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

[DND_Reborn]

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.

LOL it would be funny since we use TV for a VTT/secondary display to include a countdown timer on the screen for everyone to see! I know a couple players who would never be able to manage it. Heck, even 60 seconds would be rough for them.

 

[NotAYakk]

OD&D had slow combat.

Take a name level fighter and have it fight another name level fighter.

Compared to a level 1 fighter, the fighter's damage output is at most 2x or 3x higher (mainly caused by everything auto-hitting, while low level fighters missed a lot). But the fighter's toughness is 9x higher.

After name level, the fighter's HP stops going up nearly as fast, and the fighter's damage output increase also slows (going from 80% to 85% accuracy is a smaller bump than going from 30% to 35% accuracy percentage wise).

---

One thing OD&D did better than later editions was maintain the importance of an attack, instead of inflating numbers.

At low levels, an attack is a chance to land a blow. If it lands, the enemy is likely to be killed.

At high levels, an attack is a nearly guaranteed hit, but it takes many hits to drop a foe.

Despite damage per hit not moving much, if enemy HP grows inversely with PC accuracy, the number of swings remains unchanged.

In later versions of D&D, hit chance stays more level, and number of attacks grows. Resolving 2 or 3 attacks/round takes 2 to 3 times longer than one attack; the result? combat that takes the same number of rounds takes longer to evaluate.

4e attempted to fix this by scaling player damage, and not accuracy/attack count. It ended up failing because they didn't go all in; in 4e, your damage didn't scale enough to keep up with monster toughness: one of the only ways to have your damage per round keep up with monster toughness was to ... get more attacks.

In addition, rolling 7d12 and adding up all that damage is slow compared to rolling 1d12. As others have noted, the lower HP totals meant that lower damage expressions and less adding happens.

---

OD&D did the opposite with spells than with attacks. In OD&D, the chance of a spell landing dropped as you gained levels (and fought similar level foes), but the impact of a spell landing often grew.

Saving throws got better at higher levels; which means "spell accuracy" got worse.

Meanwhile, fireballs got bigger.

In theory, spell effectiveness (in fractions of enemy toughess) times accuracy remained relatively level.

For both spells and weapons, low level foes became auto-hit and auto-kill.

But against high level foes weapon attacks auto-hit and did attrition damage.

Against high level foes, spell attacks had a low chance to hit, but could end a fight. Damage spells (fireball) would deal attrition-ish damage (the enemy would save against the damage, taking half, with increasing likelihood).

---

5e is sort of a middle ground between 3e and 4e and OD&D. Attack counts go up modestly, accuracy goes up modestly, and damage per hit goes up modestly.

Big monsters tend to have legendary saves and high save checks, making save-or-lose spells less effective (like OD&D).

The numbers are bigger, so you have to add up more dice.

The greater number of taps (or attack attempts) to kill creatures, and the greater number of dice per tap, slows things down.

---

I suspect, but am not certain, that the "name level" loss of HD and going to static HP per level aligns with when (relative) accuracy stops giving as large a boost to damage per round.

---

Now, if the above is the case, how would I OD&D 5e? Note that this may involve changing encounter difficulty.

1) Replace extra attack(x). Now it is weapon master(x).

Weapon Master:
When take the attack action, roll an additional d20. You can replace your attack roll with it. If your weapon hits, it deals an extra weapon damage die.

You can instead choose to cleave. Make a single weapon attack targeting 2 creatures in range; any creature hit takes the same damage.

Fighter gets Weapon Master upgrades; they deal more +2/+3[W] and roll extra +2d20/+3d20 and let you cleave 3 or 4 targets.

This should be faster to resolve than extra attack. As a bonus, it makes the weakest fighter subclass (champion) more fun.

I haven't run the numbers on what it does to DPR. But it isn't obviously better/worse. I do like this however, I should run the numbers.

2) Give everyone (including monsters) full (or maybe half) proficiency bonus to saves. If you have proficiency in a save, add an extra 1/2 or full proficiency. (make spells less accurate).

3) Scale down monster HP to account for the reduction in damage.

4) Rescale cantrips a bit (saves get harder to land, making the attack ones better).

5) Compensate casters for the fact that save spells are harder to land somehow. Not sure how.

 

[Neonchameleon]

In later versions of D&D, hit chance stays more level, and number of attacks grows. Resolving 2 or 3 attacks/round takes 2 to 3 times longer than one attack; the result? combat that takes the same number of rounds takes longer to evaluate.

