Okay. I'm certainly no whiner, but seriously, combat of any kind takes FOREVER to resolve without really abstracting things. I have not sprung for a GM screen, but I'm seriously considering it for the amount of just time spent flipping through the book during combat. The book is so expensive that I can't really ask my players to buy it and read it on their own, so they have only a loose grasp on their own options and modifiers in combat, and all of us are fumbling with character sheets, various cheat sheets that I have made, and just getting confused and even a bit irritated. I really like how detailed the system is, but I can't shake the feeling that we should be picking this up faster. We've been at this for a couple of months now, gaming once a week, and we still don't really know what we're doing. I have tried very hard to read the rules, make specific sheets (melee actions, shooting actions, flow of combat sequence, etc.) to hand out, but nothing seems to help much. Generally, every gaming session that breaks into combat ends up running at least an hour or two over schedule. The characters, bless 'em, will spend about an hour coming up with tactics before engaging and it usually really pays off so I can hardly fault them, but once the dice start rolling, the modifiers start stacking, and everything else, we're talking hours of combat. Hours. I don't think we're stupid, I just think it's that complicated. I have heard that index cards might help, I have my cheat sheets, and I feel like I'm awash in papers. They all pretty much look the same, and I have to go through the pile over and over to find what I'm looking for. The book is getting passed all over the room, and general pandemonium ensues. I'm pretty sure it's frustrating the players, and I know it's frustrating me...

So, what the heck can I do to really speed things up? Any tips? Do you find this is the case in your games?

Sorry about the rambling rant, but this is all very fresh in my mind and this campaign we're on will really stretch on for another month, easy, if we don't get this under control.

I personally don't find the combat being that slow. You mention the modifiers piling up, that might be a sticking point for you. Your players should be able to keep track of their own particular modifiers for most combats since they won't change from fight to fight, with the only real modifiers being things that you should know in advance. Ranges, the size of enemies(Hulking, Enormous, et cetera), any special environmental concerns.

But really, your players can't afford $30 for a rulebook?

Well, to speed things up, I also have a pdf version of the core book and for every player I printed out a booklet containing the Combat Actions Chart, and the entire Skill and Talents section so the players themselves can look up their own boni and abilities. They cheerfully welcomed it. I also bought a second core book off of Ebay, and that helps a lot in combat as well as leveling up.

Also:

-No need to roll for locations if the enemies are either very low-lever or they're wearing identical armour on every location. For minor enemies I don't bother to look up critical damage, unless it's a dramatic moment or the last of the bunch.

-Keep the players' turns snappy, if with every action they need ten minutes to debate, remind them that they don't have time to contemplate each and every move, combat is fast and deadly so they need to be able to make snap decisions.

-Don't use millimetric combat movement, keep it descriptive, only use a rough map for relative positions but don't fuss over positions exact to the meter.

-As a GM, be prepared, know the scores of your baddies or have the book, and page number written down on a note for quick reference.

-If it's a minor encounter or - combat, don't fuss over an enemy ending up with one or two HP, kill him off, or if the players kill enough of the enemy group, have them retreat, run away. Or if your players are a cruel bunch, just describe the killing of those two unfortunate gang members who were stupid enough to stay and fight against a party of 5 Acolytes who just slaughtered 10 of their buddies.

You don't always have to squeeze out the dicerolls and exact calculations to the bitter end. Pace and tempo are often more important to keep the player's brain from frying early on in the evening;

I found it fantastic to have TWO GM-screens. One from RT, one from DH. The RT I use myself, the DH lies open on the table. All the combat-actions are written there, modifiers etc. There are some differences between the weapons on the screens, which could mean there are different types of the same weapon.

+ you get 2 funky adventures and some other generators for spaceships and monsters.

I have no trouble with the speed of combat. But I think that Meph makes some excellent suggestions of keeping things going faster. I use various of the methods he is mentioning. But let me another tip: Don't bother throwing Initiative for every opponent. Unless they are special.

I would also suggest to keep things simple and not use every little rule you can find. In the basic, the system is fast and simple to learn.

Let your players pay for one extra copy for their use? If you divide the cost between 4 people, it is not that expensive anymore.

