Just a quick question. A group of us finished a Space Marine mission last night which I was GM'ing. We've had several scenes of combat, one with 4 marines and a scout against 3 Striking Scorpions.

As the Marines and Striking Scorpions were both very good in combat, they were often cancelling each other out. This combines with ALOT of misses by the PCs and most strikes being doged/parried, along with high armour values meant that combat was taking forever! What do other players/GMs do in this situation? I wanted to give decriptions throughout the combat so that it wasn't simply a dice-rolling exercise, but as you can imagine, made it last even longer.

Any thoughts for future games would be great.

Never time the combats in my game but it depends.

What is the goals of that particular encounter?

1) A fast paced combat where the pc's can show how cool they are by spraying down some mooks (or spraying their blood all over the place).

I use the mook rules from CA, 1 wound for light mooks (Scum, Guardsman, zombies) so if you wound them they are unconscious, dead or dying and in case of heavier mooks you have to wound them twice or score a hit which deals more than 10 wounds or damage.

2) An epic duel, climactic battle with insidious villains and their personal hence-critters

We use the normal combat rules

Thanks for the advice.

It was the first game in which i'd used a floorplan to plot where people were too. It certainly helped the players picture where they were in a room, what cover was nearby and where bad guys were in relation to them. It was just adding to the length of time encounters were taking for me to manage it all.

I like the idea of making your regular joes pretty easy to kill. We've also discussed enemies fleeing if something particularly gruesome happens near them. This I suppose would also speed up encounters.

Oh,

And I only use the critical tables on pc's and very important npc's, those I want to give a fighting chance

I use a simplified critical table which goes, roughly, like this:

1: stunned 1 round

2: stunned 1d5 rounds

3: toughness test or dead

4: dead

5: dead + Willpower test for the nearest ally or become pinned.

I use it for random extras or really weak opponents in huge fights.

Also, I try to avoid powerful NPCs going at each other the way you described, for obvious reasons. I am pretty good at keeping tons of rules etc. in my head during a fight, probably from GMing D+D for years in some really massive battles all by the rules, but as you noticed, once you pass a certain amount of Agiliy + Armor Points, nothing really dies easily.

Intelligent use of Suppression Fire makes this even worse, as it severely ruins the damage output of the pinned party.

Also, in rather large engagements like a guard platoon going up against an ork mob, I usually focus on the stuff my players are involved with, and just give a general description of the battlefield around them. In cases where I need more detail, I have on occasion played out the fight without my players beforehand, and then adapt it to what they do.. for example, if Ork A is killing a Guardsman in Round 4, 8 and 10, and they kill him in round 7, obviously 2 more guardsmen are "free" and will join the players helping them dealing with the orks they took on , while the rest of the skirmish goes on in the background along the pre-planned route.

By this quick-and-dirty rule, the players immediately feel they get something for taking part, because they get backup, and dont really see the fight as being pre-planned... plus they can influence the outcome (sooner or later the orks are dead) without me having to adapt all that much.

Khaunshar said:

I'm going to steal this chart now I hope you don't mind.

Also the idea of preplanning your battles is pretty good but don't you think it is a bit difficult to keep it all on paper. I pressume that you record how many wonds the guardsmen have after each round and the like. I don't think I have that much time. What I will be doing instead is have a number in my head of the amount of guardsmen will survive the battle. Then I will add to that depending on how well the PC's do. i.e. they kill five orks 6 more guardsmen survive. But I won't try play the battle in advance.

Well due to my job sometimes having long breaks, I got too much time at my hands with nothing but a handful of pencils, paper, and my smuggled-in D10s, so pre-playing fights is actually a great way to pass time (plus a co-worker of mine loved it. She started asking about Dark Heresy after a few days and is now playing in a group with her friends).

I dont write down the wounds actually. I just keep in mind any extraordinary events I happen to remember (unlikely kills, that make for a great little spotlight moment during the fight, like a guardsman killing an ork in melee or some such) and when they die. If my players attack a "background" orc mid-fight I usually just have him unwounded... it never really was a big issue.

And sure, steal that chart thats what its meant for. Helps a lot.

Oh cool I don't have that type of time right now but maybe i will during the summer I'll look into it. Not like i'll have anything else to do. Job hunting is a failed pasttime of mine :-). I shall put the chart to good use ..... some heretics are going to die today

I always use the full combat rules, and give NPCs Righteous Fury. This is because:

1. I really, really hate the concept of mooks. I like a bit more realism. This isn't a novel set in the 40k universe, it's a smulation of a "real" event in the 40k universe. No gunning down legions of people, one bullet per, and no special treatment based on one's position in the plot.

