Average rounds per encounter?

[Alisair Longreach]

I know that I ignored a lot of situational modifiers in my calculations to keep it simple.

I let the bonus damage from Encounter and Daily attacks take care of fractional hits because the bonus damage is usually a lot less than the average damage from an at-will. Most Encounter attacks only add 1[W] bonus damage on a hit and nothing on a miss. The best Daily attacks add 2[W] or more on a hit and a small amount of damage on a miss.

To calculate the effects of area attacks requires some fancy A.I. programming which I do not have the computer savvy to do.

There is only a 5% chance of a critical hit with every attack and spreading the bonus damage over 20 attacks only gives a very small increase in damage output.

We can get more precise fractions by calculating the damage-per-round and to-hit ratios but that is another can of worms.

We can debate the length of an combat encounter with anecdotal evidence from other posters but generally a level 1 to 3 fight is fast, furious and fun but a level 10 fight lasts 2-3 times longer.

I find that a fight lasting no longer than one hour is fun but fights lasting longer that 2 hours and devolving into at-will rollfests gets boring really fast.

 

[Mengu]

In my experience, combat lasts 1-20 rounds. Big range huh. DM has pretty good control over how long he wants combat to last, both during encounter design and while running the encounter, though players can occasionally surprise you and mop the floor in 3-4 rounds with something you thought would be a longer challenge, or do something unexpected to make an encounter drag.

For published and LFR adventures, my experience is that they run somewhere between 3-7 rounds provided you have a reasonably competent group.

 

[DanmarLOK]

I'll second this.

I'm just in heroic but our encounters are running 3 to 5 rounds with 5 pc's versus Level+3-4 XP budgets with less than half devoted to minions. Temporally (is that a word?) the encounters range from 45 minutes to 90 minutes.
One of worst offenders was our last battle. 5 pc's versus 16 npc's (5 minions). one PC, one of the two strikers, was locked down in an immobilized state at the start of the battle and failed 3 saving throws to get unstuck and due to situational circumstances didn't' have any ranged attacks. That one lasted 85 minutes 38 seconds from the first initiative roll to the last guy being forced to surrender.

In the interests of full disclosure, I grant an across the board +2 to hit (pc and npc) so everyone has a 10% higher chance to hit their targets (because missing just sucks) and I allow the use of average damage (no damage dice rolls and everyone takes the option). It speeds each person's turn up a little bit and the DM's a lot. Damage dice take more time to roll than to hit dice by a significant portion. On the downside because of rounding down everyone is doing a fractional point less damage on any odd multiple dice roll.

How long it takes depends on too many situations and could range from 15 mins to 3 hours or so, how many rounds is equally eratic.

At lower levels the players are just getting used to their characters and I'd say an average encounter would take 3 to 5 rounds and solo battles the same. The harder encounters that push the players to the edge should take around 7 or 8 rounds. As far as epic levels though, if your players put some effort into their characters a fight should never last past 6 rounds even against a deity. I can't imagine being in a battle for 12+ rounds.. some of the people I play with would just leave mid encounter if it were so.

 

[Blackbrrd]

My current campaign (level 1-9), has an average combat length of about 5 rounds. The party consists of:
Bard (Gnome)
Fighter - Battlevigor (Dwarf)
Ranger - Ranged(Elf)
Invoker - Wrath (Human)
Barbarian (Half-Orc)

The Invoker and Ranger does the most damage, followed by the Barbarian and Fighter. the Bard does the least damage but he keeps the party alive. Combat really slows down if one of the following characters are missing: Invoker, Ranger. The party unravels without the Fighter.

Going with at-will damage is [self-sensured], as already at level 7 you have 3 encounter powers. The highest DPS-ones are immediate actions (The ranger has one and the barbarian has one). I don't think I have seen the Invoker hit less than two targets and the barbarian gets at least one free charge each encounter...

 

[KarinsDad]

I just started in an online game last name and I kept track of the number of rounds.

5 first level PCs, 2 of whom have area effect spells.

Encounter #1 started with 5 minions and 2 normals, the DM then threw in 2 more normals in round 2 from around a corner (so, I don't think they actually fought until round 3). This encounter was easy and took 4 rounds.

