Image Source: Do I really need to? 🙂
I’m prepping this week’s game tonight so I’ll keep the post a bit on the short side.
Greywulf commented on this post earlier today* and shared his most excellent tricks to save time in RPG combats (dude, I’m like Keanu now, whoa!)
One of his tricks literally set my crunch-loving-but-lazy DM brain on fire:
- As GM, I keep a Hit Point pool for groups of monsters rather than track individual totals. When there’s enough in the pool to down one of the critters, I pick one (usually the most dramatically applicable), and he’s dead. Reset the pool, and start counting. It sounds like this is going into 4th Edition, which is cool.
That’s just so cool. I had read, somewhat hastily, about it on Treasure Tables but it’s only this morning that the little spark of inspiration hit the one receptive cell in my brain (Terry Pratchet quote!!!) and exploded.
You see I love mooks, they are the bread and butter of the early fights of a Friday night D&D evening. The players are tired, they are getting into the groove of the evening’s game and mowing down mooks gets the blood flowing. This trick is awesome to speed up what is otherwise a near-pointless exercise in terms of story and plots (but helps generates the necessary non-Role-playing XPs).
I’ve spent some time with Yan over Gtalk bouncing different ways of implementing this rule in our group and we came up with 3 Scenarios:
- As is, it’s simple and effective.
- As above but don’t reset the pool upon death of a mook. This allows Critical hits and massive damage abilities to drain the pool while there are still mooks around. Once the pool hits zero, all remaining mooks are demoralized and flee/Surrender.
This makes the players really enjoy Crits and massive damage as the DM describes the poor mooks being splattered with chunks of their colleagues. But it feels to me that it’s really open for abuse by crafty players. Especially our Crusader that can have a 9d6 blast available in each encounter.
- As the 1st variation but the DM multiplies the pool by a Morale Modifier based on the motivations of the Mooks.
For example, a street gang in their home turf, outnumbering a party of PCs 3 to 1 would get a pool increased by 10 to 20%. They’d still lose a member whenever an individual’s average HP is reached, but the group would be more resilient to massive damage and therefore less easy to intimidate.
Furthermore, this opens a lot of possibilities for social PCs to influence that pool with morale affecting skills and abilities. In D&D, this could mean intimidate checks, Bardic Inspire courage, Fear effects and various others to affect, upwards or downwards, a Mook Hit Point pool. Yan and I really like it and are looking forward to try it on Friday.
From the player and DM perspective, what do you think?
*Secret Blog trick: The more comments you have on your blog the easier posting gets as you stea… huh build on other people’s ideas… yeah that’s it! 🙂
From someone who really, really, really doesn’t like the idea (and almost every excecution) of hit points*, that’s a brilliant idea.
It’s an almost Risus-like abstraction of the enemies, and that’s a good thing!
One problem I can see arising is that the ‘individual mook destruction point’ is reached when there’s been only a few attacks on each mook, but spread out over a lot of them. Then again…I’m not sure that’s a problem.
*What I’ve seen of D&D 4th Edition – er, I mean, Star Wars Saga Edition, they’ve finally moved to a combined ‘hit point/wound state’ mechanic, which isn’t too terribly bad. Heck, BESM uses it, and I don’t have too much of a problem with it there. 🙂
Actually I’m not sure it’s so much of a problem. Do you remember those old 1st edition modules with entries like that?
Ogres (6), hp: 16, 21, 24, 24, 27, 30.
When in fact my Stat line looks more like this.
Ogres (6), hp: 29
Spreading damage may actually cause the players to kill a 16 hp Ogre faster 🙂
“Ogres (6), hp: 29”
Sounds good – what sort of ‘Ogre Death Point’ would you have for that group, though?
I think I’d like to see an example of this used in play…
Theft is good! 🙂
I think we picked it up from role-playing tips weekly many moons ago, and it fit our gaming style perfectly. Glad you like it too.
It certainly changed the workload for this GM, that’s for sure, and made it very simple to handle fights against lots of mooks at the same time – something notoriously difficult to handle otherwise in 3.5E.
We’ve fiddled with a few things like crits and Cleave are dealt with, but in general I tend to go with the flow during the game (as if you hadn’t guessed 🙂 )
Tell you what… the 1st encounter of Friday’s game is against mooks. My usual DM log will feature a mechanics run down of how it went.
But as a thought experiment, the borderline case would be for each Ogre to be hit for 5 points of damage with an area effect right? 5X6 =36 = 1 dead ogre in theory. I’d do the Greywulf thing and wing it or rewrite the stats as:
Ogres (6): Hp: 24 and reset the pool at 6X24 or something,
It worked! It worked so well!
I’ll post about it on my DM log.