Dithering
My favorite games feature epic combat. There’s nothing quite like the clash of steel on steel or the bellow of man and beast each striving to land that killing blow. When armies march and fireballs burst, the bloodthirsty barbarian living inside my puny gamer heart thrills at the chance to snatch crit-victory from the jaws of botch-defeat. Unfortunately, nothing brings epic combat to a screeching halt quite like pulling out the dice and actually starting an epic combat. If you’re familiar with this sentiment, then you know what I’m talking about. Combat can take a long damn time, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.
I mean sure, you can announce who’s on deck in the initiative order. You can institute a timer. Encourage players to write down their conditional modifiers. Invest in condition cards or spell cards. Implement some kind of digital character sheet. Roll multiple attacks ahead of time. Take average damage. Roll your to-hit at the same time as your damage dice. Tell Fred to pull his head out of his ass and the headphones out of his ears.
…
So OK, maybe there are some things you can do to help with the problem. But at the end of the day, these games are complicated, and no amount of finesse can fix it. Case in point, here’s my longest ever turn. We were using the mythic rules in Pathfinder. I was a wizard.
1. Spend a mythic surge to auto-roll a 20 to initiative. (non-action from mythic improved initiative)
2. Say “enormous rapidity” to trigger contingency + mythic haste. (free action)
3. Move behir ally into breath weapon range.
4. Behir readies to breathe if anything approaches.
5. Cast quickened see invisible. (swift action)
6. Cast dazing ball lightning (standard action)
—–6a. Spend a mythic surge to activate mythic spell focus
—–6b. Use versatile evocation to bypass resistance (non-action)
7. Retrieve stored wand. (move action)
8. Spend mythic surge to cast greater invisibility from wand. (2nd standard action from mythic)
9. Re-position thanks to mythic haste. (2nd move action)
10. Realize i should have had the behir attack since it now doesn’t know where I am to guard me. (free action)
11. Ask GM to start a new campaign at a lower level. (free action)
At that point in the campaign, writing stuff down on the play mat became essential. I would wind up crossing things out and reordering my actions as the initiative went around the table, but my turns still wound up taking a silly amount of time to resolve. Nature of the beast, you know?
How about the rest of you guys? What was the longest, most complicated turn sequence you’ve ever encountered? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Well, it’s not exactly a story of my own actions, but more of another player. What he played as was a wizard… (No surprise there… Wizards DO take a long time to do things.) A rather forgetful wizard at that. I don’t know if it was either he was playing his character EXTREMELY WELL or he just does not know how to keep track of things. But anyways, whenever it was his turn, he’d spend something like 5 minutes trying to decide what to do and what spell to cast, only to default to his oh so favorite one: Ray of Mercy.
Now, said character was quite ineffectual to begin with, mainly relying on Save: Negate spells, instead of the classic Magic Missile for a go to spell, but to rely on a nonlethal cantrip for some “damage” really emphasizes on how not really useful the character was…
I’m sure I could see some lengthy turns coming out of my brother’s new character in a new campaign we joined, being a Mesmerist Swiss Army Gnome and all… With both illusions and more toys than any one person would ever need, I wouldn’t put it past him to have some elaborate plan in mind to turn the world on it’s head.
Ray of Mercy? Oh man… That’s the least decisive spell. You aren’t even deciding if you want to kill the guy! Talk about dithering. :/
Cripes, that’s a lot of actions to take. My current PFS front runner is a 12th level APG Summoner. He runs something of a dirty trick to make use of the action economy of standard action Summoning.
Round 1a) Summon a thing as a standard action.
Round 1b) Summoned monster (full) attacks.
Round 2a) Summoned monster (full) attacks.
Round 2b) Summon a thing as a standard action.
Round 2c) New summoned monster (full) attacks.
As I’m sure you can imagine, this gets pretty heavy duty when I’m throwing around multiple creatures per casting, including Superior Summons for one more per group. And the sheer variety of things you can call, including their spells, Smite Evils, full attacks, and etc….. they all add tons of actions through brute force swarming.
Thankfully, I am not that kind of jerk that doesn’t make monster stat cards, modified by Augment Summons. You basically NEED it if you want to play this class.
Ha! Yeah, I think that beats me. If you use Superior Summoning and a third level slot to grab 1d4+2 eagles every round, and if each of those eagles uses each of its attacks…. Tell you what, if you can calculate the maximum number of eagles a 20th level master summoner can get onto the battle field at one time, and if you can figure out the raw number of attacks those eagles can put out over the course of X rounds before they disappear, I’ll give you a hero point.
To be fair, at some point it’s less about how many eagles you can get and more about how many adjacent squares that you can afford to fill with eagles.
Medium enemy, grounded: 17 eagles, 51 attacks per round. Over a 20 minute duration that’s 10,200 attacks.
