Long Combats are Bad

[ashockney]

I also had a similia experience recently and noticed than in my 4e adventures there were too many combats that were too long. They were fun battles, even at 1st level, but this became tedious when there were three or four in a row, each lasting an hour or more. And the same over the campaign as 4 became 8 became two dozen long, similiar battles.

So, to spice it up a bit, using advice from here I zeroed in on the resource management and the concept behind each encounter.

The result was one hit minions, two hit minions, standard battles, and multi-tier boss fights. The minions were all sure to have at least standard, if not encounter level, attacks. Each encounter now had their own unique complexities, and the purpose of the encounters shifted focus in the minions battles to the obstacles, effective reource management, and protecting your weak spots. That was a very nice balance, and allowed me to get through many more encounters in a night.

 

[Smoss]

I hate long tedious combat. Probably another reason that I don't quite fit in with 4e as it feels like that to me. Heck, my last revision of my RPG rules was all about improving the speed of combats.

I crafted it specifically so that combats are descriptive, intense, and deadly. A 'boss" fight between a PC and an equal foe might take a few rounds (Parry, dodge, thrust, HA!) before a hit connects and death occurs... But I made it so that a single PCs actions can move FAST. So rounds go quickly and everyone can get involved faster (Less down time between players).

And that was really my key. I hate sitting on the sidelines waiting for other people to get done with their turns. My patience has slimmed in my old age. I am sure others hate waiting too. Keeping everyone involved as much as possible is a GOOD THING (tm).
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Smoss
Doulairen

 

[Beginning of the End]

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.

For those playing 3E and looking for the rapid-fire "old school" encounter pacing, I strongly recommend this article: Revisiting Encounter Design.

If you design all of your encounters to be challenger (EL = party level), then they will be challenging. And challenging means drawn out. And if you go for a tough fight, it will be even more drawn out.

A lot of problems in terms of combat length didn't come about as the result of any sort of mechanical change: They came about because people misinterpreted the CR rules and started designing their encounters differently. (This new "common understanding" of encounter design was then more or less hard-coded into the 4E ruleset, systematizing the problem.)

 

[Hussar]

I'm not sure if a lot of this can't be solved in the encounter design end.

If you want mooks and a bad guy, design an encounter around all of that but space it out. Instead of the fairly traditional setup of having encounters X, Y and Z, mix them all up into one encounter and then space things out so that you don't overwhelm the party.

I'm a big fan of the Savage Worlds approach to encounter design where most of the baddies are mooks and go down in one hit. So, build your encounter around the idea that there should be about a 2 or 3:1 bad guy to good guy ratio and then start paying attention to the location.

Encounters should be spread out over several areas that allow lots of movement. The whole "waves of baddies" approach to encounters.

The 1d4 bears in the woods? Don't bother. Make the encounter matter and then the problem solves itself.

 

[Reynard]

I'm not sure if a lot of this can't be solved in the encounter design end.

If you want mooks and a bad guy, design an encounter around all of that but space it out. Instead of the fairly traditional setup of having encounters X, Y and Z, mix them all up into one encounter and then space things out so that you don't overwhelm the party.

I'm a big fan of the Savage Worlds approach to encounter design where most of the baddies are mooks and go down in one hit. So, build your encounter around the idea that there should be about a 2 or 3:1 bad guy to good guy ratio and then start paying attention to the location.

Encounters should be spread out over several areas that allow lots of movement. The whole "waves of baddies" approach to encounters.

The 1d4 bears in the woods? Don't bother. Make the encounter matter and then the problem solves itself.

This advice only applies for one particular method of play: the "story" game. Not everyone plays that way.

The point is to be able, when deemed necessary (for any number of reasons: maybe it is 25 minutes to the end of the session, maybe the dice determined lots of really weak opponents, or maybe the players just don't feel like fiddling with AoOs and square based movement right now), to run combats that work mechanically with other aspects of the system (i.e. resource management issues) and are fun, but also happen very quickly.

