“Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
How to Manage Complex Spells and Powers
Today you will learn how to manage complex spells and powers so you can make faster and better choices with your monsters’ most powerful abilities.
You’ll learn what to prioritize when it comes to understanding and organizing these complex attacks.
Finally, you’ll put what you learn into practice and talk about the impact on your own game.
Why Manage Complex Spells and Powers?
The nature of monsters’ most powerful attacks is they are a source of both challenge and slog. These trademark abilities are intended to provide the characters with an
impressive obstacle or attack to overcome or survive.
However, these attacks or abilities also tend to have the most moving parts, slowing your decision-making and turn execution – and thus the whole combat encounter – down.
So how do you avoid the risk of slog when dealing with these complex spells and powers?
Four Simple Steps to Complex Ability
Management
Here are four ways to ensure faster and better understanding, organization and selection of complex spells and powers.
1. Get Familiar
No, not a familiar, but get familiar! Make sure you avoid having to look up any rules keywords for your monsters’ complex abilities during combat.
Read, study and commit critical rules and keywords to memory before the game, especially for a session where you expect a boss monster combat or any combats with monsters that have at least three complicated abilities with a lot of “moving parts.” Walk through a few attacks. Roll dice and track damage, for as much as a full round. This helps you get used to the execution of complicated abilities and get an idea of where the greatest risk of slog will be for you and your monster.
You’ll get an immediate preview of which abilities you need to spend more time on to improve your in-combat execution of them, from decision to resolution.
2. Sort by Range
Time and distance, movement and range: these are basic criteria for efficient
target selection.
Mark or note the ranges of your monsters’ most complex attacks.
Imagine being able to quickly scroll through a list of complex powers and spells labeled with “short, medium and long” ranges. At a glance, you can quickly rule out what attacks do or don’t make sense as the monster starts its turn.
3. Sort by Number of Targets
The most powerful attacks and abilities demand efficiency. They need to challenge the party. And that means maximum target selection whenever possible. Fireballs shouldn’t hit just one target, for example, but monsters should work together to ensure their orc sorcerer’s fireballs singes every single one of the five heroes.
How? Start with something like what you learned in Step 2: a simple, at-a-glance label. Go through the list of complex attacks and abilities and label each with “single, low, medium or high” number of maximum targets.
4. Create Custom Spell and Power Sheets
Create a custom spell, power or attack sheet with columns for all of an abilities’ basic stats, a brief description (a one line-summary, like many games include things like spell descriptions), range, maximum targets, usage limits and any other key statistics that would help you understand and decide to either use or not use an ability as quickly as possible.
For example, I like to use custom spreadsheets to analyze, sort and rate very complex enemy NPCs the party might face in a boss showdown.
By having a critical review and summary of their complex attacks, spells and other powers in front of me, I can run this boss monster more efficiently from a tactical
perspective. This lets me better continue to keep combat pacing and any roleplaying during the fight flavorful, dramatic and exciting.
Even if I go through the 4 steps just once with a key enemy NPC personality, I’ve already saved myself so much tactical decision-making and execution time when his or her first combat turn begins.
Help Your Players
Remember the above principles and methods apply for players of complex characters as well.
Spellcasters tend to be more complex thanks to the greater number of options when it comes to targeting and area alone.
However, some game systems have more even playing fields where even high-level warriors have dizzying, sophisticated and impressive maneuvers and strikes on par with classic high fantasy sorcery.
Whatever system you play, help your players by offering some the tips here when you see them struggling with complex powers, spells or attacks. Fumbling through these awesome but complex powers should never suck the life out of a fast-paced combat – don’t let that happen!
Great Responsibility
Congratulations! You’ve learned how to best manage complex spells and powers, challenge your playgroup to new heights of organization and tactical execution.
Next, you’ll learn how to create your own Battlesheet or Combat Tracker – a dashboard of highly organized combat information to keep the execution of your combat turns fast and deadly.
Resources
You’ll find more at Roleplaying Tips: 11 Monstrous Tips, 10 Monstrous Tips, 7 More Monstrous Tips and Don’t Be Afraid to Modify Your Monsters and Managing Your Group.
And even more at Leonine Roar: True Encounter Difficulty: Challenge Your Players,
Higher Encounter Damage 101, Monster Complexity and Selection, Faster D&D 4e Combat: Top Tips, Faster Combat: Rule of Three,Faster Combat: Encounter Triggers Checklist and 4e DM’s Cheat Sheet: Be Ready for Anything!