Long Combats are Bad

[Boregar]

I'd certainly be interested in something like the two tier system Reynard proprosed in the OP, as its exactly this problem which has sapped my enthusiasm for running D&D at the moment, and lead me to put it aside in favour of starting a Delta Green campaign. (First session tomorrow - woo-hoo!) I looked at the adventure I'm running, saw there were three encounters that I think I need to include before the end of the adventure (there are a few I can toss out) and realised that playing for roughly 3 hours every two weeks meant it was going to be at least a month before we were done.

Some way of introducing a 'quick fight' option would be most welcome.

 

[Lanefan]

Some way of introducing a 'quick fight' option would be most welcome.

The only thing to watch out for here is making sure the resource management gets properly taken care of. Even a minor battle is going to use up some resources - hit points, cures, spells, maybe a weapon gets broken - and if this gets glossed over then the party is going to be in better shape than perhaps they should be if something significant does come up later. So you'll still have to sweat the details.

Result: the time that would have been spent playing out the combat instead goes to determining what resources got used = no net gain = might as well play out the combat in the first place.

And if you really want to speed up combat, try a rules-light system. It's often easier to add detail than to subtract it, for when you want it.

Lanefan

 

[IronWolf]

Our group doesn't seem to have a hard time with long combats. We've had them, but these are typically the ones that one wants to be long, a pivotal moment in the game. For other combats even without a whole lot of tweaking they run reasonably quick - though our group is pretty good about being ready to declare their move when their turn comes up, roll multiple dice at once for all of their attacks and their attack and damage rolls at the same time which speed things up.

For cases that need a little more tweaking I think the DM has a good amount of control to speed things up by possibly reducing hit points of the critters on the fly. Or if a fireball lands in the middle of a group of them and did good damage, then likely that was enough to take them out, even if technically three of four of the critters still had 3hp left. Little things like that allow you to leave the tactics, but leave the characters feeling like heroes as they blaze through a battle.

This may be too subjective for some groups, but it seems to work well for ours without need of encumbering the rules with a new combat system.

 

[Umbran]

I was thinking about this on my way home from my regular Pathfinder campaign last night: whether its 4E, Pathfindser or 3E, overly long (in real world session time terms) are Not Good. They eat up more temporal resources than they are worth, either delaying or pushing aside other aspects of play that are equally or more rewarding (Or "fun"), for what?

Maybe we should look at that question you end with - what are the players getting out of the combat?

If the primary activity in the combat is a slow wearing away of BBEG resources, henchmen, and hit points, then the players are perhaps getting some tactical exercise, but not a whole lot else. Standing toe to toe exchanging blows for three hours, not a whole lot of fun, you're right.

But what if you put other things in that long fight? What if there's plot development right in the middle of the fight, or other tasks that need to be achieved, or goals reached? Then perhaps the long fight isn't a problem.

Long fights in which you don't actually do much are bad. Fights in which you also save the princess from bunking in the vat of boiling acid, complete the ancient cipher to stop the doomsday spell, and get of 17 good quips insulting how poorly the BBEG dresses - that's apt to be more fun.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The only thing to watch out for here is making sure the resource management gets properly taken care of. Even a minor battle is going to use up some resources - hit points, cures, spells, maybe a weapon gets broken - and if this gets glossed over then the party is going to be in better shape than perhaps they should be if something significant does come up later. So you'll still have to sweat the details.

Result: the time that would have been spent playing out the combat instead goes to determining what resources got used = no net gain = might as well play out the combat in the first place.

And if you really want to speed up combat, try a rules-light system. It's often easier to add detail than to subtract it, for when you want it.

Lanefan

Yarp.

Gotta spread some around.

In general, long in actual time combats are only as big a problem as a particular group makes them. If the main attraction for everyone is mostly sessions full of detailed battles then long combats are working fine.

What seems to be a big issue is that some people think that a rules-light combat system automatically means zero detail and no combat options.

GURPS combat, while not being what I would call rules-light exactly, offers 3 tiers of detail depending on what you want to accomplish.

There is advanced combat with the full rules, a grid, and minis or tokens, basic combat which is much like advanced without messing with a map or markers, and the quick contest. Super fast engagements can be played by treating a combat as a quick contest of skill. Combatants just roll opposed combat skill checks and the one who makes it by the greatest margin (or fails by the smallest!) wins.

Even using the quick contest as a base, one can add detail and some choice through the use of modifiers to the skill check to represent being aggressive, defensive, etc.

 

[Barastrondo]

There's a current thread that talks about treating dungeons in 4e as skill challenges; could you do the same with combat?

On RPGnet it has been proposed that such things be called "kill challenges," and it is hard for me to speak against the term.

 

[I'm A Banana]

There's a current thread that talks about treating dungeons in 4e as skill challenges; could you do the same with combat?

Yessir, and except for some of the general problems with skill challenges, that could work just peachy.

Result: the time that would have been spent playing out the combat instead goes to determining what resources got used = no net gain = might as well play out the combat in the first place.

That's a rub. How many healing surges did you have to spend? How many daily powers did you have to use? How down in HP are you by the end? This is theoretically doable, though.

The big issue is that if you ignore combat, you're glossing over a huge part of the rules system. Combat is where, currently, characters get to be awesome, players get to feel tension, and where the challenge of the D&D game mostly lies.

You may, indeed, be better off starting with a system that is more narrative to begin with.

