D&D 5E Has D&D Combat Always Been Slow?

[Raith5]

I think 5e combat is quick. As much as I loved 4e, 5e is much, much faster. I think 5e is also significantly faster than 3e, especially at higher levels.

I have to say that I think 5e can be a bit too quick with climatic fights with solos. Im not sure if I am sold the way 5e does legendary actions etc. I think I would be willing to slow fights a touch -especially with elite monsters and solos - if big monsters were a touch more complex and unpredictable.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

That's a big part of it. Round-to-round, little meaningful change happens. There's little functional difference between the target having 100 hp or 1 hp; more HP just means it takes more time. While that's not necessarily unique to specifically D&D, lately it feels a lot slower and a lot more static when playing D&D.

This can be an issue, but it is possibly more due to encounter design. A 5-round combat of just standing there whacking a dragon felt longer than a 10-round mixed mass melee that took three times as long to resolve. When you're swinging at the boss one round, then cutting down a couple of its minions the next, and climbing up a wall the round after, its a lot more engaging than the more static fight.

Typically, yes. We do have one newer player (the son of one of our regulars) who is a little slower than average, but that's because he's new to rpgs in general. I think one of the reasons why the contrast between FFG Star Wars and D&D has started to hit me is because building dice pools for SWs (the game handles bonuses by adding more dice to roll) takes extra time, but it still seems to move quicker for the group.

This is the biggest issue that I've noticed: In terms of basic resolution mechanics 5e is as fast as most other systems, but there are a lot more newer players for 5e around, and actually deciding what to do on your round may take them longer.
Having more options can also play into this: martial-type characters in 5e often have more options than earlier editions (excepting 4e or course). Deciding whether to Action Surge, use Second Wind, or activate a maneuver means longer thinking time than if your only option is just rolling attack and damage.

Unrelated (I think,) but I've noticed that (optimization) tends to lead to a weird swingy-ness in which 5E seems to bounce back and forth between the "problems" of 3E and 4E without a happy medium. Either we're steamrolling an encounter (but it's taking a while to hack through the HP) or we lose initiative and get hit with some manner of save-or-suck effect from a high level creature. (It wasn't with the same group I'm talking about here, but I noticed that with Curse of Strahd; Strahd himself was a cakewalk, but other encounters nearly killed the party right out of the gate. There was rarely an encounter which fell somewhere in the middle.)

From this and other descriptions, it sounds like your DM might be prone to running only fairly major encounters. If you only do a few deadly encounters per long rest, they do get swingy. (As well as class balance tending to go out of the window.)
I think someone asked this before, but how many encounters does your group tend to fight between rests, and what level are you?

 

[Neonchameleon]

Now, and here is the crux of the speed: The VAST majority of "modifiers" during combat are on a case-by-case basis and based on the DM's adjudication of each individual situation/action! I can't stress enough just how FAST this is in play. When a Player says "Fellborn jumps down off the balcony, trying to slice the ogre in two with his two handed sword!" ...the DM just thinks "Ok, that's 10'. You'll take d6 damage. You get +1 to hit from attacking above, and do double damage as if you charged, but if you miss, you will be on the ground and automatically get an attack from the ogre as you stand up". Done. The player accepts it or not. There is no need to flip through books, look up special abilities that might apply, check out the rules for Athletic Skills to see if there is an adjustment/modifier, or anything of the sort. A DM can make a decision on the spot in seconds...not the minutes it may take to flip through 3 books.
..
So there you have it. With the more "rules a game gets", the slower it becomes; kinda like Windows OS. Go back to earlier editions, with a MUCH greater focus on "Rulings not Rules", and "If it's not there...make it up", and you get a LOT of speed in regards to game-flow.

Alternatively you, instead of being able to do what you know you should, need to read the DM's mind to see if something which one DM would reward will be rewarded or penalised by another DM. This leads to analysis paralysis and frustration on behalf of the player - and it leads to frustration and irritation on behalf of the DM who needs to ass-pull a new set of rulings each time the players come up with a set of wacky stunts. And for consistency a good DM will remember what they did last time.

