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Message: <blockquote data-quote="alien270" data-source="post: 6258802" data-attributes="member: 6698097">In my last campaign the problem with combat length was partially party composition, and partially because my group sometimes has issues with people leaving the room for smoke breaks, paying more attention to smart phones, etc. (which isn't a fault of the system).  The party was problematic because there was a defense-specced Paladin, a sword and board Fighter, and a healing-specced Cleric (later when we got a 4th player who made a Monk combat got a little faster).  They basically opted to win by attrition, and as a GM I felt I couldn't threaten them easily (especially the Paladin), and so I had to increase the level and/or numbers of monsters.  Problem was, they didn't do a whole lot of damage (the Fighter could, but has epically terrible dice), and so most fights took 10+ rounds.  These fights could get into the 1-1.5 hour range, but these guys are not the most efficient at taking their turns either (the Fighter would often take several minutes to decide what to do, as if he hadn't thought about it during the previous turns, only to whiff).  My current campaign has run for just 2 sessions now, and so the players are still getting used to their characters.  The player with the biggest "distractions during the game" problem doesn't know his Rogue very well, there are 2 Bards (arguably the most complex class in the game; one of them is a player brand-new to d20 who was only recently introduced to RPGs through Edge of the Empire), and the players who know there characters best are the Wizard and Sorcerer.  Obviously I expect combat to speed up once everyone gets used to their characters, but still their first few sessions were encouraging.  They ended up bypassing several fights, but they did have one double-strength encounter in the first session that ran about 30 minutes.  First fight with new characters, so there was a lot of rules-referencing, but I was extremely efficient at running the monsters since I wanted to finish before 10:30.  The session after that, they had a VERY quick altercation with a brood of medium white dragons.  This was already poised to be a tough fight, and the dragons wanted tribute from the PCs for crossing their hunting grounds.  The Dwarf Bard tossed one of the dragons his gold (the first PC to do so), but the Rogue decided he wanted to snatch it out of midair and take it for himself.  I gave the angered dragon a surprise round (in which he critted), then the dragons rolled high for initiative and there were 2 more crits in round 1.  The PCs surrendered soon after that with half of them badly hurt and the dragons all untouched.  That only took a few minutes <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=":)" />The only other fight they've had was with some Redcaps (eyeballed difficulty, but probably roughly double-strength), and that took maybe 40ish minutes but the PCs spent a lot of time trying to figure out why they kept teleporting away, and the Dwarf was reluctant to spend Recoveries before this fight so he ended up down in the first round and didn't get back up until round 3 or so.  While his turns went really quick, his lack of damage early on also meant the enemies lasted longer than they should have.  Plus there were bad tactics all around, and the Rogue only hit with ONE attack in a 6ish round fight.  So far, it's starting to seem like this second campaign is having fights be a more typical length that I've seen reported online.  Not that we didn't have shorter fights in my first campaign, but I generally avoided them because the PCs barely got scratched unless I pummeled them with many rounds of attacks.  I figured better to have a challenging fight that lasted longer than a pointless fight that was shorter.  So I guess I can see where the combat length discrepancy comes from.  If you don't have a walking-tank Paladin paired up with a super-healer Cleric though, you probably won't run into the issue (which is the only mechanical issue I've experienced that is likely to lead to prolonged battles).  Oh, and on another note if you're interested in more "open-ended" combat as opposed to 4E's "pick power from list" or 3E's "I have no meaningful options besides full attack," you might want to check <a href="http://www.pelgranepress.com/?p=14078" target="_blank">this</a> out.</blockquote>

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