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GameMastery Guide / Running a Game / How to Run a Game / The Science of GMing

Running Smooth Combats

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 39
Combat is the slowest and most complex part of the game, with issues of timing, multiple creatures acting at once, and many, many dice rolls. Here are some tips for speeding up combat—things you can do and things your players can do to help.

Be Prepared: This sounds like a no-brainer, but the greatest source of combat slowdowns is not knowing what a creature can do or how its special ability functions. It’s hard enough for the players to keep track of what their PCs can do, but as a GM you’re usually running multiple creatures at once and have to keep in mind how the results of this combat affect other events in the session. Read over the stat blocks for all creatures you’re using that session; if any of them have special abilities or use a universal monster rule, be sure you’re familiar with those as well. If a creature has a complex spell or spelllike ability, note its page number or print out the ability to save time referencing it.

Display the Combat Order: See page 35 for descriptions of initiative trackers such as Paizo’s GameMastery Combat Pad and initiative cards. If a PC knows what the current tick of the initiative clock is and knows when the participants get to act, he knows when his turn is coming up and can plan for what he wants to do. This means instead of hemming and hawing for a minute at the start of his turn, he can hem and haw during the previous player’s turn and be ready when it’s his turn. It also lets the PCs coordinate their actions together—while stingy GMs may see this as cheating or metagaming, remember that the turn-based initiative system is just a tool to simulate real-time combat in a way that doesn’t take forever, and in a real combat, people on the same side wouldn’t be locked into only acting in a specific order without awareness of each others’ intent.

Five Second Rule: If the players can see who’s up next in the initiative order, they have no excuse for not knowing what’s going on or what their characters want to do. If a PC’s turn comes up and the player takes more than a few seconds to announce his character’s action, skip him as if he had chosen to delay his action and move on to the next creature’s turn—after all, combat is hectic, and sometimes in the thick of battle you need a second or two to focus. This doesn’t cost the PC any actions, so they’re only penalized their position in the initiative, and it hopefully encourages them to pay more attention to what’s happening. Note that speeding up combat in general means players get to act more often and are less likely to get distracted between their turns, so the rest of these tips should make this one less necessary. Note also that you should let players know in advance that you’re going to do this, as springing it on them unexpectedly can seem vindictive.

Plan and Combine Dice Rolls: Rolling attacks and damage separately takes twice as long as rolling them all together. Save time by coordinating your attack roll dice with your damage roll dice so you can roll them at the same time, and encourage players to do the same. For example, if the PCs are fighting four orcs, each with a falchion, get four different-colored d20s and a pair of matching d4s for each orc, then roll all 12 dice at the same time; if the red d20 and green d20 are hits, you know to look at the red d4s and the green d4s and ignore the blue d4s and purple d4s. If the PCs are fighting a dire lion, you can color-coordinate the bite’s d8 die with one d20 and two claw d6 dice with two other d20s, and roll all the dice at once.

Be aware, however, that while rolling attack and damage at the same time is always a good idea, rolling all your attacks at once can be problematic if you (or your players) want to split the attacks between multiple opponents—if you don’t carefully assign each attack before you roll, it’s tempting to say that two of those three attacks which would have missed the main villain were actually directed at his weaker henchmen, whether or not that was your original intention.

Tokens: There are dozens of conditions in the game that can affect a creature’s behavior, possible actions, or combat stats, and it’s easy to lose track of them during gameplay. One way to help with this is using tokens next to or underneath a creature on the battlefield or the displayed initiative tracker. The simplest tokens are torn pieces of paper with the condition written on them. Alternatively, you can use glass beads, colored plastic disks (possibly even magnetic ones for easy stacking), flat wooden squares, or even fancier tools. Several companies make variants of these, allowing you to customize them to your needs, such as a yellow marker for panicked, green for nauseated, red for enraged, and so on. Tokens also let you single out unusual creatures when unique miniatures are unavailable (“the orc with the purple marker has tentacles instead of arms”) and help the players identify targets in combat without having to ask which opponent is which (“I attack the panicked orc before he runs away and alerts anyone to our presence”).