One of the nits that seems to get perennially picked in D&D is the Tumble skill. Specifically, the uses of the skill which allow a character to avoid attacks of opportunity: The DC 15 check to avoid attacks for moving through threatened areas and the DC 25 check to tumble right through an opponent’s space.

There are generally understood to be two shortcomings to these rules:

1. The game already makes it relatively difficult to control territory. For example, there is no effective way for a single person to guard a 10′ wide hallway — no matter how skilled they are and unskilled their opponents are. The Tumble skill exacerbates this because now you can’t even control the space you’re standing in: Say the PCs want to prevent someone from reaching the Lever of Doom at the end of a hallway — it doesn’t matter how many demigods you cram into the hallway, a 1st level tumbler can still move past them like water through a sieve.

2. The idea that some skill in tumbling would allow you to dextrously move past a slower and clumsier opponent is not problematic in and of itself. The problem is that the DC for check is flat: It would be fine if the 5th level rogue could tumble past a whole brigade of 1st level warriors, but it shouldn’t be possible for that same rogue to tumble past Cyrano de Bergerac or Benedict of Amber.

Essentially, the Tumble skill needs to somehow take the skill of the person you’re tumbling past into account.

SOLUTIONS

Over the years I have seen several attempted solutions (and attempted many myself). These include:

1. Opposed tumble checks.
2. The tumble check is opposed by a Reflex saving throw.
3. The tumble check replaces your AC.
4. The tumble check is added to your AC.
5. Add your tumble bonus (sans Dex) to your AC (either with or without a flat-DC check).
6. Add the level of the character you’re tumbling past to the DC of the check.
7. Add the BAB of the character you’re tumbling past to the DC of the check.
8. Add the melee attack bonus of the character you’re tumbling past to the DC of the check.
9. The tumble check is opposed by a melee attack roll. (If the target succeeds at the opposed check, a new attack roll is made to resolve the AoO.)
10. A flat-DC check grants you a flat +4 dodge bonus to AC. (The Mobility feat either makes the check unnecessary or stacks.)

PROBLEMS

None of these are entirely satisfactory, in my opinion. The reasons include:

1. Tumbling is not a required skill for being a highly-skilled swordsman. Not only doesn’t it make sense for my ability to hit your with a sword to be dependent on my ability to (literally) jump through hoops, it also doesn’t solve the inherent imbalance you’re trying to correct: The tumbler will still be able to tumble past the finest swordsmen in the world (since it’s unlikely they’ve taken ranks in Tumble).

2. This mitigates the problem better than an opposed Tumble check (since Reflex saves improve automatically). And although Reflex saves still aren’t tied to melee prowess, the conceptual match is slightly better: It makes sense that quick reflexes would allow you to react quicker to a tumbler. But this solution doesn’t actually fix the game balance issues: Saving throws simply don’t advance as quickly as skill ranks do. The tumblers still outstrip the abilities of the fighters, it just takes them slightly longer to do it.

3. Tumbling should never make you easier to hit than if you just casually strolled by the person you’re attacking. It is relatively trivial to come up with situations where replacing your AC with your Tumble check would result in precisely that.

4. One interesting facet of the 3rd Edition rules is that a character’s AC is, essentially, a special case of the central resolution mechanic in which you take 10 and then add your various bonuses. (In fact, many variants exist where you roll a d20 instead of effectively taking 10 to determine your AC against any particular attack.) But when you think of AC in this way, the problem with this solution immediately becomes apparent: In addition to your own tumbling skill, you’re also adding a second d20 roll to your total. This is obviously not balanced.

5. But simply adding your Tumble bonus doesn’t work, either. It eliminates that second d20 roll, but you’re still faced with the fact that this would become a huge bonus. Consider the fact that the game is obviously balanced so that two characters of the same level both have at least a decent opportunity to hit each other. Tacking on a +20 bonus to AC obviously throws that out of whack. If that doesn’t convince you, simply consider the fact that a magic item conferring a +10 bonus to Tumble costs roughly the same as a +3 bonus to AC.

6. Adding the level of the character you’re tumbling past to the DC of the check at least takes some measure of the skill of the opponent you’re facing. But level is only proximate to combat, and the system begins suffering some real problems when you try to use it with monsters (many of which have HD higher than their CR).

7. Adding the BAB, on the other hand, is a much better solution. I would recommend lowering the base DCs slightly to compensate in the tumbler’s favor here (so the checks would DC 10 + BAB and DC 20 + BAB). The only problem with this is that BAB, while a better proximate of combat prowess than level, is still only proximate: There are many, many things which improve your ability to make an attack. But this is definitely a workable solution.

8. Adding the full melee attack bonus, on the other hand, doesn’t work. The problem simply becomes that the resulting DCs end up being far too high to be reasonable for a character of the same level. You can mitigate this somewhat by stripping away most or all of the base DC of the check (so the DCs become equal to the melee attack bonus and the melee attack bonus + 10 for the two checks), but this only mitigates the problem. And, at low levels, it results in check DCs which are too low.

