First Combat for Gameday

[Mournblade94]

How long did this take people to complete?

It took my group over an hour to finish.

Many of the players were new, not being snarky here, but one player is on serious meds for ADD.

The DM Seemed familiar with 4e rules.

Some players were running 2 characters.

I was playing Squeaks.

Still, it seemed to me that this combat should not have taken as long as it did. Since combat time has been a topic here I timed the battle. 1h, 2 min with some seconds.

How was it for everyone else?

 

[Nikosandros]

I tested the adventure before running it in a stored for the GD and the first combat took forever, especially because of the bear with his 276 HP.

For the GD I cut the trogs' and the bear's HP by 20% and I decided that the quickling had summoned the bear. After the death of the quickling the bear took 20 damage every round.

 

[Trolls]

We had an fairly experienced DM, two experienced players with the avenger and the paladin (me) who are DMs in other games, a player with the invoker who was only a little familiar with the game, and a barbarian and bard who hadn't played 4E before.

Since we had to spend a fair amount of time clarifying options, keywords and rules, that first encounter took about 1hr 30mins.

Aside from inexperience, another reason for the slow encounter was fear of using dailies, meaning the bear took a long time to take down. I was the only player to use a daily power during that fight, and I rolled a natural 1 with it!

 

[Xer0]

It took the group I GMed about an hour to complete the first combat. It probably would have gone more smoothly if I had the resources from the kit to work with, but they didn't arrive in time for the Gameday, so I had to draw it all out by hand.

The other group at the event took significantly longer. They had just finished the first encounter as we were wrapping up the third.

 

[Arkobla Conn]

I had 6 PC's in my group, so we had an extra trog. They also came in between buildings and the combat got very constricted. With 3 trogs, everyone had a -2 penalty and most didn't get to flank. This led to a 1.5 hour combat. It was a great deal of fun, but I had to significantly reduce the 3rd combat to get the event into the 5 hour window we had at the store.

 

[kenmarable]

Just over 2 hours for us and it did really drag on at the end. We managed to get enough effects on the bear that it was pretty useless, but the barbarian and paladin had to stand there and slowly pound away at it for a very long time while the other 3 of us handled the rest.

I don't know about the others, but trying to save at least 1 or 2 daily powers, I wound up just firing off the same at-will over and over for probably the last 5 rounds of combat.* So, the first 2/3 of that combat was a lot of fun, but the last was just going through the motions of the same actions over and over for most of us.

Didn't ruin the game by any means, but was surprising how long it took to slog through it.

* Although I did use my action point to go nova with a daily and encounter and my daily magic item power in one round. So without that, I might have had 1 or 2 rounds less of "use at-will #2, rinse, repeat".

 

[Rechan]

Three hours.

DM knew the rules back and forth, as did myself (Paladin) and the Bard.

One player (Invoker) was very slow to get his abilities. The avenger player was new, but grasped his abilities well.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

We didn't finish the first encounter, or any of the other combats for that matter. The DM called them to keep things moving so we could get to the end before the store kicked us out.

A couple of the player's had not played 4e before, but I'm pretty sure it would have been too long either way.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I think we finished in under an hour. I don't know if our DM ran the thing as written though. He mentioned that his standard 4E running style was to cut monster HP in half and double thier damage. We all knew what were doing as players but it took a little extra time (as expected) to figure out the new abilities as they came up.