D&D 4E How long are your 4e combats taking, real time?

[Truename]

Just finished the final encounter of Siege of Bordrin's Watch. The whole session took us about four hours. We took about 30 minutes to get started and a 15 minute break to get food, so call it a bit over three hours total.

I had high hopes for this encounter. It's got a lot of interesting terrain and "neverending monsters" mechanic that means you have to do more than just kill things, and a wicked trap that the PCs intentionally trigger. I'm happy to say my hopes were born out. It was a great encounter, an edge of the seat, we're all going to die encounter. Two of the PCs did die, a third would have died if he hadn't remembered his Second Chance power after taking a critical hit that would have killed him, and it was close for everyone. At one point, one of the players said "I give us zero chance of all getting out of this alive." Although it was long, I never felt like it was a grind.

(Overall, the battles in Siege have been top-notch. It's not much for plot, but the combat encounters are varied and interesting.)

Party composition:
lvl 4 Archer Ranger (barely hurt)
lvl 4 Wizard (nearly dropped)
lvl 4 Rogue (dropped, nearly died)
lvl 4 Fighter (died)
lvl 4 Cleric (died)

The encounter was a level 8 encounter. As written, it's a level 7 encounter for a level 3 party, so I bumped it up a level by adding more monsters. The trap isn't included in the encounter budget, but it's under the player's control. Also, the monsters enter in stages, but they're unlimited. I figure it's either lvl+3 or lvl+4 overall.

Player tactics in this encounter were unusually poor. The room is huge and takes a good three or four rounds of flat-out running to reach the top. They split the party early and couldn't support each other well. There were also some dubious choices about when to use action points and encounter powers. Because of the split party, the rogue had to fend off some fairly nasty soldiers on his own rather than activating the trap that stops the flow of bad guys.

Players also spent a lot of time hemming and hawing over their moves. A fair amount of "can the monster really do that?" and not-quite-rules-lawyering going on, even before the tide turned against them. Overall, they were more distracted and distractable than I've seen them in a while.

They didn't have any real trouble hitting the monsters, but they didn't focus fire because they were split.

Bottom line, I think they could have finished this 30-60 minutes earlier if they had taken their turns quicker, and another 30-60 minutes earlier with better tactics. I expected it to take one and a half to two hours, not three.

 

[Bayonet_Chris]

Combat times

I've been running twice a week (most weeks) since Keep on the Shadowfell came out last year and my party is going to gain 8th level this upcoming Tuesday. The party on any given day is between 5 and 7 characters and we only have lunch to finish it up. We get our combats done between 45 minutes to maybe an hour ten.

I also run a game every other week in a more relaxed setting (4-5 hours to play) and we get combats done pretty quickly - that group is usually between 5 and 7 people as well. I'd guess the time taken would be the same.

According to my game log, one evening (probably a little over four hours of actual playing time) we fit in three small encounters, two larger ones, and a skill challenge. With roleplaying/non-combat time factored into a four hour block, we usually get 2-3 solid combats in without pushing for time.

When the players know their characters and the party size is reduced, it moves really quickly. When my party at work is running 5 people, it feels pretty leisurely and we get done before an hour is up.

 

[Bayonet_Chris]

I think certain factors have a huge impact on the length of combat:

1) The DM - the DM generally has more to do than all the PC's (keeping track of each monster, selecting their powers, rolling dice for each monster, etc.). If the DM is slow, the combat is going to be slow no matter what the players do. (Sometimes you can't help it - if some of the players are more tactically gifted than you, then you need to spend extra time choosing your monsters actions to challenge them.)

2) The Players - some people are just slower to decide their actions than others. Not much you can do about that. Some people are ineffecient when resolving their turn even when they know what they want to do. There are various tricks to speed up the players turns that have already been discussed.

5) Teamwork - if the players know how to make their characters work together, they hit more often and do more damage when they hit (especially if warlords and battle clerics are involved0).

These three are true in my experience. The other two are more marginal than you think - good players can overcome the other two.

 

[Vaeron]

30-60 minutes. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Most of the "more" is the result of unbalanced encounter design (WotC for example appears to believe a level 18 elite and 5 level 14 minions = a level 14 encounter). It's when this happens and the combat goes miss-miss-miss-miss that it really starts dragging.

In general, combats don't last longer than an hour. I'd say a good approximation would be the RPGA adventures a local coffee shop runs. About an hour for set up and roleplay. An hour for skill challenges and investigation. And an hour each for two combat encounters of either High or Low difficulty. That seems to be the norm.

I've played lots of combats that don't even last thirty minutes. A lot of it depends on how well players know their characters, how prepared they are for their next move, and how much chit-chat there is over the table. Another big thing that slows combat down is meta-gaming. When people discuss possible strategies over the table it takes forever - I'm pleased not to play in any groups presently where that's an issue.