How to speed up combat:

- Only named characters take criticals, all others die at zero wounds
- Mooks only have 1 wounds, Strong Mooks go down after to hits (or 1 hit which does 10+ damage)
- Use word to make a quick referance table for you and your players

How to slow down combat but make it more cool and clear

- Use a battlegrid and miniatures or tokes..

All of the speeding up methods are good ones. I use the one hit rule for lesser mooks, and I give my medium and big mooks 2-5 hits before going down. Only characters and major NPC's get the detailed crit hits.

Also, unless the combat is absolutely essential to the act, you could even reduce the enemy to a single horde(a la Deathwatch) and damage it like that. This would of course only be for battle type of encounters where single combat would take forever.

The biggest problem is when we have to use a bigger gun. One of my mates has a heavy bolter. Image rolling for dmg for 5-6 hits with tearing quality. This is really nightmare, we decided that if enemies are not important, they are just dying after succesful hit roll. It has no sense to count and track all of those dmg if you know that they won't survive it anyway.

A few tips, none of which are particularly cleaver but have worked for us:

• Roll ALL to hit and damage dice at the same time (I like to have 3 different colour sets of percentile dice when I can - for all 3 of my attacks - to resolve everything at once.)
• Do the same with damage (and that`s even more important with weapons with Tearing that take forever to resolve otherwise.)
• We generally aren`t too careful with minor NPC wounds either... a good hit or two is enough to end more mooks (as others suggested)
• Unless the characters have managed to set up an ambush, I don`t let them get any time to plan out tactics. And I expect characters to be ready when their initiative comes around. I`ve forced characters to lose an action if they take longer than a few seconds to declare their actions - after all, the characters would not have a whole lot of time to decide.
• I keep most modifiers to a minimum: I may through in a +10% from time to time but most of the "standard" mods I expect the players to know already. And I make it their responsibility to know/remember them or go without them.
• Delegate looking up rules: characters like psykers sometimes take more time to play in combat so I make sure that while the character is acting, someone else at the table is looking up the specifics of any rule which is unclear. (and if it takes too long, I just make a ruling and worry about it after the combat / game.)
• Minimize the number of attack rolls for NPCs: with large groups, I just assume that (BS% or WS%) enemies hit with their weapon fire. So, if 10 enemies with a BS of 40% are firing at the characters, then 4 / 10 enemies hit. Just roll damage! (Even with auto-fire, I tend to try and keep it simple. To keep things believable, I'll make sure someone is hit with 2 or 3 shots from time to time...)

Hope this helps!

To speed things up, I boosted the damage of every weapon by +5 after the first combat I ran. It took forever to resolve it and my players were laughing out loud when a NPC was hit in the head by a lasbolt without suffering any damage (TB 4, so a 20% chance of not doing any damage with a laspistol). It felt like everybody was using BB guns.

But, then again, we are all former L5R 1st edition players and we are used to weapons that actually do some damage when they hit.

Kyorou said:

So many people seem to over-emphasise this, when it's never come up for me in nearly five years of playing the various incarnations of 40kRP.

An average, unarmoured human, hit by a lasgun or a sword carried by an SB3 creature, will lose 1d10 wounds... and given that most humans (advanced player characters being the most pertinent exception) only have around 10 wounds initially, that seems to all work out quite well, particularly once you factor in the frequently-overlooked rule in the Rogue Trader rulebook that lets you exchange a single d10 from your damage from an attack with the number of Degrees of Success you scored, which pushes average damage up slightly.

It changes when you get to lower-damage weapons or a higher-than-average toughness bonus, yes, but I don't see the issue as being quite so significant as many people claim. At least part of it is description - not dealing any damage in a mechanical sense is not inherently a "bullets bounce off flesh" moment. Afterall, it's entirely possible to become injured without being significantly hurt, so an attack that deals 0 wounds against an unarmoured target may simply have done something inconsequential... similarly, not every shot that lands on the "head" location in-game will have struck right between the eyes, just as not every body hit will have struck centre mass and punctured a major internal organ.

