Hey all. So I've got a query that perhaps may make some explode in rage, to whom it is not a problem at all but a definite Good Thing - alas, as with all Good Things, sometimes one gets too much of it. So with apologies to those suffering from the opposite of my issue, I present my case...

I've run two Dark Heresy campaigns so far for my friends, which ran 4 and 3 Acolytes, respectively. This is my third game, and is looking to be the biggest by far: six players have come on board, all of them showing a whole lot of excitement and commitment to the game and gametimes. Some problems, though: of these, only two of them are experienced TTRPG players. The rest enjoy it, but are more prone to the faults of the medium that sometimes raise their heads...namely, when things begin to drag. Namely, when things begin to drag in combat .

Having a good slugfest with 3-4 players is easy; even with a minion for each Acolyte and perhaps a boss to even them out, you only make 8-10 character turns per round. As more players join, I find myself wondering what to do to expedite my turns and make things move a little faster - with 6 players, rounds with 13-15 turns in them aren't out of the question. For everyone involved, I think that's too much.

My idea is a simple one, but I'd like your opinions on it: Half the enemy NPCs, with double the Wounds on each. It doesn't fit a plot or story terribly well, but it would make the rounds go faster - or, more to the point, it would give my Acolytes more turns to do something (which, really, is all they care about). Does this sound like a decent fix? Have you encountered a similar problem before, and how did you solve it?

Use Mook rules. Throw a few more enemies at the party to make it seem like even resistence. Only give Higher ranking enemies/bosses full wound amounts. Speeds up combat immensly and lets the players feel totally cool.

I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with the term 'Mook rules'...what do you mean, exactly?

"Mooks" are npc goons who are only good for one hit. A single decent ranged attack or a single melee hit will take one down. irrespective of how may wounds they should have, they only really have one. Explain the hit in gory detail, too.

Leave the leaders and "special" types amongst the opposition with normal wounds (or double them to make it more difficult), so the players have to concentrate on killing them.

Taking out 3 or 4 opponents with a single grenade or Auto-burst makes newbie players feel like they are achieving something.

S.K..

Ah, I see what you mean...take the opposite approach, make a ton of weak NPCs, who after the first round will be dying in droves and make the impression of progress.

I like that idea well enough, but perhaps I didn't voice one point well enough: all of the people in my current game have played Dark Heresy before, and so might be a bit innured to that artificial feeling of badassery. They know what it takes to kill your average Minima-rank dude, and may feel slighted if they start dying off even faster than they did in previous games. Not to say that they won't notice that those same foes have a ton of wounds...heck, I'd probably tell them I was doing it...but it provides a different problem with experienced DH players (if not overly experienced TTRPG players in general).

Also, using Mook rules seems like it might only exascerbate my primary problem: rounds taking very, very long to get through thanks to the number of combatants. While using Mook rules would mean that every turn would become successively shorter as more and more enemies die, I don't know if that would provide enough momentum to fix the ADD my players seem to assume when waiting for their own turns.

Or do you/anyone else have experience where using this method has done just that? o.O

I believe it was TS Luikart who introduced volley fire rules for mook groups. Essentially, you partition them into squads and have each squad roll a single attack, modified in damage and success chance by the weapons used and the number of mooks. With squads of five, you could easily have combats with 27 participants (6 acolytes + 2 squads PDF/IG/Redemptionists/whatever versus 1 big bad + 2 squads of cultists) that don't feel larger than a fight of eleven.

The rules should be somewhere in the depths of the forum...

As an alternative to volley fire, I use the "bucket of dice" approach. Give the mooks a BS in whole deciles, i.e. 10, 20, 30 or 40, but not 33 or 28. That way you only need to roll one d10 per mook. BS 30, at medium range, means you need to roll a 1-3 to succeed. Twenty mooks get twenty dice, discard the ones which roll more, then roll damage for those - you've instantly saved yourself having to roll each mook separately.

I use a similar approach for damage tracking. Instead of each mook having a single hit, I work out how much damage it should take to kill them, add 1 and divide by two (round up). Any hit which does that much damage, kills them - any hit which does less, I ignore. e.g. for a mook with 10 wounds, you need to do 6+ damage to kill, 5 or less is ignored. (I'm assuming you don't bother with critical damage for mooks.) That way I don't have to track wounds, but retain (roughly) the same level of difficulty in killing them; in the example, a weapon doing d10 damage after toughness and armour will still take an average of two shots to kill one mook.

These tricks speed things up more than you'd expect. But TBH, I'd balk slightly at 6 players. I'd be looking to keep combat to a minimum (which I usually do anyway).

