Combat Management

[SikSavant]

I didn't want to hijack the other thread where this came up, but I was rather shocked to learn that combat can take a *very* long time in FG. I think 3 1/2 hours was the quote...and that was with an experience FG GM running things.

I've not run a single FG game yet, but I must admidt that the great thing about d20 is the combat is "fast" and well paced. Perhaps (and I'm really only guesing here) that a much more sophisticated combat manager in FG would help out. I recently downloaded and am playing around with PCGen/GMGen from CMP/Sourceforge. Just fiddling around with the well conceived combat management tool within GMGen makes me long for a similar tool in FG. How 'bout it Developers?

IMHO, software needs to make gaming easier by taking over the arduous and tedious aspects of the hobby; something software is inherantly good at. If these programs are only the digital methaphor for paper-and-pencil we've accomplished very little. I *really* like the direction FG is headed and I know the developers care about this product, and there are only so many hours in a day. But I'd like to hear from SmiteWorks on the possibility of a GMGen quality combat managment tool in FG. Thanx!

[Cantstanzya]

I have added an initative box to the mini sheets so the players can drag their init to their mini sheets to save the DM from having to do it. I then sort the combat tracker and this give me the order of the combat. It saves a ton of time. It used to be I would have to drag all of the players init to the combat tracker along with the NPCs. Now I only have to do it for the NPCs.
I have been working on a round counter but haven't gotten it to work yet. Hopefully the scripting they have been talking about in 1.06 will make this possible.

[kalmarjan]

Okay, just to clarify a few things... I am the DM whose combat session took 3 1/2 hours.. That was a small one. Only a Gnoll cleric, Gnoll Ranger, six Gnoll mooks, a Grick, and 1 NPC player, plus 5 regular players. When two of them had to leave, I NPC'ed them as well.

Imagine the six Gnolls are in sniping positions, the Ranger is attacking the Rogue scouting ahead, the grick is holding the rest of the party back at the doorway to the courtyard they are fighting... Oh, and it is in the middle of the night, because the party's mage has a curse on him that makes it so that any sort of light is like looking into the sun for him.... he can only see at nighttime or any other sort of darkness. Add in a real heavy haze and a range modifyer of -2 to attacks... and voila!
The combat itself is a real challenge at this point... which explains the length of time. If things were in optimal conditions, this battle would have took 30 minutes of game time to resolve.

Don't even talk to me of the battle with the Blue Dragon, 6th level Gnoll Ranger, 3 6th Level Clerics and an Orc Fighter with 6 players. That battle alone took 3 4 hour sessions to resolve. Not because of the gaming platform or the program, because my players are just that damn good. Imagine a see saw battle, where everyone is on the edge of their seat... wondering what will happen next. They gladly came the next week both wondering aloud "Are we gonna live" and "Lets kick some Dragon A##".

I want to say that I do not want a combat manager. There are other programs for that. (DMGenie is one...) I like what this interface gives us. I would say that the players are into the battle as well, the reason things take so long is due to complications... just as in PNP gaming.

Instead of a round counter, I place an object in the init tracker called "Round", give it an it of 100, and the HP represents the number of rounds. When I sort out the init, the rounds is on the top.

As for the combat, the 3 1/2 hours was from a complicated battle. I believe that my players will remember it for times to come. Part of the problem is sometimes, it seems that the tokens that are placed drops players. This takes up a bit of time. Also, player participation is the key. If you need to page your players over and over again, then this will eat up time for sure.

As for the init spots on the tracker.... Since the tracker automatically keeps what is written in the box even after you have closed it out, you only need to put the players in there once. When the new init is rolled, you simply drag it there, and then sort it after.

I don't want to scare you about the length of time that it takes to do combat in FG. It is as fast as any PNP game. If you are running 10 NPCs plus 3 players as NPCs (For a total of 13 NPCs) plus 5 players, no matter what you do, it will be a little sluggish.

Hope this helps,

Sandeman

[Nursenut]

Hiya,
I ran a couple combats last night..using advice from kalmarjan and others and combat went much smoother. But I must stress you MUST prepare before hand! I had all baddies Hot buttoned. Init tracker filled out and ready.
Combat was: 2 PCs, 1 NPC, 1 Animal Companion, 3 skeletons and 3 Fungi. Now granted this was a 1st level encounter...but it took about 15 min at most.

[gurney9999]

Yes. preparation for combat by a DM is vital with FG, just as it is with normal pen and paper gaming. If you have two major battles within your FG 'module', load up your function keys with many of the activities (attack rolls for each of the monsters with weapons and/or special attacks defined, spell declarations, initiative rolls with bonuses, declarations of crtical hits, etc.).

Also, a lot of the time around combat deals with typing what actions are being taken, both as a DM and a player. Suggest to your players that they set up their repeatable actions ("attack with longsword +3", "move back to protect spellcaster", "initiative +2", etc.) on their quick keys as well, so they can quickly communicate through FG.

[SikSavant]

Well, I must admit that I'd rather have a Combat Manager and not use it, than to need a Combat Manager and not have one. Physical conflict is one of the main elements in many RPGs. Even the manuals are combat heavy in their treatments, probabaly over 40% of the content is somehow related to fighting.