In my experience of running playing different editions of the game, I think that the two biggest contributors to slowing play are the combat grid and its associated rules, and players dawdling or otherwise taking a long time to make choices (which can sometimes be related to the former).

That reliance on the grid slows down play should be self evident. It takes time to set up. People count squares for everything from movement to range to areas of effect. There are ways to mitigate the time it takes -- pre-game prep and using tools like string lines, rulers and area templates help a lot -- but it still takes more time.

Players taking a long time is a more difficult situation to pin down. Sometimes players are paralyzed by choices (especially players with lots of feats or spells), or simply unfamiliar with the basics of their characters and/or the rules. Sometimes it is an attention issue. But even if the players knows what's going on and has an idea what to do when his turn comes up, looking up rules is fairly common and will eat a bunch of time.

 

[Hussar]

Heh, you won't get me to disagree with that Reynard. Player dithering is the bane of my online games. Drives me straight up the wall. I've actually seen a player take fifteen minutes (I timed it) to take a single turn with a fourth level fighter.

That banging sound is me slamming my head against my keyboard in frustration.

But, I disagree that it's only "story" games where you should maintain encounters that matter. If the only purpose of the encounter is to spend twenty minutes and burn some resources, that's not what I consider to be great design.

Make the encounters matter and then the time they take isn't such an issue. Instead of blowing off some meaningless combat for twenty minutes to kill time until the end of the session, why not end the session early and start the next session completely set up for a much more intricate and detailed encounter? That way you cut down the set up time and get right to things the next week.

I'm just not all that impressed by filler encounters anymore.

 

[NewJeffCT]

So far in my 4E campaign, combats have played out much quicker than in 3.5E. However, I'm sure combat times will increase as the group goes up in level.

At the end of my 2.5 year long 3.5 campaign that ended in January, the big epic combats that came at the end of the campaign (level 15-18) would often take two entire sessions of wall-to-wall combat. The group had 7 PCs, plus the teenage son of one of the other players, for a total of 8, plus a couple of NPC allies. However, because the group was so big and so versatile, I had to put together "big" combats in order to challenge them... I had a CR+3 dragon once as the last solo encounter of the campaign, and it crushed 3 of the PCs with its initial attack, but the group still did over 300 hit ponts of damage to it in the first round alone on their counterattack, which was like 60% of its total. So, BBEGs would have a couple of major allies for support, plus some tough bodyguards and a host of minions. I recruited a friend of one of my players for the finale and had him run the pit fiend, ice devils and the royal bodyguards, while I ran the BBEG, the arcane and divine spellcaster support and the minions, plus the summoned fiendish beholder.

I think the biggest holdup for the group in 3.5 was that we had three inexperienced players, so it took them a bit longer. Plus, the major bad guys at higher level are so complex with templates, prestige classes, magic items, special class/race abilities, and a whole host of spells to choose from that I had too many options each round and took longer than I should making decisions. However, most of those final combats were very challenging (in a good way) and fun for both sides.

Thankfully, 4E is simpler in terms of ease of use for inexperienced players, and the bad guys usually have far fewer options. And, for my group, if we get through 2-3 combats in a session now, we're almost grateful that we accomplished so much... so, long combats are also a relative term. ("Wow, we got through 2 combats in only 2 hours, plus we got some important clues from the old sage, and managed to meet a couple of other interesting NPCS...")

 

[Rel]

This is a pretty interesting discussion. I've found that the default 4e rules can lead to longer combats than I sometimes desire. My solution was to adopt a house rule from somebody (unfortunately can't remember who) at ENW where I cut all monster HP to 60% of normal and had all their attacks do an extra 1/2 Level + 3 damage. Suddenly fights seemed more deadly and also got resolved faster.

Beyond that I most often come down on the side of "if a fight isn't going to be interesting then either skip it or find a way to make it be interesting". Most often the latter because I love interesting fights.

However there were a couple times where, for reasons of story continuity or verisimilitude, I had established that there was a certain encounter ahead of them that I knew was likely to be fairly straightforward, easy and possibly dull. In those cases what I did was this:

I picked three "attacks" based on the general capabilities of the monsters the PC's would face. I was only concerned with the bonus to hit and what defense it would target. So the answer might be +8 vs. AC or +12 vs. Will. If the bad guy in question didn't have a wide breadth of attacks then I was fine using the same attack more than once.

