Combat length and Adventure pacing

[TerraDave]

Also been thinking about this a lot.

Put those three elements together, and the cumulative effect are combats that can take greatly varying amounts of time. ....So, does 4E assume too much that the group will be effective at running/playing combat? My suspicion is that it does, and this affects people's enjoyment of the system.

But Merric, doesn't even your relatively optimized group have combats that range from 7-12 rounds. My feeling is that this things just take too many rounds, with all the related issues.

In an amusing coincidence, I happen to be reading an article on pacing in adventures in Dragon #301, and it's good advice so I'm going to summarize it.

1. Pacing means having high points (tension wise) and low points as you steadily build towards the climax. It does not mean continually rising action from the get go.

2. Break up combat encounters with non-combat encounters. In fact the article recommends never having a fight back to back.

3. Vary the non-combat encounters. The article mentions traps, NPC interaction, information, skill checks, visual descriptions, puzzles and riddles, the cut scene and the snack break. And we might as well throw a skill challenge in there for 4e.

Good advice. The current series from WotC doesn't really follow it.

I like the Dungeon Delves, which all fit this model. If they had a bit of exploration and roleplay in addition they'd be ideal for a single-session adventure.

IF only. My big turn off with them and the chaos scar.

From what I've seen of WotC adventure paths in 4e, though, they tend to have 10 or 20 combats per module, which is just ridiculous to me.

Try 30. More if you use suggested random encounters or bonus material from DDI.

 

[brainstorm]

IMO, 4e is presented as a 1 size fits all game, when really it is designed for a group of 4 to 5 players. As a dm of a group of 4 and a separate group of 7, I can say from experience that the game runs fine in the smaller group, but the grind and pacing is terrible in the larger group. I personally think that the player options should be streamlined and more limited as the size of the group goes over the 4-5 player standard.

 

[MerricB]

But Merric, doesn't even your relatively optimized group have combats that range from 7-12 rounds. My feeling is that this things just take too many rounds, with all the related issues.

Indeed, that's one of my points, which leads off the second section of the post. 1 hour for a combat may be too long (and that's based on how many rounds it takes to defeat the monsters).

I mean: one hour combats, if the combats are fun, are fine if you want combat to be the dominant feature of your game. However, what do they interfere with?

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

You can adapt to the situation by timing your powers right, but usually you still use only your powers. In older editions, because your powers were rare, or you had none (fighter or thief) you had to use the terrain to get advantage, use your fellow PC´s as shields, used burning oil to bring down an enemy... often circumventing hp and ending the combat immediately by just one clever idea. Sometimes t involved a clever use of a power... e.g.: command: "jump" to someone walking on the ceiling with boots of spider climbing...

I'm sorry, but such situations were rare in AD&D unless you had a very permissive DM. Certainly the "save or die" spells (or, in Sleep's case, "die") could end battles quickly, but mostly the fighters were down to "I swing with my sword" because that's all they could do. Especially once they entered melee - they couldn't leave it without taking hits.

There might have been rare combats where cleverness allowed you to take advantage of some feature to end the combat quickly, but from my experience those occasions were very rare indeed.

 

[TerraDave]

This is a reply to Merics previous post.

And not everyone can get through that many rounds in an hour (I can probably do about 7 in that time). Do you need that many rounds? Its better then say 2 or 3 (taking an hour), but still.

It should be noted there is the issue of "mixing things up" ie doing something besides combat, but there is also just an issue of absolute time: if you feel compeled to go through so many encounter to level, or for the adventure you are using, your just sort of stuck with a lot of time in combat.

I guess what gets me is the irony of the approach. Having big, long, set piece enounters works really well when combat is rare. Combining it with combat being common, pacing will certainly suffer.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I'm sorry, but such situations were rare in AD&D unless you had a very permissive DM. Certainly the "save or die" spells (or, in Sleep's case, "die") could end battles quickly, but mostly the fighters were down to "I swing with my sword" because that's all they could do. Especially once they entered melee - they couldn't leave it without taking hits.

There might have been rare combats where cleverness allowed you to take advantage of some feature to end the combat quickly, but from my experience those occasions were very rare indeed.

this is why i often played bards... because you had spells and other abilities to be creative with... a fighter was often a bit bland, but he was really able to do melee damage and resist magic as no other character...

Some Examples for spells a spellcaster can use:
stone to mud --> death, no save.
greater image --> fireballs at will.
fireball --> read dragon lance to see how a god uses it as a solution for every problem
cantrip
wall of ice
command

@odhen: yes, you got me right! The power system discourages people from getting creative. But with the right use of terrain and page 42, you can do cool things, the DM just needs to say: "yes"
And with creative use of powers: like an at-will power use to loosen a stalactite which impales a monster seems like a creative use of a power... which should be rewarded by all means... do so more often and you get a game which is fun!

 

[S'mon]

IMO, 4e is presented as a 1 size fits all game, when really it is designed for a group of 4 to 5 players. As a dm of a group of 4 and a separate group of 7, I can say from experience that the game runs fine in the smaller group, but the grind and pacing is terrible in the larger group. I personally think that the player options should be streamlined and more limited as the size of the group goes over the 4-5 player standard.