The numbers can get a little higher if the Summoner abuses the Dirty Trick mentioned above, but not by much.
lol. Just realized you actually replied. After some quick back of the envelope math, it appears that I’ve gone crosseyed. Ima just assume you’re correct. +1 hero point to Rosc!
Oh! On the topic of mythic shenanigans. There’s a particular article that involves a guy pushing a Mythic party to its theoretical limits to get the wackiest Nova that I’ve ever seen. It’s a bit of a long read, but you’ll chuckle the whole way through.
http://designofdragons.blogspot.com/2016/04/in-brightest-day-in-blackest-night-no.html
lol. Nice. I wonder what they named the boat?
I’m actually quite proud of my best Cthulhu-slaying efforts. It involved the feather fall spell and a bucket of white mice. Here’s the step-by-step:
1. Be a 20th level mythic wizard.
2. Get to Mythic Tier 4
3. Take Mythic Feather Fall http://www.d20pfsrd.com/mythic/mythic-magic/augmented-spells#TOC-Feather-Fall
4. Obtain 40 mice.
5. Place mice in a convenient container.
6. Fly above your enemies.
7. Dump mice on your enemies as a ranged touch attack. (Or as a splash weapon at the easier-to-hit empty square.)
8. While the mice are mid-flight, expend two uses of mythic power to cast Augmented Mythic Feather Fall on the mice.
9. Deal 200d6 points of force damage to your enemies with your mouse grenade.
10. Laugh maniacally. (optional)
I’m sure you could really crank this one, but even if you “just” add the maximize and empower metamagic feats, you’re looking at 200d6 –> 280d6 –> all sixes –> 1680 force damage, give or take 40 saves to half.
“I mean sure, you can announce who’s on deck in the initiative order. You can institute a timer. Encourage players to write down their conditional modifiers. Invest in condition cards or spell cards. Implement some kind of digital character sheet. Roll multiple attacks ahead of time. Take average damage. Roll your to-hit at the same time as your damage dice. Tell Fred to pull his head out of his ass and the headphones out of his ears.”
Or just play an RPG (Basic D&D? DCC RPG) that’s not ridiculously complicated.
That won’t work. Fred still has his headphones in.
I have the opposite problem: perpetually stuck at low levels with 90% of actions boiling down to “I hit it with my [insert weapon name]”.
One of these days I’ll leave the category of random dudes with pointy sticks and enter the domain of big darn glazed-in-fangirls heroes… [in Aragorn voice] but that is not this day!!!
Legend tells of a certain map that might aid thee in thy quest: https://vimeo.com/58179094
My longest turn was a wizard, obviously (anyone sensing a pattern here?).
I specialized in summons and at any time for 3-6 little elementals running around, meaning I had to make as many movements, attack-rolls, and saves as the rest of the of the party combined. It was probably the most munchkin-esque character I ever played, and I decided I didn’t really like it. I got to do lots of THINGS but my character, the one who mattered anyway, never really felt like he was in danger. It was very powerful and IMO, so incredibly boring.
That’s how I feel about simulacrum cheese or reliance on gate and planar ally. I don’t want to play my own party of dudes. I want to play my dude. It may not be the “optimal strategy,” but I’m not here to win. I’m here to feel like Gandalf.
“A wizard is never late, nor is early. No, he arrives precisely when he means to.” -Gandalf the Grey
Unless of course the party can’t get their shit together. Then he arrives a session or two later.
Not so much complicated, but long. I rolled a crit, which meant the boar gets a free AoO from Outflank. Which meant I get one from Paired Opportunists. The boar rolls a crit, which mean I get another AoO, which means the boar does too. I roll ANOTHER crit so another round of AoOs. And I still had another regular attack and the boar has 3. I believe I mentioned I killed an adult white dragon in a single turn. Thank you Keen Scimitar.
I feel like your character sheet was a set of dominoes.
It’s gotten to the point that if I’m fighting something with less than 100 HP and I have at least a 50/50 chance of hitting, the GM will just say I kill it when I confirm just one crit.
Are your buddies optimized to the same level? Because it sounds like your GM could stand to turn up the threat level.
I believe so, yes. It’s only me that he does this to, since I’m the only crit-fisher AoO generator. With a scimitar that crits on a 15.
Sometimes we steamroll the opposition, sometimes it’s a slog-fest.
You HAVE to look at this. I rolled 4 crits yesterday in one turn.
http://fav.me/dd47n6u
Hot dice, man. Hot damn dice!
No kidding. I can only imagine what I would have rolled if Irlana had gotten off her regular attacks rather just AoOs.
how many eyes does tiefling thief have?!
…do we get to see her face in the naked patron comics?
I believe we’ve got some bangs-free stuff on the HoEF comics.
Of course, we first see her face over here: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/easy_on_the_eyes
I once fell asleep waiting for my combat turn. We were running homebrew combat rules – every turn was 10 minutes per PC. There were five of us, and then the monsterns had their turn. I was just going to lie down for a bit and then they told me I was snoring.