Adding new monsters to encounter

Submitted by Asturia on Wed, 2009-07-01 22:33

I was running an encounter with a lot of enemys (10 total) I had to add another 10 monster.
Is there an easy way to join them with the current encounter?

When I click on Start Combat, I have to enter the initiative for everyone again.
Isn't it better that when you add new monsters, you can directly input the initiative and they can only act after the current round is finished?

Just a suggestion, or what would you do in a situation like this?

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Use 3.5 rules...

Submitted by Nebulorum on Thu, 2009-07-02 00:38.

There are two way I handle this.

  1. If you know that the both groups will be part of the combat (or it highly likely) simply add both groups, start combat and then skip the monsters that are not in the combat yet.
  2. Use 3.5 rules for adding combatant to the ongoing battle. Simply add the monster (load file), they will be placed in reserve (like delaying). Then add them whenever you find appropriate.

In a lot of the published adventures there is a statement "roll initiative when...". I use solution 1 for this, and skip the monster while the when condition has not happened. Solution 2, I have used very little, but worked fine on 3.5.

This is a "limitation" of VCC. The reason is that the combatants are placed in a round robin, and as soon as someone delays or does a ready action the original order I gone. When I created version 0.10 I had to come up with a solution. And I decided to revert to 3.5 rule for this. To me the 4E rules don't make sense (3.5 rules are correct).

Lets say we have the following initiatives: A - 20, B - 15, C - 10, D - 5. A delays and then acts before D, after is has acted we have: D - 5, B - 15, C - 10, A - 20. Now which is the first combatant? Where should I place E with initiative 17? What happens if D delay and then acts before A on the next round? This can get messy.

I couldn't see a nice solution. So the initiative is used just to compose the initial order and from there on the information is gone. If you read DMG there is a suggestion of using a stack of cards to keep initiative. This is the basis of VCC's implementation.