The Alexandrian

Possibly the single most important skill for a GM is pacing: Cool challenges, awesome drama, incredible roleplaying, stunning set pieces, breathtaking props. These are all great. But they can be rendered almost irrelevant if your sessions are bloated with boredom or choked with dead air. It won’t necessarily kill your game deader than a doornail, but the constant drag from poor pacing will make everything else a little harder and a little worse.

So a very large part of being a great GM is developing the tools and techniques to keep things moving and to keep the players engaged at the table. I’ve already written a whole series about the pacing of narrative elements, but effective pacing also includes the more practical elements of managing the moment-to-moment details of the conversation at the game table.

When it comes to mechanics, this often just boils down to resolving things swiftly and efficiently: Virtually any time that you’re interacting with the mechanics, the right answer is to move through the interaction as quickly as possible.

Note: This isn’t because we inherently don’t like mechanics or mechanical choices. It’s because the actual rote execution of the mechanic is usually not the interesting bit of the game and you want to get to the next interesting bit (which can just as easily be another mechanical choice as a cool character detail or dramatic dilemma). There are also MANY exceptions that prove this rule. For example, knowing when to build the stakes up around a specific, momentous die roll so that everyone at the table is holding their breath through every jittering bounce of the polyhedron can be a very effective technique.

A large part of this efficiency, of course, is simply knowing the rules. But it can also be techniques that let you essentially fake knowing the rules – like using a cheat sheet, prepping your scenario notes using a hierarchy of reference, or identifying the rules guru at the table who you can provide that mastery by proxy.

Of course, this can only take you so far. However, once you’ve more or less maximized your efficiency in mastering the rules, you can still push things farther still by multitasking – i.e., resolving multiple mechanical interactions wholly or in part simultaneously.

There are a number of ways that you can do this, but today we’ll focus on one of the easiest: Rolling multiple dice at the same time.

ATTACK + DAMAGE

Start by rolling your attack die and your damage die at the same time.

I’m not sure this really needs more explanation: Do it just a few times and you’ll quickly realize how much time you’re saving. Teach your players to do it, too! In a typical combat with fifteen combatants, your group will be making ninety attack rolls (or more!). If you’re saving just four seconds per roll, that adds up to 5 minutes per combat. Running three or four combats per session? That’s fifteen or twenty extra minutes of play!

This, obviously, assumes that you’re playing a game like D&D that has a randomized component to damage. But it broadly applies to any mechanic that uses two-step rolling: These mechanics rarely have a decision point between the two rolls, so there’s no reason not to make both rolls at the same time.

ROLLING MULTIPLE ATTACKS

On the GM side of the screen, you’ll often be making rolls for a whole gaggle of NPCs. Stop rolling them one at a time! If you’ve got five bad guys who are all attacking, scoop up five dice and roll all those attacks at the same time!

Often these bad guys are all using the same stat block and may even be attacking the same target, so it won’t really matter which die gets assigned to which bad guy. (You can almost think of a mob of eight goblins in melee as just being one mass that makes eight simultaneous attack rolls.)

But you can also use this technique with disparate stat blocks and/or bad guys attacking different targets. You just need to figure out how to assign the dice in front of you:

Color coding. Use dice with different colors and assign those colors to the different attacks. In my experience, this tends to work best when you can make long-term color assignments. (For example, when I make iterative attacks in 3rd Edition I use red dice for the first attack, black dice for the second attack, and blue for the third.)

On the other hand, trying to remember that the ogre was blue, the goblin was red, the other goblin was purple, and… Wait was the ogre purple and the second goblin blue? … Yeah, it tends to bog down. There are workarounds for this (or maybe your memory is just better than mine), but you may want to use a different technique for assignments that vary from one encounter to the next.

Tip: One work-around that DOES work smoothly, though, is when you’re rolling for two groups of bad guys that are numerically distinct – five goblins and three ogres, for example. Roll five blue dice for goblins and three black dice for ogres and there’s really no confusion about which color goes with which group. This might also be “the five halflings attacking Alaris and the three halflings attacking Dupre.”

Read left to right. When you roll the dice, they’re generally going to scatter across the table. I tend to roll across the table in front of me (instead of in a straight line onto the table), so my dice tend to spread out left-to-right. I can then just “read” the dice left to right – assigning them to the bad guys on my list in the same order.

(You might find a top-to-bottom reading of the dice works better for you. Whatever works.)

