How would you go about running combat here on the forums. I find it kind of tedious at the table top, so I'm curious how people run it here. I may run a T2K game in the future and I've been puzzling over this for a bit.

I run a T2k 4e game here on RPOL and I think that the key is for the GM to do all of the dice rolls based on player declared actions. We're gradually working out how best to do declared player actions as we go along, but it has become apparent that, as well as declaring Fast and Slow actions, players also need to declare the number of Ammo dice they are using on an attack, what stance they are in, whether they are using things like NVGs etc and whether they will push a check or not.

I also generally ignore initiative and instead work on the principle of posting a GM turn post and then asking each PC to post their turn posts when they can - if you ask players to wait to post until their initiative point comes up then you're going to wait for a long time and make the game even slower. I think that this is the approach on most games on RPOL though.

I should also point out that I use the optional combat rules to use a 2m grid on a map rather than 10m hexes, though I doubt that this makes a significant difference on RPOL.

This approach works well and means that I end up with a list of actions for each PC and NPC. I then make all the dice rolls for each action, work out how the narrative of the scene flows and then write it up as my latest GM turn post.

Does that help?

After somebad8ve I got in PM's, I'm probably going to drop the grid map idea and use a 'theater of the minds eye' approach when it comes to maps and such. I feel it would take the book keeping out of it.

And i suppose having the GM roll all the combat rolls would work out, as it would have the same consistency each time instead of having a player forget what roll to make.

That's still a lot of rolls, but I guess if I made a sort of standardized combat format where the players states their stance, ammo dice, target, what cover they're behind...

Still lots of book keeping, but I'm starting to see possibilities. Thanks for the advice!

In reply to Sp0rk (msg # 3):

I've run T2k V2.2 games as well and I think that there is less GM book keeping with the 4e rules but there are more dice rolls due to the push mechanic.