to increase difficulty is by adding extra monsters to encounters.
Conclusion
Never roll for damage. Instead, always just use the maximum possible damage when deciding on damage. Making this simple rules change will likely cut the time you spend resolving combat in half.
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