Geometric reading. This is a similar technique, but rather than linearly assigning the dice, I’ll equate the cluster of the dice on the table to the grouping of the bad guys in the game world. A simple version of this is to take a left-to-right reading of the dice, as above, and then, similarly, look at the bad guys on the battlemap left-to-right from my point of view. But you might also look at the battlemap (or imagine the scene in your mind’s eye) and see that the bad guys are arranged in two ranks with three of them in the front rank, so you just grab the three dice closest to you for their attacks.

You can also flip this around and group according to target. So if the PCs are standing three abreast in a dungeon corridor, for example, the dice on the left will be those that target the PC on the left, and so forth.

The most important thing with these techniques is to not over-think it: Whatever method you’re using, quickly shift the dice for clarity (if at all) and then move immediately to resolution.

Note: Sometimes when I describe this technique, people will express concern about the possibility of cheating – e.g., assigning your best rolls to the bad guy with the most powerful attacks or whatever. Basically… don’t do that. If you want to cheat (and you shouldn’t), there are ways to do it with a lot less rigamarole.

If you’re concerned, hard-coded color coding avoids the issues entirely. In practice, it’s not really a problem: When I’m assigning the dice, I’m treating them as objects. It’s only after I quickly and definitively shift them to the appropriate stat blocks that I actually starting processing the numbers on the dice.

This technique of rolling fistfuls of dice is often only use to the GM, but there are systems where it may be useful to also teach it to your players. For example, the aforementioned iterative attacks of D&D 3rd Edition: The groups where I can get the players to simultaneously roll all their color-coded attack dice and matching-colored damage dice at the same time sees combat resolve MUCH more quickly than in the groups where I can’t make that happen.

PRE-ROLLING

A final dice trick for speeding up resolution is to pre-roll the dice. For example, while the PC wizard is counting up his fireball damage you look ahead and see that the horde of goblins is going next: You know that regardless of the fireball, they’re going to attack the paladin. So you can scoop up those d20s, roll them, and have them ready to go once you’ve finished adjudicating the fireball.

There are two keys to pre-rolling:

  • You have to be nigh certain that the circumstances of the battle aren’t going to change the character’s intended action.
  • You have to be able to stick with the intended action even after seeing the roll and realizing it’s not going to work. (Some people find they just can’t resist the temptation to switch things up. That’s not a sin. Just be self-aware enough to avoid the problem by not using the technique.)

What’s really great is when you get a group of players who are mature enough and trusted enough that they can ALSO use this technique without any problems. I can’t express how amazing it can be to say, “Okay, David, what you are you doing?” and for David to immediately say, “I’m attacking the ogre, hitting him for 32 damage.” (In this case, David has also used an open difficulty number to good effect.)

And when you get a whole sequence of players doing the same thing – pre-rolling attacks, pre-rolling fireball damage, etc. — it can be like you’re playing a totally different game! You can just roar through the mechanical portion of combat, which then immediately opens up all kinds of space for the group to instead focus on the strategic choices, dramatic dilemmas, and narrative description of the conflict!

So grab those dice and get rolling!

14 Responses to “Random GM Tip – Fistfuls of Dice”

  1. Xercies says:

    One thing I find that mechanically gums up D&D 5E mechanics wise is spellcasting. Everything seems to need a separate rule to work, or to roll a DC against a separate monster stat. And it slows down everything so much, and it’s annoying because you want to as a GM streamline that crap but it’s nearly impossible because of the aforementioned every spell has a different rule.

  2. Monstrim says:

    Hey, the Cheat Sheets link is broken 🙂

  3. croald says:

    @xercies, if you wanted to take the time, a roll by the DM with a monster’s stat as a bonus, against a DC set by the player character, can be equivalently replaced by a roll by the player with their character’s bonus, against a DC set by the monster’s stat. Then the player can go ahead and pre-roll it, and tell you “I beat DC 17” or whatever. Might be worth it for specific combat spells they like to rely on? (I’m not suggesting you convert the whole PHB or anything.)

    That is, convert the monster’s saving throw into a PC skill check. The odds of success don’t change, but it also has the benefit of focusing attention on the actions of the hero. “I’m so awesome I beat their high defence” feels different from “I cast the standard spell and the monster whiffed its save” even if mechanically they’re equivalent.

  4. Zed Lopez says:

    To run a con game of Delta Green I once printed out a sheet of random percentile rolls and crossed ’em off as I went. I had told the players I’d make their mental stress rolls and track it for them (in small part so players didn’t know how close to the edge they were and in large part so I didn’t have to go over the rules multiple times) so I knew I know there would be times I’d need several rolls at once.

