How does one run combat?

[Jack1]

I'm soon gonna be starting an exalted game featuring a group of lookshy rangers. My only real experince with exalted so far has been the Solar game I'm currently in and one of the main problems I've noticed is this:


Combat takes forever.


There is so much stuff to keep track of on both sides what with health levels, wound penalties, willpower, charms, stunts, combos, multiple action penalties, initiative and the all important essence pools. This is way more stuff than I'm used to dealing with and I've never seen another GM (of the two people I've seen run exalted) handle it any better than I feel I could. I'm seeing this as a major obstacle to running a good game. One combat shouldnt take 2-3 hours to resolve but from everything I've seen, that looks to be about average.


Now the game I'm running is pretty small (3 players) so I'm hoping that will help a bit, but I'm looking for the help of some more experienced exalted players and GMs.


Has anyone else experienced the same problem? If so how did you get around it? Did you get around it? Does combat always actually take this long?


For the record I'll be running the game under power combat.


Thanks in advance for all your help.

 

[Vanman]

Well, I certainly don't have experience running combat, as I just ran my first one last week. However.....


If you don't think you need all that stuff, get rid of some of it. Adjust it how you see fit, so that it's streamlined. One possible thing to do, to get rid of one of those elements, is to roll initiative one time and keep those scores throughout the combat. It won't speed it up considerably, I grant you, but it's one less roll. Look at power combat vs regular combat. Does it take longer? If so, then the normal combat rules may be the way to go.


The other thing to do is to talk to your players. Tell them it may take a while. Let them know this is a problem so, when it's not their turn, ask them to think about what they want to do. That way, when it's their turn, they can jump right into it. With only two players, the wait between when they go shouldn't be all that long.


In the end, if you're going to use all of the rules as they're presented, I don't know if there's a way to get around combat taking a long time. Nature of the beast, in my opinion. Again, I've only run one combat thus far, so I'm not speaking from experience. But then, I just finished a Champions campaign, so my group and I are used to long combats.


Bottom line - if it takes too long, start streamlining. If not, then you'll have to live with the alternative.

 

[Cynis Filthist]

Exalted combat is FAST as hell, of course this coming from someone who came to Exalted from Rifts/Palladium.


I tend to trust my players to keep their own tallies, essence pools, etc.

 

[Fruan]

There are two points that I can offer to help make combat less painless:


The first is to have everything as organized as you can before hand; Everyone should have the stats for every weapon they're likely to used writen down. Everyone should have a precis of all their combat charms so they don't need the look through the book every time they need to do something slightly unusual.


Our group builds on this with a system of beads; Everyone has green beads for their temporary willpower, yellow beads for their personal essence and white beads for peripheral. This way activating charms doesn't require paperwork, just shifting piles of beads.


Further more, we use red beads as reminders of dice pool penalties. These most commonly come from lost health levels, but there are miriad other souces. Having shiny red beads infront of you really helps to remember them.


The other point is that combat should be fun; This is largely what stunts are for, after all. Combat might take forever, but as long as everyone involved is interesting it shouldn't drag on too long.


A rule that my group has found it useful to use to help this and keep the flow going is that no stunt should take longer than about 5 seconds to describe: You get one sentance of moderate length. Don't waffle.

 

[Dereis]

As ST, I take a lesson from monster-a-day anime and make one big combat per session.  The first part of the story is intrigue and building on the story and interaction with NPCs, and then something happens and the players face a potential combat situation.  For some reason they love to try and avoid the combat or find a non-combat solution, but I think they do it just to play out their characters and try to challenge me as a ST.  Sometimes I let them skip past the combat I planned and run with whatever they want to do next, but occasionally their enemies will not be swayed even by supernatural means.


I like Fruan's system of beads... we use something similar with visual methods of keeping track and it speeds up combat considerably.  


Another lesson from monster-a-day anime: give your bad guys a secret weakness that might be discovered by the party.  But don't make it cheesy and too easy to figure out like they do in monster-a-day anime.  Something situational or environmental is a good choice.  I like to give my players time to lay traps, or environmental openings like attacking from above or below, or using fog or darkness or something similar to their advantage.  Also, using some kind of lure or even a hostage may gain some ground in combat.  Have something in mind, but don't encourage your players too much or lead them to it.  If they don't discover it, let them go up shit creek, and perhaps later explain where they went wrong.

 

[Persell]

Exalted combat is FAST as hell, of course this coming from someone who came to Exalted from Rifts/Palladium.
I tend to trust my players to keep their own tallies, essence pools, etc.

So says you.  


Unfortunately, my experiences have taught me that combat in Exalted, or Riffs, or even DnD is only as fast as your players are excited, decisive, and commited.  It also helps if they coordinate actions, IN CHARACTER, instead of telling each other what to do.


