My world, My rules, How to speed up combat.

The fewer die rolls you make, the faster things go. Use a magic system that doesn't require a skill roll. Get rid of hit locations. (A low damage roll means you winged him, a high one means you hit something vital.)

Oh I ditched the locational armor charts about the time the group got to six people for the second time. It was way too much. Heh.

My magic system requires no dice rolls, its all pts spending from a "mana pool", using powers as spells. Sort of like a Multipower with an endurance battery, but a bit looser in rules. you have a Valve a Capacity and a Charge stat for how many points you can spend at once, how many you can hold at once, and how many you are holding. Spells are like 1d6 EB for 5pts per d6, so if you have a valve of 50 you could do 10d6, and spend 50 of the points you have available in charge. Typically Charge starts out about 8x your Valve, so that's basically 8 spells at full power before you're out...and the recharge depends on the basis of your magic...Faith gets points for praying etc.  And the spells are all charted out for the players by yours truely to remove all math from figuring out power levels.

I like the idea of simplified minions, but it utterly negates all the detail of the system. I tend to oversimplify anyhow, worrying about STR, DEX, SPD, BODY, STUN and ARMOR as the only stats for monsters other than special attacks/abilities. But doing a 1 hit 2 hit system ignores a bit too much to give the players a chance to feel like the abilities they spent so long writing up really matter. Damage ranges in my game are extreme at times, ranging from 2d6k to 7d6+1k at times, and the other night in a highly specialized set of circumstances and with a lot of magic involved, someone pulled off a 13 1/2d6k attack. In related news, that's the LAST time I throw a lone challenger at a group of 10, even if he's 230ft tall and has a 150STR, 100 BODY, and 500 STUN...Poor thing didn't stand a chance. First round had him down by half and stunned, he never got to do more than yell a lot and smash a bunch of trees on the way to his death.

Endurance has been dead to me for at least 20 years.

Generally I like the hitpoint mechanics of Champions mostly as is, I'm just looking for more ways to simplify it without sacrificing what makes the system the system. The problem isn't really with the minions...I already run them as 3-5 stats on a notepad. The problem is that EVERY combat for me has become large scale, because no matter what I throw at them, it's 10 vs X. I'm looking more for ways to speed up the 10 than the X. I've got the X. X is in the Bag. But the 10, I could use some tricks to make combat faster for them too...And if I apply too much more simplification to the system, I might as well hop over to WoD or FATE and be done with it...Hehehehe. I've actually toyed with the idea of going D20, but have been playing HERO for 30 years now...since back when there was no HERO and it was all just Champions.

What Derek said basically..... Does remind me I need to get back to fleshing out the new Fantasy HERO game I want to do.....any excuse to build. So, if folks feel up to posting magic systems and the like I'll be happy to poach the good stuff.

~Rex

The ancient question: How do I make this go faster?

I'm going to give the outlier answer: Why do you want too? What part of it seems slow? Can you more accurately specify what you're perceiving that's slowing you down? The top three as my peers have mentioned are: STUN/BODY/END tracking, Hit Locations, and the mighty Speed Chart. This then leads to the key question, for me, "What do you want combat to feel like?" Before I go into detail, let me give you an example:

In the last game I was playing, we were in a drawn battle of 5 on 50 (not a typo) and our group had to position appropriately, fire weapons and synchronize actions to take down priority targets, and rain hell on the battlefield. We did that. It took six hours, most of which involved us standing around while the GM rolled a ton of dice for the NPCs and tried to figure out what people's attacks would resolve as. He even had an assistant running numbers and hit resolution in the background, and it still felt like a painful, painful slog. It wasn't fun, except for the 60 seconds every 20 minutes when I got to fire my weapon. Because it was a classic "stand still and fire" confrontation, there wasn't anything cool or dramatic to do, no chatter, nothing. It just went on until the other side was deceased. Cool briefly, but I told Chris at the end, "Dude, I have freakin' combat fatigue. Let's move on." Why? Because for the majority of it, I was playing Marvel Puzzle Quest, not RIFTS(tm). This is not a system issue; it was a GM management and decision issue.

Example 2: I run (intermittently, but now that I'm on the forums that part of my mind will likely re-engage) a Persona campaign, an Urban Horror setting with college students who use super-powered ego constructs in a parallel dimension. There is no sense of drag, even in a complex fight, because the fights happen on the ground, and people have to watch each other's backs and there is always something happening to them or around them, and, they are encouraged to use all of the tricks at their disposal, there is no delay. Even long fights are fulfilling because of the variety, the NPCs taunting or doing interesting things, and so on. Nothing kills a combat like predictability.

That being said:

Let's say you want your PCs to feel powerful; having them swim through hordes of minions will do that. Using Tasha's 1 hit/2 hit minion law (goblins take one; hobgoblins take two, etc.) you can quickly simulate hack & slash in HERO, just by reducing it to its core elements. Another common way around this is to ignore STUN for minions; they just take BODY, and upon taking X BODY, they fall down. You can simplify this further by giving them sufficient BODY to ignore DEF tracking, which gives people the ability to chuck dice and deal damage, without all that messy stat tracking that people seem to dread. At that point, I'm unconcerned with END, save for someone using a long string of special abilities. Most of my players use mental math to keep reasonable track, and it isn't a problem.

Now when you get to the Boss, that Boss in turn is a fully specced PC; it has DEF, full stats, tons of STUN and BODY, and uses Hit Locations. That will simulate the film drama experience nicely, such as the fight between Agent Smith & Neo at the end of The Matrix, or the Cave Troll battle in Fellowship of the Ring. When you get into those situations, I've found that using maps, placing markers, and giving people an opportunity to role-play and look cool using their powers kind of obviates the "this feels drawn out" sensation (see above; no one feels bored when they're in the thing and doing something cool).

I've heard people recommend the elimination of the Speed Chart, but then you "aren't playing HERO" anymore (no judgment, just a POV there). The Speed Chart is what separates so many characters from so many others, to the point where I've included caps based on builds. Frex, Tanks cannot crack 4 Speed; period. You want to be in big bulky armor and swing a 2-Handed Sword? Awesome. But genre says you aren't the super dextrous thief dealing DPS on backstabs who falls down if someone hits him with a wiffle-ball bat.

So you can ignore some stats, and you can focus on the end results, and that's fine, but what I would really come back to here, is this: What do you think is slow, why do you want to speed it up, and what do you want the end result to be, in terms of look & feel?