    I do love rolling dice, but this was a big time-saver.

  5. Belgand says:

    One of the most useful pre-rolling techniques for me is to roll initiative for NPCs when I prep for the session. If they don’t get into combat or circumstances change (e.g. they’re surprised or something) it’s not a huge loss, but it speeds things up significantly and means that I can start sorting out the turn order as soon as players roll.

    I might start pre-rolling a few rounds worth of attacks and damage for them as well. Making it easier for the NPC turns to become a case of simply narrating the results without having to fiddle around with rolls in the middle.

  6. Eric says:

    I have a collection of dice with 8d6 all orange in color, 8d8 llc green in color, and so on for each die size. When I need to grab 10d10 (for a mass roll, per above article) it is very fast and easy to do so.

  7. Justin Alexander says:

    @Eric: I presort my dice types into corners of my GM screen to similar easy-grabbing effect!

  8. Volanin says:

    @xercies, I use exactly this technique @croald mentioned in my D&D 5E table to an absurdly great success: instead of players calculating the Spell Save DC as 8+ABILITY+PROF, and each monster rolling D20+SAVE…

    … spellcaster players roll their Spell Attack as D20+ABILITY+PROF, and monsters have a DC of 14+SAVE. As @croald said, it’s mathematically equal, but feels a lot different!

    And you get to blast away this useless Spell Save DC which starts at 8 instead of 10, making the system simpler and, arguably, more in line with previous versions.

  9. balambeer says:

    Another option for matching colored dice to opponents is to use miniature base rings.

    I use home-made ones: a circle of colored paper slightly larger in diameter than the base of the mini, blue-tacked to the bottom of the base.

    If I don’t have miniatures it’s even easier; use markers of the appropriate color (such as glass beads).

  10. DiscoDan says:

    One thing that I’ve due that saves me loads of time is not rolling for damage. Every monster or NPC stat block has the average number next to the amount of damage they’re supposed to roll on a given attack, just use that number instead of rolling (sword does 1d6+2 (5) damage). You save time of time rolling then adding.

  11. TZC says:

    Hey this idea of switching from monster saving throws to PC attack rolls – are there other things tied to saving throws or attack rolls that come into play? As per @volanin etc. For example, are there such things are critical spell attacks? IIRC, right now there are, but only for those spells where attack rolls are made. But does this open up, say, Disintegrate to potentially doing 20d6 + 40 damage?

  12. croald says:

    @TZC, I’d say no, treat it as the same test, just have the player roll instead of the DM. But hey man, it’s your game. If it seems fun to houserule that Disintegrate can do critical damage, go for it.

  13. Alien@System says:

    Reading this, I have to say I’m amused how Savage Worlds advertises itself with the tagline “Fast. Furious. Fun.” and yet quite honestly is bad at streamlining its dice rolls. A single attack involves five dice (Usually 2D6 and 3 others that depend on a different value on your character sheet each), all of which can explode, and that you have to interpret using a complicated decision tree (two are the attack roll (take highest), the rest is damage (add), but one of the damage dice is only added if the attack roll is very good. And if the attack non-D6 shows a 1, you have to report that because it’s a minor fumble). And of course you should have a decision point of spending a point to re-roll the attack part before seeing the damage roll.
    Not that Savage Worlds isn’t fun (there’s lots of cheering around the table on a doubly exploding D12, or lots of anxious groaning when the GM just doesn’t stop rolling behind the screen and you just know there is going to be a 34 damage attack coming from a 2D6 damage weapon), but it’s certainly not as streamlinable as the D20+mod of DnD.

  14. Mathemagician says:

    My favorite application of geometric reading is a mechanic our group calls “Roll with uncertainty.” When I ask for a check like stealth, knowledge, insight, where I want to shield the player from metagame knowledge on if they were successful/to what degree, we “Roll with uncertainty.” The player rolls 4d20 and then tells me what their modifier is (with a +5 if they have advantage), and I roll a d4 behind the scene. Then I read from left to right and use the result given by the d4.

    I’m also a big fan of having a chart of pre-rolled random encounter checks so that I can look ahead and see “if they continue on this road, they’ll have an encounter in about a day” — it gives me a little bit of space to help the random encounter come up more naturally, and streamlines all of the “no encounter during this watch” stuff.

    Thanks for the great article!

Leave a Reply

Archives

Recent Posts


Recent Comments

Copyright © The Alexandrian. All rights reserved.