Even in D&D 3.X you didn't actually need to flip through three separate books to adjudicate something like that, and both 4e and 5e are actively simpler. Meanwhile AD&D is larded with rules (such as the helmet rules). You just don't know which set the DM is using.

An actually fast game is something like Fate - which has a framework rather than relying on DM ass-pulls. That way, instead of having to ask the DM "If I were to try this" the player has a much clearer way of making the calling themselves and doesn't have to stop to ask the DM for a 30 second ruling which they then need to figure out and then figure out if it's something that their character would take the risk for - or something that there's a misunderstanding behind.

Rulings slow things down every time they are needed while players can learn rules. Good game design isn't "rulings, not rules", it structures using powerful rules and rulings just fill in the gaps; the idea you want "rulings not rules" is an excuse for shipping games that are not fit for purpose. (This is entirely independent of the big thing slowing 5e combat down - "bullet sponge" enemy design where an AD&D ogre had 19hp and an 5e one has 59 by default).

 

[Neonchameleon]

So, my question is three parts:

1) Do you feel D&D combat is slow (or "drags")?

2) If yes, how do you address this in 5E?

3) Has it always been that way? I'm not familiar with very much of 1E or 2E.

There's a difference between slow and draggy. I find 5e combat to be horribly draggy while not being that slow by WotC D&D standards, The difference is that slow is the length of time a combat takes as measured by the clock, draggy is about how interesting and tense the combat is in that time. It's possible to have a two hour combat that doesn't drag because everyone is on the edge of their seats and to have a half hour combat that does because it's just so tedious.

5e combat is IME both faster and draggier than both 3.X and 4e combat. This is for two reasons:

• "Bullet-sponge" enemy design
• Tactical position being made almost meaningless deemphasising tactics

Other people have started to mention the bullet sponge design. Thanks to bounded accuracy enemies have a narrow range of AC and saving throws, meaning that the biggest way most NPCs have to protect themselves is their hit points. You'll normally hit them and have to chew through their hp until they hit zero. In AD&D your average ogre had 19 hp. In 3.5 your average ogre had 29hp - but you were much more likely to have a bonus to damage from your stat. In 5e? Your average ogre has 59hp and an AC of only 11. Even a first level PC is probably hitting that on 6s - the goal is just to chew through the enemy's hit points as they stand there. Bullet sponges are known to be one of the least engaging ways of increasing difficulty in a video game (having to pump more shots into the enemy) and it applies in RPGs too.

Meanwhile tactical positioning barely matters in 5e. In 3.5 and 4e flanking is a thing - move to opposite sides of the enemy (a risky place to be) for +2 to hit. It encourages you to try to move into certain spots and out of others. 5e drops flanking to an optional rule. In 3.5 and 4e you get significant bonuses by trapping the archers and the casters in combat; in 3.5 they are forced to switch from using Dex to Str to hit, and in 4e artillery NPCS get +25% baseline damage at range and -25% baseline damage in melee. In 5e, thanks to the weapon finesse rules being a default the NPC archer who draws their shortsword for melee is using exactly the same stats and just drops their damage die from d8 for the longbow to d6 for the shortsword while still using dex. W00t. And forcing the caster into melee? Just as pointless - they take disadvantage on spells that make attack rolls, so they instead use spells that force saving throws at full effectiveness. The only real part of tactical positioning that reliably matters is focus fire.

TSR-era D&D was based on a paradigm of combats being fast to resolve. There wasn't much you could do in them by the rules except pick spells, but when a fight happened it was intended to be fast. In the game of "see whose health bar drops first" a whiff is easy to resolve and when the health bars dropped they dropped fast. 3.X and 4e D&D were based on a paradigm of combat being engaging and you had time and options to counter-play the enemies and rescue each other. 5e is somewhere between the two a level of tactical engagement that's about 80% of the way towards TSR era D&D and a level of speed that's about 75% of the way towards 3.X and 4e. I find this an unhappy medium.

 

[Don Durito]

Some things could really due to be put back in.

Flanking is difficult to make work but the following additions could probably help.

