Combat Tips

[MarcRyder]

I Gm'ed my first game a couple days ago. Went well until, they had to fight there way out. For some reason it took two hours to do 15 seconds of combat. Normally when I play I don't pay attention, I just till one back and roll the dice.

Can anyone help me or give me tips on how to make the combat sessions faster?

[Adam of the Old Kingdom]

for a start, combat is slow, very slow. I find it not unusual to have one minut eof combat last for half an hour.
in the RPG world there is no other place that have so much detail. yo are basicly running through every 3 seconds of each person in combat, if you have 6 people in combat and each 3 secons takes 15 seconds to resolve thats *calculates* 22 minutes per mellee.

As was said, you and your players should know your stuff. players not actively acting should use that time to prepare their next action not look up stuff when it gets to their turn. Roll as many dice as you can at one. an NPC fires a gun, roll the strike and damage at once while the player rolls the dodge.
Use genric NPCs, they mostly use the same gun and have the same stats, with a tweek or 2 for special occations. make up a sheet of Generic foes, so you can easily see low, mid and high level stats for anythign like a dozenNPCs and hangit on your GM shield to glance at quickly.

Get a feel for the rules, you can instinctively modify them for circumstance and minimise your looking up of stuff.

Talk to your players on bits an peices to help shave a little bit of time here and there to slowly reduce the amount of time it takes to play out combat.

and remember, combat is slow and does take time. it's a reality of RPGs.

Or you could just double the damage of PCs guns and half the armour of the NPCs.

[MADMANMIKE]

..It depends on whether you want realism or cinematics. My games are more towards the movie-hero type, so I let the players figure out what they want to do with their characters. I have to players right now, and one is only on his second ever Rifts/Palladium game session.

..Both players decided to simul every attack leveled at them until their armor was decimated (I use house rules for damage, 1MD=5 SDC), and generally let the damage go through the SDC before the hit points as near misses that whittle down the characters endurance.

..One player has been through three suits of armor in four combat sessions, but now has 21 confirmed kills (he uses alot of explosives).

..So don't be surprised by the length of time it takes to run some combat. Like everyone else said, to keep it down to a minimum, know your stats. Make up some generic baddies and have them ready for the combat. It also helps to have the basics on all the characters abilities as well, so you know what they can and can't do.

..Here's a couple of NPC sheets I worked up for my Heroes Unlimited and Rifts campaigns. Note that the Rifts sheets have five somewhat fleshed out NPC's and the rest are cannon fodder generics.

..Also along that line, check out the NPC logs Palladium bought from me, found off their main page under Rifts Character Sheets at The Cutting Room Floor.

-Mike >8]