Just had a really great game the other night, first one in several months. Had a good plot written up, lots of details and some good roleplay, and plenty of ridiculous shennanigans had by all.

Except for the combat (in my opinion). It got kinda late before we got into the first combat of the night, and already Im kinda spent and unfocused. My group has already been confused by how combat works in the past and I half assed it for the combat. Didn't bother with keeping track of spent CAs and actually didn't even bother to use combat manuevers amazingly. Mostly just attack, parry or dodge, roll damage, etc etc.

Surprisingly they loved it, complimented me on the quickness of combat compared to before. They were satisfied, I really was not. They didn't even notice we weren't using Combat Manuevers at all. I'm thinking up a few things to make combat faster and simpler, but still keeping combat dynamic.

First idea, have each PC only know about 2 or three Combat Manuevers of their choice. They won't have to scratch their heads looking at the full Combat Manuevers sheet making a decision.

Second idea, maybe remove hit locations and have PCs use a total of CON + SIZ instead.

Anybody tried these before, what were your results? Any suggestions?

Isn't this pretty much how it usually works out, players have two or three of their favorite CMs they generally fall back upon? I generally like to have them mix it up a bit more than they do, and it seems the best way to do this is to have an NPC *show* them how effective a combination of the non-standard CMs (Trip, Blind) can be.



This can speed things up quite a bit... as well as amp up the lethality. And it is pretty standard for mooks, per page 146 (average of STR and CON). You can still use locations for "flavor," as a guide to describe who was hit where.

Pretty much old School D100 - works well

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Darkness Rising
Dark R II
Dilgar War