Back to the matter at hand. I've got a Rogue Trader campaign starting up in a few weeks' time, and I've decided on a houserule for it that will have a number of effects, one of which is speeding up fights with minor enemies. In the new vehicle rules in Into the Storm , vehicles are affected differently by Righteous Fury than people are. Instead of rolling additional damage, Righteous Fury against a vehicle causes a single 1d5 roll against the vehicle Critical Hit table. It's not enough to blow up a tank, but it's still significant. I've decided to apply that to combat against people as well, so Righteous Fury causes a single 1d5 roll on the relevant critical hit table rather than extra damage. Against major enemies, this causes more interesting fights - minor wounds are caused more frequently and earlier, by both parties - but against minor enemies, who I just kill when they take Critical Damage, it speeds things up a little instead, as they're potentially suffering critical damage sooner.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

N0-1_H3r3 said:

No, it doesn't, imo. That means somebody wth 10 wounds who is hit by a shot fired from a basic NPC (who can't Righteous Fury) has virtually no chance of dying from that first shot (actually, he has no chance of even be seriously wounded, as critical hits only begin to be nasty when you pass the -5 limit). And that's assuming he didn't Dodge the shot in the first place. So far I have yet to read a BL novel where somebody gets shot in the head with a laspistol and just gets a sunburn.

I don't mean the game system is badly done. It may be OK for some people who don't mind shooting somebody five times to put him down and running combat that last for two hours. It just doesn't suit my needs. I want combat to be fast-paced and deadly. I want every attack to be potentially lethal. And I don't want the combat phases in my games to last more than 20 minutes max. So I just can't use it as it is.

Kyorou said:

I've got to say, your experiences don't mirror my own.

First of all, I didn't think the average person (not PC) had 10 wounds. I thought they had 3-5. Even a las pistol can waste most average unarmored people.

The only things my group has had to hit more than five times to kill are hulking things like orks and battle servitors. Their collection of heavy bolters, hell guns, grenades, meltas, dueling pistols, etc. make short work of most of what they target. Similarly, most baddies have been able to seriously wound my players fairly quickly...as long as you are well equipped.

Remember the scale you are working at here. The people they combat should usually be VERY well equipped and prepared. They should have heavy bolter and las gun emplacements, warp weaponry, explosives (4d10 damage ruins most players day quite nicely), traps, rending, etc. etc. etc.

Rogue Trader is not Dark Heresy, it isn't D&D. The players have vast resources, deal with conflicts on a planetary scale, and should be fighting opponents that reflect that. If they are using stubbers or basic las weaponry, yeah, it will take a while. But if they are using all the goodies at their disposal like they ought to be, combat should be fast, furious, and dangerous.

Finally, if you want combat to be cinematic (that sounds like your goal), don't break out the miniatures and put them on a grid. If you use miniatures explain to your players that they are just a visual aid, you aren't using the grid combat rules. Combat on a grid lends itself to a slow, methodical approach to combat (which can be fun if you are playing a combat oriented game). But for cinematic combat you should be focusing on describing the situation and what dramatic actions your players are doing, not trying to calculate if you can rush this turn.

Most any system can be as cinematic or detail oriented as you want. I've even run D&D 4e as a fast, fun cinematic system instead of the granular wargame was intended to be. The onus is on the GM to make the combat cinematic.

For combat against many enemies, I also found the horde rules as described in the Deathwatch introduction game quite useful. It's fast and even low powered weaponry is suddenly lethal when dozens of people use it.

Santiago said:

Page 245; "For all attack rolls, count the degrees of success. The attacker may choose to replace the result on a single damage dice with the number of degrees of success from his attack roll. If the attack inflicts more than one dice of damage, the attacker may replace the result on one dice of his choice with the degrees of success from the attack roll."

Kyorou said:

Two things here - when dealing with a novel, 'reality' is skewed by the requirements of narrative; an author in that context will seldom describe a shot to the head that doesn't kill unless it's significant in some way... but we're not dealing with a novel here.

Shots to the head do not inherently punch through the skull and destroy the brain. Shots to the body don't automatically puncture lungs, obliterate the heart or otherwise mangle other internal organs. Hits to the limbs don't automatically sever them... expectations that every 'hit' should cause a significant injury fail to account for glancing blows and attacks which deal little more than minor flesh wounds (the lower end of every weapon's damage range).

Santiago said:

The main side-effect of making combat significantly more lethal tends to be that combat becomes less common - a more lethal fight discourages players from engaging in combat in general - as well as changing how effective armour is (a weapon dealing 1d10+8 damage renders flak armour largely ineffectual, and anything even slightly more powerful (+1 damage or +1 pen is a sufficient difference) than that has a small-but-significant chance of putting a hole in light tank armour).

