Tips & tricks for playing the game...

[Kaled]

Last week sometime, perhaps in a discussion of some house rules, someone mentioned that adding in an extra dice roll could slow things down and it occurred to me that everyone probably has things they do to speed up games to such an extent that an extra dice roll wouldn't be a real burden - hence I thought I'd start a thread so people can share their tips and tricks.  This is not intended to be a thread to discuss changes to the rules or a place to post house rules - more a place to share ways to run a more efficient game and speed up play when using the standard rules.

So, to get things started...


Just roll the dice already!
Usually working out the modifiers to a characteristic test only takes a few seconds, so people work out the score they need before rolling the dice.  Sometimes however things are more complicated; maybe there are a lot of modifiers, or the GM needs to look something up, or the rules are ambiguous and a discussion takes place as to whether a particular modifier should apply - these things take time, time that is often wasted.  In these situations, I find it saves a lot of time to just roll the dice - one in ten rolls are an automatic pass (01-05) or fail (95-00), but in practice you can often see at a glance whether a lot more tests are passed or failed without working out the modifiers.  For example, if a character has BS=50 and is shooting at a target some distance away, the player can immediately see that any score under 50 is going to be a miss.

[MarcoSkoll]

Well, here's a personal favourite - that, now I think about it, really should have gone in the Revised Armoury...

~~~~~

Faster Full Auto
Pick up several D10, and just roll several of the tens dice simultaneously - the tens dice alone will sort out most hits. If any rolls are marginal (i.e. if a 26 is needed, and the tens dice is a 2) then roll the units dice to sort them out. You may still need to pick up a second dice to see if that tens roll of 0 is the dreaded 00, but it can still save quite a lot of time.

The method unfortunately doesn't work as well for semi-auto (because the possibility of placed shots complicates things), but it really does save time for full auto - or indeed, flame weapons.

If you're dealing with Full(20), four rolls of 5 tens dice (and then sorting out marginals) is a lot quicker than twenty individual D100 rolls.

[RobSkib]

Before the game starts, the GM writes down a list of all characters, their Initiatives and their speeds in order. This greatly cuts down the faffing that goes on between character's turns, as you can get on with playing the game rather than waiting for dopey players to finish picking their noses!

I also make it a point to include any of the less commonly used special rules written down on their character sheet somewhere - it saves lots of flicking through rulebooks and annuals.

[Brother_Brimstone]

Related to RobSkib's point about noting unusual rules on the sheet, if you use a character who uses combat drugs or is subject to stat change of that type (obviously not psykers who may have unexpected stat drops - WP loss, but i mean anyone using deliberately stat-changing wargear), write (+xd10) on the stat the drug increases. For example, Severin is a Psychon user so i have (+2d10) next to his S and T scores, so i know what to add when the injector turns on, without having to consult the book.

This may seem rather obvious, but at the Spring Clave someone was using an Arco Flagellant with the typical cocktail of many, many drugs and he had all the drug names on his sheet but none of the effects. He then said the key word, and spent a long, long time looking up each of the drugs, rolling their effects and noting them. It got to the point where the GM had to say that if he didn't finish calculating soon, we would just have to carry on without the rest of the stat mods, because it was holding everyone up.

I'm not saying this to try and embarass the person in question or single them out - i'm sure it happens in plenty of games, i'm just using it as an example of how it can slow game time down considerably and how it can be avoided by just noting the drug's effects on the character sheet.

[Ynek]

To speed up full auto, I do something similar to Marco's 'faster full auto' rules, but with a slight change.

I have eleven D100s (one D10, and one D00), all in different colours. This means that it's possible to roll up to eleven full auto shots without confusion, as you can always match which D10 goes with which D00.

Also, we tend to avoid working out things like knockback etc. unless they're going to have a significant effect. For instance, if a character is standing on a narrow ledge, we'd calculate knockback, since there is a very real possibility that they will fall off the edge and incur falling damage. However, if a character is standing in a field, with nothing around him for several yards, we just give it a miss, because it's not going to have any interesting effects anyway, and it's just a waste of time.

[MarcoSkoll]

Here's something I've been working on for the IGT - a new type of character sheet:



I find one of the biggest time wasters in Inquisitor games is the rustling of character sheets as a player has to shuffle through them looking for their Guardsman's BS, or mark another injury level onto their Arcoflagellant.
In an attempt to fix this, I've been working on a character sheet that combines three or four characters on to one piece of paper. It's got their statlines, list of abilities and injury table on one side, and their weapon stats and equipment list on the other.

