And to control the pace, you don't need to run 20 rounds of combat every long rest, you just need the party to believe that there could be 20 rounds of combat before that long rest. Vary your adventure days, have the occasional after BBEG lieutenant fights (where the BBEGs lieutenants show up a minute or two after the initial battle), have 40 round combat days, etc. Also, I've found Deadly combats typically take about 6 rounds. 3 of those is 18, very close to the recommended 20 and fits in neatly with 2 short rests per day.
I see the RPG experience as more than a haunted house ride. And I don't do adventure paths.
I mostly don't build encounters to any guidelines, no. I build them to be challenge to the PCs that'll A) do some work in the narrative and B) be worth playing out at the table. But even a combat that doesn't go more than three rounds is likely to be more than half an hour at my tables. Part of that will be because I run for five or six PCs, part of that will be because not all my players are super speedy about declaration and/or resolution (and I'm not bothered by how long things take, the players are attentive and responsive, no one's checked out).
Alright, well that’s definitely the problem.
I don’t suspect you’re much slower than most, no. You’ve just got an above average sized group of players who tend not to play at a very fast pace, fighting combats that are probably significantly above the expected difficulty. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but it does all contribute to your combats taking a long time to resolve. So, if you’re imagining 6+ combats like that a day, yeah, no wonder it sounds like a boring slog. I recommend at some point trying to run encounters according to the DMG guidelines for a group of 4 or 5 players. I think you will find that it’s much easier to get through them very quickly and get many more of them done in a session. You might not prefer that to how you currently run things, and that’s fine if so. But you might find it illuminating. In my experience, running any game as intended has a way of revealing why a lot of the design choices that would otherwise feel, frankly, stupid, were made, and even if you don’t like the game as it was designed, understanding how it was designed and why can be really helpful in coming up with house rules that directly and specifically fix the things you don’t like about it, with fewer unwanted side-effects.
Not sure what you mean by this. Poisons in both the 2014 and 2024 version of 5E frequently inflict the poisoned condition, which means disadvantage on attack rolls. That is no joke.
Yeah, and there's also the problem of making six or eight fights in a day make any kind of narrative sense. I think I might have run a gantlet that intense once, in somewhere over 300 sessions of 5e-ish games. I'm also perfectly happy to run a ten- or eleven-round combat that consumes an entire four-hour session, if the narrative that emerges calls for such a fight.
Prior to the 2024 DMG, most attacks that dealt poison damage first had to hit with an attack roll, usually dealing a very small amount of piercing or slashing damage on a hit, and then forcing a Constitution saving throw, dealing a much larger amount of poison damage on a failed save, and often (but not always) half as much poison damage on a successful one.
sure, the point was more that the danger is by default artificial
doesn’t matter, I could have written no one ever makes it to level 5 just as well, which affects your game whether you play an AP or not
And not infrequently also inflicting the poisoned condition. I know I've run monsters like that quite recently, though admittedly I don't remember whether they came from the official MM or not.