My only suggestions are that in combat, only the player who is acting be aloud to speak.  If someone absolutely needs to speak, make them raise their hand first.  Also, I have resorted to giving my players a time limit to decide and describe their actions, followed by another time limit on dice rolling.  However, these have not been rules I had to instate permanently.  


I have experimented with having players declare actions (in order of initiative) before combat and then they had to commit to it when we rolled the combat actions, or took penalties for changing their action.  Unfortunately, I have not employed this with Exalted (as it is the game I have had the least experience GM/STing).  But it has worked with Rifts and DnD.

 

[Cynis Filthist]

So says you.  
Unfortunately, my experiences have taught me that combat in Exalted, or Riffs, or even DnD is only as fast as your players are excited, decisive, and commited.

Yes so says I, Even on its best time a Rifts/Palladium combat round takes about twice as long the slowest Exalted Combat round. Speed is all relative, someone coming from Rifts who is used to combat taking between 30-45 minutes easilly, a 15 minute combat round is quick.

 

[Flagg]

Short answer: Wait a few weeks for 2nd Edition.


-S

 

[Jakk Bey]

15 minutes a round?  Whuzzah?


If folks have their stuff together, and you trust them, you just roll along.


Then again, I usually adjudicate combat in the Old Skool WoD method of Declare Last, Act First method of decending Initiative.  So long as everyone has their stuff written down, it all flows pretty free.  With judicious use of Stunts, a round can take as long as ten minutes, if everyone is descriptive and flowery, but then again I tend to run combat with a liberal hand.  


I used to run a Palladium game back in the day, and that was some bookkeeping for your ass.  Not as much as say, Space Opera--that was an exercise in pain only rivaled by I.C.E.'s Roll-Master...


2 to 3 hours for a single combat?  WTF?  Are your players having to read the frippin' book for each Charm?  Are they taking smoke breaks?  I haven't seen even a BIG climatic battle last more than an hour, and that's with all the whistles, bells, and foo fraw.  


If your people are scattered, and scatter brained, I can see things taking a while, but it's up to the ST to set the pace.  Keep all your information in front of you, and be quick and decisive.  If you dither, your players take the cue that it's OK to dither as well.

 

[wordman]

2 to 3 hours for a single combat?

Hell, I've taken 2 to 3 sessions for a single combat. My last combat took four, though with nine exalts, hordes of war ghosts, rooms packed with zombies, the catapults, the spine chains, two chimera beast men, the dozen or so first circle demons, the second circle demon and the lunar necromancer, there was quite a bit to go through.


So, I may not be the best source of advice. That will not stop me from despencing some:

• Get used to the idea that Exalted takes more pregame time for practical bookkeeping than many other games.
  
• As storyteller, find something that can instantly roll exactly the number of dice you need, preferably if it can count successes automatically. Counting dice pools takes forever, particularly with hordes of opponents. I'd recommend my own Omnihedron for this, but the Win32 version is likely to go away Real Soon.
  
• Use graph paper, a word processor, or something to draw grids of boxes for each NPCs: Willpower, Health Levels, Essence Pools, Dice Penalties. Do this way before the game starts. The bead method also works, but isn't practical for facing a lot of non-extra opposition. Note that dice penalties can come from more sources than just damage.
  
• For each NPC, know exactly what their preferred defense is ahead of time. If appropriate, know which charms they will use during attack and defense.
  
• Figure out which persistant charms NPCs will have active and/or in what order they will activate them.
  
• Don't let your players think to much.

 

[Cthulhu_Wakes]

Hmm, to each his own, I can usually blow through combat with all my people, epic or just a brawl in the streets. ^^; But then again, we're all combat nuts and we know our Charms in and out. That helps.

 

[Jakk Bey]

wordman--I tend to zero out extraneous stuff from combats.  Yes, there might be a huge battlefield, but I concentrate on what's in front of the PCs, and often, I just wing it and just plain cheat on the rest--what is going to serve the plot best, what is going to be the most dramatic?


Unless the PCs are directly involved in it, I don't really worry about it too much, other than make some notes on what I think ought to be happening with the rest of the forces.  


If it's appropriate, the PCs can whip the crap out of their opponents, only to find themselves under the bow of the general's army.  Or, they can lose their own fight, find themselves against the wall, when their gallant crew of misfits and misbegottens come to the rescue, battered but ready for a fight. Or it turns into a rout.  It depends on what serves the plot best.  


Then again, I'm not a real fan of wargaming.  


But, your advice for bookkeeping is vital for getting through combats is spot on.  Your players already have their stuff in front of them, so should you.  With all their tactics and goodies laid out.  With space to make notes if they have penalties or a bonus here and there from an effect.  Not having note space is a sin in my book for an ST, because that shows piss poor planning.


Plan ahead, and take lots of notes.  And have plenty of dice on hand.