9. This is the solution proposed by Monte Cook in Arcana Evolved and then later picked up by Mike Mearls in Iron Heroes. Cook makes the basic “avoid AoO” a straight opposed check, while effectively giving the tumbler a -5 penalty on a check to tumble through someone’s space. Cook and Mearls are both savvy game designers and, as one might expect, this is probably the best solution we’ve looked at so far: It turns out that attack bonuses and the skill bonus of a specialist tend to stay within reasonable distance of each other at any given level. And by making the check a gatekeeper for the actual resolution of the AoO (the check doesn’t determine whether the AoO succeeds or not, it determines whether the AoO can be attempted), Cook makes sure that tumbling never makes it more likely for the tumbler to be hit.

The only criticism of this method is that it essentially doubles the amount of time it takes to resolve the action. This is not necessarily the end of the world, but whenever you add a die roll to the game you’re slowing it down. Slow it down enough and it’s no longer fun to play.

10. This is a fairly elegant solution, but suffers from two shortcomings. First, it fails to address the “move through their space” element. Second, the lack of scaling with skill has simply been moved from the person being tumbled past to the person doing the tumbling: No matter how skilled you are at tumbling, you still get nothing more than that flat +4 bonus to AC. Tying the size of the AC bonus to the result of the Tumble check can solve the second problem, but only clumsily or through the use of a chart look-up (neither of which, in my opinion, are desirable).

DESIGN GOALS

So, taking all of that into consideration, is there a solution which works? For me, a successful rule would need:

1. To take into account the skill of both the tumbler and the person being tumbled past. Highly skilled swordsmen should be tougher to tumble past than neophyte warriors; highly skilled tumblers should be better at tumbling past people than amateur acrobats.

2. Never result in the tumbler being easier to hit than if they hadn’t tumbled.

3. Be simple to use and easy to remember. And, to that end, consistent with other skill checks. (In general, if three or four different tasks use the same mechanic, it’s easier than if those tasks each use different mechanics.)

4. Minimize the number of rolls needed to resolve the action.

THE SOLUTION

I’m going to make the rather radical suggestion that part of the problem in trying to solve this problem is that there are actually multiple actions trying to be resolved simultaneously. In reality, there are three things these Tumble checks are attempting to handle:

1. The ability to move around the battlefield quickly and nimbly (minimizing the risk posed from people taking shots at you as you run by them).

2. The ability to dextrously move through someone’s space.

3. The ability to nimbly avoid a specific attack aimed at you.

I’m going to sugggest that the solution is to split these different actions up and resolve them independently of each other.

TUMBLING MOVE: By making a Tumble check (DC 15) you gain a +4 dodge bonus to Armor Class against attacks of opportunity caused when you move out of or within a threatened area. You can move up to half your speed without penalty. You can move at your speed by accepting a -10 penalty to this check and you can run by accepting a -20 penalty to this check.

TUMBLE PAST: You can attempt to tumble through an opponent’s space as part of normal movement. Because you are entering an opponent’s space, this provokes an attack of opportunity from the opponent. You must make a Tumble check (DC 25). If the attack of opportunity is successful or the Tumble check fails, you move back 5 feet in the direction you came, ending your movement there. Otherwise, you move through the opponent’s space and can continue your move normally.

AVOID ATTACK OF OPPORTUNITY: When you are hit as a result of an attack of opportunity you provoked, you may use an attack of opportunity or swift action to attempt a Tumble check to negate the hit. The hit is negated if your Tumble check result is greater than the opponent’s attack roll. (Essentially, the Tumble check becomes your Armor Class if it is higher than your regular AC.)

DESIGN NOTES

This solution keeps most resolutions to a simple skill check vs. a flat DC (the easiest of all possible skill checks), but it never negates the opponent’s ability to interfere with the tumble. In one key regard it borrows Cook’s solution of opposing the Tumble check with an attack roll, but by borrowing from the Mounted Combat feat mechanic of negating a hit it simplifies Cook’s solution: Instead of two separate resolutions, there is essentially only one resolution point (nobody is ever asked to roll more than a single check to resolve the action).

We’ve also made a successful use of this ability more useful, because it actually uses up the opponent’s attack of opportunity. As a result, the character must burn a limited resource (either an attack of opportunity or a swift action) in order to perform the attempt. Any character with basic training in tumbling can attempt to dodge their way nimbly through combat (by making a flat DC check to receive a bonus to AC), but if a character wants to be able to really dance through a mob of opponents, they should pick up the Combat Reflexes feat.

Those flat DCs also hide another useful design feature: Eventually the tumbler won’t have to actually make those checks. At that point, the only check which becomes important is the opposed check to negate the hit. This further speeds up gameplay while satisfying our design goals.

I have a general design philosophy of creating widely useful abilities. There are several reasons for this:

It tends to create simpler and more useful rules. When you aren’t trying to narrowly tailor a rule to model a very specific situation, you can usually leave a lot of the special case rules — the little nitpicky rules that make it difficult to remember or apply the rule on the fly — by the wayside.