Then I went around the table and had each attack target each PC once. Such that each PC was subject to three attacks. The results were interpreted thusly:

If you got hit once, lose a Healing Surge.
If you got hit twice, lose two Healing Surges and a Daily Magic Item power.
If you got hit thrice, lose three Healing Surges, a Daily Magic Item power and another Daily power.

That let me simulate the resource drain they might have encountered and it was all done in 5 minutes. It's true that doing this doesn't account for some of the synergies of how the party works together, possibly having the Defender protect party members who have lower defenses and causing them never to have been attacked. But if I start accounting for all of that then complexity starts creeping back into the system to the point where we may as well just play out the combat. And I'll also note that the attack bonuses of the bad guys are probably kind of low compared to baseline or else I wouldn't be glossing over this encounter in the first place.

 

[Umbran]

First, to answer Umbran: It isn't that we know Fight X is going to be boring, it's that we know that some fights end up not being worth their time investment in fun -- that isn't to say they are completely boring, but rather that they'd be more fun if they we shorter. More importantly, we often don't know which fights those will be.

You're now talking about potentially starting in on a fight, realizing it is boring, and switching mechanics mid-stream?

Eew. That's ugly. In terms of player expectations, I mean. I'd rather just truncate the fight, give the PCs the benefit of the doubt, and move on to the next thing.

Honestly, my issue isn't with having a quick-fight mechanic. My point is that even a quick-fight mechanic ought to be entertaining or engaging (if short). I am not a fan of mechanics for the sake of bean-counting in my rpgs. If it isn't attached to something engaging in other terms, I'm apt to jettison it and handwave. While resource management is part of the game, if the PCs have an extra healing surge or daily power (or the equivalents in other systems), I'm just not going to sweat it that much.

If the PCs are hexploring or dungeon delving, their battles aren't going to be part of a narrativist rising action -- they are going to be encounters, random and otherwise, that are part of the setting. The idea of the "adventure" as a "plot" with a "villain" is only one way to play, and not one I am particularly fond of using all the time.

So? In what way is it acceptable for any encounter, no matter the playstle, to be dull*? This isn't about rising narrativist action, it is about whether what I'm doing right now this instant in play is interesting. It doesn't matter if they happen while hexcrawling, dungeon delving, or in a specific plot arc. You're the GM and you are still in charge of what the PCs run into.

If you, as a GM, are delegating your design to random tables, you still owe it to the players to develop the skill of making the results of those random rolls into something fun to interact with. If you are using a published module, you still owe it to the players to develop the habit of reviewing the materials beforehand, edit if necessary, and running them in an interesting manner.

And, of course, if you designed it all yourself, you choose the details of terrain, the monsters/NPCs, the goals of said monsters, their tactics, and so on. You'd have nobody to blame but yourself.



*"Dull" being relative, of course, as different groups like different things, but the GM is supposed to know something about what the group likes.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

I face this issue as I am running a campaign with very litte real time available, but some serious storylines and lots of combat. With 3 leaders in the group I need some means to attrit the healing surges down some while not spending an entire session on a 'prep' encounter. As it is, we are on month 3 of a single module.. and I am forgetting what the overarching plot is!

So, my recent attempt was to make the skill challenge system act as more of an attrition mechanic.. the details are posted over in the House Rules forum at: Lethal Obsideon

In play this worked out well, even tho the group was learning it as we went. It has the advantage of being very easy to run and it gives the players meaningful choices. Not as complex as a full-on battle, but its a good replacement for those 'filler' encounters. I really enjoyed the fact that my players had some serious discussion about how to handle the encounter, both as an overall approach and then inside the challenge itself.

One of the PCs lost 3 healing surges in the first round... that caused a bit of consternation, but another PC didn't lose any by being more cautious.


As for running full-on combats, I subscribe to Stalker0's guide to the Anti-Grind