I am going to add arenas into some of my cities in my campaign, but I know from experience that it can be time consuming and boring for the members of the party who are not participating in the duels. I came up with one method to determine how the duels would turn out. The rules of this arena would only allow magic that raises a character's AC , or magic imbues their weapon to do more damage. The spells must be cast at the moment the fight starts. This means that a wizard could cast mage armor, but not shield; a paladin could cast divine favor, but they couldn't use their smite. This method would have to assume that the fighter will most likely keep their concentration, and the fight would last less than 10 rounds. If the spell were something like Armor of Agathys, then I would subtract that value from the enemies total health. The method is as follows:
1) Have the player and the NPC roll percentage dice and add a modifier to the person who is advantaged. The modifier would be determined by this equation:
(# of Attacks * (damage die rank + To hit modifier + Damage Modifier) + (Total Health * Armor Class)) You do this equation for each character and divide one by the other. This gives a percentage, and you add the distance from 100% to the advantaged character.
The ranking for the damage die is as follows: [1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 2d4, 1d10, 1d12, 2d6, 2d8] and the values assigned to each of these is [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ]
So for example the result of the player over the NPC would be [1.15]. This would mean that the player would add 15% to whatever they rolled on their percentage die.
I was planning on narrating how the fight turns out, but I wanted to at least make it so that the fight does not take up 15 or more minutes of the parties time.
What do you all think of this ratio, and how do you think it might be improved?
I did a fighting pit encounter for my players recently. For the most part I just abstracted the combat out all together. I basically turned it into something of a professional wrestling match, where the player described what sort of attack they were doing and I had them roll a relevant skill vs. whatever the opponent rolled, and described how the round shook out. I had a sort of point system where I kept track of who won each skill contest and whoever got to three "wins" first won the combat.
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"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
Another option is to not have any Characters which are sitting out the combat - make it a team combat event.
This is how they did it in Critical Role - team event, fighting captured monsters of higher and higher CR each round - team get to decide when they're dropping out ( we barely survived that, we're not fighting something tougher! ).
That way everyone is involved, and there's no need to artificially restrict the use of abilities.
I don't know if that will fit your campaign - but I thought it was a pretty cool way of doing party inclusive arena fighting.
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I like to do arenas in my game as well. When its one on one, I found the group doesn't mind when you start describing the combat of it and whats going on in detail and adding in abillity checks if they plan on doing described fighting as well. Choke slams, arm locks, slamming into them and knocking them over with shields, etc etc. If your other members are not into it you can just ask the player in combat to roll 10d20 then have your combatant roll 10d20 with their modifiers at the start and narrate a fight for who is the victor if you want it over fast.
But I find the normal route of action per action helps and if the group decides to interfere with some stealth antics to help push the fight to one side they can join in on it. The one on one fights also tend to go fairly quickly.
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I am going to add arenas into some of my cities in my campaign, but I know from experience that it can be time consuming and boring for the members of the party who are not participating in the duels. I came up with one method to determine how the duels would turn out. The rules of this arena would only allow magic that raises a character's AC , or magic imbues their weapon to do more damage. The spells must be cast at the moment the fight starts. This means that a wizard could cast mage armor, but not shield; a paladin could cast divine favor, but they couldn't use their smite. This method would have to assume that the fighter will most likely keep their concentration, and the fight would last less than 10 rounds. If the spell were something like Armor of Agathys, then I would subtract that value from the enemies total health. The method is as follows:
1) Have the player and the NPC roll percentage dice and add a modifier to the person who is advantaged. The modifier would be determined by this equation:
(# of Attacks * (damage die rank + To hit modifier + Damage Modifier) + (Total Health * Armor Class)) You do this equation for each character and divide one by the other. This gives a percentage, and you add the distance from 100% to the advantaged character.
The ranking for the damage die is as follows: [1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 2d4, 1d10, 1d12, 2d6, 2d8] and the values assigned to each of these is [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ]
So for example the result of the player over the NPC would be [1.15]. This would mean that the player would add 15% to whatever they rolled on their percentage die.
I was planning on narrating how the fight turns out, but I wanted to at least make it so that the fight does not take up 15 or more minutes of the parties time.
What do you all think of this ratio, and how do you think it might be improved?
I did a fighting pit encounter for my players recently. For the most part I just abstracted the combat out all together. I basically turned it into something of a professional wrestling match, where the player described what sort of attack they were doing and I had them roll a relevant skill vs. whatever the opponent rolled, and described how the round shook out. I had a sort of point system where I kept track of who won each skill contest and whoever got to three "wins" first won the combat.
Another option is to not have any Characters which are sitting out the combat - make it a team combat event.
This is how they did it in Critical Role - team event, fighting captured monsters of higher and higher CR each round - team get to decide when they're dropping out ( we barely survived that, we're not fighting something tougher! ).
That way everyone is involved, and there's no need to artificially restrict the use of abilities.
I don't know if that will fit your campaign - but I thought it was a pretty cool way of doing party inclusive arena fighting.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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I was planning on including those as well. Do you think it would be better to just not have 1v1 battles?
I like to do arenas in my game as well. When its one on one, I found the group doesn't mind when you start describing the combat of it and whats going on in detail and adding in abillity checks if they plan on doing described fighting as well. Choke slams, arm locks, slamming into them and knocking them over with shields, etc etc. If your other members are not into it you can just ask the player in combat to roll 10d20 then have your combatant roll 10d20 with their modifiers at the start and narrate a fight for who is the victor if you want it over fast.
But I find the normal route of action per action helps and if the group decides to interfere with some stealth antics to help push the fight to one side they can join in on it. The one on one fights also tend to go fairly quickly.