It leads to emergent behavior in the system. This is where complex strategies and long-lasting appeal come from. Games like Candyland or Monopoly which can essentially only be played in one way successfully (“roll the dice” or “roll the dice and buy every piece of property you can”) are relatively boring games. Games like Chess or Go, on the other hand, have only a handful of rules, but those rules lead to emergent behaviors that lead to complex and varied strategies.

It usually empowers the players. Some designers tend to forget that roleplaying games are, fundamentally, about letting the players do really cool things. The definition of “really cool things” will depend on the game you’re playing and the genre you’re aiming for (in some cases “really cool things” will include “dying horribly at the hands of creatures from beyond time, space, and human ken”), but roleplaying games are still fundamentally about players doing things.

The problem with this design philosophy is that sometimes it will lead to an unbalanced rule. In the interests of keeping a new rule flexible and useful, the rule will end up being too useful. There are basically two forms of this:

An ability becomes so useful that every character ends up having it. This is generally undesirable because it reduces the complexity and variety of the game. When every character looks like a cookie-cutter copy of every other character the game has lost its dynamic quality.

An ability becomes so widely applicable that it is constantly being used. Since using any rule tends to take a certain amount of time, this tends to bog down gameplay in an undesirable way.

(There are exceptions to these rules, but they tend to be core components of the system. For example, saving throws are so useful that every character has them. Making a melee attack is so widely applicable that attack rolls are constantly being made. You’ll notice, however, that the basic rules for these widely useful and widely applicable abilities are as simple as they possibly can be: Roll a single die, add modifiers, compare to a difficulty class.)

The fact that my design philosophy can occasionally lead to problematically over-powered rules is not a problem. Or, rather, it’s not a problem as long as you have a chance to properly analyze and playtest the rules. (This is, sadly, not as common in the RPG industry as it should be. I remember one product I worked on with a dozen other writers. Towards the end of the design cycle, the editor asked the writers to submit a list of their playtesters so that they could be properly credited. I promptly sent in my list of a five playtesters. When the book was published there was a grand total of six playtesters listed.)

This is all one long prelude to saying: Upon playtesting and analysis, my initial “Thoughts on Tumbling” (posted March 28th) had two problems:

First, a stupid mistake. In translating my thoughts on tumbling from my house ruled version of D&D back to the normal version of the game I messed up some terminology. I said “swift action” when I should have said “immediate action”.

Second, the ability to use tumbling to negate any hit is too widely useful once you add in Combat Reflexes. Combat Reflexes basically becomes a must-have feat.

So, in fact, my mistake in using “swift action” instead of “immediate action” actually becomes prophetic in a sense: You should only be able to use tumbling to negate hits resulting from attacks of opportunity you provoke. (Which means that “swift action” is, in fact, the correct terminology.)

I have revised the essay as it appears on the Creations page, but I am leaving the original posting of the essay intact so that the two versions an be compared (if anyone should so desire).

One of the nits that seems to get perennially picked in D&D is the Tumble skill. Specifically, the uses of the skill which allow a character to avoid attacks of opportunity: The DC 15 check to avoid attacks for moving through threatened areas and the DC 25 check to tumble right through an opponent’s space.

There are generally understood to be two shortcomings to these rules:

1. The game already makes it relatively difficult to control territory. For example, there is no effective way for a single person to guard a 10′ wide hallway — no matter how skilled they are and unskilled their opponents are. The Tumble skill exacerbates this because now you can’t even control the space you’re standing in: Say the PCs want to prevent someone from reaching the Lever of Doom at the end of a hallway — it doesn’t matter how many demigods you cram into the hallway, a 1st level tumbler can still move past them like water through a sieve.

2. The idea that some skill in tumbling would allow you to dextrously move past a slower and clumsier opponent is not problematic in and of itself. The problem is that the DC for check is flat: It would be fine if the 5th level rogue could tumble past a whole brigade of 1st level warriors, but it shouldn’t be possible for that same rogue to tumble past Cyrano de Bergerac or Benedict of Amber.

Essentially, the Tumble skill needs to somehow take the skill of the person you’re tumbling past into account.

SOLUTIONS

Over the years I have seen several attempted solutions (and attempted many myself). These include:

1. Opposed tumble checks.
2. The tumble check is opposed by a Reflex saving throw.
3. The tumble check replaces your AC.
4. The tumble check is added to your AC.
5. Add your tumble bonus (sans Dex) to your AC (either with or without a flat-DC check).
6. Add the level of the character you’re tumbling past to the DC of the check.
7. Add the BAB of the character you’re tumbling past to the DC of the check.
8. Add the melee attack bonus of the character you’re tumbling past to the DC of the check.
9. The tumble check is opposed by a melee attack roll. (If the target succeeds at the opposed check, a new attack roll is made to resolve the AoO.)
10. A flat-DC check grants you a flat +4 dodge bonus to AC. (The Mobility feat either makes the check unnecessary or stacks.)