The second encounter was a lot tougher (goblin underboss, hexer, 2 sharpshooters, 3 warriors). There were 7 foes, most of them higher level than the PCs. The DM had 2 of them take off in round 3 and 2 more take off in round 4 and even with 3 remaining, it still took the PCs 6 rounds to finish off the combat. This was an n+4 encounter and if the DM would have kept it going (he probably had them flee both because we were generally getting trashed and because it was getting so late real time), that it would have easily taken 10 to 12 rounds to finish this (if the other foes would have stayed, more Daily powers would have been pulled out).

I have been trying to keep a rough idea of how long encounters take and my general feeling is that encounters take:

3 to 5 rounds at level one, same level foes
+1.5 rounds for each +1 n goes up. So, n+2 encounter is 6 to 8 rounds.
+1 round per 4 PC levels (due to increased monster hit points)

So, a 21th level n+4 encounter will take somewhere around 14 to 16 rounds.

This is obviously a rough rule of thumb, but it seems to match up with my heroic and paragon experiences (and my one epic test battle).

I think that optimized PCs that can increase their DPR significantly can drop these numbers quite a bit.

 

[babinro]

My group of six level 18 characters typically run encounters about 6 rounds in duration. Pretty ideal as they'll only start to get into using at-wills and things wont feel stale.

It must be noted that I run nearly all monsters at their bloodied value of HP and increase their damage. As such, battles for my game are likely at least half the duration of the norm.

Despite the the few rounds, battles still tend to last a minimum of one hour in length each and can easily go up to two depending on terrain and the like.

 

[mattcolville]

Action Point every encounter. This gives your players an extra standard action in every encounter and helps resolve the combat a bit faster.

This isn't the first time I've heard people say this. I think it's ignoring the function of Action Points.

Action Points exist to make the choice "continue or rest" a tougher decision. The players have burned through some of their encounter powers and are considering whether to rest and replenish everything, or press on. "Hey we'll get another Action Point!" means they're more likely to say "no, let's not rest, let's keep going."

That's the idea behind the design, and I've seen my players make exactly this decision. Giving players an Action Point every encounter means you might as well not use Action Points.

 

[Turtlejay]

Have your cake and eat it? Perhaps give them Action Points every encounter, but also give them some other goodies at milestones? I know at higher levels when rings become available, they improve quite a bit after a milestone. Include more treasure like this, or add a different type of action point (several have been mentioned in the General Forum lately, but I won't go into in *here*).

You can give them the extra actions you want, and also encourage them to press on.

Jay

 

[KarinsDad]

Action Points exist to make the choice "continue or rest" a tougher decision.

That is one of several reasons for a single action point per two encounters, but it is not the reason for their existence.

Action points actually exist to replace the 3.5 concept of action points where it was a bonus to hit. The entire concept is to give the players a little bit more control when they decide that they need it. Effectively, it's a PC cheat. The player decides that he needs an advantage at this point in time, so he gets it. He gets to change the laws of physics of the game system.


I give the PCs 2 action points between each short rest.

1 can be used normally.
1 can be used in place of a healing surge for "magical" healing.
1 can be used to bring an encounter power back.

So obviously, only two of these three functions can be used between short rests for a given PC. This has sped up encounters quite a bit, helps out with the swinginess of combat a bit, and also allows more encounters per day (in situations where they are in a dungeon).

Works great.

 

[Blackbrrd]

...
3 to 5 rounds at level one, same level foes
+1.5 rounds for each +1 n goes up. So, n+2 encounter is 6 to 8 rounds.
+1 round per 4 PC levels (due to increased monster hit points)

So, a 21th level n+4 encounter will take somewhere around 14 to 16 rounds.

This is obviously a rough rule of thumb, but it seems to match up with my heroic and paragon experiences (and my one epic test battle).

I think that optimized PCs that can increase their DPR significantly can drop these numbers quite a bit.

I think you are right about the duration of encounters, but not the part where it goes as you go up in level. This is highly dependent on party setup - if the party focuses on DPR this doesn't really happen. If the party focuses on healing/damage mitigating (disabling conditions instead of damage for instance) combat will last longer.

I completely agree with your last statement and this is something the players/dm should be aware of. You get a faster game if the party goes for DPR instead of damage mitigation. The two parties will have nearly the same survivability and the damage mitigation party will have more dice rolls and therefore have a lower randomness factor.

If as a DM I have a damage mitigation party I would strongly ponder using the +50% damage, 66% hp rule for my monsters.