 

[MrMyth]

This isn't to say that every long combat is bad or a waste. Sometimes you want a big long epic combat that eats 2 to 4 hours of game time. But sometimes you want combat that moves quickly and smoothly, resolving in 15-30 minutes so the PCs can get on with the adventure at hand.

I think this hits the nail on the head. There is a time and place for both intensive combats and fast-paced ones. I tried this approach in my epic 4E game - over the course of each level, there would typically be 2-3 boss battles, and each one might have 2-3 'skirmish' encounters leading up to it - I'd keep the skirmish battles lower level, filled with lots of hard-hitting but fragile monsters (so they died easy but still burnt through party resources), while the boss battles would feature more complicated enemies and terrain.

But even then (especially at Epic), the difference was only so big. A boss battle would take 1.5 to 2.5 hours, skirmishes would run for an hour... the difference is there, but could be expanded. I've been toying with the idea in my next game to try and emphasize this even more so - abstract things more for the skirmishes so that you don't even need to bother with the battle map, and save the greater tactical game with full minis and map for the boss battles or key plot battles, etc.

Of course, part of the problem I ran into at epic levels is that it was harder and harder to justify any fight that wasn't epic in scope. Getting back to lower levels should hopefully help avoid that problem.

 

[cdrcjsn]

Most fights in 4e seems to last around 10 minutes per player for me, so around 50 minutes for a 5 player group.

If I want combats to take half that duration, I could probably just half the monster's hit points and double their damage output.

But the main impediment I think for battle-lite games is that you need to get everyone on board with the idea.

A lot of players LIKE the fact that combats are long, complicated and engrossing. To them it's the meat and potatoes of the game, with the rest being gravy.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

I agree with the OP and many of the people who've responded that ideally, there would be fast combats and slow combats, with the slow combats generally "boss fights" or otherwise interesting fights (including fights when severely resource depleted) and the fast fights being the unimportant and relatively uninteresting fights (random guards, wandering monsters, etc.) I have found this to be a big problem in a "beer and pretzels" style game that I run--we only get 2-3 combats per session, and that's not enough to get old-style dungeon crawling feel.

I further agree that the solution is to tack on a quick resolution system (perhaps based on skill challenges, perhaps not). The quick resolution system has to meet these requirements to satisfy me:
1. It has to deplete resources in a way comparable to the normal combat system (i.e. in 4E, you have to finish the fight with fewer dailies, less healing surges, etc. than you started with.)
2. It has to have some scalability for opposition difficulty--sometimes you'll be using this for ganking a severely underpowered foe, sometimes for fast forwarding through the tough guards outside the throne room so you can spend your time on the big final battle.
3. It can't be dramatically more swingy than normal combat (halving the hit points and doubling the damage of enemies makes it more likely that a couple of lucky crits will kill a PC outright, which would be frustrating).
4. There should be low to no risk of PC death--I don't want my PCs dying like punks, and in any event it would be frustrating to lose a character in an abstracted simplified way without actually fighting the fight.

"Kill Challenge" sorts of approaches like Flanf's seem promising, but I don't think they quite get the job done. In particular, if you only lose a healing surge on a failure, a medium big fight won't burn off enough PC resources as a kill challenge. A normal fight might cost the party an average of two or three healing surges per PC.

So here's my sketch of a system:
Each PC rolls 4d20. Their rolls plus level are compared to a DC based on the monster's level--something like a target of 10+monster level, with a modifier of, say, +/-3 for every additional monster/additional PC beyond parity. (A party of five 4th level PCs fighting five 4th level monsters would be rolling d20+4 versus a DC of 14; a party of five 4th level PCs versus four 4th level monsters would be rolling d20+4 versus a DC of 11, but if there were six monsters they would be against a DC of 17.) Standard substitutions apply for elites, solos, and minions, and monster levels get averaged out. (Actually, that suggests that it should be calculated off the XP of the fight, which allows a little more granularity. <shrug>)

For each roll, you compare to the DC. If you met the DC, yay! If you missed the DC, you lose a healing surge/quarter of your hit points (your choice which way you take it). If you missed by 5, you lose 2 surges/quarter of your hit points. Each defender can take one healing surge of damage from one other PC. You can spend a daily power to get a bonus of +3 to one roll. (I'm inclined to allow this after the fact, or to do the rolls sequentially? Not sure. You don't want players to have to decide up front before they get either really lucky or terribly unlucky, but speed is essential.) Typically, magic item daily powers, combat appropriate daily utility powers, and level appropriate consumable magic items get you a +2. You can't spend action points, but the fight doesn't count as an encounter for purposes of regaining action points.

The whole thing should take maybe five minutes, start to finish, but still produce something vaguely like the resource burn of hacking your way through the fight.

As should be clear, I haven't playtested this at all. My numbers might be off, maybe even way of. An on-level fight without any daily powers spent should average 3 healing surges per character spent, which seems roughly right--spending a daily power will almost certainly save a healing surge (although that may not be enough of a pay-off for a daily power, but it means that daily powers will mostly get used on screen, which seems right). Also, while some similar system can be used in PF/3.x/other games, you would need to come up with a more nuanced way of handling spell resources (probably something like top level spells are +2, next level spells are +1, etc.--if you only toss magic missiles at a high level combat, you suffer big penalties, thus taking more damage; but the healing economy is very different, too, so...). Ideally we would test the system versus actual combat to try to determine how close it is to accurate, but that would take some work--I might try eventually but I don't have time in the near future.