Systems Where You Dread Running Combat

[Jay Murphy1]

My observing its fraught is not an identical set with describing it as always failing (if that was so, almost no OSR game would be very satisfactory to most people).

I'm not understanding what you mean here. Care to clarify?

 

[Jay Murphy1]

That's an entirely separate issue to how interesting or not combat is.

I do not agree. Fighting a hated enemy is surely more interesting than fighting the town guard? On either side of the table.

 

[CleverNickName]

Could you define clunky?

Clunky means "awkward and difficult to handle," "outdated," or "heavy and cumbersome."

 

[Jay Murphy1]

Clunky means "awkward and difficult to handle," "outdated," or "heavy and cumbersome."

Thank you. I would apply heavy and cumbersome to Champions. I can't think of any other game I've played where the rules got in the way of me managing a superhero pace for a superhero game. I passed on Savage Worlds when I read it. That system fits the first descriptor.

 

[Argyle King]

Your experience isn't typical, I'd hazard.
In a 3 hour session in store of D&D 5E, I've routinely gotten through 3-4 encounters of "average" difficulty.
Sentinel Comics it's more like 2-3 encounters of "average" difficulty
In a 5 hour session of AD&D 2E, in store, I would struggle to get through the Retail Play modules with 5-10 encounters.
In my home games, AD&D combats typically took 30 minutes to an hour. Cyclopedia, 20 to 40 minutes. 5E varied from 10 minutes to an hour, save for double-deadly which ran up to two hours.
My SG1 game via discord had several hour to 1.5 hour fights, but that was because of careful use of terrain and the slowdown of VOIP gaming with a VTT, and two players severely prone to analysis paralysis.

Perhaps not, but I'd posit that you needn't look far to find threads trying to do monster design and HP differently.

Anecdotally, the slowest games in which I've been involved have been Adventurer's League.

I think 5th is relatively fast in the first tier of the game. It gets slower as the game stacks more numbers vertically.

It's also worth mentioning that "drag" isn't strictly just time either. Yes, time is a large component. However, how that time is spent is also relevant. 4th Edition could also be very slow, but encounter design was more dynamic with more moving pieces, so it often felt like more was happening (even when the amount of rounds was the same). Likewise, combat was less static.

 

[pemerton]

There are only so many ways you can describe the same "I swing my sword" and "I cast Eldritch Blast" before people start rolling their eyes. When the battle scene is already taking over an hour, nobody is going to care what it looks like this time.

I don't read @Jay Murphy1 as talking about vivid descriptions. It's about exciting actions and their resolution.

Like @Thomas Shey, I'm not sure about the universalisability of the particular mechanical techniques being used, but that's a separate thing.

 

[Argyle King]

So if you are comparing D&D to other RPGs, that's pretty much meaningless as a response, which was comparing this to previous versions of D&D where the rounds of combat has stayed fairly static even moving to lower defense but more HPs.

See my previous post for comparison to other editions of D&D.

I mentioned 4E in my previous post.

3rd Edition was slow at high levels but for different reasons.

In my previous post, I mention time as well as how time is spent.

4E was slow because of growing HP. But I've found that "fixing" 4E encounter design and monster math -without screwing with other parts of the game- was easier. Also, as already said... there was usually a better illusion of something happening, even if I was just chipping away at HP.

For similar reasons, I find that FFG Star Wars combat feels smoother. In D&D, we're counting encounters. In Edge of the Empire (a version of FFG Star Wars,) the group I usually game with has had session-long "encounters" which were fun to play through because they were always evolving and moving forward in some way. Rather than X-encounters per day, slogging through HP, and so forth; an encounter could (and has) encompass a chase, a tie-fighter battle, a blaster shoot out, and a rush to jump to hyperspace before being tractored into an empire ship. Playing through all of that as one huge evolving encounter still worked and transitions from one scene to the next almost always feels as though you're moving toward something. It rarely feels like I'm chipping away at a largely unchanged situation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do not agree. Fighting a hated enemy is surely more interesting than fighting the town guard? On either side of the table.

Not intrinsically, no. I've been in combats over the years with theoretically big bads we've had to deal with the consequences of for weeks of play, and they still weren't interesting to fight, and I've had one-off opponents who were.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not understanding what you mean here. Care to clarify?

Fraught means there's a lot of failure states, not that it automatically fails. Like most such things you can have groups and individuals for whom its never a problem (and of course individuals for whom it is but for various reasons don't say so).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Thank you. I would apply heavy and cumbersome to Champions. I can't think of any other game I've played where the rules got in the way of me managing a superhero pace for a superhero game. I passed on Savage Worlds when I read it. That system fits the first descriptor.

Where, while I consider Hero probably a bit more than I want to deal with, I always found it dynamic and engaging, and find Savage Worlds usually an acceptable compromise.