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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NinjaPaladin" data-source="post: 6258425" data-attributes="member: 6747691">It's left up to interpretation, and I've seen different groups handle it in different ways. Some people leave the GM entirely in charge, and the GM is the arbiter of when a rolled-icon comes into play. Others (like me) let the players suggest things. It's the first time I've seen something (at least in a d20 system) that would work for a heist or thriller game, where you the GM could have the heroes all at gunpoint in a featureless room, and then the player can say, "Aha, but I know something you don't," put the icon die on the table, and then essentially retcon in THE TWIST ("I suspected you might double-cross us, so I called in some favors with ATF. The guard right behind you has been deep cover for ten months..."), and have it give the fun of "AHA, what happens NOW?"(And for non-mind-breaking stuff, it also just allows people to get out of trouble or turn things in a direction that is more where they want to go. Improv, playing along, letting people make their own narrative. Like I said, I had a demon turn out to be someone's ex-boyfriend, which was kind of hilarious. He's become a recurring character.)The 13th Age folks have an organized play program, where they send out free adventures via e-mail for GMs to run, either at cons, shops, or in their own homes. The adventures come in chapters or sections, like "Crown of the Lich King, Part 1 of 6", so GMs who are tired or stumped can play this out of the box, and players without a constant GM can also go from game to game knowing roughly what's going on at any given time (you always get a clue at the end of part 1, you find a contact at the end of part 2, and so on, until you get the crown at the end of part 6). I understand that 4e and Pathfinder have similar programs.I've only run the organized play stuff a little myself, since I like my campaign just fine, but the organized play adventures are GREAT sources of fun new monsters and new ideas (like the use of montage sequences to get quickly through things you don't want to spend a lot of time on). So even if you don't intend to run them as written, I would absolutely take a look at them and mine them for content.The link to sign up (and get access to the current adventure and all past ones) is at:<a href="http://www.pelgranepress.com/?p=12301" target="_blank">http://www.pelgranepress.com/?p=12301</a>So, only speaking for myself:I largely sat out 4e and Pathfinder -- played some 4e but had work/life conspiring to make it hard to get a game going, so I cannot compare those except in terms of what I have heard.I ran a 3e campaign from 1st-20th level, and by the end, even a speed-bump fight was likely to take 45 minutes to an hour, and for the big chapter-ending boss battles, a single round (5-6 players plus an equal number of monsters) could take upwards of an hour. We’d play from 6:00-10:30, telling jokes and having fun but never entirely stopping, and might only get through half of a big boss battle. In contrast, I’ve run 13[SUP]th[/SUP] at conventions as a “learn to play” kind of deal. I had three hours slotted, and the first hour was character generation and explaining basic concepts. With two hours remaining, I have still (every time I’ve done this) gotten through two short fights, a montage scene that would essentially be close to a 4E skill challenge, and a harder boss fight.  So, two hours for three fights and a roleplaying/skill-challenge section sounds like an average of 30 minutes per fight, roughly? To be fair, part of that is that the characters are low level. Higher-level characters generally have more options and might take more time. That said, it was mitigated by including some people who had never played any kind of RPG before, which is not a problem one usually faces in one’s weekly campaign. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Part of the speed is per-round. Simple classes have fewer options (but are still powerful enough that they aren’t weak, just simple), and even complex classes don’t have to worry about figuring out spaces on a grid for area-effect spells. It’s just, “Well, that’s a lot of guys. I’m busting out the spell that hits up to three enemies.” The lack of a grid also lets people forget about the environment unless said environment is fun or exciting in some way. (I included cover and dark areas because they were fun, and still used minis on a table, but the minis were just “What guy am I whacking?”, not “Okay, I have this many spaces to move…”) Also, effects and abilities are simpler in general to keep track of. For buffs, things are usually “lasts until end of your next turn” or “lasts all battle”, and for penalties, things are usually “lasts until end of your next turn” or “save to end this effect at”, like you’d see in 4E. This gets rid of things like effects lasting 3 rounds, forcing people to track lots of different status modifiers. (There are still some, and in a boss fight with multiple casters, they CAN add up, but I’ve found them easier to track in my experience.) Another part of the speed is number of rounds. Because of the escalation die (a d6 that adds (number of rounds of combat you’ve completed) to all attack rolls made by the party), people are hitting significantly more often by the end of the fight, meaning that the end-of-fight grind-down isn’t so difficult (when you’ve beaten the really dangerous guy and now just have to grind down the tanky brute sidekick). Even without the escalation die, though, the fact that martial classes scale in damage just like casters means that bad guys can go down FAST. I don’t believe I EVER reached +6 on the Escalation Die in the games I ran at conventions, which means that every fight was over in six rounds or fewer. (I’ve had some fights reach that point in my home campaign, but those were usually staggered-enemies fights, where the heroes took out the bad guys they saw, thought they were done, but then SURPRISE, the real tough enemies showed up – which in effect meant that the party had to do two back-to-back fights, with the bad news of no chance to heal and recover spells but the good news of lasts-all-battle buffs not expiring.) In the games I run with my kids, things go a little slower, because the boys want to describe everything and add leaping and grappling hooks and sudden rocket attacks that I somehow have to make sense of… but a normal fight still tends to take about a half hour, likely since I’m only running it for two players. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I hope that helps. I’m sure mileage varies.</blockquote>

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