PROBLEMS

None of these are entirely satisfactory, in my opinion. The reasons include:

1. Tumbling is not a required skill for being a highly-skilled swordsman. Not only doesn’t it make sense for my ability to hit your with a sword to be dependent on my ability to (literally) jump through hoops, it also doesn’t solve the inherent imbalance you’re trying to correct: The tumbler will still be able to tumble past the finest swordsmen in the world (since it’s unlikely they’ve taken ranks in Tumble).

2. This mitigates the problem better than an opposed Tumble check (since Reflex saves improve automatically). And although Reflex saves still aren’t tied to melee prowess, the conceptual match is slightly better: It makes sense that quick reflexes would allow you to react quicker to a tumbler. But this solution doesn’t actually fix the game balance issues: Saving throws simply don’t advance as quickly as skill ranks do. The tumblers still outstrip the abilities of the fighters, it just takes them slightly longer to do it.

3. Tumbling should never make you easier to hit than if you just casually strolled by the person you’re attacking. It is relatively trivial to come up with situations where replacing your AC with your Tumble check would result in precisely that.

4. One interesting facet of the 3rd Edition rules is that a character’s AC is, essentially, a special case of the central resolution mechanic in which you take 10 and then add your various bonuses. (In fact, many variants exist where you roll a d20 instead of effectively taking 10 to determine your AC against any particular attack.) But when you think of AC in this way, the problem with this solution immediately becomes apparent: In addition to your own tumbling skill, you’re also adding a second d20 roll to your total. This is obviously not balanced.

5. But simply adding your Tumble bonus doesn’t work, either. It eliminates that second d20 roll, but you’re still faced with the fact that this would become a huge bonus. Consider the fact that the game is obviously balanced so that two characters of the same level both have at least a decent opportunity to hit each other. Tacking on a +20 bonus to AC obviously throws that out of whack. If that doesn’t convince you, simply consider the fact that a magic item conferring a +10 bonus to Tumble costs roughly the same as a +3 bonus to AC.

6. Adding the level of the character you’re tumbling past to the DC of the check at least takes some measure of the skill of the opponent you’re facing. But level is only proximate to combat, and the system begins suffering some real problems when you try to use it with monsters (many of which have HD higher than their CR).

7. Adding the BAB, on the other hand, is a much better solution. I would recommend lowering the base DCs slightly to compensate in the tumbler’s favor here (so the checks would DC 10 + BAB and DC 20 + BAB). The only problem with this is that BAB, while a better proximate of combat prowess than level, is still only proximate: There are many, many things which improve your ability to make an attack. But this is definitely a workable solution.

8. Adding the full melee attack bonus, on the other hand, doesn’t work. The problem simply becomes that the resulting DCs end up being far too high to be reasonable for a character of the same level. You can mitigate this somewhat by stripping away most or all of the base DC of the check (so the DCs become equal to the melee attack bonus and the melee attack bonus + 10 for the two checks), but this only mitigates the problem. And, at low levels, it results in check DCs which are too low.

9. This is the solution proposed by Monte Cook in Arcana Evolved and then later picked up by Mike Mearls in Iron Heroes. Cook makes the basic “avoid AoO” a straight opposed check, while effectively giving the tumbler a -5 penalty on a check to tumble through someone’s space. Cook and Mearls are both savvy game designers and, as one might expect, this is probably the best solution we’ve looked at so far: It turns out that attack bonuses and the skill bonus of a specialist tend to stay within reasonable distance of each other at any given level. And by making the check a gatekeeper for the actual resolution of the AoO (the check doesn’t determine whether the AoO succeeds or not, it determines whether the AoO can be attempted), Cook makes sure that tumbling never makes it more likely for the tumbler to be hit.

The only criticism of this method is that it essentially doubles the amount of time it takes to resolve the action. This is not necessarily the end of the world, but whenever you add a die roll to the game you’re slowing it down. Slow it down enough and it’s no longer fun to play.

10. This is a fairly elegant solution, but suffers from two shortcomings. First, it fails to address the “move through their space” element. Second, the lack of scaling with skill has simply been moved from the person being tumbled past to the person doing the tumbling: No matter how skilled you are at tumbling, you still get nothing more than that flat +4 bonus to AC. Tying the size of the AC bonus to the result of the Tumble check can solve the second problem, but only clumsily or through the use of a chart look-up (neither of which, in my opinion, are desirable).

DESIGN GOALS

So, taking all of that into consideration, is there a solution which works? For me, a successful rule would need:

1. To take into account the skill of both the tumbler and the person being tumbled past. Highly skilled swordsmen should be tougher to tumble past than neophyte warriors; highly skilled tumblers should be better at tumbling past people than amateur acrobats.

2. Never result in the tumbler being easier to hit than if they hadn’t tumbled.

3. Be simple to use and easy to remember. And, to that end, consistent with other skill checks. (In general, if three or four different tasks use the same mechanic, it’s easier than if those tasks each use different mechanics.)

4. Minimize the number of rolls needed to resolve the action.

THE SOLUTION

I’m going to make the rather radical suggestion that part of the problem in trying to solve this problem is that there are actually multiple actions trying to be resolved simultaneously. In reality, there are three things these Tumble checks are attempting to handle:

1. The ability to move around the battlefield quickly and nimbly (minimizing the risk posed from people taking shots at you as you run by them).