It's not a perfect solution, as there usually isn't the room to fit all the definitions on it, so you'll still have to refer to their main character sheet for those things; But I find the specific wording of an ability or piece of equipment tends to be needed much less than the character's WS, checking they have True Grit, marking on a heavy injury to the chest, or knowing what range band their pistol is.

There are a few more tweaks I've yet to make, but I hope to have it finished and downloadable in time for the IGT. All in all, it should save on having paper all over the table and on the time wasted sorting through all of it.

[Kaled]

I like it - it's a neat solution to the problem of too much paper on the table.  I think I'd rather have the weapon details on the same side as the character, but that would still mean you could have two characters on each side and a whole warband on one piece of paper.

[MarcoSkoll]

I think I'd rather have the weapon details on the same side as the character.

In some ways, I think having all the character statlines on the same side might be better, because then you know that this is the Equipment side, so any Toughness value, regardless of who it's for, is on the other side, rather than having to figure if this is that character's side of the paper.
But I'm getting into trivialities of a second or two there, and I suppose it's neater to keep all of a character's details together.

Still, not quite as space efficient, as I found a solution earlier that by groups data by type rather than character (allowing it to share table headings), and will thus handle up to six characters on one sheet - but while that might be useful for keeping track of an entire warband (rather than a specific combination of 3 or 4 characters from that warband) it's overkill for the IGT.

After a bit of a session this evening, I've done some neatening, and I think I've successfully managed to sort a character sheet for 4, even with some space for "Game Notes".
Here's the beta version. If it passes muster, then it should graduate to the "Inquisitor Game Aids" sticky, but I'll wait for feedback first.

EDIT: One thing I realise I missed from the explanation is that I recommend highlighting the top line on the injury table to indicate the character's preferred hand. You can see this in the photo above, with Marco, Silva and Jax being right handed, left handed and ambidextrous respectively.
This will be in the next version.

I should have some more gaming aids, GMing tools and other game accelerants in the coming month or two, as I've been trying to find ways to fit as much scenario as possible into the 60-75 minutes available at the IGT.
But in that case, there is probably going to be a lot of penalising slow/indecisive players as well.

[Myriad]

Given the amount of times I forget attributes on my characters because I don't play much and don't have the sheet in front of me, this should be a great help.  It looks like you could jot down some weapon details, if only range bands (which I still don't understand) and accuracy.

[precinctomega]

I approve of MarcoSKoll's solution, but prefer to be even more radical.

At the IGT, I'll be reducing the size of all my character sheets to the size of a filing card.  I'll then print them on card, laminate them and join them together with treasury tags.  A superfine lumcolor non-permanent marker will then be used to make notes which I can simply wipe off after each scenario.

R.

[MarcoSkoll]

Well, I'll be laminating my copy too (if I can remember where the laminator is), and may be using a more cut down and compact version.

However, this version, while not a perfect solution, covers the primary issue - it gets everything onto one sheet, saving having to sort through three or four. The saved table space is a happy side effect.

[MarcoSkoll]

As I'm going to fix some of the glitches on the economy character sheet over the next day or so, does anyone have any feedback on it or things they think need adding/changing?

[Morcus]

I always have a note book with me and I find it saves alot of time if I work out some of the possible options and modifiers and such for when its my turn all the time so I'll quite often have a list of scores needed to hit and such.

From a GM perspective sometimes I find it easier with really complex sets of modifiers to just sort of 'guess' whats needed especially if it doesn't involve two PC's (As they tend to get moody if they get injured in such situations).

My Brother likes to have all the character sheets and info on his laptop and has them all open so he just has to click on the bars and he finds this easier, I find it easier to read off paper so I don't on that one.

[GAZKUL]

being lazy i simply made a table which holds 9 characters per sheet, though it dousn't include weapon stats it dous include Resistance values for gas based weapons.

[MarcoSkoll]

A trick that came up during the INQvitational battle report.

We started a little later than planned, so to save on the time spent on turns full of "I walk over there and pause for breath", I made action rolls a 3+ until it looked like things were about to kick off. This saved a lot of time and let us get straight into the meat of the game. You might have to clamp down on characters deciding to try and use this to sprint across the entire board on the first turn, but for players playing sensibly it shouldn't be a problem.

I'd really recommend this as a technique, particularly for games like those at WHW that are trying to fit into a tight time limit.