{"id":257,"date":"2015-02-09T18:26:51","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T18:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/?p=257"},"modified":"2015-02-09T20:06:35","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T20:06:35","slug":"dd-3-5pathfinder-to-ddm-combat-conversion-initial-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/?p=257","title":{"rendered":"D&D 3.5\/Pathfinder to DDM Combat Conversion – Initial Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Players<\/a>

Players Map of Cauldron<\/p><\/div>\n

So why a D&D Combat conversion?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are several reasons, at least in my D&D games, that caused combats to take forever.\u00a0 I often thought it might be my bad DM’ing<\/strong>, but I attended a D&D 4.0<\/strong> game at a local card shop, where we were given 1st level characters<\/strong> and put into a basic encounter.\u00a0 Even with a licensed RPGA DM running it and having players well versed in D&D (even if not that version), it took over 3 hours<\/strong> to finish a 1st level encounter<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 Who has time for that?\u00a0 I guess I did many years ago, but no so much anymore.\u00a0 My last skirmish<\/a> had 17 creatures, probably over 100 combined levels of creatures, but took only an hour to finish.\u00a0 Plus, it still offered plenty of strategy, a sufficient amount of dice rolling, and quite a few tense moments.<\/p>\n

Here are the main challenges with standard D&D combat as I see it, and what I hope to address with my DDM conversion:<\/p>\n

1:\u00a0 Too many options<\/strong> – Even for basic characters, I notice the players in my game constantly<\/strong> <\/em>referencing the various rulebooks, character sheets, spell lists, etc. for the actions their character can take.\u00a0 Often, a wizard or cleric with a lot of spell options could take 10 minutes picking out something to do.\u00a0 Even when I instituted a ‘30 second turn<\/strong>‘ rule, it was very difficult for some characters to figure out what to do, often resulting in skipped turns and hurt feelings.<\/p>\n

In contrast, DDM has all the information about the actions a character can take on a single small stat card.\u00a0 There are a couple of options not mentioned on the card, such as charging, but in general, everything you might want to do is right there.<\/p>\n

2:\u00a0 Too much complexity<\/strong> –\u00a0 D&D cleaned up a lot of things over the editions, such as saving throws<\/strong>…remember the charts from Advanced D&D?\u00a0 Now we have 3 types of saves and a lot less bookkeeping.\u00a0 Still, having to refer to even 3 modifiers is an example of something that takes time.\u00a0 D&D (4.0) IMO was a step backward in terms of ease-of-use, with multiple attack types<\/strong> vs. defense types<\/strong>, instead of just a standard AC.\u00a0 While I don’t deny some of these things offer more ‘realism’, I don’t think they provide enough<\/em> <\/strong>realism to be worth confusing the game.\u00a0 Original DDM uses your level for all saves, removing a ton of bookkeeping from the game.\u00a0 If necessary, there are abilities that can be used that provide a bonus to certain types of saves:\u00a0 for example, there are several creatures that get a general ‘+4 saves<\/strong>‘ to account for their toughness, and it’s easy enough to say a mage gets ‘+2 save vs. spells<\/strong>‘ or similar if players want to have a character be somewhat better at saving vs. things in their area of expertise.\u00a0 Warriors could have ‘+2 save vs. fear effects<\/strong>‘, etc.\u00a0 These bonuses will be right on the players cards so they know to account for it.<\/p>\n

3:\u00a0 Too many dice rolls<\/strong> – Every dice roll can take several seconds…after figuring out whether your ranger hit that random minion, now you roll damage.\u00a0 Then recording that damage takes several more.\u00a0 If players are doing damage a hundred times during a session, that can quickly mean a lot of time.\u00a0 While again, static damage<\/strong> as DDM uses may not be as ‘fun’ as rolling dice, it is a lot easier in terms of bookkeeping.\u00a0 Plus, there are still critical hits, smites, sneak attacks<\/strong> and the like to offer some variety in terms of possible damage.\u00a0 This also has the side benefit of reducing variance, e.g. ‘OMG that roflzombiedragon just crit my rogue, rolled max damage and one-shotted him’.\u00a0 Damage is also one of the easier items to convert from D&D to DDM; if a sword does 2d8 damage<\/strong>, it has an average damage value of 9, which is easily rounded to Damage 10<\/strong> in DDM.<\/p>\n

Even prior to my thinking about a D&D conversion, we had some house rules to try to speed up our games.\u00a0 Fighters, for example, could attack level 1 grunts (orcs, goblins, kobolds, etc) once per level of the character, plus any hit by any character on a grunt killed it.\u00a0 This also provided more of the ‘I’m Aragorn and I’m a bad***<\/strong> who is going to slice through 50 orcs to get to the boss.’<\/p>\n

Side benefits to a DDM converson:<\/p>\n

\"skulk\"<\/a>

An ex-girlfriends angry father<\/p><\/div>\n

4:\u00a0 Balancing encounters<\/strong> – Poor balancing of encounters<\/strong> was definitely my fault, as that wasn’t my strong suit.\u00a0 Other than adding or removing HP or giving a boss an escape spell on the fly, it was more about ‘did this fight challenge the players<\/strong>‘.\u00a0 If it didn’t, critters were made tougher; if the party was about to die, the monsters got fewer hp.\u00a0 That was honestly a very stressful aspect of DMing for me.\u00a0 We had one player who hardcore twinked his characters, one who made decent characters, and several who never really understood the game.\u00a0 As the one who min-maxed all his characters is now GM’ing his own game, he finally understands the challenge he posed in making the game fun for everyone.\u00a0 This goes back to point 1; if everyone has a very simple, easy-to-understand character card, there will likely be fewer vast power level differences among characters.\u00a0 Plus, I plan on making it very clear in the next game I run that my constant tweaking of encounters is going away.\u00a0 If characters TPK, so be it, we’ll make more.<\/p>\n

Plus, as long as I have an idea of what a player would ‘cost’ in DDM, knowing whether a party is headed for trouble is easier to spot and maybe deal with before an encounter.\u00a0 With the material I’ll initially be working with (Shackled City Adventure Path), I’ll also start honing my ability to offer different flavors of combat encounters, instead of constant straight up dice-fests.<\/p>\n

5: More roleplaying – <\/strong>Often, it felt like the role-playing in our later games was rushed, as we knew that the big combat coming up was going to take a fortnight to finish.\u00a0 Plus, we had one player in particular who liked the role-playing more, and a couple who liked it, but liked fighting more…if this conversion can speed up combat significantly, we could end up with more of both<\/em> role-playing and combat<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This got pretty long, so I’ll leave it here and discuss some of the specific mechanics I’m working on and the challenges I’m having next time; as a conversion is a lot more work than I initially thought it was going to be, if you have any thoughts, comments or suggestions, please drop me an email, as the more minds the merrier!<\/p>\n

Thanks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So why a D&D Combat conversion? There are several reasons, at least in my D&D games, that caused combats to take forever.\u00a0 I often thought it might be my bad DM’ing, but I attended a D&D 4.0 game at a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268,"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playingwithmyself.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}