 

[Vaeron]

30-60 minutes. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Most of the "more" is the result of unbalanced encounter design (WotC for example appears to believe a level 18 elite and 5 level 14 minions = a level 14 encounter). It's when this happens and the combat goes miss-miss-miss-miss that it really starts dragging.

In general, combats don't last longer than an hour. I'd say a good approximation would be the RPGA adventures a local coffee shop runs. About an hour for set up and roleplay. An hour for skill challenges and investigation. And an hour each for two combat encounters of either High or Low difficulty. That seems to be the norm.

I've played lots of combats that don't even last thirty minutes. A lot of it depends on how well players know their characters, how prepared they are for their next move, and how much chit-chat there is over the table. Another big thing that slows combat down is meta-gaming. When people discuss possible strategies over the table it takes forever - I'm pleased not to play in any groups presently where that's an issue.

 

[Rel]

...stuff...

Pardon the off topic post, but B_C, I note that you're from Apex, NC. That's where I live. Are you aware of the ENWorld NC Game Days that we have three times a year? If not our next one is coming up the weekend of April 25-26. Just wanted to let you know.

 

[ariochdm]

In our group we have 5 players that have played many versions of D&D over the years so a very experienced group. We've been playing about 12 hours per month since the game came out and have been playing keep on the shadowfell and the follow up Thunderspire module.

Party is 6th level now (wiz, fighter, warlock, rogue, cleric).

On average our combats take 2 hours some longer. The game itself is mostly fun but when the combats take more than an hour (unless its a key battle with the main NPC enemy or something) then it really puts a drag on the game. We like to play the game as it was intended (no rule modifications) to maintain balance and most monsters fight to the death (party feels cheapened if I try and just call the combat and say they've won). I'll also add that there is very little BSing or roleplaying going on during these combats. It takes 2 hours to get through them without any distractions. Add in some distractions and your heading towards 2.5 hours on average.

We use a lot of tools miniatures, battlemats, and pc's. One thing that I've found that has really sped things up (the battles used to be 2+ hours on average but that has been reduced to 2 hours because of this tool) is using google docs. Every player has a pc. We all login to google docs and we can look at a spreadsheet on the web. What is great about this spreadsheet is there is no check/check out or refresh required. You can see real time as the players manipulate the fields and who is manipulating what field. We put all the conditions, inititaitve, hp's, spent surges, etc into the sheet. Having everyone see what the stats are makes the players move faster through the combat with their strategies and they know when their turn is coming up. As the DM I've also had the players enter as much info into the sheet as I can for me. They put their damage into the spreadsheet, when a creature becomes bloodied I tell them and they mark it in the sheet, when they hit a creature they record the ac for that creature into the spreadsheet, etc. This has helped a lot making me (the DM) move through the combats faster as it offloads some of the stuff I had to deal with and I can focus on the strategy and dealing damage. I rarely have to record any information letting the party (not just one person but everyone so the workload is spread out) do that for me in the spreadsheet.

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=writely&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F&followup=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F&ltmpl=homepage&rm=false

I still wish that WOTC would come up with some additional playtested rules for speeding up combat.

 

[Fundin Strongarm]

I'm wondering if any of the people for which combat takes 1.5+ hours play in any RPGA Living Forgotten Realms adventures. There, you have 3-4 combats and 0-1 skill challenges (and admittedly not all that much roleplay but there is some) and they usually take 4 hours to play. I'm used to DMing this and combats only take 45-60 minutes, which is consistent with my home game (as mentioned earlier).

Has anyone played both (home game and LFR) and come away with different experiences? I'd suggest that anyone looking to speed up combat try to play an RPGA LFR game and see how it runs and compare it to your other experiences.

(To me, putting all that info into google just sounds like waaay too much time and work.)

 

[ariochdm]

The spreadsheet thing only takes seconds to update. Not any longer than it would for the person to write down that they've used one of their surges, not any longer than it would take to record the damage you've dealt or received on paper or pencil.


Setting up the spreadsheet initially the way you want might take you 15-20 minutes to figure out the layout and such. But once its setup you generally dont ever touch the formattign again.

So no the spreadsheet isnt too much work at all from our groups experience.

 

[Fundin Strongarm]

I'm happy to hear it works for you. Nobody that I play with brings a laptop. Well, one guy did but it took him too long to do things (although he was fairly new to 4th, I'll admit). He stopped playing, however.

Just trying to figure out 2 hour combats, that's all. If people don't mind and have fun, it's no biggie. For others, find a local LFR game and play a session to see how much faster combat can be.