2. The ability to dextrously move through someone’s space.

3. The ability to nimbly avoid a specific attack aimed at you.

I’m going to sugggest that the solution is to split these different actions up and resolve them independently of each other.

TUMBLING MOVE: By making a Tumble check (DC 15) you gain a +4 dodge bonus to Armor Class against attacks of opportunity caused when you move out of or within a threatened area. You can move up to half your speed without penalty. You can move at your speed by accepting a -10 penalty to this check and you can run by accepting a -20 penalty to this check.

TUMBLE PAST: You can attempt to tumble through an opponent’s space as part of normal movement. Because you are entering an opponent’s space, this provokes an attack of opportunity from the opponent. You must make a Tumble check (DC 25). If the attack of opportunity is successful or the Tumble check fails, you move back 5 feet in the direction you came, ending your movement there. Otherwise, you move through the opponent’s space and can continue your move normally.

AVOID ATTACK: When you are hit in combat, you may use an attack of opportunity or swift action to attempt a Tumble check to negate the hit. The hit is negated if your Tumble check result is greater than the opponent’s attack roll. (Essentially, the Tumble check becomes your Armor Class if it is higher than your regular AC.)

DESIGN NOTES

This solution keeps most resolutions to a simple skill check vs. a flat DC (the easiest of all possible skill checks), but it never negates the opponent’s ability to interfere with the tumble. In one key regard it borrows Cook’s solution of opposing the Tumble check with an attack roll, but by borrowing from the Mounted Combat feat mechanic of negating a hit it simplifies Cook’s solution: Instead of two separate resolutions, there is essentially only one resolution point (nobody is ever asked to roll more than a single check to resolve the action).

We’ve also made this ability more widely useful, allowing it to negate any hit in combat. As a result, the character must burn a limited resource (either an attack of opportunity or a swift action) in order to perform the attempt. If a character wants to be able to really dance through a mob of opponents, they should pick up the Combat Reflexes feat.

Those flat DCs also hide another useful design feature: Eventually the tumbler won’t have to actually make those checks. At that point, the only check which becomes important is the opposed check to negate the hit. This further speeds up gameplay while satisfying our design goals.

I have a simple rule of thumb: If you’re designing a mystery for your PCs to solve, you should include at least three clues for every conclusion you want them to reach. More often than not they’ll miss the first clue and misinterpret the second, but the third will do the trick. (And sometimes they’ll spontaneously jump to a conclusion without even being given a clue, which is always a pleasant surprise.) If you further design the adventure so that they can complete it even if they don’t reach every single conclusion that you want them to, then your adventure is probably robust enough to withstand actual play design.

This design methodology not only sidesteps the common problem (where the PCs miss or misinterpret some vital clue), but it also leads to a more robust scenario: All those clues give you a much firmer and deeper understanding of what’s happening, making it much easier to improvise on your feet if the PCs suddenly go haring off in a random direction.

The classic adventure Death in Freeport doesn’t quite honor this design principle: When running the adventure out of the box there are a couple of choke points where PCs might find themselves facing a brick wall if they turn the wrong way or make the wrong assumption. But way back in 2000, when I first ran this adventure, I buffed it up with a few additional clues and alternate investigation methods. And I not only ran it with great success in 2000, but I ran it again in 2002 to launch a fairly successful mini-campaign, and then I ran it again in 2003 as a one-shot. It was pretty much foolproof.

Then, in 2004, I discovered that I had never known true foolishness.

This is the story of the worst experience I have ever had as a DM. I had gathered together a gaming group with the intention of playtesting a mega-adventure that, sadly, was never published. In order to lead the group into this adventure (which started at 6th level), I decided to go with some tried-and-true material: The original Freeport trilogy that I had run to such great success before. After five or six sessions of material I was completely confident about, I would have a firm baseline for judging the success of the original material in the mega-adventure.

Instead, the campaign lasted only three sessions and never got beyond Death in Freeport.

I say it lasted “only” three sessions, but the reality is that these sessions were grueling and painful affairs. It was not just that the party ineptly blew off, ignored, or blatantly misinterpreted even the simplest of clues — it was the inept bungling of their every attempt to carry through on a good intention and the utter incompetence of their exploits. A quickie adventure that generally takes about four hours to complete dragged out for more than twenty hours of gameplay, by the end of which I, as the DM, was struggling to find any way of bringing the scenario to a close.

Here are a few of the more memorable and (in retrospect and from a safe distance) hilarious exploits:

1. They were given a “To Do” list that the priest had apparently made the day before he disappeared. On the list there was a specific person mentioned. They tracked this person down and discovered he was a ship’s captain. They proceeded to concoct an elaborate scheme in which they would pretend to have a cargo they needed to ship and then offer it to the captain’s closest competitor! The competitor accepted the cargo. When this failed to elicit a response, they sat down with the captain and said, “Hey! We just gave your competitor some business! Whaddya think of that?”

