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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 4882369" data-attributes="member: 18280">If you care to jump back to when 4e was announced, you will discover quite a bit of talk about how slow 3e is combat-wise.  One of the initially intended goals of 4e was to speed up combat.Should you care to examine the threads following the initial release of 4e, you will discover significant space devoted to combatting combat "grind" and speeding up combat in general.  You may also note that WotC decided to make combats last long enough to allow everyone to do 'something cool"; i.e., the longer combats are an intentional design element.I began to run a Basic Fantasy game, and combats were much faster than the norm I experienced with 3e, even with the same players.  When I began playtesting RCFG (where the combat rules are much more complex than those of Basic Fantasy, but much less complex than 3e), I was able to keep a ratio of encounters per session similar to Basic Fantasy.This was done simply by elminating the need for a grid.Scott Rouse, in another thread (and I can and will hunt it down for you if need be) admitted that WotC-D&D is more tied into minis than TSR-D&D, and that 4e is more tied to minis than 3e.  This is an obvious move for WotC, as their market research showed that players who buy minis spend significantly more than those who do not.Some time back I ran the Caves of Chaos (from Keep on the Borderland) in 3e, and the pace was significantly slower than running the same module in 1e, 2e, or Holmes Basic (all of which I have also done)."Faster playing" doesn't necessarily mean "better" or "more fun", but it does have a real effect on how balance (or lack there of) interacts with the game.  If, running 3e, I average 1 encounter per 40 minutes, and in RCFG I average 5 encounters during the same period, the 1 encounter in 3e must bear five times the "weight" (in terms of "table balance" and "fun") that any one of the 5 RCFG encounters must bear.IOW, if any one of the five RCFG encounters is a dog, the 40 minutes can still be fun overall, but if the single 3e encounter is a dog, then the 40 minutes sucks.This is going to greatly affect how the players view balance in the game.  I cannot see how it can be avoided.RC</blockquote>

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