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

[Doctor Proctor]

Our group takes a long time to encounters as well...I'd say about and hour and a half to two hours usually. There's a lot of reasons for this, and I doubt it will change anytime soon...

1) About half the party is fairly...weak. I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but when someone has a 14 in their attack stat, they miss a lot. When that person is then a Ranger, it hurts the party because we have a Striker that doesn't add anything to the combat. We have another character that's a Tiefling STR Cleric, and she uses a sling. So this means that she's going completely against all racial bonuses, which is fine, but is then further compounding this by using a DEX weapon when she's a STR Cleric.

2) Our group gets very distracted. One of our players actually plays DS while at the table, which means she's often not paying attention to the game or planning what she should be doing next.

3) The players don't know their characters. Several of them never use encounter powers unless prompted to do so, and they don't use power cards and so we constantly have to wait for them to look things up in the PHB and do the math to figure out their attack stat and damage every time they use something.

So basically, between all of the distractions and looking things up, combat rounds take a long time to reolve. Combats as a whole are extended because half the party can't hit very accurately. While the other half of us have 16's and 18's in our primary stats, it's just not enough to be effective.

In general though, I think one thing that can help other parties is for DM's to familiarize themselves with the way the PC math works out. Our DM didn't really do that, and so he never said anything about some of the characters with very low attack stats because they were within the +4 to +8 range that's listed in the PHB.

The really big thing though is that players need to pay attention to the game during combat and get familiar with their characters and abilities. I think it works much better if you focus during the combats and keep all of the messing around out of it. I'd rather have combat take an hour, and then have an hour to mess around and have fun, than have to slog through 2 hours of combat and then go straight into the next one.

 

[Lab_Monkey]

Recently, combats have been going slowly in my group. We get through 2-4 combats in a 5 hour session.

Here's the party composition:
Dwarf Tempest Fighter
Human Swordmage
Human Laser Cleric
Dragonborn Tactlord
Halfling Rogue
Shardar-kai Wizard

I think it's the lack of strikers and the group size that is slowing things down us. Having two leaders keeps everyone on their feet, but I feel like things would go faster if we had 2-3 strikers instead.

It doesn't help that they rarely focus fire and the rogue only gets sneak attack damage about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time (sometimes less).

 

[Rel]

I think it's the lack of strikers and the group size that is slowing things down us. Having two leaders keeps everyone on their feet, but I feel like things would go faster if we had 2-3 strikers instead.

I think you have a very interesting point here. Obviously anytime you have a bigger party it's going to take more or more powerful bad guys to challenge them. That will probably translate into combats taking longer.

But the other thing is that, with extra healing available, the GM may have to throw even more or higher level creatures at you to make you feel threatened. And of course, compared to a party that is Striker heavy, you are putting out less damage so that's also taking longer to bring down the bad guys.

This is where I think the GM needs to tweak things a bit and take the standard critters in the MM and give their attacks a boost while leaving HP the same or lowering them a bit. That might get a good balance of challenge/threat without things feeling like a grind.

 

[Nightson]

That's dangerous though, if they trade damage for survivability then you shouldn't buff monster damage up as it's going to leave them weaker then intended. If you lowered their HP at the same time then it might work, but I'd talk to the party before hand, maybe they specifically wanted to be a hard to kill party even if combats take longer.

 

[jorrit]

I played KotS with my children. We had a team of three:
- One Dragonborn Fighter with longsword.
- One Elf Ranger with longbow.
- One Half-elf Cleric (me) with a quarterstaff.

We ran through most encounters with at most one hour of combat. The combination above seemed to work pretty well. The fighter was going melee and attracting most of the enemy attacks by making liberal use of the marking facility. The ranger fired from a distance dealing considerable damage using hunters quarry. And the cleric mostly stood aside healing the fighter and dealing out temporary hitpoints to the fighter as well using one of his at-will spells. This has been our strategy in most encounters so far and it works pretty well. Occasionally the fighter goes down with 0HP but nothing a quick 'Healing Word' can't solve.

Greetings,

 

[pogre]

Our party is 3rd level. Paladin, Cleric, Rogue, Warlock, Warlock. Combats take between 45 and 90 minutes. I guess 60 is standard, but it feels long to me.

 

[jorrit]

I played KotS with my children. We had a team of three:
- One Dragonborn Fighter with longsword.
- One Elf Ranger with longbow.
- One Half-elf Cleric (me) with a quarterstaff.

We ran through most encounters with at most one hour of combat. The combination above seemed to work pretty well. The fighter was going melee and attracting most of the enemy attacks by making liberal use of the marking facility. The ranger fired from a distance dealing considerable damage using hunters quarry. And the cleric mostly stood aside healing the fighter and dealing out temporary hitpoints to the fighter as well using one of his at-will spells. This has been our strategy in most encounters so far and it works pretty well. Occasionally the fighter goes down with 0HP but nothing a quick 'Healing Word' can't solve.

Greetings,

BTW. This one hour per encounter includes setup time, roleplaying and everything. It is the total time we play on one evening and we generally do one encounter per evening.

Greetings,

 

[Mengu]

My last game session, we got through a mere 2 encounters in about 4 hours, with 5 players. And the first encounter started the first minute of the game, because I had stopped the previous sessions just before they entered the encounter.

I don't really know what's taking so long, I can only imagine it's people being unable to decide what they are going to do, or taking too much time discussing among each other. The encounters were a level equivalent, and a level+2. The encounters were both against undead, and the party has a cleric, a paladin, and a star pact warlock, so I expected no shortage of radiant powers which I thought would tear through the undead quickly. There was a bit of exploring and searching between the two encounters, but that didn't take too long.

I'm not unhappy with how the session went, but I was hoping to get 3 maybe even 4 encounters in.

 

[Bayonet_Chris]

Players

In the games I run, everyone has a pretty solid handle on both 4E and their individual characters, through experience and DM coaching (making them aware of what they can and can't do and giving them suggestions until they get the hang of it).

I do play in a few games where not everyone has that, and they do take considerably longer. When someone spends five minutes looking over their character and looking things up, intervention is necessary.

 

[Ryujin]

Last session was roughly 6.5hours of play. Maybe 7. We went through Three combat encounters and some minimal role play. I think that the final fight was a double encounter fight, with a "prisoner" we had dragged along with us turning out to be a succubus (Oh, what a give-away). More than 2.5 hours were spent on that fight alone, as it involved a bunch of human fighter-type minions, a Dragonborn leader, a 400+ hp werewolf, and the succubus.

No doubt some will recognize that fight. I won't give away where it occurred. Let's just say that either our DM has become downright cruel in his old age, or the encounters have taken a serious jump in difficulty.