Re: [DL] What do i do wrong? (High Targets and booring long Combat)

[<markus.finster@chello.at>]

Sadly, it's been a while since my last DL session, but maybe my advice helps you anyway.

Combat can take long. And it sounds that your players are really lousy when it comes down to rolling dice. I see a reporter with 2d6 in shooting miss the bad guy because he never rolls enough to hit, but surely the war veteran with his 4d10 will hit, now won't he?

Are you applying bonuses? Like +2 if you fire with a shotgun? Do they ever take time to aim?
I mean, if the opposition is just gun fodder, all it normally takes is one or two good hits with a pistol to bring em down, since damage rolls are added together.

Combat can be sped up if everyone is keeping track, so to speak. If everyone knows which bonus he gets on a particular action, they can roll for shooting, roll for damage and just tell you the result. If you use miniatures, they can even put them down on their own.
Frankly, that never worked in our group, so I still kept track for every bad guy.
What considerably speeds combat up if every only announces actions. If a player got 5 Action cards and he spends the first three for aiming, I don't need him to tell me every time he puts down a card that he uses that one for aimin +1, the next for aimin +2 and so on.
It's enough that he throws down 4 cards and tells me "I'm shooting with aiming +3".

Also: Do your players spend chips on their rolls? With a red or blue chip they can roll again and add the result to their highest die roll.
I once had a player who shot down a sharpshooter with his peacemaker.
I told him that due to distance he had to roll a 16. plus, he would only hit, if the hit location would be arms or head, so he said, "OK, I aim for the head as well."
That made the roll to 22, he used three cards for aiming and spend a red and a blue chip, rolling a total of 25 (with a skill of 4d10).

I just told him that the shooters dead - nothing's more embarrassing if you hit on that shot and then roll a mere 4 or 5 for damage ;-)

hth,
Markus
 
> Von: "Patrick Jungbluth" <pjungbluth@arcor.de>
> Datum: 2002/12/19 Do AM 10:57:18 GMT+01:00
> An: "Deadlands Mailinglist" <deadlands@gamerz.net>
> Betreff: [DL] What do i do wrong? (High Targets and booring long Combat)
> 
> My group and me where playing CL original 3 times yet and while in the beginning they where quite excitet about the system now 3 of 6 players dont want to play anymore and the rest has the opinion of "lets see one more time then we decide if we play again"
> 
> While they are quite happy with the background they have BIG problems with the rules. one thing is that the target numbers appear really high. a target of 5 is somthing that is rarly beaten and 9 or 11 is allmost impossible. i am not so sure but i guess its not supposed to be that hard. do we do somthing wrong by taking Skill Dices and count just the highest? but i guess that is somthing that i can change by just generally lowering each and every target roll by 1 or 2.
> 
> the other and more serious problem is that combat has the tendency to bore all the players to death. as soon as someone draws a gun you can be sure that this will be the last scene in that session since combat never took less then 3 or 4 hours. most of the time everyone shoots just air and never hits and if the hit the do no or just 1 wound and then you still have to see where the shoot lands how much wind the shot does and so on. we where using the mook rules from the revised edition but i think of giveing the hit point rules from the original rules a try since there even shots that dont do a single wound still do up to 5 hits. 
> 
> i am also seduced of removing the stun and recovery checks cuz they just slow down combat even more when the affectet player looses another round of actions and me for my part most of the time just forget to check for the npcs. 
> 
> anyone has some idea how that would affect overall playbalance or any other advices how to streamline combat a bit more so it becomes playable in a manageble time. or does anyone came up whit a more fluid and faster combat system? i remember reading somewhere in the web about an alternate combat system which was using poker hands to handle iniciative but sadly i have not read more of it and i seem unable to find it anymore
> 
> thanks for any advice
> 
> Patrick
>