The captain said, “He’s a liar and a cheat and a swindle, but who you choose to do business with is your own affair.”

They concluded from this that the captain had never heard of the priest they were looking for. (You’ll notice that they never actually asked the captain whether he knew anything about the priest. They never even mentioned the priest.) Then they spent about an hour of game time acquiring the cargo they had pretended to have so that they could actually give it to the competitor and pay him to ship it. (Why? I never found out.)

2. Assassins were sent to kill them. They killed the assassins and discovered a note on one of their bodies describing where and when they were to meet the person that had hired them. The party went to this location several hours before the meeting was scheduled to happen and discovered it was a tavern. They stayed there for about half an hour and then left… still several hours before the meeting was scheduled. The next morning they went back, broke into the tavern, and tried to kill the bartender.

3. After missing or blowing off several other clues, one of them finally managed to get himself killed. So a replacement PC was brought in, and I seized the opportunity to give this new PC a “clue” which basically consisted of him saying: “Hey, I know the guy who’s behind this. We should follow him and find out where their hideout is.”

So they follow this guy for a couple of minutes… and then one of them steps out of hiding and stabs him to death.

4. So the bad guys kidnap another priest, and this time I connive to have one of the PCs see it happen. (I’m getting desperate at this point.) The PC follows the kidnappers for several blocks and then… shoots at them with his crossbow. He’s outnumbered 6-to-1 and, after getting hit once, announces that he “only had 1 hp left” and is now dead.

This same group also had another memorable moment: At one point the party’s wizard was hit by a silver dart which had a note wrapped around it, “You die at midnight.” The party concluded, rightly, that this was a threat! So they head back to the inn where they were staying and resolve to all stay awake in the common room so that they can’t be surprised…

… all of them except the wizard, that is, who instead specifically gets his familiar drunk enough that it’s unconscious and then goes upstairs and falls asleep himself.

Oddly enough, when the rest of the group came in the next morning, they found the wizard dead with a knife sticking out of his throat.

And that’s basically what happened to the campaign, too. It was a mercy killing, really. The PC who had gotten himself killed by launching a “cunning” ambush with only 1 hp left to his name was revived inside the bad guy’s secret hideout while he was being prepared for a ritual sacrifice. With a little prompting he managed to escape, putting him in the perfect position to grab the rest of the party and lead them back to the secret hideout! This would start the straight-out dungeon crawl portion of the adventure, which would presumably negate much of their bumbling ineptitude!

… only that’s not what he did. Instead he fetched the city guard, who moved in and secured the hideout. This was almost certainly the most competent thing any of them had done in the course of the entire adventure, but it also assured that the PCs never actually managed to accomplish anything at all.

It may have ended with a whimper instead of a bang. But at least it ended.

Shamus Young’s blog is provoking me to all kinds of random thoughts. Then I had similar thoughts over at Giant in the Playground. So I thought I’d mix the two together and share ’em with you:

1. ROLL INITIATIVE LAST: Have your players roll their initiatives at the end of combat. Use this initiative for the next combat. (Initiative modifiers essentially never change, so it doesn’t really matter when you roll the check.) When it looks like the PCs are about to encounter something, roll for its initiative and slot it into the order. If they don’t encounter it for some reason, no big deal.

Using this method, by the time combat starts, initiative is already completely resolved. As a result, there’s no delay while you ask for initiative, the dice are rolled, your players tell you their results, and then you sort the results into order. This allows you to start combat off with a bang and keep the ball rolling with that same high intensity. It means that when the players are ambushed, you can maintain that adrenaline rush of surprise instead of immediately undermining it with the mundane task of collecting initiative.

This method also means that initiative results are generally being collected at a time when other bookkeeping chores are being done anyway: After the heat of battle, wounds are being healed; corpses are being looted; equipment lists are being updated; and options are being discussed. Juggling a few extra numbers does not detract from that moment.

2. INITIATIVE CARDS: Write the names of each PC on an index card. Do the same for each group of NPCs. When initiative is rolled, jot down the result on the PC’s or NPC’s card and then sort them into order. During combat you can just flip from one card to the next. If someone readies or delays an action, turn their card sideways so it sticks up. When they take that action, pull the card out and put it back in the rotation.

3. INITIAL PRESENTATION: The other thing which can deflate the initial tension of a battle is the set-up for the battle. Sketching the scene on the battlemap and positioning the miniatures takes time. Learn to work your set-up into the presentation of the battle:

“Suddenly you hear the mournful baying of wolves and the battle horns of orcs!” <as you say this, start sketching the scene on the battlemap> “Aragorn, what are you doing?” <finish sketching the map as you go around the table and find out what the PCs’ first action is going to be> “Over the top of the ridge a dozen warg riders suddenly surge into view!” <begin placing the warg rider miniatures as you say this> “Aragorn, you’re first: What are you doing?” <finish placing the warg riders as Aragorn declares his action, then more smoothly into resolving his action>

The point is that you’re putting out the enemy figurines (even if they’re not dramatically painted miniatures) can be a dramatic moment in itself, if you make it the moment of revelation. On more than one occasion I’ve had players murmur “oh shit” or “how many of them ARE there?” as the number of miniatures comes out onto the table.