- Characters can use a reaction to intercept someone trying to move past them (as in 13th Age) - if measuring squares, perhaps put a limit of 15ft on how far you can move doing this.
- Using a ranged attack or casting a spell that takes an action (but not bonus action spells) in melee provokes an attack of opportunity from a melee character - which in turn forces a concentration on a hit or the spell is lost (this is really important as it, 1) makes it much more important for the party to work together and 2) encourages characters to take risks such as eating attacks of opportunity in order to park themself in front of the enemy spellcaster to shut them down.

The first one helps as it mitigates against the second.

 

[Argyle King]

There's a difference between slow and draggy. I find 5e combat to be horribly draggy while not being that slow by WotC D&D standards, The difference is that slow is the length of time a combat takes as measured by the clock, draggy is about how interesting and tense the combat is in that time. It's possible to have a two hour combat that doesn't drag because everyone is on the edge of their seats and to have a half hour combat that does because it's just so tedious.

5e combat is IME both faster and draggier than both 3.X and 4e combat. This is for two reasons:

• "Bullet-sponge" enemy design
• Tactical position being made almost meaningless deemphasising tactics

Other people have started to mention the bullet sponge design. Thanks to bounded accuracy enemies have a narrow range of AC and saving throws, meaning that the biggest way most NPCs have to protect themselves is their hit points. You'll normally hit them and have to chew through their hp until they hit zero. In AD&D your average ogre had 19 hp. In 3.5 your average ogre had 29hp - but you were much more likely to have a bonus to damage from your stat. In 5e? Your average ogre has 59hp and an AC of only 11. Even a first level PC is probably hitting that on 6s - the goal is just to chew through the enemy's hit points as they stand there. Bullet sponges are known to be one of the least engaging ways of increasing difficulty in a video game (having to pump more shots into the enemy) and it applies in RPGs too.

Meanwhile tactical positioning barely matters in 5e. In 3.5 and 4e flanking is a thing - move to opposite sides of the enemy (a risky place to be) for +2 to hit. It encourages you to try to move into certain spots and out of others. 5e drops flanking to an optional rule. In 3.5 and 4e you get significant bonuses by trapping the archers and the casters in combat; in 3.5 they are forced to switch from using Dex to Str to hit, and in 4e artillery NPCS get +25% baseline damage at range and -25% baseline damage in melee. In 5e, thanks to the weapon finesse rules being a default the NPC archer who draws their shortsword for melee is using exactly the same stats and just drops their damage die from d8 for the longbow to d6 for the shortsword while still using dex. W00t. And forcing the caster into melee? Just as pointless - they take disadvantage on spells that make attack rolls, so they instead use spells that force saving throws at full effectiveness. The only real part of tactical positioning that reliably matters is focus fire.

TSR-era D&D was based on a paradigm of combats being fast to resolve. There wasn't much you could do in them by the rules except pick spells, but when a fight happened it was intended to be fast. In the game of "see whose health bar drops first" a whiff is easy to resolve and when the health bars dropped they dropped fast. 3.X and 4e D&D were based on a paradigm of combat being engaging and you had time and options to counter-play the enemies and rescue each other. 5e is somewhere between the two a level of tactical engagement that's about 80% of the way towards TSR era D&D and a level of speed that's about 75% of the way towards 3.X and 4e. I find this an unhappy medium.

I don't have much of a response yet, but a lot of what was said here seems to cover how I've been feeling about the game for a while.

 

[Argyle King]

This can be an issue, but it is possibly more due to encounter design. A 5-round combat of just standing there whacking a dragon felt longer than a 10-round mixed mass melee that took three times as long to resolve. When you're swinging at the boss one round, then cutting down a couple of its minions the next, and climbing up a wall the round after, its a lot more engaging than the more static fight.

This is the biggest issue that I've noticed: In terms of basic resolution mechanics 5e is as fast as most other systems, but there are a lot more newer players for 5e around, and actually deciding what to do on your round may take them longer.
Having more options can also play into this: martial-type characters in 5e often have more options than earlier editions (excepting 4e or course). Deciding whether to Action Surge, use Second Wind, or activate a maneuver means longer thinking time than if your only option is just rolling attack and damage.



