Re: [DL] Our first foray into DL Original Recipe

["David L. Hoff" <dlhoff1@charter.net>]

Rich Borges wrote:

>	Well, me and my group (formally a DL d20 group) tried our hand at the PEG
>way of doing things with a sort of "combat exercise." I wanted everyone one
>to get a rough idea of the way combat runs and what they can do. This was
>the first time through for everybody including me (the Marshal.) To say it
>went a little rough around the edges would be an under statement. But,
>everybody seems willing to learn and found some things they like about it. A
>couple of the guys are even going to be picking up the book (not bad if you
>ask me.) And hear I thought I was doing all wrong.
>	If anybody has any suggests for running combat smoother or any easy way to
>keep track of stuff...I am all ears. Thanks...
>
>  
>

Greetings!

I agree with what most people have said so far about keeping combat 
moving, using the mook rules, having a spare deck or two availiable, 
etc. Here are a few suggestions of my own:

1) Get a bunch of those cheap d6's from your local gaming store, you 
know, the ones usually sold for a buck a handful or so. Use them as 
miniatures for the bad guys. You can easily keep track of how badly 
wounded a mook is by what number is showing (6 = no wounds, any other 
number = the number of wounds taken). The assortment of colors makes it 
easy to keep track of who is who, such as having the black dice be the 
guys with pistols, the blue dice are guys with shotguns, and the red die 
is a guy with a flamethrower :-)

2) Have any of your spell chuckers do up a 3x5 card for each spell they 
know. That way, instead of having to look through a 120 page book past 
all of the spells they don't know for the one they want to cast, they 
can just sort through a small stack of cards. I also use this for the 
bad guys, writing down stuff like black magic powers. hexes, harrowed 
powers, etc. In fact, if you have a bunch of cards made up, and you need 
to quickly make up an NPC with some powers, you can just deal him out 
some cards from the appropriate stack.

3) Don't drag out a combat that isn't important. If the players are 
supposed to ambush some bad guys before making their way to the evil 
villian's lair, don't spend chips to make the mooks take longer to kill; 
if they take enough wounds to put them down, let them die. Save your 
chips for the big fight with the evil mastermind. It keeps the session 
moving, as well as making the final battle a true test of what your 
heroes are made of.

Thats all I can think of off the top of my head. Hope this helps.

--David L. Hoff
dlhoff1@charter.net