First, excellent analysis. Second I'm going to disagree with this part in specific.

Resolving 2 or 3 attacks/round with the same target number and same decisions being made doesn't IME take 2 to 3 times longer than one attack. It might for a computer - but for a player you only need to check the target number once (for both rolls) and you can easily grab two different coloured sets of dice. And it's one thought process. It takes longer than one attack, but not much longer.

3.X and 4e made different versions of the same mistake here. The 3.X iterative attacks mean that you've got to do linked but different calculations for each attack because there is at least one extra modifier on each attack (plus a different one on TWF). The 4e standard actions are fine for speed (as long as you don't go over about three or four dice; you're right that this is a problem at 7d12). The problem comes when you're using minor action or interrupt attacks. These are added processes and generally also have less familiarity (which speeds any process up, so although the mechanical actions between a two weapon fighting off-hand attack and a minor action attack encounter power may bethe same you'll always be doing the TWF).

Big monsters tend to have legendary saves and high save checks, making save-or-lose spells less effective (like OD&D).

The numbers are bigger, so you have to add up more dice.

The greater number of taps (or attack attempts) to kill creatures, and the greater number of dice per tap, slows things down.

The other thing is the way the hit points escalate with level. 4e hit points go up linearly. 5e's I would say go up faster - but whatever they do the CR charts in both the DMG and XgtE are utterly broken.

But there's one final major missing difference. And that's level range. oD&D was basically a level 1-10 game with a soft cap at L10 where player hit points slowed down. WotC D&D has levels up to 20 in play - and both 3.X and 4e have an epic tier with ridiculous modifiers.

 

[Zaukrie]

My players and I seem to like combat.....so I'm not sure what "too slow" really means......now, it can slog at the end of an encounter, but as stated above, once they've won, just start having the bad guys die on the next hit. For those that say it is too slow, do you not like combat, or do you want more discrete encounters per session?

 

[Zaukrie]

I think this may be part of why I'm noticing it more now.

Though, it's odd (to me) that a game focusing so much on a combat system is producing somewhat bland combat.

Our group certainly isn't opposed to combat. But we are opposed to burning several sessions on resolving a combat, especially when we have other aspects of the game we'd also like to get to. I think, to some extent, this puts pressure on a few of us to optimize -so as to make combat faster.

A lot of our combats devolve into the enemy swinging at PCs with high AC (and missing) and the PCs hitting often, but whittling away HP.

I've also noticed that higher level 5E seems to swing back and forth between 3E "problems" and 4E "problems." In 3E, "rocket tag" became a thing at higher levels. In 4E, my usual group had a tendency to steamroll encounters -even against supposedly deadly foes. It's a combo which produces a weird swinginess that (for me personally) isn't very engaging at either end.

Some of it might also be that (it appears) our tastes are starting to embrace breadth of play more than the usual 1-20 mode of advancement.

This is the issue with the decision to go with bounded accuracy....the only way to make high level monsters more powerful is to give them more hit points, and to have combat slog down. It is my main issue with 5e. If you keep the AC the same, and drop the hit points a ton, how, exactly, did an ancient dragon even survive that long? There has to be something that scales up to make them tougher, and if it isn't making them harder to hit, it is making them last longer when they are hit.

 

[NotAYakk]

First, excellent analysis. Second I'm going to disagree with this part in specific.

Resolving 2 or 3 attacks/round with the same target number and same decisions being made doesn't IME take 2 to 3 times longer than one attack. It might for a computer - but for a player you only need to check the target number once (for both rolls) and you can easily grab two different coloured sets of dice. And it's one thought process. It takes longer than one attack, but not much longer.

It doesn't have to take 2-3 x longer, it just has to take longer.

A round where you roll to attack (possibly with advantage), then work out how many hits, then roll damage for however many hits land, is slower than one where you only do it once. Even if you do everything right and efficiently (colored dice, etc).

A OD&D fighter attack might look like this:
d20 - 3, hits AC 9, 1d8+2 - 5 damage.

A 5e paladin attack with nothing really special going on might look like this:
d20+13 (17) hits AC 30, 1d12(4)+1d8(6)+7 = 17 (6 radiant)
d20+13 (5) hits AC 18, 1d12(10)+1d8(1)+7 = 18 (1 radiant)
ok first hit, second missed, so 17 total (6 radiant).

Even roll 20 doesn't make the second as fast as the first.

