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Creating and Dealing with Large Combat

Combat, for better or for worse, is a big part of many adventures. This section contains some ground rules and suggestions to help streamline and speed up any combat that occurs during your campaign.

The first rule of making combat run efficiently is this: be prepared. As a GM you should know how many enemies you’re going to throw at a party, how difficult they should be to dispatch, and what their stats are – and we mean all of their skill rolls, attribute scores, etc., in addition to any specific rules they may need to reference. You don’t want to waste time during combat looking up how much damage your steel ranger’s gun does or how the mechanics of splash damage for the grenade your NPC just lobbed work. This goes for players too – encourage players to plan their actions out during other players’ turns. When everyone knows what they’re supposed to do when their turn comes around, combat moves much faster and keeps all of the players engaged.

Miniatures and Battle Mats

You and your players don’t have to use miniatures in combat at all, but the use of miniatures in combat can help add visualization to the scenario that allows for a more enjoyable experience at the occasional cost of time spent.

If you’re using a standard 1” square gridded battle mat as might be available in most game stores, try using blindbag figurines or figurines from any other miniatures system as your ponies; just try to keep all of the players to roughly the same scale and size. Having blindbags occupy squares can be a bit awkward at times, so having characters occupy and move between the intersections on the grid instead of occupying squares with each line representing a distance of five feet works very well. In play-testing, when miniatures were used, this was among the most preferred methods by testers. 1” hexagonal grid battle maps require that they occupy single hexes, and works better with player-tokens than it does with blindbags or other pony mini-figures.

If you’re not in the market for an expensive battle mat, using a non-gridded map with a scale can also work, and made moving diagonally and representing altitude much smoother. Large whiteboards are great for this, as you can draw in and alter terrain with ease. Enemy character or creature locations can be marked with anything from poker chips change to extra dice – what’s really important is that both you and the players can visually distinguish what enemies are where.

Creator’s Note: I personally prefer using dice for marking enemies (different numbers facing up can record remaining health, altitude, or differentiate between groups or types of monsters), and by preference use a scale on an unmarked board as the battle space, but you should try to find a way that works for you and your players best. Coinage of varying denominations also works well.

 

Mooks

A good way to speed up combats with large numbers of enemies is to use mooks.

The term mook refers to a ‘faceless’ (meaning non-unique) or simply unnamed enemy combatant, generally of the sort considered expendable by those higher up the chain of command (if there is one). Now bear in mind that Fallout Equestria as a setting doesn’t encourage the use of mooks in the conventional sense – even your bad guys are still ponies, and they should have at least some sort of reasonable (or unreasonable, as the case may be) motivation for their actions.



Then what are they in game terms? Simple: Mooks are enemies that are toned down from full characters to make fighting them take less time. When making mooks consider that most common enemies don’t need a full stat block. The odds are they’ll only use a few attributes or skills in the course of combat anyway, which is why the stats provided in the Monsters section are truncated for most enemies. If they take their END score in wounds, then they die – don’t worry about if the five wounds were to the leg or the horn or anywhere in between, unless your player characters are going specifically to disarm or cripple rather than kill. Not worrying about hit locations on the player side also speeds up combat by removing a die roll. If they took out a leg or just dealt single wounds to multiple locations, odds are they’ll go unconscious from the pain and bleed out anyway.

As a rule of thumb, use mooks whenever enemies outnumber the players by more than 3-1 as a way of speeding up combat. For extremely large numbers of weaker creatures (5-1 ratio or worse), consider allowing players to take them out with a single wound instead of multiple to further streamline it. Adding mooks to a larger fight between more powerful characters is a great way to add variety to a combat without greatly extending the time it takes out of a session. Don’t be afraid to mix and match different difficulties of opponents against your players; things out in the wasteland shouldn’t necessarily always be on equal footing.

As a GM, you want to conserve your energy and time during a session for more important encounters – boss fights, large monsters, plot-important hostile NPCs or encounters intended to be particularly challenging. Don’t sweat the small stuff with chance encounters and random enemies out in the wasteland.

On the flip side of this coin, at lower levels a bunch of rag-tag raider grunts can give a party of player characters a really hard time. Mooks are for making combats easier for players, and should only be used here if the players shouldn’t be challenged significantly by the encounter. Many GMs may not want to use them at all because of this; there a prevailing attitude in post-apocalyptic settings that every experience should have a high risk of death associated with it.

But hey, if you’re really just looking to make a game fatal, just don’t play with luck cards. In tests, that upped our fatality rates by over 500%!


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 821


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