It’s also not a bad idea to get an erasable battlemap and use it more often than not. Even if the players aren’t going to be fighting in a particular room, the visual reference isn’t going to kill anybody. And it helps to have a firm visual reference of positioning even when you’re not in combat. (When a trap goes off, for example.)

And the pay-off when you can reach down into a drawer; declare, “Suddenly, out of the black abyss, a black dragon emerges!”; pull the miniature out and, with a dramatic swoop, place it on the battlemap is totally worth it.

Also: When you’re drawing a battlemap, don’t sweat the details. If you’re off by 5 feet, your players are never going to know.

Of course, if you don’t use a battlemap (which is more than possible in D&D, despite what some would tell you), none of this makes the least difference to you. Get initiative preemptively out of the way and you’re good to go.

4. GLASS BEADS: If you’re fortunate enough to be able to always have enough miniatures at hand to cover every single monster in the scenario, then you’re a lucky bastard and the rest of us resent you terribly.

While we’re resenting you, however, we’re going to head down to our Friendly Neighborhood Gaming Store and buy some of those glass beads that people use as counters for CCGs and the like. For $10-15 you can pick up more than a hundred beads in fix or six different colors. These are great: Not only are they cheap, but they can also be used to stand-in for miscellaneous battlefield scenery and the like. (Use the green ones for trees.)

Some people recommend dice for the same purpose. Dice have the advantage that you can use different numbers on each die to represent different creatures within the group. But the problem is that there are dice flying all over the table during combat as people make their rolls. The counters are easily distinguishable and, if they (or the table) are bumped, they aren’t designed to roll away.

I’ve been known to start epic combats against a horde of mooks by literally pouring a handful of counters out on the edge of the map (”Suddenly, on the far side of the cavern, a horde of goblins — hooting and gibbering in their barbaric tongue — leaps up from their hiding places!”) and then rapidly shifting them to make sure they’re all in different spaces.

5. CHEAT SHEETS: I use three useful cheat sheets during combat:

(1) A cheat sheet with key PC stats, particularly armor class. One of the biggest things that used to slow down my combats was having to ask, “What’s your AC?” and then waiting for the player to look at his sheet. If your party has a lot of abilities which cause their ACs to move around (like a rogue using Combat Expertise a lot), get a whiteboard and have the players update their AC on the whiteboard whenever it changes.

(2) A separate cheat sheet with the monster stats on them. I generally find that having all the stats for a monster on one page, in a large font (12 or 14 pt.), makes it a lot easier to find the information that I want quickly.

(3) A cheat sheet briefly summarizing the mechanics for all the combat maneuvers in bullet-point style. My version of this is about two and a half pages long and it makes a huge difference. Sure, there’s still the occasional need for a manual look-up when I need to know a particular detail, but generally glancing at the cheat sheet is enough to jog my memory.

Basically, you want to get rid of as many interactions in which you’re just asking people for a number or waiting for someone to roll the dice as possible. You also want to get rid of any dead space created by simply flipping through pages trying to find the information that you need. “What’s your AC?” is a big one. “I rolled X on my saving throw, did I save?” is another. Which brings us to:

6. BE OPEN WITH YOUR TARGET NUMBERS: The uncertainty of rolling against a DC you don’t know can certainly increase tension for the PCs, but it gobbles up time. A good compromise here is to let the first few roles be made in the dark, but then be open about what the number you’re looking for is. And only do this when you can use it to good narrative effect.

For example, it can be effective to say, “Your shot is true, but you’re shocked to see it shatter on the creature’s skin as if you had struck a wall of stone.” That serves as a revelation of the creature’s nature (high natural armor bonus). But after a couple of rounds you can simply announce the AC and move on (they’re going to figure it out eventually in any case). And if they’re just fighting bog-standard goblins in scalemail, there’s really no reason not to let them know what the AC is from the get-go.

7. MULTITASK: Waiting for a player to make his attack roll? Ask the next player what they’re planning to do. Did one of your monsters just drop a fireball on half the party? Ask them for their saving throws and then — while they’re rolling — move on to the next monster and resolve its action. (In the case of a fireball you can also announce what the damage is, what the DC of the save is, and then let the players proceed with rolling their saves while you move on to the next set of tasks.)

You can also encourage players to multitask in small ways. For example, one common trick is to roll your attacks and your damage at the same time. If the attack roll results in a miss, you can just ignore the damage roll. But if the attack roll hits, there’s no delay while damage dice are picked up and rolled.

8. ROLL A LOT OF DICE: Invest in a lot of d20s. Then, when the mooks are attacking en masse, roll all their attacks at once. I use a simple left-to-right metric: The dice which ends up furthest to the left after rolling is assigned to the monster farthest to the right in my field of vision. In a lot of cases, there’ll be multiple mooks on one target — as long as they’ve all got the same stats, I can roll all of their attacks at once without really worrying about exactly which die goes to which monster.

