Using Positive Reinforcement to Make 4E Combat Faster
Fourth Edition D&D is a cool system, and combat is usually a lot of fun (and more interactive and interesting than 3rd edition combat), but it has one flaw: it sometimes takes forever. Our gaming group has been experimenting with different ways to speed things along, and I think we’ve hit on something that works.
It’s a fact that 4E game sessions can get bogged down by combat. Big fights can take up an entire 3-4 hour gaming session, and that’s not a good thing. A quick Internet search will turn up tons of house rules intended to speed things up, but a lot of them suffer from the law of unintended consequences (like halving everything’s hit points).
We started putting every player’s turn on a 60-second timer (which I believe is actually an app on Ryk’s iphone). At first, there was a negative consequence if you didn’t get done in time. I don’t even remember exactly what the penalty was, but it didn’t last long because it immediately created a weird adversarial thing between player and DM. “Timer went off, you get the penalty.” “What?! No way, I was rolling as it went off.” That’s not a good thing either.
After that, we switched to positive reinforcement — 10 bonus XP whenever you got done before the timer went off. This worked fine, but had a few problems. At times, it really stacks up, and it starts to feel a little strange lurching toward level-up simply because you rolled faster, or had simpler turns that didn’t take much calculation or planning. As the party increased in level, 10 xp became less and less of a reward. Once you hit epic tier, it’s almost an insult. “Here’s 10 xp, don’t spend it all in one place.”
Our latest iteration scales better with character levels and seems to be balanced so far. Each time you get your turn done before the buzzer, you get a white poker chip. Each chip represents a five percent chance of recovering a used encounter power. You can cash in any number of chips as a free action and make a percentile roll to see if you get a power back. Turn in five chips, roll a 25 or less, and you get to reuse an encounter power (I’ll leave it to someone else to factor out the probabilities and determine if it’s better to roll five times at five percent or once at 25).
It makes for a slight decision, because you lose all your white chips at any long or short rest. You can keep saving up for a higher percentage chance, but it might be too late by then.
This requires a bit more playtesting (it’s a little rough on controllers who might have to make nine attack rolls in a single turn), but so far, it’s been a good solution. There’s been some talk of allowing the chips to also be used for a one percent chance to recover a daily power, but I suspect once you start messing with dailies, either the chance is so low as to be inconsequential, or the whole thing becomes unbalancing.
Poker chip photo by joncampbell.
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December 3rd, 2009 11:25 PM
So far I think we’re all liking the system, but it seems like we’re more concerned with collecting, and hoarding the chips than actually using them. The problem is that we’re probably all trying to save up for that big chance at recovering a power, when really we should just go for it with whatever chips we’ve got. I’m gonna start doing that myself; get 2, 3, or 4 chips, then have a go at it.
December 3rd, 2009 11:57 PM
If you figure the 5% rolls in terms of NOT getting the recover (0.95), if you use five chips individually, 77% of the time (0.95^5), you will fail on all five tries. Compare this to the 75% chance of failure with one big go and it’s not that much worse. And there is always the chance that you will get lucky, dice being fickle the way they are…
December 4th, 2009 1:25 AM
I’m terrible at statistics, but now that I look at it, rolling d100 with a five percent chance five different times is statistically equal to rolling once with a 25 percent chance (P=.25 either way, ie .05+.05+.05+.05+.05 vs .25).
However, if you save up and cash in five chips, your probability of getting the power back more than one time = 0. The probability of two successful rolls with the five separate five percent rolls is only .05 (.25 * .2), but it’s still greater than 0. The probabilities get vanishingly small the more successful rolls you hope for (down to .0000003125, or 0.00003125 % for five out of five), but it never reaches zero.
Bottom line, unless I’ve botched this horribly, it’s always a better play to roll each turn (unless you haven’t spent an encounter power you want back yet).
December 4th, 2009 3:17 AM
Those statistics are depressing. But hey, a slim chance is getter than no chance.
December 4th, 2009 4:44 AM
Good lord does my group need this. We’re level 2 ish and it takes us FOREVER to finish combat. Holy crap. Some days I feel like I could play a game of Risk and still be done before we kill the fucking ooze. Puzzle-based ooze boss with a party that fails at puzzle thinking sounds funny from a distance but takes forever in practice. Of course, it does give My wizard plenty of chances to miss with everything better than an at-will, yet still finish off an ooze while bleeding out in the corner.
December 4th, 2009 8:14 AM
Hitting is overrated. I haven’t hit with a Daily attack power in over 3 weeks.
December 4th, 2009 12:54 PM
Yeah, just leave all the hitting to the melee fighters. In the mean time you can have really short turns due to all the missing, and accumulate more white chips! That way you can get back a daily (If we implement a system that allows for it), and miss with it all over again. It’ll be awesome!
December 4th, 2009 3:03 PM
Yea, that’s the story of my wizard.
December 4th, 2009 3:45 PM
To avoid penalizing the controllers, I’d give it based on the first roll. I find the worst delays are based in figuring out what to use. One player always has to look stuff up in his book, even when the others tell him based on the PDF (purchased during the brief period when they were legal). By having people decide the power and the targets quickly, it helps immensely.
But it doesn’t help when it’s the GM who’s slow.
As to using one at a time or all at once, I’d make a rule that you can only roll once per turn. Because if you roll five times, that will slow down the game.
Personally, I’d use a chance of a bonus action point instead of recovering a power. This would be anextra AP that could be used even if you’ve already spent one.
December 4th, 2009 6:02 PM
The newest suggestion, as of last night, was that the white chips fade after a game session, rather than after a short or even long rest. I think that’s a reasonable idea.
I was also thinking of converting it to a purchase system, rather than just a roll for percentages. that way you could buy an encounter back for say 5 chips, and maybe a daily for 10 or 15. If you did it that way it might make more sense for the chips to reset at an extended rest. You could also buy an action point for say 8 or 10. Of course you still can’t spend more than one action point in an encounter. Maybe even purchase back healing surges for 3 or so.
I like the idea of the purchase system (especially for daily powers) ‘cuz I’ve never been fully satisfied with 4e’s tendancy to require a rest after every 2 encounters or so.
The original concept was that if a player hadn’t declared his/her initial action within 1 minute, the player’s initiative fell to 1 point behind the next actor in the initiative order. Technically that was still in effect (at least while I was still DM) and the party seemed to have gotten over major lags in deciding on an action. However battles were still slow, particularly with long convoluted resolutions to actions (mostly from controllers, though certain drow barbarians ended up doing a LOT of stuff in one turn).
The army currently teaches its occicers and NCO’s that it’s better to make an OK decision NOW than it is to make the best decision later. I wanted to make that applicable to D&D but as Ed mentioned, the negative effects were a little too adversarial (player v. DM rather than character v. monster).
December 4th, 2009 7:22 PM
I kinda like the purchase system idea. Gives players more options, and might even add a bit of strategy to how we employ our chips.
The positive reinforcement in general is really effective for speeding up fights. It kinda keeps everybody paying attention to combat, so they can start planning their turn ahead of time. And just doing that much even makes combat more enjoyable, because we’re not being lazy, and zoning out when it isn’t our turn. We’re actively thinking about what to do next.