What can we do to streamline combat in Deadlands?

Question

I'm a player in a regular Deadlands game. Sessions usually run 4-5 hours, and it seems like at least an hour gets dedicated to a single combat encounter. We have several characters with high dice for Quickness, often resulting in 3 or 4 action cards per round. We also have a Huckster - things always get interesting when he's lobbing spells around.

We've been kicking around the idea of simply converting the campaign to the Savage Worlds system, which is similar but a lot more streamlined. Short of that, are there any suggestions for streamlining Deadlands combat?

Update:

I play a Buffalo Hunter with 4d6 Quickness and a speed 2 rifle. On average, I get two cards per round: one to ready the next shot and one to fire. Our party usually has 6 or 7 people, so I'm often stuck sitting around waiting while everyone else does more complicated stuff. Granted, that's per my character's design, but it still feels like a drag.

Answer 1

To be quite honest, I think this is fairly unavoidable in a group with 6 or 7 people. Just about any RPG with any kind of mechanical depth is going to really slow down when you have that many people; I don't a copy of the Deadlands rulebook handy, but if it has any player number guidelines, that's probably more than the listed reccomendation for group size.

Different encounter design could help - I'm stating the obvious here, but the fewer monsters you're fighting, the fewer actions they take.

Answer 2

You have my sympathies. It sounds like you've chosen a character that's slow but effective, and you're tired of having the enemies dead by the time your turn comes. (This happens to me a lot.) Are you playing the action cards "open handed"? Having the action cards visible and accessible to the play group can help keep things flowing by cutting out the "do I have any sixes?" factor, and make the countdown flow more smoothly. Otherwise, I'd recommend banking your bounty chips and boosting your initiative as soon as is practical.

Answer 3

Does your GM/Marshall take each player one at a time? IE could the game be speeded up if players not yet announcing thier action turn to one another and roll thier results in readiness?

Combat goes much quicker for the ST/marshall if he just turns to each player and they can quickly say "I shoot X gun for X success and did X damage, Charlie saw me" than if he has to ask "what do you do, OK roll for that, what did you get? Ok thats a hit ... and damage ..."