Roughly-speaking, it'll take 3 hits from a lasgun or autogun to bring an unarmoured average man down, less if you're using sudden death criticals to resolve minor NPCs in fights. That's easily achievable in a single turn. Anything more damaging verges on Made of Plasticine , IMO... neither method can really account for the wild extremes of human durability (ranging from death by falling out of bed at the fragile end, to surviving repeated gunshot wounds at the bizarrely durable end), so I find the middle ground presented by the rules as written to be quite acceptable.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I like this rule a lot! Makes single shot weapons a little more likely to do good damage on a good BS test!

Here's an interesting question actually: if I'm attacking someone with a knife and I roll, say, 8 degrees of success on my WS test, (I catch them unawarres with an all out attack and get a great roll, for instance) can I substitue a value of 8 for the damage roll despite the fact that the knife rolls a d5 for damage?

I would venture yes becasue it represents an almost perfect hit, allowing you to do more damage by striking just right... but what do you guys think?

Macharias the Mendicant said:

Personally, I'd either half the effective degrees of success (as the damage roll for a 1d5 is essentially 1d10 halved, so the process would be equivalent to replacing the damage roll before halving it to make a d5 roll), or I'd cap the damage roll at 5. Either way, it's still a good damage roll, just not beyond the normal abilities of the weapon. However, having not written that rule, I couldn't tell you the intended way of resolving the matter, so I suggest asking here to get an official response, should you want one.

An alternate solution to increase lethality is lowering the starting wounds. Right now you start with 10 wounds, but if you lower them to 5 wounds. Every shot has a 50/50 chance of causing a seriously injury.

Macharias the Mendicant said:

Macharias the Mendicant said:

With a d5 damage weapon, you still need to roll a d10 because righteous fury only happens on a 10, not the 9. So I'd say that in your example, you get the same result as if the d10 rolled an 8, meaning 4 damage.

Bilateralrope said:

I think in keeping with the spirit of the rules, what you suggest makes sense and is likely the correct interpretation/application.

I guess the issue for me is that I had always hoped for some sort of rule that made stabbing someone in the back pay off with more than a +30% to hit for being unawares. I thought this rule might allow for that

Hmm... I wonder about the possibility of creating a talent to increase the likelyhood os a righeous fury on a "backstab" kind of attack (I guess I'm just revealing my 2nd ed D&D roots). Or,one could rule that a result of 10 or more degrees of success on the WS/BS would count as having roled a natural 10... (Not that it's likely but it IS possible...).

Maybe I'll give that a thought and crunch a few numbers...

Some GM's allow sneaks attacks like that to bypass wounds and go directly to critical damage, making any weapon incredibly deadly (also makes talents that increase critical damage much better)

Mind you that shouldn't always happen...

Macharias the Mendicant said:

Have a look at Helpless Targets on page 248.

Bilateralrope said:

True. But helpless IS different than simply not being aware of someone though I suppose if you're really sneaky the GM might rule that someone is effectively helpless... Maybe a compromise is to make the attack count as having the Tearing quality? (And weapons that already have tearing could get a 3rd die and just keep the highest?) Hmm... I'm still not quite happy with that one as is... I think a Talent is in order... I'll see what I can come up with tomorrow at work.

I promise to share!

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Well, as my players and I lean very much towards Narrativism in our games, I could say I almost am. We are much more concerned about the pace and the atmosphere of the game than about realism or balance of power between PCs. So, as I said before, I don't need combat to be realistic (which would quite difficult anyway as the system allows you to dodge lasbolts moving at the speed of light ). I need it to be fast and, if possible, impressive (and there aren't many things I can think of that are as unimpressive as a professional assassin needing to empty half a clip to eliminate a nobody).

So, I'm not complainig about the system not being Storyteller's, Dogs in the Vineyard's or Nobilis', because I know it doesn't try to be any of those things. I'm just saying that, using the rules as they're written, it feels like it takes just about forever to kill something (and it actually gets worse when the power level goes up because then everybody has 20 wounds and wears good quality carapace armor and there's just no way to kill someone with one shot unless you're using a meltagun).