I certainly agree prep is very important, but it's starting to feel like the Quick Keys are becoming a crutch for behaviour that could be more integrated into the tool itself. The Quick Keys seems to be a place that I have to manually store redundant information in order to use the tool smoothly in play. This seems to indicate a deficiency in the tool's ability to draw upon the information already known to the tool. Rolling initiative, making attacks, awarding damage, assigning injury states are all common combat tasks. I simply would enjoy seeing FG aid GM with combat at the same level of care and thought that is going into the mapping portion of the tool.

Thanx to all for the interesting discussion! :D

[joshuha]

Hopefully the upcoming LUA scripting in 1.06 will help us solve our own problems.

One thing to be wary about is when automating do you just automate to D20 (as in d20 + Init). I would like them to spend more development time on general features then ones that might only work in D20. Auto initiative and stuff is neat but they would need to do it very modular for it to be flexible for systems like Shadowrun, World of Darkness, etc.

Not saying it shouldn't be done and I agree some better solutions would help greatly. I personally think we should be able to have a much more modular init tracker that could take macros placed on the columns. This way you could say have a column called attack and drag the bonus over form you monster and then it ask you what kind of dice (or type it in) and then everytime you click he column "button" attack next to the NPC you need it does the roll. Having modular columns then lets you put other things like "Damage" or whatever you want. This keeps the system open for other systems but still provides good flexibility.

[richvalle]

This has come up before. One of the dev's responces is that you have to be carefull with what gets automated as there are strict rules from WoTC that combat can NOT be automated.

Not sure to what extent that goes for.

Oh... and the init tracker is supposed to get a facelift/something new. Hopfully that will help as well.

rv

[Dupre]

With the scripting support, you can automate much of the combat process if you want to. We, however, cannot provide a ruleset with automated combat due to license issues.

[SikSavant]

How did we get to "automated" combat? I don't want a Big Red Button that I press and all the little ants start maching into the fray until one side is defeated. The level of software assistance I'm looking for merely aids the GM in running combat by keeping combat related data close at hand, in the proper windows where it can be easily used, and other sensible combat control. This would be far from automated.

I appologize for making the presumption that FG was a d20 only game tool; I really thought that was it's mission. Of course, it's incredibly easy to draw this conclusion as most of the FG content appears to be written for d20. Well, I keep learning at least

:D

[Crusader]

Don't worry about it. :) I guess the d20-related stuff dominates out of natural reasons.

As I have said elsewhere I made a ruleset for a completely different game, and I would have made it publicly available, but it is so heavily riddled with copyrighted material so that would be a stooopid idea.

[Stuart]

I have now run three sessions ... hardly experienced I know but ...
I honestly don't consider combat in FG overly time consuming but I have loads to do ... my players might however but ... hey-ho, at least they have a game. I've run about 6 minor skirmishes so far, the biggest had 6 players plus 9 orcs and a shaman ... took about and hour and a half ? I'll confess (hopefully the players are not reading this ... close your eyes now !) that I did not do too much prep and just jotted down a few notes on a sticky which I stuck to the side of my PC. This was only because I have not had the time to play with FG and get to know all it's bells and whistles ... sticky paper is pretty high tech for me I'm afraid ! :shock:

(Embarrassed ... he heads off to look for his FG manual and confess sins on msd's site ...) :(

[Spyke]

(hopefully the players are not reading this ... close your eyes now !)

I haven't seen a thing... :)

That combat ran smoothly, and was very exciting, so I say YAY to the sticky notes.

Of course it wouldn't have taken place at all if I, as the rogue, had bothered to check whether there more than just the two orcs I spotted sitting on those crates... :oops:

[Goblin-King]

Just as a general point, since it's come up a lot here lately... The biggest benefit from 1.06 to people who run d20 (and hence probably aren't much bothered with their own modifications to the rulesets) will be more advanced combat management. Rest assured we've been reading all the stuff about this on the boards, and I'm not too concerned if everything works as planned ;)


One thing to be wary about is when automating do you just automate to D20 (as in d20 + Init). I would like them to spend more development time on general features then ones that might only work in D20.

Flexibility and ruleset independence are very high on our list of priorities. All the automation going in will go through a review of its applicability in a generic sense. Also, we like to read any feedback on this since we just can't review all the rules in use out there.

This is also one of the core reasons we decided to go ahead and implement scripting: You can't stay system independent and provide advanced functionality, so we had to move the functionality onto the ruleset level.

[Snikle]

I am sure whatever you guys have in the works for a counter is probably better than what I thought up, but I was messing around and I thought that a counter might be useful. For example, say a player casts a spell that lasts 4 rounds, then 2 rounds later another one casts a spell that lasts 10 rounds, then another etc etc.
So I thought up an idea that maybe could be worked into FG somehow, maybe after we get the scripting release. Essentially you could drag and drop a character, then hit radio buttons to track how many rounds have pasted since whatever action that player took. Left column is the tens and right is the ones, so 1 blue in the left and three in the right would be equal to 13 rounds having passed. Anyway, just an idea, not sure how useful it would be, but there it is.
In the example below, it has been 69 rounds since Fal did his action, 3 for Auron, 9 for Craw and 6 for Helse.

https://www.sylnae.net/img/fg/counteridea.jpg