 

[Jack1]

First of all thanks for all the advice.


As regards relative system speeds I doubt it helps that I'm coming in from L5R. Combat in that game is fast and clean, so I suppose I'm kinda spoiled in that regard.


Now, I have, as previously stated, I have never run exalted before. My experience of exalted combat comes mainly from the one game I've played in.


That game has 7 players, which, I imagine, really doesnt help. My game only has three (my preference is for 4, but WOW has really eaten up my local RPG playerbase) so hopefully, that makes life easier.


I'm fully aware also of the value of preparation and accutely so when it comes to exalted. I generally tend to disregard movement rules and go with whatever is dramatic. Likewise, combat rounds are not a fixed value of time as far as I'm concerned. I try and be abstract about these things as much as possible. It never even crossed my mind to try and keep track of the PCs essence pools, only those of my NPCs. I'm also fully aware that bookeeping is a nessecity, as there's no way you could commit so much information to memory.


The rules as regards talking during another players action sound good, but in practice I can imagine it being hard to implement. I'll certainly give it a shot.


As a superfluously elaborate stunter I'm not sure about time limits, however I am gonna try and get people to get everything ready before their action comes around.


I suppose a lot of trouble in the game I'm in comes from people not knowing their charms (some people dont know the system all too well either which is a hinderance) does anyone have a solution to this? Samiel is mad about his charm-cards but he's never actually tried to use them. Do people think that it might help?


Once again, thanks for the feedback, you've all been most helpful.

 

[Vanman]

Try this:


http://www.edexalted.com/Default.asp


This is a character creation program that prints out the charms that each character has. The charms from the BWB have the rules in the program, so you get a description. Those that come from the Caste books and other supplements don't have write ups, but they do have the book and page number, so if they have to be looked up, you know exactly where to look. Or, if you wanted to do some work, you can type in the description yourself. Don't know if you want to do that much work, but it's extremely useful to have all of a character's charms right there, with all the costs and a description of it printed out.


The character sheets are pretty nifty too. And it handles all of the Exalts as well.


Just my two cents.

 

[EccentricNed]

That looks really handy, does it have random character generator?

 

[Vanman]

That looks really handy, does it have random character generator?

No. I think random character generators in Exalted are kind of difficult to do, particularly with the charms. That, and you have to pick favored abilities, and backgrounds - that stuff is, in my opinion, too hard to randomise.


But it is an extremely useful tool, particularly for this GM who hasn't gotten all the charms memorised....


:-)

 

[Solfi]

There's a couple of characters of various XP level ready to download from the site though'...


Would be nice if more people submitted their stuff I suppose.

 

[Flagg]

I believe there's a plan to (eventually) allow importing/exporting of  EdExalted characters to Lore5.


-S

 

[Solfi]

That sounds totally sweet... who's plan is that? Ed:s or yours? And since you seem to be in the loop; will there be conversion / added support for 2nd. ed rules?

 

[Flagg]

On out side. I'm not really in the loop, but I think it was somewhere (low) on the to-do list last I checked.


-S

 

[Forest Eyes]

I'll describe my efforts to streamline combat, since I struggled with the same thing early on. Some of this has already been covered, but I'll repeat it nontheless.


1) Figure out your pools for all attack forms ahead of time. It's a waste of time to say "My dex of three plus my melee of two plus the accuracy of three..." etc etc. Most of the sample characters in the books do this, so just follow the model; for each weapon, write down the Speed (Wits + Dex + Weapon Speed) Accuracy (Dex + Combat Skill + Weapon Accuracy) and Damage (Str + Weapon damage) and Defense (Dex + Combat Skill + weapon def, for melee weapons) for each attack form you use. This way, the most you'll ever have to do to figure out a pool is deal with four or five numbers (wounds, multiple actions, circumstance, stunts, and Charms.) Still can get hairy, but on average it works fine.


2) Charm cards. Get them from the White Wolf site or make them yourself, doesn't matter. This is critical for new players, so they don't have to look at their character sheet and go "What does Dipping Swallow Defense do again?" It also encourages them to use their more exotic charms, rather than simple using the straightforward ones that are easy to remember.


3) Essence counters. You don't need to be fancy and shell out for glass beads, use frickin' pennies and nickles if you have to.


4) Extras get one group initiative. They're there to be cut down, no need to role separate initiative for them. If you're using more than one type of extra, then roll for each type if you want to be fancy.


5) Not all extras have to attack every turn. Some turns they can be watching each others' backs, waiting for an opportunity to strike, etc.


6) Encourage your players to play cinematically. It fits the feel of the game anyway--no need to stress over movement modifiers or anything. Go with the only law of physics in Exalted; if it looks cool, it works better.


7) Read the combat tutorial on Abrax's fansite, and have your players read it. It's really frickin' useful to new players. I require players to read it now.