D&D: Fighting Faster

Ever find combat to be a slog? Catch your players drifting off when it’s their turn?  Maybe you need faster combats!

But seriously, here’s a few things I’ve found that might help with the feeling that combat takes too long.

Run Fewer Combat Encounters

Read a book. Or watch a movie. How many fight scenes are there In your basic action hero tale?  Now how many encounters have you got in your adventure? Fighting could be a cathartic release to dramatic tension. Instead, we’re trudging through yet another batch of random rats that eat hit points we’ll need for the big fight.

Random encounters have their place to break up slow spots, but they’re a tool, not a requirement,

Use a Battlemat

I played a long time without minis or battlemats. It was all in our heads. When 3E came out and rules like Attack of Opportunity implied knowing exact positions, we got one. The real value was that when it came to be a player’s turn, they could glance at the battlemat, see where the enemy was, and get to it. In the old days, every other player was asking clarifying questions about positioning, because we were playing chess in our minds without paying attention to the previous moves.

You don’t need minis. We’ve used dice, wooden pieces, nuts, and bolts. Even a dead disc battery.

Be Ready For Your Turn

A player should be paying attention during other player’s turns to assess what they will do next. This includes looking up a spell or two that they want to use. Deciding to move and attack something should be quick. Spells are harder, this is why magic users have been some of the hardest characters to play since the dawn of the game. But being ready on your turn helps keep the game moving.

Get a Sand Timer

When a player is dithering about what to do, start the timer. When it runs out, their action is full defense (or dodge if they have it). Safe as can be in a combat situation, not decisive. Why? Because this is the literally making the combat take longer as the next player has to wait.

Spellcards or Custom Spellbook

Whether you acquire spellcards or make your own little spellbook, having all your spells and their rules right in front of you without the noise of the big book of more spells than you can cast will speed up your decision making.

Know your Character Sheet (or Make a Better One)

I’d been making my own character sheets since Appleworks (a word processor on the Apple IIe. Early on, I figured out that I needed to cluster the combat info into a clear, concise area. Hit points, saving throws, armor class, and weapons with their to-hit and damage values all needed to be together.

Regardless of how your sheet is, you need to know where your crap is. Remember where the pieces of information are and why you need them. A fighter should not struggle to know he has +5 to-hit and does 1d8+3 damage.  All he does is swing that sword all day, these numbers should be ingrained in by the end of the first encounter.

For each weapon, calculate your to-hit number (proficiency bonus plus strength or dex bonus plus any weapon bonus) and circle it.  Write down the damage (including modifier) and underline it. You want your eye to find your longsword and see the +4 to-hit as fast as possible.

Margins are For Hit Points

The classic character sheet has a little box for Hit Points. Why are you erasing it and writing a new value every time you get hit?  That box is to remind you of your MAXIMUM at fully healed condition. Use the margin of your sheet to keep a running, changing, tally of your hit points.

Why? It’s faster. And you’ll not run out of eraser so soon.

Make a Cheat Sheet for Abilities/Combat Options

In the old days, all a fighter could do is swing a sword. Pretty easy to remember what you could do on your turn. Nowadays, there’s a lot more options and Feats.  Make yourself a sheet summarizing each option. It’s kind of like a wizard player making their own spellbook. It will help you look up what you can do, but also the act of putting it together will imprint the basics into your brain.

No phones/handhelds in use at the game table

We’re here to play D&D. Not doom scroll social media, or catch more pokemon. Turn that other stuff off. I assure you prior generations managed to live without that crap while siting at a table with their friends imagining they were killing dragons and we all turned out fine.

Minimize Non-Game Chatter

You will never execute this one perfectly. Players will always make jokes, movie references, and remember things to ask about next week’s movie night plans. But a little less of it will help keep the pacing and mood up.

Allow for Pre-Fight Planning

In an actual game round of six seconds, a character is limited to six words. It’s nigh impossible to plan out an actual smart coordination of characters and powers once the combat has started. Some players love tactical aspect of the game, so locking them into this strictly prevents intelligent strategy. There might be scenarios you WANT that disorder, but all the time kills their fun.

For most encounters, once you reveal the situation and obvious foes on the battlemat, allow the players to discuss their plan of attach for a few minutes. Don’t let them spend an hour at this. And make it clear that when the round starts, players are deciding whether to implement what was discussed. This shifts the conversation from one player perhaps dictating actions to others, to trying to setup a killzone instead of getting in each other’s way.

Five to ten minutes of this should be enough, more and they’re stuck in analysis paralysis. We’re just make space for clever ideas like drawing the enemy to a spot where a fireball can mop them up without clipping any friendlies. Hopefully.

Allow for Difficulties

Any of your players might have anxiety, attention, memory, or learning issues. We’re not here to literally diagnose that. But you can take a guess. If any of the ideas here would make it harder adjust accordingly. We’re here to have fun together, and combat should run at the pace all the players are having fun.

Fight On!

That’s it folks. Combat is a large part of Dungeons and Dragons, and is supposed to be fun. I think that when it runs a little smoother, it’s more so.

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