Some people suggest using color-coded dice instead: For example, the blue die might be monster #1, the yellow die might by monster #2, and so forth. I’ve found that this can work fairly well at low levels, but once iterative attacks kick in I find the color-coding is more useful to distinguish between iterative attacks. (All the black dice are attacks at the highest BAB, all the blue dice are attacks at the second highest BAB, and so forth.)

9. BE DESCRIPTIVE: Don’t let a quest for speedy combat resolution reduce combat to nothing more than completely abstract and rapid-fire dice rolls. It doesn’t matter how fast you roll the dice: If you’ve taken all the flavor and excitement out of the experience, even the shortest combats will still feel tedious.

So, describe the rapid flurry of blows. Describe the blood flowing. Describe the awesome wuxia swordplay. Describe the grunting and the sweating. Describe the amazing near misses. Describe the steel beating on steel. Be imaginative and remember that not every descriptive element needs a mechanical representation: A person can be staggered by a blow without necessarily being dazed. A person can be knocked back a step without actually repositioning themselves on the combat grid.

Here’s an exercise I do every once in awhile: Take a really great fight film — like The Matrix or 300 or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — and narrate the action as it happens on screen, as if you were describing it to your gaming group. It sounds corny, but it builds your repertoire and helps loosen up your description instincts.

One more tip: Don’t feel like you need to narrate every roll of the dice. Sometimes its okay to just let the dice speak for themselves. Sometimes its better to resolve a couple or three actions and then weave them into a post facto description. The orc misses his attack roll, then the player makes his, but the damage roll is low. Thus: “The orc throws his entire body into swinging his axe. You easily sidestep the obvious and awkward blow and counter-attack with a dextrous thrust. But the orc manages to twist his body lithely to one side so that your sword only scratches his arm. The orc turns that twist into a save counterblow which <roll the orc’s next attack> swings wildly over your head as you duck under it at the last possible second.”

10. DESIGN INTERESTING SCENARIOS: Try to shake things up every three or four combats by adding some sort of “spice” to the encounter. This might be an unusual tactic by an opponent (for example, pulling some of the PCs onto the ethereal plane in order to split their forces). This might be unusual terrain (fighting on a cliff-face or a rain-slicked street). It might be a location with interesting props (a bazaar where rickety tables are destroyed or a building that catches on fire).

Just a little something extra that breaks up the monotony, possibly disrupts the normal PC tactics, and makes the combat a little more memorable and unique.

Not every interesting scenario will require a new mechanic. But if it does, try to keep it simple. A rain-slicked street can be modeled by requiring a Balance check (DC 10) whenever the PCs run or charge. A bazaar full of rickety tables might require a Reflex save (DC 12) to avoid hitting a table (hardness 5, 6 hp). Don’t ask your players to learn complex new mechanics just for the sake of the encounter — you’ll spend more time explaining the mechanics than you will enjoying them.

11. BE JOHN WOO, JACK KIRBY, AND STEVE DITKO: Steve Ditko co-created Spider-Man. Jack Kirby basically co-created every other classic Marvel superhero of note. And John Woo essentially created the modern gun-fu genre. What these creators have in common is their ability to create dynamic and exciting action sequences without putting their stories on hold. With most comic books and action movies, you can literally remove the fight scenes and insert a placard which reads “They Fight” and lose nothing except some cool visuals: All of the character development and important plot points happen when people aren’t throwing punches.

But you can’t do that with a story by Woo, Kirby, or Ditko: The fights scenes are an integral part of the story. They are a crucible in which characters are revealed and developed. The plot continues to flow and evolve. The fact that they’re incredibly awesome fights is just sauce for the goose.

Try to find that same quality in your own fight scenes. Ask yourself what purpose a fight can serve other than just straight-up violence.

Even a properly designed random encounter can serve as a source of information or character development: For example, in my Rappan Athuk campaign one of the frequent random encounters in the dungeon was with gelatinous cubes. The PCs had been wondering what was responsible for cleaning out the corpses they left behind them, and when they encountered the gelatinous cubes a light bulb went on over their heads. It was a minor thing, but those gelatinous cubes still stick out in the memory.

12. TRAINING SCENARIOS: Quite a few people have annoying sections of the combat rules that they’re constantly having to look up. Tripping, for example, is usually high on the list. Grappling and mounted combat are other common examples.

Here’s a suggestion: Design a few combat scenarios in which a particular set of rules will be used over and over and over again.

For example, maybe the villains of your next adventure can have their combat tactics developed around tandem tripping combos (one villain trips the target and then the others beat up on the prone character). Familiarize yourself with the rules for this one specific combat maneuver, and then use the game session as a way to cram both your players and yourself on them. By the time you’ve resolved the twentieth trip attack in less than an hour, you’ll have those rules down pat. (Which means that it will be a lot easier to throw a few random trips into your normal fights, which will help you spice them up with a little variety.)

Ultimately, we learn best by doing.  This is why we know how to resolve a sword swing so well: We do it several dozen times a night.