Combats take a long time – we seem to naturally pace about 3-5 minutes per combat round.
Combats are short, 1-3 rounds – we regularly experience 4-8 rounds of combat, with some going up to 10+, only occasionally 3 or less.
Combat is the PCs vs. one opponent – we regularly fight multiple enemies, usually 3-6, sometimes a dozen or more, only occasionally just 1.
The first two are explained by the third: If you're only using a single opponent for the PCs, it's likely that you're using a more powerful and complex monster than if you've got a large group of opponents. This tends to slow down play as the DM learns the rope of the new opponent.
But if you're only fighting a single opponent, then combat is probably going to be pretty short: When everybody is wailing on a single target, the target just can't last very long.
There are also quite a few cascading effects at work here, too:
(1) IME, the first few rounds of combat are the slowest. The PCs are still figuring out what they're doing and the DM is still familiarizing themselves with the monsters. If it's a short combat, then just as everyone starts to get warmed up it comes to an end.
(2) If you're routinely designing around single opponents, those single opponents are likely to end up being EL+2 or EL+4. Some of this is a desire to get a "bang for your buck" and some of it is in an effort to lengthen combats which are "too short". Unfortunately, this doesn't do much to lengthen combat (because you've still got all the PCs wailing on a single target), but it does tend to slow it down. Why? Because an EL+2 or EL+4 creature is dangerous -- it can take out low HP classes very, very quickly. In those circumstances, the players learn to be cautious... and caution slows things down.
Is my group, are my games the anomaly, or are the “accepted facts” of the edition wrong for you, too?
I'm pretty much on your page.
We'll have long combats, but they're long because they're epic -- not because the rules are bogging us down. A couple weeks ago, for example, we ran a 4 hour session that was essentially a single running combat. But it involved a dozen opponents, a half dozen areas, multiple ambushes, and lasted for 40+ rounds.
We'll also have very short, quick combats -- usually against mooks. A few months ago we had a session that was pretty much the polar opposite of that one: It lasted about 6 hours, during which we resolved 10-12 combat encounters (depending on how you chose to count them -- a couple of them kind of bled into each other).
(This is a group with 5 players, 6 PCs, and two animal companions.)
My group strives for 3-5 minutes (or less) per combat encounter. Of course, that's why I only play 'B/X' D&D and Microlite20 now.
I don't know Microlite20, but there's no way you're achieving that kind of resolution time in B/X D&D unless all of your combats are resolved in one-hit kills in the first round of combat. (Which would, frankly, be mind-numbingly boring for me.)
3 minutes for a combat encounter involving 4 players + DM means that everyone is getting less than 40 seconds to declare, resolve, and describe their actions.
If a game wasn't particularly focused on combat, I could see using a one-roll combat resolution check type of mechanic that could achieve interesting results in that type of timeframe. But D&D just isn't (and has never been) that game.
I'm skeptical that you accomplish this in an average of 36 to 60 seconds. I believe that you accomplish the occasional 36 to 60 second turn. I do not believe that it is the average, or even the norm if you are playing at mid to upper levels of the game. Your average should be demolished by the occasional four minute turn while something gets looked up, and the regular social rituals of human interaction and of combat narration should demolish your 36 to 60 second baseline.
I can't speak for the original poster, but I'll certainly have longer turns where we're looking up the rules for a spell or whatever. But we'll also have 5 second turns in which the fighter will roll his dice, miss, and we'll move on.
My group is also pretty good at multitasking. An extreme example of that is healing: The cleric knows when his turn is coming up, knows where he's moving, and knows who he's healing. More often than not, when his turn comes up he'll have already told the person he's healing how much they'll be getting healed for. And even if he hasn't that interaction still looks like:
DM: It's the cleric's turn.
Cleric: I heal so-and-so.
DM: Okay, it's the fighter's turn.
And then the DM can leave the cleric and so-and-so to resolve the bookkeeping while combat continues flowing.
Like I say, that's an extreme example. But it makes a big difference if (a) the DM doesn't try to micro-manage everything; and (b) players are engaged and thinking ahead to what their next action will be.
The biggest slow-downs at our table happens when the situation suddenly changes in an unexpected fashion and the next player has to reconsider the action they were planning to take.
Our DM has an article about this:
Running Combat.
