Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="thecasualoblivion" data-source="post: 4705613" data-attributes="member: 59096">Not really. 30 minute(minimum) combat rounds would have happened with or without the distractions. The distractions were the response to things taking that long in the first place.Its hard to keep attention when you aren't personally involved in the game for 15-30+ minutes at a time. Watching other people add up numbers on dice or paging through books and character sheets isn't very interesting, and that was where most of the time gets lost. Because its the real world, and in the real world sh^$ happens. Maybe you get lucky and get a great group. For the rest of us, we get at least one person who optimizes more than the others, and the game goes to crap. As for the second paragraph, why should this have to happen? If I am buying a published adventure, it is to save myself preparation. What you describe is preparation. Is it so wrong to want a game that works correctly out of the box? 4E does. While most people used heavy housefules, 1E and 2E still worked just fine as written. 3E is the exception in terms of D&D. 3E grind came from the players, not from the monsters. A 3E Rogue could easily attack 4-6 time per turn, with different modifiers on different attacks, rolling 8d6+modifiers and up for each hit. Unless you're a math whiz, it takes time to add up all those dice. Power attack, summons, buff stacking, and other things similarly could slow things down to a crawl. Add to this monsters with heavy immunities, ability drain, and other things and you get grind.As for 4E, I've got a campaign going at level 16, and its the fastest 4E game I've ever run. We have some incredibly powergamed characters, but killing Elites in one round and winning combats in 2-3 rounds is still impressive, not to mention fast. Hundreds of hp is commonplace, but we have the firepower to chew through that in incredible fashion. Thanks to the Warlords obscene initiative bonus to the entire party, the battle is often over before the monsters get a turn. We did a test game at level 30, and people would be amazed how fast a level 30 Ancient Red Dragon dies, thousands of hp and all.</blockquote>

Verification