My Heroic tier campaign is going ok with 7 players - I use the ars ludi initiative system (players roll to beat single monster roll, then go round-table) which speeds things up a fair bit I think. However I'm concerned the game will be too grindy in Paragon and if run a follow-on Paragon campaign I think I'll need to stick to a 5 player cap.

 

[brainstorm]

My Heroic tier campaign is going ok with 7 players - I use the ars ludi initiative system (players roll to beat single monster roll, then go round-table) which speeds things up a fair bit I think. However I'm concerned the game will be too grindy in Paragon and if run a follow-on Paragon campaign I think I'll need to stick to a 5 player cap.

Lower level Heroic tier isn't too bad with 7 players because their options are limited. Once we got to 6th or 7th levels, the grind started to noticeably impact our encounters. As players get more and more powers, the grind gets worse. We just hit Paragon Tier and I had to stop the game because we were barely getting through 1 combat per session, which is a pace I cannot live with. That's why I'm suggesting limiting power gain for larger groups. Replacing powers earlier rather than adding powers may work, but I haven't tried it yet.

 

[Ariosto]

D&D, in every edition, has at its heart a combat system.

From my perspective, it has -- by design -- become a lot more than the original "heart". Combat length and adventure pacing are key to a pretty radical shift in focus.

The tie-in with a game of "builds" is also very significant to my eye.

The other part is the time taken to choose the action to take. And it's that second part that 4e has a problem with.

For me, the whole package is problematic -- but that is because I prefer to get rounds and combats over with as quickly as in the old rules-sets actually designed for that purpose. Once the real tactics are in place, I don't want to get bogged down in fine points of fencing (or else I would play, e.g., Rapier & Dagger or maybe Amber Diceless Roleplaying).

However, I have seen a similar problem even without anything like the complications of WotC's games. That problem is "individual initiative", especially as practiced in 4E. Player E tends to want to see the results of the moves of Players A, B, C and D -- and whatever monsters are interleaved -- before making his or her own choice.

Old RuneQuest similarly has "strike ranks" (different from the Mongoose version), but the round starts with a Statement of Intent Phase. That in my experience speeds things up a bit. In old D&D, I have often used "simultaneous moves", which can be even faster, but I think that probably would not work well in 4E.

As a simple example, if you're faced by three ogres, combat will end quickest if you concentrate on one ogre. Some groups don't do that, and so combat takes longer.

It might seem counter-intuitive that one can do that, or at least that one can force the other two ogres to "take a number" instead of using the very same local superiority. Turning to an unengaged foe a backside that effectively has "clobber me" painted on it is generally not considered good tactics in other contexts of my acquaintance.

It has now been some time since I regularly played AD&D, but I've got a feeling that an average combat would be somewhere in the realm of 20-30 minutes to resolve.

My experience is about half that, with 45 minutes being epic tops. That refers to pretty "down to business" play, though. As I mentioned in another thread, the group in which I am lately a player has brought (basically doubled) it up to your range with a lot of distractions. I blame (at least partly) the DM's "plot line" scenario structure that makes the fights basically not of our choosing and commanding no great investment of interest.

The 4e feats and powers have a lot of fiddly bits that interact with other fiddly bits -- including the 30 pages of general combat rules, and sometimes the skill rules -- to make the combat game complicated, and complications take time to sort out. The combat game in turn is the primary arena in which the products of the game of builds get to "strut their stuff". Moreover, more stuff is getting added book after book.

 

[Ariosto]

Tougher combats take longer.

If by 'tougher' you mean "more evenly matched", then I can dig it. If you mean only "harder for the players" (with the same slant to "where are the easy ones, guys?"), then that puzzles me. One might expect heavier odds in favor of either side to lead to quicker resolution.

The other point about long combats is that they detract from the significance of other encounters and discoveries.

"The other" other point is that variety is the spice of life, and a long sameness of anything can get boring. Follow that up with different people having different interests, and making one thing chew up an hour at a stretch is going to leave some people really fed up or tuned out.

I reckon most people who like 4e dislike some non-combat activities that have been common to D&D -- enough so that spending an hour at a stretch on them (much less in just one mode) would be a great big drag.

In old D&D, I am not accustomed to spending an hour on anything. An hour typically means 3 to 6 (4 being about average) different "scenes" involving different kinds of engagement and decision-making, most pretty notably decisive in one way or another -- at least in terms of resources used and/or direction taken. Up to a dozen encounters with phenomena of only passing interest might fit into the same time, but most often there is great variety in how much time players devote to one situation and the next as well as in how they spend that time.

In 4e, I tend to see the fights really as the "main event", the pearls on a string of other business not worthy of so much attention. I'm sure there are people who do it differently, but I doubt that most 4e players most of the time expect to spend an hour or more between fights. Barring that, combat alone takes up more than half of session time -- leaving less than half for everything else.