You think you've got problems...I've got 14 in the group, and 3 more that want to join because they've heard the cool stories. Sheesh.

Granted, I hardly ever have more than 9 at the table...we use a system whereby the Inquisitor rotates his acolytes out to wherever they are needed, and I throw them some plot bones "off stage." I also run multiple lines of investigation in geographic/astrographic proximity, to facilitate this lateral movement of players.

Combat can take forever, so with a large group you do have to use mook rules, and keep things focused and on task. I don't allow players to dally in proclaiming action, and if they need to look something up to use a power/skill, the next in initiative gets to go and I come back to them.

The fire squad idea is good as well. Your main villains should be powerhouses, and use all the skills and cunning at their disposal...but do try to make them think differently than you do. Give a villain favorite methods, such as explosives, poisons, bladework, etc... And that will make them stand out from the mooks that are just there to amp up the risk and die in droves.

What i've done recently for groups of spods is group up the ones with the same weapons and effective assist fire. They give each other +10 to hit and the rate of fire is the total for the the turn.

So 3 mooks with single shot weapons would be a semi auto attack (3 shots) with +20 to the roll.

Three people with semi auto guns (3 shots). Would be a Full auto (9 rounds) with a +20.

Essentially the mook damage rules I use, is that when they hit 1 to -7 critical damage they are stunned for a turn then fatigued (possibility of fleeing if you do that) and past -8 on a critical they are straight out dead.

It really speeds things up for me.

Schlobo said:

Do you give initiative rolls to each and every one of the opposition? Our Gm usually bunches up the mook types into squads (much as discussed earlier) and has them all act at the same time. Makes things flow easier too.

Unfortunately the A.D.D. which develops in longer combats is a problem which gets worse at higher levels. Our group of 6 is at 6th level and we took on a cult base of 30+ enemies recently. The resulting fight (with miniatures) took almost 5 hours. I thought it was ace, but then again i play 40k so appreciated the scenery/spectacle, but two of the characters in the group got taken down quite early on and spent as much time unconscious as they did fighting because they had to be healed. These situations can make people exceptionally bored.

Unfortunately its down to each of the players perspectives. some like to watch, some dont....

S.K.

Face Eater said:

I think this is a nice one!

Solomon Kane said:

IMHO this is the main problem with the DH combat system. For large scale combats, the likes of which you would see in a D&D video game, can take up very valuable rollplay time. The fun of DH is the investigation, and the combat rules (IMHO) are there for the minor scrapes every inveigator will get themselves into. Thats why I love these homebrewed rules for "mooks" (a term i had never heard before), as it gives players the feeling that they are actually accomplishing something, and it gives the story a little more bravado in the PCs favor.

Sort of depends on the players. For our group, investigation is a way of finding new people to put a hurt on.

Another way to speed up combat is to cut down on the dicerolling and waiting for dicerolling. As GM I'd reccomend having a few full pages of row upon row of random 1-100 numbers. Go down the rows and strike out the numbers as you use them. Saves plenty of time. You can still roll for important cases.

Have your players plan their turn and preroll their attack dice, so when their initiative comes up they can just tell you what they do, how many rates of success they earned and how much damage each hit did. Then you as a GM must of course consult your random chart to find any dodges, parries and similar. This requires two things: that you trust in your players and that they are willing to learn the rules properly so don't have to ask about modifications.

Generally speaking, if you have a good push of people that _wants_ to play with you, you can ask for effort from them. Require that they learn the rules properly. At least all of their available actions and applicable modifiers to them. As a stepping stone: print a quick-guide with the most common attacks, like the rulebook p 189 tries to be, but make yours easy to read, informative, correct and sort the actions into useful categories...

I regularly play and GM with pretty large groups, generally 6-7 players and sometimes as many as 20 opponents (most with the 2wound mook rules) Since we got the prerolling rolling (sorry...) and learned the rules properly the fights are very smooth and actionfilled even for us that waits.

You can find mook rules in Creatures Anathama. I use the 2 hit point mooks, which work like this: If a hit does 10 or more damage, after armour and toughness bonus, it is killed in one shot. Otherwise it is wounded. I put a little colored disk under the mini so everyone can see it's wounded. A wounded mook dies as soon as it takes any more damage. With the colored disks, I never have to write anything down.

To speed up the start of combat I use "Init Tool" a free java initiative roller that I keep up on my laptop. I create groups of combatants before the game, and track hit points for non-mooks in the tool. You can find it at: www.rptools.net . The defaults are D&D, but it's easy to change to Dark Heresy.

I am totally going to steal one of these volley fire rules, not sure which one yet.