From this and other descriptions, it sounds like your DM might be prone to running only fairly major encounters. If you only do a few deadly encounters per long rest, they do get swingy. (As well as class balance tending to go out of the window.)
I think someone asked this before, but how many encounters does your group tend to fight between rests, and what level are you?

I guess options could be a problem, but that's not what I feel is happening. I mean, one of the other games I play frequently is GURPS and the options aren't an issue there. My guess is that some of the difference comes from how HP are treated, but I am not 100% sure. It's difficult to compare two games which operate so differently.

As far as options, I'm inclined to say that 5E has less options than we've played with in the past (in either older editions or different games).

---

The amount of encounters varies. Over the past few years, level varies as well. We've gone 1-20 a few times at this point. Though, I think our most recent actual full campaign ended around level 12 or so before we moved to a different game.

The mini-campaign to just kinda screw around for a few weeks until we could get back to our usual game was level 8 characters.

Offhand, I would say that it depends upon the in-game time constraints of what we're doing (i.e. are we leisurely walking somewhere or racing to get somewhere,) but I would guess around 5 combats per adventuring day. Sometimes it may be more, but sometimes it may be less.

The usual group members lean toward playing classes which refresh resources on short rests. Wizards tend to be somewhat rare in our 5E games, unless it's a multiclass into something. I don't think we would struggle against much more difficulty if more encounters were added.

It's hard to give a concrete answer on what our average amount of encounters is because it varies a lot depending upon what we're doing in-game.

Walking through goblin-infested woods or exploring a layer of hell? There are a lot of encounters.
Buying passage on a ship to go somewhere? Maybe one or two random encounters as we navigate.
Defending castle walls from an invading army (part of our last full-length campaign)? We had waves of encounters against a large horde of foes.

When I've been in Adventure League games, it is with different people. Things get slower there (as well as more difficult and deadly,) because of more newer players and more unfamiliarity with the tactics of how the other people sitting at a table approach things.

 

[dave2008]

We tried this. It only lasted one gaming session. It worked, and combats ran much faster and more smoothly. We went from 90 to 120 minute combats down to 60 to 75 minute combats. However, everyone also agreed that it made the game feel literally like a business meeting. It just stopped being fun, and turned combat into a chore of dice rolling to endure and grind through rather than an enjoyable pastime. People stopped paying attention to what others were doing, too, because they were focused on getting ready for their next turn rather than observing the game.

As a player at a table with a typically combat-heavy, kick-in-the-door style of play, it was kind of a profound experience to play D&D and hate running the combat encounters. This was one of our last sessions before abandoning 4e and going back to 3e and Savage Worlds for a few years before 5e released. I don't think that's coincidence.

That is interesting. We have a very different experience. Though it was difficult at first, once we got the hang of it, combat was much more exciting, frantic and engaging. Everyone is on their toes and really alert. The action is bang, bang, bang, and feels more like the chaos of combat to us, requiring quick decisions and reactions. Now it took a bit to get there, but at this point we are so used to it that it is second nature. We don't even really keep track of the time anymore, we just do it naturally.

 

[MichaelSomething]

It's threads like these that make me want to create a legendary monster who's power is that they grow stronger based on the time the player takes. For every real life minute that passes, it gains bonus damage dice (or something like that).

 

[DND_Reborn]

I don't have much of a response yet, but a lot of what was said here seems to cover how I've been feeling about the game for a while.

Again, the bullet-sponge thing @Neonchameleon mentions is handled by the suggestions I made in my first post.

I hate to sound like I am harping on this, but I really think it might help your game and make combat faster for you:
1. Cut HP in half for monsters/NPCs. PCs only get CON mod at level 1.
2. Bump AC by 4-5 points for everything.
3. Everything gets save proficiency. Prior proficiency in saves becomes advantage.

As far as tactics go, IME using battle maps has helped a lot.

What is missing is the other tactics which make options like knocking an opponent prone or disarming them more meaningful.