2. Using Crits only for people with plot armor makes several Talents much less worthwhile -- Crippling Strike, Street Fighting. Why bother with Blood Loss rules at all?

bogi_khaosa said:

Most of my mooks also have rigtheous fury

1) I introduced them because WH and DH battles became endless rounds of rolling dice

2) My players don't seem te mind it quickens up the combats, keeps them exciting. But I prefer cinimatic battles

It's true that I have yet to run a large combat. I may change my mind when/if that happens (I'm going for a vaguely CoC feel. No massive shoot-outs -- yet anyway).

I do not plan them, the fight are usually small, though my pc's tend to make them big.
Though next time they are Going to Kulth to investigate some forward positions...

Being a geek with too much time on my hands, I made an Excel sheet that automates most of combat for me. It includes a little VBA script that rolls dice with modifiers for damage, and lots of complicated equations.

The result is I simply press F9, and the sheet tells me wether each combattant hits or misses, with how many shots he hits, what their hitlocations are, how much damage they cause, adjusted for the targets TB and AP at that location modified by the attackers Pen value.

That speeds things up a bit, but I'm still looking for a quick way to enter gross-damage rolled by the players for net-total calculation. Geeky? Uhuh!

It means I have to keep my laptop at the gaming table, but I found looking up stuff in the somewhat unofficial .pdf versions of the books alot faster than using the real things, and I use tha name generators at malleus-dk alot, so the PC is my friend anyway.

Well, I run my combat straight out of the book, and haven't had any complaints as to the length or interaction with tests and Dodge and Parry. With 'regular' characters (all of the characters participating in my games are human, more or less), combat can be quite deadly so my players are quite happy to have a chance to dodge or parry to avoid injury. Like any other tabletop game, good tactical use of terrain and intelligent action on the part of the NPCs (presuming the NPCs are intelligent, of course) can really heighten the tension in a combat and go a long way in making it seem like each and every turn is important, which definitely cuts down on boredom for the players.

If your combats are taking a long time because of superhuman wounds and high armor values, maybe you could look into using the number of successes on a combat roll to increase damage or allow armor penetration or something equally frightening. If it's due to some other factor, try to identify the factor and think on how you can mitigate it.

I wish I could offer more useful advice, but as I mentioned I'm playing with normal characters, and things work out really well for us with the rules as printed.

Wow Darth Smeg, that sounds really cool.

I also like Khaunshar's simplified critical table, and may steal it. I usually don't do the critical chart for run of the mill NPC's, but that is a nice compromise.

I run combat pretty fast and loose,

NPCs have about 10 wounds, if they take more than that they probably die.

NPCs get righteous fury if It feels appropriate for the combat.

also that sounds totally awesome Darth Smeg! I use my laptop a lot as well, I have a lot of detailed NPC's, locations, adventure components, etc typed up in google docs, super easy to reference and keep up to date with the laptop rather than paper. google docs also means I can use someone else's laptop, update stuff at work, etc.

If there's an interest in it, I'll see if I can't tidy it up a little, then post it up on DarkReign for downloads.

It's still a little rough around the edges, but then you can't argue with free, eh?

That would be great Darth Smeg,

a boon for the mathematically lazy!

A first Beta can be found at http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/482802/Combat%20Datapad%20-%20Beta1.xls

Let me know if this works all right, and if so, I'll upload it to a more available site like DarkReign

hmmm,

I get a compile error, can't find project or library. highlights the 'Left' in:

numb = Left(dice, D - 1)
' Number of dice given by first characters, up til the "d"

I don't know vb, so i can't offer anymore troubleshooting than that.

Have you installed the "Analysis Toolpak - VBA" Add In?

Or are you perhaps using a Mac? I got an error message like that on my Mac, but I haven't got around to troubleshooting it yet.

Seems you need to do some additional steps to make the Analyst ToolPak scripts work. See here for a step by step guide

Also, due to some inconsistancies between Mac and Windows, I had to make 2 different versions:

Combat Datapad - Beta1 - Mac

Combat Datapad - Beta1 - Windows

I have re-written the sheet using standard macros and Excel functionality. You shold no longer need any special Add-Ins to use this sheet.

The revised sheet can be found here

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes

Thanks,

Totally works,

I was stuggling with getting it to work with the add ins.

Also: it is totally awesome! no more fudging through sheer laziness!

Thanks for the kind words, glad it works for you.

I've updated the code with support for Tearing and Righteous Fury, and will mess with it some more over the Weekends. The current Beta version can be downloaded here , for those with more Faith than Brains

Let me know what features you would find useful, and I'll see what I can do. I'm no VB-expert, but my Google-Fu is getting alot of practice looking up guides, howtos and documentation