jmucchiello
Hero
BTW, jmucchiello, are you honestly claiming that you averaged 20+ combatants in the fight at the same time, AND your fights averaged 30 minutes (or so) AND you had the depth of tactical choices that you would get in 3e? Really?
No, I said that such a combat could take 25-30 minutes. Granted 25-50% of the combatants were sluphs (4e calls them minions) and unlike what someone else wrote I wasn't counting henchmen as it's been too long since I've used them. We switched to 2e rather early and henchmen became passé. So most combatants were controlled by the DM.
But, we certainly had 4+ combats in 4 hours regularly and that included time to move between rooms and waste time listening at doors and reciting Monty Python scripts. (Heavy MP sessions had fewer combats, I'll admit.) I'll also admit that was when we had 6 players who were heavily involved in combat tactics and were able to keep the MP down during actually combat time. In fact that group steered away from heavy role-play since that usually resulted in the most MP.