The thing is, the change in the state of the fiction between the two mechanics is the same. You went in there and wounded a big monster, and the big monster didn't die.

Possibly the 5 damage was the same percentage of the monster's total HP as the 17 was as well.

And going from 1 to 2 attacks? Might take 25% longer. 2 instead of 1 digit modifiers, an extra damage die, multiple damage types? Another 10% longer. Going from 2 to 3 attacks, another bit of slowdown.

The fiction-per-second goes down, which slows combat down. Optimizing for fiction-per-second is valuable. And in 5e as character power accumulates, so do mechanics, and those mechanics slow down the fiction.

3.X and 4e made different versions of the same mistake here. The 3.X iterative attacks mean that you've got to do linked but different calculations for each attack because there is at least one extra modifier on each attack (plus a different one on TWF). The 4e standard actions are fine for speed (as long as you don't go over about three or four dice; you're right that this is a problem at 7d12). The problem comes when you're using minor action or interrupt attacks. These are added processes and generally also have less familiarity (which speeds any process up, so although the mechanical actions between a two weapon fighting off-hand attack and a minor action attack encounter power may bethe same you'll always be doing the TWF).

The interrupt attacks are a huge load -- because they interrupt other turns, breaking the flow of the game and making it take longer to get around a round.

4e made multiple smaller taps far more effective than one large tap because you could stack static per-tap damage. 4e also made HP grow fast enough that the "big taps" at high levels where not big enough; a 7d12 attack by the time you got it didn't do anything impressive.

3 1[W] attacks did more damage than a 7[W] attack did, but took longer to resolve. And the 7[W] attack had less fiction impact than a 3[W] attack at level 1, but also took longer to resolve.

The "optimal" 4e weapon user had enough encounter and at-will powers to make 3-4 attacks on their turn then 1 interrupt, at least for the first 2-3 rounds of the game. This far outdamaged any "big hit" build, mainly because 4e didn't have many optimization opportunities to boost a big hit, and had plenty for small repeated hits.

Crit-fishing was the closest to optimizable "big hit" and it also relied on rolling a lot of dice. One avenger I played had an encounter power that did 4 attacks, each rolling twice, each hitting for 2d6+big static, a 19-20 crit range and a fistful of crit dice.

An attack round could easily involve rolling upwards of 30 dice, and as fast as I could roll and scan and the like, this took time.

The fiction impact of that? Decent, but it was mostly a single number (damage) reduced from the enemy's HP. (the number was often "all of it").

All of those additions, conditions, rolls, checks -- they where mechanics that didn't directly impact the fiction.

The other thing is the way the hit points escalate with level. 4e hit points go up linearly. 5e's I would say go up faster - but whatever they do the CR charts in both the DMG and XgtE are utterly broken.

4e monster HP where (L+3)*8 or so.

The DMG charts aren't as far off as you think. They are tools for calculating CR from a monster, not per-level advice.

Look at bruisers -- monsters that do little other than soak up damage and deal it. They'll match the CR charts far closer. Even then, because CR is the product of offence and defence, a monster will often be way higher in defence or offence.

Then you have to factor in the myriad special defences CR11+ creatures usually have.

I hear people talking about how CR charts are broken, but when I take a non-cherry-picked monster without lots of weird abilities from a MM and paper-napkin crunch it through the CR calculating algorithm, I don't get a value that far off from the MM value.

What more, if I take the CR algorithm and I reverse engineer what I suspect they are doing "behind the scenes", I get something with reasonable amount of mathematical elegance; XP is the primary unit it appears. Take HP times DPR, throw in a modification factor for AC/ATK, then multiply it by a constant (there may also be an exponent in there, I forget off the top of my head), and you get XP. And then CR<->XP is pretty close to a constant and exponent relationship.

The exponents involved are close to the exponents that mimic the "number of foes" scaling on XP, which calls back to the military tactics rule of how armies scale (which is between linearly and quadratically; the first is how armies that fight 1:1 scale, the second is how armies where unlimited "ganging up" can occur scale).

The 5e designers did the math, they just didn't make it as obvoius as the 4e designers did.

But there's one final major missing difference. And that's level range. oD&D was basically a level 1-10 game with a soft cap at L10 where player hit points slowed down. WotC D&D has levels up to 20 in play - and both 3.X and 4e have an epic tier with ridiculous modifiers.

As mentioned, OD&D fighter-type damage output relied on more accuracy climbing instead of damage per hit or swings per turn climbing.

