Please share your strategies!

[nathan]

Hey everyone, I could use some advice. I’m running a Rifts campaign, and I’m struggling with how combat flows, especially with multiple attacks per melee round. Some characters have three or four attacks, while others (like Juicers or dragons) have way more, and it's making combat feel really uneven and kinda bogged down. I don’t want to just handwave the rules, but tracking all these attacks, dodges, and parries is slowing everything to a crawl. Does anyone have tips on keeping combat fast and balanced without losing the spirit of the system?

[Grazzik]

Hey everyone, I could use some advice. I’m running a Rifts campaign, and I’m struggling with how combat flows, especially with multiple attacks per melee round... Does anyone have tips on keeping combat fast and balanced without losing the spirit of the system?

As GM, I tailor the approach to the style of play. For lots of H2H, it makes sense to go granular so the fight can be cinematic. For pew pew fights in Rifts, it's more about ablative armor and delivering damage to punch through. Excluding the peculiarities for magical / supernatural / superhuman powers, here are a couple house rules I've used from time to time to speed up normal combat, though some make the game in essence deadlier to finish combat faster:

• If the combat is a surprise (ambush, accident, etc.), give the instigator a couple free attacks without any any chance to dodge or parry. This is particularly true when using laser guns or similar - they don't make noise and the target might not even know they have been hit since the only pressure that would be felt is likely from the vaporizing armor material. Also they wouldn't know from what direction it's coming from since the beam only lasts microseconds. This is where a combat computer is essential to tell you your armor has been damaged. The initial damage could tip the scales as to how many are involved in the fight and whether there is a fight in the first place.
• If the victim of the surprise attack is not experienced (<level 3), roll for HF 15 to see if they freeze up during the first round of combat.
• Once combat starts, I've moved to using a system others described on other posts which is where attacks are spread out equally across the 15 seconds of the melee. This isn't hard to do and a 15 column tracking table works great. Initiative is used to figure out the order of play where PC/NPC attacks fall on the same second. This means that PC/NPCs play the entire round, not just up front and then wait for the juicers to finish, so that players feel engaged and don't get bored. It also means PC/NPCs with lots of attacks can bundle attacks.
• As dodging takes up an attack, I allow a PC/NPC to bring up to half their attacks from the next round forward to dodge. However, this means potentially lots of unopposed attacks in the second round often leading to a quick end.
• Combining the previous two rules, if a PC/NPC has multiple unopposed attacks they can take against a single target, roll once and multiply damage by the number of attacks... shaves off a minute or two by avoiding unnecessary dice rolls.
• Where damage is AoE (i.e. grenades or missiles), roll damage once and apply to everyone, don't roll for individual damage.
• Where multiple attacks are landed on a target in a given second, don't roll for damage until all done so damage is just one pooled dice roll.
• In Rifts, players should learn real quick that focused, concentrated fire is the only way to go given the ablative nature of combat mechanics.
• NPCs run away after taking 50% damage or losing a single NPC. PCs can chase after or (if in the open) take long range shots while the target is in range, but this is dependent on the terrain, plot (e.g. must stop NPC getting back to their boss), and alignment (good PCs should let them go).
• I play 10:1 SDC Rifts with AR, so having damage potentially punch through armor to hit squishy SDC/HP encourages PCs to run away fast if they get into a heavy firefight and don't want to end up with a total party kill.

Basically, PCs need to go into combat intentionally, deliver maximum damage fast to eliminate the threat, and move on with the story. If on the receiving end, they need to break contact with the enemy fast and move on. I'm sure I do other things, but those come to mind at the moment.