There is a limit on how much accuracy you can add (eventually you always hit). So more meat can't be compensated for with more accuracy one you are almost always hitting.

 

[iserith]

My players and I seem to like combat.....so I'm not sure what "too slow" really means......now, it can slog at the end of an encounter, but as stated above, once they've won, just start having the bad guys die on the next hit. For those that say it is too slow, do you not like combat, or do you want more discrete encounters per session?

I was wondering the same thing. A running joke in my circle is that D&D doesn't have combat in it because if you tune in to any random D&D stream, there's hardly ever any combats. Mostly just no-stakes social interaction with quirky, cagey NPCs or between PCs. Oh, and lots of shopping.

So my question is similar to yours: Is combat perceived as being slow because it's keeping people away from the content they prefer? Or would they do more combat if combat wasn't so slow (for them)?

 

[Neonchameleon]

It doesn't have to take 2-3 x longer, it just has to take longer.

A round where you roll to attack (possibly with advantage), then work out how many hits, then roll damage for however many hits land, is slower than one where you only do it once. Even if you do everything right and efficiently (colored dice, etc).

Oh, indeed. I was specifically objecting to the 2-3 times longer that you claimed in the post I was replying to - not to the principle that it's longer.

A OD&D fighter attack might look like this:
d20 - 3, hits AC 9, 1d8+2 - 5 damage.

A 5e paladin attack with nothing really special going on might look like this:
d20+13 (17) hits AC 30, 1d12(4)+1d8(6)+7 = 17 (6 radiant)
d20+13 (5) hits AC 18, 1d12(10)+1d8(1)+7 = 18 (1 radiant)
ok first hit, second missed, so 17 total (6 radiant).

Even roll 20 doesn't make the second as fast as the first.

I will say the ascending AC sped things up a bit. But not enough for the multiple attacks.

The thing is, the change in the state of the fiction between the two mechanics is the same. You went in there and wounded a big monster, and the big monster didn't die.

Here I disagree slightly. The change in state between the two mechanics isn't quite the same - smites are a limited resource and I think that's where the extra d8 comes from.

And this is why I defend (a) attacks that spend resources, (b) attacks with forced movement, (c) interrupt attacks, and (d) attacks with riders like "knocked prone". They all change the state of the fiction (how much forced movement matters depends on the terrain).

I've commented and stand by my comment that after 4e's levels of forced movement going back to systems that use battlemaps but no worthwhile forced movement feels like acting against a green screen rather than actually on set.

The interrupt attacks are a huge load -- because they interrupt other turns, breaking the flow of the game and making it take longer to get around a round.

On the other hand having them there can be pretty serious changes to the game state. Especially ones that involve leaping in the way of an attack or blocking an attack for a friend. There's a cost, but a significant benefit.

4e made multiple smaller taps far more effective than one large tap because you could stack static per-tap damage. 4e also made HP grow fast enough that the "big taps" at high levels where not big enough; a 7d12 attack by the time you got it didn't do anything impressive.

Yes, this was definitely an issue

I would say I was pretty happy with the result of five damage dice off a single tap encounter power in my 4e session last week - but I'm playing a level 4 character. The dominance of multi-attacks doesn't come in until later.

I hear people talking about how CR charts are broken, but when I take a non-cherry-picked monster without lots of weird abilities from a MM and paper-napkin crunch it through the CR calculating algorithm, I don't get a value that far off from the MM value.

The problem comes when you run it the other way. The hit points recommended by the CR charts for a given level are ridiculous. And in practice I don't want to calculate the CR for existing monsters, I want to use the CR charts to help build my own monster.

 

[Ancalagon]

Thankfully DND doesn't have the horrors of " I roll to hit, you roll to not be hit", which is both slow, annoying and frustrating.

I know exactly what you mean, and there is a solution - Troika! has it. It's an opposed skill check. Whoever wins hits the other - no matter if they were the attacker or defender. So with the exception of ties, every attack = someone getting hit. Melee combat goes fast in Troika!

 

[DND_Reborn]

I know exactly what you mean, and there is a solution - Troika! has it. It's an opposed skill check. Whoever wins hits the other - no matter if they were the attacker or defender. So with the exception of ties, every attack = someone getting hit. Melee combat goes fast in Troika!

Shadowrun (2E anyway) does the same thing, but only for melee combat. The "victor" inflicts damage on the other. We've thought about adopting it to 5E and are still thinking about it.